Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence of his course with
the moment at which the proceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost
any "happy thought," and in the interest of almost any branch of culture
or invocation of response that might be more easily improvised than not,
could positively strike the observer as excessive, as in fact absurd,
for the formation of taste or the enrichment of genius, unless the
principle of these values had in a particular connection been subjected
in advance to some challenge or some test. Why should it take such a
flood of suggestion, such a luxury of acquaintance and contact, only to
make superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of living inward a
little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little
further, rather modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable,
young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in the way of question-
begging movement, the way of vision and of non-vision, the enormous
habit of holidays? If one could have made out once for all that holidays
were proportionately and infallibly inspiring one would have ceased
thoughtfully to worry; but the question was as it stood an old story,
even though it might freshly radiate, on occasion, under the recognition
that the seed-smothered patch of soil flowered, when it did flower, with
a fragrance all its own. This concomitant, however, always dangled, that
if it were put to us, "Do you really mean you would rather they should
not perpetually have been again for a look-in at Berlin, or an awfully
good time at Munich, or a rush round Sicily, or a dash through the
States to Japan, with whatever like rattling renewals?" you would after
all shrink from the responsibility of such a restriction before being
clear as to what you would suggest in its place. Rupert went on reading-
parties from King's to Lulworth for instance, which the association of
the two places, the two so extraordinarily finished scenes, causes to
figure as a sort of preliminary flourish; and everything that came his
way after that affects me as the blest indulgence in flourish upon
flourish. This was not in the least the air, or the desire, or the
pretension of it, but the unfailing felicity just kept catching him up,
just left him never wanting nor waiting for some pretext to roam, or
indeed only the more responsively to stay, doing either, whichever it
might be, as a form of highly intellectualised "fun." He didn't overflow
with shillings, yet so far as roving was concerned the practice was
always easy, and perhaps the adorably whimsical lyric, contained in his
second volume of verse, on the pull of Grantchester at his heartstrings,
as the old vicarage of that sweet adjunct to Cambridge could present
itself to him in a Berlin cafe, may best exemplify the sort of thing
that was represented, in one way and another, by his taking his most
ultimately English ease.
Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, could do or fail to do
for him, how can one not rejoice without reserve in the way he felt what
he did feel as poetic reaction of the liveliest and finest, with the
added interest of its often turning at one and the same time to the
fullest sincerity and to a perversity of the most "evolved"?--since I
can not dispense with that sign of truth. Never was a young singer
either less obviously sentimental or less addicted to the mere twang of
the guitar; at the same time that it was always his personal experience
or his curious, his not a little defiantly excogitated, inner vision
that he sought to catch; some of the odd fashion of his play with which
latter seems on occasion to preponderate over the truly pleasing poet's
appeal to beauty or cultivated habit of grace. Odd enough, no doubt,
that Rupert should appear to have had well-nigh in horror the
cultivation of grace for its own sake, as we say, and yet should really
not have disfigured his poetic countenance by a single touch quotable as
showing this. The medal of the mere pleasant had always a reverse for
him, and it was generally in that substitute he was most interested. We
catch in him reaction upon reaction, the succession of these conducing
to his entirely unashamed poetic complexity, and of course one
observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be
gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the
_youngest_ quantities of art and character taken together that ever
arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his
pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all
nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find
in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to something
more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self-
consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration (in verse, only in
verse, oddly enough) of the unpleasant to behold, to touch, or even to
smell, was certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious," but
there were so many things in his consciousness, which was never in the
least unpeopled, that it would have been a rare chance had his
projection of the self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious
allusion stayed out. What it all really most comes to, you feel again,
is that none of his impulses prospered in solitude, or, for that matter,
were so much as permitted to mumble their least scrap there; he was
predestined and condemned to sociability, which no league of neglect
could have deprived him of even had it speculatively tried: whereby what
was it but his own image that he most saw reflected in other faces? It
would still have been there, it couldn't possibly have succeeded in not
being, even had he closed his eyes to it with elaborate tightness. The
only neglect must have been on his own side, where indeed it did take
form in that of as signal an opportunity to become "spoiled," probably,
as ever fell in a brilliant young man's way: so that to help out my
comprehension of the unsightly and unsavoury, sufficiently wondered at,
with which his muse repeatedly embraced the occasion to associate
herself, I take the thing for a declaration of the idea that he might
himself prevent the spoiling so far as possible. He could in fact
prevent nothing, the wave of his fortune and his favour continuing so to
carry him; which is doubtless one of the reasons why, through our
general sense that nothing could possibly not be of the last degree of
rightness in him, what would have been wrong in others, literally in any
creature but him, like for example "A Channel Passage" of his first
volume, simply puts on, while this particular muse stands anxiously by,
a kind of dignity of experiment quite consistent with our congratulating
her, at the same time, as soon as it is over. What was "A Channel
Passage" thus but a flourish marked with the sign of all his
flourishes, that of being a success and having fruition? Though it
performed the extraordinary feat of directing the contents of the poet's
stomach straight at the object of his displeasure, we feel that, by some
excellent grace, the object is not at all reached--too many things, and
most of all, too innocently enormous a cynicism, standing in the way and
themselves receiving the tribute; having in a word, impatient young
cynicism as they are, _that_ experience as well as various things.
III
No detail of Mr Marsh's admirable memoir may I allow myself to
anticipate. I can only announce it as a picture, with all the elements
in iridescent fusion, of the felicity that fairly dogged Rupert's steps,
as we may say, and that never allowed him to fall below its measure. We
shall read into it even more relations than nominally appear, and every
one of them again a flourish, every one of them a connection with his
time, a "sampling" of it at its most multitudinous and most
characteristic; every one of them too a record of the state of some
other charmed, not less than charming party--even when the letter-
writer's expression of the interest, the amusement, the play of fancy,
of taste, of whatever sort of appreciation or reaction for his own
spirit, is the ostensible note. This is what I mean in especial by the
constancy with which, and the cost at which, perhaps not less, for
others, the poetic sensibility was maintained and guaranteed. It was as
genuine as if he had been a bard perched on an eminence with a harp, and
yet it was arranged for, as we may say, by the close consensus of those
who had absolutely to know their relation with him but as a delight and
who wanted therefore to keep him, to the last point, true to himself.
His complete curiosity and sociability might have made him, on these
lines, factitious, if it had not happened that the people he so
variously knew and the contacts he enjoyed were just of the kind to
promote most his facility and vivacity and intelligence of life. They
were all young together, allowing for three or four notable, by which I
mean far from the least responsive, exceptions; they were all fresh and
free and acute and aware and in "the world," when not out of it; all
together at the high speculative, the high talkative pitch of the
initiational stage of these latest years, the informed and animated, the
so consciously non-benighted, geniality of which was to make him the
clearest and most projected poetic case, with the question of difficulty
and doubt and frustration most solved, the question of the immediate and
its implications most in order for him, that it was possible to
conceive. He had found at once to his purpose a wondrous enough old
England, an England breaking out into numberless assertions of a new
awareness, into liberties of high and clean, even when most sceptical
and discursive, young intercourse; a carnival of half anxious and half
elated criticism, all framed and backgrounded in still richer
accumulations, both moral and material, or, as who should say,
pictorial, of the matter of course and the taken for granted. Nothing
could have been in greater contrast, one cannot too much insist, to the
situation of the traditional lonely lyrist who yearns for connections
and relations yet to be made and whose difficulty, lyrical, emotional,
personal, social or intellectual, has thereby so little in common with
any embarrassment of choice. The author of the pages before us was
perhaps the young lyrist, in all the annals of verse, who, having the
largest luxury of choice, yet remained least "demoralised" by it--how
little demoralised he was to round off his short history by showing.
It was into these conditions, thickening and thickening, in their
comparative serenity, up to the eleventh hour, that the War came
smashing down; but of the basis, the great garden ground, all green and
russet and silver, all a tissue of distinguished and yet so easy
occasions, so improvised extensions, which they had already placed at
his service and that of his extraordinarily amiable and constantly
enlarged "set" for the exercise of _their_ dealing with the rest of
the happy earth in punctuating interludes, it is the office of our few
but precious documents to enable us to judge. The interlude that here
concerns us most is that of the year spent in his journey round a
considerable part of the world in 1913-14, testifying with a charm that
increases as he goes to that quest of unprejudiced culture, the true
poetic, the vision of the life of man, which was to prove the liveliest
of his impulses. It was not indeed under the flag of that research that
he offered himself for the Army almost immediately after his return to
England--and even if when a young man was so essentially a poet we need
see no act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune of this set
of letters from New York and Boston, from Canada and Samoa, addressed,
for the most part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, in the
fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; for we make him out as
steadily more vivid and delightful while his opportunity grows. He is
touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure of his good
faith; we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New
York pandemonium--obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and the
overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged
advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and
manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights--eyes
of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the
vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We
feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would fain turn it on to the
capture of deeper meanings. But we must leave him to himself and to
youth's facility of wonder; he is amused, beguiled, struck on the whole
with as many differences as we could expect, and sufficiently reminded,
no doubt, of the number of words he is restricted to. It is moreover his
sign, as it is that of the poetic turn of mind in general that we seem
to catch him alike in anticipations or divinations, and in lapses and
freshnesses, of experience that surprise us. He makes various
reflections, some of them all perceptive and ingenious--as about the
faces, the men's in particular, seen in the streets, the public
conveyances and elsewhere; though falling a little short, in his
friendly wondering way, of that bewildered apprehension of monotony of
type, of modelling lost in the desert, which we might have expected of
him, and of the question above all of what is destined to become of that
more and more vanishing quantity the American nose other than Judaic.
What we note in particular is that he likes, to all appearance, many
more things than he doesn't, and how superlatively he is struck with the
promptitude and wholeness of the American welcome and of all its
friendly service. What it is but too easy, with the pleasure of having
known him, to read into all this is the operation of his own
irresistible quality, and of the state of felicity he clearly created
just by appearing as a party to the social relation. He moves and
circulates to our vision as so naturally, so beautifully undesigning a
weaver of that spell, that we feel comparatively little of the story
told even by his diverted report of it; so much fuller a report would
surely proceed, could we appeal to their memory, their sense of poetry,
from those into whose ken he floated. It is impossible not to figure
him, to the last felicity, as he comes and goes, presenting himself
always with a singular effect both of suddenness and of the readiest
rightness; we should always have liked to be there, wherever it was, for
the justification of our own fond confidence and the pleasure of seeing
it unfailingly spread and spread. The ironies and paradoxes of his
verse, in all this record, fall away from him; he takes to direct
observation and accepts with perfect good-humour any hazards of contact,
some of the shocks of encounter proving more muffled for him than might,
as I say, have been feared--witness the American Jew with whom he
appears to have spent some hours in Canada; and of course the "word" of
the whole thing is that he simply reaped at every turn the harmonising
benefit that his presence conferred. This it is in especial that makes
us regret so much the scanting, as we feel it, of his story; it deprives
us in just that proportion of certain of the notes of his appearance and
his "success." _There_ was the poetic fact involved--that, being
so gratefully apprehended everywhere, his own response was inevitably
prescribed and pitched as the perfect friendly and genial and liberal
thing. Moreover, the value of his having so let himself loose in the
immensity tells more at each step in favour of his style; the pages from
Canada, where as an impressionist, he increasingly finds his feet, and
even finds to the same increase a certain comfort of association, are
better than those from the States, while those from the Pacific Islands
rapidly brighten and enlarge their inspiration. This part of his
adventure was clearly the great success and fell in with his fancy,
amusing and quickening and rewarding him, more than anything in the
whole revelation. He lightly performs the miracle, to my own sense,
which R. L. Stevenson, which even Pierre Loti, taking however long a
rope, had not performed; he charmingly conjures away--though in this
prose more than in the verse of his second volume--the marked tendency
of the whole exquisite region to insist on the secret of its charm, when
incorrigibly moved to do so, only at the expense of its falling a little
flat, or turning a little stale, on our hands. I have for myself at
least marked the tendency, and somehow felt it point a graceless moral,
the moral that as there are certain faces too well produced by nature to
be producible again by the painter, the portraitist, so there are
certain combinations of earthly ease, of the natural and social art of
giving pleasure, which fail of character, or accent, even of the power
to interest, under the strain of transposition or of emphasis. Rupert,
with an instinct of his own, transposes and insists only in the right
degree; or what it doubtless comes to is that we simply see him arrested
by so vivid a picture of the youth of the world at its blandest as to
make all his culture seem a waste and all his questions a vanity. That
is apparently the very effect of the Pacific life as those who dip into
it seek, or feel that they are expected to seek, to report it; but it
reports itself somehow through these pages, smilingly cools itself off
in them, with the lightest play of the fan ever placed at its service.
Never, clearly, had he been on such good terms with the hour, never
found the life of the senses so anticipate the life of the imagination,
or the life of the imagination so content itself with the life of the
senses; it is all an abundance of amphibious felicity--he was as
incessant and insatiable a swimmer as if he had been a triton framed for
a decoration; and one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct,
some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in
the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last
drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting
for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever
doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any
rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime of 1914 done for him
all it could, without a grain of waste--his assimilations being neither
loose nor literal, and he came back to England as promiscuously
qualified, as variously quickened, as his best friends could wish for
fine production and fine illustration in some order still awaiting sharp
definition. Never certainly had the free poetic sense in him more
rejoiced in an incorruptible sincerity.
IV
He was caught up of course after the shortest interval by the strong
rush of that general inspiration in which at first all differences, all
individual relations to the world he lived in, seemed almost ruefully or
bewilderedly to lose themselves. The pressing thing was of a sudden that
youth was youth and genius community and sympathy. He plunged into that
full measure of these things which simply made and spread itself as it
gathered them in, made itself of responses and faiths and understandings
that were all the while in themselves acts of curiosity, romantic and
poetic throbs and wonderments, with reality, as it seemed to call
itself, breaking in after a fashion that left the whole past pale, and
that yet could flush at every turn with meanings and visions borrowing
their expression from whatever had, among those squandered
preliminaries, those too merely sportive intellectual and critical
values, happened to make most for the higher truth. Of the successions
of his matter of history at this time Mr Marsh's memoir is the
infinitely touching record--touching after the fact, but to the
accompaniment even at the time of certain now almost ineffable
reflections; this especially, I mean, if one happened to be then not
wholly without familiar vision of him. What could strike one more, for
the immense occasion, than the measure that might be involved in it of
desolating and heart-breaking waste, waste of quality, waste for that
matter of quantity, waste of all the rich redundancies, all the light
and all the golden store, which up to then had formed the very price and
grace of life? Yet out of the depths themselves of this question rose
the other, the tormenting, the sickening and at the same time the
strangely sustaining, of why, since the offering couldn't at best be
anything but great, it wouldn't be great just in proportion to its
purity, or in other words its wholeness, everything in it that could
make it most radiant and restless. Exquisite at such times the hushed
watch of the mere hovering spectator unrelieved by any action of his own
to take, which consists at once of so much wonder for why the finest of
the fine should, to the sacrifice of the faculty we most know them by,
have to become mere morsels in the huge promiscuity, and of the thrill
of seeing that they add more than ever to our knowledge and our passion,
which somehow thus becomes at the same time an unfathomable abyss.
Rupert, who had joined the Naval Brigade, took part in the rather
distractedly improvised--as it at least at the moment appeared--movement
for the relief of the doomed Antwerp, but was, later on, after the
return of the force so engaged, for a few days in London, whither he had
come up from camp in Dorsetshire, briefly invalided; thanks to which
accident I had on a couple of occasions my last sight of him. It was all
auspiciously, well-nigh extravagantly, congruous; nothing certainly
could have been called more modern than all the elements and suggestions
of his situation for the hour, the very spot in London that could best
serve as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most various; a
challenge to the appreciation of life, to that of the whole range of the
possible English future, at its most uplifting. He had not yet so much
struck me as an admirable nature _en disponibilite_ and such as any
cause, however high, might swallow up with a sense of being the sounder
and sweeter for. More definitely perhaps the young poet, with all the
wind alive in his sails, was as evident there in the guise of the young
soldier and the thrice welcome young friend, who yet, I all recognisably
remember, insisted on himself as little as ever in either character, and
seemed even more disposed than usual not to let his intelligibility
interfere with his modesty. He promptly recovered and returned to camp,
whence it was testified that his specific practical aptitude, under the
lively call, left nothing to be desired--a fact that expressed again, to
the perception of his circle, with what truth the spring of inspiration
worked in him, in the sense, I mean, that his imagination itself
shouldered and made light of the material load. It had not yet, at the
same time, been more associatedly active in a finer sense; my own next
apprehension of it at least was in reading the five admirable sonnets
that had been published in "New Numbers" after the departure of his
contingent for the campaign at the Dardanelles. To read these in the
light of one's personal knowledge of him was to draw from them,
inevitably, a meaning still deeper seated than their noble beauty, an
authority, of the purest, attended with which his name inscribes itself
in its own character on the great English scroll. The impression, the
admiration, the anxiety settled immediately--to my own sense at least--
as upon something that would but too sharply feed them, falling in as it
did with that whole particularly animated vision of him of which I have
spoken. He had never seemed more animated with our newest and least
deluded, least conventionalised life and perception and sensibility, and
that formula of his so distinctively fortunate, his overflowing share
in our most developed social heritage which had already glimmered, began
with this occasion to hang about him as one of the aspects, really a
shining one, of his fate.
So I remember irrepressibly thinking and feeling, unspeakably
apprehending, in a word; and so the whole exquisite exhalation of his
own consciousness in the splendid sonnets, attach whatever essentially
or exclusively poetic value to it we might, baffled or defied us as with
a sort of supreme rightness. Everything about him of keenest and
brightest (yes, absolutely of brightest) suggestion made so for his
having been charged with every privilege, every humour, of our merciless
actuality, our fatal excess of opportunity, that what indeed could the
full assurance of this be but that, finding in him the most charming
object in its course, the great tide was to lift him and sweep him away?
Questions and reflections after the fact perhaps, yet haunting for the
time and during the short interval that was still to elapse--when, with
the sudden news that he _had_ met his doom, an irrepressible "of
course, of course!" contributed its note well-nigh of support. It was as
if the peculiar richness of his youth had itself marked its limit, so
that what his own spirit was inevitably to feel about his "chance"--
inevitably because both the high pitch of the romantic and the ironic
and the opposed abyss of the real came together in it--required, in the
wondrous way, the consecration of the event. The event came indeed not
in the manner prefigured by him in the repeatedly perfect line, that of
the received death-stroke, the fall in action, discounted as such; which
might have seemed very much because even the harsh logic and pressure of
history were tender of him at the last and declined to go through more
than the form of their function, discharging it with the least violence
and surrounding it as with a legendary light. He was taken ill, as an
effect of blood-poisoning, on his way from Alexandria to Gallipoli, and,
getting ominously and rapidly worse, was removed from his transport to a
French hospital ship, where, irreproachably cared for, he died in a few
hours and without coming to consciousness. I deny myself any further
anticipation of the story to which further noble associations attach,
and the merest outline of which indeed tells it and rounds it off
absolutely as the right harmony would have it. It is perhaps even a
touch beyond any dreamt-of harmony that, under omission of no martial
honour, he was to be carried by comrades and devoted waiting sharers,
whose evidence survives them, to the steep summit of a Greek island of
infinite grace and there placed in such earth and amid such beauty of
light and shade and embracing prospect as that the fondest reading of
his young lifetime could have suggested nothing better. It struck us at
home, I mean, as symbolising with the last refinement his whole instinct
of selection and response, his relation to the overcharged appeal of his
scene and hour. How could he have shown more the young English poetic
possibility and faculty in which we were to seek the freshest reflection
of the intelligence and the soul of the new generation? The generosity,
I may fairly say the joy, of his contribution to the general perfect way
makes a monument of his high rest there at the heart of all that was
once noblest in history.
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