Part 2

That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is preoccupied with the duality in human nature, and in "An Escape" there is a fine simile of the struggle:

Desire of infinite things, desire of finite. ... 'tis the wrestle of the twain makes man. --As two young winds, schooled 'mong the slopes and caves Of rival hills that each to other look Across a sunken tarn, on a still day Run forth from their sundered nurseries, and meet In the middle air.... And when they close, their struggle is called Man, Distressing with his strife and flurry the bland Pool of existence, that lay quiet before Holding the calm watch of Eternity.

The incidence of finite and infinite is felt with equal force: sense is as powerful as spirit, and therein of course lives the keenness of the strife. In "Soul and Body" there is a passage--only one of many, however--in which the rapture of sensuous beauty is expressed. The spirit is imagined to be just ready to put off sense, to be for ever caught out of "that corner, consciousness." And the body reminds it:

Thou wilt miss the wonder I have made for thee Of this dear world with my fashioning senses, The blue, the fragrance, the singing, and the green.

.....

Great spaces of grassy land, and all the air One quiet, the sun taking golden ease Upon an afternoon: Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances As if they heard, drawn upward and held there, Some god's eternal tune;

We may take our last illustration of this subject from a passage at the end of the volume called _Emblems of Love_. It is from a poem so rich in beauty and so closely wrought, that to quote from it is almost inevitably to do the author an injustice. But the same may be said about the whole book: while single poems from it will disclose high individual value, both as art and philosophy, their whole effect and meaning can only be completely seized by reading them as a sequence, and in the light of the conception to which they all contribute.

The book is designed to show, in three great movements representing birth, growth, and perfection, the evolution of the human spirit in the world. The spirit, which is here synonymous with love, is traced from the instant which is chosen to mark its birth (the awakening sense of beauty in primitive man), through its manifold states of excess and defect, up to a transcendent union which draws the dual powers into a single ecstasy. The greatness of the central theme is matched by the dignity of its presentment, while the dramatic form in which it is embodied saves it from mere abstraction. We see the dawn of the soul in the wolf-hunter, suddenly perceiving beauty in nature and in women: the vindication of the soul by Vashti, magnificently daring to prove that it is no mere vassal to beauty: and the perfecting of the soul in the terrible paradox of Judith's virginity. But it is in one of the closing pieces, called fittingly "The Eternal Wedding," that the poet attains the summit of his thought along these lines; prefiguring the ultimate union of the conflicting powers of life in one perfect rapture.

... I have Golden within me the whole fate of man: That every flesh and soul belongs to one Continual joyward ravishment ... That life hath highest gone which hath most joy. For like great wings forcefully smiting air And driving it along in rushing rivers, Desire of joy beats mightily pulsing forward The world's one nature.... ... so we are driven Onward and upward in a wind of beauty, Until man's race be wielded by its joy Into some high incomparable day, Where perfectly delight may know itself,-- No longer need a strife to know itself, Only by its prevailing over pain.

That is the topmost peak that his philosophy has gained--for just so long as to give assurance that it exists. But no one supposes that he will dwell there: it is altogether too high: the atmosphere is too rare. It was reached only by the concentration of certain poetical powers, chiefly speculative imagination, which carried him safely over the chasms of a lower altitude. But when other powers are in the ascendant, as for instance in _The End of the World_: when he is recalled to actuality by that keen eye for fact which is so rare a gift to genius of this type, the terror of those lower chasms is revealed. Here is one of the characters reflecting on the thought of the end of the world, which he believes to be imminent from an approaching comet:

Life, the mother who lets her children play So seriously busy, trade and craft,-- Life with her skill of a million years' perfection To make her heart's delighted glorying Of sunlight, and of clouds about the moon, Spring lighting her daffodils, and corn Ripening gold to ruddy, and giant seas, And mountains sitting in their purple clothes-- O life I am thinking of, life the wonder, All blotcht out by a brutal thrust of fire Like a midge that a clumsy thumb squashes and smears.

That passage will serve to point the single comment on technique with which this study must close. It has not been selected for the purpose, and therefore is not the finest example that could be chosen. It is, however, typical of the blank-verse form which largely prevails in this poetry, and which, in its very texture, reveals the same extraordinary combination of qualities which we have observed in the poet's genius.

We have already seen that spiritual vision is here united with intellectuality as lucid as it is powerful: that the mystic is also the humanitarian: that imagination is balanced by a good grip on reality; and that the sense-impressions are fine as well as exuberant. We have seen, too, that this diversity and apparent contrast, although resulting in an art of complex beauty, do not tend towards confusion or obscurity. There has been a complete fusion of the elements, and the molten stream that is poured for us is of glowing clarity.

Exactly the same feature is discernible in the style of this verse. Look at the last passage for a moment and consider its effect. It is impossible to define in a single word, because of its complexity. The mind, lingering delightedly over the metaphor of life the mother, is suddenly awed by the magnitude of the idea which succeeds it. The æsthetic sense is taken by the light and colour of the middle lines, and then, as if the breath were caught on a half-sob, a wave of emotion follows, pensive at first, but rising abruptly to a note that is as rough as a curse. There are more shades of thought, lightly reflective or glooming with prescience; and there are more degrees of emotion, from tenderness to wrath, than we have time to analyze. The point for the moment is the manner in which they are conveyed, and the adequacy of the instrument to convey them.

The texture of the verse itself will provide evidence of this. Here are barely a dozen lines of our English heroic verse; and they will be found to contain the maximum of metrical variety. Probably only two, or at most three of them (it depends upon scansion, of course) are of the regular iambic pentameter: that is to say, built up strictly from the iamb, which is the unit of this form. All the others are varied by the insertion at some point in the line, and frequently at two or three points, of a different verse-unit, dactyl, anapæst, trochee or spondee; and no two lines are varied in exactly the same way.

But, besides the range of the instrument, there is the exquisite harmony of it with mood or idea. The strong down-beat of the trochee summons the intellect to consider a thought: the dactyl will follow with the quick perception of a simile: the iamb will punctuate rhythm: anacrusis will suggest the half-caught breath of rising emotion, and turbulent feeling will pour through spondee, dactyl, and anapæst. And so with the diction. Just as we find a measure which is both vigorous and light, precise and flexible, easily bending law to beauty; so in the language there is a corresponding union of strength and grace, homeliness and dignity. Could a great conception be stated in a simpler phrase than that of the two first lines?

Life, the mother who lets her children play So seriously busy, trade and craft--

and yet this phrase, simple and lucid as it is, conveys a sense of boundless tenderness and pity, playing over the surface of a deeper irony. Doubtless its strength and clarity come from the fact that each word is of the common coin of daily life; but its atmosphere, an almost infinite suggestiveness of familiar things brooded over in a wistful mood, comes partly at least through the colloquial touch.

Mr. Abercrombie has no fear to be colloquial, when that is the proper garment of his thought, the outer symbol of the inner reality. Nor is he the least afraid of fierce and ugly words, when they are apt. The last line of our passage illustrates this. Taken out of its setting, and considering merely the words, one would count a poet rash indeed who would venture such a harsh collocation. But repeat the line aloud, and its metrical felicity will appear at once: put it back in its setting, as the culmination of a wave of feeling that has been gathering strength throughout: remember the idea (of beauty annihilated by senseless law and blind force), which has kindled that emotion; and then we shall marvel at the art which makes the line a growl of impotent rage.

All of which is merely to say that the spirit of this poetry has evolved for itself a living body, wearing its beauty delightedly, rejoicing in its own vitality, and unashamed either of its elemental impulse or its transcendent vision.

Rupert Brooke

_Born at Rugby on August 3, 1887; Died at Lemnos an April 23, 1915_

Probably most English people who love their country and their country's greatest poet have at some time taken joy to identify the spirit of the two. England and Shakespeare: the names have leapt together and flamed into union before the eyes of many a youngster who was much too dazzled by the glory to see how and whence it came. But returning from a festival performance on some soft April midnight, or leaning out of the bedroom window to share with the stars and the wind the exaltation which the play had evoked, the revelation suddenly shone. And thenceforward April 23 was by something more than a coincidence the day both of Shakespeare and St George.

Reason might come back with the daylight to rule over fancy; and the cool lapse of time might remove the moment far enough to betray the humour of it. But the glow never quite faded; or if it did it only gave place to the steadier and clearer light of conviction. One came to see how the poet, by reason of his complete humanity, stood for mankind; and how, from certain sharp characteristics of our race, he stood pre-eminently for English folk. And coming thence to the narrower but firmer ground of historical fact, one saw how shiningly he represented the Elizabethan Age, with its eager, inquisitive, and adventurous spirit; its craving to fulfil to the uttermost a gift of glorious and abundant life.

Now precisely in that way, though not of course in the same superlative degree, one may see Rupert Brooke standing for the England of his time. And when this poet died at Lemnos on April 23, 1915, those who knew and loved his work must have felt the tragic fitness of the date with the event. If the gods of war had decreed his death, they had at least granted that he might pass on England's day. In him indeed was manifested the poetic spirit of the race, warm with human passion and sane with laughter: soaring on wings of fire but nesting always on the good earth. And though one does not claim to find in him the highest point or the extremest advance to which the thought of his day had gone, he stands pre-eminently for that day in the steel-clear light of his gallant spirit.

The title of Rupert Brooke's posthumous book--_1914_--signifies that moment of English history which is reflected in his work. He is the symbol of that year in a double sense. He represents the calamitous political event of it in his voluntary service to the State, and the manner of his death. Thus by the accident of circumstance which made him eminent and vocal, he serves to speak for the silent millions of English men and women who splendidly sprang to duty. But in his poetry there is a closer and deeper relation to that tragic year. Incomplete as it may be: youthful and prankish as some of it is, the thought and manner of the time are imaged there. A certain level of humane culture had been reached, a certain philosophy of life had been evolved, and a definite attitude to reality taken. Lightly but clearly, these things which reflect the colour of our civilization at August 1914 are crystallized in Rupert Brooke's poetry to that date. But at that point the image, like the whole order of which it was the reflection, was shattered by the crash of arms; and the few poems which he wrote subsequently are preoccupied with the spiritual crisis which the war precipitated.

Most of the admirers of this poet have seen only in his last pieces the singular identity of his spirit with the spirit of his country. And that is so noble a concord that it cannot be missed. For when England plunged into the greatest war of history, she flung off in the act several centuries of her age. Priceless things, slowly and patiently acquired, went overboard as mere impedimenta; but in the relapse, the slipping backward to an earlier time and consequent recovery of youth, with its ardour and passion, its recklessness and generosity and courage, the optimist saw a reward for all that was lost. So with the poetry of Rupert Brooke. Those few last sonnets, as it were the soul of rejuvenated England, seem to the same hopeful eye a complete compensation, not only for the wasted individual life, but for the beauty and significance of the age for which he stood, now irrevocably lost.

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.

Before that renunciation one can only stand with bowed head, realizing perhaps more clearly than the giver did, the splendour of the gift. But he too, this representative of his age, knew the value of the life that he was casting away. It was indeed to him a "red sweet wine," precious for the "work and joy" it promised, and the sacred seed of immortality. It is this, above all, that his poetry signifies: a rich and exuberant life, keenly conscious of itself, and fully aware of the realities by which it is surrounded. Its nature grows from that--sensuous and _spirituelle_, passionate and intellectual, ingenuous and ironic, tragic and gay. Never before--no, not even in Donne, as some one has suggested--was such intensity of feeling coupled with such merciless clarity of sight: mental honesty so absolute, piercing so fierce a flame of ardour.

From the fusion of those two powers comes the distinctive character of this poetry: the peculiar beauty of its gallant spirit. They are constant features of it from first to last, but they are not always perfectly fused nor equally present. In the earlier poems, to find which you must go back to the volume of 1911 and begin at the end of the book, they enter as separate and distinct components. One would expect that, of course, at this stage; and we shall not be surprised, either, if we discover that there is here a shade of excess in both qualities: a touch of self-consciousness and relative crudity. The point of interest is that they are so clearly the principal elements from which the subtle and complex beauty of the later work was evolved. Thus, facing one another on pages 84 and 85, are two apt examples. In "The Call" sheer passion is expressed. The poet's great love of life, taking shape for the moment as love of his lady, is here predominant.

Out of the nothingness of sleep, The slow dreams of Eternity, There was a thunder on the deep: I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night's primeval bars, I dared the old abysmal curse, And flashed through ranks of frightened stars Suddenly on the universe!

.....

I'll break and forge the stars anew, Shatter the heavens with a song; Immortal in my love for you, Because I love you, very strong.

But on the opposite page, the sonnet called "Dawn" swings to the extremest point from the magniloquence of that. It is realistic in a literal sense: a bit of wilful ugliness. Yet it springs, however distortedly, from the root of mental clarity and courage which was to produce such gracious blossoming thereafter. It is engaged with an exasperated account of a night journey in an Italian train: all the discomfort and weary irritation of it venting itself upon two unfortunate Teutons.

.....

One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again. The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before.... Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

It is not long, however, before we find that the two elements are beginning to combine; and we soon meet, astonishingly, with the third great quality of the poet's genius. It is strange that imagination always has this power to surprise us. No matter if we have taught ourselves that poetry cannot begin to exist without it: no matter how watchful and alert we think we are, it will spring upon us unaware, taking possession of the mind with amazing exhilaration. That is especially true of the quality as it is found in Rupert Brooke's poetry. For, however you have schooled yourself, you do not expect imaginative power of the first degree to co-exist with sensuous joy so keen, and so acute an intelligence. Yet in a piece called "In Examination" the miracle is wrought. This, too, is an early poem, which may be the reason why one can disengage the threads so easily; whilst a notable fact is that the delicate fabric of it is woven directly out of a commonplace bit of human experience. The poet is engaged with a scene that is decidedly unpromising for poetical treatment--all the stupidity of examination, with its dull, unhappy, "scribbling fools."

Lo! from quiet skies In through the window my Lord the Sun! And my eyes Were dazzled and drunk with the misty gold,

.....

And a full tumultuous murmur of wings Grew through the hall; And I knew the white undying Fire, And, through open portals, Gyre on gyre, Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing, And a Face unshaded ... Till the light faded; And they were but fools again, fools unknowing, Still scribbling, blear-eyed and stolid immortals.

There are at least two poems, "The Fish" and "Dining-Room Tea," in which imaginative power prevails over every other element; and if imagination be the supreme poetic quality, these are Rupert Brooke's finest achievement. They are, indeed, very remarkable and significant examples of modern poetry, both in conception and in treatment. In both pieces the subjects are of an extremely difficult character. One, that of "The Fish," is beyond the range of human experience altogether; and the other is only just within it, and known, one supposes, to comparatively few. The imaginative flight is therefore bold: it is also lofty, rapid, and well sustained. In "The Fish" we see it creating a new material world, giving substance and credibility to a strange new order of sensation:

In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies. The kind luxurious lapse and steal Shapes all his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides Superb on unreturning tides.

.....

But there the night is close, and there Darkness is cold and strange and bare; And the secret deeps are whisperless; And rhythm is all deliciousness; And joy is in the throbbing tide, Whose intricate fingers beat and glide In felt bewildering harmonies Of trembling touch; and music is The exquisite knocking of the blood. Space is no more, under the mud; His bliss is older than the sun. Silent and straight the waters run. The lights, the cries, the willows dim, And the dark tide are one with him.

We see, all through this poem (and the more convincingly as the whole of it is studied) the "fundamental brain-stuff": the patient constructive force of intellect keeping pace with fancy every step of the way. So, too, with "Dining-Room Tea." Imagination here is busy with an idea that is wild, elusive, intangible: on the bare edge, in fact, of sanity and consciousness. It is that momentary revelation, which comes once in a lifetime perhaps, of the reality within appearance. It comes suddenly, unheralded and unaccountable: it is gone again with the swiftness and terror of a lightning-flash. But in the fraction of a second that it endures, æons seem to pass and things unutterable to be revealed. Only a poet of undoubted genius could re-create such a moment, for on any lower plane either imagination would flag or intellect would be baffled, with results merely chaotic. And only to one whose quick and warm humanity held life's common things so dear could the vision shine out of such a homely scene. But therein Rupert Brooke shows so clearly as the poet of his day: that through the familiar joys of comradeship and laughter: through the simple concrete things of a material world--the "pouring tea and cup and cloth," Reality gleams eternal.

When you were there, and you, and you, Happiness crowned the night; I too, Laughing and looking, one of all, I watched the quivering lamplight fall

.....

Flung all the dancing moments by With jest and glitter....

Till suddenly, and otherwhence, I looked upon your innocence. For lifted clear and still and strange From the dark woven flow of change Under a vast and starless sky I saw the immortal moment lie. One instant I, an instant, knew As God knows all. And it and you I, above Time, oh, blind! could see In witless immortality.

But the precise characteristic of this poetry is not one or other of these individual gifts. It is an intimate and subtle blending of them all, shot through and through with a gallant spirit which resolutely and gaily faces truth. From this brave and clear mentality comes a sense of fact which finds its artistic response in realism. Sometimes it will be found operating externally, on technique; but more often, with truer art, it will wed truth of idea and form, in grace as well as candour. From its detachment and quick perception of incongruity comes a rare humour which can laugh, thoughtfully or derisively, even at itself. It will stand aside, watching its own exuberance with an ironic smile, as in "The One Before the Last." It will turn a penetrating glance on passion till the gaudy thing wilts and dies. It will pause at the height of life's keenest rapture to call to death an undaunted greeting: