I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward Marsh the communication of many of his letters, these already gathered into an admirable brief memoir which is yet to appear and which will give ample help in the illustrative way to the pages to which the present remarks form a preface, and which are collected from the columns of the London evening journal in which they originally saw the light. The "literary baggage" of his short course consists thus of his two slender volumes of verse and of these two scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence [Footnote: There remain also to be published a book on John Webster, and a prose play in one act.—E.M.]—though I should add that the hitherto unpublished letters enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, which will have rendered the highest service to each matter. That even these four scant volumes tell the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine young spirit they are concerned with we certainly hold back from allowing; his case being in an extraordinary degree that of a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest, and half of whose manifestation therefore was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication. He did in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, as one reads him, whether in verse or in prose, that distinguished readability seems all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either, an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief, if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the student of the human drama has ever caught sight of—granting always, that is, that some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to his part. Such was the sort of recognition, assuredly, under which Rupert played his—that of his lending himself to every current and contact, the "newer," the later fruit of time, the better; only this not because any particular one was an agitating revelation, but because with due sensibility, with a restless inward ferment, at the centre of them all, what could he possibly so much feel like as the heir of all the ages? I remember his originally giving me, though with no shade of imputable intention, the sense of his just being that, with the highest amiability—the note in him that, as I have hinted, one kept coming back to; so that during a long wait for another glimpse of him I thought of the practice and function so displayed as wholly engaging, took for granted his keeping them up with equal facility and pleasure. Nothing could have been more delightful accordingly, later on, in renewal of the personal acquaintance than to gather that this was exactly what had been taking place, and with an inveteracy as to which his letters are a full documentation. Whatever his own terms for the process might be had he been brought to book, and though the variety of his terms for anything and everything was the very play, and even the measure, of his talent, the most charmed and conclusive description of him was that no young man had ever so naturally taken on under the pressure of life the poetic nature, and shaken it so free of every encumbrance by simply wearing it as he wore his complexion or his outline.

That, then, was the way the imagination followed him with its luxury of confidence: he was doing everything that could be done in the time (since this was the modernest note), but performing each and every finest shade of these blest acts with a poetic punctuality that was only matched by a corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly my being sure of it all the while, even if with little current confirmation beyond that supplied by his first volume of verse; and the effect of the whole record is now to show that such a conclusion was quite extravagantly right. He was constantly doing all the things, and this with a reckless freedom, as it might be called, that really dissociated the responsibility of the precious character from anything like conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which no troubled young singer, none, that is, equally troubled, had perhaps ever felt he could afford to dissociate it. Rupert's resources for affording, in the whole connection, were his humour, his irony, his need, under every quiver of inspiration, toward whatever end, to be amused and amusing, and to find above all that this could never so much occur as by the application of his talent, of which he was perfectly conscious, to his own case. He carried his case with him, for purposes of derision as much as for any others, wherever he went, and how he went everywhere, thus blissfully burdened, is what meets us at every turn on his printed page. My only doubt about him springs in fact from the question of whether he knew that the earthly felicity enjoyed by him, his possession of the exquisite temperament linked so easily to the irrepressible experience, was a thing to make of the young Briton of the then hour so nearly the spoiled child of history that one wanted something in the way of an extra guarantee to feel soundly sure of him. I come back once more to his having apparently never dreamt of any stretch of the point of liberal allowance, of so-called adventure, on behalf of "development," never dreamt of any stretch but that of the imagination itself indeed—quite a different matter and even if it too were at moments to recoil; it was so true that the general measure of his world as to what it might be prompt and pleasant and in the day's work or the day's play to "go in for" was exactly the range that tinged all his education as liberal, the education the free design of which he had left so short a way behind him when he died.

Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence of his course with the moment at which the proceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost any "happy thought," and in the interest of almost any branch of culture or invocation of response that might be more easily improvised than not, could positively strike the observer as excessive, as in fact absurd, for the formation of taste or the enrichment of genius, unless the principle of these values had in a particular connection been subjected in advance to some challenge or some test. Why should it take such a flood of suggestion, such a luxury of acquaintance and contact, only to make superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of living inward a little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little further, rather modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable, young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in the way of question-begging movement, the way of vision and of non-vision, the enormous habit of holidays? If one could have made out once for all that holidays were proportionately and infallibly inspiring one would have ceased thoughtfully to worry; but the question was as it stood an old story, even though it might freshly radiate, on occasion, under the recognition that the seed-smothered patch of soil flowered, when it did flower, with a fragrance all its own. This concomitant, however, always dangled, that if it were put to us, "Do you really mean you would rather they should not perpetually have been again for a look-in at Berlin, or an awfully good time at Munich, or a rush round Sicily, or a dash through the States to Japan, with whatever like rattling renewals?" you would after all shrink from the responsibility of such a restriction before being clear as to what you would suggest in its place. Rupert went on reading-parties from King's to Lulworth for instance, which the association of the two places, the two so extraordinarily finished scenes, causes to figure as a sort of preliminary flourish; and everything that came his way after that affects me as the blest indulgence in flourish upon flourish. This was not in the least the air, or the desire, or the pretension of it, but the unfailing felicity just kept catching him up, just left him never wanting nor waiting for some pretext to roam, or indeed only the more responsively to stay, doing either, whichever it might be, as a form of highly intellectualised "fun." He didn't overflow with shillings, yet so far as roving was concerned the practice was always easy, and perhaps the adorably whimsical lyric, contained in his second volume of verse, on the pull of Grantchester at his heartstrings, as the old vicarage of that sweet adjunct to Cambridge could present itself to him in a Berlin cafe, may best exemplify the sort of thing that was represented, in one way and another, by his taking his most ultimately English ease.

Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, could do or fail to do for him, how can one not rejoice without reserve in the way he felt what he did feel as poetic reaction of the liveliest and finest, with the added interest of its often turning at one and the same time to the fullest sincerity and to a perversity of the most "evolved"?—since I can not dispense with that sign of truth. Never was a young singer either less obviously sentimental or less addicted to the mere twang of the guitar; at the same time that it was always his personal experience or his curious, his not a little defiantly excogitated, inner vision that he sought to catch; some of the odd fashion of his play with which latter seems on occasion to preponderate over the truly pleasing poet's appeal to beauty or cultivated habit of grace. Odd enough, no doubt, that Rupert should appear to have had well-nigh in horror the cultivation of grace for its own sake, as we say, and yet should really not have disfigured his poetic countenance by a single touch quotable as showing this. The medal of the mere pleasant had always a reverse for him, and it was generally in that substitute he was most interested. We catch in him reaction upon reaction, the succession of these conducing to his entirely unashamed poetic complexity, and of course one observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the youngest quantities of art and character taken together that ever arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to something more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self-consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration (in verse, only in verse, oddly enough) of the unpleasant to behold, to touch, or even to smell, was certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious," but there were so many things in his consciousness, which was never in the least unpeopled, that it would have been a rare chance had his projection of the self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious allusion stayed out. What it all really most comes to, you feel again, is that none of his impulses prospered in solitude, or, for that matter, were so much as permitted to mumble their least scrap there; he was predestined and condemned to sociability, which no league of neglect could have deprived him of even had it speculatively tried: whereby what was it but his own image that he most saw reflected in other faces? It would still have been there, it couldn't possibly have succeeded in not being, even had he closed his eyes to it with elaborate tightness. The only neglect must have been on his own side, where indeed it did take form in that of as signal an opportunity to become "spoiled," probably, as ever fell in a brilliant young man's way: so that to help out my comprehension of the unsightly and unsavoury, sufficiently wondered at, with which his muse repeatedly embraced the occasion to associate herself, I take the thing for a declaration of the idea that he might himself prevent the spoiling so far as possible. He could in fact prevent nothing, the wave of his fortune and his favour continuing so to carry him; which is doubtless one of the reasons why, through our general sense that nothing could possibly not be of the last degree of rightness in him, what would have been wrong in others, literally in any creature but him, like for example "A Channel Passage" of his first volume, simply puts on, while this particular muse stands anxiously by, a kind of dignity of experiment quite consistent with our congratulating her, at the same time, as soon as it is over. What was "A Channel Passage" thus but a flourish marked with the sign of all his flourishes, that of being a success and having fruition? Though it performed the extraordinary feat of directing the contents of the poet's stomach straight at the object of his displeasure, we feel that, by some excellent grace, the object is not at all reached—too many things, and most of all, too innocently enormous a cynicism, standing in the way and themselves receiving the tribute; having in a word, impatient young cynicism as they are, that experience as well as various things.