The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir/Memoir/Part I
xi
Memoir
I
Rupert Brooke was born at Rugby on August 3rd, 1887. His father was William Parker Brooke, a Rugby master, son of Canon Brooke of Bath; and his mother was Mary Ruth Cotterill. He was the second of three brothers.[1]
When he was five years old his father became Housemaster of School Field, which was his home till 1910. He loved the house and the garden, especially his own particular long grass-path with borders and pergolas, where he used to walk up and down reading. At this House he entered Rugby in 1901, from the preparatory school at Hillbrow, and next year won a scholarship.
His school life was very happy. In his first year at Cambridge, reading out a paper on Modern Poetry which he had written at the end of his last term at Rugby for the School Society called Ἔρανος, and afraid that the alarming undergraduates might think it sentimental, he excused himself by explaining the circumstances in which he wrote it. "I had been happier at Rugby," he said, "than I can xiifind words to say. As I looked back at five years, I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious; and I could not (and cannot) hope for or even quite imagine such happiness elsewhere. And then I found the last days of all this slipping by me, and with them the faces and places and life I loved, and I without power to stay them. I became for the first time conscious of transience, and parting, and a great many other things."
This happiness was compounded from many sources: friendship, games (he played for the School in both the XI and the XV), and books. He was a balanced combination of the athletic and the intellectual types of schoolboy—'always with a ball in his hand and a book in his pocket' is a vivid little description. "Rupert" (writes a contemporary in the VIth who was at another house, and afterwards became an Assistant Master[2]), "first of all people at school gave me an inkling of what a full life really meant. I was an awful Philistine, and still am, I fear; but he, with no appearance of superiority or attempt at preaching, as keen as any of us on all the immensely important events in school life, and always ready for a rag, impressed us as no one else could with the fact that these things were not all—not even the most important. And the best thing about him was that he was not out to impress us—it was just being himself."
xiiiHis great school-friend Hugh Russell-Smith, since killed in action, wrote in the Rugby paper, the 'Meteor,' when he died:—
"For the first two or three years, I think, few of us realised that someone out of the ordinary had come among us. He was rather shy and quiet, though he at once proved himself a good athlete, and he lived much the same life as anyone else. Gradually, however, we began to notice little things about him. Instead of coming 'down town' with us, he used to go off to the Temple Library to read the reviews of books in the 'Morning Post' and 'Chronicle.' He read Walter Pater, and authors we knew very little about. He read a good deal of poetry, and he let us find him in raptures over Swinburne. He began to wear his hair rather longer than other people. Still, he played games enthusiastically, and helped us to become Cock House in football and in cricket. Gradually most of us in the House came under his spell. We accepted his literary interests. He was so straightforward and unaffected and natural about them, and he took our chaff so well, that we couldn't have helped doing so. Perhaps they amused most of us, but one or two—and those the most unlikely—were occasionally found clumsily trying to see what there really was in such things. But it was his personal charm that attracted us most, his very simple and lovable nature. Few could resist it. When in his last year he became head of the House, almost everyone came under the sway of his personality. It seems to me now, as it seemed then, that there xivreally was a spirit in School Field which made it rather different from any other House. It was due, I believe, partly to Rupert, partly to his father. The situation might have been difficult for both. The way in which things actually turned out shows one of the most delightful sides of Rupert. He was in all things more than loyal to his father, but he never made it awkward for the rest of us. His sense of fun saw him through, and it helped us a good deal to know that he would not misinterpret all the little pleasantries that boys make at the expense of their Housemaster. The result was a sort of union between the Housemaster and the House, which made very much for good.
"Outside the House, his worth was realised to the full by some—by the Upper Bench, and by a few of the Masters who knew and loved him. He rose to a high place in the VIth, won two prizes for his poems, played cricket and football for the School, and became a Cadet Officer in the Corps. But I think he was never a school hero. It was chiefly his House that knew his lovableness. And when he was at Cambridge, I think he always loved the House lunches, which we used to have nearly every week. The last letter I had from him was one in which he was talking of members of the House who had fallen in the war.
"Rupert had an extraordinary vitality at school, which showed itself in a glorious enthusiasm and an almost boisterous sense of fun—qualities that are only too rare in combination. Of his enthusiasm it is hard to speak; we knew less about it, although xvwe felt it. We knew much more of his glorious fooling—in his letters, in his inimitable and always kind burlesques of masters or boys, in his parodies of himself. He seemed almost always ready for laughter. It is often the small things that stand out most vividly in one's mind. I see Rupert singing at the very top of his voice, with a magnificent disregard for tune, the evening hymn we used to have so often at Bigside Prayers. I see him rushing on to the Close to release a sheep that had become entangled in one of the nets. I see him tearing across the grass so as not to be late for Chapel. I generally think of him with a book. He had not yet developed that love of the country and that passion for swimming with which the friends of his Grantchester days associate him. He used to read, when we used to walk or bathe. But whatever he was doing or wherever he was, he was always the same incomparable friend. He has often quoted to me a verse of Hilaire Belloc:
From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.
How much Rupert loved Rugby while he was there, I know; and I know too how much those who knew him there loved him."
The letters which he wrote in his last year at school are radiant. "I am enjoying everything immensely at present. To be among 500 people, all young and laughing, is intensely delightful and {{xviinteresting. . . .[3] 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 young—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 spectator as well, and I delight in contriving effective exits. The world is of gold and ivory. . . . How is London? Here the slushy roads, grey skies, and epidemic mumps cannot conceal a wonderful beauty in the air which makes New Big School almost bearable." And in the summer: "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 punishment, death perhaps—or life."
'Work' was only one of the lesser elements which went to make up all this joy. He got a fair number of prizes, and went to King's with a scholarship: but lessons seem to have been almost the only thing he didn't as a rule care for. He would have liked to read the books as books, but grammar irked him. When he came to 'extra work' for the scholarship examination, he enjoyed it. "This introduces me to many authors whom the usual course neglects as 'unclassical.' . . . Theocritus xviialmost compensates me for all the interminable dullness of Demosthenes and the grammars on other days. I never read him before. I am wildly, madly enchanted by him." He never became an accurate scholar, and though he enjoyed certain authors, and had a special love for Plato, I don't think Greek and Latin played the part in his development which might have been expected.
His voluntary reading, at school and afterwards, was mainly English—quantities of prose, but still more poetry, in which his taste was very comprehensive; and his zealous interest in contemporary work had already begun. A paper on Modern Poetry, which he read to the Ἔρανος Society, presses on his hearers Kipling, Henley, Watson, Yeats, A. E., and——Ernest Dowson. This brings us to his amusing phase of 'decadence.' From 1905 till well into his second year at Cambridge he entertained a culte (in such intensity, somewhat belated) for the literature that is now called 'ninetyish'—Pater,[4] Wilde, and Dowson. This was a genuine enthusiasm, as anyone may see from his earliest xviiipublished work, especially the poems written in the alexandrine of 'Cynara' of which the 'Day that I have loved' is the culmination. But he loved to make fun of it, and of himself in it; for all through his life his irony played first on himself. Here is the setting of a dialogue: "The Close in a purple evening in June. The air is full of the sound of cricket and the odour of the sunset. On a green bank Rupert is lying. There is a mauve cushion beneath his head, and in his hand E. Dowson's collected poems, bound in pale sorrowful green. He is clothed in indolence and flannels. Enter Arthur." 'Good-morrow,' says Arthur. 'What a tremulous sunset!' But that is all he is allowed to say. Rupert proceeds with an elaborately 'jewelled' harangue, ending 'I thank you for this conversation. You talk wonderfully. I love listening to epigrams. I wonder if the dead still delight in epigrams. I love to think of myself seated on the greyness of Lethe's banks, and showering ghosts of epigrams and shadowy paradoxes upon the assembled wan-eyed dead. We shall smile, a little wearily I think, remembering. . . . Farewell.' 'Farewell,' says poor Arthur, opening his mouth for the second time and exit.
"I am busy with an enormous romance, of which I have written five chapters. It begins with my famous simile[5] about the moon, but soon gets much more lewd. One of the chief characters is a dropsical leper whose limbs and features have been absorbed xvixin one vast soft paunch. He looks like a great human slug, and he croaks infamous little songs from a wee round mouth with yellow lips. The others are less respectable.
"Did you see the bowdlerised decadent?[6] I suppose the scenery looked extremely valuable. I dare not witness it. Nero is one of the few illusions I have left. All my others are departing one by one. I read a book recently which proved that Apollo was an aged Chieftain who lived in Afghanistan and had four wives and cancer in the stomach; and the other day I found myself—my last hope!—acting on moral principles."
"This morning I woke with ophthalmia," he wrote in another letter, "one of the many diseases raging through Rugby. It is all owing to a divine mistake. I wanted to get rose-rash, being both attracted by the name and desirous to have the disease over before the time of the Italian 'tour' came. Therefore yestre'en I prayed to Æsculapius a beautiful prayer in Sapphics—it began, I think, ἵμερος νῦν ἐστί ῥόδον πυρέττειν, . . . but either my Greek was unintelligible, or the names of ills have changed since Æsculapius, for I awoke and found the God had sent me this, the least roseate of diseases."
He wished, of course, or rather wished to be thought to wish, to shock and astonish the respectable; but he did not in practice go very far in that direction. His hair, slightly longer than usual, has already been mentioned. Ties might not be coloured; but there was no rule against their being 'puff' and xxmade of crêpe de chine; and such ties he wore, as did the other school swells. It was amusing to cause a flutter in the orthodox School Societies, of which he was really an active and enthusiastic member, though one might not think so from his accounts of their proceedings. "Last Sunday I read a little paper on Atalanta, and was mightily pleased. The usual papers we have are on such subjects as Hood or Calverley—'something to make you laugh.' . . . I saw my opportunity, and took it. 'Have I not,' I said, 'many a time and oft been bored beyond endurance by such Philistines? Now my revenge comes; I shall be merciless!' So I prepared a very long and profound paper, full of beautiful quotations, and read it to them for a long time, and they were greatly bored. They sat round in chairs and slumbered uneasily, moaning a little; while I in the centre ranted fragments of choruses and hurled epithets upon them. At length I ended with Meleager's last speech, and my voice was almost husky with tears; so that they woke, and wondered greatly, and sat up, and yawned, and entered into a discussion on Tragedy, wherein I advanced the most wild and heterodox and antinomian theories, and was very properly squashed. So, you see, even in Rugby the Philistines don't get it their own way always."
"I am finishing my paper on James Thomson.[7] I have cut out all the wicked parts, but I still fear xxifor the reception. Last week we had a paper on T. Gray. The stupendous ass who wrote and read it, after referring to the Elegy as 'a fine lyric,' ended with the following incomparable words: 'In conclusion, we may give Gray a place among the greatest, above all, except perhaps Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson.' This lewd remark roused me from the carefully-studied pose of irritating and sublime nonchalance which I assume on such occasions. I arose, and made acid and quite unfair criticisms of Gray and Tennyson, to the concealed delight of all the avowed Philistines there, and the open disgust of the professing 'lovers of literature.' I was nearly slain."
He wrote quantities of poetry at Rugby, a very little of which he thought worth preserving in the '1905-1908 ' section of his first book. Some of it appeared in the Phœnix, a free-lance school paper of which he was twin-editor, and some in the Venture, which succeeded the Phœnix. His verse of this time shows a good ear, and a love of 'beautiful' words, but not much else. A good deal of it was written when he ought to have been otherwise employed. "I shall sit in a gondola," he wrote when he was going to Venice in April 1906, "and pour forth satires in heroic verse, or moral diatribes in blank verse. Intense surroundings always move me to write in an opposite vein. I gaze on the New Big School, and give utterance to frail diaphanous lyrics, sudden and beautiful as a rose-petal. And when I do an hour's 'work' with the Headmaster, I fill notebooks with erotic terrible fragments xxiiat which even Sappho would have blushed and trembled."
In 1904 he was given an extra prize for a poem on The Pyramids, and next year he won the real prize with one on The Bastille, which he recited on June 24th. "The speeches were rather amusing. I am informed that my effort was one of the only two audible; and as the other was in a foreign tongue, I carried off the honours. I am also told by a cricketer friend of mine—that half the audience were moved to laughter, the other half to tears, which I regard as a compliment, though I can understand the feelings of neither half. Anyhow I got a Browning and a Rossetti out of it, which is something, though they are in prize-binding."
Next year he had to fall back on prose. "I have undertaken to write an Essay for a prize. If I win this I shall stand up next Speech Day and recite weird 'historical' platitudes to a vast slumbrous 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 the 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." xxiiiHe won the prize (the King's Medal for Prose); and as he got into the XI. at about the same time, he left Rugby with honours thick upon him.
- ↑ Dick, who was six years older, died in 1907; and Alfred, three years younger, was killed near Vermelles in June 1915, serving as a lieutenant in the Post Office Rifles.
- ↑ Hubert Podmore, who, before he was killed in action, gave Mrs Brooke leave to publish this extract from his letter to her.
- ↑ Throughout this book, three dots mean that there are dots in the original letters; six, that something is omitted.
- ↑ A little parody with which he won a Westminster Gazette prize in 1907 may be worth preserving here: "From 'Marius the Bank Clerk,' by Walter Pater (Book II. Chap. ix., 'Procrastination'). Well! it was there, as he beat upon the station gate (that so symbolic barrier!) and watched the receding train, that the idea came upon him; casting, as it were, a veil of annoyance over the vague melancholy of his features; and filling, not without a certain sedate charm, as of a well-known ritual, his mind with a now familiar sense of loss—a very desiderium—a sense only momentarily perceptible, perhaps, among the other emotions and thoughts, that swarmed, like silver doves, about his brain."
- ↑ This was as follows :—"The moon was like an enormous yellow scab on the livid flesh of some leper."
- ↑ Nero at His Majesty's Theatre.
- ↑ He had 'ransacked the eight bookshops in Charing Cross Road' for Thomson's works. (This is, of course, the author of the City of Dreadful Night, not of the Seasons.