Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  The proofs of his first book of poems were lying about that summer on the grass. There were also the manuscripts of poems that were in process of composition. It seemed natural to turn his poetry over and say nothing about it, save perhaps to remark upon his habit of leaving spaces for unforthcoming words which gave his manuscript the look of a puzzle with a number of pieces missing. On one occasion he wished to know what was the brightest thing in nature? and then, deciding with a glance round him that the brightest thing was a leaf in the sun, a blank space towards the end of Town and Country’ was filled in immediately.

  Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare.

  But instead of framing any opinion as to the merit of his verses we recall merely the curiosity of watching him finding his adjective, and a vague conception that he was somehow a mixture of scholar and man of action, and that his poetry was the brilliant by-product of energies not yet turned upon their object. It may seem strange, now that he is famous as a poet, how little it seemed to matter in those days whether he wrote poetry or not. It is proof perhaps of the exciting variety of his gifts and of the immediate impression he made of a being so complete and remarkable in himself that it was sufficient to think of him merely as Rupert Brooke. It was not necessary to imagine him dedicated to any particular pursuit. If one traced a career for him many different paths seemed the proper channels for his store of vitality; but clearly he must find scope for his extraordinary gift of being on good terms with his fellow-creatures. For though it is true to say that ‘he never “put himself forward” and seldom took the lead in conversation’, his manner shed a friendliness wherever he happened to be that fell upon all kinds of different people, and seemed to foretell that he would find his outlet in leading varieties of men as he had led his own circle of Cambridge friends. His practical ability, which was often a support to his friends, was one of the gifts that seemed to mark him for success in active life. He was keenly aware of the state of public affairs, and if you chanced to meet him when there was talk of a strike or an industrial dispute he was evidently as well versed in the complications of social questions as in the obscurities of the poetry of Donne. There, too, he showed his power of being in sympathy with the present. Nothing of this is in the least destructive of his possession of poetic power. No breadth of sympathy or keenness of susceptibility could come amiss to the writer; but perhaps if one feared for him at all it was lest the pull of all his gifts in their different directions might somehow rend him asunder. He was, as he said of himself, ‘forty times as sensitive as anybody else’, and apt, as he wrote, to begin ‘poking at his own soul, examining it, cutting the soft and rotten parts away’. It needed no special intimacy to guess that beneath ‘an appearance almost of placidity’ he was the most restless, complex, and analytic of human beings. It was impossible to think of him withdrawn, abstracted, or indifferent. Whether or not it was for the good of his poetry he would be in the thick of things, and one fancies that he would in the end have framed a speech that came very close to the modern point of view - a subtle analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect, and full of his keen unsentimental curiosity.

  No one could have doubted that as soon as war broke out he would go without hesitation to enlist. His death and burial on the Greek island, which ‘must ever be shining with his glory that we buried there’, was in harmony with his physical splendour and with the generous warmth of his spirit. But to imagine him entombed, however nobly and fitly, apart from our interests and passions still seems impossibly incongruous with what we remember of his inquisitve eagerness about life, his response to every side of it, and his complex power, at once so appreciative and so sceptical, of testing and enjoying, of suffering and taking with the utmost sharpness the impression of everything that came his way. One turns from the thought of him not with a sense of completeness and finality, but rather to wonder and to question still: what would he have been, what would he have done?

  The Intellectual Imagination.

  ‘Is not life both a dream and an awakening?’ Mr de la Mare asks in his study of Rupert Brooke. The greatest poets, having both the visionary imagination and the intellectual imagination, deal with both sides of life; in the lesser poets either the one kind of imagination or the other predominates. Blake and Shelley are obvious instances of the visionary; Donne and Meredith of the intellectual. The distinction is finely and subtly elaborated by Mr de la Mare; and when he affirms that Rupert Brooke possessed the intellectual imagination in a rare degree we assent with a conviction which shows that the problem of Rupert Brooke’s poetry has, for us, come nearer solution.

  A poet of one’s own time and acquaintance is inevitably much of a problem. We hear so many strains in his voice that will be silent in a hundred years’ time. Nor do we know what allowance to make for our personal attachment, nor what for old arguments and theories once taken in such good part and such high spirit by an unknown and eager boy. There is in existence a copy of his first volume, in which a pencil has underlined each adjective judged wrong or unnecessary. The lines still stand, though the poet is dead and famous. He would not have had it otherwise. But, do what we will, it is idle to read ‘The Fish’, where a great number of those marks occur, without finding them the signposts of memories and dreams. Rupert Brooke was certainly fond of adjectives. But was not his passion for loading his lines, like the fingers of some South American beauty, with gem after gem, part of his boldness and brilliancy and strength? So he went to the South Seas, turned Socialist, made friend after friend, and passed from one extreme to another of dress and diet - better preparation, surely, for the choice of the right adjective than to sit dreaming over the fire with a book. But all this time one is not reading The Fish’; one is thinking of Rupert Brooke, one is dreaming of what he would have done. When we turn again to Mr de la Mare, he helps us to define what was, and still is, our case against the adjectives. Magic, he says, ‘is all but absent from his verse’. The words remain separate, however well assorted. Though he has described most of the English country sights, it has never happened to us, walking the woods, to hum over a line or two and, waking, to find them his. The test is personal and, of course, imperfect. Yet perhaps the same is generally true of those poets in whom the intellectual imagination predominates. The supreme felicities of Keats or Shelley seem to come when the engine of the brain is shut off and the mind glides serene but unconscious, or, more truly, perhaps, is exalted to a different sphere of consciousness. Like Meredith and like Donne, Rupert Brooke was never for a second unconscious. The brain was always there, working steadily, strenuously, and without stopping.

  There can be no question that his brain was both a fine instrument and a strong one; but there are other questions, for is it not true that the intellectual poet, unlike the visionary poet, improves and develops with age? Though Keats died younger, and Shelley only a year or two older, than Rupert Brooke, both left behind them unmistakable proof not merely that they were great poets, but that their greatness was of a particular character. If we cannot call Rupert Brooke a great poet, that is to some extent the result of feeling that, compared with the others, he has left us only sketches and premonitions of what was to come. He was of the type that reacts sharply to experience, and life would have taught him much, perhaps changed him greatly. Like Dryden, like Meredith, like Donne himself, as Mr Pearsall Smith has lately shown us, it might have been in prose and not in poetry that he achieved his best. It might have been in scholarship; it might have been in action. But if we seem to disparage what he left, there again we trace the effect of friendship. We do not want our friend rapt away into the circle of the good and the great. We want still to cherish the illusion that the poems will be bettered, the adjectives discussed, the arguments resumed, the convictions altered. The actual achievement must always have for those who knew him a ghostly rival in the greatness which he did not live to achieve. But he was of the few who seem to exist in themselves, apart from what they accomplish, apart from length of l
ife. Again and again Mr de la Mare turns from the poetry, greatly though he admires it, to bathe and warm himself in the memory of the man. One sort of magic may have been absent from his verse, but ‘above all Brooke’s poems are charged with and surrender the magic of what we call personality. What, if he had lived, he would have done in this world is a fascinating but an unanswerable question. This only can be said: that he would have gone on being his wonderful self.’ One might add that he still goes on being his self, since none of those who knew him can forget him; and it must be a wonderful self when no two people remember the same thing, but all are agreed that he was wonderful.

  These are the Plans.

  So far as we can read Charles Sorley’s character between the lines of his book, nothing would have annoyed him more than to find himself acclaimed either a poet or a hero. He was far too genuine a writer not to be disgusted by any praise implying that his work, at the stage it had reached, was more than a promise and an experiment. It is indeed largely because Charles Sorley was experimental, here trying his hand at narrative, here at description, always making an effort to shed the conventional style and press more closely to his conception, that one is convinced that he was destined, whether in prose or in verse, to be a writer of considerable power. The writer’s problem presented itself very early in his life. Here at Marlborough, where he was at school, the downs showed themselves not, as other poets have seen them, soft, flowery, seductive, but stony, rain-beaten, wind-blown beneath a clay-coloured sky. He tried to put down in verse his delight in that aspect of nature and his corresponding notion of a race of men

  Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown,

  But bold, 0, bolder far than we!

  He tried to say how much had been revealed to him when he wandered, as he was fond of doing, alone among the downs:

  I who have walked along her downs in dreams,

  And known her tenderness, and felt her might,

  And sometimes by her meadows and her streams

  Have drunk deep-storied secrets of delight,

  Have had my times, when, though the earth did wear Her selfsame trees and grasses, I could see The revelation that is always there,

  But somehow is not always clear to me.

  Succeeding these schoolboy attempts at landscape comes the natural mood of feeling that beauty is better not expressed, and that his spirit, compared with the spirits of the poets, is dumb. Running alongside of them, also, is his characteristic view - or the view that was characteristic of that stage of his life - of our modern sin of inactivity. The rain beats and the wind blows, but we are sluggish and quiescent —

  We do not see the vital point

  That ’tis the eighth, most deadly, sin To wail, ‘The world is out of joint’ —

  And not attempt to put it in.

  We question, answer, make defence,

  We sneer, we scoff, we criticize, We wail and moan our decadence, Enquire, investigate, surmise —

  We might of course cap these verses with a stanza to prove that Sorley found satisfaction in the outbreak of war, and died bidding men

  On, marching men, on

  To the gates of death with song.

  Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping.

  So you may be glad though sleeping,

  Strew your gladness on earth’s bed.

  So be merry, so be dead.

  And yet from the evidence of his poetry, and still more from the evidence of his remarkable prose, it is clear that Sorley was as far from trumping up a precocious solution, as ready to upset all his convictions and be off on a fresh track, as any other boy with a mind awakening daily more widely to the complexity of things, and naturally incapable of a dishonest or sentimental conclusion. ‘A Call to Action’, from which we have quoted, was written when Sorley, at the age of seventeen, was going through à phase of admiration for the work of Mr Masefield. And then came a time, in Germany, of ‘setting up and smashing of deities’, Masefield and Hardy and Goethe being the gods to suffer, while Ibsen and the Odyssey and Robert Browning inherited the vacant pedestals. Almost at once the war broke out.

  I’m sure the German nature is the nicest in the world, as far as it is not warped by the German Empire [he wrote]. I regard the war as one between sisters... the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic... 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 against the rebellious servant... Now you know what Sorley thinks about it.

  “What Sorley thinks about if appears to us of extreme interest, because, as our quotations have tried to show, Sorley thought for himself, and fate contrived that the young men of his generation should have opportunities for doing the thinking of a lifetime in a very few years. Such opportunities for changing his mind and moving on Sorley used to the full. There was, directly he joined the army, the problem of what he called ‘the poorer classes’. ‘The public school boy,’ he said, ‘should live among them to learn a little Christianity; for they are so extraordinarily nice to one another.’ After that reflection there comes, a page or two later, the remark: ‘I have had a conventional education: Oxford would have corked it.’ So his dream for next year is to be perhaps in Mexico, selling cloth.

  Or in Russia, doing Lord knows what: in Serbia or the Balkans: in England never. England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory, and the ideal... Details can wait - perhaps for ever. These are the plans.

  It is upon the plans rather than upon the details that one is inclined to dwell, asking oneself to what goal this generation, captained by men of such vigour and clear-sightedness as Sorley, was making its way.

  We know not whom we trust,

  Nor whitherward we fare,

  But we run because we must

  Through the great wide air,

  are lines from an early poem that seem to express a force yet undirected seeking a new channel. But the poems are more than scattered details to be used to illustrate an imaginary career. They have often enough literary merit to stand upon their own feet independently of any personal considerations. They have the still rarer merit of suggesting that the writer is so well aware of his own purpose that he is content to leave a roughness here, a jingle there, for the sake of getting on quickly to the next stage. What the finished work, the final aim, would have been we can only guess, for Charles Sorley at the age of twenty was killed near Hulluch.

  Mr Sassoon’s Poems.

  As it is the poet’s gift to give expression to the moments of insight or experience that come to him now and then, so in following him we have to sketch for ourselves a map of those submerged lands which lie between one pinnacle and the next. If he is a true poet, at least we fill up in thought the space between one poem and another with speculations that are half guesses and half anticipations of what is to come next. He offers us a new vision of the world; how is the light about to fall? What ranges, what horizons will it reveal? At least if he is a sincere artist this is so, and to us Mr Sassoon seems undoubtedly sincere. He is a poet, we believe, meaning by that that we cannot fancy him putting down these thoughts in any form save the one he has chosen. His vision comes to him directly; he seems almost always, before he began to get his words into order, to have had one of those puzzling shocks of emotion which the world deals by such incongruous methods, to the poet often, to the rest of us too seldom for our soul’s good. It follows that this one slim volume is full of incongruities; but the moments of vision are interesting enough to make us wish to follow them up very carefully.

  There are the poems about the war, to begin with. If you chance to read one of them by itself you may be inclined to think that it is a very clever poem, chiefly designed with its realism and its surface cynicism to shock the prosperous and sentimental. Naturally the critical senses rise in alarm to protect their owner from such insinuations. But read them continuously, read in particular The Hero’ and The Tomb-Stone Maker’, and you will drop the idea of being shocked in
that sense altogether.

  ‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,

  And folded up the letter that she’d read.

  ‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke

  In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.