To William Sharp, as to many others, the closing days of 1899 brought a deep personal sorrow in the death of Robert Browning. The younger man had known him for several years, and had always received a warm welcome from the Poet in his house in Warwick Crescent which, with its outlook on the water of broad angle of the canal with its little tree clad island, he declared laughingly, reminded him of Venice. And kindly he was too, when, coming to the first of our “At Homes” in South Hampstead, he assured me with a genial smile “I like to come, because I know young people like to have me.”
“It is needless to dwell upon the grief everywhere felt and expressed for the irreparable loss” (W. S. wrote in his monograph on Browning). The magnificent closing lines of Shelley’s “Alastor” have occurred to many a mourner, for gone indeed was “a surpassing Spirit.” The superb pomp of the Venetian funeral, the solemn grandeur of the interment in Westminster Abbey, do not seem worth recording: so insignificant are all these accidents of death made by the supreme fact itself. Yet it is fitting to know that Venice has never in modern times afforded a more impressive sight than those of craped processional gondolas following the high flower-strewn famous barge through the thronged water-ways and out across the lagoon to the desolate Isle of the Dead: that London has rarely seen aught more solemn than the fog-dusked Cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying upward the loved familiar words of the “Lyric Voice” hushed so long before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends, Lambeth artificers and a few working-women, who threw sprays of laurel before the hearse—by that desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his thread-bare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin as it was lifted upward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again like the sea upon this lost wandering wave.”
But it was nevertheless difficult to realise that the stimulating presence had passed away and the cheerful voice was silent: “It seems but a day or two that I heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death’s vanity—a brave assertion of the glory of life. ‘Death, death! It is this harping on death I despise so much,’” he remarked with emphases of gesture as well as of speech—the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener’s knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him—“this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death—call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference—is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recreating new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of what we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of everything. Never say of me that I am dead!”
On the 4th January, 1890, W. S. wrote to Mr. Thomas A. Janvier:
London.
Many thanks for the Aztec Treasure House, which opens delightfully and should prove a thrilling tale. I don’t know how you feel, but for myself I shall never again publish serially till I have completed the story aforehand. You will have seen that I have been asked and have agreed to write the critical monograph on Browning for the Great Writer’s Series. This involves a harassing postponement of other work, and considerable financial loss, but still I am glad to do it.
The Harlands spent New Year’s Day with us, and the Champagne was not finished without some of it being quaffed in memory of the dear and valued friends oversea. You, both of you, must come over this spring.
Ever yours,
William Sharp.
With each New Year a Diary was begun with the intention of its being carefully continued throughout the months, an intention however that inevitably was abandoned as the monotony of the fulfilment palled upon the writer.