Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/28

22 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 a poet 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 respecting the pulpit and the appurtenances thereof.

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, knowing 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