not touch his life to greatness. Had these been the whole story, there would have been nothing to mark his life from many millions that have gone through the world, eager, beautiful, forgotten. His achievement as a poet, definite, memorable, exhilarating, yet reaches its fullness in a volume of work circumscribed enough if we set it beside that by which any other poet establishes his claim to greatness. Finally his death, noble as it was, was yet but one of lamentable multitudes, marking heroism if you will, but not greatness. For it is not lightly that we call men great; it is only once in a while that we single one from the many who do splendidly and fully all that they might do, and say that he among them all is great. But with this man fortune was to be lavish against all example. Although neither his brilliance in life nor his courage in death could place him among the few at whose names the blood of generations thrills, and although his work, sure as it is of durable fame, does not place him with those poets, perhaps a score in the language, who, by the scope and volume of their poetry alone, assert their greatness, yet Rupert Brooke will be a name as surely marked of greatness as any in England. Only once before in our history, I think, has a man passed to so large and just a renown with so unconsidered and slender a warrant. Until April 23d in this year,1 when this

1 1915.

greatly loved boy died at the Dardanelles, Philip Sidney had not found his fellow.

To those of us who see in poetry the perfect flowering of life, the story of Rupert Brooke will always mean chiefly the score or so of poems in which he reached to the full maturity of his genius and gave imperishable expression to the very heart of his personality. Nor will any profound response to his poetry be enhanced by the accident that brought sublimity to his death, either in those who knew and loved him or in these few who from age to age shall build his best renown. Rupert Brooke, as all poets, would wish to stand or fall chiefly by his poetry, and in the ultimate judgment of poetry no external circumstance whatever has the weight of a single word. Not even the fact that the man who wrote the sonnets, than which after long generations nothing shall make the year 1914 more memorable, served and died for England at war, can add one beat to their pulse. The poetry that shines and falls across them in one perfect and complete wave is, as poetry must always be, independent of all factual experience, and comes wholly from the deeper experience of the imagination. To say that only under the actual conditions could these sonnets have been written is not to the point. Experience of the conditions is common enough; the rare thing is the genius of the poet, and we know that this will fulfil itself be the condi

tions what they may. It is well to be clear in this matter. We must not suppose, as has sometimes been loosely suggested, that Brooke, in answering a national call, was stirred to a new and profounder poetic expression. At the time when his poetic power was moving in its fullness, it happened to find itself concerned with a great national crisis. The intensity with which this crisis seized his imagination produced poetry which must endure; also it determined him to take up arms. But the two results were not dependent on each other, and to pretend that they were is a sophism of the kind that he would scornfully have repudiated. Had he for any reason been disqualified for service, the poetry would have come in no less certain measure. It is intensity of perception that creates poetry.

Rupert Brooke's best poems are secure of the admiration of all who have the wit to praise justly in these things, and it is this renown that he would most have desired. But we must remember that the people who care deeply and with understanding for rare and lovely art are very few; a few thousands, perhaps, out of the many millions of an age. It is only the ineffectual visionary who supposes that the masses of the people will respond directly to the appeal of excellence in poetry or painting, or even in the more popular arts, as music and the drama. The evidence in the matter is plain enough; I do not even know that the fact is lamentable: it is

a fact. But there are already, as I believe there always will be, great numbers of people to whom the name of Rupert Brooke means something, while his poetry, strictly speaking, means nothing. There are times when such a thing is unhappy. The interest with which people who are incurably lazy in their higher perceptions will regard a poet who is a navvy, or has no arms, or is mentioned by a bishop, is merely vulgar. But sometimes a poet becomes celebrated among this wider public in a way that makes for good. The homage that has instinctively been paid for three hundred years to Philip Sidney by people who know not a line of his poetry, and scarcely an event of his life, is wholesome and springs from the better parts of human nature. And so it is with Rupert Brooke. His truest fame will be with those who love his poetry, but the many spirits that will quicken at his name, knowing but vaguely of a brief and fortunate life, a brilliant personality, a poetic genius which they will not be curious to explore, a supreme sacrifice, will quicken worthily and to their own good. Always there will be the false gods of popular favour, the charlatans, the panders, the crafty and unscrupulous flatterers of mob-sentimentality, who betray their consciences daily for a little unsavoury power. The people exalt without understanding them, blindly praising, as it were, their own baser instincts. But, blindly too perhaps, the people will also desire and

from time to time discover some external symbol of the nobility that is in them also, patiently keeping the balance of the world. Such a symbol, clear, almost spare, yet magnificently complete, is the radiant, perfectly poised story of Rupert Brooke.

II

THE development of Rupert Brooke's poetic power was, it seems to me, unlike that of most poets. The early verse of men who afterwards prove their authenticity generally shows a great emotional force with little intellectual power of arrangement, and a weakly imitative craftsmanship. The emotion will commonly be concerned, partly by personality and partly by acceptance from tradition, with what we may roughly call the more generous normal instincts of mankind, as a delight in the natural world, the lover's worship, hatred of tyranny, the mere high spirits of young and happy limbs, sorrow for the passing of beauty. Of such things is the material of most fine poetry, as it is of nearly all futile versifying, and so it is that early work frequently tells us nothing of its writer's future. We know that the material is there, but there is nothing to show whether or no there will ever be the art to shape it. But in Rupert Brooke's beginnings there is none of this. The volume of 'Poems' published in 1911, which contains work