rs". Brooke was certainly in danger
of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in
the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to
save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He
would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the
old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze
hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school,
which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame
production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest
interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon
the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly have had to
come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal
admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable
genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.

This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured
the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much
love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not
an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called
"Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite
the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James
might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme,
for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us
for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told
us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names
him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he
was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his
intimacy on the instant's introduction, which would indeed be
"condemned to sociability".

This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious
chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all,
and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the
wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with
reference to Brooke, it is not Henry James informing of the young and
handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty
singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the
borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so
heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He
needed