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 apert Brooke 
 
 and the 
 
 Intellectual 
 Imagination 
 
 Walter de la Mare 
 
 i 
 
 ^■^.. 
 
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
 INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER DE LA MARE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 1920 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 HAKCOURT., BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
 0A1I \ 5 1920 
 
 THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
 RAHWAY N. J 
 
 ©CLA559385 
 
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
 INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 
 
The following paper zvas read before the School 
 
 at Rugby on the evening of 2Sth March 19 19. 
 
 A few alterations and omissions have been made 
 
 in preparing it for the press 
 
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
 INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 
 
 One evening in 1766, Dr. Johnson being then in 
 the fifty-seventh year of his age, his friends, Boswell 
 and Goldsmith, called on him at his lodgings in 
 Fleet Street. They thereupon endeavoured in vain 
 to persuade him to sup with them at the Mitre. 
 But though he was adamant to their cajoleries, he 
 was by no means averse to a talk. With true hospi- 
 tality, since he had himself, we are told, become a 
 water-drinker, he called for a bottle of port. This 
 his guests proceeded to discuss. While they sipped, 
 the three of them conversed on no less beguiling a 
 subject than that of play-going and poetry. 
 
 Goldsmith ventured to refer to the deplorable 
 fact that his old friend and former schoolfellow 
 had given up the writing of verses. '' Why, sir," 
 replied Johnson, '' our tastes greatly alter. The 
 lad does not care for the child's rattle. ... As 
 we advance in the journey of life, we drop some of 
 the things which have pleased us; whether it be 
 that we are fatigued and don't choose to carry so 
 
 3 
 
Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 many things any farther, or that we find other things 
 which we Hke better." 
 
 Boswell persisted. ^' But, sir," said he, '' why 
 don't you give us something in some other way? " 
 '' No, sir," Johnson replied, '' I am not obliged to 
 do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as 
 he can do. A man is to have part of his life to 
 himself." " But I wonder, sir," Boswell continued, 
 " you have not more pleasure in writing than in not 
 writing." Whereupon descended the crushing re- 
 tort, '^ Sir, you may wonder." 
 
 Johnson then proceeded to discuss the actual 
 making of verses. '' The great difficulty," he ob- 
 served — alas, how truly, " is to know when you have 
 made gdod ones." Once, he boasted, he had written 
 as many as a full hundred lines a day; but he was 
 then under forty, and had been inspired by no less 
 fertile a theme than " The Vanity of Human 
 Wishes," a poem that, with other prudent counsel, 
 bids the " young enthusiast " pause ere he choose 
 literature and learning as a spiral staircase to 
 fame: — 
 
 Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes 
 And pause a while for Letters, to be wise . . . 
 
 None the less, Johnson made haste to assure 
 
Intellectual Imagination 
 
 Goldsmith that his Muse even at this late day was 
 not wholly mum:— "I am not quite idle; I made 
 one line t'other day; but I made no more." '' Let 
 us hear it," cried Goldsmith, '' we'll put a bad one 
 to it! " '' No, sir, I have forgot it." And so sally 
 succeeded sally. 
 
 How much of the virtue of Johnson's talk we 
 are to attribute to Boswell's genius for selection 
 and condensation, and how much to the habitu- 
 ality of his idol's supreme judgment, penetration, 
 humanity and good sense, is one of the delectable 
 problems of literature. This fact, at any rate, is 
 unquestionable; namely, that Johnson seldom indeed 
 let fall a remark, even though merely in passing, 
 which is not worth a sensible man's consideration. 
 He knew — rare felicity — what he was talking about. 
 He spoke — rare presence of mind — not without, but 
 after, aforethought. However dogmatic, overbear- 
 ing and partisan he might be, not only in what 
 he is recorded to have said is there always something 
 substantive, four-square, but very frequently even 
 his most occasional utterance stands like a signpost 
 at the crossroads positively imploring the traveller 
 to make further exploration. 
 
 "The lad does not care for the child's rattle." 
 Here, surely, is one of those signposts, one more 
 
Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 pressing invitation to explore. By rattle, obviously, 
 Johnson meant not only things childish, but things 
 childlike. For such things the '^ lad " does not 
 merely cease to care. He substitutes for them other 
 things which he likes better. Not that every vestige 
 of charm and sentiment necessarily deserts the 
 rattle, but other delights intrude; and, what is still 
 more important, other faculties that will take pleas- 
 ure in these new toys and interests come into energy 
 and play. Does not this rightly imply that between 
 childhood and boyhood is fixed a great gulf, phys- 
 ical, spiritual, psychological, and that in minds in 
 which the powers and tendencies conspicuous in 
 boyhood, and more or less dormant or latent in 
 earlier years, predominate, those of childhood are 
 apt to fade and fall away? 
 
 This is true, I think, of us all, whatever our 
 gifts and graces; but in a certain direction I believe 
 it is true in a peculiar degree of poets — of children 
 and lads (and possibly lasses, though they, for- 
 tunately for me, lie outside my immediate inquiry) 
 who are destined, or doomed, to become poets. 
 Poets, that is, may be divided, for illustration and 
 convenience, into two distinct classes: those who in 
 their idiosyncrasies resemble children and bring to 
 ripeness the faculties peculiar to childhood; and 
 
Intellectual Imagination 
 
 those who resemble lads. On the one hand is the 
 poet who carries with him through life, in varying 
 vigour and variety, the salient characteristics of 
 childhood (though modified, of course, by subse- 
 quent activities and experience). On the other, the 
 poet who carries with him the salient characteristics 
 of boyhood (though modified by the experiences and 
 activities of his childhood). This is little more than 
 a theory, but it may be worth a passing scrutiny. 
 
 What are the salient characteristics of childhood? 
 Children, it will be agreed, live in a world peculiarly 
 their own, so much so that it is doubtful if the adult 
 can do more than very fleetingly reoccupy that far- 
 away consciousness. There is, however, no doubt 
 that the world of the grown-up is to children an in- 
 exhaustible astonishment and despair. They brood 
 on us. And perhaps it is well that we are not invited 
 to their pow-wows, until, at any rate, the hatchet 
 for the hundredth time is re-buried. Children are 
 in a sense butterflies, though they toil with an almost 
 inconceivable assiduity after life's scanty pollen and 
 nectar, and though, by a curious inversion of the 
 processes of nature, they may become the half- 
 comatose and purblind crysalides which too many of 
 us poor mature creatures so ruefully resemble. 
 They are not bound in by their groping senses. 
 
8 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. Be- 
 tween their dream and their reality looms no im- 
 passable abyss. There is no solitude more secluded 
 than a child's, no absorption more complete, no 
 insight more exquisite and, one might even add, 
 more comprehensive. As we strive to look back and 
 to live our past again, can we recall any joy, fear, 
 hope or disappointment so extreme as those of our 
 childhood, any love more impulsive and unquestion- 
 ing, and, alas, any boredom so unmitigated and un- 
 utterable? 
 
 We call their faith, even in ourselves, credulity; 
 and are grown perhaps so accustomed to life's 
 mysteries that we pale at their candour. ^' I am 
 afraid you cannot understand it, dear," exclaimed 
 a long-suffering mother, at the end of her resources. 
 " O yes, I can very well," was her little boy's reply, 
 " if only you would not explain." " Why is there 
 such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all 
 these things? " ran another small mind's inquiry. 
 And yet another: ^'Perhaps the world is a fancy, 
 mother. Shall I wake from this dream? " 
 
 We speak indulgently of childish make-believe, 
 childish fancy. Bret Harte was nearer the truth 
 when he maintained that '' the dominant expression 
 of a child is gravity." The cold fact is that few 
 
Intellectual Imagination 
 
 of us have the energy to be serious at their pitch. 
 There runs a jingle: 
 
 O, whither go all the nights and days? 
 
 And where can to-morrow be? 
 Is anyone there, when I'm not there? 
 
 And why am I always Me? 
 
 With such metaphysical riddles as these — riddles 
 which no philosopher has yet answered to anybody's 
 but his own entire satisfaction — children entertain 
 the waking moments of their inward reverie. They 
 are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again 
 and again out of the noise and fever of existence 
 into a waking vision. We can approach them only 
 by way of intuition and remembrance, only by be- 
 coming even as one of them; though there are many 
 books — Sully's '' Studies of Childhood," for in- 
 stance, Mr. Gosse's " Father and Son," John Rus- 
 kin's '' Prseterita," Serge Aksakoff's '' Years of 
 Childhood," Henry James's '' A Small Boy and 
 Others " — which will be a really vivid and quiet 
 help in times of difficulty. 
 
 This broken dream, then, this profound self- 
 communion, this innocent peace and wonder make 
 up the secret existence of a really childlike child: 
 while the intellect is only stirring. 
 
lo Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 Then, suddenly Hfe flings open the door of the 
 nursery. The child becomes a boy. I do not mean 
 that the transformation is as instantaneous as that, 
 though, if I may venture to give a personal tes- 
 timony, I have seen two children venture out into 
 the morning for the first time to their first boys'- 
 school, and return at evening transmogrified, so to 
 speak, into that queer, wild, and (frequently) ami- 
 able animal known as a boy. Gradually the childish 
 self retires like a shocked snail into its shell. Like 
 a hermit crab it accumulates defensive and aggres- 
 sive disguises. Consciousness from being chiefly 
 subjective becomes largely objective. The steam- 
 engine routs Faerie. Actuality breaks in upon 
 dream. School rounds off the glistening angles. 
 The individual is swamped awhile by the collective. 
 Yet the child-mind, the child-imagination persists, 
 and if powerful, never perishes. 
 
 But herCy as it seems to me, is the dividing line. 
 It is here that the boyish type of mind and imagina- 
 tion, the intellectual analytical type begins to show 
 itself, and to flourish. The boy — I merely refer, if 
 I may be forgiven, to Boy, and far more tentatively 
 to Girl, in the abstract, though, of course, there is 
 no such being — the boy is happy in company. Com- 
 pany sharpens his wits, awakens his rivalry, deep- 
 
Intellectual Imagination ii 
 
 ens his responsiveness, enlarges his responsibility, 
 " stirs him up," as we say. Apron-strings, however 
 dear their contents, were always a little restrictive. 
 He borrows a pitiless pair of scissors. He, unlike 
 the child told of by Blake and Vaughan and Tra- 
 herne, had always more or less '' understood this 
 place." He loves '' a forward motion " — the faster 
 the better. When " shades of the prison-house " 
 begin to close about him, he immediately sets out to 
 explore the jail. His natural impulse is to discover 
 the thronging, complicated, busy world, to sail out 
 into the West, rather than to dream of a remote 
 Orient. He is a restless, curious, untiring inquirer, 
 though preferably on his own lines rather than on 
 those dictated to him. He wants to test, to examine, 
 to experiment. 
 
 We must beware of theories and pigeon-holes. 
 Theory is a bad master, and there is a secret exit 
 to every convenient pigeon-hole. There are children 
 desperately matter-of-fact; there are boys dreamily 
 matter-of-fancy. But roughly, these are the two 
 phases of man's early life. Surroundings and educa- 
 tion may mould and modify, but the inward bent 
 of each one of us is persistent. Can we not, indeed, 
 divide "grown-ups" into two distinct categories; 
 those in whom the child is most evident, and those 
 
12 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 resembling the boy? '' Men are but children of a 
 larger growth/' says Dryden. And Praed makes 
 fun of the sad fact: '' Bearded men to-day appear 
 just Eton boys grown heavy." The change is one 
 of size rather than one of quality. Indeed, in its 
 fight for a place, in its fair play and foul, in its rigid 
 conventions, in its contest for prizes that are so 
 oddly apt to lose their value as soon as they are 
 won, how like the school of life is to any other 
 school; how strangely opinions differ regarding its 
 rules, its aims, its method, its routine and — its Head- 
 master. 
 
 And the poets? They, too, attend both schools. 
 But what are the faculties and qualities of mind 
 which produce poetry, or which incline us towards 
 it? According to Byron, there are four elements 
 that we are justified in demanding of a poet. He 
 found them, not without satisfaction, more con- 
 spicuous in Pope than in his contemporaries. These 
 elements sense, learning (in moderation), passion 
 and invention. Perhaps because he was less rich 
 in it, he omitted a fifth element, by no means the 
 least essential. I mean imagination, the imagina- 
 tion that not merely invents, but that creates, and 
 pierces to the inmost spirit and being of life, human- 
 ity and nature. This poetical imagination also is 
 
Intellectual Imagination 13 
 
 of two distinct kinds or types: the one divines, the 
 other discovers. The one is intuitive, inductive; 
 the other logical, deductive. The one visionary, 
 the other intellectual. The one knows that beauty 
 is truth, the other proves that truth is beauty. And 
 the poet inherits, as it seems to me, the one kind 
 from the child in him, the other from the boy in 
 him. Not that any one poet's imagination is purely 
 and solely of either type. The greatest poets — 
 Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, for instance, are mas- 
 ters of both. There is a borderland in which dwell 
 Wordsworth, Keats and many others. But the 
 visionaries, the mystics, Plato, Plotinus, the writer 
 of the book of Job, Blake, Patmore, and in our own 
 day. Flecker, and Mr. John Freeman, may be taken 
 as representative of the one type; Lucretius, Donne, 
 Dryden, Pope, Byron, Browning, Meredith, and in 
 our own day, Mr. Abercrombie, may be taken as 
 representative of the other. 
 
 The visionaries, those whose eyes are fixed on the 
 distance, on the beginning and end, rather than on 
 the incident and excitement of life's journey have 
 to learn to substantiate their imaginings, to base 
 their fantastic palaces on terra firma, to weave their 
 dreams into the fabric of actuality. But the source 
 and origin of their poetry is in the world within. 
 
14 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 The intellectual imagination, on the other hand, 
 flourishes on knowledge and experience. It must 
 first explore before it can analyse, devour before it 
 can digest, the world in which it finds itself. It 
 feeds and feeds upon ideas, but because it is crea- 
 tive, it expresses them in the terms of humanity, 
 of the senses and the emotions, makes life of them, 
 that is. There is less mystery, less magic in its 
 poetry. It does not demand of its reader so pro- 
 found or so complete a surrender. But if any 
 youthfulness is left in us, we can share its courage, 
 enthusiasm and energy, its zest and enterprise, its 
 penetrating thought, its wit, fervour, passion, and 
 we should not find it impossible to sympathise with 
 its wild revulsions of faith and feeling, its creative 
 scepticism. 
 
 Without imagination of the one kind or the other 
 mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic busi- 
 ness. The moment we begin to live — when we meet 
 the friend of friends, or fall in love, or think of our 
 children, or make up our minds, or set to the work 
 we burn to do, or make something, or vow a vow, or 
 pause suddenly face to face with beauty — at that 
 moment the imagination in us kindles, begins to 
 flame. Then we actually talk in rhythm. What is 
 genius but the possession of this supreme inward 
 
Intellectual Imagination 15 
 
 energy, in a rare and intense degree? Illumined by 
 the imagination, our life — whatever its defeats and 
 despairs — is a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness 
 and adventure and mystery. This is the fountain 
 of our faith and of our hope. 
 
 And so, by what I am afraid has been a tediously 
 circuitous route, I have come at length to Rupert 
 Brooke and to his poetry. His surely was the in- 
 tellectual imagination possessed in a rare degree. 
 Nothing in his work is more conspicuous than its 
 preoccupation with actual experience, its adventur- 
 ousness, its daring, its keen curiosity and interest 
 in ideas, its life-giving youthfulness. Nothing in his 
 work is more conspicuous by its absence than 
 reverie, a deep still broodingness. The children in 
 his poems are few. They are all seen objectively, 
 from without; though a wistful childlike longing 
 for peace and home and mother dwells in such a 
 poem as '' Retrospect '^ or " A Memory.'' I am not 
 sure that the word '' dream " occurs in them at all.^ 
 
 1 To my shame and consternation my friend Mr. Edward 
 Marsh has pointed out to me, since this paper was read, that 
 the word " dream " occurs in no less than fifteen of Brooke's 
 poems. This, I hope, will be one more salutary lesson that 
 general impressions are none the worse for being put to a 
 close test. Still, the fact that that peculiar, dreamlike quality 
 and atmosphere which is so conspicuous in the poetry of the 
 visionaries is very rarely, if ever, present in that of Brooke 
 will not, I think, be gainsaid. 
 
i6 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 " Don't give away one of the first poets in Eng- 
 land," he says in one of his letters, " but there is in 
 him still a very, very small portion that's just a 
 little childish." Surely it was the boy in him that 
 boasted in that jolly, easy fashion, the boy in him 
 that was a little shamefaced to confess to that faint 
 vestige of childishness. The theme of his poetry is 
 the life of the mind, the senses, the feelings, life 
 here and now, however impatient he may be with 
 life's limitations. Its longing is for a state of con- 
 sciousness wherein this kind of life shall be possible 
 without exhaustion, disillusionment, or reaction. 
 \His words, too, are not symbols; they mean precisely 
 what they say and only what they say. Whereas 
 the words of the mystics of the childlike imagina- 
 tion, Blake and Vaughan and Coleridge, seem chiefly 
 to mean what is left hinted at, rather than expressed. 
 His world stands out sharp and distinct, like the 
 towers and pinnacles of a city under the light of the 
 sky. Their world, old as Eden and remote as the 
 stars, lies like the fabric of a vision, bathed in an 
 unearthly atmosphere. He desired, loved, and 
 praised things in themselves for their energy, vivid- 
 ness and naturalness; they for some inward and 
 spiritual significance, for the reality of which they 
 are the painted veil. They live in the quietude of 
 
Intellectual Imagination 17 
 
 their imaginations, in a far-away listening, and are 
 most happy when at peace, if not passive. He is all 
 activity, apprehensiveness. 
 
 Nothing pleases him so much as doing things, 
 though, fretted that body and mind so soon weary, 
 he may pine for sleep. His writing, whether in his 
 poems, his Webster, or in his letters, is itself a kind 
 of action; and he delights far more than the mystics 
 in things touched, smelt and tasted. He delights, 
 that is, in the things in themselves, not merely 
 for their beauty or for the reality they represent. 
 He is restless, enquiring, veers in the wind like a 
 golden weathercock. He is impatient of a vague 
 ideahsm, as wary as a fox of the faintest sniff of 
 sentimentality. To avoid them (not always quite 
 successfully,) he flies to the opposite extreme, and 
 to escape from what he calls the rosy mists of poets' 
 experience emphasises the unpleasant side of life. 
 His one desire is to tell each salient moment's truth 
 about it. Truth at all costs: let beauty take care 
 of itself. So he came to write and to defend poems 
 that in Mr. Marsh's witty phrase one finds it dis- 
 quieting to read at meals. A child, a visionary, lives 
 in eternity; a man in time, a boy — sheer youthful- 
 ness — in the moment. It is the moments that flower 
 for Brooke. What is his poem " Dining-room Tea " 
 
1 8 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 but the lovely cage of an instant when in ecstasy 
 time and the world stood still? 
 
 For truth's sake he has no fear of contradictions. 
 t^ The mood changes, the problem, even the certainty 
 shows itself under different aspects; he will be faith- 
 ful to each in turn. Obviously he rather enjoyed 
 shocking the stagnant and satisfied, and bating the 
 thin-blooded philosophers, enjoyed indeed shocking 
 and bating himself, but he also delighted, as in a 
 pure intellectual exercise, in looking, as we say, all 
 round a thing. If, unlike Methuselah, he did not 
 live long enough to see life whole, he at least con- 
 fronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcert- 
 ing stare. If he was anywhere at ease, it was in 
 " the little nowhere of the brain." Again and again, 
 for instance, he speculates on the life that follows 
 death. First, (mere chronological order is not ab- 
 solutely material) he imagines the Heaven of the 
 fish: 
 
 Fat caterpillars drift around, 
 And Paradisal grubs are found; 
 Unfading moths, immortal flies, 
 And the worm that never dies. 
 And in that Heaven of all their wish, 
 There shall be no more land, say fish. 
 
 Next, he laments despairingly in Tahiti, with a 
 
Intellectual Imagination 19 
 
 kind of wistful mockery, at the thought of an im- 
 mortality where all is typical and nothing real: 
 
 And you'll no longer swing and sway 
 Divinely down the scented shade, 
 Where feet to Ambulation fade, 
 And moons are lost in endless Day. 
 How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, 
 Where there are neither heads nor flowers? . . . 
 
 Next, he momentarily wafts himself into the being 
 of a Shade: 
 
 So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams. 
 Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams. 
 
 Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men, 
 Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible, 
 
 And light on waving grass, he knows not when; 
 And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. 
 
 Next, he deprecates the possibility of a future life 
 even as tenuous and nebulous as this: 
 
 Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile. 
 Cling, and are borne into the night apart. 
 The laugh dies with the lips, '' Love " with the lover. 
 
 And, again, he is lost in rapture at the possibility 
 which he mocked at in the first poem, sighed at in 
 
20 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 the second, belittled in the third, and denied in the 
 fourth: 
 
 Not dead, not undesirous yet, 
 Still sentient, still unsatisfied, 
 
 We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit. 
 Around the places where we died, 
 
 And dance as dust before the sun. 
 And light of foot, and unconfined, 
 
 Hurry from road to road, and run 
 About the errands of the wind. 
 
 And every mote, on earth or air. 
 
 Will speed and gleam^, down later days. 
 
 And like a secret pilgrim fare 
 By eager and invisible ways. 
 
 Nor ever rest, nor ever lie. 
 
 Till, beyond thinkin-^, out of view. 
 
 One mote of all the dust that's I 
 
 Shall meet one atom that was you. 
 
 Then in some garden hushed from wind, 
 "Warm in a sunset's afterglow, 
 
 The lovers in the flowers will find 
 A sweet and strange unquiet grow 
 
 Upon the peace; and, past desiring, 
 
 So high a beauty in the air, 
 And such a light, and such a quiring, 
 
 And such a radiant ecstasy there, 
 
Intellectual Imagination 21 
 
 They'll know not if it's fire, or dew, 
 Or out of earth, or in the height, 
 
 Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue. 
 Or two that pass, in light to light, 
 
 Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . . 
 
 Which of these conflicting solutions, we may in- 
 quire, to one of Life's obscurest problems are we 
 to accept as his? Do, or do not, such seductive 
 speculations as these confirm the view expressed by 
 Plato in the Republic that the poets undermine the 
 rational principle in the soul? It may be admitted 
 that such poetry as this, in the words of Bacon, 
 " makes men witty," and is unquestionably a 
 '^ criticism of life "; but can it be said to teach — as 
 Wordsworth intended that his poetry should? Well, 
 when Mrs. Barbauld had the temerity to charge 
 " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " with two grave 
 faults; first, that it was improbable, and next, that 
 it had no moral, Coleridge cheerfully pleaded guilty 
 to the first charge, while, as for the other, " I told 
 her that ... it had too much — that is, for a work 
 of pure imagination." Will it satisfy " serious " 
 inquirers if it be suggested that these poems of 
 Brooke's are manifestations of the intellectual im- 
 agination? Probably not. They demand of a poet 
 a definite and explicit philosophy. They desire of 
 
22 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 him a confirmation, if not of their own faith, then 
 of his. But it cannot be too clearly recognised that 
 the faith of a poet is expressed in all that he writes. 
 He cannot, either as a man or as a poet, live without 
 faith; and never does. A few lovely words about 
 lovely things is an expression of faith: so, too, is all 
 love, all desire for truth, all happiness. If we have 
 such faith ourselves, if we search close enough, we 
 shall find a poet's faith expressed implicitly through- 
 out his work. 
 
 We must, too, be thankful for many and various 
 mercies, the mercy, for instance (so richly conferred 
 in Brooke's writing), that here was a man who never 
 spared mind and spirit in the effort to do the best 
 work he could, who was that finest thing any man 
 can be — a true craftsman delighting in his job. We 
 cannot demand that he shall answer each of our 
 riddles in turn; ^^ tidy things up." He shares our 
 doubts and problems; exults in them, and at the 
 same time proves that life in spite of all its duplicity 
 and deceits, and horrors, is full of strangeness, 
 wonder, mystery, grace and power: is ''good." 
 This, at any rate, is true of Rupert Brooke. And 
 he knew well enough that the nearer a poet gets to 
 preaching, the more cautious he should be respect- 
 ing the pulpit and the appurtenances thereof. 
 
Intellectual Imagination 23 
 
 As with the life hereafter, so with this life, so 
 with love. The sentimentalist always shy of the 
 real, the cynic always hostile to it, cling to some 
 pleasing dream or ugly nightmare of the real, know- 
 ing them to be illusions. That is precisely what 
 Brooke, keen, insistent, analytical, refused to do. 
 He pours out his mind and heart for instance in the 
 service of love. The instant that love is dead, he 
 has, to put it crudely, very little use for its corpse. 
 He refuses point blank to find happiness in any 
 happy medium, to be a wanderer, as he said, in " the 
 middle mist.'^ There are two sides — many more 
 than two, as a matter of fact — to every question. 
 " Blue Evening " or '' The Voice " prove his com- 
 petence to see both. At times, indeed, with a kind 
 of boyish waywardness and obstinacy he prefers 
 the other side — the ugliest — of the much-flattered 
 moon. Helen's young face was beautiful. True. 
 In age not only must she have lost her youthful 
 fairness, but possibly became repulsive. Well, 
 then, as a poet, hating " sugared lies," he must 
 say so. 
 
 It is indeed characteristic of the intellectual im- 
 agination to insist on " life's little ironies." It 
 destroys in order to rebuild. Every scientist who 
 is not a mere accumulator of parts, possesses it. 
 
24 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 Acutely sensitive to the imperfections of the present, 
 its hope is in the future; whereas the visionary, 
 certainly no less conscious of flaw and evil is happy 
 in his faith in the past, or rather of the eternal now. 
 The one cries " What shall I do? " the other " What 
 must I be? " The one, as has been said, would 
 prove that truth is beauty; the other knows that 
 beauty is truth. After all, to gain the whole world 
 is in one true sense to save the soul. 
 
 In the lugubrious and exciting moment when 
 Brooke wrote '^ Kindliness " and " Menelaus and 
 Helen," it was not his aim or thought to see that 
 age, no less than youth and beauty is, in his own 
 phrase, " pitiful with morality." He resented ugli- 
 ness and decay, and associated them with death and 
 evil. For death, whatever else it may be, brings 
 destruction of the beauty of the body; and evil 
 brings the destruction of the spirit which is the life 
 and light of the body. They are the contraries of 
 a true living energy; and because his mind seemed to 
 be indestructible, and his body as quick with vital- 
 ity as a racehorse, and love the very lantern of 
 beauty, he not only feared the activities of death, 
 but was intolerant of mere tranquillity, even of 
 friendliness, and, above all, of masking make-believe. 
 
 SometiCiCS, indeed, in his poetry, in his letters, 
 he is not quite just to himself in the past, or even 
 
Intellectual Imagination 25 
 
 in the present, because he seemed to detect com- 
 promise and pretence. " So the poor love of fool 
 and blind I've proved you. For, fool or lovely, 'twas 
 a fool that loved you." On the other hand, listen 
 to these fragments from the letters in Mr. Marsh's 
 vivifying memoir, '' I find myself smiling a dim, 
 gentle, poetic, paternal Jehovah-like smile — over the 
 ultimate excellence of humanity." "Dear! dear! 
 it's very trying being so exalted one day, and ever 
 so desperate the next — this self-knowledge! . . ." 
 " I know what things are good: friendship and work 
 and conversation. These I shall have. . . . " He 
 tells how the day has brought back to him " that 
 tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want 
 to walk 1000 miles, and write 1000 plays, and sing 
 1000 poems, and drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 
 1000 girls, and — oh, a million things! . . . The 
 spring makes me almost ill with excitement. I go 
 round corners on the roads shivering and nearly cry- 
 ing with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some 
 playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten 
 one. ..." " Henceforward," writes Mr. Marsh 
 in another passage, '' the only thing he cared for — 
 or rather he felt he ought to care for — in a man, was 
 the possession of goodness; its absence the one thing 
 he hated. ... It was the spirit, the passion that 
 counted with him " 
 
26 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 His verse tells the same tale. Life to poetry, 
 poetry to life — that is one of the few virtuous 
 circles. Life and thought to him were an endless 
 adventure. His mind, as he says, was restless as. a 
 scrap of paper in the wind. His moods ebbed and 
 flowed, even while his heart, that busy heart, as 
 he called it, was deeply at rest. Wit to such a mind 
 is a kind of safety-valve, or even the little whistle 
 which the small boy pipes up for courage' sake in 
 the dark. Letters and poems flash and tingle with 
 wit — and rare indeed are the poems in our language 
 which, like '' Tiare Tahiti," ''The Funeral of 
 Youth," and " The Old Vicarage," are witty and 
 lovely at the same time: 
 
 And in that garden, black and white, 
 Creep whispers through the grass all night; 
 And spectral dance, before the dawn, 
 A hundred Vicars down the lawn; 
 Curates, long dust, will come and go 
 On lissom, clerical, printless toe; 
 And oft between the boughs is seen 
 The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . 
 Till, at a shiver in the skies. 
 Vanishing with Satanic cries, 
 The prim ecclesiastic rout 
 Leaves but a startled sleeper-out. 
 Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, 
 The falling house that never falls . . . 
 
Intellectual Imagination 27 
 
 Few poets have mocked and made fun and made 
 beauty like that, all in one breath, and certainly not 
 the childlike visionaries, though one of them knew 
 that even by mere playing the innocent may go to 
 heaven. And beneath Brooke's wit was humour — 
 the humour that is cousin to the imagination, smiling 
 at the world it loves and understands. 
 
 Byron, too, was witty, mocking, enjoyed turning 
 things inside out and wrong side upwards, picking 
 ideas to pieces, shocking the timid, the transcen- 
 dental, the spinners of cocoons; but Brooke, unlike 
 Byron, was never sourly sardonic, never morbidly 
 cynical. Simply because he was alv/ays testing, 
 analysing, examining, with an intellect bordering 
 as close on his emotions as his emotions bordered 
 on his intellect, he was, again, in Mr. Marsh's words, 
 self-conscious, self-examining, self-critical, but never 
 self-absorbed; never an ice-cold egotist, that is, 
 however insistent he may be on his own individual- 
 ity. More closely than Byron he resembles 
 Mercutio : 
 
 If love be rough with you, be rough with love; 
 Prick love for loving, and you beat love down . . . 
 If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire 
 Of this, sir-reverence love, wherein thou stick'st 
 Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho! . . . 
 
28 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 I mean, sir, in delay 
 We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day. 
 Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits 
 Five times in that ere once in our five wits. 
 
 And in his metaphysical turns, his waywardness, 
 his contradictoriness, his quick revulsions of feeling, 
 he reminds us not less — he reminded even himself 
 (in a moment of exultation) of the younger Donne. 
 
 Though " magic " in the accepted sense is all but 
 
 absent from his verse — the magic that transports the 
 
 imagination clean into another reality, that drenches 
 
 a word, a phrase, with the light that was never 
 
 strangely cast even on the Spice Islands or Cathay, 
 
 he has that other poetic magic that can in a line 
 
 or two present a portrait, a philosophy, and fill the 
 
 instant with a changeless grace and truth. That 
 
 magic shines out in such fragments, for instance, 
 
 as: 
 
 Beauty was there, 
 Pale in her black; Dry-eyed; she stood alone . . . 
 
 or 
 
 or 
 
 And turn, and toss your brown delightful head. 
 Amusedly, among the ancient Dead; 
 
 And less-than-echoes of remembered tears 
 Hush all the loud confusion of the heart; 
 
Intellectual Imagination 29 
 
 or 
 
 There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter 
 And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after, 
 
 Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance 
 And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white 
 
 Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, 
 A width, a shining peace, under the night. 
 
 What, again, is it but this magic which stills the 
 heart, gives light to the imagination, in one of the 
 less well-known, but not the least quiet and tender 
 of his poems, ^' Doubts "? 
 
 When she sleeps, her soul, I know. 
 Goes a wanderer on the air, 
 Wings where I may never go. 
 Leaves her lying, still and fair, 
 Waiting, empty, laid aside. 
 Like a dress upon a chair . . . 
 This I know, and yet I know 
 Doubts that will not be denied. 
 
 For if the soul be not in place. 
 What has laid trouble in her face? 
 And, sits there nothing ware and wise 
 Behind the curtain of her eyes, 
 What is it, in the self's eclipse. 
 Shadows, soft and passingly. 
 About the corners of her lips. 
 The smile that is essential she? 
 
30 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 And if the spirit be not there, 
 Why is fragrance in the hair? 
 
 Above all, Brooke's poems are charged with, and 
 surrender the magic of what we call personality. 
 1 They seem, as we read them, to bring us into a 
 happy, instant relationship with him, not only 
 ghostly eye to eye, but mind to mind. They tell 
 more than even friendship could discover unaided. 
 They share his secrets with the world — as if a boy 
 had turned out the contents of his astonishing 
 pockets just before going to bed. They share them, 
 too, in that queer paradoxical fashion which makes 
 a volume of poems a more secure refuge even than 
 one's lawyer, one's doctor, or a priest. 
 
 Many of our fellow-creatures — whether we like 
 or dislike them, approve or disapprove — always re- 
 main a little mysterious and problematical. Even 
 when they most frankly express themselves, we are 
 conscious that there is still something in them that 
 eludes us, a dream unshared, a reticence unbroken, 
 a fugitive phantom. Have we, indeed, all of us, to 
 the last dim corner and attic, cellar and corridor, 
 explored ourselves? Because of his very candour, 
 because, so to speak, of what he looked like, this 
 was to some extent true of Rupert Brooke. Age, in 
 time, scrawls our very selves upon our faces. Fast- 
 
Intellectual Imagination 31 
 
 locked the door of our souls may be, but the key 
 hangs in the porch. But youth and delightful man- 
 ners may be a mask concealing gravity and deep 
 feeling. And what is one's remembrance of that 
 serenely eager, questing face, stilled, as it were, with 
 the phantom of a smile that might have lingered in 
 the countenance of the Sphinx in her younger days, 
 but that of the very embodiment of youth? We 
 don't often meet people in this world who instantly 
 recall the Golden Age and remind us that the Greek 
 sculptors went to Life for their models. Even 
 Henry James, in his essay on Brooke, not less in 
 its translucency than five fathoms deep, seems to 
 pause Prospero-like before that Ariel whom he had 
 suddenly encountered in the beautiful setting of the 
 Cambridge backs. With the lingering gusto which 
 an epicure lavishes on a rare old vintage he tastes 
 —tastes again, and all but hesitates for words 
 to express his precise reaction; and to suggest that 
 Henry James was ever at a loss for words is to 
 insinuate that the Mississippi might run short of 
 water. 
 
 One was just happy in Brooke's company. Guilt- 
 ily one eyed his gold. Here in laughing, talking 
 actuality was a living witness of what humanity 
 might arrive at when— well, when we tread the 
 
32 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 streets of Utopia. Happiness is catching. No doubt 
 this admiration sometimes elated him, without his 
 being aware of it. At times, in certain company, it 
 must have been a positive vexation. Admiration is 
 a dense medium through which to press to what 
 treasure may be beyond. Poets, indeed, unHke chil- 
 dren, and for their own sake if not for that of others, 
 should be heard and not seen; and it must have 
 been very difficult for this poet to take cover, to 
 lie low. He came; you saw; he conquered. And 
 after? Like a good child's birthday cake, he was 
 as rich as he looked. 
 
 " I never met," wrote to his mother one heaven- 
 sent friend (I mean sent to the outskirts of heaven), 
 " I never met so entirely likeable a chap. . . . 
 Your son was not merely a genius; what is perhaps 
 more important, he had a charm that was literally 
 like sunshine." Indeed the good things simply softly 
 shimmered out of him — wit, enthusiasm, ideas, rail- 
 lery, fun, and that sympathetic imagination concern- 
 ing everybody and everything that he himself said 
 was the artist's one duty. He had, of course, his 
 own terms — critical, and perhaps at times a little 
 exacting. If he suffered a fool, no more than with 
 the rest of his own generation was it with a guileless 
 gladness. He preferred humanity to be not too stiff, 
 
Intellectual Imap-ination 33 
 
 not too stupid, and not to dry. Talk he loved; and 
 when he listened, his mind was in his eyes, '' tree 
 whispering to tree without wind, quietly." If he 
 hated, if his sensitiveness wholly recoiled, then that 
 was the end of the matter. 
 
 He confronted his fellow-creatures just like the 
 boy he was, ready to face what and who may come 
 without flinching; smiling lip and steady eye. One 
 was conscious of occasional shynesses and silences, 
 even a little awkwardness at times that was in itself 
 a grace. One was still more conscious of an in- 
 satiable interest and speculation. His quiet gaze 
 took you in; yours couldn't so easily take him in. 
 These are but my own remembrances, few, alas, 
 however vivid and unfading: and even at that they 
 are merely those of one of the less responsive sex! 
 
 In spite of life's little disillusionments (which, it 
 is prudent to remember, we may cause as well as 
 endure; ) in spite of passing moods of blackness and 
 revulsion, nothing could be clearer in his poems, in 
 his letters, and in himself, than his zest and hap- 
 piness. Looking back on his school-life he said that 
 he had been happier than he could find words to say. 
 Vv^hat wonder that at twenty he describes himself 
 as in the depths of despondency ''because of my 
 age " ? And a little later: " I am just too old for 
 
34 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 life so full and so arresting that he was afraid he 
 might not be able to keep pace with it? It was a 
 needless apprehension. The sea was deep beneath 
 the waves and the foam. If he had lived to be, let 
 us say, forty, he would have said just the same 
 thing, though, perhaps, with more emphasis and 
 more philosophy. He was never to experience that 
 little misfortune. He flung himself into the world 
 — of men or of books, of thought and affairs — as a 
 wasp pounces into a cakeshop, Hotspur into the 
 fighting. When his soul flourished on Walter Pater 
 and Aubrey Beardsley, he thought it a waste of time 
 to walk and swim. When, together v/ith meat and 
 alcohol, he gave up these rather rarified dainties, 
 and lived, as it is fabulously reported, on milk and 
 honey, it seemed a waste of time to do anything else. 
 He could not be half-hearted. Indeed, in that " tear- 
 ing hunger to do things " — working, playing, read- 
 ing, writing, publishing, travelling, talking, social- 
 ism, politics — any one thing seemed a waste of time, 
 because meanwhile the rest of life's feast was kept 
 waiting. "What an incredibly lovely, superb 
 world! " he exclaims. Lovely, superb — what are 
 the adjectives which we should choose? Again, " it 
 is fun going and making thousands of acquaint- 
 
Intellectual Imagination 35 
 
 ances." It must be fun — when you are Rupert 
 Brooke. Frankly, voraciously, that is how he met 
 everything and everybody — from Mrs. Grundy to 
 the Statue of Liberty. 
 
 The Statue of Liberty reminds me, naturally 
 enough, of America. Three years ago, the fact that 
 one of the great American Universities had awarded 
 Brooke the first Rowland Memorial Prize — " in 
 recognition of an achievement of marked distinction 
 in the field of literature " — passed, comparatively 
 speaking, unnoticed in England. But that award 
 was not merely an academic compliment. The value 
 of a gift is in the spirit of the giver, and this gift 
 of love and admiration was from the heart. The 
 friend — because none worthier to be sent was 
 free — the friend of Brooke's whose privilege it was 
 to go to New Haven formally to receive that prize 
 on/,Mrs. Brooke's behalf, was absolutely unknown 
 there. His name — my name, as a matter of fact — 
 was, alas! no Sesame. In New York I went, I 
 remember, to call one day on a very charming friend 
 of Brooke's, to whom he wrote some of his gayest 
 letters. A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who 
 the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she ex- 
 claimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, 
 '' Gee whiz! what a name! " This trifling and im- 
 
36 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 modest digression is only to show just how Mrs. 
 Brooke's ambassador stood in the great eye of 
 America. Now, in Brooke's own words, '' American 
 hospitahty means that with the nice ones you can be 
 at once on happy and intimate terms." I wish I had 
 words to express how true that is — that heedful, 
 self-sacrificing, unbounded kindness. The nice ones 
 indeed were everywhere, for without exception they 
 all knew, or knew of, Brooke. Not that they knew 
 no other contemporary English poet, perhaps even 
 a little better than John Bull does himself — Mr. 
 Yeats, Mr. Binzon, Mr. Masefield, Mr. Gibson. But 
 I had but to whisper " R. B." — and the warmest 
 welcome and interest were mine. Now, in nineteen 
 hundred and sixteen that welcome for his sake was 
 not merely of literary significance. The ardour and 
 devotion of those English sonnets of his had gone 
 home, and the home of poetry is world-wide. Never 
 was a true friendship between two countries and 
 nations of such vital importance as that between 
 England and America to-day. Long before the 
 American nation actually ^' came into " the war, 
 many, many hearts there beat truly with ours. 
 Cousins cannot invariably see eye to eye. But we 
 cannot forget that generous sympathy in the hour 
 when England needed it. Our steady insight and 
 
Intellectual Imagination 37 
 
 understanding, with as slight an admixture as pos- 
 sible of a peculiar quality of insularity which may 
 be comprehensively described as '' God-Almighti- 
 ness," is the least we can give in return. 
 
 I hope it will be no breach of confidence if I quote 
 a few words from a letter I received from a friend 
 in America only the other day, one who knew 
 Brooke's poetry not by hearsay, but by heart. " I 
 dutifully belong," she writes, '' to the English-speak- 
 ing Unions, and am properly interested in various 
 schemes for making the relations between England 
 and America closer. But I may say this to you — I 
 don't want the alliance to result in the least Ameri- 
 canizing of England. I want England to remain 
 ^ like her mother who died yesterday ' " (she is quot- 
 ing Edward Thomas, rare poet and rarest friend). 
 " We over here," she continues, '' can't have all the 
 simple, lovely and solitary things of which English- 
 men write. It helps so much to be able to think of 
 them as they are in England." These are the words 
 of a devotee of England — such devotees as poetry 
 makes and keeps. 
 
 But such were the friends that Brooke himself 
 with his poetry and happiness made wherever he 
 went. " Happy," indeed, is the refrain that runs 
 through all his letters. And then, at length, when on 
 
38 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 his way to the last great adventure of all: "I have 
 never," he writes, " I have never been so pervasively 
 happy in my life." That is how he opened the door 
 into one's life, and came in. But behind all that we 
 say or do, behind even what we think, is the solitude 
 wherein dwells what we are: and to that solitude 
 he was no stranger. This solitude was not what 
 called most frequently for expression. Because each 
 day was so great a tax, however welcome, on mind 
 and body, he sometimes longed for sleep: 
 
 O haven without wave or tide! 
 Silence, in which all songs have died! 
 Holy book, where hearts are still! 
 And home at length under the hill! 
 O mother quiet, breasts of peace, 
 Where love itself would faint and cease! 
 
 infinite deep I never knew, 
 
 1 would come back, come back to you. 
 Find you as a pool unstirred, 
 Kneel down by you, and never a word, 
 Lay my head, and nothing said, 
 
 In your hands, ungarlanded; 
 
 And a long watch you would keep; 
 
 And I should sleep, and I should sleep! 
 
 So, again and again his thoughts in his poetry turn 
 towards death, only to appearance the deepest sleep 
 of all. But then, again, because nothing in life 
 
Intellectual Imagination 39 
 
 could satisfy such a hunger and aspiration for life, 
 beyond mood and change he longed for a peace 
 ''where sense is with knowing one": and, beyond 
 even this bodiless communion, for the peace that 
 passes understanding: 
 
 " Lost into God, as lights in Hght, we fly. 
 Grown one with will." 
 
 Simply because things as they are are not as they 
 should be, we take refuge at times from the defeats 
 and despairs of this mortal existence in satire and 
 scepticism, a passing doubt in man, in goodness, in 
 the heavenly power. So, too, did he. He kept piling 
 up the fuel for those '' flaming brains " of his; took 
 life at the flood. When ashes succeeded the blaze 
 and the tide ran low and the mud-fiats shimmered 
 in the mocking sunshine; why, he could at least be 
 frank. Each in turn he accepted life's promises; 
 when it broke some of them — as it sometimes must 
 in order to keep the others — he closely examined the 
 pieces, whatever the pang. One promise, however, 
 would never have failed him: " There are only three 
 good things in this world: one is to read, one is to 
 write, the other is to live poetry." The last is by 
 far the most difficult, and Mrs. Grundy is not un- 
 charmed to discover that not all the poets are mas- 
 
40 Rupert Brooke and the 
 
 ters of the art. But there it is: they are his own 
 words; and he meant what he said. 
 
 What, if he had Hved, he would have done in this 
 world is a fascinating but an unanswerable question. 
 This only can be said: that he would have gone on 
 being his wonderful self. Radium is inexhaustible. 
 As we look back across the gulf of these last four 
 years we see him in vividest outline against the 
 gloom. Other poets, beloved of the gods, and not 
 unendeared to humanity, have died young, as did 
 he. Indeed it may be that, however uncompromis- 
 ing the usages of age, every poet, every man in 
 whom burns on a few coals of imagination, " dies 
 young.'' But no other English poet of his age has 
 given up his life at a moment so signal, so pregnant. 
 That has isolated and set Rupert Brooke apart. No 
 single consciousness can even so much as vaguely 
 realise the sacrifice of mind and hope and aspiration, 
 of life and promise, " lovely and of good report " 
 which this pitiless and abominable war has meant 
 to England and to the world. His sacrifice was 
 representative. The " incantation of his verse " 
 quickened " a new birth," his words were " sparks 
 among mankind." 
 
 What place in English literature the caprices of 
 time and taste will at length accord him does not 
 
Intellectual Imagination 41 
 
 concern us. Let us in our thoughts be as charitable 
 as we can to our posterity, who will have leisure 
 for judgment, and can confer that remembrance 
 which fleeting humanity flatters in the term '' im- 
 nxortality." 
 
 I saw him beat the surges under him, 
 
 And ride upon their backs . . . 
 
 His bold head 
 'Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar'd 
 Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke 
 To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd. 
 As stooping to relieve him. I not doubt 
 He came alive to land. 
 
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