A POET'S PROSE.* Ten lives of Rupert Brooke and Charles

Hamilton Sorley afford an interesting, if obvious, contrast and comparison. There is so much to say about Rupert Brooke and comparatively so

little about his poetry. His life was so manifestly incomplete, so provocative, so full of promise rather than production, his verse so finished, and so often entirely achieving its limited object, that his life seems to have been designed to write

about, his verse to enjoy.

One is tempted, for the sake of symmetry, to say that the nract opposite is true of Charles Sorley. But that would not be

.lorrect, for though Sorley's verse is far more provocative of 3omment than Brooke's (just as it is far inferior in achieve- ment), his life is not at all uninteresting, as the present letter-

autobiography shows. Still, ther6 is more to say of Sorley's

verse than of his life, and readers of his .Marlborough, and other Poems must not expect a prose equivalent to the intense origin- ality and vigour of such poems as " The Song of the Ungirt

Runners."

The book is a collection of his letters, written from Marlboroughs from Germany, from the Army in training, and from the front. For the most part they are accounts of his daily life and criticism, the books he was reading and the plays he had seen. One can Imagine how delightful they must have been to receive. They aecessarily lose something of freshness and vividness when they are put together in a book, but they are full of amusing phrases and interesting comments. If the reader can forget that the author of all this delightful vitality was killed at the age of twenty, they can hardly fail to afford charming reading. His mother and father give two biographical chapters at the beginning of the book, to explain how he went from Marlborough to Ger- many—first to the house of a worthy Professor and his Frau (who "trembled to become thick"), then to the University at Jena— just escaped from Germany on August 3rd, got a commission, went to the front, and was killed at Hulluch on Ootober 12th, 1915. It is the contrast between such a death and the easy, careless happiness of the.letters which gives the book so dreadful

a poignancy.

The letters contain one piece of extremely colloquial verse which is not to be found elsewhere. It was written on his last tight at Marlborough " miserably struggling with innumerable packing-cases in the void of an empty, swept, and garnished

study " " So this is the end of it all !

Of the sloth and the slumber, Of the hates that we hated like gall And the loves few in number, And no one will now, pity, say Or can back again wish us Who have done nothing good in our day And (what's worse) nothing vicious.

And time made us outcast and dunce, Though for kingship intended. It might have been beautiful—once, But now it is ended."

Any one who can remember his own last night at a Public School will note the extraordinary aptness of the lines in expressing what every one must feel in those circumstances. He sums up exactly the position of a Public School—its theoretical disastrous- ness, its practical success :— "Theoretically it seems there is not a thing to be said for our Public School system. But yet it has given me and heaps of others five years that could hardly have been more enjoyable. I wonder why. Perhaps because human nature flourishes better in a poisonous atmosphere."

His literary criticism is of the sort that everybody writes in • The butlers of Charles dories. Cambridge : at the University Press. ries_ el, netj letters and does not expect to see reprinted in large formal books. Still, it is a great deal fuller of witty and penetrating remarks than is that of most of us. Of Goethe, at one time his " greatest author," he says : " If Goethe really died saying ' more light,' it was very silly of him ; what he wanted was more warmth." Pis own view of Rupert Brooke, derived from buying the first Georgian Poetry Book and reading " Grantchester " in it, seems curious to-day :- " There is also our Local Poet,' your friend without a shirt, whose sex caused us such trouble that day on the river--and I think he is undoubtedly a poet, though a slight and lyrical one. I think the lines :

' Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land ? '

are as true a description of the Fens as there is. But as you would expect—since the Fens seem to be the only thing he has any experience of—he is nearly perfect when he keeps to them but quite shadowy on anything else."

Two years later, writing on Brooke's death, he says :— " I think Brooke's earlier poems—especially notably The Fish' and `Grantchester'—are his best. That last sonnet- sequence of his, which has been so praised, I find (with the exception of that beginning ' These hearts were woven of human joys, which is not about himself) overpraised. He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable, and sacri- ficial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non- compliance with this demand would make life intolerable. . . . He has clothed his attitude in fine words ; but he has taken the sentimental attitude."

This may or may not be sound criticism of " 1914," but' as a picture of Rupert Brooke's work it entirely ignores its most important side, that of love poetry, an element entirely lacking in Sorley's own verse.

But perhaps the best passages in the book are the accounts of Germany just before the war—the attractive, earnest, if homely people, the charming, easygoing life at the University of Jena, and the intense aesthetic, and particularly dramatic, activity which he saw all round him. He felt the Germans to be like the Homeric Greeks :- " So I am really reading it [the Odyssey] in sympathetic: surroundings, and when I have just got past the part where Helen shows off to Menelaus her new work-basket that runs on wheels, and the Frau rushes in to show me her new water-can with a spout designed to resemble a pig—I see the two are made from the same stuff (I mean, of course, Helen and Frau B., not Frau B. and the pig). Also I enjoy being able to share in a quiet amateur way with Odysseus his feelings about ` were it but the smoke leaping up from his own land.' " He felt also that the Germans were like the Elizabethans, both in their capacity for producing Shakespeare and their tendency to form startling theories and inconveniently act upon them. It was this tendency, he thought, which produced the war. The Germans definitely thought that their activity, efficiency, and learning were necessary to the world and started out to inculcate them. He considered them wrong but well-meaning :- " We are not fighting a bully, but a bigot. They are a young nation and don't see that what they consider is being done for the good of the world may be really being done for self-grati- fioation. I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha and Mary, the efficient and the intolerant against the casual and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which it is fighting, and each that virtue's supplementary vice. I hope that it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency and tolerance will be no longer incompatible. But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two and efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to fight this rebellious servant."

We wonder whether Sorley would have changed this view if he had seen more of what Germany became in the fierce agony of the war. But this was how he wont to fight, with his eyes open, not seeing England and Germany- as white and black, but calmly appraising them both. And in this faith he died.