COLD COMFORT FOR THE YO1ING.
The Chilswell Book of English Poetry. Compiled by Robert Bridges. (Longman. 68. 6d. net.)
THE ground of poetry is love, not wisdom. This is true in ultimates, in the most concrete examples : poetry is bOrn from passion, not from morality. It is truer still in the inmost, in the highest dignities of the mind ; poetry is the fire that burns without consuming, while philosophy is the light that shines without dazzling. But Dr. Bridges has always held to the other opinion. He takes poetry to be the expression of the spirit of man, as anyone might ; but to him the spirit of man walks with austerity among abstractions and ethical ideas. He is no man to Compile anthologies for children. If we had hoped that in The Chilswell Book of English Poetny Dr. Bridges would put off his laurels and from time to time play with the children instead of improving them, the preface Would soon have informed us better. It is a subtle; proud and chilling exercise in prose, written exactly as if English were a stone-dead language. His views are persuasively stated :-
" While in all other Arts it is agreed that a student should be trained only on the best models, wherein technique and aesthetic are both exemplary, there has been with respect to Poetry a pestilent notion that the young should be gradually led up to excellence through lower degrees of it ; so that teachers have invited theft- pupils to learn and admire what they expected them to outgrow : and this was carried so far that writers, who else made no poetic pretence, have good-naturedly composed poems for the young, and in a technique often as inept as their sentiment. This mistake; rested on two shallow delusions : first, that beauty must needs• be fully apprehended before it can be felt or admired ; secondly that the young are unimaginative."
- Certainly children will delight in the most unexpected of poems, and each will have preferences that no other child shares. But Dr. Bridges makes no attempt to explain how anthologies for children should differ from general anthologies why, for example, The Golden Treasury will not serve for a school book as well as any other. The selection of poems in the Chilswell Book is middling ; some of them, the lyrics more especially, are excellent, but many are too stodgy for a child and too commonplace for an adult. In his anxiety for justice and nobility in poetry Dr. Bridges has often included empty moralizings or spiritless counsels. We are unable to conceive how Dr. Bridges could select Mr. Kipling's.
"The Hun is at the Gate," or the poems he quotes from Longfellow; and Moore, and still imagine that he was keeping to his owni criterion. Even in wisdom he is not complete.
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