RUPERT BROOKE’S CAMBRIDGE.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 139, 2 September 1927, Page 12

RUPERT BROOKE’S CAMBRIDGE.

{Written fcr The Sun.] I SUPPOSE that the time has now arrived when the name of Rupert Brooke, for the rising generation, is invested with something of the mythical aura that surrounds that of Byron. Both poets left their hearts under classic Grecian soil, and both died for a cause in which they believed, and therein found release. But there the analogy ends. Byron was a world-weary sensualist, Rupert Brooke a young man who had just outgrown a period of green-sickness such as was inevitable to a nature like his. He embodies for our age the spirit of hope and of youth. I have recently had cause to reread Mr Marsh's memoir of Rupert Brooke, and the array of familiar names has prompted in me the hop© that I may be able, in a very small way, to reconstruct for a younger generation the Cambridge of Rupert Broke. I was a stair-mate of Hugh RussellSmith, who contributes largely to that portion of the memoir which is concerned with the poet’s school and university days. He was one of Brooke’s friends with the least promise of future celebrity. If it had not been for the war he would to-day perhaps have been a. married don with the oversight of his college rowing club as his particular hobby. Yet because he was Brooke’s friend a vignette of this old Rugby boy may not come amiss. He was a large, blond, loose-limbed man who always gave me the impression of having outgrown his strength. From a somewhat ungainly beginning he developed into a first-class oarsman.

In his letter to Brooke’s mother he refers to her son’s fondness for Hilaire Belloc’s lines: From quiet homes and small beginning, Out to the undiscovered end, There’s nothing worth the wear of winning But laughter and the love of friends. It is in the hope that by recalling what I can of some of Brooke’s Cambridge friends I may in a measure reproduce the atmosphere of his Cambridge days, that I pass these familiar names in view. I never met the poet in person, but one could not be at Cambridge during his day without being aware of his mana. It was a time when pessimism was more than usually rife. I suppose that civilisation as a whole was sickening for the war. Yet it was a time that must seem to many, in the retrospect, a veritable Golden Age. I imagine that Hugh Rus-sell-Smith was one of those boy friends whom Brooke, in a sense, outgrew. Yet there must have existed a loyalty of feeling to those earlier days, or the friend would not have written of the poet as he did at the end. More significant in the array of names in the memoir is that of F. H. Keeling, known to his contemporaries as “Ben” Keeling. There is no doubt whatever that in his case a Somme bullet stopped a c areer that would have been famous. He was one of the outstanding figures of his day, a Socialist from Eton, and a walking refutation of the theory that a runaway chin indicates weakness of character. I have heard it said that he was allowed to retain a beard in despite of King’s Regulations, because otherwise he could not command the respect of his platoon. To one who, like myself, continued in a kind of wavering allegiance to all things that were orthodox, Ben Keeling seemed to stalk Cambridge like some kind of portent. I have two vividly persistent recollections of this chinless iconoclast. I can remember his bursting in upon a lecture that Granville Barker was delivering On Socialism and the Drama. Keeling’s red tie seemed like an affront to that pearl grey afternoon’s dignity and peace. So, for that matter, was Mr Barker’s speech. Those were the days when “disciple of Bernard Shaw” connoted crankiness! Even the “chucker out” at the Court Theatre, where Shaw then reigned, had a Fabian face. How quaint and dated this will all seem to the young man of to-day! Another picture I retain of Keeling is at a meeting of “The Stump and Magpie.” one of the thousand reading clubs that must have existed in the University. We had just finished reading Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” and had lapsed into a general discussion. I remember that Keeling sprawled on the hearth rug and shot mandarin pips into the fire while he gave vent to opinions that made me feel that every established thing was rocking upon its foundations. If one was blessed or cursed with the collector’s flair one instinctively made note of Keeling’s mannerisms and obiter dicta. He was so palpably a famous man in the making. There was always one Tuesday evening when the hall of the Union Debating Society was crammed to the doors: that was when Ben Keeling was “up” in defence of Socialism. His politics robbed him of the chance of attaining the presidency of the Union Debating Society, the “cordon bleu” of undergraduates ambitious to become speakers. I do not think that Rupert Brooke spoke at the Union. He seems to have preferred the more intimate atmosphere of the Fabian Society. He made most of his public appearances as a member of the A.D.C., which is the aristocrat of Cambridge dramatic societies. In this respect there is no need for me to amplify Mr Marsh’s memoir. I make the following quotation from a letter from Brooke to Keeling, because it would appear to justify what I wrote at the outset of this column. There was in Rupert Brooke a strain of something that no subsequent disillusionment wholly eradicated. You may call it the Greek spirit or what you will. You may drag in Matthew Arnold’s tag of “sweetness and light.” At any rate it was .something that differentiates him from Byron. Keeling, it appears, is depressed, and Brooke is indulging in a little introspection, which is what most of us do when writing to a friend who has announced himself to be in -he unholy state of depression: Why do you say you are becoming ia pessimist? What does it mean? •He may,** I say to myself, “think that the Universe is Lad as a whole, «»r that it’s bad just now, or that, more locally and importantly, things aren’t going to get any better in our time or our country, no matter how fiumh »fc Breach Sodalisjn and clean

hearts at them.” ... I feel a placid and healthy physician about it all, only I don’t know what drug to recommend. This is because 1 liavo sucli an overturning, it intermittent, flood of anti-pessimism in me. . . . Pessimism may be cured by other things than reason: by energy or weather or good people, as well as by a wider ethical grasp. At least so 1 find in the rather slight and temporary tits of depression I have iiad in exile or otherwise lately, or even in the enormous period of youthful tragedy with which I started at Cambridge. . . . The remedy is mysticism or life. I’m not sure which. Do not leap or turn pale at the word “mysticism.” I don’t mean any religious thing, or any formal belief. ... It consists in just locking at people and things as themselves, neither as useful or moral or ugly or anything else, hut just as being. At least that’s a philosophical description ol it. What happens is that I suddenly feel the enormous value of everybody I meet and almost everything I see. In things I am specially moved in this way, especially in sonic things, anil in people by almost all people. And then comes an adumbration of what is perhaps Rupert Brooke’s best known poem, “The Great Lover.” 1 have no space for further quotation from this letter, but if the reader would get the genesis of “The Great Lover” he should read it, on page 51 of the Memoir. It was written at a period later than the Cambridge days proper. To recreate the atmosphere of that period is a simple matter. One has simply to read the poem on Grantchester. Of other friends mentioned in the Memoir, Hugh Dalton and D. W. Ward provoke a train of reminiscence. Dalton is now, I believe, a Socialist member of Parliament. D. W. Ward won the Whewell Scholarship, a feat once performed by a New Zealander, Gray Russell. The former was a far more propitiary Socialist, in manner at all events, than was Ben Keeling, with a precocious air of donnishness about him, and a very pleasing delivery. He was another of the lights of the Union. Athleticism never seemed to attract Rupert Brooke, though he played foot ball for his college. He was so engaged upon other matters that he had no time to be solemn about caps and blazers, as so many of us were. At the Cambridge of Brooke’s day athletics were absorbing much of that terrific stream of energy that the war subsequently arrogated to itself. If one must serve a fetish, one can perhaps least harmfully become thrall to athletics; but Rupert Brooke was the best kind of rebel against any species of thraldom. He passed through Cambridge “proudly friended,” as he seems to have passed through life, and to such of us as could give only a timid acquiescence to things as we found them, he is, perhaps, more of a myth than he is to the eager rebel of today. It is probable that the Cambridge of to-day differs from the Cambridge of Rupert Brooke’s day only in the mechanics of life and in the cut of its coat. Within there is waged the eternal strife between the two spirits, th:«k which denies and that which acclaims. To the latter Rupert Brooke emphatically belonged, despite those sporadic gloomy passages in his poems. There will no doubt be found undergraduates of the present day who will be ready to pay the tribute he asked of Posterity in the concluding lines of “The Great Lover”: But the best I have known Stays here and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown About the winds of the world, and fades from brains Of living men, and dies. Nothing remains. Oh dear my loves, o faithless once again This one last gift I give, that after men Shall know, and later lovers, far removed, Praise you. “All these were lovely”; say, “He loved ” C. R. ALLEN. Wellington.