Letters from America | Page 4

individual case.
Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or in other words made one want to read back into him each of his promoting causes without exception, to trace to some source in the ambient air almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so precious a loose and careless bundle of happy references did that inveterate trick of giving the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with his general kind fail to prevent your feeling sure of his having about him. I think the liveliest interest of these was that while not one of them was signally romantic, by the common measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung together, reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to join their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process, the great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. I do not mean of course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, in the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort, most in abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a single shade. I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was the better established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the three sons of a house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he lost his father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having then already died and the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front, shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance I speak of gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and which one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact was that if one liked him--and I may as well say at once that few young men, in our time, can have gone through life under a greater burden, more easily carried and kept in its place, of being liked--one liked absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception; so that he appeared to convert before one's eyes all that happened to him, or that had or that ever might, not only to his advantage as a source of life and experience, but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of illustrational virtue or glory. This appearance of universal assimilation--often indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were of the very essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its gaiety--made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired, cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to that), incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own rightness. It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether, that he should have come into the world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby home, as that he should have been able later on to wander as irrepressibly as the spirit moved him, or as that he should have found himself fitting as intimately as he was very soon to do into any number of the incalculabilities, the intellectual at least, of the poetic temperament. He had them all, he gave himself in his short career up to them all--and I confess that, partly for reasons to be further developed, I am unable even to guess what they might eventually have made of him; which is of course what brings us round again to that view of him as the young poet with absolutely nothing but his generic spontaneity to trouble about, the young poet profiting for happiness by a general condition unprecedented for young poets, that I began by indulging in. He went from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried off a Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in "May week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was to find, very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with his felicities all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering what it was left to such a place to do with the added, the verily wasted, grace of such a person, or how even such a person could hold his own,