Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/29

Rh matter of fact—to every question. "Blue Evening" or "The Voice" prove his competence 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 now immortal fairness, but possibly she became repulsive. Well, then, as a poet, hating "sugared lies," he said so.

It is indeed characteristic of the intellectual imagination to insist on 'life's little ironies.' It destroys in order to rebuild. Every scientist, who is not a mere accumulator of facts, possesses it. 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 in 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