Letters from America

Letters from America

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Title: Letters from America
Author: Rupert Brooke
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6445] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 14, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Frontispiece: Rupert Brooke 1913]

Letters from America
by Rupert Brooke.
With a Preface by Henry James

NOTE
The author started in May 1913 on a journey to the United States, Canada, and the South Seas, from which he returned next year at the beginning of June. The first thirteen chapters of this book were written as letters to the Westminster Gazette. He would probably not have republished them in their present form, as he intended to write a longer book on his travels; but they are now printed with only the correction of a few evident slips.
The two remaining chapters appeared in the New Statesman, soon after the outbreak of war.
Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed the republication of the articles.
E. M.

CONTENTS
Note
RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
I. Arrival
II. New York
III. New York--(_continued_)
IV. Boston and Harvard
V. Montreal and Ottawa
VI. Quebec and the Saguenay
VII. Ontario
VIII. Niagara Falls
IX. To Winnipeg
X. Outside
XI. The Prairies
XII. The Indians
XIII. The Rockies
XIV. Some Niggers
An Unusual Young Man

RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James
Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The chances and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something in the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the cold impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the need of understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty and disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which it was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakeably clear, or has at a happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law, that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.
It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and Chatterton,