but always landed flat. The unfeeling surface of Lord Byron’s pool would
all but slap the breath out of his defenseless body, but he ever came up
gallantly to a new plunge until his muscles had learned their trick.
What joy when he won his first happy high dive--“into cleanness leaping”
with keen lithe grace. That morning, sky and water were one tender,
rose-tinged, rippling coolness of silver gray, and the breakfast spread
in the dewy garden was a feast for gods and heroes. The eggs were golden
fare indeed, and the honey tasted of hawthorn and apple blossoms.
With a like persistency, he practised diving of another sort. Again and
again he essayed the plunge far below the surface of every-day thoughts
and fancies in the hope of bringing up the perfect pearl of his
dreams--a poem in which the white light of truth should be all
fair-rounded, pure-gleaming beauty. “I can feel the one thing that is
worth while, and it seems as if I had it in my hand,” he mourned, “but
when I look there is only a wisp of seaweed, and a shell or two with
echoes in their pearly coils of the eternal whisper of the waves!”
“Your life is too much an unbroken round of happy happenings,” hinted
one of his friends. “If you could run away into the wilds for a
time--away from your many admiring friends and the chatter of afternoon
teas and tennis courts--you might find yourself more in touch with the
big things you long for.”
“I think I’ll try a trip to America,” resolved the young poet. “There
may be some sort of a new world still to be discovered in the States or
Canada--or beyond among the islands of the South Seas.”
In his “Letters from America,” which appeared first in the “Westminster
Gazette” and were afterward published with a biographical introduction
by Henry James, we have some of his off-hand impressions of the New
World. We get glimpses of New York Harbor at night and in the early
morning, as a poet sees it. We see the crowds and electric glare of
Broadway with something of the detached amusement that a careless and
idly curious traveler from another planet might feel. And we see a
Harvard-Yale baseball game and the 1913 Commencement at Cambridge with
the eyes of that elder Cambridge across the Atlantic. This is the way
the one-time cricketer and football champion viewed his first “ball
game.”
When I had time to observe the players, who were practising about
the ground, I was shocked. They wear dust-colored shirts and dingy
knickerbockers, fastened under the knee, and heavy boots. They
strike the English eye as being attired for football, or a
gladiatorial combat, rather than a summer game. The very
close-fitting caps, with large peaks, give them picturesquely the
appearance of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to watch, and in
outline easy to understand, as it is merely glorified rounders. A
cricketer is fascinated by their rapidity and skill in catching and
throwing. There is excitement in the game, but little beauty except
in the long-limbed “pitcher,” whose duty it is to hurl the ball
rather farther than the length of the cricket-pitch, as
bewilderingly as possible. In his efforts to combine speed,
mystery, and curve, he gets into attitudes of a very novel and
fantastic, but quite obvious, beauty.
One queer feature of this sport is that unoccupied members of the
batting side, fielders, and even spectators, are accustomed to join
in vocally. You have the spectacle of the representatives of the
universities endeavoring to frustrate or unnerve their opponents,
at moments of excitement, by cries of derision and mockery, or
heartening their own supporters and performers with exclamations
of “Now, Joe!” or “He’s got them!” or “He’s the boy!” At the crises
in the fortunes of the game, the spectators take a collective and
important part. The Athletic Committee appoints a “cheer-leader”
for the occasion. Every five or ten minutes this gentleman, a big,
fine figure in white, springs out from his seat at the foot of the
stands, addresses the multitude through a megaphone with a “One!
Two! Three!” hurls it aside, and, with a wild flinging and swinging
of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices in the Harvard
yell.... It all seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination
of entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a
trifle fantastic....
“The glimpses you give of the ‘States’ are brief and, for the most part,
superficial,” we accused him, not unjustly. “You approach what you are
pleased to call our ‘rag-time civilization’ in a rag-time mood.”
“You delightful Americans are too sensitive,” he replied with his
irresistible smile. “Of course no mere Briton could do you justice in a
few random, hastily-flung newspaper letters. One of these days I hope to
work up these trivial jottings in some more thoughtful and not unworthy
fashion.”
He describes Niagara Falls, the Canadian Rockies, and the South Seas
with a poet’s appreciation, but with an irrepressible homesickness for
his little England. He wonders and admires, but misses the haunting
echoes of humanity, the sense of a loving, lingering past, that make the
English landscape dear:
It is indeed a new world. How far away seem those grassy, moonlit
places in England that have been Roman camps or roads, where there
is always serenity, and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and the
sunlight flashes upon more than flint! Here one is perpetually a
first-comer.... The flowers are less conscious than English
flowers, the breezes have nothing to remember, and everything to
promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian
lanes.... There is nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and
no human mystery in the colors, and neither the same joy nor the
kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands know....
In the perfect lazy content of the South Pacific isles, that are, he
says, “compound of all legendary heavens,” Rupert Brooke led a blissful,
lotus-eating existence. Nowhere had he even imagined such serene bodily
well-being as he found darting, floating, and dreaming through the
irised waves, lulled by the faint thunder of the surf on the distant
reef. It seemed, too, that this must be the seventh heaven of song. If
swimming and poetry had been all, home and friends might have called in
vain. But the young poet’s love of England was proof against every
beguiling lure. Do you remember how Tennyson in his “Palace of Art,”
after showing pictures of every sort of loveliness--beautiful,
enchanting, magical glimpses of many lands--turns at last to this scene
as best of all?--
And one, an English home--gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.
Even so Rupert Brooke, from his South Sea paradise, longed for the
“ancient peace” of the old vicarage by the River Cam. Never for a moment
did he forget that he was England’s--flesh of her flesh, soul of her
soul.
Soon after his return from his wander year, before his joy in all the
dear home ways had lost any of its new zest, it seemed as if the old
comfortable order of things might pass away forever. The face of his
world was changed in a day. From a brand fired somehow, somewhere, in
the mysterious Balkans, all Europe was suddenly ablaze. England awoke
from her preoccupation with her own family difficulties--the Irish
Home-rule question, the disputes between capital and labor, and the
militant suffragettes. She could not see Belgium and France destroyed.
Englishmen who had been reading with incredulous amazement the daily
reports of the threatening violence of the continental misunderstanding,
and congratulating themselves on their sane and secure aloofness, awoke
to find that they were at war with Germany and Austria.
Rupert Brooke was camping out that fateful August of 1914 in a place
remote from newspapers with their rumors of war. Away on a sailing trip,
he heard no news of any sort for the space of four days. Then on his
return, as he stepped out on the beach with singing pulses and the happy
tang of the salt spray on his lips, a telegram was put in his hands:
“We’re at war with Germany. England has joined France and Russia,” it
read.
It was as if all the winds of heaven had passed in a moment into a
dreadful, breathless calm. In the stunned and sultry stillness that
engulfed him, his whole being hung helpless like an empty sail. He ate
and drank as one in a dream, and then went out alone to the top of a
hill of gorse, where he sat looking broodingly at the sea and trying to
understand. Over and over he repeated the words, “England at war--war
with Germany! Germany!...” Scraps of memories--pleasant, appealing, and
humorous--floated by like bits of remembered tunes: the convivial
glitter of a Berlin café; the restful charm of a quiet-colored summer
evening at Munich; the merry masquerade and revelry of carnival time;
the broad peasant women singing at their work in the fields. Could it be
that all the wholesome, friendly world he knew there had changed--had
become a menace, a thing to be hated?
Not only the Germany he knew, but the whole world, was trembling. The
earth was not the stable place of solid content and cheerful achievement
he had always taken for granted. A shrinking, quaking nightmare of
change had seized the foundations of the universe in its trembling grip.
The months ahead loomed gaunt and strange--no days for happy work; no
quiet evenings for untroubled friendship and affection; no time to “loaf
and invite one’s soul”; no place for play, for music, for poetry, for
anything that made life worth living. An age “of blood and iron” had
swallowed up the golden age. England would be merry England no longer.
England! The name rang in his ears like a knell. England invaded! “I
realized with a sudden tightening of the heart,” he said, “that the
earth of England was like a loved face, like a friend’s honor--something
holy. The full flood of what England meant to my inmost self swept me on
from thought to thought. Gray, uneven little fields, and small ancient
hedges rushed before me, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness,
sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of
rambling hills and friendly copses--the England that had given me life
and light!”
England! The name was now a trumpet call! What were the piping times of
peace to this great moment when he could go out as England’s son to meet
her foes, to keep her sacred soil safe from the invaders’ tread? Aloud
he said grimly, “Well, if Armageddon’s _on_, I suppose one should be
there.”
It seemed to many as if this terrible war must indeed be the mysterious
Armageddon, darkly foreshadowed in the Book of Revelation as the war of
wars, when the “kings of the earth and the whole world” should gather
for the battle that would usher in the great day of God. It was to be
the war to end war.
Rupert Brooke, a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Naval Division, was one of
that brave, futile company of Englishmen that were hastily flung across
the Channel to the defense of Antwerp. Crouching in ditches, rifles in
hand, they waited the approach of an unseen enemy whose big guns were
shelling the outer forts from a point beyond the horizon line. There was
nothing that the bravest could do but lie there amid the whistling,
screaming shells, and fall back as ordered when the range of the heavy
fire advanced. The battle was fought by the great cannon and the
scouting aëroplane that circled high overhead and signaled the range to
the distant battery.
When the forts crumbled before the bombardment--pitiful hopes of the old
order before the deadly engines of the new--the city was a place of
terror and desolation. The hideous din of bursting shells, the crash of
falling houses and shattering glass, mingled with the terrified cries of
distracted fugitives. The young poet-soldier, marching in a night
retreat under a black sky, lighted fitfully by the glare of burning
villages, saw the pathetic multitude of helpless refugees hurrying
eastward. There were two small children trying to help their mother push
a wheelbarrow piled with clothing on which sat the feeble, trembling
grandmother. Another family had loaded all their most cherished
possessions in a little milk-cart, pulled by a panting dog, while a
heavy-eyed lad of nine pushed from behind and watched to see that
nothing was dropped by the way. Aged peasants with bundles on their
backs tottered by, and mothers with tiny babies in their arms trudged
wearily along, trying to comfort the frightened children who ran by
their side or clung to their skirts. All had the dazed faces of the
victims of flood or fire, who flee from the place that was home to the
uncertain refuge of outer strangeness.
It seemed to Rupert Brooke that the suffering he saw was his own. As in
the old Rugby time, when everything that the days brought--honest work,
hearty play, and happy comradeship, in a fair English land under
peaceful skies--was taken up as food for his eager life and made a part
of himself, so now it seemed that body and soul alike tasted every grief
and distress that can come to helpless humanity. There were new depths
in the brave blue eyes that had seen defeated hopes and yet never
doubted that right would triumph. The face that had before expressed
promise, now showed power.
All through the trying weeks that followed in his training-camp in
England, he carried with him the memory of those tragic days in Belgium.
“I would not forget if I could,” he said steadily. “Remembering is
sharing.” And steadily, with a strength that ever cries, “We’re baffled
that we may fight better!” he looked past the darkness of the present to
the victory that his spirit saw.
The hard monotony of the days became glorious. All his life was alight
with the fervor of his love for his native land and his longing to serve
her. There was room in his heart for but one thought--England! And in
the singleness of his devotion he felt a wonderful peace that outer
happenings could not give or take away. He was safe from the chances of
the changing days--safe with “things undying.” Safe!--That word which
sometimes makes men craven, sounded in his ears like a note of triumph;
and the lines of a new song came to his lips:
“We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain forever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavor;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.”
A wonderful thing had happened. The young soldier who had lost many
things those first weeks of the war--carefree days and nights, the joy
and bright confidence of youth--had found his man’s soul. And the maker
of verses had become a true poet. In losing his life he had found it,
and found, too, the one gift he had long sought in vain.
Rupert Brooke had learned to “see life steadily and see it whole.” The
five “1914 sonnets” have the wise simplicity, the deep feeling, and the
large vision that belong to great poetry. When the poet-soldier
embarked with the troops that were sent on the ill-starred Dardanelles
campaign, he had the joy of knowing that whatever might befall,
something of his inmost life would live forever in immortal verse to
stir the hearts of living men.
He never reached Gallipoli. On April 23, 1915, the day of St. Michael
and St. George, he died, not in battle, but of illness on a French
hospital-ship. Early in April he had suffered a sunstroke, but had
apparently recovered. Then it was known that he was the victim of
blood-poisoning. “Death loves a shining mark!” and “Whom the Gods
love!”--The unspoken words gripped the hearts of his comrades with chill
fear, yet it seemed unbelievable that this radiant young life should be
snuffed out.
The poet, himself, had a definite premonition of the end--During the
days of fever, his mind found now and again a cool peace in the memories
of the past. He was a Rugby boy again. Now he sat in the chapel, looking
at the light as it fell, jeweled green, blue, and ruby-red, through the
stained glass window of the Wise Men, that Dr. Arnold had brought from
an old church at Aerschot, near Louvain. Louvain--Belgium! He could not
lie there quietly; his country needed him. He moved suddenly as if about
to rise, and a nurse bent over him anxiously. But--once more he was at
Rugby, standing before the statue of the author of “Tom Brown” and
spelling out its inscription as he had when a child: “_Watch ye. Stand
fast in the faith. Quit ye like men. Be strong._”--Again he was on the
porch leading to the quadrangle where the boys were assembled for house
singing. How the “Floreat, floreat, floreat, Rugbeia” rang out!
Was it not getting very dark? He could scarcely see the white figure of
the nurse. Perhaps there was going to be a storm.... He remembered a
hurricane at Rugby when he was only eight years old--the “big storm,”
they always called it. Many of the fine elms were laid low, among others
the one survivor of Tom Brown’s “three trees.”
“Think of all the years of sun and wind that have been made into the
magnificent strength of that tree,” some one had mourned. “And now see
it snapped like a straw before the fury of a single hour!”
“Perhaps it’s happier to go like a warrior in battle, than just to grow
old and die little by little,” the boy had said. He had somehow dimly
felt that the splendid spirit of the tree--the life that ever flickered
golden-green in the sunlight and danced in joyous abandon in the May
breeze--had fared forth on the wings of the wind, a part of the brave
spirit of things that deathless goes on forever from change to
change....
They buried him at night, carrying his body by torchlight to an olive
grove on the isle of Scyros, a mile inland on the heights. “If you go
there,” writes Mr. Stephen Graham, “you will find a little wooden cross
with just his name and the date of his birth and his death (1887-1915)
marked in black.” One who knew him said, “Let his just epitaph be: ‘He
went to war in the cause of peace and died without hate that love might
live.’”
Better than any inscription or memorial, however, are the words of his
own poem, _The Soldier_, in which his love for his country still lives.
It echoes to-day in the hearts of many who, at their country’s call, “go
to war in the cause of peace.”
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: HERBERT C. HOOVER
I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem matter of
indifference to me.
TERENCE.
This is the story of a young hero of to-day--of a leader who has, we may
well hope, as many rich, useful years before him as those that make the
tale we are about to tell.
History is not often willing to call a man happy--or a hero--while life
lies ahead of him. Time can change everything. Time alone can prove
everything. We must wait for the judgment of time, it is said.
We feel very sure, however, of the worth of the work of Herbert Clark
Hoover, the man who gave up a business that meant the directorship of
more than 125,000 workers in order that he might give his time and his
powers to the task of feeding ten million helpless people in war-ravaged
Belgium and northern France.
“If England could have availed herself of such talent for organization
as H. C. Hoover has displayed in feeding the Belgians, we should be a
good year nearer the end of the war than we are to-day,” said a
prominent member of the British Parliament.
“There is a man who knows how to get things done!” we are hearing said
on every side. “If America should feel the pinch of war and famine, Mr.
Hoover could meet the problem of putting us on rations, and there would
be no food riots.”
Who is this man who knows how to do things? In what school did he learn
how to meet emergencies and how to manage men?
They tell us he was a Quaker lad, born on an Iowa farm, who in his early
boyhood moved to a farm in the far West. Was it because of this early
transplanting--this change to new scenes, new problems, new
interests--that he learned to see things in a big way and to get a grip
on what really matters in Iowa, in Oregon, in the world?
“The first thing you think about Hoover,” said a man who knew him in
college, “is that he is a free soul and feels himself free. Most people
are more or less hedged in by their own little affairs. His interests
have no walls to shut him away from other people and their interests.
He is a man who is in vital touch with what concerns other men.”
But we come once more to the question: how did he come by the vital
touch which gives him this power over men and makes him in a very real
sense a citizen of the world? You remember the exclamation of envious
_Cassius_ when he was protesting to _Brutus_ against the growing
influence of _Cæsar_:
Now in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat does this our Cæsar feed,
That he is grown so great?
_Cassius_ was, of course, speaking in grudging scorn; but we often find
ourselves thinking quite simply and sincerely that we would like to know
what goes to the making of true power.
Sometimes we like to pretend that we can explain the making of a great
man. We say, for example, of Lincoln: he early learned what it meant to
meet hardship, so he was strong to endure; by hard times and hard work
he learned the value of things, the things that really count; he knew
what sorrow was, and the faith that is greater than grief, so he had a
heart that could feel with the sorrows of others and could help them to
win faithfulness through suffering. Because a truly sympathetic heart
beats with the joys as well as the griefs of others, he cared for the
little things that go to make up the big thing we call living, and his
warm human touch made him a friend of simple people, with an
understanding of all. Thus it was that he knew people in a real way and
life in a true way, and so was able to be the leader of a nation in a
time that tried the souls of the bravest. So we say, and fancy that we
have explained Lincoln. But have we? Many other boys knew toil and want
and sorrow, and many learned much, perhaps, in that hard school; but
there was only one Lincoln.
We can, in truth, no more explain a great man than we can explain life
itself. How is it that the acorn has power to take from the earth and
air and sunshine the things that make the oak-tree, the monarch of the
forest? How is it that of all the oaks in the woods of the world there
are no two exactly alike? How is it that among all the children in a
family, in a school, in a nation, there are no two really alike?
[Illustration: _Underwood & Underwood_
Herbert C. Hoover]
A boy I knew once put the puzzle in this way: “You would think that
twins would be more truly twins than they are. But when they seem most
_twinsy_, they’re somehow different, after all!”
All that we can say is that each child is himself alone, and that as the
days go by the things he sees and hears, the things he thinks about and
loves, the things he dreams and the things he does, are somehow made a
part of him just as the soil and sunshine are made into the tree.
What was it in the Iowa farm life that became a part of the Quaker boy,
Herbert Hoover? He learned to look life in the face, simply and frankly.
Hard work, resolute wrestling with the brown earth, made his muscles
firm and his nerves steady. The passing of the days and the seasons, the
coming of the rain, the dew, and the frost, and the sweep of the storm,
awoke in his spirit a love of nature and a delight in nature’s laws.
“All’s love, yet all’s law,” whispered the wind as it passed over the
fields of bending grain. Since all was law, one might, by studying the
ways of seed and soil and weather, win a larger harvest than the
steadiest toil, unaided by reason and resource, could coax from the long
furrows. It was clear that thinking and planning brought a liberal
increase to the yield of each acre. The might of man was not in muscle
but in mind.
Then came the move to Oregon. How the Golden West opened up a whole
vista of new ideas! How many kinds of interesting people there were in
the world! He longed to go to college where one could get a bird’s-eye
view of the whole field of what life had to offer before settling down
to work in his own particular little garden-patch.
“I don’t want to go to a Quaker school, or a college founded by any
other special sect,” he said. “I want to go where I will have a chance
to see and judge everything fairly, without prejudice for or against any
one line of thought.”