II
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o come, then, to art, which is above personality, what of that? Art is,at most, but the mortal relic of genius; yet it is true of it that,like Ozymandias' statue, "nothing beside remains". Rupert Brooke wasalready perfected in verbal and stylistic execution. He might have grownin variety, richness and significance, in scope and in detail, no doubt;but as an artisan in metrical words and pauses, he was past apprenticeship.He was still a restless experimenter, but in much he was a master.In the brief stroke of description, which he inherited fromhis early attachment to the concrete; in the rush of words,especially verbs; in the concatenation of objects, the flow of things'en masse' through his verse, still with the impulse of "the bright speed"he had at the source; in his theatrical impersonation of abstractions,as in "The Funeral of Youth", where for once the abstract and the concreteare happily fused; -- in all these there are the elements, and in the lastthere is the perfection, of mastery. For one thing, he knew how to end.It is with him a dramatic secret. The brief stroke does this worktime and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in"at dead YOUTH's funeral:" all were there, -- "All, except only LOVE -- LOVE had died long ago." The poem is like a vision of an old time MASQUE: -- "The sweet lad RHYME" ----"ARDOUR, the sunlight on his greying hair" ----"BEAUTY . . . pale in her black; dry-eyed, she stood alone." How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging;but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk.And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had lefthis short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come intothe long sweep and open water of great style: -- "And light on waving grass, he knows not when,And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell."
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