The Case of Rupert Brooke
I can’t share The Little Review’s estimate of Rupert Brooke. I’m reminded immediately of something I found not long ago by Herbert Trench:
“Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,
Seeing that our footing on the earth is brief,
Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.
For standard of our love not theirs we take
If we go hence today
Fill the high cup that is so soon to break
With richer wine than they.
Ay, since beyond these walls no heavens there be,
Joy to revive or wasted youth repair,
I’ll not bedim the lovely flame in thee
Nor sully the sad splendor that we wear.
Great be the love, if with the lover dies
Our greatness past recall;
And nobler for the fading of those eyes
The world seen once for all.”
Swinburne’s
“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free”
I like better so far as the music of it is concerned; and fully as well, perhaps, as far as ideas go. There is something rather conscious and posing in Mr. Trench’s effort. And you see why I think of him when I read Rupert Brooke. There is the same memento mori, the same hopelessness of outlook. It seems a pity to me, when a man can write as well as Brooke does in The Hill and in that exquisite sonnet beginning “Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire of watching you,” that he should waste his time on stupid, unpleasant cynicisms like Wagner and that Channel Passage, in which he doesn’t know which pain to choose—nausea or memory. I believe an Englishman can’t achieve just the right degree of mockery and brutality necessary for such an effort. Take Heine, if you will—(I’m a Heine enthusiast); he could do it with supreme artistry. Do you remember the sea poems—especially the one where he looks into the depths of the sea, catches sight of buried cities and sees his lost love (“ein armes, vergessenes Kind”)? It finishes with the captain pulling him in by the heels, crying, “Doktor, sind Sie des Teufels?” Heine can touch filth and offer it to you, and you are rather amused—as at a child. But Englishmen are too self-conscious for anything of that sort. You are shocked and ashamed when they try it, feeling in a way defiled yourself by reading. It irritates me, and I wish Mr. Brooke would stop it, right away. He’s too worth while to waste himself.