An Appreciation of the Poet Laureate [Robert Bridges has just
celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday, and this expression of appreciation by one of our younger readers reaches us at an opportune moment. A review of Dr. Bridges' hew poem The Testament of Beauty appears on another page.— En. Spectator.] ENGLISH laureate poetry was said to have died with Tennyson, its epitaph was sung by Punch, and with the election of Austin its place was taken by practical politics. In the face of this, perhaps, some cynic will not allow it to be any great claim that Robert Bridges is the best of England's laureate poets. Wordsworth, who died when Mr. Bridges was six years old, may be a greater poet, but only in intention was he a greater Laureate. Wordsworth accepted the office "as a dis- tinction sanctioned by her Majesty, and which expresses . . . a sense of the national importance of Poetic Litera- ture." This attitude is the only true one, and his words are sufficient answer to any who maintain that the paureate Office should be as extinct as that of the Court 'ester.
Laureate poetry, however, is.by no means dead, and in Bridges Tennyson has, for a successor, as great a Laureate as himself. Both are superb lyric poets, but Bridges has Dot allowed his lyric gift to suffer beneath the dignities of office. He has also withstood Tennyson's temptation to become oracular, but, no less than Tennyson, he has Wished to bring together Art and moral beauty, advocat- ing—in The Necessity of Poetry—a truth increasingly visible beneath the decay of "realism." When caught up within the great moment of the War, he seldom allowed his lyricism to be clouded by false sentiment.
It is not as poets that I would have the two Laureates dispute precedence—a barren business at best. But recognition there should and must be for the work that Mr. Bridges has done on behalf of English letters.
The editions of the poems of Dixon, Dolben and Gerard Manly Hopkins are to his great credit. The first two have excellent memoirs, and for the third we must be eternally indebted, although our gratitude may be tempered with regret that he debated the production—" coy in my home"—for nearly thirty years.
Mr. Bridges' criticism is always worth listening to, whether it is directed towards English pronunciation, handwriting, hymn-singing, prosody, or the poetry of Keats. The common factor of these activities is that the right to criticize always belongs inalienably to him.
He has criticized the average hymn-singing, saying that it keeps him away from church, but he has himself compiled The Yattendon Hymnal, which contains hymns translated by him from the Latin and German and revives old settings undeservedly neglected. He has criticized modern pronunciation- and become concerned at the divorce between the written and the spoken word, but his essays, as they have been lately produced, printed in phonotype, by the Oxford Press, are an attempt at a remedy.
his criticism of another's work he is one of the few Critics who can keep a wholesome mean between the criticism of personal taste and that of poetic rule. His dwn taste is unimpeachable ; for witness we have The Spitit of Man. It is founded upon a determined sense of 'beauty :— And he,ha,s to guide him an invaluable technical know- ledge,combined. with a deep belief in the value of writing with* " a,.continuous literary decorum." Because he himself writes within this tradition, it may not at ,.first tkp., seen that his work has the genuine
. "I love all beauteous things, I seek and adore them."
originality which, as Mr. Eliot says of another poet, comes from "a logical development of the verse of his English predecessors." Bridges is liable to be pigeon-holed with Matthew Arnold as " academic"—a recurrent charge against the work of any author who loves his Homer at least as much as his Shakespeare. No doubt, however, the notion receives colour from the fact that he has written eight of what might be wrongly dismissed as "closet dramas." These plays are original experiments upon various dramatic models. The situations are pur- posely not overstrained, and that Nero and The Return of Ulysses would act well, I have no doubt, were the players to appreciate the music and restraint of his verse.
A justifiable exaggeration it is that every one of Bridges' lines is flawless. His lyric skill is without fault, but a work of art cannot be great by technique alone. This is a truism, but it does not appear to be so when technique goes by the name of " form." It is the intensity of his poetic emotion which Mr. Bridges does not appear always to estimate rightly. He is prone to faulty emphasis emotionally, but never technically. However, if this is a valid criticism, I admit it may be largely caused by a growing habit of asking from a lyric much that it is not its business to give. We require a story or a philosophy where we should be content only with a mood.
A lyric must capture the central note of a mood, but the occasion of that mood is nothing more than a husk which falls away when the flower is budded. It is a right instinct in Bridges rarely to give a title to his lyrics. The original experience, once it has suffered change into form and sound, should be dismissed even from a headline.
In the place of any lack of importance which we may perhaps ungratefully, feel in his lyric, we have a far- reaching faculty of experiment. This largely accounts for his not being more widely known and appreciated. Popular fame means identification with some easily de- finable activity. But Mr. Bridges refuses to be tied down to any one sphere of work. Because of this he has done immeasurable service in raising the Laureate Office above the petty political trafficking which was its main business in days gone by.
At the age of eighty-five Mr. Bridges has kept the vitality and valuable inquisitiveness, peculiar to youth. He has kept his great zest for writing, not out of the habit of a lifetime, but because of his extrenie readiness to turn the skilled hand of the craftsman to the new work of an old art.
JAMES THORNTON.
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