by Mike Read
Frances saw Brooke as the pivotal figure in their circle of friends, which in effect he had become, having learned the knack of how to be the centre of attention and the central attraction. Bizarrely, he made all those associated with Comus solemnly promise that they wouldn’t get engaged or married during or within six months of the production – nonsense, of course, and impossible to impose upon anyone. In fact, Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford were the first to break the so-called pact by getting engaged.
Comus, using the original music by Lawes, was repeated at a public matinee on the following day at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Ticket prices ranged from one to three shillings. The reviews for the first night were mixed, though Lytton Strachey, writing kindly of it in The Spectator, felt that it was ‘happily devoid of those jarring elements of theatricality and false taste which too often counterbalance the inherent merits of a dramatic revival’.
Scott and Wilkinson, photographers who were based at Camden Studio adjoining the New Theatre, Cambridge, wrote to Rupert asking him to ‘make an appointment with us to be photographed in your character in Milton’s Comus’. They added that the photographer would ‘consider it a personal favour’ if Brooke would be willing to pose for them. He posed. The production of Comus was a major feather in Brooke’s cap: the Milton tercentenary celebration was attended by such luminaries as the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Robert Bridges, who was to become Laureate after Austin’s death five years later, the author Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and Thomas Hardy. The production was followed by a dance at Newnham Grange with the whole cast in costume, including Rupert in a rather short, spangled, sky-blue tunic that was far too skimpy to sit down in.
The only shadow cast over the success of Comus was the death, during the dress rehearsals, of Brooke’s friend and mentor at King’s, Walter Headlam. who had encouraged him to undertake a production of the play. Headlam had been taken ill while watching a cricket match at Lord’s and later died in hospital of strangulation of the bowels. Rupert was devastated, pouring out his feelings to his mother: ‘[I]t made me feel quite miserable and ill for days … he was the one classic I really admired and liked … what I loved so in him was his extraordinary and loving appreciation of all English poetry.’
In the summer of 1908, Brooke and several of his Cambridge friends, including Hugh Dalton, Noel’s sister Margery, Ben Keeling, Dudley Ward and James Strachey, attended a Fabian summer school on the Welsh coast, in Merionethshire, some 3 miles south of Harlech. The first of the Society’s summer schools in Llanbedr had taken place the year before, following a suggestion by Fabian member Mabel Atkinson after she had been inspired by a German summer school. At the same time, a similar suggestion had arisen, and Frank Lawson Dodd had devised a scheme by which a large house could be procured for the education and recreation of Fabians during the holidays. The Society put their heads together and came up with a solution: Dodd discovered a house at Llanbedr called Pen-yr-Allt (top of the cliff), while Mabel Atkinson laid down a blueprint for an educational programme. A management committee of twelve was formed, all of whom pledged their own money in ten-year loans, at 5 per cent interest. They included George Bernard Shaw and his wife, H. G. Wells, and socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb. On the way to the camp Brooke and the others stayed with Beatrice at Leominster, after which the whole party went to Llanbedr via Ludlow Castle.
Before setting off, Rupert had sent Dalton a postcard claiming he was going to bring ‘a blanket, chocolate and nineteen books, all in a bag’. Dalton carried a torch for Rupert and was always eager to be in his presence, even though his feelings were not returned. Brooke’s rebuffs fired Dalton’s passions to greater heights and, although no relationship was forthcoming, Dalton was still inspired enough to quote Brooke’s poem ‘Second Best’ in his political speeches, both as Labour MP and as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1935. When he went down from Cambridge, he pointedly burned all his correspondence, keeping only communication from Rupert. News of Rupert’s death some seven years later would find Dalton inconsolable and in floods of tears. Thus Brooke moved people. Brooke also repelled James Strachey’s advances and suggestions with gentle humour during the period at Llanbedr.
Pen-yr-Allt became their temporary home for almost a fortnight. The origins of the house go back further than 1869, when a Mr Humphreys converted the old Welsh farmhouse into a fine family residence, complete with its Caernarvon arches, an architectural feature not usually found that far south. It was later inhabited by the Williams family with their seventeen children, before becoming a school. Four years before Brooke’s arrival, another future poet, Robert Graves, attended the establishment for a term, at the age of eight and three-quarters. It was there that Graves chanced upon the first two poems he remembered reading: the early English ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’. Here Graves was caned by the headmaster for learning the wrong collect one Sunday, and was terrified by the head’s daughter and her girlfriend, who tried to find out about the male anatomy by exploring down his shirt. It was not only girls who frightened him: ‘There was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was very overcome by horror at the sight.’ Brooke had the benefit of the same swimming facilities, which were more like a small plunge bath than today’s conception of a pool. The changing hut had a small coal fire, to enable the boys to dry off properly before walking the quarter of a mile back to the house.
During his ten days at Pen-yr-Allt, Rupert attended lectures on Tolstoy and Shaw, long walks, daily exercises and evening dances – a formidable mixture. Fees were set at 35 shillings a week, with half a crown extra for Swedish drill. Despite these, and his comment, ‘Oh, the Fabians, I would to God they’d laugh and be charitable’, Rupert was not deterred from returning the following year. In between studies, there were not only Fabian meetings, football, rugby and cricket matches, drama societies, and poems to write, but also Carbonari gatherings. These are a few entries from Brooke’s Cambridge pocket diary for 1908–9.
Sat 12 Sept 1908 Cornford
Tues 20 Oct 1908 G. L. K. [Geoffrey Langdon Keynes]
Thurs 22 Oct 1908 Carbonari
Sat 14 Nov 1908 Tea-party – Keynes
Sun 15 Nov 1908 Supper – Justin
Mon 7 Dec 1908 Fabians
Sun 2 May 1909 Darwins 7.45
Thurs 13 May 1909 Noon – tennis
Mon 7 June 1909 Picnic
It was at one of the Carbonari gatherings that Brooke was properly introduced to Eddie Marsh, then a civil servant at the colonial office, who had first seen Rupert in 1906 in The Eumenides. A former Apostle of the 1890s and the great-grandson of the assassinated British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, he was extremely well connected both politically and socially and was later to introduce Brooke into the rarefied atmosphere of these circles. At breakfast, the morning after meeting Marsh, Brooke, who had just won a prize in the Westminster Gazette for ‘The Jolly Company’, showed an impressed Marsh his poem, ‘Day That I Have Loved’.
Day That I Have Loved
Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,
And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.
The grey veils of the half-light deepened; colour dies.
I bear you, a light burden, to the shrouded sands,
Where lies your waiting boat, by wreaths of the sea’s making
Mist-garlanded, with all grey weeds of the water crowned.
There you’ll be laid, past fear of sleep or hope of waking;
And over the unmoving sea, without a sound,
Faint hands will row you outward, out beyond our sight,
Us with stretched arms and empty eyes on the far-gleaming
And marble sand…
Beyond the shifting cold twilight,
Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming,
There’ll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drear
Waste darkening, and, at length, flame ultimate on the deep.
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br /> Oh, the last fire – and you, unkissed, unfriended there!
Oh, the lone way’s red ending, and we not there to weep!
(We found you pale and quiet, and strangely crowned with flowers,
Lovely and secret as a child. You came with us,
Came happily, hand in hand with the young dancing hours,
High on the downs at dawn!). Void now and tenebrous,
The grey sands curve before me…
From the inland meadows,
Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark, and fills
The hollow sea’s dead face with little creeping shadows,
And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills.
Close in the nest is folded every weary wing,
Hushed all the joyful voices; and we, who held you dear,
Eastward we turn and homeward, alone, remembering…
Day that I loved, day that I loved, the Night is here!
At the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1908, a Trinity man who had been at Cambridge two years earlier returned for another year. He was Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, who had recently, at a friend’s behest, experimented with using his real surname. He found it an embarrassment, and indeed had dropped the experiment, and by the time he came up again, was using the family’s adopted name. ‘I got to know Rupert Brooke and A. C. Landsberg, and he used to hold poetry recitals in Firbank’s rooms.’
When Wilde’s close friend Robert Ross, who had done much to try to redeem Wilde’s reputation, came to Cambridge on business, Holland and his old Cambridge chum Ronald Firbank threw a supper for him, retaining the menu signed by those present, including Ross and Brooke. They drank Moët et Chandon, 1884.
During 1908, Methuen and Co. published The Westminster Problems Book, which included three of Brooke’s contributions to the problem page of the Westminster Gazette. Two of these were in verse.
A Nursery Rhyme
Up the road to Babylon,
Down the road to Rome,
The King has gone a-riding out
All the way from home.
There were all the folks singing,
And the church-bells ringing,
When the King rode out to Babylon,
Down the road to Rome.
Down the road from Babylon,
Up the road from Rome,
The King came slowly back
All the way back home.
There were all the folks weeping.
And the church-bells sleeping,
When the King rode back from Babylon,
When the King came home.
Fragment Completed
What of the voyage (the Dreamer saith)?
How shall the brave ship go?
Bounding waters to lift her keel,
Winds that follow with favouring breath –
Shall she come to her harbour so?
Up the shimmering tideway steal
To the flying flags, and the bells a-peal,
And the crowds that welcome her home from Death,
And the harbour lights aglow?
What at the end of her seafaring,
What will her tidings be?
Lands in the light of an unknown star?
Midnight waves, and the winds that bring
Scents of the day to be?
Lost little island in seas afar,
Where dreams and shadowy waters are,
And the winds are kindly, and maidens sing,
To the throb of an idle sea?
What of the voyage (the Dreamer saith)?
How hath the good ship come?
(They answered) The Sea is stronger than Dreams,
And what are your laughter and Hope and Faith
To the fury of wind and foam? –
Wreckage of sail, and shattered beams,
An empty hulk upon silent streams,
By the Tides of night to the Harbour of Death,
So hath your Ship come Home.
While he continued to develop as a poet, his passion for Noel Olivier grew. He became infatuated with her, although a strong will, sense of caution and independence instilled in her by school and family kept him firmly at arm’s length. Her unavailability fanned the flames of desire to such an extent that Rupert even wrote to Dudley Ward on 20 October, ‘Can’t she be kidnapped from Bedales?’
The spirit of the pioneering establishment at which she was studying was to affect Brooke via some of the pupils who passed through it. In 1900, the founder of the co-educational Bedales School, J. H. Badley, moved his expanding establishment from Haywards Heath in Sussex to a new home in Hampshire. A 150-acre site just to the north at Petersfield and close to the village of Steep was selected. It has fine views of the Downs towards Butser and Wardown to the south, while to the north, rising to 800 feet, the beech hangers from Stoner Hill to the Shoulder of Mutton mark it is a dramatic area of England. The main house on the estate, Steephurst, built in 1716, initially housed the seven girls at the school (compared to sixty-seven boys who had their dormitory in another building), while the architect and former pupil, Geoffrey Lupton, designed a new school building as an addition to the establishment. Badley’s creed, still praised by the Bedalians and staff alike in autonomous retrospection, was integrated into his initial prospectus: ‘to develop their powers in a healthy and organic manner rather than to achieve immediate examination results; and thus to lay a sound basis for subsequent specialisations in any given direction. With this view, body, mind and character as subjects for training are regarded as of equal importance!’ Badley, ‘the Chief ’, was, in short, building an alternative to the imperialist sausage machine of the public schools (he, like Brooke, was a Rugbeian), with the focus more on the individual.
Several of the circle that were to become Brooke’s friends were Bedalians -Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat and Noel Olivier – and their way of life and attitude towards it instilled the spirit of the school so strongly in him that he almost felt he had been partially educated there. Bedalian-style camps became a way of life for the group of friends for years. J. H. Badley had laid down the rules for the school camps:
The camp is always pitched near a bathing place, for Bedalians, like fish, cannot live long out of water. The camp itself consists of four tents – the cook tent, one sleeping tent for the girls and two for the boys. Bedding of straw, bracken or heather is provided, and each camper brings with him three blankets, one of which is sewn up into a sleeping bag. Pillows most of us scorn; the most hardened do without, the others roll up their clothes, and this makes a good substitute … Every other day, at least, is spent in a good tramp across the country – 10 or 15 miles at first to get into training, but this may be increased to 20 or even 25 later on.
Rupert and Noel formed part of a crowd who went skiing at Klosters, Switzerland, at the end of 1908; the eleven-day holiday cost him 11 guineas, which he was able to borrow from his mother. While there Brooke helped to compose a melodrama, From the Jaws of the Octopus, in which he played the hero, Eugene de Montmorency. They saw the new year in with a whirligig of skiing, tobogganing and youthful exuberance, before Rupert returned to King’s, a round of Carbonari meetings, political and social debates, and to take up his role of president of the Cambridge Fabians for the year 1909–10.
On 9 February, he entertained in his own rooms, with Hilaire Belloc as the main guest and speaker. Belloc was a good catch, as he had already written some twenty-eight books stretching back to 1896, and 1909 would see another five published, including his epic Marie Antoinette. His books were discussed by King Edward VII; and he was the subject of cartoons in Punch. Rupert knew many of Belloc’s poems by heart and certainly some of his songs. The outpourings of the beer-loving Anglophile from La Celle St Cloud in France had far-reaching influences on Brooke’s poems. These lines from Belloc’s ‘West Sussex Drinking Song’ –
They sell good beer at Hazelmere
And under Guildford Hill
At little Cowfold as I’ve b
een told
A beggar may drink his fill;
There is good brew at Amberley too,
And by the bridge also;
But the swipes they sell in the Washington Inn
Is the very best beer I know.
– with their naming of places in Sussex and Surrey villages, are not dissimilar in their roots to sections of a poem Brooke would write in 1912, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, in which he used place names local to Cambridge.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there…
As well as Belloc’s words, Brooke was clearly impressed by the exhilarating manner, uproarious humour and powerful gift of speech of this larger-than-life character, who appeared to exist on a diet of beer and cheese.
The Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes was not so much of an influence. Brooke declared his play The Frogs, written around 400 BC, to be a farce after seeing it in Oxford during February 1909, declaring to his mother that it was ‘quite extraordinarily bad’. Notwithstanding his opinion, The Frogs, The Birds and The Wasps, three of Aristophanes most famous plays, have certainly achieved a certain amount of durability!
With the spring approaching, Rupert was temporarily without holiday plans. There were thoughts of Wales, Devon, Cornwall, and even Belgium and Holland, when he realised that he could get from London to Rotterdam for just 13 shillings. ‘In April,’ he declared, ‘I shall be God let loose!’