The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir/Memoir/Part IV

The Old Vicarage, which was his home in 1911, is a long, low, ramshackle, tumble-down one-storied house, with attics in a high roof, and a verandah. It has a profuse, overgrown, sweet-smelling, 'most individual and bewildering' garden, with random trees and long grass, and here and there odd relics of the eighteenth century, a sundial sticking out from the dried-up basin of a round pond, and an imitation ruin in a corner. Towards the end of the year it is a little melancholy. "The garden," he wrote in September, "is immeasurably autumnal, sad, mysterious, august. I walk in it feeling like a fly crawling on the score of the Fifth Symphony"; and in December he called it a House of Usher. But in summer it's a paradise of scent and colour. "You'll find me quite wild with reading and the country," he wrote in an invitation. "Come prepared for bathing, and clad in primitive clothes. Bring books also: one talks eight hours, reads eight, and sleeps eight."

Here is a morning of about this time, in a letter to Miss Katherine Cox: "I worked till 1, and then ran nearly to Haslingfield and back before lunch, thinking over the next bits. There was such clearness and frosty sun. Some men under a haystack, eating their lunch, shouted how fine a day it was. I shouted back it was very cold; and ran on. They roared with laughter and shouted after me that with that fine crop of hair I oughtn't to be cold . . . . It was wonderful and very clean out there. I thought of all you Londoners, dirty old drivellers! Now I'm come in to rehearse my nigger part [as a super in the Magic Flute] and to work. I've realised that taking part in theatrical performances is the only thing worth doing. And it's so very nice being an intelligent subordinate. I'm a very good subordinate—it's such a test! I'm thought not to dance well: but my intelligence and devotion have brought me rapidly to the front. I am now the most important of 7 negroes!"

He was now working at the first draft of his dissertation on John Webster, which he sent in at the end of the year. "I've wallowed in Webster-Texts all day," he wrote in September. "If only I didn't want, at the same time, to be reading everything else in the world, I should be infinitely happy." He didn't get the Fellowship till next year.

He was also preparing the book of Poems which Messrs Sidgwick & Jackson published in December. It had a mixed reception, both from his friends and from the critics. I was lucky enough to take it in a way which pleased him; and he rewarded me with the following letter, which is too informing to be left out, though I would rather it fell to someone else to print it: "Your letter gave me great joy. I horribly feel that degrading ecstasy that I have always despised in parents whose shapeless offspring are praised for beauty. People are queer about my poems. Some that I know very well and have great sympathie with, don't like them. Some people seem to like them. Some like only the early ones—them considerably, but the others not at all. These rather sadden me. I hobnob vaguely with them over the promising verses of a young poet, called Rupert Brooke, who died in 1908. But I'm so much more concerned with the living; who doesn't interest them. God! it's so cheering to find someone who likes the modern stuff, and appreciates what one's at. You can't think how your remarks and liking thrilled me. You seemed, both in your classing them and when you got to details, to agree so closely with what I felt about them (only, of course, I often feel doubtful about their relative value to other poetry) that I knew you understood what they meant. It sounds a poor compliment—or else a queer conceitedness—to remark on your understanding them; but it's really been rather a shock to me—and made me momentarily hopeless—that so many intelligent and well-tasted people didn't seem to have any idea what I was driving at, in any poem of the last few years. It opened my eyes to the fact that people who like poetry are barely more common than people who like pictures.

"I'm (of course) unrepentant about the 'unpleasant' poems. I don't claim great merit for the Channel Passage: but the point of it was (or should have been!) 'serious.' There are common and sordid things—situations or details—that may suddenly bring all tragedy, or at least the brutality of actual emotions, to you. I rather grasp relievedly at them, after I've beaten vain hands in the rosy mists of poets' experiences. Lear's button, and Hilda Lessways turning the gas suddenly on, and—but you know more of them than I. Shakespeare's not unsympathetic. 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.' And the emotions of a sea-sick lover seem to me at least as poignant as those of the hero who has 'brain-fever.' . . . . ..

"Mrs Cornford tried to engage me in a controversy over the book—she and her school. They are known as the Heart-criers, because they believe all poetry ought to be short, simple, naive, and a cry from the heart; the sort of thing an inspired only child might utter if it was in the habit of posing to its elders. They object to my poetry as unreal, affected, complex, 'literary,' and full of long words. I'm re-writing English literature on their lines. Do you think this is a fair rendering of Shakespeare's first twenty sonnets, if Mrs Cornford had had the doing of them?

It seems to me to have got the kernel of the situation, and stripped away all unnecessary verbiage or conscious adornment."

The verdicts of the newspapers varied from that of the Saturday Review, which "definitely told Mr Rupert Brooke to 'mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks,'" to that of the Daily Chronicle, which prophesied, by the mouth of Edward Thomas, that he would be a poet, and not a little one. It may be said that in general the book was received with a good deal of interest, and hailed as at least promising. Many of the critics seemed so struck with the 'unpleasant' poems (seven, at most, out of fifty) that they could hardly notice the others. This showed, perhaps, a wrong sense of proportion; but the author's own point of view about them is certainly a matter of interest, and though the purpose of this memoir is not critical, it may be worth while here to put together some of its factors, besides those which appear from the letter I have just quoted. It is, of course, absurdly untrue that, as has been said, he felt he ought to make up for his personal beauty by being ugly in his poetry. To begin with, ugliness had a quite unaffected attraction for him; he thought it just as interesting as anything else; he didn't like it—he loathed it—but he liked thinking about it. 'The poetical character,' as Keats said, 'lives in gusto.' Then he still had at this age (24) a good deal of what soon afterwards faded completely away—the bravado, the feeling that it was fun to shock and astonish the respectable, which came out in his school letters. Again, he was incensed by the usual attitude of criticism—in his view, either stupid or hypocritical—towards 'coarseness' in literature. "Indeed," he wrote early this year in a review, "the Elizabethans were unrefined. Their stories were shocking, their thoughts nasty, their language indelicate. It is absurd to want them otherwise. It is intolerable that these critics should shake the pedagogic finger of amazed reproval at them. . . . . . . Such people do not understand that the vitality of the Elizabethan Drama is inseparable from [its coarseness]. Their wail that its realism is mingled with indecency is more than once repeated. True literary realism, they think, is a fearless reproduction of what real living men say when there is a clergyman in the room." The feeling here expressed urged him to make a demonstration; it dignified the boyish impulse into a duty.

To conclude this subject I will quote a letter to his publisher about the sonnet Libido, to which the original title Lust is now restored: "My own feeling is that to remove it would be to overbalance the book still more in the direction of unimportant prettiness. There's plenty of that sort of wash in the other pages for the readers who like it. They needn't read the parts which are new and serious. About a lot of the book I occasionally feel that like Ophelia I've turned 'thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, to favour and to prettiness.' So I'm extra keen about the places where I think that thought and passion are, however clumsily, not so transmuted. This was one of them. It seemed to have qualities of reality and novelty that made up for the clumsiness. . . . I should like it to stand, as a representative in the book of abortive poetry against literary verse; and because I can't see any æsthetic ground against it which would not damn three-quarters of the rest of the book too; or any moral ground at all."

During all this time he was working up to a rather serious illness. As a child and as a boy he had been delicate, but at Cambridge his health had greatly improved, and all the time he was there he never had to go to a doctor. Now, however, he left his open-air life and came to London for work on Webster. "He lived," his Mother tells me, "in wretched rooms in Charlotte Street, spending all day at the British Museum, going round to his friends in the evening and sitting up most of the night. He then went to Grantchester to finish his dissertation, and from his brother's account scarcely went to bed at all for a week, several times working all night. He came home for Christmas quite tired out." The letter to me which I last quoted, written at Rugby on the 22nd of December, ends with this: "I'm sorry I never saw you again. The last part of November and the first of December I spent in writing my dissertation at Grantchester. . . . . . . I couldn't do it at all well. I came to London in a dilapidated condition for a day or two after it was over. Now I'm here over Christmas. About the 27th I go to Lulworth with a reading-party for a fortnight. Then to the South of France, then Germany . . . and the future's mere mist. I want to stay out of England for some time. (1) I don't like it. (2) I want to work—a play, and so on. (3) I'm rather tired and dejected.

"So I probably shan't be in London for some time. If I am, I'll let you know. I'm going to try to do scraps—reviewing, etc.—in my spare time for the immediate future. I suppose you don't edit a magazine? I might review Elizabethan books at some length for the Admiralty Gazette or T.A.T. (Tattle amongst Tars), or whatever journal you officially produce? At least I hope you'll issue an order to include my poems in the library of all submarines."

His next letter is of February 25th, 1912, from Rugby: "I went to Lulworth after Christmas for a reading party. There I collapsed suddenly into a foodless and sleepless Hell. God! how one can suffer from what my amiable specialist described as a 'nervous breakdown.' (He reported that I had got into a 'seriously introspective condition'! and—more tangibly—that my weight had gone down a stone or two.) I tottered, being too tired for suicide, to Cannes, not because I like the b—— place, but because my mother happened to be there. I flapped slowly towards the surface there; and rose a little more at Munich. I have come here for a month or two to complete it. After that I shall be allowed (and, by Phœbus, able, I hope) to do some work. My cure consists in perpetual over-eating and over-sleeping, no exercise, and no thought. Rather a nice existence, but oh God! weary."

In March he went for a walk in Sussex with James Strachey, and sent Miss Cox a sensational account, dated from 'The Mermaid Club, Rye,' of an unsuccessful attempt to visit a great man whose acquaintance he had made at Cambridge. "I read the 'Way of All Flesh' and talk to James. James and I have been out this evening to call on Mr Henry James at 9.0. We found—at length—the house. It was immensely rich, and brilliantly lighted at every window on the ground floor. The upper floors were deserted: one black window open. The house is straight on the street. We nearly fainted with fear of a company. At length I pressed the Bell of the Great Door—there was a smaller door further along, the servants' door we were told. No answer. I pressed again. At length a slow dragging step was heard within. It stopped inside the door. We shuffled. Then, very slowly, very loudly, immense numbers of chains and bolts were drawn within. There was a pause again. Further rattling within. Then the steps seemed to be heard retreating. There was silence. We waited in a wild agonising stupefaction. The house was dead silent. At length there was a shuffling noise from the servants' door. We thought someone was about to emerge from there to greet us. We slid down towards it—nothing happened. We drew back and observed the house. A low whistle came from it. Then nothing for two minutes. Suddenly a shadow passed quickly across the light in the window nearest the door. Again nothing happened. James and I, sick with surmise, stole down the street. We thought we heard another whistle, as we departed. We came back here shaking—we didn't know at what.

"If the evening paper, as you get this, tells of the murder of Mr Henry James—you'll know."

By this time he was quite well again. He went to Germany in April, and stayed there for two or three months, mostly with Dudley Ward in Berlin, where he wrote The Old Vicarage, Grantchester ('this hurried stuff,' he called it when he sent it me). "I read Elizabethans for 2-3 hours a day, quite happily," he wrote to his Mother. "Other work I haven't tried much. I started a short play, and worked at it for two or three hours. I paid the penalty by not getting to sleep till 5 next morning." The play was a one-act melodrama called Lithuania, founded on the well-known anecdote of a son coming back with a fortune, after years of absence in America, to his peasant-family, who kill him for his money and then find out who he was. (It was acted in the spring of 1916 by Miss Lilian M'Carthy, Miss Clare Greet, Leon M. Lion, John Drinkwater, and others, at a charity matinée at His Majesty's, together with Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife and Wilfrid Gibson's Hoops; and was thought to show much promise of dramatic power.)

He came home from Germany as well as ever, to spend the rest of the summer at Grantchester.

I must here touch upon a change in his outlook, a development of his character, which, as I think, took form during this year from the germs which may be seen in his earlier letters, already quoted, to Mr Cotterill and to Ben Keeling. Perhaps it was the result of the 'introspection' which contributed to his illness, and to which his illness in its turn gave opportunity. To put it briefly and bluntly, he had discovered that goodness was the most important thing in life—'that immortal beauty and goodness,' as he wrote much later, 'that radiance, to love which is to feel one has safely hold of eternal things.' Since he grew up he had never held (and did not now acquire) any definite, still less any ready-made, form of religious belief; his ideals had been mainly intellectual; and if he had been asked to define goodness, he would probably have said that it meant having true opinions about ethics. Now he found that it was even more a matter of the heart and of the will; and he did not shrink from avowing his changed view to his old comrades in the life of the mind, some of whom perhaps found it a little disconcerting, a little ridiculous.

Henceforward the only thing that he cared for—or rather felt he ought to care for—in a man, was the possession of goodness; its absence, the one thing that he hated, sometimes with fierceness. He never codified his morals, never made laws for the conduct of others, or for his own; it was the spirit, the passion, that counted with him. "That is the final rule of life, the best one ever made," he wrote next year from the Pacific,—"'Whoso shall offend one of these little ones'—remembering that all the eight hundred millions on earth, except oneself, are the little ones."

In the autumn of this year he began coming to London oftener and for longer visits, usually staying at my rooms in Gray's Inn; going to plays and music halls, seeing pictures, and making numbers of new acquaintances and friends. Henry James, W. B. Yeats and John Masefield he knew already; and he made friends about this time with Edmund Gosse, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson, John Drinkwater, W. H. Davies, and many others.

There was a general feeling among the younger poets that modern English poetry was very good, and sadly neglected by readers. Rupert announced one evening, sitting half-undressed on his bed, that he had conceived a brilliant scheme. He would write a book of poetry, and publish it as a selection from the works of twelve different writers, six men and six women, all with the most convincing pseudonyms. That, he thought, must make them sit up. It occurred to me that as we both believed there were at least twelve flesh-and-blood poets whose work, if properly thrust under the public's nose, had a good chance of producing the effect he desired, it would be simpler to use the material which was ready to hand. Next day (September 20th it was) we lunched in my rooms with Gibson and Drinkwater, and Harold Monro and Arundel del Re (editor and sub-editor of the then Poetry Review, since re-named Poetry and Drama), and started the plan of the book which was published in December under the name of Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912.

This was our great excitement for the rest of the year. Rupert went to stay with Ward in Berlin for November, and kept sending suggestions for promoting the sale of the book. (Years before, a cynical young friend of ours at King's had told me that though 'Rupert's public form was the youthful poet, the real foundation of his character was a hard business faculty.') "I forget all my other ideas," he wrote, after making some very practical proposals, "but they each sold some 25 copies. I have a hazy vision of incredible réclame. You ought to have an immense map of England (vide 'Tono-Bungay') and plan campaigns with its aid. And literary charts, each district mapped out, and a fortress secured. John Buchan to fill a page of the Spectator: Filson Young in the P.M.G. (we shall be seventeen Things that Matter in italics?), etc. etc. You'll be able to found a hostel for poor Georgians on the profits." Some of his ideas were too vast, but others were acted on; and though delays of printing and binding kept the book back till a few days before Christmas, frustrating our calculation on huge sales to present-givers, its success outran our wildest hopes.

He spent most of the spring of 1913 in London, enjoying himself in many directions. He went again and again to the Russian Ballet, which he loved ("They, if anything can, redeem our civilisation," he had written in December. "I'd give everything to be a ballet-designer"); and he conceived a passion for the Hippodrome Revue, Hullo, Ragtime! which he saw ten times. He had always been on occasion a great fitter-in of things and people, and vast networks of his minute arrangements survive on postcards, though without the finishing strands put in by telephone. He got to know more and more people, including the Asquith family and George Wyndham, with whom he spent a Sunday at Clouds. He had no ambition for the career of a 'young man about town'; but he felt he might let himself go for the moment, as he would be starting for America before he could get too much involved.

He got his Fellowship on March 8th. "It's very good of you to congratulate me," he wrote to Geoffrey Fry. "You can't think how I despise you mere civilians, now. Jetzt bin ich Professor. A grey look of learning has already settled on my face. And I wear spectacles." Next week he went to King's to be admitted, or, as he called it, 'churched.' "I dined solemnly," he told Mrs Cornford, "with very old white-haired men, at one end of a vast dimly-lit hall, and afterwards drank port somnolently in the Common Room, with the College silver, and 17th Century portraits, and a 16th Century fireplace, and 15th Century ideas. The perfect Don, I ..."

The only other break in the London life was a visit to Rugby towards the end of March, when he wrote a rapturous spring-letter to Miss Cathleen Nesbitt. "But oh! but oh! such a day! 'Spring came complete with a leap in a day,' said the wisest and nicest man in Warwickshire—my godfather, an aged scholar, infinitely learned in Greek, Latin, English, and Life. He said it was a quotation from Browning. It certainly fitted. I took him a walk. The air had changed all in a night, and had that soft caressingness, and yet made you want to jump and gambol. Alacer, and not acer, was, we agreed, the epithet for the air. Oh! it's mad to be in London with the world like this. I can't tell you of it. The excitement and music of the birds, the delicious madness of the air, the blue haze in the distance, the straining of the hedges, the green mist of shoots about the trees—oh, it wasn't in these details—it was beyond and round them—something that included them. It's the sort of day that brought back to me what I've had so rarely for the last two years—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 crying with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten one."