Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/23

Rh a kind of action; and he delights far more than the mystics in things touched, smelt and tasted. He delights, that is, in things in themselves not merely for their beauty or for the unseen reality they represent. He is restless, enquiring, veers in the wind like a golden weathercock. He is impatient of a vague idealism, 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 disquieting to read at meals. A child, a visionary, lives in eternity; a man in time, a boy—sheer youthfulness—in the moment. It is the moments that flower for Brooke. What is his poem "Dining-room Tea" 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. The mood changes, the problem, even the certainty shows itself under different aspects; he will be faithful to each in turn. Obviously he rather enjoyed shocking the stagnant and