attained a circulation which any poet might envy. They are comprised in
two slender volumes, that above mentioned, and one of 1911, published
while he was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, and when he died
off Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic pathos, he had not
completed his twenty-eighth year. He was, unlike the majority of his
contemporaries, a meticulous and reserved writer, little inclined to be
pleased with his work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation.
Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or Fergusson, he left
a very slender garland of verse behind him, in which there is scarcely a
petal which is not of some permanent value. For instance, in the volume
of 1911 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude in taste and
petulant in temper; but even these now illustrate a most interesting
character of which time has rounded the angles, and we would not have
otherwise what illustrates so luminously--and so divertingly--that
precious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke.
Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may be
misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the poet's memory with
idolatry. There is some evidence of a Rupert Brooke legend in the
process of formation, which deserves to be guarded against not less
jealously than the R.L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know
that for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured until
they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was far from being either a
plaster saint or a vivid public witness. He was neither a trumpet nor a
torch. He lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling and
attentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of the pageantry of
life. Existence was a wonderful harmony to Rupert Brooke, who was
determined to lose no tone of it by making too much noise himself. In
company he was not a great talker, but loved to listen, with sparkling
deference, to people less gifted than himself if only they had
experience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state, bewitched with
wonder and appreciation. His very fine appearance, which seemed to glow
with dormant vitality, his beautiful manners, the quickness of his
intelligence, his humour, were combined under the spell of a curious
magnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room, he seemed to
bring sunshine with him, although he was usually rather silent, and
pointedly immobile. I do not think it would be easy to recollect any
utterance of his which was very remarkable, but all he said and did
added to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect.
There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can be
definitely identified with the war. The last six months of his life,
spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence in
Cambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least
prepared him, were devoted--for we must not say wasted--to breaking up
the _cliche_ of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain
to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert Brooke's
verse, and his principal legacy to English literature. Our record would
be imperfect without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed of
these:--
"Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
"Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage."
If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans, it is more
than probable that Rupert Brooke would have become an enlightened and
enthusiastic professor. Of the poet who detains us next it may be said
that there was hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which he
could not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet almost by
accident, resembled the most enlightened of the young Italian noblemen
of the Renaissance, who gave themselves with violence to a surfeit of
knowledge and a riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the
fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, such as we
read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Everything he did was done in the
service of St. Epicurus, it was done to _darsi buon tempo_, as the
Tuscans used to say. But this was only the superficial direction taken
by his energy; if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest in
his pursuit of learning; there was a singular harmony in the exercise of
the physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties at his disposal.
Julian Grenfell was a master of the body and of the mind, an unrivalled
boxer, a pertinacious hunter, skilled in swimming and polo, a splendid
shot, a swift runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete so
accomplished should have had time left for intellectual endowments is
amazing, but his natural pugnacity led him to fight lexicons as he
fought the wild boar, and with as complete success.
The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell has been
told in an anonymous record of family life which is destined to
reverberate far beyond the discreet circle of friends to which it is
provisionally addressed. It is a document of extraordinary candour,
tact, and fidelity, and it is difficult to say whether humour or courage
is the quality which illuminates it most. It will be referred to by
future historians of our race as the most vivid record which has been
preserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited patrician family at
the opening of the twentieth century. It is partly through his place at
the centre of this record that, as one of the most gifted of his elder
friends has said, the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked "with all
that is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous," but it is also
through his rare and careless verses.
Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable ease, was not a
poet by determination. In a family where everything has been preserved,
no verses of his that are not the merest boyish exercises are known to
exist previous to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became a
professional soldier in India in 1911. He was on his way home from South
Africa when hostilities broke out, and he was already fighting in
Flanders in October 1914. After a very brilliant campaign, in the course
of which he won the D.S.O. and was twice mentioned in despatches, he was
shot in the head near Ypres and died of his wounds at Boulogne on May
26th, 1915. During these months in France, by the testimony of all who
saw him and of all to whom he wrote, his character received its final
touch of ripeness. Among his other attainments he abruptly discovered
the gift of noble gnomic verse. On receiving news of the death of Rupert
Brooke, and a month before his own death, Julian Grenfell wrote the
verses called "Into Battle," which contain the unforgettable stanzas:--
"The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth....
"The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.
"The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
"The blackbird sings to him 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another,
Brother, sing.'"
The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final prophetic
quatrain:--
"The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings."
"Could any other man in the British Army have knocked out a heavy-weight
champion one week and written that poem the next?" a brother officer
asked. "Into Battle" remains, and will probably continue to remain, the
clearest lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in which
the war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it gives noble
form to their most splendid aspirations. Julian Grenfell wrote, as he
boxed and rode, as he fought in the mud of Flanders, as the ideal
sporting Englishman of our old, heroic type.
The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on tradition that it is
not surprising that all the strange contrivances of twentieth-century
warfare have been found too crabbed for our poets to use. When great
Marlborough, as Addison puts it, "examin'd all the dreadful scenes of
war" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with Marathon than with
the tanks and gas of Ypres. But there is one military implement so
beautiful in itself, and so magical in the nature of its service, that
it is bound to conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote _The
Campaign_ once more, "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." But
the poets are still shy of it. In French it has, as yet, inspired but
one good poem, the "Plus haut toujours!" of Jean Allard-Meeus, a hymn of
real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam:
A.H." is equally unique, and, in its complete diversity from
Allard-Meeus' rhapsody, suggests that the aeroplane has a wide field
before it in the realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject
is the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed on November
3rd, 1916. This distinguished young statesman and soldier had just been
promoted, after a career of prolonged gallantry in the air, and would
have flown no more, if he had returned in safety to our front on that
fatal day.
Major Baring has long been known as an excellent composer of sonnets and
other short pieces. But "In Memoriam: A.H." lifts him to a position
among our living poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long
irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical difficulty is to
support lyrical emotion throughout. No form of verse is more liable to
lapses of dignity, to dull and flagging passages. Even Dryden in _Anne
Killigrew_, even Coleridge in the _Departing Year_, have not been able
to avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to escape them by a use of
swollen and pompous language. I will not say that Major Baring has been
universally successful, where the success of the great masters is only
relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and originality,
which interprets an emotion and illustrates an incident the poignancy of
which could scarcely be exaggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting
that "A.H." is one of the few durable contributions to the literature of
the present war.
It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is constructed
with great care on a complicated plan, but a fragment of Major Baring's
elegy may lead readers to the original:--
"God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift
And maimed you with a bullet long ago,
And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift,
And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow,
Gave back your youth to you,
And packed in moments rare and few
Achievements manifold
And happiness untold,
And bade you spring to Death as to a bride,
In manhood's ripeness, power and pride,
And on your sandals the strong wings of youth."
There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words; it is a
closely followed study in poetical biography.
The water has its marvels like the air, but they also have hardly yet
secured the attention of the poets. In _A Naval Motley_, by Lieut.
N.M.F. Corbett, published in June 1916, we encounter the submarine:--
"Not yours to know delight
In the keen hard-fought fight,
The shock of battle and the battle's thunder;
But suddenly to feel
Deep, deep beneath the keel
The vital blow that rives the ship asunder!"
A section of the new war-poetry which is particularly pathetic is that
which is inspired by the nostalgia of home, by the longing in the midst
of the guns and the dust and the lice for the silent woodlands and cool
waters of England. When this is combined with the sense of extreme
youth, and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poignancy of
it is almost more than can be borne. The judgment is hampered, and one
doubts whether one's critical feeling can be trusted. This particular
species of emotion is awakened by no volume more than by the slender
_Worple Flit_ of E. Wyndham Tennant, who died on the Somme in September
1916. He was only nineteen when he fell, at an age when, on the one
hand, more precocious verse than his has been written, and when yet, on
the other, some of the greatest poets had not achieved a mastery of
words equal to that already possessed by this young Wykehamist. The
voice is faltering, and there is a want of sureness in the touch; the
metrical hammer does not always tap the centre of the nail's head. But
what pathos in the sentiment, what tenderness in the devotion to beauty!
Tennant had, we may suppose, read Flecker before he wrote "How shall I
tell you of the roads that stretch away?"; or was it merely the family
likeness in the generation? But I know not what but his own genius can
have inspired the "Home Thoughts in Laventie," a poem about a little
garden left unravished among the rubble of the wrecked village, a poem
which ends thus:--
"I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A-courting on the leas.
And meadows, with their glittering streams--and silver-scurrying dace--
Home, what a perfect place."
Among these boy-poets, so cruelly and prematurely snatched from the
paternal earth, Tennant suggests to us the possibility that a talent of
very high order was quenched by death, because in few of them do we find
so much evidence of that "perception and awe of Beauty" which Plotinus
held to be the upward path to God.
In June 1917 there was published a slender volume which is in several
ways the most puzzling and the most interesting of all that lie upon my
table to-day. This is the _Ardours and Endurances_ of Lieut. Robert
Nichols. I knew nothing of the author save what I learned from his
writings, that he is very young, that he went out from Oxford early in
the war, that he was fighting in Flanders before the end of 1914, that
he was wounded, perhaps at Loos, in 1915, and that he was long in
hospital. I felt the hope, which later information has confirmed, that
he was still alive and on the road to recovery. Before _Ardours and
Endurances_ reached me, I had met with _Invocation_, a smaller volume
published by Lieut. Nichols in December 1915. There has rarely been a
more radical change in the character of an artist than is displayed by a
comparison of these two collections. _Invocation_, in which the war
takes a small and unconvincing place, is creditable, though rather
uncertain, in workmanship, and displays a tendency towards experiment in
rich fancy and vague ornament. In _Ardours and Endurances_ the same
accents are scarcely to be detected; the pleasant boy has grown into a
warworn man; while the mastery over the material of poetic art has
become so remarkable as to make the epithet "promising" otiose. There is
no "promise" here; there is high performance.
Alone among the poets before me, Lieut. Nichols has set down a reasoned
sequence of war impressions. The opening Third of his book, and by far
its most interesting section, consists of a cycle of pieces in which the
personal experience of fighting is minutely reported, stage by stage. We
have "The Summons," the reluctant but unhesitating answer to the call in
England, the break-up of plans; then the farewell to home, "the place of
comfort." "The Approach," in three successive lyrics, describes the
arrival at the Front. "Battle," in eleven sections, reproduces the
mental and physical phenomena of the attack. "The Dead," in four
instalments, tells the tale of grief. "The Aftermath," with
extraordinary skill, records in eight stages the gradual recovery of
nerve-power after the shattering emotions of the right. The first
section of "Battle," as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted in
full as an example of Lieut. Nichols's method:--
"It is mid-day: the deep trench glares--
A buzz and blaze of flies--
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs,
The great sun rakes the skies,
"No sound in all the stagnant trench
Where forty standing men
Endure the sweat and grit and stench,
Like cattle in a pen.
"Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs
Or twangs the whining wire;
Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs
As in hell's forging fire.
"From out a high cool cloud descends
An aeroplane's far moan;
The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends,
The black speck travels on.
"And sweating, dizzied, isolate
In the hot trench beneath,
We bide the next shrewd move of fate
Be it of life or death."
This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy by what
follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in all literature, from
the wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of the
hopeless longing for an irrecoverable presence as informs the broken
melodies, the stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of
_Ardours and Endurances_:--
"In a far field, away from England, lies
A Boy I friended with a care like love;
All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries,
The melancholy clouds drive on above.
"There, separate from him by a little span,
Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free,
Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man,
One with these elder knights of chivalry."
It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to intrude upon,
such passionate grief. These poems form a revelation of the agony of a
spirit of superabundant refinement and native sensuousness suddenly
stunned, and as it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual
anguish. If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of
"Aftermath," where the pain of the soul is abated, and where the poet,
scarred and shattered, but "free at last," snaps the chain of despair,
these poems would be positively intolerable.
In the closeness of his analysis and in the accurate heaping up of exact
and pregnant observations, Lieut. Nichols comes closer than any other of
these English poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I wrote
in _Three French Moralists_. One peculiarity which he shares with them
is his seriousness: there is no trace in him of the English cheerfulness
and levity. Most of our war-writers are incorrigible Mark Tapleys. But
Lieut. Nichols, even when he uses colloquial phrases--and he introduces
them with great effect--never smiles. He is most unlike the French, on
the other hand, in his general attitude towards the war. He has no
military enthusiasm, no aspiration after _gloire_. Indeed, the most
curious feature of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on the
few yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to have no
national view of the purpose of the war, no enthusiasm for the cause, no
anger against the enemy. There is but a single mention of the Germans
from beginning to end; the poet does not seem to know of their
existence. His experiences, his agonies, his despair, are what a purely
natural phenomenon, such as the eruption of a volcano or the chaos of an
earthquake, might cause. We might read his poems over and over again
without forming the slightest idea of what all the distress was about,
or who was guilty, or what was being defended. This is a mark of great
artistic sincerity; but it also points to a certain moral narrowness.
Lieut. Robert Nichols' "endurances" are magnificently described, but we
are left in the dark regarding his "ardours." We are sure of one thing,
however, that none of us may guess what such a talent, in one still so
young, may have in store for us; and we may hope for broader views
expressed in no less burning accents.
There could hardly be a more vivid contrast than exists between the
melancholy passion of Lieut. Nichols and the fantastic high spirits of
Captain Robert Graves. He again is evidently a very young man, who was
but yester-year a jolly boy at the Charterhouse. He has always meant to
be a poet; he is not one of those who have been driven into verse by the
strenuous emotion of the war. In some diverting prefatory lines to _Over
the Brazier_ he gives us a picture of the nursery-scene when a bright
green-covered book bewitched him by its "metre twisting like a chain of
daisies, with great big splendid words." He has still a wholesome hunger
for splendid words; he has kept more deliberately than most of his
compeers a poetical vocation steadily before him. He has his moments of
dejection when the first battle faces him:--
"Here's an end to my art!
I must die and I know it,
With battle-murder at my heart--
Sad death, for a poet!
"Oh, my songs never sung,
And my plays to darkness blown!
I am still so young, so young,
And life was my own."
But this mood soon passes, and is merged in the humoristic and fantastic
elation characteristic of this buoyant writer, whose whim it is to meet
the tragedy not mournfully but boisterously. Where by most of the
soldier-bards the subjective manner is a little over-done, it is
impossible not to welcome so objective a writer as Captain Graves, from
whose observations of the battle of La Bassee I quote an episode:--
THE DEAD FOX HUNTER
"We found the little captain at the head;
His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead,
And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.
"The well-known rosy colours of his face
Were almost lost in grey.
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case,
For others' sake that day
He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.
"For those who live uprightly and die true
Heaven has no bars or locks,
And serves all taste.... Or what's for him to do
Up there, but hunt the fox?
Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide
For one who rode straight and at hunting died.
"So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came,
Why, it must find one now:
If any shirk and doubt they know the game,
There's one to teach them how:
And the whole host of Seraphim complete
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet."
I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which Englishmen will not
allow to be forgotten. The great quality of Captain Graves' verse at
present is its elated vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor grief
can long subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements, his
animal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, and he is above us in a
moment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under a sky of unruffled
gaiety. In our old literature, of which he is plainly a student, he has
found a neglected author who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton,
Henry VIII's Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a great
deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, _The Tunning of Elinore
Rummyng_ and _Colin Clout_. He likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalid
images: we suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediate
predecessors. But his extreme modernness--"Life is a cliche--I would
find a gesture of my own"--is, in the case of so lively a songster, an
evidence of vitality. He promises a new volume, to be called _Fairies
and Fusiliers_, and it will be looked forward to with anticipation.