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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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[Frontispiece: Rupert Brooke 1913]
Letters from America
by Rupert Brooke.
With a Preface by Henry James
NOTE
The author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States,
Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the
beginning of June. The first thirteen chapters of this book were written
as letters to the _Westminster Gazette_. He would probably not have
republished them in their present form, as he intended to write a longer
book on his travels; but they are now printed with only the correction
of a few evident slips.
The two remaining chapters appeared in the _New Statesman_, soon
after the outbreak of war.
Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed the republication of the
articles.
E. M.
CONTENTS
Note
RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
I. Arrival
II. New York
III. New York--(_continued_)
IV. Boston and Harvard
V. Montreal and Ottawa
VI. Quebec and the Saguenay
VII. Ontario
VIII. Niagara Falls
IX. To Winnipeg
X. Outside
XI. The Prairies
XII. The Indians
XIII. The Rockies
XIV. Some Niggers
An Unusual Young Man
RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of
literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the
true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the
moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved
his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing
else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us _as_ a poet, in
spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The
chances and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw
us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win
more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless
to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something in
the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the
point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the cold
impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the need of
understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty and
disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine
flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang
about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to
indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which it
was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to
proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the
world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native
force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is
naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakeably clear, or has at a
happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our
suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any
rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law,
that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been
positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.
It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been
inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is
apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed
exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in
exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and
Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi
and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely
to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and
bareness and bleakness--all this in reference to the voices that have
most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various
examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter
attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in
how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the
torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of
Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor
Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the
occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem
denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more of
these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime
determinant, after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, the
vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest generosity we know kept
by her at their pitch, kept fighting for their life and insisting on
their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even
sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at any
moment have made the loss of the precious clue really irremediable.
Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for half our interest in the
poetic character--a sentiment more unlikely than not, I think, to
survive a sustained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of
Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We quite consciously miss in these
bards, as we find ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to miss
it in Shelley, that such "complications" as they may have had to reckon
with were not in general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no
stretch of the view either of our own "theory of art" or of our vivacity
of passion as making trouble, contributes perceptibly the required
savour of the pathetic. We cling, critically or at least experientially
speaking, to our superstition, if not absolutely to our approved
measure, of this grace and proof; and that truly, to cut my argument
short, is what sets us straight down before a sudden case in which the
old discrimination quite drops to the ground--in which we neither on
the one hand miss anything that the general association could have given
it, nor on the other recognise the pomp that attends the grand
exceptions I have mentioned.
Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and
irresistibly attaching, virtually met a soldier's death, met it in the
stress of action and the all but immediate presence of the enemy; but he
is before us as a new, a confounding and superseding example altogether,
an unprecedented image, formed to resist erosion by time or
vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities, finer ones than
ever before, in the stuff poets may be noted as made of. With twenty
reasons fixing the interest and the charm that will henceforth abide in
his name and constitute, as we may say, his legend, he submits all
helplessly to one in particular which is, for appreciation, the least
personal to him or inseparable from him, and he does this because, while
he is still in the highest degree of the distinguished faculty and
quality, we happen to feel him even more markedly and significantly
"modern." This is why I speak of the mixture of his elements as new,
feeling that it governs his example, put by it in a light which nothing
else could have equally contributed--so that Byron for instance, who
startled his contemporaries by taking for granted scarce one of the
articles that formed their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost
everything that made them idiots if he himself was to figure as a child
of truth, looks to us, by any such measure, comparatively plated over
with the impenetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten to add,
not of Byron's volume, his flood and his fortune, but of his really
having quarrelled with the temper and the accent of his age still more
where they might have helped him to expression than where he but flew in
their face. He hugged his pomp, whereas our unspeakably fortunate young
poet of to-day, linked like him also, for consecration of the final
romance, with the isles of Greece, took for _his_ own the whole of
the poetic consciousness he was born to, and moved about in it as a
stripped young swimmer might have kept splashing through blue water and
coming up at any point that friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice
shed, might determine. Rupert expressed us _all_, at the highest
tide of our actuality, and was the creature of a freedom restricted only
by that condition of his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole
with gratitude and relief--given that I qualify the condition as
dazzling even to himself. How can it therefore not be interesting to see
a little what the wondrous modern in him consisted of?
I
What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at
an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally and
sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely
never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition
(both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean), should have flowered
at once into a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands of other
sentiments are of course all the while, in different connections, at
hand for us; but it is of the exquisite civility, the social instincts
of the race, _poetically_ expressed, that I speak; and it would be
hard to overstate the felicity of his fellow-countrymen's being able
just now to say: "Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our
arrangements, with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with the
waste of so much of our effort and the weight of the many-coloured
mantle of time that drags so redundantly about us, this natural
accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary beauty
of the English aspect, this finest saturation of the English
intelligence by its most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly
do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word, at
once radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as
delightfully exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last
fibre, from the very wealth of our own conscience and the very force of
our own history. We haven't, for such an instance of our genius, to
reach out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive,
tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter of
course reached and revelled, for that is exactly our way in proportion
as we feel ourselves clear. But the kind of experience so entailed, of
contribution so gathered, is just what we wear easiest when we have been
least stinted of it, and what our English use of makes perhaps our
vividest reference to our thick-growing native determinants."
Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed commentator may well keep before
him, simply did all the usual English things--under the happy provision
of course that he found them in his way at their best; and it was
exactly most delightful in him that no inordinate expenditure, no
anxious extension of the common plan, as "liberally" applied all about
him, had been incurred or contrived to predetermine his distinction. It
is difficult to express on the contrary how peculiar a value attached to
his having simply "come in" for the general luck awaiting any English
youth who may not be markedly inapt for the traditional chances. He
could in fact easily strike those who most appreciated him as giving
such an account of the usual English things--to repeat the form of my
allusion to them--as seemed to address you to them, in their very
considerable number indeed, for any information about him that might
matter, but which left you wholly to judge whether they seemed justified
by their fruits. This manner about them, as one may call it in general,
often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain strain
of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their happiest
effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was
slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the far
recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered
demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable
just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other
of his odd ways to their influence. He might not always be, at any rate
on first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, but there was in
any case one reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a
wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all
appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed
relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!"
The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large
might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own
fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless
dormant enough, but with the questions always liable to revive before
the individual case.
Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or in
other words made one want to read back into him each of his promoting
causes without exception, to trace to some source in the ambient air
almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so precious a loose and
careless bundle of happy references did that inveterate trick of giving
the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with his general kind fail to
prevent your feeling sure of his having about him. I think the liveliest
interest of these was that while not one of them was signally romantic,
by the common measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung
together, reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to
join their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process,
the great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in
particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. I do not mean of
course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were
made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, in
the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort, most in
abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a single shade.
I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was the better
established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the three sons of a
house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he lost his
father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having then already died and
the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front,
shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance I speak of
gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that
perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the
bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and which
one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with
everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact
was that if one liked him--and I may as well say at once that few young
men, in our time, can have gone through life under a greater burden,
more easily carried and kept in its place, of being liked--one liked
absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception; so that
he appeared to convert before one's eyes all that happened to him, or
that had or that ever might, not only to his advantage as a source of
life and experience, but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of
illustrational virtue or glory. This appearance of universal
assimilation--often indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were
of the very essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its
gaiety--made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired,
cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once
neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to that),
incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own rightness.
It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether, that he should
have come into the world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby home,
as that he should have been able later on to wander as irrepressibly as
the spirit moved him, or as that he should have found himself fitting as
intimately as he was very soon to do into any number of the
incalculabilities, the intellectual at least, of the poetic temperament.
He had them all, he gave himself in his short career up to them all--and
I confess that, partly for reasons to be further developed, I am unable
even to guess what they might eventually have made of him; which is of
course what brings us round again to that view of him as the young poet
with absolutely nothing but his generic spontaneity to trouble about,
the young poet profiting for happiness by a general condition
unprecedented for young poets, that I began by indulging in. He went
from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried off a
Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in "May
week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was to find,
very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with his felicities
all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at
the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering what it was
left to such a place to do with the added, the verily wasted, grace of
such a person, or how even such a person could hold his own, as who
should say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. Any difficulty
dropped, however, to the reconciling vision; for that the young man was
publicly and responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little over-
officiously involved--to the promotion of a certain surprise (on one's
own part) at his having to "be" anything. It was to come over me still
more afterwards that nothing of that or of any other sort need really
have rested on him with a weight of obligation, and in fact I cannot but
think that life might have been seen and felt to suggest to him, in an
exposed unanimous conspiracy, that his status should be left to the
general sense of others, ever so many others, who would sufficiently
take care of it, and that such a fine rare case was accordingly as
arguable as it possibly _could_ be--with the pure, undischarged
poetry of him and the latent presumption of his dying for his country
the only things to gainsay it. The question was to a certain extent
crude, "Why need he be a poet, why need he so specialise?" but if this
was so it was only, it was already, symptomatic of the interesting final
truth that he was to testify to his function in the unparalleled way. He
was going to have the life (the unanimous conspiracy so far achieved
_that_), was going to have it under no more formal guarantee than
that of his appetite and genius for it; and this was to help us all to
the complete appreciation of him. No single scrap of the English fortune
at its easiest and truest--which means of course with every vulgarity
dropped out--but was to brush him as by the readiest instinctive wing,
never over-straining a point or achieving a miracle to do so; only
trusting his exquisite imagination and temper to respond to the
succession of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this
succession could in the most natural and most familiar way in the world
amount to for him that we find this idea of a beautiful crowning
modernness above all to meet his case. The promptitude, the perception,
the understanding, the quality of humour and sociability, the happy
lapses in the logic of inward reactions (save for their all infallibly
being poetic), of which he availed himself consented to be as
illustrational as any fondest friend could wish, whether the subject of
the exhibition was aware of the degree or not, and made his vivacity of
vision, his exercise of fancy and irony, of observation at its freest,
inevitable--while at the same time setting in motion no machinery of
experience in which his curiosity, or in other words, the quickness of
his familiarity, didn't move faster than anything else.
II
I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward Marsh the
communication of many of his letters, these already gathered into an
admirable brief memoir which is yet to appear and which will give ample
help in the illustrative way to the pages to which the present remarks
form a preface, and which are collected from the columns of the London
evening journal in which they originally saw the light. The "literary
baggage" of his short course consists thus of his two slender volumes of
verse and of these two scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence
[Footnote: There remain also to be published a book on John Webster,
and a prose play in one act.--E.M.]--though I should add that the
hitherto unpublished letters enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and
interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, which will have
rendered the highest service to each matter. That even these four scant
volumes tell the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine young
spirit they are concerned with we certainly hold back from allowing; his
case being in an extraordinary degree that of a creature on whom the
gods had smiled their brightest, and half of whose manifestation
therefore was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication.
He did in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, as one reads
him, whether in verse or in prose, that distinguished readability seems
all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the
gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in
itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either,
an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for
one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief,
if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed
altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the
student of the human drama has ever caught sight of--granting always,
that is, that some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to his
part. Such was the sort of recognition, assuredly, under which Rupert
played _his_--that of his lending himself to every current and
contact, the "newer," the later fruit of time, the better; only this not
because any particular one was an agitating revelation, but because with
due sensibility, with a restless inward ferment, at the centre of them
all, what could he possibly so much feel like as the heir of all the
ages? I remember his originally giving me, though with no shade of
imputable intention, the sense of his just _being_ that, with the
highest amiability--the note in him that, as I have hinted, one kept
coming back to; so that during a long wait for another glimpse of him I
thought of the practice and function so displayed as wholly engaging,
took for granted his keeping them up with equal facility and pleasure.
Nothing could have been more delightful accordingly, later on, in
renewal of the personal acquaintance than to gather that this was
exactly what had been taking place, and with an inveteracy as to which
his letters are a full documentation. Whatever his own terms for the
process might be had he been brought to book, and though the variety of
his terms for anything and everything was the very play, and even the
measure, of his talent, the most charmed and conclusive description of
him was that no young man had ever so naturally taken on under the
pressure of life the poetic nature, and shaken it so free of every
encumbrance by simply wearing it as he wore his complexion or his
outline.
That, then, was the way the imagination followed him with its luxury of
confidence: he was doing everything that could be done in the time
(since this was the modernest note), but performing each and every
finest shade of these blest acts with a poetic punctuality that was only
matched by a corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly my being
sure of it all the while, even if with little current confirmation
beyond that supplied by his first volume of verse; and the effect of the
whole record is now to show that such a conclusion was quite
extravagantly right. He _was_ constantly doing all the things, and
this with a reckless freedom, as it might be called, that really
dissociated the responsibility of the precious character from anything
like conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which no troubled young
singer, none, that is, equally troubled, had perhaps ever felt he could
afford to dissociate it. Rupert's resources for affording, in the whole
connection, were his humour, his irony, his need, under every quiver of
inspiration, toward whatever end, to be amused and amusing, and to find
above all that this could never so much occur as by the application of
his talent, of which he was perfectly conscious, to his own case. He
carried his case with him, for purposes of derision as much as for any
others, wherever he went, and how he went everywhere, thus blissfully
burdened, is what meets us at every turn on his printed page. My only
doubt about him springs in fact from the question of whether he knew
that the earthly felicity enjoyed by him, his possession of the
exquisite temperament linked so easily to the irrepressible experience,
was a thing to make of the young Briton of the then hour so nearly the
spoiled child of history that one wanted something in the way of an
extra guarantee to feel soundly sure of him. I come back once more to
his having apparently never dreamt of any stretch of the point of
liberal allowance, of so-called adventure, on behalf of "development,"
never dreamt of any stretch but that of the imagination itself indeed--
quite a different matter and even if it too were at moments to recoil;
it was so true that the general measure of his world as to what it might
be prompt and pleasant and in the day's work or the day's play to "go in
for" was exactly the range that tinged all his education as liberal, the
education the free design of which he had left so short a way behind him
when he died.
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