Forever England (30 page)

Rupert Brooke was already perfected in verbal and stylistic execution. He might have grown in variety, richness and significance, in scope and in detail, no doubt; but as an artisan in metrical words and pauses, he was past apprenticeship. He was still a restless experimenter, but in such he was a master. In the brief stroke of description, which he inherited from his early attachment to the concrete; in the rush of words, especially verbs, still with the impulse of ‘the bright speed’ he had at the source; in his theatrical impersonation of abstractions, as in ‘The Funeral of Youth’, where for once the abstract and the concrete are happily fused; – in all these there are the elements, and in the last there is the perfection, of mastery.

Mr Marsh has had to face the enormous difficulties which beset the biographers of those who have died with undeveloped powers, tragically, and in the glory of public gratitude … at Grantchester his feet were permanently bare; he disdained tobacco and butcher’s meat; and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open air. You might judge him extreme, and from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated as any other pose, but you could not from the first moment of speech with him doubt that, whatever
he might do, he was an originator, one of those leaders who spring up from time to time and show their power most clearly by subjugating their own generation. Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows. One may trace some of the effects of this belief in the tone of his letters at this time: their slap-dash method, their hasty scrawled appearance upon the paper, the exclamations and abbreviations were all, in part at least, a means of exorcizing the devils of the literary and cultured. But there was too much vigour in his attitude in this respect, as in all others, to lend it the appearance of affectation. It was an amusing disguise; it was in part, like many of his attitudes, a game played for the fun of it, an experiment in living by one keenly inquisitive and incessantly fastidious; and in part it was the expression of a profound and true sympathy which had to live side by side with highly sophisticated tastes and to be reported upon by nature that was self-conscious to the highest degree. Analyse it as one may, the whole effect of Rupert Brooke in these days was a compound of vigour and of great sensitiveness. Like most sensitive people, he had his methods of self-protection; his pretence now to be this and now to be that. But, however sunburnt and slap-dash he might choose to appear at any particular moment, no one could know him even slightly without seeing that he was not only very sincere, but passionately in earnest about the things he cared for. In particular, he cared for literature and the art of writing as seriously as it is possible to care for them. He had read everything and he had read it from the point of view of a working writer … It
may seem strange, now that he is famous as a poet, how little it seemed to matter in those days whether he wrote poetry or not. It is proof perhaps of the exciting variety of his gifts and of the immediate impression he made of being so complete and remarkable in himself that it was sufficient to think of him merely as Rupert Brooke. It was not necessary to imagine him dedicated to any particular pursuit. If one traced a career for him many different paths seemed the proper channels for his store of vitality; but clearly he must find scope for his extraordinary gift of being on good terms with his fellow-creatures. For though it is true to say that ‘he never “put himself forward” and seldom took the lead in conversation’, his manner shed a friendliness wherever he happened to be that fell upon all kinds of different people, and seemed to foretell that he would find his outlet in leading varieties of men as he had led his own circle of Cambridge friends. His practical ability, which was often a support to his friends, was one of the gifts that seemed to mark him for success in active life. He was keenly aware of the state of public affairs, and if you chanced to meet him when there was talk of a strike or an industrial dispute he was evidently as well versed in the complications of social questions as in the obscurities of the poetry of Donne … One turns from the thought of him not with a sense of completeness and finality, but rather to wonder and to question still what would he have been, what would he have done?

There is no doubt in my own mind that, had Brooke lived, his main work would ultimately have been dramatic. His dominant characteristic was, if I observed him aright, that ‘gusto’ in people and life, which he shared with Keats and Synge [John Millington, the Irish playwright] and that ‘gusto’ is the essence of drama … Before the war, he, Miss Van Volkenburg, Miss Allenby [seemingly Browne’s guarded alias for Cathleen Nesbitt] and I were planning a close and practical association in theatrical work in Paris, where it was our intention to establish an English theatre in the autumn of 1915.