Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/30

24 phrase, 'pitiful with mortality.' He resented ugliness 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 vitality 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.

Sometimes, indeed, in his poetry, in his letters, he is not quite just to himself in the past, or even in the present, because he seemed to detect compromise 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..."