July 25, 1918 
Land & Water 
17 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Souire 
Rupert Brooke 
THREP: years after Rupert Brooke's death, Messrs. 
Sidgwick & Jackson have pubhshed (los. Gd. net) 
what may be regarded as the definitive edition 
of his poems, accompanied by Mr. Marsh's official 
memoir. The memoir has been often announced 
and postponed, but it was worth waiting for ; and though 
to posterity more materials may be available this memoir 
is bound to be the foundation of all future biographies. 
Mr. Marsh has added one more to his many services to 
contemporarv poetry and contemporary poets. 
Brooke's precocity at school w'as extraordinary. He was 
reading at seventeen the literature, decadent and otherwise, 
one e.xpects to find in the rooms of c-esthetic undergraduates ; 
he was already finding pleasure in playing with paradox 
and in polishing flippancies ; he was alreacly, also, taking 
his poetry seriously, and writing prose of extraordinary 
maturity and ease. Read him at eighteen : 
I have undertaken to write an essay for a prize. If 
I win this I shall- stand up next Speecli Day and recite 
weird "historical" platitudes to a vast shimbrous audience. 
The idea is so pleasingly incongruous that I desire to realise 
it. Moreover, I once airily told a pedantic and aged man 
that if I liked I could understand even history, and he, 
scoffing, stirred my pride to prove it. Therefore I am 
going to write an essay on "The Influence of William III. 
on England." Of William III. I know very little. He 
was a king, or something, they say, of tlie time of Congreve 
and Wycherley. Of England I know nothing. I thought 
you might aid me in a little matter like this. If ever you 
have written an epic, a monograph, an anthology, or a 
lyric on William III., please send it to me that I may quote 
it in full. 
Even stranger in these school letters are the more personal 
passages. "To be among 500 people," he writes, "all young 
and laughing, is intensely delightful and interesting. . . . 
I am seated on the topmost pinnacle of the Temple of Joy. 
Wonderful things are happening all around me. Some day, 
when all the characters are dead — they are sure to die 
voung — I shall put it all in a book. I am in the midst of a 
beautiful comedy — with a sense of latent tears — and the 
dramatic situations work out delightfully. The rest are 
only actors ; I am actor and sjjectator as well." And, in 
his last tcnn at Rugby : 
I am infinitely happy. I am writing nothing. I am 
content to live. After this term is over, the world awaits. 
But I do not now care what will come then. Only, my 
present happiness is so great that I fear the jealous gods 
will requite me afterwards with some terrible punish- 
ment. . . . 
Such letters from a schoolboy, were nothing else known of 
him, might to a hasty reader call up conjecturally the picture 
of a most abnormal prig — though prigs are not "infinitely 
happy" at public schools. But what his school-fellows saw 
was a boy, prodigiously handsome, wearing his fair hair a 
little longer than was customary and spending a good deal 
of time in the library ; but a boy who played in the XI. 
and the XV., was jropular in his house, who never paraded his 
tastes or his peculiar talents to those who shared neither, 
and whose most conspicuous trait was his cheerful com- 
panionability. 
****** 
This must always be borne in mind by the reader of the 
Memoir. Mr. Marsh has done his work perfectly as far as 
his materials would allow him : he orders his narrative with 
great skill and Iiis own commentary is at once valuable 
and beautifully unobtrusive. He has colIecte.fl what he can, 
at a time when so many who might have contributed are 
away or dead, a fair number of personal reminiscences, and 
a few "characteristic anecdotes." It is agreeable to learn 
of the Canadian disciple who told Brooke that he "had 
-Mr. Noyes skinned " ; and there is a still funnier storv of 
Mrooke's departure, unfriended, by the boat from Liverpool, 
He thought he would not be left out in the cold so hired a 
small boy to wave a handkerchief to him as (he boat went olT. 
What ocids and ends he could collect .Mr. .Marsh lias collected. 
But he has to depend mainly upon Brooke's own letters. 
They arc the letters of a very young man, continually visiting 
new. places, and full of his own impressions of them ; often 
writing, as a man is unconsciously compelled to do, to friends 
who admire him, "in character" ; leading (at least, in so 
far as we can deduce from this part of his correspondence) 
a life free, until the close, from serious stress or exacting 
occupation. A Life mainly consisting of these may suggest 
to the careless reader a dilettante hfe mainly concerned with 
the first person. Nothing could be more baseless than that 
deduction. Brooke was fundamentally both a serious and a 
modest man ; he could talk gaily and well, but was never 
guilty of intellectual vanity or deliberate conversational 
display ; and if many felt that sunshine always entered a 
room with him and a shadow fell when he left (a thing true 
of him, though it ma}' sound mere facile hyperbole) he was 
not conscious of it himself, and was frequently the quietest 
person present. As at school, so afterwards, he got on with 
every kind of man ; and he was often still more at home 
with those who did not share his mental interests than 
with those who did. The little contribution here printed 
from a business man who met him in the South Seas throws 
more light' on the natural cheerful Brooke who charmed his 
way across two hemispheres than any number of beautifully 
written letters. 
His seriousness, though very lightly worn, deepened 
towards the end of his life ; but it was alwa3's present under 
his youthful audacities. No man could have indulged less 
freely in moral platitudes ; but, as Mr. Marsh says, it was 
evident when he returned from the South Seas that goodness 
was all that he cared for in men, and that he had shed the 
last of his intellectual prejudices. It was whilst an under- 
graduate that he wrote "The prejudices of the clever are 
harder to kill than those of the dull"; later he was not 
afraid (one can imagine many of the "clever" shuddering 
at the quotation) to write: "That is the final rule of life, 
the best one ever made, ' Whoso shall offend one of these 
little ones ' — remembering that all the eight hundred millions 
on earth, except oneself, are the little ones." This came 
from the South Seas, where he was revolted by the ruin our 
civilisation has brought to the islanders. He never affected 
the comfortable doctrine that politics do not matter to an 
artist. At Cambridge he became a Socialist. Sociahsm was 
fashionable ; but he did not adopt it in a mechanical way, 
and he took no view ready made. No examples of his 
political thinking are here given, but there are a few. sen- 
tences which show how his interests kept alive, as also how 
free he was from thinking by rote. He sent home from the 
Pacific money for the Dublin Strikers ; he loathed indus- 
trialism and empires ; but he equally hated those whose 
dislike of these things leads to anti-patriotism. One slight 
passage has a topical interest. He enjoyed Germany, and 
had many German friends ; but in 191J' he wrote : 
I have sampled and sought out German culture. It 
has changed all my political views. I am wildly in favour 
of nineteen new Dreadnoughts. German culture rtust 
never, never prevail ! The Germans are nice, and well- 
meaning, and they try ; but they are soft. Oh ! they 
are soft ! 
It is the ri^lit word ; there is the material the Junkers use ; 
but the sentiments would have been expressed in 1911 by 
very few men sharing Brooke's general ideas. 
* * * * • * * , 
Mr Marsh gives some interesting and touching extracts 
from Brooke's last letters. He did not dread death ; he 
seemed as curious about it a« he was about life ; his one 
regret, at moments very bitter, was that he would leave no 
children. Ho died at Scyros, as gifted, as generous, and as 
gentle a spirit as any of his time. Little, it seems, remained 
to be recovered of his too scanty poetry ; but Mr. Marsh 
prints a few new verses and a nimiber of fragments found 
with his things in the yEgcan. He always had a personal 
style ; in his last volume the unmistakable touch of great- 
aess had come into it ; and were these last fragments all 
tlikt survived in him, they would alone be sufficient to show 
that a potentially great poet had been lost. Take tiiis : 
They say Achilles in the darkness stirred. 
And Hector, his old enemy. 
Moved the great shades that were his limbs. They heard 
More than Olympian thunder on the sea'. 
There is nothing recondite in the thought or elaborate in the 
language ; but it is in the real, and not the imitation grand 
manner ; the style is the style of a master. 
