The Art of Living Inward: James’s Essay on Rupert Brooke

Hazel Hutchison, University of Aberdeen

A full-length version of this paper is forthcoming in the Henry James Review

The death of the poet Rupert Brooke in 1915 prompted a wave of tributes and elegies to a young man who came to symbolise the ideal of Englishness. Among these tributes was an essay by Henry James printed as the introduction to Brooke’s collected travel essays Letters from America. This was the last piece of work James completed before his health collapsed in November 1915 and was published a few days after his death in March 1916. This paper examines James’s friendship with Brooke and maps the story of the essay’s composition. It also asks what this essay reveals about James’s views on art, nationality and the First World War.

James presents Brooke as an artist of “incalculable” potential, largely on the strength of his war sonnets published shortly before his death. However, James was also aware of weaknesses and inconsistencies in Brooke’s character, especially his need for society and admiration. James observes that Brooke appeared to exist mostly in the eyes of those he met, but this creates a tension with the “art of living inward” that is, for James, the hallmark of the artist. James clearly felt that the war had allowed Brooke to reconcile his two personas, but Brooke’s letters and essays show that in reality he left many issues of identity and national allegiance far from resolved at his death. James, like many others in 1915, uses Brooke’s death as an opportunity to explore and express his own feelings about the war and about nationality. His symbolic shift from US to British citizenship, and his feeling that the war was a battle to protect civilization itself, contribute to his idealization of Brooke as the “ideal image of English youth”. Despite the destruction of the war, James asserts the ability of the artist to “outimagine” and thereby “outlive” suffering.