Part 19

Chateau Lake Louise, Canada, 1913.

The Little Dog's Day

All in the town were still asleep, When the sun came up with a shout and a leap. In the lonely streets unseen by man, A little dog danced. And the day began.

All his life he'd been good, as far as he could, And the poor little beast had done all that he should. But this morning he swore, by Odin and Thor And the Canine Valhalla--he'd stand it no more!

So his prayer he got granted--to do just what he wanted, Prevented by none, for the space of one day. "Jam incipiebo , sedere facebo ," In dog-Latin he quoth, "Euge! sophos! hurray!"

He fought with the he-dogs, and winked at the she-dogs, A thing that had never been heard of before. "For the stigma of gluttony, I care not a button!" he Cried, and ate all he could swallow--and more.

He took sinewy lumps from the shins of old frumps, And mangled the errand-boys--when he could get 'em. He shammed furious rabies, and bit all the babies , And followed the cats up the trees, and then ate' em!

They thought 'twas the devil was holding a revel, And sent for the parson to drive him away; For the town never knew such a hullabaloo As that little dog raised--till the end of that day.

When the blood-red sun had gone burning down, And the lights were lit in the little town, Outside, in the gloom of the twilight grey, The little dog died when he'd had his day.

July 1907.

London, October, 1915.

Rupert Brooke: A Biographical Note

Any biographical account of Rupert Brooke must of necessity be brief; yet it is well to know the facts of his romantic career, and to see him as far as may be through the eyes of those who knew him (the writer was unfortunately not of this number) in order the better to appreciate his work.

He was born at Rugby on August 3, 1887, his father, William Brooke, being an assistant master at the school. Here Brooke was educated, and in 1905 won a prize for a poem called "The Bastille", which has been described as "fine, fluent stuff." He took a keen interest in every form of athletic sport, and played both cricket and football for the school. Though he afterwards dropped both these games, he developed as a sound tennis player, was a great walker, and found joy in swimming, like Byron and Swinburne, especially by night. He delighted in the Russian ballet and went again and again to a good Revue.

In 1906 he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where he made innumerable friends, and was considered one of the leading intellectuals of his day, among his peers being James Elroy Flecker, himself a poet of no small achievement, who died at Davos only a few months ago. Mr. Ivan Lake, the editor of the 'Bodleian', a contemporary at Cambridge, tells me that although the two men moved in different sets, they frequented the same literary circles. Brooke, however, seldom, if ever, spoke at the Union, but was a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society, and held the posts of Secretary and President in turn. His socialism was accompanied by a passing phase of vegetarianism, and with the ferment of youth working headily within him he could hardly escape the charge of being a crank, but "a crank, if a little thing, makes revolutions," and Brooke's youthful extravagances were utterly untinged with decadence. He took his classical tripos in 1909, and after spending some time as a student in Munich, returned to live near Cambridge at the Old Vicarage in "the lovely hamlet, Grantchester." "It was there," writes Mr. Raglan H. E. H. Somerset in a letter I am privileged to quote, "that I used to wake him on Sunday mornings to bathe in the dam above Byron's Pool. His bedroom was always littered with books, English, French, and German, in wild disorder. About his bathing one thing stands out; time after time he would try to dive; he always failed and came absolutely flat, but seemed to like it, although it must have hurt excessively." (This was only when he was learning. Later he became an accomplished diver.) "Then we used to go back and feed, sometimes in the Orchard and sometimes in the Old Vicarage Garden, on eggs and that particular brand of honey referred to in the 'Grantchester' poem. In those days he always dressed in the same way: cricket shirt and trousers and no stockings; in fact, 'Rupert's mobile toes' were a subject for the admiration of his friends."

Brooke occupied himself mainly with writing. Poems, remarkable for a happy spontaneity such as characterized the work of T. E. Brown, the Manx poet, appeared in the 'Gownsman', the 'Cambridge Review', the 'Nation', the 'English Review', and the 'Westminster Gazette'. Students of the "Problem Page" in the 'Saturday Westminster' knew him as a brilliant competitor who infused the purely academic with the very spirit of youth.

To all who knew him, the man himself was at least as important as his work. "As to his talk" -- I quote again from Mr. Somerset -- "he was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was extremely tolerant of fools, even bad poets who are the worst kind of fools -- or rather the hardest to bear -- but that was kindness of heart."

Of his personal appearance a good deal has been said. "One who knew him," writing in one of the daily papers, said that "to look at, he was part of the youth of the world. He was one of the handsomest Englishmen of his time. His moods seemed to be merely a disguise for the radiance of an early summer's day."

Mr. Edward Thomas speaks of him as "a golden young Apollo" who made friends, admirers, adorers, wherever he went. "He stretched himself out, drew his fingers through his waved fair hair, laughed, talked indolently, and admired as much as he was admired. . . . He was tall, broad, and easy in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward unusually much to look at you with his steady blue eyes."

On Mr. H. W. Nevinson, who, in a fleeting editorial capacity, sent for Brooke to come and discuss his poems, he made a similar impression:

"Suddenly he came -- an astonishing apparition in any newspaper office: loose hair of deep, browny-gold; smooth, ruddy face; eyes not gray or bluish-white, but of living blue, really like the sky, and as frankly open; figure not very tall, but firm and strongly made, giving the sense of weight rather than of speed and yet so finely fashioned and healthy that it was impossible not to think of the line about 'a pard-like spirit'. He was dressed just in the ordinary way, except that he wore a low blue collar, and blue shirt and tie, all uncommon in those days. Evidently he did not want to be conspicuous, but the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful."

Notions of height are always comparative, and it will be noticed that Mr. Nevinson and Mr. Thomas differ in their ideas. Mr. Edward Marsh, however, Brooke's executor and one of his closest friends -- indeed the friend of all young poets -- tells me that he was about six feet, so that all doubt on this minor point may be set at rest.

He had been in Munich, Berlin, and in Italy, and in May, 1913, he left England again for a wander year, passing through the United States and Canada on his way to the South Seas. Perhaps some of those who met him in Boston and elsewhere will some day contribute their quota to the bright record of his life. His own letters to the 'Westminster Gazette', though naturally of unequal merit, were full of humorous delight in the New World. In one of his travel papers he described the city of Quebec as having "the radiance and repose of an immortal." "That, in so many words," wrote Mr. Walter de la Mare, "brings back his living remembrance. . . . With him there was a happy shining impression that he might have just come -- that very moment -- from another planet, one well within the solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours." Not even Stevenson, it would seem, excited a greater enthusiasm among his friends; and between the two men an interesting parallel might be drawn. Brooke made a pilgrimage to Stevenson's home in Samoa, and his life in the Pacific found full and happy expression in his verse. His thoughts, however, turned longingly to England, the land "where Men with Splendid Hearts may go," and he reappeared from the ends of the earth among his friends as apparently little changed "as one who gaily and laughingly goes to bed and gaily and laughingly comes down next morning after a perfectly refreshing sleep."

Then came the War. "Well, if Armageddon's ON," he said, "I suppose one should be there." It was a characteristic way of putting it. He obtained a commission in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in September, and was quickly ordered on the disastrous if heroic expedition to Antwerp. Here he had his first experience of war, lying for some days in trenches shelled by the distant German guns. Then followed a strange retreat by night along roads lit by the glare of burning towns, and swarming with pitiful crowds of Belgian refugees. Yet as Mr. Walter de la Mare said of him, when he returned from Antwerp, "Ulysses himself at the end of his voyagings was not more quietly accustomed to the shocks of novelty."

On Brooke, as on many other young men, to whom the gift of self-expression has perhaps been denied, the war had a swiftly maturing influence. Much of the impetuosity of youth fell away from him. The boy who had been rather proud of his independent views -- a friend relates how at the age of twelve he sat on the platform at a pro-Boer meeting -- grew suddenly, it seemed, into a man filled with the love of life indeed, but inspired most of all with the love of England. Fortunately for himself and for us, Brooke's patriotism found passionate voice in the sonnets which are rightly given pride of place in the 1914 section of this volume. Mr. Clement Shorter, who gives us the skeleton of a bibliography that is all too brief, draws special attention to 'New Numbers', a quarterly publication issued in Gloucestershire, to which Brooke contributed in February, April, August, and December of last year, his fellow poets being Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. He spent the winter in training at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire, and sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on the last day of February. He had a presentiment of his death, but he went, as so many others have gone,

"Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing, Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows, Sweeps out to darkness, triumphing in his goal, Out of the fire, out of the little room. . . . -- There is an end appointed, O my soul!"

He never reached the Dardanelles. He went first to Lemnos and then to Egypt. Early in April he had a touch of sunstroke from which he recovered; but he died from blood-poisoning on board a French hospital ship at Scyros on Friday, April 23rd -- died for England on the day of St. Michael and Saint George. He was buried at night, by torchlight, in an olive grove about a mile inland. "If you go there," writes Mr. Stephen Graham, "you will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his birth and his death marked on it in black." A few days later the news of his death was published in the 'Times' with the following appreciation:

"W. S. C." writes: "Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other -- more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.