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LETTERS FROM AMERICA
By Rupert Brooke.
With a Preface by Henry James
[Frontispiece: Rupert Brooke 1913]
NOTE
The author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States,
Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the
beginning of June. The first thirteen chapters of this book were written
as letters to the _Westminster Gazette_. He would probably not have
republished them in their present form, as he intended to write a longer
book on his travels; but they are now printed with only the correction
of a few evident slips.
The two remaining chapters appeared in the _New Statesman_, soon after
the outbreak of war.
Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed the republication of the
articles.
E. M.
CONTENTS
Note
RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
I. Arrival
II. New York
III. New York--(_continued_)
IV. Boston and Harvard
V. Montreal and Ottawa
VI. Quebec and the Saguenay
VII. Ontario
VIII. Niagara Falls
IX. To Winnipeg
X. Outside
XI. The Prairies
XII. The Indians
XIII. The Rockies
XIV. Some Niggers
An Unusual Young Man
RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of
literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet,
the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the
moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved
his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing
else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us _as_ a poet, in
spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The
chances and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw
us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win
more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless
to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something
in the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the
point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the
cold impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the need of
understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty
and disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine
flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang
about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to
indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which
it was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to
proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the
world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native
force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is
naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakeably clear, or has at a
happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our
suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any
rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law,
that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been
positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.
It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been
inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is
apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed
exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton
in exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and
Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi
and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely
to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and
bareness and bleakness--all this in reference to the voices that have
most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various
examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter
attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing
in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the
torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of
Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of
Victor Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the
occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem
denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more
of these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime
determinant, after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, the
vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest generosity we know kept
by her at their pitch, kept fighting for their life and insisting on
their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even
sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at
any moment have made the loss of the precious clue really irremediable.
Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for half our interest in
the poetic character--a sentiment more unlikely than not, I think,
to survive a sustained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of
Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We quite consciously miss in these
bards, as we find ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to miss
it in Shelley, that such "complications" as they may have had to reckon
with were not in general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no
stretch of the view either of our own "theory of art" or of our vivacity
of passion as making trouble, contributes perceptibly the required
savour of the pathetic. We cling, critically or at least experientially
speaking, to our superstition, if not absolutely to our approved
measure, of this grace and proof; and that truly, to cut my argument
short, is what sets us straight down before a sudden case in which the
old discrimination quite drops to the ground--in which we neither on the
one hand miss anything that the general association could have given it,
nor on the other recognise the pomp that attends the grand exceptions I
have mentioned.
Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and
irresistibly attaching, virtually met a soldier's death, met it in the
stress of action and the all but immediate presence of the enemy; but he
is before us as a new, a confounding and superseding example
altogether, an unprecedented image, formed to resist erosion by time or
vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities, finer ones than
ever before, in the stuff poets may be noted as made of. With twenty
reasons fixing the interest and the charm that will henceforth abide
in his name and constitute, as we may say, his legend, he submits all
helplessly to one in particular which is, for appreciation, the least
personal to him or inseparable from him, and he does this because,
while he is still in the highest degree of the distinguished faculty
and quality, we happen to feel him even more markedly and significantly
"modern." This is why I speak of the mixture of his elements as new,
feeling that it governs his example, put by it in a light which nothing
else could have equally contributed--so that Byron for instance, who
startled his contemporaries by taking for granted scarce one of the
articles that formed their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost
everything that made them idiots if he himself was to figure as a child
of truth, looks to us, by any such measure, comparatively plated over
with the impenetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten to add,
not of Byron's volume, his flood and his fortune, but of his really
having quarrelled with the temper and the accent of his age still more
where they might have helped him to expression than where he but flew in
their face. He hugged his pomp, whereas our unspeakably fortunate young
poet of to-day, linked like him also, for consecration of the final
romance, with the isles of Greece, took for _his_ own the whole of the
poetic consciousness he was born to, and moved about in it as a stripped
young swimmer might have kept splashing through blue water and coming
up at any point that friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice shed,
might determine. Rupert expressed us _all_, at the highest tide of our
actuality, and was the creature of a freedom restricted only by that
condition of his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole with
gratitude and relief--given that I qualify the condition as dazzling
even to himself. How can it therefore not be interesting to see a little
what the wondrous modern in him consisted of?
I
What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at
an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally
and sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely
never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition
(both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean), should have flowered
at once into a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands of other
sentiments are of course all the while, in different connections, at
hand for us; but it is of the exquisite civility, the social instincts
of the race, _poetically_ expressed, that I speak; and it would be hard
to overstate the felicity of his fellow-countrymen's being able just
now to say: "Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our
arrangements, with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with
the waste of so much of our effort and the weight of the many-coloured
mantle of time that drags so redundantly about us, this natural
accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary
beauty of the English aspect, this finest saturation of the English
intelligence by its most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly
do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word,
at once radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as
delightfully exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last
fibre, from the very wealth of our own conscience and the very force
of our own history. We haven't, for such an instance of our genius, to
reach out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive,
tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter of
course reached and revelled, for that is exactly our way in proportion
as we feel ourselves clear. But the kind of experience so entailed, of
contribution so gathered, is just what we wear easiest when we have
been least stinted of it, and what our English use of makes perhaps our
vividest reference to our thick-growing native determinants."
Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed commentator may well keep before
him, simply did all the usual English things--under the happy provision
of course that he found them in his way at their best; and it was
exactly most delightful in him that no inordinate expenditure, no
anxious extension of the common plan, as "liberally" applied all about
him, had been incurred or contrived to predetermine his distinction. It
is difficult to express on the contrary how peculiar a value attached
to his having simply "come in" for the general luck awaiting any English
youth who may not be markedly inapt for the traditional chances. He
could in fact easily strike those who most appreciated him as giving
such an account of the usual English things--to repeat the form of
my allusion to them--as seemed to address you to them, in their very
considerable number indeed, for any information about him that might
matter, but which left you wholly to judge whether they seemed justified
by their fruits. This manner about them, as one may call it in general,
often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain
strain of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their happiest
effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was
slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the
far recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered
demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable
just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other
of his odd ways to their influence. He might not always be, at any rate
on first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, but there was
in any case one reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a
wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all
appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed
relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!"
The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large
might or mightn't do for those in contact with it, became thus one's own
fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable period doubtless
dormant enough, but with the questions always liable to revive before
the individual case.
Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or in
other words made one want to read back into him each of his promoting
causes without exception, to trace to some source in the ambient air
almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so precious a loose and
careless bundle of happy references did that inveterate trick of giving
the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with his general kind fail to
prevent your feeling sure of his having about him. I think the liveliest
interest of these was that while not one of them was signally romantic,
by the common measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung
together, reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to
join their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process,
the great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in
particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. I do not mean of
course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were
made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, in
the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort, most in
abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a single
shade. I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was the better
established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the three sons of a
house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he lost his
father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having then already died
and the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front,
shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance I speak
of gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that
perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the
bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and
which one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with
everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact
was that if one liked him--and I may as well say at once that few young
men, in our time, can have gone through life under a greater burden,
more easily carried and kept in its place, of being liked--one liked
absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception; so that
he appeared to convert before one's eyes all that happened to him, or
that had or that ever might, not only to his advantage as a source of
life and experience, but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort
of illustrational virtue or glory. This appearance of universal
assimilation--often indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were
of the very essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its
gaiety--made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired,
cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once
neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to that),
incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own rightness.
It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether, that he should
have come into the world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby home,
as that he should have been able later on to wander as irrepressibly as
the spirit moved him, or as that he should have found himself fitting
as intimately as he was very soon to do into any number of the
incalculabilities, the intellectual at least, of the poetic temperament.
He had them all, he gave himself in his short career up to them all--and
I confess that, partly for reasons to be further developed, I am unable
even to guess what they might eventually have made of him; which is of
course what brings us round again to that view of him as the young poet
with absolutely nothing but his generic spontaneity to trouble
about, the young poet profiting for happiness by a general condition
unprecedented for young poets, that I began by indulging in. He
went from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried off a
Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in "May
week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was to find,
very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with his felicities
all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at
the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering what it was
left to such a place to do with the added, the verily wasted, grace
of such a person, or how even such a person could hold his own, as who
should say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. Any difficulty
dropped, however, to the reconciling vision; for that the young man
was publicly and responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little
over-officiously involved--to the promotion of a certain surprise (on
one's own part) at his having to "be" anything. It was to come over me
still more afterwards that nothing of that or of any other sort need
really have rested on him with a weight of obligation, and in fact I
cannot but think that life might have been seen and felt to suggest to
him, in an exposed unanimous conspiracy, that his status should be
left to the general sense of others, ever so many others, who would
sufficiently take care of it, and that such a fine rare case was
accordingly as arguable as it possibly _could_ be--with the pure,
undischarged poetry of him and the latent presumption of his dying for
his country the only things to gainsay it. The question was to a certain
extent crude, "Why need he be a poet, why need he so specialise?" but if
this was so it was only, it was already, symptomatic of the interesting
final truth that he was to testify to his function in the unparalleled
way. He was going to have the life (the unanimous conspiracy so far
achieved _that_), was going to have it under no more formal guarantee
than that of his appetite and genius for it; and this was to help us
all to the complete appreciation of him. No single scrap of the English
fortune at its easiest and truest--which means of course with every
vulgarity dropped out--but was to brush him as by the readiest
instinctive wing, never over-straining a point or achieving a miracle to
do so; only trusting his exquisite imagination and temper to respond
to the succession of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this
succession could in the most natural and most familiar way in the
world amount to for him that we find this idea of a beautiful crowning
modernness above all to meet his case. The promptitude, the perception,
the understanding, the quality of humour and sociability, the happy
lapses in the logic of inward reactions (save for their all infallibly
being poetic), of which he availed himself consented to be as
illustrational as any fondest friend could wish, whether the subject of
the exhibition was aware of the degree or not, and made his vivacity of
vision, his exercise of fancy and irony, of observation at its freest,
inevitable--while at the same time setting in motion no machinery of
experience in which his curiosity, or in other words, the quickness of
his familiarity, didn't move faster than anything else.
II
I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward Marsh the
communication of many of his letters, these already gathered into an
admirable brief memoir which is yet to appear and which will give ample
help in the illustrative way to the pages to which the present remarks
form a preface, and which are collected from the columns of the London
evening journal in which they originally saw the light. The "literary
baggage" of his short course consists thus of his two slender volumes
of verse and of these two scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence
[Footnote: There remain also to be published a book on John Webster, and
a prose play in one act.--E.M.]--though I should add that the hitherto
unpublished letters enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and
interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, which will have
rendered the highest service to each matter. That even these four scant
volumes tell the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine young
spirit they are concerned with we certainly hold back from allowing;
his case being in an extraordinary degree that of a creature on whom
the gods had smiled their brightest, and half of whose manifestation
therefore was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication.
He did in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, as one reads
him, whether in verse or in prose, that distinguished readability seems
all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the
gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in
itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either,
an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for
one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief,
if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed
altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the
student of the human drama has ever caught sight of--granting always,
that is, that some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to his
part. Such was the sort of recognition, assuredly, under which Rupert
played _his_--that of his lending himself to every current and contact,
the "newer," the later fruit of time, the better; only this not because
any particular one was an agitating revelation, but because with due
sensibility, with a restless inward ferment, at the centre of them all,
what could he possibly so much feel like as the heir of all the ages?
I remember his originally giving me, though with no shade of imputable
intention, the sense of his just _being_ that, with the highest
amiability--the note in him that, as I have hinted, one kept coming back
to; so that during a long wait for another glimpse of him I thought
of the practice and function so displayed as wholly engaging, took for
granted his keeping them up with equal facility and pleasure. Nothing
could have been more delightful accordingly, later on, in renewal of the
personal acquaintance than to gather that this was exactly what had been
taking place, and with an inveteracy as to which his letters are a full
documentation. Whatever his own terms for the process might be had he
been brought to book, and though the variety of his terms for anything
and everything was the very play, and even the measure, of his talent,
the most charmed and conclusive description of him was that no young
man had ever so naturally taken on under the pressure of life the poetic
nature, and shaken it so free of every encumbrance by simply wearing it
as he wore his complexion or his outline.
That, then, was the way the imagination followed him with its luxury
of confidence: he was doing everything that could be done in the time
(since this was the modernest note), but performing each and every
finest shade of these blest acts with a poetic punctuality that was only
matched by a corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly my
being sure of it all the while, even if with little current confirmation
beyond that supplied by his first volume of verse; and the effect of
the whole record is now to show that such a conclusion was quite
extravagantly right. He _was_ constantly doing all the things, and this
with a reckless freedom, as it might be called, that really dissociated
the responsibility of the precious character from anything like
conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which no troubled young
singer, none, that is, equally troubled, had perhaps ever felt he could
afford to dissociate it. Rupert's resources for affording, in the whole
connection, were his humour, his irony, his need, under every quiver of
inspiration, toward whatever end, to be amused and amusing, and to find
above all that this could never so much occur as by the application of
his talent, of which he was perfectly conscious, to his own case. He
carried his case with him, for purposes of derision as much as for any
others, wherever he went, and how he went everywhere, thus blissfully
burdened, is what meets us at every turn on his printed page. My only
doubt about him springs in fact from the question of whether he
knew that the earthly felicity enjoyed by him, his possession of the
exquisite temperament linked so easily to the irrepressible experience,
was a thing to make of the young Briton of the then hour so nearly the
spoiled child of history that one wanted something in the way of an
extra guarantee to feel soundly sure of him. I come back once more
to his having apparently never dreamt of any stretch of the point of
liberal allowance, of so-called adventure, on behalf of "development,"
never dreamt of any stretch but that of the imagination itself
indeed--quite a different matter and even if it too were at moments to
recoil; it was so true that the general measure of his world as to what
it might be prompt and pleasant and in the day's work or the day's play
to "go in for" was exactly the range that tinged all his education as
liberal, the education the free design of which he had left so short a
way behind him when he died.
Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence of his course with
the moment at which the proceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost
any "happy thought," and in the interest of almost any branch of culture
or invocation of response that might be more easily improvised than not,
could positively strike the observer as excessive, as in fact absurd,
for the formation of taste or the enrichment of genius, unless the
principle of these values had in a particular connection been subjected
in advance to some challenge or some test. Why should it take such a
flood of suggestion, such a luxury of acquaintance and contact, only
to make superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of living inward a
little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little
further, rather modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable,
young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in the way of
question-begging movement, the way of vision and of non-vision, the
enormous habit of holidays? If one could have made out once for all that
holidays were proportionately and infallibly inspiring one would have
ceased thoughtfully to worry; but the question was as it stood an old
story, even though it might freshly radiate, on occasion, under the
recognition that the seed-smothered patch of soil flowered, when it did
flower, with a fragrance all its own. This concomitant, however, always
dangled, that if it were put to us, "Do you really mean you would rather
they should not perpetually have been again for a look-in at Berlin,
or an awfully good time at Munich, or a rush round Sicily, or a dash
through the States to Japan, with whatever like rattling renewals?" you
would after all shrink from the responsibility of such a restriction
before being clear as to what you would suggest in its place. Rupert
went on reading-parties from King's to Lulworth for instance, which
the association of the two places, the two so extraordinarily finished
scenes, causes to figure as a sort of preliminary flourish; and
everything that came his way after that affects me as the blest
indulgence in flourish upon flourish. This was not in the least the air,
or the desire, or the pretension of it, but the unfailing felicity just
kept catching him up, just left him never wanting nor waiting for some
pretext to roam, or indeed only the more responsively to stay, doing
either, whichever it might be, as a form of highly intellectualised
"fun." He didn't overflow with shillings, yet so far as roving was
concerned the practice was always easy, and perhaps the adorably
whimsical lyric, contained in his second volume of verse, on the pull
of Grantchester at his heartstrings, as the old vicarage of that sweet
adjunct to Cambridge could present itself to him in a Berlin cafe, may
best exemplify the sort of thing that was represented, in one way and
another, by his taking his most ultimately English ease.
Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, could do or fail to do
for him, how can one not rejoice without reserve in the way he felt what
he did feel as poetic reaction of the liveliest and finest, with the
added interest of its often turning at one and the same time to the
fullest sincerity and to a perversity of the most "evolved"?--since
I can not dispense with that sign of truth. Never was a young singer
either less obviously sentimental or less addicted to the mere twang of
the guitar; at the same time that it was always his personal experience
or his curious, his not a little defiantly excogitated, inner vision
that he sought to catch; some of the odd fashion of his play with which
latter seems on occasion to preponderate over the truly pleasing poet's
appeal to beauty or cultivated habit of grace. Odd enough, no
doubt, that Rupert should appear to have had well-nigh in horror the
cultivation of grace for its own sake, as we say, and yet should really
not have disfigured his poetic countenance by a single touch quotable
as showing this. The medal of the mere pleasant had always a reverse for
him, and it was generally in that substitute he was most interested. We
catch in him reaction upon reaction, the succession of these conducing
to his entirely unashamed poetic complexity, and of course one
observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be
gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the
_youngest_ quantities of art and character taken together that
ever arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his
pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all
nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find
in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to
something more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The
self-consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration (in verse,
only in verse, oddly enough) of the unpleasant to behold, to touch, or
even to smell, was certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious,"
but there were so many things in his consciousness, which was never
in the least unpeopled, that it would have been a rare chance had his
projection of the self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious
allusion stayed out. What it all really most comes to, you feel again,
is that none of his impulses prospered in solitude, or, for that matter,
were so much as permitted to mumble their least scrap there; he was
predestined and condemned to sociability, which no league of neglect
could have deprived him of even had it speculatively tried: whereby what
was it but his own image that he most saw reflected in other faces? It
would still have been there, it couldn't possibly have succeeded in not
being, even had he closed his eyes to it with elaborate tightness. The
only neglect must have been on his own side, where indeed it did take
form in that of as signal an opportunity to become "spoiled," probably,
as ever fell in a brilliant young man's way: so that to help out my
comprehension of the unsightly and unsavoury, sufficiently wondered
at, with which his muse repeatedly embraced the occasion to associate
herself, I take the thing for a declaration of the idea that he might
himself prevent the spoiling so far as possible. He could in fact
prevent nothing, the wave of his fortune and his favour continuing so
to carry him; which is doubtless one of the reasons why, through our
general sense that nothing could possibly not be of the last degree of
rightness in him, what would have been wrong in others, literally in
any creature but him, like for example "A Channel Passage" of his first
volume, simply puts on, while this particular muse stands anxiously by,
a kind of dignity of experiment quite consistent with our congratulating
her, at the same time, as soon as it is over. What was "A Channel
Passage" thus but a flourish marked with the sign of all his flourishes,
that of being a success and having fruition? Though it performed the
extraordinary feat of directing the contents of the poet's stomach
straight at the object of his displeasure, we feel that, by some
excellent grace, the object is not at all reached--too many things, and
most of all, too innocently enormous a cynicism, standing in the way
and themselves receiving the tribute; having in a word, impatient young
cynicism as they are, _that_ experience as well as various things.
III
No detail of Mr Marsh's admirable memoir may I allow myself to
anticipate. I can only announce it as a picture, with all the elements
in iridescent fusion, of the felicity that fairly dogged Rupert's steps,
as we may say, and that never allowed him to fall below its measure. We
shall read into it even more relations than nominally appear, and every
one of them again a flourish, every one of them a connection with
his time, a "sampling" of it at its most multitudinous and most
characteristic; every one of them too a record of the state of
some other charmed, not less than charming party--even when the
letter-writer's expression of the interest, the amusement, the play of
fancy, of taste, of whatever sort of appreciation or reaction for his
own spirit, is the ostensible note. This is what I mean in especial by
the constancy with which, and the cost at which, perhaps not less, for
others, the poetic sensibility was maintained and guaranteed. It was as
genuine as if he had been a bard perched on an eminence with a harp, and
yet it was arranged for, as we may say, by the close consensus of those
who had absolutely to know their relation with him but as a delight and
who wanted therefore to keep him, to the last point, true to himself.
His complete curiosity and sociability might have made him, on these
lines, factitious, if it had not happened that the people he so
variously knew and the contacts he enjoyed were just of the kind to
promote most his facility and vivacity and intelligence of life. They
were all young together, allowing for three or four notable, by which I
mean far from the least responsive, exceptions; they were all fresh and
free and acute and aware and in "the world," when not out of it; all
together at the high speculative, the high talkative pitch of the
initiational stage of these latest years, the informed and animated,
the so consciously non-benighted, geniality of which was to make him the
clearest and most projected poetic case, with the question of difficulty
and doubt and frustration most solved, the question of the immediate
and its implications most in order for him, that it was possible to
conceive. He had found at once to his purpose a wondrous enough old
England, an England breaking out into numberless assertions of a new
awareness, into liberties of high and clean, even when most sceptical
and discursive, young intercourse; a carnival of half anxious and
half elated criticism, all framed and backgrounded in still richer
accumulations, both moral and material, or, as who should say,
pictorial, of the matter of course and the taken for granted. Nothing
could have been in greater contrast, one cannot too much insist, to the
situation of the traditional lonely lyrist who yearns for connections
and relations yet to be made and whose difficulty, lyrical, emotional,
personal, social or intellectual, has thereby so little in common with
any embarrassment of choice. The author of the pages before us was
perhaps the young lyrist, in all the annals of verse, who, having the
largest luxury of choice, yet remained least "demoralised" by it--how
little demoralised he was to round off his short history by showing.
It was into these conditions, thickening and thickening, in their
comparative serenity, up to the eleventh hour, that the War came
smashing down; but of the basis, the great garden ground, all green
and russet and silver, all a tissue of distinguished and yet so easy
occasions, so improvised extensions, which they had already placed
at his service and that of his extraordinarily amiable and constantly
enlarged "set" for the exercise of _their_ dealing with the rest of the
happy earth in punctuating interludes, it is the office of our few
but precious documents to enable us to judge. The interlude that here
concerns us most is that of the year spent in his journey round a
considerable part of the world in 1913-14, testifying with a charm that
increases as he goes to that quest of unprejudiced culture, the true
poetic, the vision of the life of man, which was to prove the liveliest
of his impulses. It was not indeed under the flag of that research that
he offered himself for the Army almost immediately after his return to
England--and even if when a young man was so essentially a poet we need
see no act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune of this set
of letters from New York and Boston, from Canada and Samoa, addressed,
for the most part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, in
the fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; for we make him out
as steadily more vivid and delightful while his opportunity grows. He is
touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure of his good
faith; we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New
York pandemonium--obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and
the overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged
advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and
manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights--eyes
of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the
vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We
feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would fain turn it on to
the capture of deeper meanings. But we must leave him to himself and to
youth's facility of wonder; he is amused, beguiled, struck on the whole
with as many differences as we could expect, and sufficiently reminded,
no doubt, of the number of words he is restricted to. It is moreover his
sign, as it is that of the poetic turn of mind in general that we seem
to catch him alike in anticipations or divinations, and in lapses
and freshnesses, of experience that surprise us. He makes various
reflections, some of them all perceptive and ingenious--as about
the faces, the men's in particular, seen in the streets, the public
conveyances and elsewhere; though falling a little short, in his
friendly wondering way, of that bewildered apprehension of monotony of
type, of modelling lost in the desert, which we might have expected of
him, and of the question above all of what is destined to become of that
more and more vanishing quantity the American nose other than Judaic.
What we note in particular is that he likes, to all appearance, many
more things than he doesn't, and how superlatively he is struck with
the promptitude and wholeness of the American welcome and of all its
friendly service. What it is but too easy, with the pleasure of
having known him, to read into all this is the operation of his own
irresistible quality, and of the state of felicity he clearly created
just by appearing as a party to the social relation. He moves and
circulates to our vision as so naturally, so beautifully undesigning
a weaver of that spell, that we feel comparatively little of the story
told even by his diverted report of it; so much fuller a report would
surely proceed, could we appeal to their memory, their sense of poetry,
from those into whose ken he floated. It is impossible not to figure
him, to the last felicity, as he comes and goes, presenting himself
always with a singular effect both of suddenness and of the readiest
rightness; we should always have liked to be there, wherever it was, for
the justification of our own fond confidence and the pleasure of seeing
it unfailingly spread and spread. The ironies and paradoxes of his
verse, in all this record, fall away from him; he takes to direct
observation and accepts with perfect good-humour any hazards of contact,
some of the shocks of encounter proving more muffled for him than
might, as I say, have been feared--witness the American Jew with whom he
appears to have spent some hours in Canada; and of course the "word" of
the whole thing is that he simply reaped at every turn the harmonising
benefit that his presence conferred. This it is in especial that makes
us regret so much the scanting, as we feel it, of his story; it deprives
us in just that proportion of certain of the notes of his appearance
and his "success." _There_ was the poetic fact involved--that, being
so gratefully apprehended everywhere, his own response was inevitably
prescribed and pitched as the perfect friendly and genial and liberal
thing. Moreover, the value of his having so let himself loose in the
immensity tells more at each step in favour of his style; the pages from
Canada, where as an impressionist, he increasingly finds his feet, and
even finds to the same increase a certain comfort of association, are
better than those from the States, while those from the Pacific Islands
rapidly brighten and enlarge their inspiration. This part of his
adventure was clearly the great success and fell in with his fancy,
amusing and quickening and rewarding him, more than anything in the
whole revelation. He lightly performs the miracle, to my own sense,
which R. L. Stevenson, which even Pierre Loti, taking however long a
rope, had not performed; he charmingly conjures away--though in this
prose more than in the verse of his second volume--the marked tendency
of the whole exquisite region to insist on the secret of its charm, when
incorrigibly moved to do so, only at the expense of its falling a little
flat, or turning a little stale, on our hands. I have for myself at
least marked the tendency, and somehow felt it point a graceless moral,
the moral that as there are certain faces too well produced by nature
to be producible again by the painter, the portraitist, so there are
certain combinations of earthly ease, of the natural and social art of
giving pleasure, which fail of character, or accent, even of the power
to interest, under the strain of transposition or of emphasis. Rupert,
with an instinct of his own, transposes and insists only in the right
degree; or what it doubtless comes to is that we simply see him arrested
by so vivid a picture of the youth of the world at its blandest as to
make all his culture seem a waste and all his questions a vanity. That
is apparently the very effect of the Pacific life as those who dip into
it seek, or feel that they are expected to seek, to report it; but it
reports itself somehow through these pages, smilingly cools itself off
in them, with the lightest play of the fan ever placed at its service.
Never, clearly, had he been on such good terms with the hour, never
found the life of the senses so anticipate the life of the imagination,
or the life of the imagination so content itself with the life of
the senses; it is all an abundance of amphibious felicity--he was as
incessant and insatiable a swimmer as if he had been a triton framed
for a decoration; and one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct,
some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe,
in the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last
drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting
for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever
doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any
rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime of 1914 done for him
all it could, without a grain of waste--his assimilations being
neither loose nor literal, and he came back to England as promiscuously
qualified, as variously quickened, as his best friends could wish for
fine production and fine illustration in some order still awaiting
sharp definition. Never certainly had the free poetic sense in him more
rejoiced in an incorruptible sincerity.
IV
He was caught up of course after the shortest interval by the strong
rush of that general inspiration in which at first all differences, all
individual relations to the world he lived in, seemed almost ruefully or
bewilderedly to lose themselves. The pressing thing was of a sudden that
youth was youth and genius community and sympathy. He plunged into that
full measure of these things which simply made and spread itself as it
gathered them in, made itself of responses and faiths and understandings
that were all the while in themselves acts of curiosity, romantic
and poetic throbs and wonderments, with reality, as it seemed to call
itself, breaking in after a fashion that left the whole past pale, and
that yet could flush at every turn with meanings and visions
borrowing their expression from whatever had, among those squandered
preliminaries, those too merely sportive intellectual and critical
values, happened to make most for the higher truth. Of the successions
of his matter of history at this time Mr Marsh's memoir is the
infinitely touching record--touching after the fact, but to the
accompaniment even at the time of certain now almost ineffable
reflections; this especially, I mean, if one happened to be then not
wholly without familiar vision of him. What could strike one more, for
the immense occasion, than the measure that might be involved in it of
desolating and heart-breaking waste, waste of quality, waste for that
matter of quantity, waste of all the rich redundancies, all the light
and all the golden store, which up to then had formed the very price and
grace of life? Yet out of the depths themselves of this question rose
the other, the tormenting, the sickening and at the same time the
strangely sustaining, of why, since the offering couldn't at best be
anything but great, it wouldn't be great just in proportion to its
purity, or in other words its wholeness, everything in it that could
make it most radiant and restless. Exquisite at such times the hushed
watch of the mere hovering spectator unrelieved by any action of his own
to take, which consists at once of so much wonder for why the finest of
the fine should, to the sacrifice of the faculty we most know them by,
have to become mere morsels in the huge promiscuity, and of the thrill
of seeing that they add more than ever to our knowledge and our passion,
which somehow thus becomes at the same time an unfathomable abyss.