But for all his insistence that the object is ‘particularly itself’, what leaps
out is the state of the artist’s mind (‘Isaw’) in treating the object as itself,
and the enjoyable sensations of such a thing (‘deliciously’). Brooke, like
several of his Bloomsbury colleagues, derived much of the official portion
of his aesthetics from reading G. E. Moore’sPrincipia Ethica, where ‘the
beautiful should be defined as that of which the admiring contemplation
is good in itself’; in Brooke’s work, the thing itself is witness to the
admiring contemplation which has seen it so.^114 In ‘Dining-Room Tea’,
for example:
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
On plate and flowers and pouring tea
And cup and cloth; and they and we
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter. Lip and eye
Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,
Improvident, unmemoried...Improvident perhaps, unmemoried never. Brooke’s vision of tea is a
Pateresque moment of connoisseurship, savouring the ‘dancing moments’
precisely because they are dancing and momentary, not for what
happened in them. Lips and eyes are detached from their owners because
what they say or see is not as important as their surface of saying and
seeing. Seeing things ‘in themselves’ means self-consciously spectating
them; like the blank wall in the sunlight, this intense, immediate experi-
ence is exactly the opposite because it is simultaneously being admired as
an intense, immediate experience. Brooke ‘was a rhetorician’, wrote
Thomas to Frost, for ‘he couldn’t mix his thought or the result of it with
his feeling. He could only think about his feeling’.^115
4
Thomas’s complaints about the self-conscious innocence of Georgian
poetry were picked up a year or two later by Eliot’s ‘Reflections on
Contemporary Poetry’ inThe Egoist, a series which marks one of the first
determined barrages of the poetry wars. But Eliot also had some of the
Imagists in his sights for their espousal of an aesthetic based on spontan-
eous non-reflection, and so his strategy was premised on bracketing
Georgian and Imagist poets together as sufferers from the same problem.
By trying so conspicuously to avoid the ‘rhetorical, the abstract, the
moralizing’, Eliot remarked, both groups ended up with rhetoric just
Inside and outside modernism 51