ROBERT BRIDGES

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME:

J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE
HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS

THOMAS HARDY
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE

BERNARD SHAW
BY P. P. HOWE
WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMAS
WALT WHITMAN
BY BASIL DE SELINCOURT

A. C. SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THOMAS
GEORGE GISSING
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
R. L. STEVENSON
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
BY UNA TAYLOR
.,.
ROBERT BRIDGES
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
F. E. BRETT YOUNG

LONDON f
MARTIN SECKER
I

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET

ADELPHI
MCMXIV
 TO
ALFRED HAYES
GENTLE POET AND
STERN CRITIC

?R
 NOTE
I HAVE thought it better, in this estimate of
a living poet, to exclude biographical details
altogether; and indeed they would have been
out of place in a book which is nothing more
than an attempt to explain to my own satis-
faction the peculiar excellences which have
made the work of Robert Bridges so great a
personal joy, and to examine my belief in its

significance for the future of English poetry.

Ihave to thank Dr. Bridges for his generous
permission to quote not only many passages
from his own works, but also the sonnet of his
friend, the late Mr. Gerard Hopkins, on page
143. Except in the case of the Plays, the text
from which quotations have been made is that
of the Oxford Edition of Collected Poems.

F. E. B. Y.
LLANTHONY,
July, 1914.
 CONTENTS
PAGE
I. PRELIMINARIES 9
II. THE RELIGION OF LOVE 20
III. BEAUTY AND JOY 38
IV. FRESHNESS OF VISION 62
V. LANDSCAPE 81
VI. MILTON'S PROSODY 102
VII. THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES 125
VIII. THE DRAMAS 145
IX. THE DRAMAS 171
X. CLASSICISM 180
XI. CLASSICAL PROSODY 198
XII. CONCLUSIONS 208
 I

PRELIMINARIES
THE vitality of any art-form is seen in the
willingness of the artist to be engrossed in the
complex and the intense, and it is in this
spirit that he must approach the expression
of beauty, which is the main business of art
and also happens to be a great deal of the
business of life. As soon
as beauty engages
more than a certain part of the attention, or
offers more than one aspect to the same

perception, its expression becomes art. One

might almost say that to voice a single aspect
of beauty is common speech, to voice two at
once is art. But in the higher forms of art we
look for more than this. It may express the
intensity with which beauty is realized and;

this the poets call Joy. It may recognize the

indestructible kinship of all beauty, and give
expression to the underlying unity, whether
it and this is generally
be real or imaginary ;

called Vision. Sometimes it reconciles things

which have seemed distant or opposed and ;

9
 ROBERT BRIDGES
when this is achieved in literature it is called
the note of Ecstasy. The three functions
keep a certain sequence. The ecstasy of one
artist is handed down as the vision of those
who come after him, and in the end may be
taken into the general consciousness of beauty.
The ecstatic artist comes rarely ; he is an
adventurer in art he generally starves or
;

dies young, for the world has naturally no use

for him.
It is not joy, nor even ecstasy, but vision
that distinguishes the golden ages of art. We
know them by the number of worshippers
that throng the temple. They are periods
marked by an extraordinary flowering of song,
when every little singer is inspired, as if in
spite of himself, to utter the authentic accents
of genius. They are times when it is not
necessary for a man to be an artist by stealth.
There is breadth, and grandeur, and a certain
unmistakable sanity about the art of these
ages. It springs from the joy of some obscure
half-realized discovery. By some means all
things have fallen naturally into the sphere of
art;
art has become easy.
The age of Wordsworth was the last of
these great fruiting-times of English literature.
It was less astonishing than the Elizabethan

age, for it took a less soaring flight from the

10
 PRELIMINARIES
level that came before it. But the later
achievement includes the earlier. The poetic
method of Shakespeare was taken for granted
by Shelley at a time when the technique of
the Elizabethans had already been absorbed
and half forgotten. This age had all the
features of a great period of literature. It
was restless, but confident ;
it was lacking in
several qualities of which the present age has
enough humour, notably, but it had a con-
fident tread in places where we can venture
only timidly or not at The age of the great
all.

Romantics gave way to an empty clamour of

tongues. It merged in the Victorian com-

promise an admirable phrase which covers

the whole field of literature to the work of
Rossetti, of the aesthetics, of Browning, Tenny-
"
son and Swinburne. The sunset
the of

great revolutionary poets," Mr. Chesterton

calls it and as a type of it he presents to us
;

Lord Macaulay. It was an age when politics

and literature were confused to the damning
of both, and to the loss of vision, joy and

beauty. It stops short of Bridges.

He one of these isolated poets whom it is
is

difficultto classify unless it be with the

isolated poets of other ages. Time has a
freakish way of mixing up her great men.
The first historian to analyse the dynamics of
11
 ROBERT BRIDGES
literary movements will often have to search
back for poets who are separated from their
real companions by a mass of little names.
Sometimes he will have to pick up stragglers
who are born a generation too late. The true
account of each great age of literature will
begin with the voices crying in the wilderness.
For instance, the first poet of the greatest age
of English letters was beheaded six years
before the birth of Shakespeare.
Wyatt and Surrey have been called the first
of the moderns ; and Surrey is remembered
in text-books of literature because he natural-
ized the Italian sonnet in the English tongue.
But there are points in his work which I find
more significant. The concentration of his
genius upon the forms of the great Italians
showed not merely a leavening of English
poetry with European culture. It implied a
ruthless discontent with the models of his
time. It embodied, too, great technical innova-
tions. Surrey was the first poet to free the
natural rhythms of English speech from the
"
five-foot prison of the iambic 5: line. He
proclaimed distantly, and in a voice that
sometimes faltered, a new joy which became the
commonplace of the great Elizabethans and ;

at the same time he kept his eyes steadfastly

upon the golden times that had come before
12
 PRELIMINARIES
"
him. For Surrey was a classicist," and has
left us a long version of Vergil. I am ready to
believe that the court of Henry VIII, if it
cared for these things, took the learning of
those two young men for pedantry. They
"
may even have been accused of a cold
carpentry of metre." But to-day we know
that they were seeking for new beauty to
express, and that their zeal for ancient models
was a token of their impatience. 1
William Collins is another of these poets
whose importance has sometimes been over-
stated ; yet he is very significant, as every
real poet must be in an age of sham poets.

Augustan art had fallen into a groove, or

rather it had lodged on a see-saw. The infant
successors of Vergil and Horace lisped in
heroic couplets, for the heroic couplets came.
The revolt of Collins took the same channels
as the revolt of Wyatt and Surrey. He looked
for beauty in the ancient perfection of form
the prisca symmetria bewailed by one of the
boldest innovators of the Renaissance.
O bid our vain endeavours cease
Revive the just designs of Greece,
1
In this connection does not seem inopportune to quote the
it
case of a daring innovator in another art, Richard Strauss, a
post-Wagnerian, who first chose to write music in the manner of
Mozart ; or that of Arnold Schonberg, who declares that he has
learnt all he knows from a study of the music of Bach, of Mozart,
of Beethoven, and of Brahms.

13
 ROBERT BRIDGES
he cried and later, impatient of the madden-
;

ing mechanism of his contemporaries, he

breaks into the soft unrimed stanza of the
Ode to Evening which so nearly discards the
whole Augustan burden of romance words.
This gentle poem is one of the most rebellious
things in literature. Here the lovely English
words are allowed to speak for themselves ;

the English landscape (Swinburne compares

him with Corot) is unveiled as it had never
been since the enchanting morning of L'Allegro.
Try to transpose
upland fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam,

or
And hamlets brown and dim-discovered spires

into the Augustan key.

But the Ode to Evening was written in 1747,
when Chatterton was still to pave the way for
the Eve of St. Agnes in a Ballade of Charity,
and Thomson and Shenstone were slipping
their chains in the Spenserian stanza. little A
later William Blake was to bring the aureole
of mysticism into the language. And yet
Blake and Collins were reactionaries in the
strictest sense of the word before they were
innovators. They are not even among the
greatest poets. But they were dazzled with a
14
 PRELIMINARIES
new joy, a wakening consciousness of beauty,
which was to find its full expression long after
they were silent. These poets of joy, these
singers before sunrise, are naturally dis-
satisfied with the worn poetic methods of
their time, and as naturally turn their eyes
back to greater models. It was this dis-
content which turned Blake to the form of the
Elizabethan lyric. It made him complain to
the Muses to whom it was then fashionable to
pay court :

How have you left your ancient love

That bards of old enjoyed in you ?
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.

Robert Bridges was born in 1844, of a

Kentish family. He was six years old when the
Poet Laureate sealed his fame with In
Memoriam, and twenty-six when the Idylls
were finished. His own first volume of verse
was published in 1873. Tennyson, Browning,
Arnold and Rossetti were still writing, but the
dread Victorian era was at an end, though
Mr. William Watson had yet to appear, and
Swinburne was still regarded with suspicion
in respectable circles.
n His work has been
issued for the most part
privately, and has been appreciated by a very
15
 ROBERT BRIDGES
small circle of readers. His recognition by
literary men of the day has been narrower
even than his reputation. His published work
includes seven plays modelled directly, even
to details of stage-craft, upon either the
Elizabethan manner or a mixture of any
manners but the modern ;
one that is derived
from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, and is
partly a translation two masks in the Greek
;

manner ;
a long version of Vergil in classical
prosody and five little books of Shorter
;

Poems, which are curiously divided they;

are either direct formal imitations of Victorian

and Elizabethan models, or they are written
in a manner so entirely fresh and original,
with such advanced technical skill, that we
feel the innovator and the inventor in every
line.

Indeed, Bridges' discontent with the models

of hisday is the most obvious feature of his
work. If he was brought up on Tennyson and
Browning, the result has been a complete
breaking away from the methods of both.
From the first his eyes have been fixed on the
great ages of literature. He could not breathe
the atmosphere of the drawing-room. I sup-
pose it is natural enough that this tendency,
though it is only half his significance as a
poet, should have hoodwinked a great part of
16
 PRELIMINARIES
contemporary criticism. It is this that has
stamped him as a poet of the study, a re-
"
actionary, a worker in old claims, a classical
revivalist."
He is all this, but a great deal more. There is
that in his work which has not been heard in
English poetry since Shelley died the note
-

of joy. With
and supporting it is an intenser
it

perception ofbeauty than any of our poets

has shown us since the Romantic movement
fell into its Victorian decay.

My soul is drunk with joy ; her new-born fire

In far forbidden places wanders away . . .

is the text of half his lyric discoveries. The

sense of beauty ever-present, intense and .

transient, drifts over all his work. With

Keats he has loved the principle of beauty in
all things; and he has felt, as perhaps only
Keats before him, the pains of beauty the
"
no-formed stings " that Whitman found in
"
the perception of loveliness. Sense is so
tender," he cries

O, and hope so high,

That common pleasures mock their hope and sense ;

And swifter than doth lightning from the sky

The ecstasy they pine for flashes hence,
Leaving the darkness and the woe immense.

But it is of the sunlight and the earth he

B 17
 ROBERT BRIDGES
sings. If he is a poet of the study he is much
more poet of field and hedgerow. He is the
a
first man to bring the atmosphere of the

English landscape into poetry with all its

delicate changes and shifting colour. The
impetus of the romantic movement, of Words-
worth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, was so
strong that even in Tennyson's day English
poetry had not drifted so far from nature as
in the Augustan era. But the Victorian con-
vention was wearing thin, and the first three
books of Shorter Poems were as direct a
return to natural beauty as Collins' Ode to
Evening. There is a new freshness of vision, a
power of direct expression, which lets a flood
of fresh air intocontemporary art. With it,
too, is a perception of the beauty of simple
words which is quite foreign to late Victorian
poetry.
Here is a man whose work includes the old
paradox of great beginnings. For the spirit,
and partly for the form, of his poetry, he stands
already high enough to look back unhindered
at the great ages behind him and to refer his
work to lasting models and at the same time
;

he has evolved a form and a spirit essentially

new. As a poet he is not among the greatest ;

he treads too deliberately the middle course

between imagination and fact, without the
18
 PRELIMINARIES
inclusive vision that isthe crowning glory of
the classic style. He lacks, too, the sustained
ecstasy of imagination which is the birth-
right of the greatest poets. And his genius
has an indolent cast, as though he were content
merely to seize what he may of a constant
flow of beautiful impressions and to fit it to
the most beautiful and varied language.
But of the real stuff of poetry, of beauty,
and of joy, of perfect sympathy and expres-
sion, he brings us more than any poet since
Keats, whom he so nearly approaches in sheer
grace and richness of diction. As a lyric poet
he is more consistently fine than Keats ; as a
metrist he is with Milton. Most of his collected
- Shorter Poems have, I think, the authentic
v
accent of immortal verse. One can only guess
how far this originality of metre and the
precision and sincerity of his Nature poems
may form the basis for a new school of English
verse. No great poet of his class, isolated, at
once revivalist and inventor, has yet failed
sooner or later to influence the growth of our
literature, and a new flowering of English
poetry has been long delayed.

19
 II

THE RELIGION OF LOVE

THREE years after the date of his first published
work, a now extinct collection of lyrical poems,
printed in 1873, the first sonnets of The Growth
of Love appeared. Robert Bridges was in his
thirty-third year. He had reached a season
of life to which neither Keats nor Shelley ever
attained ; one at which Coleridge's year of
marvels had closed, and the Sybilline leaves
of his friend had all been scattered. It is

representative of the serious temper of the

man that this blossoming should have been so
long withheld, for the flower of poetry is one
that tends to burst so early from its sheath.
Neither the technique nor yet, in any great
degree, the matter of The Growth of Love
suggests the work of a young man there is so
:

little in it that one could wish, in the light of

remoulded or unwritten. And yet

later work,
he does not overwhelm us with any " high
midsummer pomps ' :

ofHis genius
song.
awakens with the slow unfolding of a Northern
20
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
spring, beneath skies of a chilly tenderness.
Poetry, with him, is from the first a sober
\

ecstasy, shrinking from fine extravagance as (

from a breach of taste, and from the mere j

sensuous indulgence of words as from a lapse \

in the ideal of conduct which hisiTSoTalready

defines.
Here, indeed, is one of the tokens of youth,
that absorption in a moral idea which in
"
Shelley became a passion for reforming the
"
world ;
but in Bridges the passion is limit-
ing rather than expansive. There is a staid-
ness, a conscious severity in these sonnets
which seems strange in the work of a young
man, and stranger still in the treatment of
such a subject for love, that Lord of Terrible
:

Aspect, is here compelled to take its place in

a sort of religious scheme, of which itself is the
crown and fulfilment. This conception ob-
viously suggests a comparison with the imagina-
tive love of the great Florentines ; and while
they are too individual to be called derivative,
it is fair to
say that these sonnets carry a
strong Renaissance flavour. Sometimes they
are as sweet and pensive as Dante; ardent
sometimes with that vague desire for abstract
beauty which quivers beneath the passive
sonnets of Michaelangelo. And the author
must have been conscious of his models, for
21
 ROBERT BRIDGES
in the seventh of the set he hints that the joy
of Love is surely bringing him towards
A grace of silence by the Greek unguesst
That bloom'd to immortalize the Tuscan style.

Within his limitations he has succeeded in

this. Nowhere else, save in the Vita Nuova,
does love, and love that never wholly loses
touch with humanity, rise so nearly to the
dignity of a religion. At times the intense
seriousness of these early sonnets threatens to
hide the lover in the vestments of the priest.
And I think it is this lofty sacramental feeling
which invests each of these poems, even the
more and tender, with their strange
trivial

solemnity though the whole world were,

;
as
to him, a temple of love, and he the celebrant
of an austere ritual.
In common with most religions his ecstasy
is made a means of escape from life for ;

. . . man hath sped his instinct to outgo

The step of science ; and against her shames
Imagination stakes out heavenly claims,
Building a tower above the head of woe.

Or again :

Thy smile outfaceth ill, and that old feud

Twixt things and me is quash'd in our new truce.

In one of the loveliest sestets in the language

22
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
he tells of the bewildering calm to which, -

through love, he may attain :

And when we sit alone, and as I please

I taste thy love's full smile and can enstate
The pleasure of my kingly heart at ease,
My thought swims like a ship, that with the weight
Of her rich burden sleeps on the infinite seas
Becalm'd, and cannet stir her golden freight.

Even when he breathes that diviner air he is

conscious of the perilous height at which his

"
ideals are poised Yet lieth the greater
:

that few there be are weaned

bliss so far aloof,
from earthly love," he sings ; and a little later
"
he shies again at those whom the flames of
earthly love devour." It seems as if there
were no room in his scheme of spiritualized <.

love for many of the themes on which poetry

has fed ever since the springtime of song ;
as if the bulk of English love-poetry, from the
Elizabethans to Swinburne, were judged by
him as lacking in essential fastidiousness ;
*
as even the Renaissance were a little too
if

frank. It is not until we reach the first

Epistle in Classical Prosody, published thirty

years later, that we learn anything of Love's
Joys that fear to be named, feelings too holy to gaze on ;

And with his inviolate peace-triumph his passionate war ;

... his mighty desire, thrilling ecstasies, ardours

Of mystic reverence, his fierce flame-eager emotions,
Idolatrous service, blind faith and ritual of fire.
23
 ROBERT BRIDGES
In his age he stands within hand-clasp of
Whitman. Here is the substitute of youth
for those fierce, flame-eager lines :

The mystery of joy made manifest

In love's self-answering and awakening smile ;

Whereby the lips in wonder reconcile

Passion with peace, and show desire at rest.

And I suppose because he has made of

it is

love a religion that we meet with this unusual

element in the early work for every religion
;

wins to its ecstasies by virtue of some renuncia-

tion, and he has reconciled passion with peace
by sacrificing some of its ardours. But there
are varieties of religious experience. Keats,
whom we shall shortly see that Bridges has
handled somewhat roughly, also thought of
love as a religion.
"
My creed is love," he wrote to Fanny
"
Brawne, and you are its only tenet." Per-
haps Keats' conception of love's religion was
Eleusinian. Bridges' is more nearly love
according to the Book of Common Prayer.
This Puritanism, as it has been called, crops
up so freely in the early sonnets and has been
so often remarked as to be worth considering
further, for it persists throughout the mass
of his love-poetry into the critical essays, the
plays, and the version of Apuleius. Even the
Later Poems, in which the temple of love has
24
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
grown mellow and beautiful with age, are not
free from it. At the outset it is to be dis-
tinguished from the puritanism of reaction
which chastened the later years of Wagner
and Tolstoi, for that was an index of failing
powers, of sheer physical exhaustion as ;

again it differs from the white-hot Platonism

of the youthful Shelley with its far intenser
flame. It is partly an instinctive modesty, -

partly an expression of good breeding and it;

gives me the idea not merely of a spiritual

aristocracy nor yet entirely of a moral, but a
blend of both a sort of aristocracy of manners. -
:

It is a quality that is unimaginable in a con-

tinental literature ;
insular, egotistic, tinged
with that spiritual isolation which I have
already noticed and, on the surface, it might
;

be explained by saying that Bridges was a

Victorian poet. For however much we may
attribute his early avoidance of the physical
in his love-poetry to a conscious choice and

rejection of material from the standpoint of

poetics, we cannot forget that he was born
into an age which worshipped the proprieties '
to a positively indecent extent. The ideals
to which his generation raised their eyes were
the ideals of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Mr.
Samuel Smiles and while the national science
;

devoted its energies to the making of fortunes

25
 ROBERT BRIDGES
in hardware and woollen goods, the national
art accepted a reactionary standard of prudery
compared with which the art of any period,
except that of Cromwell's Commonwealth, was
licentious. In spite of all this, I believe we
can neglect the influence of the era on Bridges'
poetry. The Victorians were as little his
teachers in manners as they were his masters
in technique and I think the very individu-
;

ality of that technique, its colour, its clarity,

its virginal sweet air, were enough to cleanse
it of that taint.There is in these poems a
sincerity of outlook which makes the loves of
their Galahads and Arthurs seem shoddy. I
have spoken already of the Victorian com-
promise. The puritanism Bridges is un-
of
compromising, and, differing thus subtly from
the attitude of his contemporaries, he has
carried his fastidious taste unchanged into an
age in which reticence is not a characteristic
of our poetry. From the essay on Keats, one

gathers that Bridges himself appreciated the

uncleanness of the Victorian veneer. This
work is, in a way, an apologia for his own atti-
tude, and no one reading can doubt that it
rings true.

A lamentable deficiency in Keats' art which

vitiates much of his work is brought into unusual
26
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
prominence by the subject of Endymion, and that
is his very superficial and unworthy treatment of his

ideal female characters. It might be partly accounted

for Keats' art is primarily objective and
thus :

pictorial, and whatever other qualities it has are as

it were added on to things as perceived and this
;

requires a satisfactory pictorial basis, which, in the

case of ideal woman, did not exist in Keats' time.
Neither the Roman nor the Renaissance ideals were
understood, and the thin convention of classicism
which we may see in the works of West and Canova,
was played out so that the rising artists (and Keats
;

"
with them), finding nothing to be intense upon,"
turned to Nature, and produced from English models
the domestic-belle type, which ruled throughout the
second quarter of the century, degrading our poets
as well as our painters. It was banal, and the more
ideal and abstract it sought to be the more empty it
became, so that it was the portrait-painters only, like
Lawrence, who, having to do with individual expres-
sion of subjective qualities, escaped from the meanness,
and represented women whom we can still admire.
. . Keats deplores, in one of his letters, that he was
.

not at ease in women's society, and when he attri-

butes this to their not answering to his preconception
of them, it looks as if he were seeking his ideal among
them. Certainly what appears to be the delineation
of his conception often offends taste without raising
the imagination, and it reveals a plainly impossible
foundation for dignified passion, in the representation
of which Keats failed. I conclude that he
supposed
that common expressions became spiritualized by
27
 ROBERT BRIDGES
being applied to an idea. Whatever praise is given
to Keats' work must always be with this reservation ;
and he generally does his best where there is no
opportunity for this kind of fault.

One feels that all this is rather hard upon

the consumptive chemist's assistant. Keats
was never a favourite of the critics and ;

when one turns in pity from this essay to the

pages of Endymion, and finds there poetry,
''

simple, sensuous, impassioned," as Milton

would have had it, and very passable god-
desses too, the question rises whether the
" "
careful avoidance of this kind of fault in
the love-poetry of Bridges does not constitute
a defect. The wonder is that with a passion
which is literally incomplete he remains so
" 5:

great a love poet. Dignified passion is

the phrase. He is ashamed

To have used means to win so pure acquist.

His tears even

were proud drops, and had my leave to fall,

Not on thy pity for my pain to call.

In another sonnet he finds it necessary to

make excuses for writing love-poetry at all.
All through the first part of The Growth of
j

\ Love runs this haughty disdain of emotion,

28
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
haughty because it obviously subserves a
spiritual egotism :

She loves me first because I love her, then

Loves me for knowing why she should be loved,
And that I love to praise her, loves again. . . .

I have dwelt at some length upon this

aspect of the sonnets not only because the

later conception ofLove is no more than a
logical development from the first type, but
also because it explains, by inference, a good
deal of the difficulty which some readers and
criticshave found in getting into touch with
his work. Many writers have called him cold,
and it is obvious that the appeal of poets
whose works do not show them as " men of
"
like passions with ourselves is limited. I
" "
think the word shy more nearly represents
"
the idiosyncrasy of his work. Somewhat
shy, somewhat austere, fastidious, difficult, 'V
says his friend the President of Magdalen,
hinting at qualities which are by no means
rare in the English temperament though seldom
present in our literature. And the only key to
the understanding of such poetry or of such a
temperament is love.
The earlier sonnets show all these qualities
in a high degree, for though he is undoubtedly
;c
master of the art which for thy sake I
29
 ROBERT BRIDGES
serve," the attitude of mind is self-conscious ;

but the twenty-third sonnet of the set, which

seems to usher in a second period, shows us
for the first time the poet uncertain of himself,

doubting whether his search for the face of

beauty without blame will ever lead him to
happiness.
weary pilgrims, chanting of your woe,
That turn your eyes to all the peaks that shine,
Hailing in each the citadel divine,
The which ye thought to have enter'd long ago ;

Until at length your feeble steps and slow

Falter upon the threshold of the shrine,
And your hearts overburdened doubt in fine
Whether it be Jerusalem or no :

Disheartened pilgrims, I am one of you ;

For, having worshipp'd many a barren face,

1 scarce now greet the goal I journey'd to :

I stand a pagan in the holy place ;

Beneath the lamp of truth I am found untrue,
And question with the God that I embrace.

It would be as unprofitable and indelicate

to reconstruct a love-story from this series of
sonnets as it would be to set down in prose
the emotional history of the hero of Maud ;

but I do think it significant that as the poems

stand in sequence they express a real develop-
ment of the ideal of love in depth and in
humanity ; so that the title of the work
becomes something more than an apt heading in
30
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
capital letters. The Growth of Love is not
merely a chronicle of the poetical moods which
chequer a love-story, like several of the famous
sequences with which it has been compared,
but a true history of the psychology of love.
This philosophical basis gives it the most
vital kind of form and there is more of the
;

essence of drama in it than in all the dramatic

works put together. The throes of wounded
pride in the thirty-second sonnet :

Thus to be humbled : 'tis to be undone ;

A forest fell'd ; a city razed to ground . . .

with its triumphant climax :

And yet, O lover, thee, the ruined one,

Love who hath humbled thus hath also crown'd

together with the manly and tender humility

of the thirty-third, seem an inevitable prologue
to the radiant fervour of the next :

my goddess divine sometimes I say :

Now let this word for ever and all suffice ;

Thou art insatiable, and yet not twice

Can even thy lover give his soul away :

And for my acts,

that at thy feet I lay ;
For never any other, by device
Of wisdom, love or beauty, could entice
My homage to the measure of this day.
I have no more to give thee lo, I have sold
:

My have emptied out my heart, and spent

life,

31
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Whate'er I had
; till like a beggar, bold

With nought to lose, I laugh and am content.

A beggar kisses thee ; nay, love, behold,
I fear not :thou too are in beggarment.

I would commend the examination of this

poem to those who have found the art of
Robert Bridges a " cold carpentry of metre " :

this magnificent white-hot

thing, simple,
strong, yet passionately abandoned. It has

very few equals in the history of the sonnet.

The glow which it sheds before it irradiates all
that immediately follows. The next sonnets
are all sunny and serene a record of the
:

sweetest love in idleness.

Simple enjoyment calm in its excess,

With not a grief to cloud, and not a ray
Of passion over hot my peace to oppress ;

With no ambition to reproach delay,

Nor rapture to disturb its happiness.

Until, a little there gather on the

later,
horizon of this cloudless sky faint vapours,
such as those which tenderly mark the close of
a day in high summer. It is a wistfulness not
new in literature, this sense of tears which
haunts the silences of extreme happiness. I
suppose the contemplation of the highest
beauty in art or nature is never wholly free
from it, and it is fitting that the new note
should follow the rapture of that exalted
32
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
period. has usually voiced a
In literature it

regret for beauty's mortality it has been a ;

"
conscious reaching back towards the good
moment," as though it were possible for
imagination to span the gap, to clutch at fast-
receding joys and even to recapture them.
Wordsworth had it in the great Immortality
ode :

It is not now as it hath been of yore ;

Turn wheresoe'er I may

By night or day
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Cowper just failed to grasp it in the lines on

looking at his mother's portrait. But the
wistfulness of Bridges is less regretful than
either of these. With him, the desire to
"
recapture passed joy is not so much 9:

envious as compassionate. The innocence of

childhood seems to him a theme for pity ; just
as familiar things, such as a beloved village
lost in a darkening plain, will seem pitiable
by reason of their very distance. And it is
the loss of innocence rather than the loss of
vision that he deplores. Looking at a picture
of himself in childhood he feels

He cannot think the simple thought which play'd

Upon those features then so frank and coy ;
'Tis his, yet oh not his and o'er the joy
! :

His fatherly pity bends in tears dismay'd.

c 33
 ROBERT BRIDGES
And when he sees childhood upon the threshold
of experience, knowing how
in the forest among many trees
Scarce one in all is found that hath made good
The virgin pattern of its slender wood

he cries :

So, little children, ye, nay nay, ye ne'er

From me shall learn how sure the change and nigh.
When ye shall share our strength and mourn to share.
The softening of regret with pity is the broad

distinction, in this case, between Bridges and

Wordsworth ; and here, as I have already
noted, it is want of a mystical faculty,
in the
in the overburdening of the poetic thought
with a moral idea, that he falls short of Words-
worth's magic. Once, and only once, does he
allow us the atmosphere of wonder without a
make-weight.
When ancient nature was all new and gay,
Light as the fashion that doth last enthral,
Ah mighty nature, when, my heart was small,
Nor dream'd what fearful searchings underlay
The flowers and leafy ecstasy of May,
The breathing summer sloth, the scented fall. . . .

And this does not suggest Wordsworth so

much as Traherne. This is how Traherne puts
"
it in his third century of meditations Cer- :

tainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet

34
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
and curious apprehensions of the world than I
when I was a child. ... I was a little stranger
which, at my entrance into the world, was
saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.
. All things were spotless and pure and
. .

glorious yea, and infinitely mine and joyful

;

and precious. I knew not that there were any

sins, or complaints, or laws. I dreamed not of

poverties, contention, or vices. All tears and

quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Every-
thing was at rest, free and immortal. ... So
that with much ado I was corrupted and made
to learn the dirty devices of this world." . . .

"
Dusty damned
'

experience
:

is what
Bridges them. Under the same heading
calls
as these poems on childhood falls the magnifi-
"
cent portrait of a mother Tears of love, :

"
tears of joy and tears of care ; and
I suppose
that the first feeling which inspires all of them
is really nothing more than the Chaucerian
i;
Routhe " the pieta of Dante and Michael-
;
" '

angelo ; pity which Bridges himself

the
addresses in the Christian Captives " sweet
pity, of human sorrow born," that makes
The heart of man so singular, that he alone
Himself commiserating against heaven
Pushes complaint, and finds within his heart
Room for all creatures, that like him are born
To suffer and perish. . . .

35
 ROBERT BRIDGES
With almost every sonnet of the series his
love seems to gather a little more of the
humanity which at first was lacking. The
complacent arrogance of the early poems is
"
softened. He rails against
?:

prodigal nature
who " makes us but to taste one perfect joy."
From this " neglected, ruin'd edifice Of works
"
imperfected and broken schemes comes the
bitter call :

Where is the promise of my early dreams ;

The smile of beauty and the pearl of price ?

The forty-seventh sonnet "

: Since then 'tis

only pity looking back, Fear looking forward,"

is a cry out of the
deep. There is only one
balm for such suffering as this. The beautiful
invocation to Sleep, more tired and more
tender than that of Sydney, brings darkness
upon this mood of fretfulness : the only
passage of the kind that breaks the consistent
optimism of Bridges' work.

Come, gentlesleep, I woo thee come and take

:

Not now the child into thine arms, from fright

Composed by drowsy tune and shaded light,
Whom ignorant of thee thou didst nurse and make ;

Nor now the boy, who scorn'd thee for the sake
Of growing knowledge or mysterious night,
Tho' with fatigue thou didst his limbs invite,
And heavily weigh the eyes that would not wake ;

36
 THE RELIGION OF LOVE
No, nor the man severe, who from his best
Failing, alert fled to thee, that his breath,
Blood, force and fire should come at morn redrest ;

But me, from whom thy comfort tarrieth,

For all my wakeful prayer sent without rest
To thee, O shew and shadow of my death.
" O shew and shadow of "
my death again
the voice is the voice of Dante.
And after this there is nothing that is not
sunny and beautiful and wise for hope, ;
"
beyond the best of art or nature's kindest
phase," returns and joy, a nobler, maturer
;

joy, a new tower above the head of woe, rises

from the ruins of the old egotism. All is
tender and strong out of his strength comes
:

forth sweetness. The simple and lovely para-

phrase of the Lord's Prayer ends the sequence.

37
 Ill

BEAUTY AND JOY

THE Robert Bridges, almost alone of
lyrics of
his work, have commanded a certain amount
of popular attention, if not of fame. Since
the publication of the first four books of
Shorter Poems, in 1890, no fewer than seven
reprints have appeared. After some twenty
years of obscurity, the Shorter Poems have
found another score years of comparatively
vigorous life upon the lips of men. One
suspects that even so they have appealed only
to a small company, however devoted. Pos-
sibly, again, they have been widely read and
loved by a public that has quite failed to
appreciate the richness of its possession ; for
an unaffected love of nature and of nature-
poems is far commoner in this country than
the difficult art of reading poetry for its own
sake.
At any rate, these five books of short poems,
hardly one of which covers more than a small
page, have entirely eclipsed the whole mass of
38
 BEAUTY AND JOY
the poet's work in the public view. For one
reader who has worked his way through the
five thousand odd lines of Nero, there must be
a score who have most of the Shorter Poems
by heart. No judgment is so
unerringly
accurate as that of a small and constant public.
It has been claimed that the lyrics have bulked

unfairly in criticism and appreciation of the

poet ; but I believe that they will be held just
as representative of Bridges' genius fifty years
hence,when the plays, sonnets and masks will
have had ample time to filter into public
consciousness.
That they will be popular with the popularity
understanding and love is, so long as
cf entire
the common conception of poetic technique
and worth stands at its present indefinite
pitch, in the nature of things impossible.
Their present appeal is that of simplicity,^
j|

of sincerity, of general grace of diction and-j

charm of manner. No volume of lyrics ever
published has been so free from what is weak, .

undesirable, or the product of some chance,

deceiving inspiration, which seems on the
morrow like " the empty words of a dream
remembered on waking." Each is, of its kind,
perfect ;and even to-day perfection of kind
is recognized where its means are not under-

stood.
39
 ROBERT BRIDGES
But not by such a standard that they
it is

ought to be judged. They hold actually, and

for reasons that can be definitely written
down, the flower of Bridges' work. In that
higher court in which poets judge poetry, and
time ponderously endorses the verdict, the
Shorter Poems will take their place infallibly,
acquitted of blemish, affectation, untruth,
fashion and littleness, among the finest pro-
ducts of English genius. They are simple, .

with the fine simplicity of the Greek anthology ;

they have a poetic richness and warmth of

colour unknown since Keats ; and they show
the unfailing moral dignity which Voltaire
assigned as the special birthright of the
English poets. They hold concentrated the
joy and vision that belong to an age of poetic
awakening. When they are imitative it is
with the love of great periods of literature
which is characteristic of a poet in Bridges'
position. Andalongside this tradition which
asserts, in a manner, the continuity of fine
literature, isan intense originality in tech-
nique, an adaptation of form to matter, which
has hardly been approached since the golden
age of Latin poetry. These special poetic
virtues are better seen in the Shorter Poems
than in any of the less spontaneous work.
They are least laboured when they are most
40
 BEAUTY AND JOY
harmonious and subtle. And they are more
purely concerned with the beautiful than the
work of any of the poet's contemporaries or
successors. Their fault, if it is to be so con-
sidered, is a feeling of remoteness, even in I

'

the most actual of the poems ; a sense that

Bridges' instrument, with all its delicate re-
sources and exquisite stops, is something
lacking in volume and tone. And this, as I
have suggested, seems to be inseparable from
the poet's method.
"
This man has put into his verse," says
Arthur Symons, in his fine essay, " only what
remains when all the others have finished. It
is a kind of essence ; it is what is imperish- -

able in perfume. It is what is nearest in

words to silence." And I think this is a very
fairsummary of the materials out of which
Bridges has made his poetry. It argues the
same deliberate choice and rejection which
we have noticed in the earlier work, the same
groping after new modes of expression, which
are the signals of his discontent. It means
that he has definitely thrown overboard a
great part of the accepted stuff of poetry.
" "
Beauty," he tells us, is the best of all we
"
know ; and with
in his passion for dealing *

nothing that is
unworthy he has made sacri- ,

fices which would have been the wrecking of a

41
 ROBERT BRIDGES
lesser poet.Seeking the subtle beauties of
new rhythms and strange technical beauties
he has wandered far indeed, I think that
:

whole new tracts of loveliness have opened

before him but in the choice of themes he
;

has restricted the field of poetry more than

any of his peers, rarely venturing forth in
search of the unusual, being contented within
the limits of the homeliest joys.
I have already spoken of his distaste for the
physical. In all the poems there is only one
reference to Nature's wonder of arch-wonders,
" "
and that is in the
her fair animal life ;

Epistle II, where it is evident that he allows

himself an unusual latitude of theme. Even
in Eros and Psyche, a poem that lies steeped
in lazy Cretan sunshine, the unveiled beauty
of a woman's form never shines among the
olives. So, with the mighty ardours of physical

passion he puts away the tenderness of

maternity. Even the pageants of history do

not call him save in the minute methods of
Nero ; while heroism in the abstract is for-
gone, for the poems of the Boer war are
intensely personal in feeling, and hardly happy
in expression. Just as Bridges can speak of

. the Dutchman's implacable folly

. .

The country of Shakespeare defying

42
 BEAUTY AND JOY
Tennyson writes of Napoleon :

He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak,

Madman !

But Tennyson also wrote The Revenge and the

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,
while in the very next poem to the unfor-
tunate Buonaparte sonnet he proclaims
"
Alexander Warrior of God." Here is
Bridges' opinion of the two of them :

What was Alexander's subduing of Asia, or that

Sheep-worry of Europe, when pigmy Napoleon enter'd
Her sovereign chambers, and her kings with terror
eclips'd ?
His footsore soldiers inciting across the ravag'd plains
Thro' bloody fields of death tramping to an ugly disaster ?
Shows any crown, set above the promise (so rudely
accomplisht)
Of their fair godlike young faces, a glory to compare
With the immortal olive that circles bold Galileo's
Brows. . . ."

This is his poetical substitute for the heroics

of war. And since the conflagrations of
human passion and the heroes which emerge
from them fire him so little, it is natural that
heroic associations should not move him either.
It may be urged that these things are only a
small part of the stuff from which lyrics are
made. Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne,
in very different ways, have proved that the
43
 ROBERT BRIDGES
lyric may be essentially dramatic in form ;

and notable that from the lyrics of Robert

it is

Bridges the more heroic moments of the

human drama are absent. He puts behind
him also the whole tradition of Romantic
beauty beauty, that is, which is reinforced
;

by association and with it magical beauty

;

of the Christabel type, and the beauty of the

eerie, which he essays once, and bungles, in
the poem on Screaming Tarn. So much of the
old material he has sacrificed. What has he
left us ; and can there be any beauty that is
new ?
I will grant that in these Shorter Poems it

would be difficult to hit upon anything that is

specifically modern (although their flavour is

as modern as Euripides), and yet there is just
as little that can be called ancient.
" "
Timeless,
v
is one of his favourite adjectives and the ;

v
beauty in which he rejoices is generally
without time. Even in poetical material
there is such a thing as fashion. The sorrow
of Werther belongs as distinctly to the
eighteenth century as the sorrow of Priam over
the body of Hector belongs to none and it is ;

in the latter category that I would place the

bulk of the beauty which Bridges uses. Of
such is the imperishable stuff of poetry.
Within these, his own limits, there is little

44
 BEAUTY AND JOY
beauty that he has not made more lovely for ;

the things of which he writes come to one

with the poignance of a personal experience.
It is evident, too, that he appreciates

simple beauties, or groups of simple beauties,

rather than the complex and to him the
;

appeal of these is so strong that he holds them

self-sufficient. No poet but Wordsworth has
leaned upon them confidently without
so
calling in extraneous appeals to increase or
intensify their meaning. I think that a part
of the great strength of his poetry lies in these

very limitations. The beauty of which he

sings is that of unalterable things : the
nightingales of Heracleitus ; the sharp -pro wed
ships of Homer ; fire and snow ; trees, flowers
and cities. And in every case he has made
them peculiarly intimate. With his art, as
with his love, to be most ours he has only to
be himself.
To-day it feels to me almost an impertinence
to quote examples from many poems which
have become part of our poetic conscious-
ness. I suppose that the anthologies have
made such perfect things as Nightingales, A
Passer-by and the ode On a Dead Child almost
popular but at this time of day it may sur-
;

prise many people to learn that these poems,

which first appeared in smaller type than their
45
 ROBERT BRIDGES
fellows from the exigencies of line-length, were
once considered a grave abuse of poetic licence.
And this is all the more remarkable because,
as is usually the case, complexity and origin-
ality of theme are nearly always associated in
Bridges with the highest mastery of treat-
ment. The full emancipation of his technique
"
first showed itself in these
'

stress-prosody
poems. To us it must seem amazing that
even the academic (and to-day we are told
that Bridges is one of them) should have
missed the charm and strength of a poem like
London Snow ; and I imagine that its rhythmic
subtlety was the greatest bar to its being
understood. Other things being equal, an
obvious rhythm, freely repeated, unvaried by
nuance or delay, always has the advantage
over rhythmical subtlety in this country.
Even Tennyson had to atone for the freedom
of Maud by six volumes of Arthurian con-

fectionery. In the last two hundred years

music has meant very little to us as a nation,
and this perhaps explains the popular lack of
ear. But, rhythm apart, surely the subject of
London Snow has its echo in the consciousness
of five million people, that wonder of loveliness
that blooms in a night to make every man a
child and every city a fairyland. Here it
bloomed incomparably :

46
 BEAUTY AND JOY
. . . and when full inches seven
It lay in thedepth of its uncompacted lightness
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven.
A high and frosty heaven . . . such a lightened
crystal brightened sky as we have all known,
and beneath it the voices of children calling,
their shrillness half muffled. London Snow
should have been written in an accentual
jingle, such as Swinburne's worst, and thus
lubricated the critics would have swallowed
the lines regardless of their length.
With flowers Bridges is always happy, even
in his conceits. There is a marvellously
pretty flower song in Achilles ; another in
Palicio. Margaret speaks :

This herb I think

Grows where the Greek hath been. Its beauty shows
A subtle and full knowledge, and betrays
A Genius of contrivance. See'st thou how
The fading emerald and azure blent
On the white petals are enmeshed about
With delicate sprigs of green ? 'Tis therefore called
Love in a mist.
PALICIO. Who is the thistle here ?
MARGARET.
O, he, with plumed crest, springing all armed
In steely lustre, and erect as Mars,
That is the Roman.
PAUCIO. Find the Saracen.
MARGARET.
This hot gladiolus, with waving swords
And crying colour.
47
 ROBERT BRIDGES
This passage is a piece of delicate and lovely
fancy. As a contrast to it I would place the
Sea Poppy, quoted in the next section as the
text of a distinction.
Of his bird-worship there are examples
beyond number Larks, Full-throated Robin,
:

Last week in February and many others. And

thisis inevitable, for bird-life enters so markedly

into the landscape of Southern England that

the tenderness of their song is almost a part
of the atmosphere. But one point seems to
me significant, and this applies also to his
ships : these winged things are
beautiful
made to bear the only conscious symbolism
that enters into his writing. The splendid
sonnet in The Growth of Love :

I would be a bird, and straight on wings I arise

with its fine winged words, is

upward sweep of
made to echo the emancipation of the spirit,
and shows itself in an unexpected emancipa-
tion of the sonnet form. The great ode in
Prometheus reflects a like ideal of spiritual
freedom :

Joy, the joy of flight.

And, in the same rapture, his soul goes adven-

turing upon the decks of A Passer-by :

Whither, O
splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,
48
 BEAUTY AND JOY
That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,
Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest ?
Ah soon, when Winter has all our vales opprest,
!

When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling,

Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest
In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling.

I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,

Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air :

I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest,

And anchor queen of the strange shipping there,
Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare ;

Nor is aught from the foaming reef to the snow-capped

grandest
Peak, that is over the feathery palms more fair

Than thou, so upright, so stately, and still thou standest.

And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless,

I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine
That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless,
Thy port assured in a happier land than mine.
But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine,
As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding,
From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line
In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding.

A certain number of poems in all five books,

and particularly in the first, are formal in the
sense that both in matter and treatment they
derive from earlier models and these, though
;

they are marvellously well imitated and con-

trive to capture not only the form but the
*

D 49
 ROBERT BRIDGES
atmosphere of the originals, are his least
considerable work. I have already hinted at
what I believe to be the explanation of this
return to the past his fine discontent with a
:

mode of expressiondegraded into common-

place by contemporary use. Even then you
will notice that he does not adopt the pot-

pourri formalism of the early Victorians such

as Hood, or the turgid Byron-Moore lyrical
convention which preceded it. In his dis-
content with the vulgarity of contemporary
forms, which represented, in fact, the lees of
the great Romantics, he turned instinctively
towards the more generous Elizabethan vin-
tage, a wine of lineage. Once, indeed, he
essays the withered rose formula :

Poor withered rose and dry,

Skeleton of a rose
Risen to testify
To love's sad close.

And one can say no more than that the

specialists in this sort of sentiment could not
have bettered it.

Usually the individual note istoo strong to

suffer easily the bonds of so fragile a technique,
and one is conscious of the restraint. Most of
these pieces are love-poems. In
spirit they
correspond with the stiffness and self -conscious-
ness of the first Growth of Love sonnets, and I
50
 BEAUTY AND JOY
suspect that they belong to the same period of
writing. It is almost as though the poet's

haughty disdain of emotion made him choose

this for the suppression of feelings too
means
tempestuous to be trusted to a freer form. It
certainly does act as a curb to the tingling
" "
passion of things like I will not let thee go
" I
in the first book. It half veils the joy of
made another song in likeness of love," or
my
"
the mild ecstasy of I have loved flowers that
fade." In some of the poems in the second
book, such as the opening dialogue between
"
Poet and Muse Will Love again awake
:

5:
that lies asleep so long ? I cannot feel that
the choice is so deliberate. Their formulae
read like the remains of a habit ; for here
conventional verse is mingled in a bewildering
way with intense and untrammelled expres-
sion such as :

Her beauty would surprise

Gazers on Autumn eves,
Who watched the broad moon rise

Upon the scattered sheaves.

Contrast this stanza with its neighbour :

And yet her smiles have danced

In vain, if her discourse
Win not the soul entranced
In divine intercourse.

And in the third poem of the same book, his

51
 ROBERT BRIDGES
exquisite Late Spring Evening, the third stanza
is marred by the same kind of intrusion.

In another kind of poem these echoes of

formalism are less destructive of reality I ;

mean those which he himself calls elegies, and

many others, not so labelled, which are really
elegiac in character. I suppose the con-
templative indolence of Gray's poem has
really fixed the atmosphere of this genre ;

but in these works Bridges is sometimes

nearer to the Milton of Lycidas, and at others
to those elegies of Shenstone, to which even
the comprehensive Augustan taste hardly did
justice, than to Gray. It is a mood which,

drooping with physical languor and smooth

with languor of the mind, suggests that the
poet is so drowsily comfortable that he can
afford to indulge in sombreness. With Bridges
it often produces a suggestion of Vergil as ;
"
in There is a hill beside the silver Thames " :

Sometimes an angler comes, and drops his hook

Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree
Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,
Forgetting soon his pride of fishery ;
And dreams, or falls asleep,
While curious fishes peep
About his nibbled bait, or scornfully
Dart off and rise and leap.

We find the same quality in the Elegy among

the Tombs, in the lovely Indolence, in the
52
 BEAUTY AND JOY
Miltonic Elegy on a Lady, with its more than
Miltonic ending :

And thou, O lover, that art on the watch,

Where, on the banks of the forgetful streams,
The pale indifferent ghosts wander, and snatch
The sweeter moments of their broken dreams,
Thou, when the torchlight gleams,
When thou shalt see the slow procession,
And when thine ears the fitful music catch,
Rejoice, for thou art near to thy possession.

we except these lyrics, a little stifled as it

If
were by the weight of old models, but lovely
none the less, and with them a small number
of occasional quick-witted, but un-
pieces,
deniably slight, are we
left with a great number
of nature-idylls of the type which he has so L

completely made his own, and a dozen or more

of love-poems as sweetly dignified as the best
of The Growth of Love sonnets, and infinitely
more flexible. It is this mingling of flexibility
with strength, of sanity with sweetness and of -

with naturalness of expression,-^

lofty idealism
which makes the love-poetry of the Shorter
Poems unique of its kind. The Platonic
candour remains, but the mode has ceased
wholly to be conventional the conceits are
;

gone the decoration is no longer there for

;

decoration's sake and to these there is added

;

a virility which was never there before. I

53
 ROBERT BRIDGES
know of no lovelier hymn of love's content
than the exalted " Love on my heart from
heaven fell " no ampler expression of love's
;

"
religion than Since thou, O fondest and
"
truest ; no nobler song of parting than the
"
magnificent O thou unfaithful, still as ever
"
dearest ; no sublimation of spiritual love so
"
lofty as My spirit kisseth thine," with the
amazing simile at the end, which takes its
place alone among the loveliest of the Idylls :

My spirit kisseth thine,

My embraceth thee
spirit :

thy being twine

I feel
Her graces over me,

In the life-kindling fold

Of God's breath ; where on high,
In furthest space untold
Like a lost world I lie :

And o'er my dreaming plains

Lightens, most pale and fair,

A moon that never wanes ;
Or more, if I compare,

Like what the shepherd sees

On late mid-winter dawns,
When thro* the branched trees
O'er the white-frosted lawns,

The huge unclouded sun,

Surprising the world whist,
Is all uprisen thereon,
Golden with melting mist.
54
 BEAUTY AND JOY
Even when he descends from these higher
levels of
passion to the smaller and more
trivial incidents in the history of love, he is
no less happy. a kind of poem not
There is

uncommon in the later books of the Shorter

Poems, and also in the New Poems, which is
domestic in tone. They are poems that dwell -

on small things remembered; little altars

dedicated to that wedded love of which I think
one might call him, more justly than Patmore,
the highest celebrant. Particularly lovely in
" '
its flavour of Spring is the slight So sweet
"
love seemed that April morn and of the ;

"
same My delight and thy delight,"
sort are
"
I climb the mossy bank of the glade," and
others. They are not among the most wonder-
ful of his achievements, but they are the best
things of the kind ever written.
^
Of his relation to Nature the next chapter
will speak more fully ;
but the greater number
of these Shorter Poems, love lyrics, elegies and
the rest, are really no more than occasional
celebrations of that characteristic emotion,
half-way to ecstasy, which he calls joy. The
word is always with us in a hundred lovely
" "
liveries :
Joy, sweetest lifeborn joy ;
" " "
heavenly Joy Joys whose earthly
;

names were never known " "

In all things
;

the essential Joy " "

beauty, which is
; Joy's
55
 ROBERT BRIDGES
" "
ladder, reaching from home to home ; my
special Joy."
The essence of this joy, " upon the formless
moments of our being flitting," is so simple
that it is hard to capture. Those moments
when " life and joy are one " seldom declare
themselves here in sudden, dizzy upspringings
of the imagination, fountains of light that
leave us dazzled or blinded but they do
;

illumine nearly every one of his poems with a

mild radiance, so that the whole range of this
man's work is like nothing so much as a sunny
"
English landscape. Shall I compare thee to a
Summer's day? Thou art more lovely and
more temperate."
I suppose it because we are used in our
is

poetry to the tropical kind of imagination

which carries us swiftly beyond the temperate
regions of ordinary experience, that so many
have overlooked this tender warmth in the
work of Bridges, and have even called him
cold. At highest reach the thin flame is
its

almost colourless, the finest emanation of the

" J!

spirit leaping live and laughing higher

that seems paler still when it is compared with
those bonfires of stale passion and violent
emotions, staining the sky red, which have
sooted so much of our poetry. It is this fifth
56
 BEAUTY AND JOY
essence of Joy which flickers out in the great
ode at the end of his Prometheus :

My soul is drunk with joy, her new desire

In far forbidden places wanders away.
Her hopes with free bright-coloured wings of fire

Upon the gloom of thought

Are sailing out.

And then, as the still flame, burning, steadies

itself :

O my vague desires !

Ye lambent flames of the soul, her offspring fires :

That are my soul herself in pangs sublime

Rising and flying to heaven before her time. . . .

Here we have poetry that is almost akin to

music in the fusion of thought with expression ;

it seems almost to have slipped the bonds of

the spoken word. It is all free and splendid :

"
Joy, the joy of flight." It is in passages like
this and they are rare that the Bridges
ecstasy most nearly approaches to that of the
great mystics the Wordsworth of the Lines
:

"
Written above Tintern Abbey finding that
serene and blessed mood in which we are laid
asleep in body and become a living soul,"
" "
when, with the deep power of joy we see
into the life of things. Yet even here there is
a distinction for the ecstasy of Bridges is not
;

nearly as remote or impersonal as that of the

mystics ;
it is more homely, more universal ;

57
 ROBERT BRIDGES
and that is why it is easily communicable to
those who approach his work with love, so
that they can taste it without wonder or
enviousness. In effect, while the joy of most
poetry resolves itself into a Promethean at-
tempt to transcend the beauties of life, the joy
of Bridges is seldom more than part of the
"
common joy of being alive. For once born,"
he says in Wintry Delights :

whatever 'tis worth, LIFE is to be held to.

Itsmere persistence esteem'd as real attainment, . . .

And 'twere worth the living, howe'er unkindly bereft of

Those joys and comforts, thro' which we chiefly regard it.

He accepts life not as a stain,

cheerfully,
however brilliant, upon the white radiance of
eternity, but as the one attainment of which
we are complete masters. It has been the
habit of poets to fret at their chains, and it has
taken a good deal of pseudo-mysticism to
reconcile them to the limitations of this

weary planet. It is characteristic of Bridges'

spiritual courage thathe wears them without
complaint, grasping with a zest as passionate
almost as Whitman's at the supreme moments.
Spiritually he might well have been the
"
author of that song of parting, Joy, ship-
mate, joy."
It is not difficult to analyse the sources of
58
 BEAUTY AND JOY
this emotion.Naturally it beats with a
quickened pulse in the rather subdued pages
of The Growth of Love, though here he writes
for the most part of its transitoriness :

Ah, heavenly joy !But who hath ever heard,

Who hath seen joy, or who shall ever find
Joy's language ? There is neither speech nor word ;

Nought but itself to teach it to mankind.

And in the Shorter Poems he finds everywhere

joy less elusive. He finds it in the simplest of
beauties. No
poet but Wordsworth has so
contented himself with the common flowers ;

for him they hold "A

joy of love at sight."
"
The very names of things beloved are dear,"
he says somewhere in the sonnets, and so he
enshrines in the tale of remembered joys his
"
lovely catalogue of the idle flowers." It is
as though every new joy added to his hoarded
delights will in some way enrich or amplify
his spiritual dignity, and make life more
worth the living. Nor does the joy fade with
the flower for when he lingers upon these
;

exquisite names,
'tis winter, child,
And bitter north winds blow,
The ways are wet and wild,
The land is laid in snow.

In the same secretive spirit he has builded,

"
out of his treasure house," a melody of " all
59
 ROBERT BRIDGES
fair sounds that I love, remembered together
:

in one.'

And I knew not whether

From waves of rustling wheat it was,

Recoveringly that pass :

Or a hum of bees in the queenly robes of the lime :

Or a descant in pairing time

Of warbling birds or watery bells
:

Of rivulets in the hills.

Indeed, it would seem that much of his joy is

retrospective; a joy in idleness, a sweet con-

templation of garnered riches which brings a
gentle flush of pleasure to the conscious mind.
Life is overwhelming in its wealth of this
"
simple enjoyment, calm in its excess,"
And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss,
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.

And conception of joy as an

I think this
inalienable possession (echoed again with
"
Margaret's cry in Palicio Oh, joy, joy, joy,
This beauteous world is mine, All Sicily mine,
This morning mine ") is partly the secret of
the love which these poems inspire. They
imply so much that is gallant and courageous,
such a splendid steadfastness in the worship
of beauty, that the reading of them is a re-

proach to those of us who have the dust of

60
 BEAUTY AND JOY
experience in our eyes. I do not think any
poet in our literature has been so determined
"
in his purpose of seeking the face of beauty
"
without blame he has sought it with
;

something of the religious fervour which we

have seen informing the sonnets of The Growth
of Love ; and his reward is joy.

61
 IV

FRESHNESS OF VISION
THE poetry of Bridges is not so much a return
nature as a return to naturalness. The
tradition of the Romantic School made fields
and trees and hills the proper material for
poetic treatment as definitely as they banished
groves, nymphs and temples ;
so that even
the latest breath of the great Victorian era
was drawn in the open air. But the devotion
to nature had become more reflective, and a
trifle indolent. One does not imagine that the
sounding cataract haunted Lord Tennyson
like a passion. But the downward smoke of
those lazy streams in the land of the Lotus-
Eaters is very pretty and natural ;
none of
the Augustans could have done it, except
Pope, who could do anything. Indeed, Tenny-
son's very common touches of natural descrip-
tion are a first suggestion of the method which
Bridges represents. The Romantics wooed
nature passionately, as though their very
fervour could force her secret from her. And
there are moments when it seems as if the
62
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
secret is on the verge of being told. In the
work of Bridges nature being wooed,
is still

but critically. Only here and there does he

forgo his detachment to give us such ardent
tones as this :

And when I saw her, then I worshipped her,

And said, O bounteous Spring, O beauteous Spring,
Mother of all my years, thou who dost stir
My heart to adore thee and my tongue to sing,
Flower of my fruit, of my heart's blood the fire,
Of all my satisfaction the desire !

How art thou every year more beautiful . . .

or this :

For who so well hath wooed the maiden hours

As quite to have won the worth of their rich show,
To rob the night of mystery, or the flowers
Of their sweet delicacy ere they go ? ...

Perhaps an adventure which is not

it is

lightly to be made in verse. It means either

complete failure, or something that is only the
shadow Coleridge tried it, as if
of success.

casually, and succeeded more often than he

failed. Francis Thompson tried it, passionately,
and failed more often than he succeeded.
Possibly it is dangerous, this tracking of the
"
nude unutterable thought." Bridges rarely
attempts to pierce to the mysterious heart of
things. His genius is reflective rather than ^ V
intuitive. His first concern is with beauty
 ROBERT BRIDGES
not the beauty of form and movement only,
but of the ideas and states of mind to which
they give birth. When he has given us this
he is content. He does not try to unveil the
mystery of terror which is always to some
extent present in the pathos we find in any-
thing beautiful. He is happy to show us Nature
in her robe of beauty and joy, without those
sudden intuitions
such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven.

Nobody has given us a satisfactory account

of ecstasy in literature. Arthur Machen has
snared the shadow of one in a very pleasantly
written essay, and makes it, not quite justifi-
ably, the ultimate test of great writing. But
at best one can only say that this author has
it, the other has not, and the solution of the

acrostic has yet to be found. Thus it is in

Smollett, but not in Fielding in Shenstone,
;

but not in Pope ;

in Dickens, but not in

Thackeray in Francis Thompson, but not in

;

Robert Bridges. Small men have caught it

where great men have missed it. It is not to
be found merely in this sentence or in that ;

it is a hidden flame which may set a whole

book flickering with strange meanings. Again,

it may be concentrated in a single phrase. I
have already suggested that it is the result of
64
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
a reconciliation between things that are in
thought very distant or opposed, or perhaps a
blending of rays that lie generally beyond the
imaginative spectrum. But comparisons of
this kind cannot do more than hint where it
lies.

The fact remains that this ecstasy, or what-

ever we choose to call it, is in all English

writers unmistakably present or unmis-

takably absent. Although we cannot define
it, it draws a definite line across the whole
field of English literature. The distinctions
which are commonly made are usually aspects
of the same difference. The opposed schools
of classic and romantic poets, of mystic and

non-mystic poets, of intuitive and reflective

poets, of mad and sane poets, are separated
by the same line in different parts of its length.
Of the first of these distinctions, which was
moreover the first to be generally recognized,
a footnote to the Essay on Milton's Prosody
gives this excellent account :

To put the matter in the simplest

diagrammatic
form, every work of art a combination of nature
is

and imagination. If it were all nature it would not

be art ; if it were all imagination it would be un-
intelligible, and this last because art is man's
creation, and man is a part of nature. We may,
therefore, roughly figure any work of art as being
E 65
 ROBERT BRIDGES
compounded of fifty parts imagination and fifty
nature, or ten of one and ninety of the other, and so
on : and (supposing equal intellectual excellence and
aesthetic beauty) the best of two works of art would be
the one which had most imagination and least nature.
Classical art is that which, like the most characteristic
Greek work, fixes certain natural limits, and does not
transgress them. It is poised at a certain imaginative
height within touch of common life, and it does not
deviate very far either above or below this constant
" "
elevation. Romantic art refuses these reasonable
limits, and leaving the imagination free to transcend
them, is in danger of losing touch with nature.
Thence it follows that in romantic art (where the
percentage, so to speak, of the natural may be
reduced to a very small proportion) it becomes neces-
sary for the natural to be reinforced, and this can
only be done by realism far stronger than classical
art would bear which, not being at so great a height,
;

is more easily degraded and brought down and thus;

realism becomes the companion of imagination. This,

I believe, gives a true and intelligible account of one
of the main distinctions between classical and romantic
as we use those ill-defined terms.

This is, at an excellent account of

any rate,
Bridges' own poetic method. It might also be
used to justify the method of a more recent
school of poets who for reasons which I am
totally at a loss to guess are sometimes
described as Bridges' disciples. It fixes the

place of realism in literature as a means of

66
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
weighting a too exuberant imagination so
that it shall not drift too far from the earth.
But realism is no more the proper sphere of
poetry than sandbags are the motive power
of a balloon. One can only guess how far
Bridges has deliberately moored his craft in
mid-air. It may be this very limitation of
method which has prevented him from reach-
ing the imaginative heights of those who are
called the metaphysical poets. I suspect that
the rarity of imaginative phrases in his work
is one of the results.

One notices this limitation of method all

through the Shorter Poems, and perhaps it

helps that impression of sincerity which is one
of their special charms. It shows itself in the
sane directness of his outlook. Here, as else-
where, he allows natural beauty to express
itself. He gives us none of the false currency
of fine phrases. When he personifies nature
or any of the things of nature, it is more often
by deliberate comparison than by any imagina-
tive fusion of idea. This manner of keeping
nature and imagination apart and as it were
parallel to one another, results sometimes in
a rather exquisite quality which is rare in
English verse, something at once naive and
restrained, severe yet passionate, a certain
grave ecstasy. We see it in the Sea Poppy
67
 ROBERT BRIDGES
lyric, where one might almost mark off
definitely the lines which are " nature " and
those which are " imagination." First the
flower is pictured with exquisite accuracy and
charm ; then, with an almost Vergilian tender-
ness, we are given the image which it suggests ;
then in the we
are brought back to
last couplet
the little yellow poppy, shaking on the edge of
the waves, with almost a hint of apology for
the imaginative flight which the poet has
taken us. He writes of the sea again in a
curiously effective stanza :

The sea keeps not the Sabbath day,

His waves come rolling evermore ;

His noisy toil grindeth the shore,

And all the cliff is drencht with spray.
The touch of imagination just escapes the
ridiculous ; lends more effect to the
but it

simple description that follows than the most

imaginative piece of invocation could have
done. We are not told that the ocean is a
"
dim leviathan," or even a " sulky grey old
brute," but merely that he does not keep the
Sabbath day. And notice that one suggestion
is not allowed to lead to another
willy-nilly ;

the word " toil " fixes the image rather than
extends it.
This is only to say that Bridges is not a
mystic poet, a metaphysical poet, or a romantic
68
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
poet. He does not transfuse the shows of
nature in a white heat of imagination. Of
Matthew Arnold's four modes of dealing with
nature the conventional, the faithful, the
Greek and the magical the last has been
the birthright of our greatest poets. It is not
the method of Bridges. Time after time
nature in one or other of her aspects has been
rapt into a metaphor or pressed into the
service of some flaming mystery. But it is

surprising how rarely the earth has been

described simply and faithfully for the sake
of its intrinsic beauty.

Coleridge, who of all poets comes nearest to

uniting both methods, could write, in lines
which are almost faint with their own beauty,
of that dell which

Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate

As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax
When, through its half-transparent stalks at eve
The level sunshine glimmers with green light.

The simile, in spite of its exquisite actuality,

lifts the dell beyond the reach of common
sight ; it has become visionary by some hidden
magic it is a valley in fairyland. In a slightly
;

reminiscent passage, Bridges describes his

vision of the virgin Spring " walking the
"
sprinkled meadows at sundown :

69
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Her dress was greener than the tenderest leaf
That trembled in the sunset glare aglow
:

Herself more delicate than is the brief

Pink apple-blossom, that May showers lay low,
And more delicious than's the earliest streak
The blushing rose shows of her crimson cheek.

Here, with a similar image and almost

equal beauty of expression, the effect seems
to me to be practically inverted. Imagination
is poised above the beauty of the vision,

defining it, rather than below, indicating and

suggesting. With Bridges imagination is a
milder, perhaps more constant radiance, thrown
across a landscape and calling from it a curi-
ously responsive glow of luminous detail.
And yet, by a strange contradiction, he is
the author of some of the most exquisite
imaginative phrases in the language. Never
very common, they are most found, I think,
in his later work ;and generally they are very
nearly perfect. Mr. Symons has noticed the
magic with which this poet brings together
alien words so that they seem as though they
have been designed for one another from their
infancy. But he has pointed out at the same
time that the boldest of them do not surprise
one. One reason for this, no doubt, is that they
are so often inevitable that the imagination
accepts them at once as perfectly fit and
natural. Bridges has the courage of all great
70
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
artists in disdaining all but the essential and
inclusive epithet. But here again it seems to
me that his finest phrases, however imaginative,
are not suggestive of anything beyond their
own beauty. Take, for instance, the wonderful
picture of morning, when
Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree,

or the
dreamy butterflies

Unpiloted in the sun,

or the palm-willow in winter where

... The spring-goddess cowers in faint attire

Of frightened fire.

Each of these lovely phrases is in one sense

suggestive ;
it includes many ideas that are
not actually expressed. But the suggestion
extends only to what may serve to complete
the picture. It does not leave us groping.

Apart from the vocal beauty and subtle con-

nection of words, these phrases are in essence
a divine economy of language joined with
most delicate imagining.
I have said that the phrases that have any
claim to be really imaginative are few. But
there are enough, if he had never written any-
thing else, to place him with the greatest
of phrase-makers. I know of few things
71
 ROBERT BRIDGES
more beautiful than this picture of the hive-
bees in the first classical epistle :

The yellow honey-makers

Whose images from of old have haunted poetry, settling
On the blossoms of man's dream-garden as on the summer
flowers.

Another superb imaginative flash gives us

"
Cupid's soft unchristened smile." Here is
another, in the picture of a November land-
scape, when the night deepens

with Winter to starve grass and tree,

And soon to bury in snow
The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole,
Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole
Of how her end shall be.

But even in the less ambitious of the Shorter

Poems we find the homely magic of Bridges'
imagination. And there is a sense in which,
in the full chorus of our lyric poetry, one hears
no voice so peculiarly English. If the poet has
caught for us any whisper which no writer
before him has been able to snare, it is less an
impalpable undertone of the earth than a very
clear note of native song. Shelley's verse
bears a wild-orchis fragrance Keats the ;
"
perfume of a musk-rose blowing in a green
"
island, far from all men's knowing Words- ;

worth's the essence of mountain loneliness

72
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
and of wide spaces. The lyrics of Robert
Bridges are fresh with the scent of the English *

country-side. They are the voice of a green

and pleasant land. They march with the season
and all the misty changes of English weather.
We have no verse since Shakespeare's that
smells so of the meadows. And there is some-
thing in the nature-poems which is as new as
it seems natural and inevitable.

Riding adown the country lanes . . .

he begins one of his later poems. The verses

are of no special merit, but the opening is so
characteristic that there is no poet before
Bridges in whose work one would meet it
without a little thrill of surprise and pleasure.
This homely lilt with its suggestion of true de-
light in the simple things of outdoor life in Eng-
land is hardly to be matched. Such phrases as
" "
Spring goeth all in
white," Gay marigold is
"
frolic," The green corn waving in the dale,"
have something of the quiet ecstasy of " When
daffodils begin to peer." Bridges is one of the
few poets who have dared to take the lanes
and meadows for granted without craving to
say something fine about them.
Whitman, sniffing the prairie smell beyond
the Missouri, vowed to praise nothing in art
or aught else that had not absorbed the breath
73
 ROBERT BRIDGES
of the plains and could give it out again. It
has taken English poetry five hundred years to
absorb England. Shakespeare's " native wood-
"
notes wild are only, as it were, accidentals in
the march of his music. Even Wordsworth
missed the delicate bloom of the English
" "
atmosphere. One after another the major
poets have been preoccupied with the music
of the spheres and have had no ear for the

piercingly sweet melodies of the English

country-side. Others have frankly despised it
in comparison with exotic effects. One must
look back to smaller men, half forgotten in
the study and unknown in the street, for the
intermittent snatches of this sense of England,
to the serious and indolent Thomson, and to
Shenstone, poor poet and inspired gardener.
It is easy to confuse the genius of a poet
with the genius of his work. The Shorter
J Poems are very nearly the most English thing
in our language ;and this simply because
Bridges has dared to be plainly pictorial, not
complicating his effects with a mixture of
morality or imaginative suggestion. They are
not a series of illustrated thoughts, but of
pictures defined and enriched by imagination.
No other poet has treated so lovingly or
minutely of the thousand shifting elements of
English landscape. Here is a man who dis-
74
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
tinguishes in verse the tones of winter skies,
June skies, October skies, rainy skies, skies
that hold snow the shapes of clouds, cloud-
;

shadows ;
blue distances and grey distances ;

valley mists and river mists, and all the

drifting,changing aspects of island weather.
The nature-lyrics might be arranged into a
song-cycle of English seasons which would
never have been surpassed for faithfulness
and charm. He presents England directly as
England presents itself in open highlands and
:

open lowlands, with a wealth of delicate but

not obscure detail.
This is one of the new paths that Bridges
has opened to us. The English genius is, in the
main, intuitive, and I have suggested that the
genius of Bridges, in so far as it is reflective,
becomes remote from the national stamp. In
this respect, if is to be made,
the distinction
he is, possibly, less
English than the rest.
Yet English nature-poetry, from Chaucer to
Tennyson, has given us much that is exotic
in colour^ and suggestion with little that is

really nature. It has not been the normal

method of our poets to subdue their vision to
the pale tones of an English landscape.
Whether we refer it to the racial love of
wandering or to some warm Iberian strain in our
blood, the tendency is not to be overlooked.
75
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Keats' longing for a beaker full of the warm
south colours all his natural description, which
is the most imaginative and least actual in the
"
language. Nature was related to him," in
"
Bridges' own phrase, as an enchantress to a
dreamer." He found less enchantment in the
earth itself than in the dreams with which he
embroidered it. Shelley, with more delicate
apprehension of colour and movement, brings
the same transfusing warmth of imagination.
In Wordsworth himself a quiet rural England
inspired but moral sentiments.
little His
brain was haunted by mountains and cataracts,
and he passed by the trim beauty of the
country-side. The vision of England has been
always with us, but it has been too cold to
supply its own inspiration. When the fairies
were banished from the land, her woods and
rivers had to be peopled with legions of nymphs
and hamadryads. The ecstatic glimpses of
England in Comus and L' Allegro, the green
"
hillocks, the hedgerow elms, the meadows trim
with daisies pied," are not
complete till
Corydon and Thyrsis strut on between the oaks.
Pope a true lover of nature, as I suspect
were many of his maligned contemporaries
made of the Thames valley a great garden.
Bridges declares boldly that meadows, rivers,
trees, woods and the commonplaces of nature
76
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
are their own justification. They are the
accepted material of his verse. He handles
them fearlessly in all their half -tints and subtle
variations.
These pictures of England are not easily to
be forgotten. They give a freshness to the
little volume of Bridges' which one finds in
"
only a few books ;
such are The Shropshire
Lad" and "Leaves of Grass." To those who
recognize this open-air fragrance as one of the
rarest and most exquisite things in literature
the Shorter Poems will be one of the dear and
intimate books that we admit to the inner
circle of literary delights. The incomparable
" "
landscape of the North Wind in October ;
"
the April lyric that begins Wanton with long
delay," the merry picture of a windmill; the
vision of the oak tree falling in the silence of
a copse ; the magic flame of the palm willow
in early spring ; these and a score of other

Idylls, little pictures, haunt the mind with the

fragrance of actual memories of some chance
aspect of beauty, realized in an exalted
moment. The colours remain wonderfully
bright with the flush of their original inspira-
tion. The scenes are picked out against the
wide background of a land which the poet
assumes instinctively that we know and love.
This confidence is part of the charm ;
there
77
 ROBERT BRIDGES
is a sense of actual locality and surroundings
which must almost be shared, an open secret
between poet and reader, before the poems,
with all their simplicity, find their proper
frame in the mind's eye. In the first book of
the Shorter Poems, there is an impression of the
time, when a gale, after blowing all night,
"
drops, in the morning, suddenly the hour,"
as Bridges puts it with characteristic precision
"
the wind has ceased to blow." This song
of a morning when

The horses of the strong south-west

Are pastured round his tropic tent,

is in itself complete and very beautiful. But

it has, I think, another characteristic which per-
vades the Poems, and indeed all
Shorter
Bridges' work, with a special charm. There is
a sense not only of the momentary local
harmonies of movement and colour, which a
dozen poets might have given us equally well,
but of the strong bass of the surrounding
country, sea and land. The soft inland touch
"
in the third stanza, the rock and tower and
"
tree whither the frightened birds had fled to
house, defines subtly the whole atmosphere of
a coast district in South England on a day of
serried cumulus cloud. Then the magnificent
sweep of the last stanzas carries us with the
78
 FRESHNESS OF VISION
clouds above meadow and down, " sheer off
the cliff upon the sea," and away over the
dancing Channel where they

piling all the south with light

Dapple in France the fertile plains.

The poem is no longer of a day of the north-

wester where Sussex meets the sea its ;

delicate motion has swept an incredibly wide

landscape before the tiny lens of the verse.
Such an impression that the minute and
often concentrated description of nature in
the poems is really the nucleus of a vast circle
of suggested landscape meets us in many
poems where it depends upon devices far less

apparent than in that I have just quoted. It

is irresistible in the picture of the sea-poppy in

the first book its lyric simplicity will perhaps

make it immortal where the seeing eye
glimpses a whole stretch of fertile hinterland
backing its ragged strip of sand. It is present
"
in such unforgettable fragments as The
"
evening darkens over in the third book, or
" " "
The upper
skies are palest blue and The
"
clouds have left the sky in the fourth, as
strongly as in the more elaborate scenic
effects. It is because of this that he who reads

only the opening stanzas of Indolence in Book

Three must feel that he has been a long journey
79
 ROBERT BRIDGES
"
between the happy shires," and drunk deeply
of the sweet air of the Thames valley.
"
There
is a hill beside the silver Thames," begins
another poem in the same book, which holds
again a continuous sense of surrounding
country, a note of what Jefferies called the
'' "
exquisite undertone of the earth in summer
"
that which just trembles at the extreme
edge of hearing." We meet it by the Thames
again in the beautiful last stanzas of The
Voice of Nature :

But far away I think, in the Thames valley,

The silent river glides by flowery banks :

And birds sing sweetly in branches that arch an alley

Of cloistered trees, moss grown in their ancient ranks,
Where if a light air stray
laden with hum of bees and scent of may.
'Tis
Love and peace be thine, O spirit, for ever :

Serve thy sweet desire despise endeavour.

:

And if it were only for thee, entranced river,

That scarce dost rock the lily on her airy stem,
Or stir a wave to murmur, or a rush to quiver ;

Wer't but for the woods, and summer asleep in them :

For you my bowers green,

My hedges of rose and woodbine, with walks between,
Then well could I read wisdom in every feature,
O well should I understand the voice of Nature.

80
 LANDSCAPE
IT this sense of landscape, to which I re-
is

ferred as an explanation of Bridges' appealing

"
Englishism," that will be, I think, his
special claim to immortality. His classicism,
his sense of joy and beauty, his love of earth,
his freshness of vision, are not in themselves

enough to assure him more than minor fame.

The last would rank him with a select band, of
whom, while the greatest Shakespeare, the
is

least are in popular estimation very small

poets indeed. It is from a fusion of his imagina-

tive temper with an unequalled insight into
natural beauty that there emerges this crown-
ing distinction.
Literature is a kingdom where battles are
fought more often on means than on prin-
ciples. As far as I am aware, nobody has
challenged Bridges' artistic right to his almost
startlingly novel method of approaching
nature. One would be surprised to find him
made the subject of such sweeping polemics as
these :

F 81
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Now there is but one grand style in the treatment
of all subjects whatsoever, and that style is based on
the perfect knowledge, and consists in the simple
unencumbered rendering of the specific characters of
the given object be
man, beast, or flower.
it Every
change, caricature or abandonment of such specific
character is as destructive of grandeur as it is of
truth, of beauty as of propriety. Every alteration
of the features of nature has its origin either in power-
less indolence or blind audacity ; in the folly which

forgets, or the indolence which desecrates, works

which it is the pride of angels to know and their

privilege to love.

Yet these words are as applicable as a

defence and explanation of the bulk of Bridges'
works as of the English landscape artists to
" "
whom their admirer
sincere dedicated
Modern Painters. Indeed, Ruskin's views
would serve not only on general grounds, but
in fullest detail, as an a?roXoy/a for a good
deal that is novel in the method of the Shorter
Poems. One questions whether the author of
such lines as I will quote stands to be judged
by literary or by pictorial canons.

In patient russet is his forest spread,

All bright with bramble red,
With beechen moss
And holly sheen the oak silver and stark
:

Sunneth his aged bark

And wrinkled boss.
82
 LANDSCAPE
Or
Of airy fans the delicate throng-
Torn and scattered around :

Far out afield they lie,

In the watery furrows die,
In grassy pools of the flood they sink and drown,
Green-golden, orange, vermilion, golden and brown,
The high year's flaunting crown
Shattered and trampled down.

Though the whole problem which exercised

Ruskin and his critics is to a certain extent
self-resolved when applied to the poetic art,
the philosophic distinction is as inevitable as
ever. Half a century has shown us the result
of that struggle, and I am not concerned to

carry through the comparison further than to

place Bridges in the spiritual category of the
English landscape painters.
We need only consider the extraordinary
grasp of detail and nicety of selection that
"
go to the composition of his landscape."
Though it is within the limits of pure description
that he develops his genius as a poet of land-
scape, it is in the perfectness of the description
that we find his greatness as an inspired poet.
Here is none of the transforming imagination
that set rolling the heavy periods of Mr.
Ruskin. The heaven-sent phrase is rare the ;

obvious epithet, or at least an epithet of

superficial character, is generally chosen.
83
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Often it is a colour epithet. In addition to
" " "
dewy eves," scented hay," dewy lawns,"
" " "
straight trunks," warbling birds," leafy
" " "
blossom-
trees," cooing doves," hot sun,"
ing boughs of April," we hear much of " white
" " "
clouds," blue skies," white sails," green
" "
grass," golden sun," bowers green," and
the like. When Keats tells us, picturing
the Bacchic revellers in Endymion :

Like to a moving vintage down they came

Crowned with green leaves and faces all on flame,

the simple adjective has a fragrance and a

magic unsurpassed even in that mine of
heaven-sent epithets. Imagination has taken
a magnificent flight to circle back upon the
obvious. In the fine picture of a day in
late winter, Bridges writes :

A black rook stirs the branches here and there,

Foraging to repair
His broken home.

Here the common epithet has no such imagina-

tive strength. It could have been applied
almost equally well to the bare branches. It
merely fixes for the rook his colour-value in
"
the picture. In the same way the green
"
grass and leafy trees and snowy skies do
not, as a rule, carry any special suggestion.
They are simply colour units to be disposed as
84
 LANDSCAPE
the spirit of the scene shall dictate. Assuming
a keen actuality of imagination in the reader,
the epithets could be left out and we should
miss nothing. Behind their use there is a
robust sense that they are among the diviner
commonplaces that will not stale with repeti-
tion ; they hint at an elevated sense of com-
munion with nature in which the simplest
properties of bird or flower begin to seem the
most poetic.
In any case it is no part of Bridges' method
in these poems of landscape to strive for
special effect in this or that part of his picture.
He has so severe an eye for the whole that
nothing of minor importance must stand out
beyond the rest. If he ventures upon detailed
description of a flower as in the poppy lyric
it is generally in the simplest terms of its
"
superficial quality, its attributes as an
element of expression." It is one of the signs,
I think, of the great poet that he is fearless in
using the obvious epithet where it will serve a
coherent picture, as it is of the small one that,
in these very conditions, he abandons it to
grope for the exalting phrase. True, the
adjective is only a poetic tradition, a legacy of
the Augustans, and if it were not for the
exalted sense of the obvious that I have
mentioned more severe art would banish the
85
 ROBERT BRIDGES
common epithet altogether. But few poets have
used it so freely or effectively as Bridges for
the sake of its mosaic value in a complex
scheme.
Indeed, in the finer efforts of landscape it
tends to disappear. Here is an example,
from the fifth Book, of this most simple and
subtle art :

NORTH WIND IN OCTOBER

In the golden glade the chestnuts are fallen all ;

From the sered boughs of the oak the acorns fall :

The beech scatters her ruddy fire ;

The lime hath stripped to the cold,

And standeth naked above her yellow attire :

The larch thinneth her spire

To lay the ways of the wood with cloth of gold.

Out of the golden-green and white

Of the brake the fir-trees stand upright
In the forest of flame, and wave aloft
To the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft.

But swiftly in shuddering gloom the splendours fail,

As the harrying North- wind beareth
A cloud of skirmishing hail
The grieved woodland to smite :

In a hurricane through the trees he teareth,

Raking the boughs and the leaves rending,
And whistleth to the descending
Blows of his icy flail.
Gold and snow he mixeth in spite,
And whirleth afar ; as away on his winnowing flight
He passeth, and all again for a while is bright.
86
 LANDSCAPE
The whole thing very inelaborate. The
is

first seven lines are a ground harmony in

shades of golden brown, of which the first

epithet strikes the prevailing tone. The chest-
nuts supply their warm red-brown, more by
suggestion than as part of the picture, to lie
with the honey-brown acorns the hint of
;
"
lemon -yellow borne by the word " lime is
"
reinforced by the pale gold of her yellow
"
attire ;and the larch repeats the prevailing
tone with a scattering of her golden needles
between the dark columns of the tree-trunks.
These, already implied, are finely grouped by
"
suggestion in the ways of the wood."
The middle part of the poem brings a
direct note of contrast with the first picture,
which, however, enforced with a firm and
is still

delicate iterationand a heightened brilliance

" "
by the phrases golden-green and white
and " forest of flame," a vision of the blue-
green fir-tops against the blue sky. Their
swaying tranquillity leads to the hurrying
change of the third picture, which spreads a
sudden veil of grey and snow white. Then
comes the bold mixing of gold and snow ;

then, at a breath, the storm passes, and the

first picture shines out again. One could fill

the space of this little poem many times over

in pointing out all the exquisite touches it
87
 ROBERT BRIDGES
holds. The perfectly adapted rhythmic
motion of the last line, of line 15, and in the
subtle changes of lines 10 and 11. The
graduated effect of assonance, in the same
"
lines, from the words fir-trees," "forest,"
" "
"flame," "aloft," tuftings and "soft";
the collision of final s
"
and initial " s " in
"

the last two words, exquisitely suggestive ;

" r's 5:
the blustering in lines 16 and 17 ;

the characteristic inversions in the same place ;

the pathetic echo of " fallen all " ; the gently

imaginative personification of the north wind,
finely subdued to the seen effect of his move-
ment ; the amazingly skilful modulation of
vowel sounds which gives such a rich succession
of open notes in some fifty words of concen-
trated description. With this overwhelming
compression of beautiful things I am not at
the moment concerned nor with the perfect
;

descriptive justice of every epithet in the

poem.
Consider only, apart from the technical and
imaginative beauty, the careful composition and
well-adapted movement of the poem. I think
it is nearly flawless. In a method where
grouping must be an effect of time instead of
space where colour is more a matter of
;

than of realization
infinitely careful suggestion ;

where light and shade depend on successive

88
 LANDSCAPE
vowel-tones which must each fall into their
place in two or perhaps three other schemes
of values, the result is sufficiently surprising.
No poet before Bridges has deliberately set
himself to attain in words the effects that
belong really to the brush. And since the
appeal of language falls more directly upon the
imagination, the vision is correspondingly
clear and exact. The grace of movement, too,
enters with a delightful enhancement. I do
not suggest that Bridges has developed a new
art, or that the poet can ever invade the realm
of the painter. Indeed, if achievements of this
kind were not so common in Bridges' work,
and had not all the appearance of deliberate
mastery over a new method, one would regard
it simply as a tour de force, an amazing double

adventure in the arts. One has only to tamper

with the poem, changing a word here and
there, to realize its exquisite poise. The
alteration of a single tone will fog the whole
picture.
This method is so often repeated in the few
pages they are less than a hundred of the
Shorter Poems, that it is not to be considered
as a casual inspiration. It reaches perfection
in at least a score of poems. I will mention
" "
only, Whither, O splendid ship," I saw the
Virgin-Mother," the third and fourth stanzas
89
 ROBERT BRIDGES
" 55
of There a
beside the silver Thames,
is hill
all in the Second Book
" 55
Indolence, in
;

Book III ; " 55 "

Last week of February, The
55 "
pinks along my garden walks, The storm is
' "
over,
5
in Book IV
and The garden
;
in
September," and "The Palm Willow,
55
in
Book V. They are all sustained examples of
5

Bridges supreme art of verse-landscape.

In spite of, or rather because of, this use of
almost unexpressive phrases, one cannot help
noticing the perfect consistency of atmosphere
5
in a Bridges picture. It is the power of

drawing out the tone of some scene over the

whole of a poem. Tennyson had something
of the same faculty I suspect that it is a
;

matter of vowel-colour, of which the poet had

such a masterly sense. The finest example of
it is from the New Poems :

NOVEMBER
The lonely season in lonely lands, when fled
Are half the birds, and mists and the sun
lie low,
Is rarely seen, nor strayeth far from his bed ;

The short days pass un welcomed one by one.

Out by the mantled engine stands

ricks the
Crestfallen, deserted, now all hands
for
Are told to the plough, and ere it is dawn appear
The teams following and crossing far and near,
As hour by hour they broaden the brown bands
Of the striped fields and behind them firk and prance
;

The heavy rooks, and daws grey-pated dance ;

90
 LANDSCAPE
As awhile, surmounting a crest, in sharp outline
(A miniature of toil, a gem's design,)
They are pictured, horses and men, or now near by
Above the lane they shout lifting the share,
By the trim hedgerow bloom'd with purple air ;
Where, under the thorns, dead leaves in huddle lie
Packed by the gales of Autumn, and in and out
The small wrens glide
With happy note of cheer,
And yellow amorets flutter above and about,
Gay, familiar in fear.

And now, if the night shall be cold, across the sky

Linnets and twites, in small flocks helter-skelter,

All the afternoon to the gardens fly,
From thistle-pastures hurrying to gain the shelter
Of American rhododendron or cherry-laurel :

And here and there, near chilly setting of sun,

In an isolated tree a congregation
Of starlings chatter and chide,
Thickset as summer leaves, in garrulous quarrel :

Suddenly they hush as one,

The tree top springs,
And off, with a whirr of wings,
They fly by the score
To the holly-thicket, and there with myriads more
Dispute for the roosts, and from the unseen nation
A babel of tongues, like running water unceasing,
Makes live the wood, the flocking cries increasing,

Wrangling discordantly, incessantly,

While falls the night on them self-occupied ;

The long dark night, that lengthens slow,

Deepening with Winter to starve grass and tree,
And soon to bury in snow
The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole
Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole
Of how her end shall be.
91
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Here there is no line, from the fine opening
to the supremely imaginative close, that is
not tinged with the same pearl-grey atmosphere,
as though not only the trim hedgerow but the
whole scene took its colour from the air. This
aspect of Bridges' genius is more noticeable
perhaps in the New Poems than anywhere
else, though in other respects they hardly
reach the level of the earlier work. The first
Eclogue is a lovely pageant of the months, a
string of precious stones each gleaming with
its delicate or fiery lustre. The two that best
illustrate this subtle control of atmosphere
" "
are July :

Heavy is the green of the fields, heavy the trees

With foliage hang, drowsy the hum of bees
In the thund'rous air the crowded scents lie low
: :

Thro' tangle of weeds the river runneth slow.

And "October":-
On frosty morns with the woods aflame, down, down
The golden spoils fall thick from the chestnut crown.
May Autumn in tranquil glory her riches spend,
With mellow apples her orchard-branches bend.
He is vigorous, too, in choosing precisely the
most effective material for his pictures, down
to the most casual points. In one of the
poems we read that, at the approach of
night
The broad cloud-driving moon in the clear sky
Lifts o'er the firs her shining shield.

92
 LANDSCAPE
From another poem I take :

And hark, on the ash-boughs ! Never did thrush sing

Louder in praise of spring
When spring is come.

In the next :

All day in the sweet box- tree the bee for pleasure hummeth;
I would point to the perfect instinct for the
" "
essential superficial quality in the choice
of firs in the first poem, of an ash tree in the

second, and a box tree in the third. In the

last two instances it adds a touch of imagina-
tive suggestion to its perfect pictorial aptness.
In the same way the poet rarely fails in his
choice of the essential epithet. Such pictures
of flowers as these :

Nor more of heavy hyacinth now may drink,

Nor spicy pink,
Nor summer's rose, nor garnered lavender,
But the few lingering scents
Of streaked pea, and gillyflower, and stocks
Of courtly purple and aromatic phlox,
"
and, within the same poem, dreamy butter-
" - throated "
flies," deepest blooms," idle
" "
effort," ragged parliament," the gentle
"
flaws of the western breeze are examples
that can be paralleled at random throughout
the Shorter Poems.
Another effect of Bridges' mosaic method,
93
 ROBERT BRIDGES
in which the parts are essential and none
all

pre-eminent, is the unusual dignity that falls

upon the common words of the language. It
is a manner which
curiously calls attention to
words which have generally kept a minor
place, or have been made the peg for a phrase
or epithet. Even the simpler names of trees
and flowers, and the more elementary words
and field, are sometimes strangely
sky, grass, sea,
enhanced by this means. It seems as if a word
which has once borne an important part in a
colour scheme suggests harmonics in the
tonal effect of a line, related here by assonance
and here by rhyme to some other parts of
the structure, and bearing a subtle share in
the rhythmic scheme, will give out more
purely its intrinsic colour and beauty. It is
difficult to illustrate a point depending upon
such fragile relations perhaps the following
:

lines will serve :

And at all times to hear are drowsy tones

Of dizzy flies, and humming drones,
With sudden flap of pigeon wings in the sky,
Or the wild cry
Of thirsty rooks that scour ascare
The distant blue, to watering as they fare
With creaking pinions. . . .

It is impossible to exaggerate the technical

complexity of this later method. Nothing is

94
 LANDSCAPE
to be gained by dissecting all the devices that
go to the making of its polyphony. There is
none that is actually new in English verse,
but no poet has lavished and combined them
so confidently as Bridges. At times they are
spun together with an
almost incredible
mastery one;
would be dazzled by the
jugglery of the technique if it were not always,
or nearly always, subordinate to the form of
the whole. There is hardly a poem, I think,
in the five books of lyrics, that gives such an
effect of severe form as The Downs :

O bold majestic downs, smooth, fair and lonely ;

still solitude, only matched in the skies ;

Perilous in steep places,

Soft in the level races,
Where sweeping in phantom silence the cloudland flies ;

With lovely undulation of fall and rise ;

Entrenched with thickets thorned,

By delicate miniature dainty flowersadorned !

1 climb your crown, and lo ! a sight surprising

Of sea in front uprising, steep and wide :

And scattered ships ascending

To heaven, lost in the blending
Of distant blues, where water and sky divide,
Urging their engines against wind and tide,
And all so small and slow
They seem to be wearily pointing the way they would go.
The accumulated murmur of soft plashing,
Of waves on rocks dashing and searching the sands,
Takes my the veering
ear, in
Baffled wind, as rearing

95
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Upright at the cliff, to the gullies and rifts he stands ;

And his conquering surges scour out over the lands ;

While again at the foot of the downs

He masses his strength to recover the topmost crowns.

It worth while, at the risk of being

is

academic, to look at some of the subtleties

that underlie the lovely flow of the poem.
The rhythm, to begin with, is subtly fitted
to the sense in every part. The sweep of the
first line which holds, by the way, in eleven
syllables, every epithet necessary to the
picture is beautifully expressive of the noble
skyline of the downs. In the second line the
metre, as it were, turns back upon itself.
Falling takes the place of rising stress, with a
curious suggestion of drift and perspective,
as though the motive power of the rhythm
had been turned off, and the verse were
carried on by the impetus of the first words,
"
till the line fades in the open vowel of skies."
Among other that of heavily-laden
effects
stresses in the last line of the second stanza is
the most obvious. Again the vowel tones
generally take the colour of the picture. In
the first they are all grave
line the only
;

"
stressed short vowel is in the word majestic,"
which has a suggestive beauty of its own. In
the second line, following the rhythmic change,
they are quite distinct the stressed vowels
;

96
 LANDSCAPE
apart from the internal rhyme are all short
or light. There is nothing to destroy the airy
width of the picture till, with a change of
focus as it were, we come to the word
"
thorned." The internal assonances, again,
would make a long catalogue. Note for
" " " 9!
instance, bold and lonely combined
" ' !

with the effective rime of only in the

next line ;
the long
"
e's
"
and i's " in the
"
" "
first two lines of the second stanza ; the s's
" "
in the first stanza ;
t in the seventh line ;

" "
e in the sixth. Note again " flashing,"
" " "
dashing," searching," sands," one of
many instances of a kind of double assonance,
where a string of words is associated by each
holding one of two vowel and consonant
"
combinations. Note ear
"
and " veering "
with its rime " rearing " " cliff "
; and
" " "
rifts "; ascending," blending," "engines."
The whole texture of assonance throughout
the poems is indeed so close that dissection
seems an impertinence. It may be objected
that many of them
are unintentional, chance
relations to be found in all poetry, or for that
matter in all prose. I should agree to the
extent of suggesting that they are nearly all

unintentional, or, if you will,

inspired. The
only standard which will decide how far they
are worth noticing is their power of thrusting
G 97
 ROBERT BRIDGES
themselves on our notice by the beauty of their
effect. There are a host of commonly recur-
ring devices which add incontestably to the
consummate effect of the verse. We fre-
quently find lurking in the poems, and quite
unsystematized, the true cynghanedd groes,
cynghanedd lusg and cynghanedd sain of the
intricate texture of Welsh poetry. The
structure of such lines as these, which would
surprise us in another English poet, would not
seem unnatural in Bridges :

Profais, nifethais, yn faith

O brif ieithoedd braf wythiaith
Ni phrofais dan ffurfafen
Gwe mor gaeth a'r Gymraeg wen.

I will only notice, then, a few of the devices

which meet us most commonly. Here is a
delightful double assonance :

Beneath the sun at indolent noonday

Or in the windy moon-enchanted night,

A similar effect, inverted, is :

In patient russet is his forest spread,

All bright with bramble red,
With beechen moss
And holly sheen, the oak, silver and stark, etc.

More suggestive of deliberation is the beautiful

echo at the end of the Elegy on a Lady :
98
 LANDSCAPE
The rest stand by in state
And sing her a safe passage over
While she is oared across to her new home. . . .

This perfect sense of the values of con-

sonant, vowel and position extends to the
least adorned of the poems. No one but the
author of London Snow could have written
even so trivial and apparently artless a stanza
as the first of the Rondeau at the end of
Book I. The line,

Hanging his quiver at his hips,

implies a whole store of delicate perceptions

which few other poets have shown us. There
is material enough in this little book of poems,

were there material enough to develop it, for

a whole system of extremely subtle art.
There is only one other point I need notice.
It is a method which depends as much upon
the association of subtle ideas as upon its
appeal to the ear. Where alliteration and
assonance are effective, I believe it is by
reason of every word connoting by its sound
alone at least one idea separate from itself. A
combination of like sounds is useless unless it
carries with it either a comparison or contrast
of these harmonics of the language. It is

astonishing how strongly an impression can be

intensified by assonance, provided the com-
99
 ROBERT BRIDGES
bination enforced is suggestive of the central
word or idea. To consider, from Bridges'
work, only a few effects :

Beneath the crisp and wintry carpet hid

A million buds but stay their blossoming,

and
And 'neath the mock sun searching everywhere
Rattles the crisped leaves with shivering din

and
The wood is bare a river-mist is steeping
:

The trees that winter's chill of life bereaves :

Only their stiffened boughs break silence, weeping

Over their fallen leaves.
and
We skated on stream and pond ; we cut
The crinching snow
To Doric temple or Arctic hut.

I quote the first three examples for the

"
assonance of the short i," the fourth for the
"
word crinching." In each case their effect
is to reinforce the idea and sound of the words
" winter "
and " chill." In the second quota-
" '

distinctly suggests another

!

tion, rattle
" "
short i "that of the word brittle." In
the few instances in the Shorter Poems where
assonance is unconvincing it generally fails to
depend upon some such central idea. It is
impossible to say whether the poet will ever
be able to depend so fearlessly on the suggestive
100
 LANDSCAPE
colour of words as to systematize its use. If
assonance is to mean the crude iteration of
Swinburne, the idea will seem far-fetched.
We are a long way from the day when the
control of vocal colour and consonantal
dynamics may be taught as definitely as the
mixing of colours on a palette.
1

Of poems, over two-thirds seem to me in some

1
this century of

particular or other exquisite, and more than a fifth are of their

kind flawless. It is not an altogether desirable manner of criticism
to make a kind of honours list of a poet's work. But if I were
asked for such an order of merit in the finer of the "S.P." and
Bridges has ventured to classify the Odes of Keats in this way it
would be this. Class I Bk. II, 2, 7 ; Bk. Ill, 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 13 ;
:

Bk. IV, 23, 28 ; Bk. V, 7, 12, 16, 19. Class II : Bk. I, 9, 12 ;

Bk. II, 3, 5 ; Bk. Ill, 3, 12, 17 ; Bk. IV, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 20,
30 ; Bk. V, 4. Class III Bk. I, 2, 6, 11, 14 ; Bk. II, 10, 11 ;
:

Bk. Ill, 5, 9, 10, 18 ; Bk. IV, 9, 11, 12 ; Bk. V, 3, 6, 9.

101
 VI

MILTON'S PROSODY
ONE may generally recognize a definite advance
in any art, in that it will meet with general
disapproval. The prosody of Bridges has
been more widely criticized, condemned and
misunderstood than any aspect of his work.
It is here that he breaks really new ground.
When the Shorter Poems were first issued,
work in the new, the so-called stress prosody,
was carefully distinguished by small type. It
was just these poems to which a distinguished
living critic whose work occasionally appears
in garlands of poetry strongly objected. The

lyrics in large type pleased him greatly ;

the rest seemed to be hardly different from

prose.
That was thirty years ago. By this time one
or two critics of metre have helped us to
realize that most English verse is prose, but
that those bewildering adventures in small
type were at least the indication of a true
prosodic method. They are their own justifica-
102
 MILTON'S PROSODY
tion, and I suppose there are few modern
readers of poetry, and no poets, who find any-
thing difficult or obscure about them. Bridges'
innovation is, after all, not in itself very
startling. Briefly, he substitutes for a line
which is measured by syllables a line which
is measured by stresses. This statement is
made with many reservations as that stress
;

must not be interpreted as meaning definite

emphasis of a syllable that the number of
;

stresses in a line is necessarily doubtful and ;

that a whole series of rhythms and conventions

belonging properly to the old style have per-
sisted into the new. Before defining the prosody
of Bridges more carefully it is worth while
briefly to examine the point from which he
sets out, and his own views of prosody con-
tained in the essay on Miltonic blank verse.
So much ink has gone to the explaining of
English verse rhythms that it is time the
that rhythm is not meant to be
critics realized

explained, but only to be understood. I do

not suppose that Vergil could have " ex-
"
plained his own prosody, or pointed out in
what way it from Homer's.
differed Un-
fortunately, too, almost the whole system of
criticizing English prosody rests on a mis-
apprehension. The fact is sadly appropriate
in that English prosody also was founded on a
103
 ROBERT BRIDGES
mistake. When a good Christian whose name
is forgotten wrote :

Laetus dies hie transeat :

Pudor sit ut diluculum,

Fides velut meridies,
Crepusculum mens nesciat . . .

he was producing what form as well as

is, in

spirit, poetry. But the author of such a

stanza as this gave us neither :

Consurgit Christus tumulo,

Victor vedit de barathro,
Tyrannum trudens vinculo
Et reserans paradisum.

The first is written to a definite scheme of long

and short syllables the second has nothing
;

to distinguish it from prose but an implied

pause after every eighth syllable, picked out
in this case by assonance.
English verse, from Chaucer and his imitators
onwards, chose the second kind of structure for
model rather than the first. It consisted of
the division of speech into lengths which held
each the same number of syllables ; and the
divisions were usually indicated by a borrowed
fashion of riming the final syllables of adjacent
divisions. It was usual following an also,
elementary rhythmic ideal, to contrive that
not only this last syllable should be, for
104
 MILTON'S PROSODY
further emphasis, stressed, but also every
alternate syllable before it. Essentially its
only difference from prose is that the reader
is forced to divide it mentally into a succes-
"
sion of equal lines." This, if it must be
explained, is the explanation of English verse.
But if mediaeval writers of
hymns perceived
the form without understanding the method of
these old religious poems and bequeathed their
mistake to Western Europe in perpetuity, the
" "
explainers of prosody in the literature of
this countryhave wandered even more
pathetically from the truth. They have dis-
covered the method too late and applied it

where no longer existed.

it

Bridges' essay on the prosody of Milton

which, by the way, was published in 1893,
when the superb rhythmic effects of the
Poems were already becoming known
Shorter
has been praised deservedly, for its care
and insight. The book is in itself sufficient
to defend him against the common charges of
" " "
cold craftsmanship," carpentry of metre
and the like ; for it shows pretty plainly that,
so far from being able to explain his own
masterpieces, he is unable to give any but the
barest account of the much simpler method
of Obviously he appreciates the
Milton.
rhythmic subtleties of Paradise Lost as only a
105
 ROBERT BRIDGES
poet can ; but he begins his explanation of
them thus :

A typical blank verse may be described as obeying

these conditions (1) It has ten syllables ; (2) It has
:

five stresses ; (3) It is in rising rhythm, that is, the

stresses are upon even syllables.

I should like to mitigate this rather alarming

preface by remembering that such is probably

the way in which Milton himself regarded his
own majestic medium. Even
the critic of so,
verse would not be justified in making three
postulates so utterly misleading for it is ;

notorious that the artist is generally incapable

of explaining his own verse. But in his intro-
duction, added eight years later, Bridges
"
writes :
My intention throughout has been
to provide a sound foundation for a grammar
of English prosody on the basis of Milton's
practice."
His attitude in a
way, typical of the
is,

method of critics of prosody since the begin-

3

ning of their perverse endeavours. Milton s

Prosody a careful piece of work, and contains
is

some really suggestive appendices, but as a

study of rhythm it is singularly unsuccessful.
It is obvious to everyone that the typical line
of Milton who may be fairly assumed to have
understood the writing of blank verse has
106
 MILTON'S PROSODY
lessthan five stresses, and is accented any-
where but upon even syllables. As Bridges
"
himself points out in his conclusion We :

may say generally that Milton's system in

Paradise Lost was an attempt to keep blank
verse decasyllabic by means of fictions."
This is a judgment which cannot be dis-
puted. Yet there is no reason but custom for
compelling all critics of verse from Milton's
day forward to be party to the fraud. None-
theless Bridges advances logically from his
hypothesis to elaborate precisely the same
fictions. He treats solemnly of supernumerary
" "
syllables, of elision, of inverted stress, and
" "
generally of a five-foot line. His con-
clusions areperfectly accurate, and are
evidently the result of much labour. But
they do not take us a step further than any
previous critics have done. While admitting,
practically, that Milton did much to introduce
the natural rhythms of speech into poetry, he
continues to explain the finest lines of Paradise
" "
Lost in terms of feet a word borrowed
from criticism of classical prosody, in which the
foot was, generally speaking, a known quantity
with a definite relative value in time. It is
this pseudo-classical foot rule that has vitiated
all criticism of our poetry until quite recent

years. It betrays itself in the use of classical

107
 ROBERT BRIDGES
"
terms descriptive of quantity iambus,"
" " "
trochee," pyrrhic," galliambic," and the
rest.
To take even such lines as these from
Chaucer :

A marchaunt was ther with a forked berd

In motteleye, and high on hors he sat,
Upon his heed a Flaundrisch bevere hat ;

His botes clasped fair and fetysly . . .

and to describe them as iambic, is obviously

absurd. They are stressed, certainly, on the
even syllables and if many such consecutive
;

lines were common in the Canterbury Tales

they would be fairly unreadable. But the
assumption since Chaucer's day, by poets and
critics alike, is that the normal English penta-
meter line is a succession of iambic feet. This
confusion of thought is accountable for much
of the poverty of rhythm in minor English
verse.
The inflexibility of metric scheme in classic
poetry was joined with a free distribution of
stresses ; and
the weaving of natural
it is

speech-rhythms upon a quantitative metric

base, in itself a constant rhythmic pattern,
though quite differently obtained, that pro-
duces most of the metric beauties of the verse.
In ordinary English poetry, quantity has no
place in the rhythmic scheme, which has only
108
 MILTON'S PROSODY
two elements the normal stresses of speech,
:

and the rather slender uniformity of a constant

line length. If we postulate the division of a
line into five "feet," each consisting of an un-
stressed followed by a stressed syllable, we
are obviously taking great liberties with our
" " or
standard when we admit inverted feet
"
weak feet." By the time a line is found to
have only two, or possibly one foot normal out
of the five and these are common enough in
Milton it is time we either looked for another
explanation or turned our poet out of Helicon
for tampering with the very ground structure
of his art. If stress-iambics are the basis of

English verse, the people who called themselves

Augustans are our only poets a point which
they were logical enough to appreciate.
It is unnecessary to spend much time over
the elaborate fictions of the critics who hold
that the metrical unit of an English blank
verse line is the foot, and that its rhythm is

the result of alternate stress. All one need

say of this theory is that it is obviously untrue,
and that a fabric of even so slight a com-
plexity as English prosody could not have
been built upon such a wretched base. More-
over, nine of Milton's lines out of ten vary
definitely from this norm. The first line of
Paradise Lost contradicts it ; and that it may
109
 ROBERT BRIDGES
be " explained " by the phrases " inverted
second foot " and " weak fourth foot " does
not alter for a moment the fact that, if alter-
nate stress be the basis of blank verse, it is a
base which is rarely present, and often com-
pletely disregarded. Nor do I see how the
persistent idea of such a base can be considered
as an element in poetic rhythm. Such a line
as :

Universal reproach, far worse to bear

in which only the fifth and sixth and- the two x

last syllables form iambic feet, does not seem

as if it can gain any rhythm from an idea
which directly contradicts the cadence of the
first two
"
feet," and is not in accord with the
third. Nor does the suggestion that the
"
minority of normal " feet in such a line
serves to maintain the unity of the rhythm
appear to be very much to the point. If it be
so, it is preserving the idea of a rhythm which
isundesirable, in spite of definite negation of
such rhythm. If such irregular lines are
written for the sake of enhancing rhythm
as one can hardly doubt it cannot be the
rhythm of the
"
normal " line which is en-
hanced.
There seems no way out of the difficulty
but to confess at once that Milton's verse and
most English verse since Milton has no
110
 MILTON'S PROSODY
rhythmic scheme at all any more than it has
;

a metric scheme or a scheme of regular stresses.

The only invariable element is the line-length.
In the choruses of Samson Agonistes we lose the
line also and, in their formal aspect, we may
;

as well admit, as did one Evans in 1852, that

"
they are not verse at all. Our truly lyric
poetry must ever be a blank," said this

despondent person ;
"an evil genius presided
at its birth."
We are still a long way from a satisfactory
scientific definition of rhythm in the abstract.
But of poetic rhythm one may say at once
that a compromise, or rather a resultant
it is

of two Bridges himself has pointed

forces.
out in a later essay 1 that quantity is the only
factor that is alone sufficient to give rhythm.
Variation of pitch alone that is a succession
of different notes of equal length and loudness
cannot produce it variation of strength
;

will produce only the most elementary im-

pression of it. The Greeks, or whoever in-

vented the Homeric hexameter, realized that
in quantity was the only scientific basis for a

prosody a truth which still holds good.

With the loss of the classical system of prosody,
European verse became syllabic that is,

1 "A letter to a Musician on English Prosody," Musical Anti-

quary, October, 1909.
Ill
 ROBERT BRIDGES
merely a matter of line-lengths, without
regulation of stress, and with no regard for
quantity.
In spite of the absence of quantity from the
scheme of English verse, I am not aware that
anyone has held that there is no such thing as
poetic rhythm The poverty
in the language.
of rhythm, even in Milton, obvious enough
is

to any reader who will honestly consider

Paradise Lost or Samson after a few hundred
lines from the ^Eneid provided, of course he
read his Vergil rationally, with a bold dis-
regard of the method of the older Universities.
The rhythm of all English poetry before
Coleridge, and of the greater part of it since,
is the result of an accumulation of rhythmic
effects, wrought one after the other from the

unpromising material of a syllabic verse, and

it is in this light that any honest account of

rhythm must consider it. There is nothing

"
in the wretched skeleton " of the syllabic
method to account for it. Even granted a
"
basic idea of alternate stress, inversions,"
"
weak feet," and the like will not give us
even an illusion of rhythm. The conflict is
radically different from that between speech-
pattern and metric
pattern,
-accent and
quantity, in classical verse. If there is an

opposition it is between two speech-patterns.

112
 MILTON'S PROSODY
But I do not believe that in these days the
" "
idea of a stress-iambic line is present in the
minds of any but those who set out to explain
English verse with an array of classical labels.
We must look elsewhere than to the foot for
our English verse-unit. The ruling principle
of English metre has lain from the first in the
natural stresses of speech, and its unit must
be found in natural combinations of these
stresses within the more or less unvarying
limit of the line. I am not denying that the
idea of a ten-syllable line of five alternate
stresses was the rule consciously accepted in
Chaucer's day but it is a rule which was
;

even then accepted to be broken.

The alternate stress, to quote Bridges again,

came to be the norm and bane of syllabic verse. In

the absence of a philosophic grammar of rhythm,
one can only offer opinions as guesses, but it would
seem to me that alternate stress can only be of
rhythmic value in poetry as the firmest basis of the
freest elaboration. One's memory hardly reaches
back to the time when itcould satisfy one. The
force of it always remains as one of the most powerful
resources of effect, but its monotony is, to an educated
ear, more likely to madden than to lull.

Resistance to the tendency has been obvious

in our literature from the first. It is sur-
prising how few even of Chaucer's lines con-
H 113
 ROBERT BRIDGES
form tothe standard. The influence of
Langland and the northern poets was always
present to Chaucer's school, whispering happy
phrases which scorned the limits of alternate
stress. One of the earliest liberties which can
almost certainly be referred to the influence
of the Latin hymns, was the
" "
inversion of
the first foot. Chaucer begins innumerable
lines with a stressed syllable.
Bright was the sonne and clear that morwenynge,
" "
Bright was the sonne is a phrase any poet
would be happy to set down in addition, it
;

shows one of the commonest rhythms of English

speech. If then, such a speech-rhythm is per-
missible at the beginning of a line, why should
it be denied a
place elsewhere ?
Truthe and honour, freedom and curtesye . . .

Curteys he was, lowly and servysable . . .

wrote Chaucer, doubling the offence, and

coming perilously near to the rhythm of the
other school of poets who wrote their lines
in balanced halves and cared not for syllabic
strictness. In fact the normal rhythms of
speech were not to be kept out of verse for
more than a few years. Even one of the
simplest stress combinations a noun preceded
by an adjective when each are of one syllable
generally gave two contingent stresses, and
114
 MILTON'S PROSODY
called for the introduction of either a double-
stressed or an inverted " foot." Compensation
allowed the weak foot, already urgently de-
manded by the simple stress scheme of such
" "
phrases as struck with his arm," end of
the tale," and the like. The structure did not,
as one would expect, fall to pieces under this
invasion ; it slowly absorbed the phrasing of
natural speech. It is essential to any poetic
form of worth that it will accommodate the
elementary rhythms of the language. The
majority of five-foot lines in the older poets
easily resolve themselves into two, or less often
three, such simple stress groups. Their
characteristic rhythms, slightly modified by
the line, become steadily more common and
familiar. Chaucer could hardly have written :

Wherein old dints / of deep wounds / did remain

or
The soothe of birds / by beating of their wings . . .

but phrases of adjacent stress and of stresses

separated by three light syllables, have since
become the commonplaces of English verse.
I regard these short speech-stress com-
binations, or speech-phrases, as giving a far
more natural analysis of the line than a
fanciful division into feet. A line will fall

easily and unmistakably into two or three

115
 ROBERT BRIDGES
such phrases, which, as well as being the
natural division which the sense of the writing
demands, are the units of speech itself for
every pause in sense is marked by a change in
pitch. Stress in English is not normally
given by pronouncing one syllable with more
vigour than another, except under conditions
of special emphasis. It is usually expressed by
a change of pitch, either on, after, or within
the syllable w^hich we describe as "stressed."
The last word of a normal sentence, unless it
be enclitic, is generally marked by a fall in
pitch through nearly five tones. The syllable
to be stressed is often influenced by derivation.
if the word be a
Generally, monosyllable the
fall iswithin the vowel itself, whether long or
short if a disyllabic, the stressed
; penultimate
is in the higher pitch and the unstressed last

syllable in the lower. The end of a normal

stress phrase is marked by this cadence. Thus
a combination of a disyllabic noun qualified
"
by a disyllabic adjective such as A little
"
learning may be musically represented
thus :

"
when the syllable of "little
first is only by

courtesy graced with a stress because, taken

116
 MILTON'S PROSODY
alone, it would carry the same cadence as
"
learning."In the second phrase the cadence
"
is on the vowel of thing."
This point is more significant in relation to
verse-rhythm than it may appear to be. The
two mechanical elements of English verse are
a strict line-length and varied stresses, and
it must be from a combination or opposition

of these that rhythm emerges. Stresses again

are varied, not in real or imagined opposition
to a scheme of feet, but with a faithful regard
for phrasing, for the little repeated melody to
which groups of inseparable words are
naturally set. Then poetic rhythm must
differ from prose rhythm in some modification
of this cadence not as opposed to the im-
possible tune suggested by five equal alternate
stresses, but to the normal tune of the words
apart from their verse setting. This, again,
will be modified by conventional rhythms, as
those of two or more phrases which have grown
familiar as a possible disposition of the ten
or more syllables which go to a line.
I would consider the following a far more
rational and suggestive division of verse than
the artificial foot-rule with its absurd symbols
of long and short.

When forty winters / shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches / in thy beauty's field
117
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Thy youth's proud livery / so gazed on / now
Will be a tattered weed / of small worth held :

Then / being asked where all thy beauty / lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say / within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame / and thriftless praise.

This is obviously the only disintegration which

the ear will accept. The italicized words
connect one phrase with another, leading
generally in a slightly ascending cadence from
the lower pitch to the higher though it :

should be that a cadence which

noticed
indicates only a pause, not a period, in sense,
is exactly inverted. Thus the phrases " a
little learning
?:
and " a dangerous thing 5:
are separately spoken to the same cadence.
But in the line :

A little learning is a dangerous thing

the cadence of "learning" is from a lower

pitch to a higher, for there would be other-
wise an awkward leap to the higher level of
"
dangerous."
The whole question of accent in English has
been sadly neglected, and in the absence of a
philosophic account of it, one can only indicate
its broadest lines. One of the main principles
appears to be that where, as is almost invari-
ably the case, the final phrase of a sentence is
in falling cadence, all phrases that lead up to
118
 MILTON'S PROSODY
it hold a In questions the whole
rise of pitch.

sequence sometimes
is reversed.
I should not have touched upon matters
which are at present mainly guesswork if it
did not seem to me that the distinction
between syllabic verse rhythm and prose
rhythm is mainly one of cadence. The ques-
tion of accent particularly deserving of
is

detailed analysis in English ; for I suppose the

system istouched by degeneration than
less
in any European language. There is a definite
tendency, however, to which one can point.
While every phrase in a sentence is made to
subserve the principal which is generally the
final cadence, the connecting or enclitic
words, such as those italicized in the Shake-
speare octave above, are, in common speech,
hurried over and given barely half their value
in time. I have suggested that the only
unchanging element in syllabic verse is the
line-length, which seems to be an easily recog-
nized constant. Previous to a temporal con-
ception of rhythm, the effect of a larger use
of natural speech-groups has been inevitably
to preserve a counterbalancing strictness in
the length of the line just as syllabic irregu-
;

larity was atoned for by the regular

later

grouping of stresses an even harder tyranny.

Thus Milton's elaborate " scansion " of his
119
 ROBERT BRIDGES
stress-groups was not entirely academic. He
surely realized the absolute need of syllabic
strictnessto maintain the proper balance
between the factors then necessary to poetic
rhythm. "... Rime gives no true musical
delite which consists only in apt Numbers
; ;

fit quantity of syllables ; and the sense

variously drawn out from one verse into
another." Where the elements of rhythm
are so few, the length of the line has been
found most important to it, as the persistence
of rime which merely a special emphasis of
is

line-length goes to show. When the sense is

drawn out from one line to another, it becomes
more than ever essential to maintain the
syllabic idea.
The line, then, is apparently responsible
for the change of cadence in verse. The words
which in ordinary speech are hurried over as

being, in a sense, outside the succession of

cadences must be given more value if the
syllabic idea is to be maintained ; partly by
the emphasis of more careful pronunciation,
and partly by being brought nearer in pitch to
the important words of a speech-phrase. And
since these transitional words are generally
between different levels of pitch, the result of
this change is a general and most noticeable

levelling of pitch throughout. Hence the

120
 MILTON'S PROSODY
most obvious distinction between syllabic
verse-diction and prose-diction is in a general
modification of cadence in the former to-
wards a common level. Perhaps this is

best illustrated when one who is read-

ing verse breaks suddenly (perhaps because
it seems to reach only a low poetic
standard) into the up-and-down cadences of
common speech.
It would be interesting to analyse the
difference between the Shakespearian and the
Miltonic rhythms, Bridges derives so
since
much from both manners. I will only indicate
an effect of rhythm which I think we owe to
the early Elizabethans. Though there is no
essential difference in rhythm between the

Wyatt and Surrey and that of

1
verse of

Lyndesay, or even of Douglas and Hawes,

their structure is more elaborate. There is
a tendency to get more into a line, to shuffle
clauses, bringing the verb at the end, and so
on, which gives a line of three and more speech-
phrases instead of the normal two. This was
the first emancipation from the influence of
the Langland school, which tended to preserve

1
To whom, by the way, the late Professor Churton Collins, with
the vagueness characteristic of those who talk about metre, at-
tributed "the great reform which substituted a metrical for a
rhythmical structure."
121
 ROBERT BRIDGES
only two phrases in a line. This elaboration
results ina line of quick and short phrasing
with frequent pauses :

Ought to be King / from whose rules / who / do swerve

And, / fools, / adore / in temple of our heart.
True / and yet true / that I / must / Stella / love.

The grammatical pauses, slight as they are,

introduce an element of syncopation. Such
a line as :

If French / can yet / three parts in one / agree,

though the short phrasing even follows the

old stress-iambic structure, carries a distinct
opposition to that structure. Reading it
smoothly, and without break, one is forcing
it into a slightly alien mould. (The line will
generally be read with a slight lengthening
after "French," a slight pause after "yet," a
" 3:

lengthening of three parts and a pause

"
after one.") The effect of rime, again, in
the sonnet form, is to make the whole line
subserve the final cadence ; that is, the
correspondence of the lines demands very
great smoothness. The contrast of this
tendency with the syncopation produces a new
and very subtle rhythmic effect. As a kind of
compromise one finds, especially in Sidney,
many lines which refuse to resolve themselves
122
 MILTON'S PROSODY
into stress-combinations ; where, in fact, the
line is the phrase :

Gone is the winter of my misery.

Inever drank of Aganippe well
Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit.

Thereno doubt, however, that Sidney

is

and the early Elizabethans generally were

running great risks of losing rhythm altogether
in trusting it to minutely syncopated single-

syllable bars rather than to the variation of

freer phrasing. To this one attributes their
marked return to the use of alliteration and
internal assonance. Shakespeare, on the other
hand, was the first to realize the allusive
possibilities of the speech-phrase ; one may
note it in the intimate inter-relation of phrasing

in most of the sonnets. Indeed, common

speech-rhythms are used so freely that many
of the lines, taken separately, are hardly
distinct from prose ; they are saved by this
close relation of speech-phrases ; and hence, I
think, the directness and rapidity of the
sonnets in spite of the intricacy of their
conceits.
Milton's Prosody arrives at sound conclu-
sionsby means which one hopes we have seen
the last of. The emancipation of normal
stresses reached in Milton its furthest develop-
123
 ROBERT BRIDGES
ment consistent with the syllabic idea. We
have not improved upon it in syllabic verse.
The rhythms of such a poem as Mr. Stephen
Phillips' Christ in Hades, which has been
warmly praised for metric originality, might
have been deliberately moulded upon the
" 5:
rules which Bridges deduces from his
examination of Milton. Nothing more is
likely to be done in the emancipation of pure
syllabic verse.

124
 VII

THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES

THE prosody of Bridgesa combination of
is *

the stress and syllabic methods it does not

;
'

properly belong to either. The emancipation

of stress-prosody is generally dated from the
publication of
Christabel, though Coleridge
was obviously not true to his own intention
of measuring a line by the number of its stressed

syllables. From the freer forms of syllabic

verse to verse which is deliberately regulated
by stress was not a long way.The syllabic
line was already overcharged with the liberties
that had crept into it. From the dramatic
licence which allowed a superfluous syllable,
it was an easy step to allowing such a syllable

in the middle of an unbroken line. By the

time it was admitted almost anywhere the
line was ripe for disintegration into its proper
units. Stress-prosody is simply the recognition
of the speech-phrase as the ruling principle of
the verse without the hindrance of a constant
line. Here Bridges shows a very sure appre-
ciation of its meaning. In a masterly appendix
125
 ROBERT BRIDGES
to Milton's Prosody he formulates some of the
rules of stress-verse thus :

The stress governs the rhythm.

I.

The stresses must be true speech-stresses.

II.
III. A stress has more carrying power over the

syllable next to it than it has over a syllable removed

from it by an intervening syllable.
IV. A stress has a peculiarly strong attraction for
its own proclitics and enclitics.
V. A stress will not carry a heavy syllable which
is removed from by another syllable.
it

VI. A stress will not carry more than one heavy

syllable or two light syllables on the same side of it.

Here are rules which the ear at once accepts

as just. The fourth is a convenient way of
expressing what the development of verse has
already indicated that the unit of verse is
the speech-phrase, the natural sense-division,
whether it be single-stressed or double-stressed.

The distinction of heavy and light syllables is

generally just, for natural speech-rhythms are
determined by quantity far more than one
suspects.
But Bridges neglects in theory, not in his
work the immediate danger that comes with
the abandonment of the line. If one has
hitherto considered English verse as a succes-
sion of feet, it will seem no less reasonable to
regard it as a succession of stresses each
126
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
attracting its own subordinate syllables. But
as soon as it is realized that English verse
since Chaucer has been just such a succession
of speech-phrases, and that its rhythm has
resulted from an unvarying line-length, it will
appear that, losing the strict line, it loses an
essential part of itself. Such a method brings
us dangerously near to freeing the stress at the
expense of the prosody. Speech-stress has
always governed the rhythm ; but in so-called
syllabic verse there was a rhythm to be
governed ; in pure stress-verse there is not.
The whole difficulty of the writers of stress-
verse is to find an adequate substitute for the
line-length, and up to the present they have
failed. Bridges himself, with an instinctive
realization of the danger, has achieved a
consummately skilful compromise with the
older manner. The bulk of the work in which
he has made it really successful is very small.
He has never published an unsuccessful attempt.
He seems to have been aware that his method
is not for lesser men to follow. At the end of
an interesting appendix to Milton's Prosody
the best things in the book are tucked away
at the end he wrote :

I will only add that when English poets will write

verse governed honestly by natural speech stress,
127
 ROBERT BRIDGES
they will discover the laws for themselves, and will
find open to them an rhythm as yet
infinite field of
untouched. There is
nothing which may not be done
in it, and it is perhaps not the least of its advantages
that it makes excellence difficult.

I am
not contending here that strict form
is essential to good poetry, or that its
rhythms
must necessarily be distinct almost in kind
from those of prose. Such one would gather
from Bridges' work to be his own view, in
spite of the words I have italicized. But it is
undeniable that the idea of a prosody whose
recommendation is that " there is nothing
which may not be done in it," is quite alien
from the spirit of all the great art of Europe,
including Bridges' own.
As a matterof fact a very short considera-
tion of the small output of pure stress-prosody
since Coleridge will be enough to prove its
failure. The better poets Coleridge himself,
Shelley, and Tennyson when they possibly
imagined themselves to be following the new
principle, have done nothing of the sort. The
only verse governed honestly by disregard of
everything but speech-stress has been that of
Swinburne and his imitators, and the English
accentual hexameter. Christabel, as has been
often enough pointed out, does not follow the
faith it professes. In the first fifty lines of the
128
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
poem there are nineteen that do not bear out
the poet's declaration " that in each case the
accents will be found to be only four." 1 In
Shelley's Stanzas, April, 1814, there is the same
mixture of styles. The typical line is appar-
ently of six main stresses with a central
caesura. There is not a single line that con-
forms with this type. 2 The line that most
nearly approaches it is :

The blooms of dewy Spring / shall gleam beneath thy

feet ;

where the implied stress on " beneath " is,

from a standpoint of natural speech-stress,
unjustifiable. Both poems are a compromise
between the old manner and the new, and both
are quite beautiful. It does not greatly matter
whether we call them stress-verse with frequent
omission and redundance of stress, or syllabic-
verse with the greatest licence in the use of
1
Three lines including "The lovely Lady Christabel" can
only be admitted by courtesy of the conventional licence borrowed
from syllabic verse which has always belonged to the final syllable
of a line. Another line "She kneels beneath the huge oak
"
tree may be allowed four stresses, but one suspects they are not
those which the poet intended. The regular lines include all the
weakest in the selection. In the others the established rhythm
makes a false stress. Most of the lines have the familiar rhythms
of syllabic verse.
2
Bridges makes the typical line of four stresses. In this case
the divergence from type is much greater, while the first line is
just as easily "explained" by placing a pause either before or after
the first word.
I 129
 ROBERT BRIDGES
superfluous syllables. Superficially, the first
description is more appropriate ; actually, I
think, the second. Obviously the verse has no
longer any scientific basis whatever, and I
think the ear which is the only real arbiter in

these matters will detect a certain loss of

rhythm even where rhythm is most emphasized.
That such a system will satisfy it at all
goes to show how persistent the idea of
the
" "
five-foot syllabic line as holding five
stresses has been. Otherwise I do not see
how we could so readily accept conven-
tional unnatural stresses and subdue real
ones.
But Bridges has a rule to meet the difficulty :

In some metres when four, and in any metre when

more than four, unstressed syllables occur together,
they will occupy the place of a stress, which
be may
said to be distributed over them and a line in which
;

such a collection of syllables occurs will lack one of

its stresses.

Thus the element of time creeps back, but

in far less obvious fashion than in the easily

recognized value of a ten-syllable line. It is

present as a kind of hidden pulsation upon
which the rhythms of speech are loosely
syncopated. This is a conception of verse
which has grown very familiar of late, and
130
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
the critical explanations of Sydney Lanier and
Mr. J. M. Robertson 1 are, on the whole, a very
just presentment of it. Previously a metrist
who had the advantage of being also a poet
had denned metre as " something measured,"
"
namely, the time occupied in the delivery of
a series of words," which is measured by "an
ictus or beat, actual or mental," dividing

speech into equal or proportionate spaces. In

addition, Patmore insisted strongly upon the
importance of tone as an essential factor in
metre.
This application of musical phraseology to
verse rhythms has certain dangers. Obviously
the idea of a regular pulse has been the actual
base upon which a good deal of verse since
Tennyson has been written. Consequently it

is quite a fair way of

explaining or analysing
such verse. It is at best rather an elementary
source of rhythm, and only the lesser poets
have been faithful to it. It does not take a
great deal of perception to discover that
Tennyson's
Break, break, break,

is
approximately in three-time that is, that
;

the words follow each other at equal intervals

Of which an excellent account may be found in Mr. T.

1

S. Omond's "English Metrists in the 18th and 19th Centuries."

(Henry Froude, 1907.)
131
 ROBERT BRIDGES
and may be represented as taking each with
its pause the time of a dotted crotchet. The
actual word is assumed to have the value of a
quaver or of a crotchet. Actually, I suppose,
a natural reading would make it nearly a
dotted quaver. But when we come to the less

simple structure of the next line,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea . . .

we are intended to distribute it, after a

"
silent stress," thus :

(/)^-MJ/ I J J* I J.

Now it obvious that no one but a hack

is

composer would tolerate such

of waltz tunes
a perversion. The phrase " cold grey stones 5!

refuses to accommodate itself to the lilt. Its

poetic value is evidently that it echoes the
rhythm of the first line and the three words
;

will be as nearly equal in time as thought can

make them. Moreover, the words " thy " and
"
O " will resent, in such a grave line, the
scant measure allowed them. So we are driven
back upon syncopation as the key to it some-
what thus :

> ' <

^-'

On thy cold grey stones, O sea

132
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
which is not very far from the actual pronuncia-
1
tion, but is pictorially a little startling.
But no refinements of demi-semi-quavers
"
will disguise for a moment that neither cold
grey stones
"
nor
"
O sea " is either written
in, or in the least suggestive of three-time.
Their divergence is so final that the idea of
such rhythm is only an intrusion.
Since Lanier's theories became known on
this side of the Atlantic, the musical scan-
sionists have swarmed over the whole field
of English verse, and instead of concentrating

upon their legitimate prey the late Mr.

Swinburne have set their metronomes ticking
before every masterpiece since L'Allegro. By
far the acutest of them is Mr. Ernest Newman,
who has, I suppose, more right than most men
living to state the case from a musician's
standpoint. His statement 2 is ingenious :

All questions of scansion in English verse are

really questions of rhythm ; questions of rhythm
are really questions of the co-ordination of sounds,
groups of sounds, of equal value ; questions of co-
1
With a little sacrifice of truth we could write it thus :

2
From a series of articles on the "Rationale of English verse-
"
rhythm" which appeared in the now extinct Weekly Critical
Review/' Paris, September, 1903. I agree with Mr. Omond that
the essay deserves to be far more widely known.

133
 ROBERT BRIDGES
ordination of sounds are questions of time and it
;

isby reference to the time sense, to our unconscious

perception of periodicity, that we can throw most
light on the nature of verse rhythm. The main
phenomena of the time sense in relation to sounds
can be best investigated in music the art in which
the rhythmic sense shows itself in its most marked
form. .
. For the important point is really the co-
.

ordination of bar with bar. This is involved in our

instinctive and almost unconscious lengthening of
certain words (or our supplementing them by pauses)
in order to satisfy the demand for the rhythmic
senses of equality between one bar and another.
One welcomes this recognition of a system
of minute lengthenings and pauses as taking a
large part in the diction of poetry. The weak
point in Mr. Newman's chain of reasoning is
the failure to distinguish between the kind of
rhythm we find in poetry and the rhythm of
music. A philosophic definition of rhythm, if
we are ever to have one, may tell us that
essentially the two are one. In practice they
are as wide apart as one can possibly conceive.
If music gives us the rhythmic sense in its
most marked form, the rhythm of poetry is
certainly the most subtle and even obscure.
"
Even so simple a phrase as cold grey stones,"
as soon as one thinks of it in terms of English
poetry, acquires a rhythmic quality which no
musical analogy will go the least way towards
134
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
" "
explaining. From the time when a spondaic
foot was admitted to a
" "
pentameter line to
let in the commonphrase of three adjacent
stresses, it has been accumulating and fixing
its rhythm from the different circumstances

of its use and from sources quite distinct

from the musical idea, until it challenges any
interference with its unanalysable mental
refinements of cadence and value. The ideal
rhythmic value of any speech-phrase may
have had a casual and unscientific growth, but
it is a very real part of our poetry. Hence
when Mr. Newman distinguishes possible poetic
rhythms as falling into bars of either two or
three notes' value, and places even Miltonic
verse in the second class, I would challenge
his right to apply even the idea of musical
rhythm to verse. And in any case I cannot
believe that Paradise Lost is written in waltz-
time.
But even if the associations of poetic
rhythm were not so far removed from a musical
idea, I do not believe that a musical basis
could be applied to the making of poetry with
any success. The more the subconscious
craftsman is obsessed with the idea of a re-
current bar-beat, the less will true poetic
rhythms be free to assert themselves. True,
the musical scheme may compromise to the
135
 ROBERT BRIDGES
extent of changing bar-signature for every
its
few words ; and where music and words are
joined, as in the chanting of psalms, this is a
method which gives many beautiful and
natural effects. 1 But in present-day music any
rhythm is no rhythm : and musical ideas must
go a long way before they can leave off even
where poetry begins. A very little advance
along these lines will mean the abandonment
of bar-marks altogether. When Moussorgski,
in one of his Songs of Childhood, marks
successive bars :

iimifififummifiti etc.

the only beginning. I suppose future

game is

song-writers will dispense with the bar alto-

gether for as soon as music approaches
;

poetry intimately it will have to go.

There is no technical difficulty whatever
that genius is not ready to master. Just as
Wolf with the common apparatus of bars and
time-signatures moulded his notes almost
miraculously to the delicate songs of Morike,
Bridges has made a temporal basis subserve
intensely beautiful effects of poetry, as no
poet has done before, and none is likely, I
think, to do again. The difficulty appears to
be mainly this : that line-length and line-
1
Bridges himself has made experiments in this direction.

136
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
cadence can, by distributing influence over a
succession of speech-rhythms, produce poetic
rhythms even though the lines only tend
towards a normal length and a normal cadence ;

but that the idea of the bar cannot be so dis-

tributed over several phrases, but must fall
directly on the words supposed to be included
in it. Hence, even if it be possible that
rhythm may be produced within a few words
by contrast between the rhythm of a bar and
of those words, it is obvious that unless extra-

ordinary skill be brought to each bar, the

syncopation will be too violent for the delicate
poise of word-values to withstand. If, again,
its influence is allowed to extend beyond the

bar, by what Bridges calls a distributed

stress, the whole structure of the line is dis-
organized, the need of bars vanishes, and the
diction falls back upon line-length as its time-
unit. That poets of some reputation have
been apparently content with the contrast, or
rather the flat contradiction of a persistent
beat with natural speech-rhythms, does not
make them the less offensive. 1
1
In Appendix F to Milton's Prosody Bridges writes :

" Next to his mistake of admitting conventional stresses I would

mention another practice of writers who have attempted the freer
verse based on stress, which is this they set up a rhythm in the
:

first lines, and expect that this will assert itself throughout the

poem, in spite of false quantities and conventional stresses. This,

though it has not hindered the poems so written from being much
137
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Such lines as :

Earth thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.

is

Thou and subtle and blind as a flame of fire

art swift ;

Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire ;

And twain go forth beside thee, a man with a maid ;

Her eyes are the eyes of a bride whom delight makes

afraid,

are pretty bad judged by any standard of

rhythm. Set to music, with a drum beat to
emphasize the rhythm, they would be more
than intolerable.
Bridges' method is to avail himself of all
the freedom which a stress-prosody allows,
and at the same time to mitigate with every
available device the anarchy to which it leads.
Briefly, he abolishes syllabic strictness for the
sake of introducing new and expressive speech-
rhythms, and simultaneously restores the
element of time, leaving their freshness un-
impaired. The whole of his achievement in
stress-prosody is to enforce the idea of regu-
larity in line-length while avoiding suggestion
of a recurrent bar-beat. It is impossible to
find a principle which applies to the whole of
his work in this manner. Every line shows its

praised for their rhythmical flow . shows also a greater misap-

. .

prehension of the qualities of stressed verse, one chief advantage

of which is that no rhythm need be exactly repeated. The constant
repetition of the same stressed rhythm in every line must produce
sing-song, and it is a clumsy remedy to break the sing-song at the
cost of the prosody."

138
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
own device escape from the double pitfall
to*
of stress-prosody, the dilemma whose horns
are music and prose. At a first glance the
prosody of the Shorter Poems is not strikingly

different from that of Maud. Critics who felt

moved to approach it with the apparatus of
classicalterminology would find no great diffi-
culty it when they had once
in explaining
accustomed themselves to a pretty free use of
" " "
the words dactyl," anapaest," and galli-
ambic." The other school could beat time to
it without a more than usually painful violation

of the decencies of speech. It has, no more

than Christabel, an unvarying number of
stresses to the line. But the main point is that

intelligent readers of poetry who will probably

not analyse it at all find nothing in it that is
not perfectly fit and rhythmically satisfying.
One can only suggest a few of the reasons
why Bridges' essays in stress-verse are poetry
although they have rather finally broken loose
from prosody. Analysis of poetic technique
can only be useful in giving us a fairly expres-
sible reason for not liking certain developments
of it. If the ear approves such work as
London Snow or Whither, O splendid ship
and I suppose they are. now recognized as
being rhythmically quite flawless any other
justification is impertinent.
139
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Of the three principal devices which we find
more or less common in all the poems, perhaps
the most significant is a very frequent use of
lines which, taken alone, diverge very little or
not at all from the familiar " pentameters " of
syllabic verse. The first line of A Passer-by
and these from the same poem :

That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding.

And anchor queen of the strange shipping there.

And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless

Thy port assured in a happier land than mine.

As thou, aslant, with trim tackle and shrouding,

From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line,

might, as far as form goes, have been written

by Milton. Their coincidence with the old
form is more than casual. It is a kind of re-
current suggestion of a stricter manner which
tends very strongly to appease the ear. It
contributes, too, to the unflagging variety of
rhythm which betrays Bridges' hatred of any
suggestion of sing-song. Another effect of this
manner is the very pleasing contrast with which
it atones for and enhances the bolder rhythms

of stress-prosody as insistence upon the idea

of a recurrent beat could never do. Such is

140
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
the very beautiful emphasis of these lines
from November :

Out by the ricks the mantled engine stands

Crestfallen, deserted, fornow all hands
Are told to the plough, . . .

and the contrast I have already noticed in the

opening lines of The Downs.
Very often, again, the form of these lines
must be made the justification of rhythms
which a strict temporal scheme will not admit.
The phrase of three adjacent and nearly level
stresses, which was first used freely in Eliza-
beth's day, takes a great deal of explaining
when it steals into verse which is supposed to
keep three-time. Swinburne could not, I
" "
think, have introduced white sails crowding
into his favourite measure without making one
wince. Yet the occurrence of the rhythm in
London Snow, where very few of the lines keep
strict syllabic length, is very beautiful and

convincing. The truth is that Bridges, even

in his more advanced stress-prosody, con-

sistently uses the rhythmic phrases of syllabic

verse with almost exactly the value they
would have had in the old manner. This
would be impossible if a temporal beat were
strongly emphasized. As it is, I find in it a
strong suggestion of syllabic verse, even where
the lines are unquestionably written on a basis
141
 ROBERT BRIDGES
of stress. The best developments of Bridges'
prosody have risen naturally from syllabic
verse in very much the same way as freedom
of phrasing within the line. Such a stanza as
this :

There shows no care in heaven to save

Man's pitiful patience, nor provide . . .

from the same manner in which the temporal

beat gives perfect justice of phrasing leads
naturally to that in which phrasing is counter-
pointed upon a syllabic structure :

While ever across the path mazily flit

The dreamy butterflies

With dazzling colours powdered and soft glooms,
White, black and crimson stripes, and peacock eyes.

One cannot leave this point without reference

to the work of a man whose name is still quite
unknown, and the bulk of whose poetry has
never been published. The late Gerard
Hopkins, was a writer with a very real
s.J.,

poetic gift, whose metres were consciously

elaborated from common syllabic types. We
have no record of the theory upon which he
worked, but I believe some idea of stress-
equivalence formed part of it. A great deal of
his work was so obscure both in metre and
diction that there is chance of its ever
little

becoming popular. I quote one very beautiful

142
 THE PROSODY OF BRIDGES
sonnet to illustrate a quite remarkable
similarity between
prosody in its simpler his
form and that of Bridges, which suggests that
he had attained by experiment the same com-
promise between stress and syllabic verse. It
will make it fairly obvious, too, that he was
not merely a craftsman.

Look at the stars ! look, look up at the skies !

O look at all the firefolk sitting in the air !

The bright boroughs, the quivering citadels there !

The dim woods quick with diamond wells the elf -eyes ; !

The grey lawns cold where quaking gold-dew lies !

Wind-beat white-beam airy abeles all on fire ;

!

Flake-doves sent floating out at a farmyard scare !

Ah, well it is a purchase and a prize.

!

Buy then ! Bid then ! What ? Prayer, patience, alms,

vows,
Look, look ! a May-mess, like on orchard boughs ;

Look !
March-bloom, like on mealed - with - yellow
sallows,
These are indeed the barn within-doors house :

The shocks. This piece-bright paling hides the spouse

Christ, and the Mother of Christ, and all his hallows.

But the chief element in Bridges' prosody,

which makes a general summary impossible,
isa very delicate sense of quantity. It is not
reduced to any system, but it may be found
almost anywhere through the Shorter Poems.
It is a sense not only of what may be legiti-

mately borne by a stress, but the precise time-

143
 ROBERT BRIDGES
value of each speech-phrase in the line. It is
obvious from the first that a really considered
prosody of stress cannot afford to neglect
quantity. I think it is an instinctive recog-
nition of this point which allows one to describe
much of Bridges' more advanced verse as
having prosody in spite of its freedom. He
recognizes, for instance, the difference in value
between a stressed long vowel and a stressed
short vowel. In such lines as this, from
London Snow :

The eye marvelled marvelled at the dazzling whiteness ;

The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air,

there is, if I am not mistaken, a very clear

sense of the time-value of every syllable.
By means of these three devices, or rather
instinctive adjustments, he has made it possible
to free English verse from the trammels of the
syllabic line. Perhaps, as he suggests, not the
least advantage of his method is that it makes
excellence difficult. Never has any method
demanded such a perfect sense of the material
value of words and phrases. A poet who
attempted to build up such a prosody according
to rule would certainly fail. Its richness is,
as it were, only a single facet of the many-
sided jewel of his verse. At its dullest it is
too complex to be anything but spontaneous.

144
 VIII

THE DRAMAS
THE eight published plays of Robert Bridges
are more than equal in bulk to the rest of his
work. It has often been said that Lyrical
Poetry is typically a by-product from the
crucible of Drama, and, for this reason, I

suppose we must be glad that they have been

written. I do not know what was the size of
the original editions, but one, at any rate, the
first part of Nero, is out of print ; and however

great or small a vogue they may have had in

their own day, it is certain that they have
given rise to a good deal of unintelligent
criticism in ours. Certainly it is unfair to
judge them as they have been judged, by the
standards which a Renaissance of Poetic
Drama has created. They are only another
illustration of that impatient return to ancient
methods which sprung, as I have already
suggested, from the poet's discontent with the
outworn creeds of his time. They are frankly
derivative. The Feast of Bacchus is " in a
K 145
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Latin manner " ; The Christian Captives,
Achilles in Scyros 1 and The Return of Ulysses
are "in a mixed manner " while Palicio is
;

labelled Elizabethan. In the appendices to

these plays Bridges has acknowledged his
indebtedness to other dramatists from Menander
to Calderon and for this reason it is only by
;
"
the conventions of these manners " that he
can be fairly judged.
In the majority of the Bridges' plays drama
resolves itself into a string of situations,
passionate, intellectual, or fantastic, in which
puppets, entangled almost beyond hope in the
dramatist's own elaborate snares, gradually
shake themselves free, by the dramatist's
permission. It implies a convention that holds
dramatic dignity inconsistent with an every-
day setting so that every drama is in spirit,
;

if not in fact, a costume play. I suppose the

idea of Drama as a thing transcending every-
day experience, or at least as only symbolical
of such experience, was adopted with the
intention of keeping its poetry unfettered,
and in this tradition Bridges has only followed
the lead of such writers as Byron, Tennyson,
Browning, Swinburne and Morris. Indeed, it
is strange that Drama should have gained so

1
I have thought it best to treat Achilles in company with the
other Masks.
146
 THE DRAMAS
littlefrom the concentration of these poetical
intelligences upon it, and that we should have
needed to wait till the twentieth century for
the poetical drama which Synge found, not
among their stately abstractions, but among
the peasantry of the Arans. The secret of a
living drama is to strike a just balance between
the action and the idea. The poets in their
disgust with the wooden materialism of drama
as they found it tried to coax it into life by

imaginative flights, and failed because the

other essential was neglected. Bridges, elabor-
ately scheming to cover the old stage carpentry
with a gloss of poetic richness, has failed for a
slightly different reason : because his plays
have been a loose mixture of the two elements,
lacking that intense heat of conception which
fuses both into the imperishable alloy.
At the same time do not believe that
I
Bridges would have chosen the newer modes
even if he had been writing plays in the flush
of the dramatic revival. To make it clear
where we stand, I quote a passage from Mr.
P. P. Howe's able monograph on Synge. He
sums up a sermon on the misuse of the word
"
dramatic " thus :

"
To come to life, and thus to the theatre, with
pleasure and excitement," is of the essence of the
"
making of drama. If poetry be emotion remembered
147
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Wordsworth said, the drama is,
in tranquillity," as
or must seem to be, emotion visualized in action,
however tranquil the after mood of the dramatist.

Nowto Bridges, drama obviously means

nothing of the sort. In nearly all these plays
one finds the expression of emotion which in
the end amounts to the influence of character
upon action the means rather than the end
of drama. Characterization does not figure in
the scheme of the play as by inalienable birth-
right but by courtesy ; and when it reveals
itself it sometimes even disconcerting to
is

the precise figures which the author is putting

through their paces. It is as though a mario-
nette should suddenly come to life, like the
puppets in Petrouchka, and with something
of the same horror one trembles lest more than
sawdust should be spilt.
In the Dramas, as in the Shorter Poems and
the Sonnets, he shows a fastidious choice of
material. I do not think he could ever have
found the exploits of a character so shameless
as Christy Mahon, subject for drama, any
fit

more than the sorrows of Nan. Such characters

and such emotions outside his conception
fall
of the dignity of poetry, and this I imagine to
be an almost insuperable bar to his success as
a dramatist, whose business, in whatever
" manner " he come to
may be writing, is to
148
 THE DRAMAS
"
life with pleasure and excitement." In the
first section on the Shorter Poems his limitation

of the field of poetic beauty was discussed ;

and this, together with the misnamed
" "
Puritanism of The Growth of Love, is

actually symptomatic of a very real divorce

from life as we know it, from the universal
"
dusty damn'd experience." To say broadly
that his poetry is a product of the study is a
ridiculous heresy which has arisen from a care-
less reading of his work but to claim that he
;

sees life whole is equally undiscriminating.

" "
If you you may call this
will isolation
a matter of temperament; and there are
passages in The Growth of Love which suggest
an early struggle :

I willbe what God made me, nor protest

Against the bent of genius in my time,
That science of my friends robs all the best,
While I love beauty, and was born to rhyme.
Be they our mighty men, and let me dwell
In shadow among the mighty shades of old,
With love's forsaken palace for my cell;

Whence I look forth and all the world behold.

"
Perhaps we should say half the world."
And I think his immersion in old stories, that
Renaissance preoccupation which so absorbs
this clerke of Oxenford, only accentuates the
isolation of the man from the life of his age.
149
 ROBERT BRIDGES
He even endeavours to justify it on a philo-
sophical basis :

The philosophic mind

Can take no middle ways ;

She will not leave her love

To mix with men, her art
Is all to strive above
The crowd, or stand apart.

As again, Wintry Delights, he speaks of

in
"
the aloofness from life's meagre
sacred
'
affairs which the elect enjoy. But this is
:>

not the spirit in which Drama is written. It

implies an unsympathetic attitude towards
the struggles out of which Drama arises, and
an incomplete understanding of those who
breathe an atmosphere differently composed
from that of his own golden clime.
You can see that he is genuinely sorry for
Keats the social condition of his parents, he
:

says, probably excluded him from contact

with the best types. No doubt this is perfectly
true ;
but it almost seems as if this critic's
"
pleasant unhindered order of life, his happy
enchantments of fortune, easy surroundings,
courteous acquaintance," have excluded him
from contact with any but the best. And it
takes all types to make a theatre. I have

already attributed to him an aristocracy of

manners, and the obligations of such nobility
150
 THE DRAMAS
leave him uncomfortable in the treatment of

unsympathetic characters. The servants in

the third act of Humours of the Court show
him at his worst.
In view of this it is fortunate that he has

written two essays with indirect bearing on

drama which help us to understand his
theories of dramatic propriety and compare
them with his practice. The Keats essay we
have already considered and may now dismiss
with the mention of one characteristic pro-
nouncement. " Keats," he says, " lacks the
essential moral grasp for drama." But the
essay on Shakespeare calls for closer examina-
tion. The main idea of the work is to show
" "
that Shakespeare was all things to all men :

that the title As You Like It might have been

made a motto for the bulk of his work. I do
not think this point had been amplified before,
and as a fact it is indisputable. But he goes
on to separate "the matter that most offends
"
my simple feelings in Shakespeare's plays.
After rebuking him for his bad jokes, and the
mere verbal trifling "which was aimed at a
part of his audience with which we are
little in sympathy," he reflects seriously and
at length on Shakespeare's indelicacy :

The fault is found chiefly [he says], in the earlier

plays, and the history is generally free from it, but
151
 ROBERT BRIDGES
the women are tainted, and it is seldom entirely
absent. cannot be wholly accounted for by any
It

theory that does not involve the supposition that he

was making concessions to the most vulgar stratum
of his audience, and had acquired the habit of so

doing, and this supposition is confirmed by the

speech of Hamlet to the players, where Shakespeare
has put his own criticism into Hamlet's mouth.

Now seems to me that there is another

it

theory by which the grossness of Shakespeare

can be accounted for, and by which, if it were
for a moment necessary, it might be defended.
For even admitting that some of Shakespeare's
clowning scenes are foolish that his brutality
;

is a survival out of darker ages, his lewdness

flung contemptuously at an audience of

lackeys, without these things we should feel
that he had lost something of breadth and
universality. Some people might possibly
respect him more many would certainly
:

love him less. Already we have a whole

Hamlets but there is only one
gallery full of ;

Falstaff, and the worth of Falstaff is not

purely dramatic. Without Shakespeare's
catholicity of feeling for mankind in its
soarings of the spirit, its exaltations of the
flesh, grossness and its splendour, there
its

would be little truth in Bridges' own happy

account of the matter :

152
 THE DRAMAS
What shall I say ? for God, whose wise decree
Confirmeth all He did by all He doth
Doubled His whole creation making thee.

For the grossness Shakespeare is like the

of

grossness of Rabelais, inwhich Arthur Machen

has seen nothing but a symbol of ecstasy :

"
the shape of gauloiserie, of gross exuberant
gaiety expressing itself by outrageous tales,
by outrageous words, by a very cataract of
obscenity." And it is like the exultation of
the double-basses in Beethoven's C minor
symphony. Rabelais himself fantastically ex-
plained, through the mouth of the priestess
Bacbuc, the springs of this godlike laughter :

Vos academiques 1'apprenant rendons 1'etymologie

de vin, lequel ils disent en Gree OIN02, estre com
VIS, force, puissance.

And it is this puissance, this dynamic essence

of humanity, which Bridges the critic dis-
approved, that Bridges the writer of dramas
lacked. We must not look for it in these
plays. We must be contented with a good
deal of ingenious stage-carpentry ; the twist-
ing and unravelling of a number of intricate
knots that have no very serious connection
with the skein of life and a great deal of
;

very beautiful lyric poetry that crops up in

the most unlikely places. We are told that all
153
 ROBERT BRIDGES
(except the first part of Nero) are intended for
the stage ; but I very much doubt if any of
them would act, unless it were perhaps the
Terentian Feast of Bacchus and the Christian
Captives.
Thisplay seems worth a more detailed
analysis than the rest, because it offers a little
more characterization than usual, and even
rises attimes to a flicker of dramatic intensity.
The story is derived from Calderon's El
Principe Constante. The scene of the play is a
castle of the King of Fez, near to the sea, now
in the occupation of the Moorish troops who
are engaged in a Spanish campaign and to ;

this place the King has summoned his daughter

Almeh. He is a man with one aim in life the
recapture of the city of Ceuta, lost to the
Christians in the days of his fathers and now ;

the prize seems almost within his grasp, for

the Portuguese forces are depleted, his army
isat the height of strength and enthusiasm,
and he only needs the help of the Moroccan
cavalry, under their prince Tarudante, to
assure success. Almeh, whom he offers to
Tarudante in marriage, is his highest card.
"
Win me Ceuta back," he says,

And drive the idolaters across the sea

Ere thou take home my daughter for thy queen.
154
 THE DRAMAS
Into this peaceful garden, where Almeh has
lately been enchanted by the singing of a
company of Christian prisoners, comes Sala
ben Sala, Fez's greatest general, a man of

chivalry and courage, and devoted to the

princess. He has escaped alone from the
unexpected defeat of the Moorish forces, and
that only by the clemency of Ferdinand, in
"
his angel fairness."
The moon to them
That was our peril the accursed yellow moon
Exposed our camp, while in the shadowy glens
The night hid their attack.

Almeh, alone with Sala, pleads for the Christian

captives who have taken her fancy she ;

weighs their freedom against the clemency of

Ferdinand. She tells him how she has heard
their hymns.
ALMEH. 'Twas last night, Sala, as I lay long awake
Dreamily hearkening to the ocean murmur,
Softer than silence, on mine ears there stole
A solemn sound of wailful harmony :

So beautiful it was that first I thought

This castle was enchanted, as I have read
In eastern tales ; or else that 'twas the song
Of people of this land, who make the sea
Their secret god, and at midnight arise
To kneel upon the shore, and his divinity
Beseech with shrilling prayer or then it seemed
:

A liquid voiced choir of spirits that swam

Upon the ocean surface, harp in hand,
155
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Swelling their hymns with his deep undersong.
That was the Christian captives,
SALA. 'Twas the night
Softened their wails to sweetness as the space
:

'Twixt hell and heaven makes the cries of the

damned
Music to the angels.

Even as Sala yields he sees the portrait of

Tarudante that the King has left, and is caught
up in a storm of jealousy.
The second act introduces the captives them-
selves. They appear as a chorus, at first
"
singing the hymn Jesu dulcis memoria,"
and later speaking with Almeh, explaining to
"
her the art of their many- voiced skill."
This use of the chorus in an historical play, in
which they do not function as a commentary
but actually as persons of the drama, is fatal
to illusion and when, at the sound of Moorish
;

drums and trumpets, Almeh tells them to go,

and they reply, presumably in unison,
We will depart and mourn
Within our sultry pit,

the device verges on the ludicrous. On the

stage, I doubt if the play could possibly survive
the longueurs of this act.
The Moors, with Tarudante's aid, have
turned the tables. They return proudly with
the Christian leaders, whom they have taken
156
 THE DRAMAS
Ferdinand and his brother
prisoners, Prince
Enrique. Almeh's fancy is immediately at-
tracted by Ferdinand and repelled by the
Moorish Prince. Enrique, seeing Almeh's
beauty, exclaims :

These be the Moorish arab such a race ;

Sprang never from the sooty loins of Ham.

"
Devil, or angel, or Arab," replies Ferdinand,
"
she has stolen my soul " ; and above these
asides one hears the voice of Tarudante :

Such perfect grace, such speech and modesty

Outbid my fancy I would fight thy battles
;

For twenty years to call this treasure mine.

THE KING. I say she is thine, and she is my only child.

Thus we find ourselves concerned with a

parallelogram of forces the King's, Sala's
:

and Ferdinand's love for Almeh, to which may

be added Tarudante's declared affection,
which is of the kind which goes to the making
of royal love-matches. Sala sees in Ferdinand's
captivity a chance to repay his old debt in
chivalry, and begs his freedom. The King
refuses. Ceuta is the only treasure he can
match with Ferdinand's life, and Ceuta
Ferdinand will never surrender.
The chorus, with whom the prince speaks
by Sala's permission, are irritated by his
scruples in the matter ; they see in the
157
 ROBERT BRIDGES
surrender of Ceuta the end of their exile, and
beg Ferdinand to yield for their sake as for
his own. I confess it is rather dull reading :

there is no getting beyond the inhumanity of

this chorus. Still there are memorable lines.
Ferdinand's
Hath not Ceuta
Been as Christ's tourney, where the nations
Have clapped their hands to see a few brave knights
Hold Africa at bay,

and the effective line in which he describes

Tarudante's army, with a Miltonic inverted
fifth foot :-
I was here ; I had come
Even to this castle, when behold, swarming
Innumerable from the hills around
The horsemen of Morocco.

There is a nice sense of the value of place-

names in the chorus's speech.

Nay, we remember well

Estramadura, we remember Tagus,
The banks of Guadiana, and our homes
Among the vineyards Ezla we remember,
;

Obidos and Alenquer, where the trees

Shadow the village steps, and on the slopes
Our gardens bloom where old Montego laves
:

The fertile valleys 'mong the hills of Beira.

And there is little more in the love-passage

between Almeh and Ferdinand : love with a
salting of proselytizing.
158
 THE DRAMAS
But the third act opens with one of those
" "
that so often astound
lyrical intermezzi
one in reading the Bridges plays. This time
it is Almeh who speaks :

O delicate air, inviting

The birth of the sun, to fire
The heavy glooms of the sea with silver laughter ;

Ye sleepy flowers that tire

In melting dreams of the day,
To splendour disregardful, with sloth awaking ;

Rejoice, rejoice, alway ;

But why are ye taking
My soul to follow you after,
To awake with you, and be joyful in your delighting ?
Ay me !

And it by one of those flower-

is followed
songs which we have grown to expect this ;

time the flower is familiar none other than ;

the already loved sea-poppy. 1 Almeh sends

" "
her maid to pick these yellow roses and,
in another love scene, she begs Ferdinand,
once more, to surrender Ceuta for the sake of
his companions and himself. Tarudante,
rather bored by the delay and Almeh's inclina-
tion for Ferdinand, decides to leave the army ;

and Sala, overwhelmed by jealousy, proposes

to risk releasing Ferdinand. He reveals his
1
Or perhaps the yellow-flowered iceplant, which is common on
the North African coast.

159
 ROBERT BRIDGES
love for Almeh, telling how he has watched
her from her childhood, and seen
From being a child, suddenly she was a woman
Changed beyond hope, to me past hope unchanged,

pretty Elizabethanism. When Ferdinand

persists in his determination to stay with his
fellow prisoners, the general even threatens to
killhim if he will not go. And when the King,
worried by Almeh's disaffection, and on Sala's
advice, consents to release all the captives, the
prince included, on the day when she shall wed
Morocco " Canst thou not thank me, arid
"
smile on Tarudante ? Almeh, to save
Ferdinand, consents in four expressive lines :

I thank thee, sire.

If Iseemed to not thank thee, 'twas the effect
Of suddenness, nothing but suddenness.
I am glad to do it.

When the prince the cost at which

she tells
his freedom is purchased we have another

courtly declaration of love, another courtly

"
answer. How canst thou love and fear ? '

says Ferdinand.

See, I can teach thee how to trust in love,

Now with this kiss.
Enter KING, TARUDANTE, and SALA.

Naturally, Tarudante no longer wishes to stay

160
 THE DRAMAS
where he not wanted, and the King, in his
is

proper Ercles vein, swears he will kill Ferdinand.

KING. He is gone
Incredible Consenting! I could not gloss it : :

Before my eyes, the eyes of Africa.

Is this her secret ? this her melancholy
That cannot love ? Treachery and apostasy !

Or is it that sick passion some have suffered

For things strange and detestable. I will see her :

She shall renounce it. Hola !

(Calling) Ho !

within
No cure but that : immediate disavowal,
Ere 'tis too late. O shame !
(Calls) Ho there,
within ?

Enter SERVANT.
(To Servant) Give word that the princess attend me here.
Exit SERVANT.
That devil knows he looks as if he knew.
;

And Sala knew it. 'Twas for this he urged

The villain's liberty. He shall go free . . .

To hell and I will grant such liberty

. . .

To all who have seen him. There's one hiding-

place
Where I may stow dishonour. But for her,
My daughter yet perchance there is any spot
; if

In all her heart untainted by this shame

Which I may reach, that natural piety
May feel my yearning sorrow. . . .
Tenderly,
Enter ALMEH.
Tenderly must I work. Lo, where she comes,
Her shameful head bowed down with conscious-
ness.
Come, Almeh, come come nearer. See ; :

Thy tender grace, thy beauty's perfect flower,

L 161
 ROBERT BRIDGES
The vesture of thy being all thy motions, ;

Thoughts, and imaginations, thy desires,

Fancies and dreams whatever from day to day
:

Thou art, and calPst thyself, what is it all

But part of me ? Art thou the beauteous branch,
I am the gnarled trunk that bore and bears thee ;

The root that feeds. I call thee not to judgment ;

Only to save what most I prize, thy name,

And mine there's one way that can be
: Morocco :

Hath taken his leave before he leave must thou

:

Beg him to see thy injury avenged,

And thy honour's sake must on thy knees
for
Bid me
revenge it. If on the same day
The Christian prince insulted thee he die,
And die at thy request, before the eyes
That saw thy shame, ere busy tongues can tell

A tale in the ear, such

speedy penalty
Will fright the scandal to a tale of terror,
And save our name. Withal he is a prince,
And that a prince should die may well atone.
What sayest thou, child ?
ALMEH. Bid me not speak.
KING. Thy tears
And sobs I cannot read. I bid thee speak.
ALMEH. O father !

KING. Speak !

ALMEH. Thy words, recall thy words.

KING. What words ?

ALMEH. Thy words of blood.

KING. Ah, Almeh ! Almeh !

Art thou my daughter ?

ALMEH. O sire, on my knees

I beg.
KING. Well, what ?

ALMEH. His life ! his life !

162
 THE DRAMAS
And persuasion failing, he dismisses Almeh,
so,
and calling Sala, decrees a death by starvation
to Ferdinand :

Let not his life

Outdrag three days. But hark : in spite of

vengeance,
And in remembrance of his claim on thee,
He may go quit upon the old condition,
Ceuta : thou understandest ?

Almeh determines to share her lover's fate.

She attempts, through her maid Zapel, to let
Ferdinand know what she is doing. Zapel
gives the letter to Sala, who clumsily allows it

to fall into the King's hands. The King is

moved :

How would my crown

Shine 'mong the blessed caliphs and the martyrs
Who fell in fight upon the road of God ?
How would they look upon me,
If'mong the moon-bright scimitars I came,
My child's blood on my head ? and she not there,
The fair flower of my life, the bird of grace,
Which my long- withering and widowed tree
Held to the face of heaven,
Now from my own trunk be my own hands torn
Better the bole be split : heaven's lightning rend
me :

All curses seize me. Almeh, thou must not die.

A herald from Portugal confirms his melting

mood. Edward, the king, is dead, and
Ferdinand now is regent of Portugal. The
163
 ROBERT BRIDGES
prospect of a possible alliance cheers him ;

he sees Ceuta within his grasp. He sends for

Ferdinand, who comes upborne between two
Moorish soldiers. They sit together, alone on
the darkening stage, while the King gives him
Almeh's letter, tells him of his own succession
to power and tries to coax the shadow of a man
back to the will to live. He even offers him
Almeh's hand.

FEED. What hear I? Wouldst thou then

Have given me in good faith Almeh to wife ?

(Makes motions towards food.)

KING. And will. Ay, drink.
FERD. And Ceuta ?

KING. That is mine,

Her price.
FERD. (thrusting things from him). Ah, never.
KING. Dost thou then refuse ?

FERD. It cheereth death to spend my last breath thus.

KING. Sittest thou there, balanced 'twixt death and life

Daintily making choice, and to my offer

Of all that God could grant thee, life and love,
Wrung from me by my sorrow, to my shame
Preferrest the Christian hell ? O Infidel,

Apostatizing dog, lest now thy mouth

Should find the power to grasp one broken speech
Of triumph over me, die at my hand.
Death shall not rob me of thy blood that's left,
(Stabs FERDINAND across the table.)
Thus let thy brother find thee, if I fail
To send him also thither, where thou goest,
To thine idolatrous and thieving sires.
164
 THE DRAMAS
And at the close of this fine scene the un-
imaginable chorus mourn antiphonally.
With moonrise the ghost of Ferdinand, a
very gratuitous ghost, appears to frighten
Sala and the King, who have returned to the
scene of the murder. Messengers arrive to say
that their scouts have seen the phantom
Ferdinand ride at full speed into the Christian
camp. A night attack is planned against the
Portuguese forces, and the fourth act finishes.
I could wish that there were little more, for
with the death of Ferdinand the interest is
waning ; or at least the final triumph of the
Portuguese, which here fills the place of the
trumpets of Fortinbras, should have been
hurried on. Perhaps Bridges, shrinking from
any Shakespearian violence, thought to miti-
gate his late transgression by the moonlight
scene in which the distraught Almeh relates
her vision of judgment, before she dies on the
body of Ferdinand, and the chorus justifies its
existence by accounting for the murderous
King. I quote part of this lovely fragment
for its sheer beauty : to the drama it means
less than nothing.

ALMEH. Air, air ! that from the thousand frozen founts

Of heaven art rained upon the drowsy earth,
And gathering keenness from the diamond ways
Of faery moonbeams visitest our world

165
 ROBERT BRIDGES
To make renewal of its jaded life.
Breathe, breathe ! 'Tis drunken with the stolen
scents
Of sleeping pinks faint with quick kisses
:

snatched
From roses, that in crowds of softest snow
Dream of the moon upon their blanched bowers.
I drink, I drink.
ZAPEL. If thou wilt tarry here,
Let me go fetch thy cloak.
ALMEH. Where is my father ?
ZAPEL. He is not in the castle.
ALMEH. Where is Sala ?
must speak with him.
I
ZAPEL. They are both sallied forth
To assault the Christian camp.
ALMEH. O then 'twas true
The noise I heard. They are righting 'twas the :

guns,
The shouts I heard. I thought 'twas in my ears.
I have had strange visions, Zapel, these last
days :

'Twere past belief what I have seen and heard.

I'll tell thee somewhat when I have time O love,
If thou wouldst be my muse,
I would enchant the sun ;
And steal the silken hues,
Whereof his light is spun :

And from the whispering way

Of the high-arching air
Look with the dawn of day
Upon the countries fair.
ZAPEL. See I will fetch thy cloak. (Exit.)
ALMEH. This is the reason
Why all's so quiet. Sweet peace, thou dost lie.

166
 THE DRAMAS
Men steal forth silently to kill :
they creep,
That they may spring to murder. Who would
think,
Gazing on this fair garden, as it lieth
Lulled by the moonlight and the solemn music
Made everlastingly by the grave sea,
That 'twas a hell of villainy, a dungeon
Of death to its possessors. Death.

But Enrique's speech, which closes the tragedy,

is a thoroughly consistent piece of the Bridges
fft*.
I have treated play at some length
this
because, in spite of the dignity and colour of
the diction and the fact that the lyrical out-
bursts are here more in keeping than usual, I
feel that undue praise has been given to the
construction of these dramas, of which it is
the best. The constant exigencies of the
scene a faire ; the threadbare devices (" See,
he comes ") by which the characters are
brought on to the stage ; the loose mingling
of colloquialisms (" food and an hour of rest
will make me fit ") with the heavy manner :

all these things are fatal to dramatic illusion

"
in whatever manner " a play be written.
Here, as in the rest, the characterization is
elementary, except perhaps in the case of
Sala and the King, who, after all, are not of a
very complicated personality. Even the final
grief of Almeh is conventional in colour.
167
 ROBERT BRIDGES
There is only one thing for which these plays
cannot be disregarded, and that is the really
beautiful poetry which smiles at one, from
time to time, through their coldness, like a
flower pushed through snow.
Palicio, the Elizabethan romantic drama,
is taken from Sicilian history of the years

about 1500, and Bridges also makes acknow-

ledgment to de Stendhal for some of his
incident. The beautiful flower-song from the
fourth act I have already quoted in another
place and this is only one of many poetical
;

beauties. In the first scene of all there is a

memorable description of Palermo and one
that suggests other cities of which we know.
Your city
Approached by sea, or from the roofs surveyed
Smiles back upon the gazer, like a queen
That hears her praise.

And again, this charming atmosphere of early

morning :

How fresh the morning air is. See how the mist
Melts in the sun, and while we look is gone.
Leisurely gathered on his sloping beams
And guarded by her angel-towers, the city
Sleeps like an island in the solemn gray.
'Tis beauteous

And again, Margaret's song of joy in the third

act :

168
 THE DRAMAS
MARGARET. Forgive, she saith, Forgive me rather, oh
heavens !

The sourness of my spirit hitherto :

Yet now forgive me not if I dare tamper

With this intrinsic passion. O joy, my joy !

This beauteous world is mine :

All Sicily is mine :

This morning mine. I saw the sun, my slave,

Poising on high his shorn and naked orb
For my delight. He there had stayed for me,
Had he not read it in my heart's delight
I bade him on. The birds at dawn sang to me,
"
Crying Is life not sweet ? O is't not sweet?
' '

I looked upon the sea ; there was not one,

Of all his multitudinous waves, not one,
That with its watery drift at raking speed
Told not my special joy.

But here, as before, the history takes a lot

of dreary telling, and that mostly because the
people are not conceived in terms of flesh and
blood. The drama stands ready to hand ;
it

only needs the animation of a man who comes

"
to its life with pleasure and excitement,"
and this it has never had. Against it one may
write down an incredible number of banalities
which stand out in relief from their pretentious
setting. Sometimes there is a looseness of
grammatical expression, such as :

Go, set his room as if he had never been,

at others a gross lack of reality, as in the scene

169
 ROBERT BRIDGES
when Palicio addresses his comic-opera
brigands :

ALL. Huzzah ! Huzzah !

PALICIO. Thank you, my men . . .

or this gem of poetical drama :

MARGARET. May I see Constance ?

Rosso. At once, but come prepared to find her weak.

For the Humours of even

the Court there is
less to be said. The court is of the kind which
one finds in Shakespeare's comedies, but much
more polite and the bulk of the humour is
;

unconscious. We have a great many of the

stock devices of comedy introduced with a
disarming na'ivett ; changed names, and even
changed hats a heap of the weak jokes for
;

which Shakespeare had been so solemnly

rebuked. I suppose the greatest failure of all
to be Tristram, evidently intended for a comic
fellow and when Diana, in the second act,
;

declares that "he is profoundly dull

5:
we
wonder if the humour is, after all, as uncon-
scious as at first we had imagined. St.
Nicholas is a gentleman who has been to school
with Don Adriano in Love's Labour Lost, and
learnt next to nothing. Sir Gregory, the deaf
major-domo, is fairly successful as a type ;
but it is unfortunate for Diana's credit as a
heroine that she should have fits,
170
 IX
THE DRAMAS
IT has to be confessed that, apart from Achilles,
which I have considered as belonging to the
masks, the only Bridges play that would
" "
act even passably is a translation. In
stage-craft the Feast of Bacchus is a decided
improvement on the Heautontimoreumenos
from which most of it is faithfully taken. In
the original we find the inevitable prolixity,
and a tangle of plots under which a modern
audience would grow very restive. The Feast
of Bacchus is, as a matter of fact, nearly six
hundred lines longer than its model, if one
excludes the Prologue but it has less difficult
;

ground to cover.
The selection and modification of material
is in some ways characteristic of Bridges. The
play quite Terentian in atmosphere indeed
is

one is surprised to find that only one-sixth of

the Latin original remains. The result is a
Terence who could be introduced into almost
any drawing-room, so thoroughly has he been
expurgated and polished. And yet the thing
171
 ROBERT BRIDGES
remains Terentian. Bridges' genius for imita-
tion, which I have had occasion to notice
before, shows itself at its strongest in this piece
of work. Here we have a Terentian play
without the two or three lewd and scurrilous
slaves, with only one lady of doubtful virtue,
and with characters who are at the same time
boisterous and gentlemanly. Bridges had
very properly pointed out that he has a right
to take what liberties he pleases with an
author who possibly changed his original out
of all recognition. We can only guess how far
Terence's
excellent
Adjusted folds betray
How once Menander went.

I do not wish to labour the point, but it seems

to me that the Athens of the New Comedy
would hardly have been satisfied with any-
thing so innocuous and un-Bacchic as the
Feast of Bacchus. The dimidiatus Menander
would not, one imagines, deliberately coarsen
his original. It is likely that Menander was

every bit as coarse as Terence. In exercising

a strict censorship over the original, Bridges
has lost us a good deal that is characteristic
and almost necessary to appreciation of the
work, something vigorous and satyric, the
harshness of the violent wines of the south.
172
 THE DRAMAS
His exact liberties with the play are hardly
worth a minute examination. When he turns
aside from his original, it is pretty easy to see
the reason. The comic slaves Dromo and
Syrus are certainly ill-mannered and tiresome ;

Bridges leaves them out altogether. This

saves us at least the constant bickering
between master and slave which, if it were
really a feature of Athenian manners, must
have made life a burden to any young gentle-
man with a taste for intrigue. The function
of the slave being to provide an ingenious ruse
whenever his master wants one, he becomes a
very important part of the mechanism of the
play. Syrus and Dromo are unattractive
examples, and we do not regret their loss.
Without them it becomes necessary to find a
convenient go-between in the innumerable
negotiations. For this function Bridges
creates an entirely new character, Philolaches,
an actor, who just misses being Terentian,
but makes a quite satisfactory substitute.
The story of Antiphila's exposure would, in
the author's opinion, deprive Chremes of
sympathy. His gentle consideration for his
characters certainly brings the play to a very
happy ending. In the original, he tells us,
"
The play, though marked by Roman taste,
is a work of high excellence but, as it stands,
;

173
 ROBERT BRIDGES
would be unpresentable to a Christian audi-
ence." But one's sympathy for the characters
in a Terentian play is not, as a rule, very
lively. After all, they are generally puppets
(and heathen puppets at that), and one is
more tempted to join in the shout of derision
that one imagines spreading through the
Roman audience when one of them is made
to look ridiculous than to shed gentle tears
over his misfortunes.
And yet the play is Terentian. I have found
little except the passages that are marked as

translations that I could persuade myself

might have been written by Terence. Yet
something of the vigour and the ecstasy
remains, in spite of the author's own admission
that this atmosphere does not please him.
Again, if one forgets Terence, the play would
make a very pleasant comedy for amateur
acting. It runs pretty smoothly from the
first scene to the last. There is a great deal
of verbiage, and the plot is a little feeble
from a modern standpoint, but a clever actor
could put a good deal of humour into most of the
parts. I am afraid Caesar's judgment of Terence
could be equally well applied to Bridges :

Levibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret vis

comica, ut equato virtus polleret honore
cum Greeds, neve hac despectus parte iaceres.
174
 THE DRAMfAS
Therea certain amount of unexpressed
is

humour, however, especially in the character

of Menedemus, who quite engages one's sym-
pathy. He has a charming simplicity. The
rest of the characters do not live. The young
men are no more convincing than Terence's ;

"
Philolaches is exaggerated Bacchis
; whose
"
badness," the author tells us, still weights
'
the play has the merit of being obviously
painted. Her name has been changed to
Gorgo.
Perhaps the real charm of the play is the
delightful metre in which it is written through-
"
out. The author describes it as a line of six
stresses, written according to rules of English
rhythm." Unfortunately there are no rules
of English rhythm. Roughly, however, the
metre follows the rules suggested for lighter
English stress-verse in an appendix to Milton's
Prosody, which I have already quoted. Some-
"
times a stress is distributed." The opening
speech of Chremes, which forms the beginning
of the Terence play, but is delayed in this
version, gives an excellent idea of it. A
natural emphasizing of the sense, the author
tells us, gives all the rhythm that is intended.

Menedemus, although our acquaintance has been but

short
And only dates from the day you bought this piece of land,
175
 ROBERT BRIDGES
And came to live close by me : for little or nought but that
Occasioned it, as you know :
yet my respect for you,
Or else your being a neighbour, for that itself, I take it,
Counts in some sort as friendship, makes me bold and free
To give you a piece of advice the fact is, you seem to me
:

To be working here in a manner which, both to your time

of life

And station,
is most unsuitable. What, in Heaven's name,

Can be your object ? What do you drive at ? To guess

your age
You are sixty years at least. There's no one hereabouts
Can show a better farm, nor more servants upon it :

And yet you do the work yourself, as though you had none.
Never do I go out, however early in the morning,
Never come home again, however late at night,
But here I see you digging, hoeing, or at all events

Toiling at something or other. You are never a moment

idle,
Or shew regard for yourself. Now all this can't be done
For pleasure, that I am sure of, and as for any profit,
Why, if you only applied half the energy
To stirring up your servants, both you and your farm
Would do much better.

For the wiles of the two slaves we have a

scheme, invented by Philolaches, in which he
and Pamphilus disguise themselves as Persians
and try to extract money from Chremes by
pretending to bring news of Clinia. The
scene contains some delightfully sonorous lines
of mock Persian, and a good deal of humour.
One appreciates, too, Chreme's summing up
of Attic comedy in the fourth act :

176
 THE DRAMAS
Fifty per cent of allour Attic comedies
Have this same plot, a daughter stolen in early years,
Lost sight of, despaired of, almost forgotten, and then at
last,
When least expected although there's scarce a soul in the
house
That does not know or guess it beforehand she reappears.
Then are not all eyes wet ? . . .

The Feast of Bacchus stands out among the

plays as at once the most readable and the
most playable. Its humour is often a little
anaemic, and in one or two places fails badly.
But for the most part it rings true enough,
and atones for a good deal that is tedious even
in the simplified and in many ways, im-
proved reconstruction of the plot.
Of Nero, which is published in two parts,
and was begun and finished at very different
stages of Bridges' craftsmanship, one is forced
to admit that it has most of the failings of the
other dramatic work, and is redeemed by less
than the usual amount of poetry. The first
part, alone among the plays, is not intended
for the stage. One imagines that it is an
early effort at dramatic writing, and need not
challenge serious criticism. It shows us the

young Nero wishing to reform the world, and

enforces fairly adequately the grim contrast of
the murders of Britannicus and Agrippina.
We do not shudder at the tale of intrigues and
M 177
 ROBERT BRIDGES
counter-intrigues. The story does not gain a
glimmer of effectiveness in dramatic form.
We have not the sense of savage irony that
seems to underlie the suave conversation of the
Corinthian proconsul and his friends in
Anatole France's wonderful story. Bridges'
Nero is not subtle enough to be convincing,
and the irony is laid on with a very heavy
hand. The " dramatic qualities other than
"
scenic in which we are told the work is an
exercise, are, we
suppose, just these attempts
at suggestiveness. But when Bridges is
suggestive, we know precisely what he is

suggesting. the phrase is admissible, his

If
hints contract the attention where those of
M. France expand it.
The second part of Nero is comparatively
successful. It has colour and movement,
and even characterization. Seneca is the
Seneca we know, but he is carefully drawn.
Nero's portrait of himself is the best thing
in the play :

I know that there is no man in the world,

Nor ever was, but hath his flaw In some
:

'Tis a foul blot, that in the eye of nature

Stands out unpardonable and unredeemed
By all the school of virtues, howsoe'er
They dance in grace around it In another
:

'Tis like a beauty-mark, a starry mole

Which on a virgin's body but sets off
178
 THE DRAMAS
The dazzling flesh, that else were self-extinguished
By its own fairness Yet by these flecks and flaws,
Whate'er they be, 'tis fated that men fall :

And thus may I, nay must ; unless in time

I heed good warning, for my fault is gross.
I am over generous yes ye say ; ;
it ;
I know it.

That is my flaw. . . .

The least considerable of the plays is The

Return of Ulysses. If I were to criticize it, it
would only be to repeat my reasons for con-
demning so much of the rest of Bridges'
dramatic work. I wish I could agree with
Dr. Warren that it gives us at last an adequate
dramatic setting of the Homeric story. Person-
ally I would rather read the translation of
Butcher and Lang. I have searched vainly
through the play for a single passage that
seems to me really worth quoting, either for
its dramatic merit or as poetry. Even the
blank verse is less skilfully handled than usual.
Even the lyric " Happy are the Earth's heirs "
has no lustre. In one or two places the affected
archaism of the language is not only ugly but
impossible.

179
 X
CLASSICISM
IN an earlier chapter I have tried to show
that the method of Bridges is, by his own
definition, classic rather than romantic ;
but
there is a very considerable legend that has
marked him down as a classical revivalist, a
man who has squandered his powers inelaborate
imitation : and this legend has grown side by
side with that other which pictures him a mere
experimenter, however brilliant, in the aridities
of technique. What could be more natural ?
Did not Horace keep his vintage nine years by
him ? are not the titles of the plays and of
the set of masks : Achilles in Scyros, Eros and
Psyche, Demeter, and Prometheus, evidence
enough, to say nothing of the Experiments
in Classical Prosody? Indeed, the journalists
have managed to make a very plausible case
for this heresy out of his titles and from the
names of his characters though it would be
:

safe to say that much of Prometheus is nearer

to Whitman than to JEschylus, Eros and
180
 CLASSICISM
Psyche nearer to Keats than to Apuleius, and
Achilles as far removed from the original
legend as is Oxford from Scyros. That he can
give us the flavour of the classics in his English
is a thing that no one who has heard the

version of Ibant Obscuri, or the masterly

transcript from the Iliad
1
can doubt. An
isolated passage, the reply of the phantom
Palinurus, will illustrate this :

And lo ! his helmsman, Palinurus, in eager emotion,

Who on th' Afric course, in bright starlight, with a fair

wind,
Fell, by slumber opprest, unheedfully into the wide sea.

for :

Ecce gubernator sese Palinurus agebat

qui Lybico nuper cursu, dum sidera servat,
exciderat puppi mediis effusus in undis.

I am not sure that the Bridges version is not

more suggestive than the original. The hint
of space, broad plains stretched
in those
beneath a Mediterranean sky, contained in the
adjacent spondaic stresses: "bright starlight,
with a fair wind," is marvellous even though ;
" "
unheedfully into the wide sea cannot
match the lassitude of Vergil's " effusus in
undis." The passage might stand on its own
merits among the best epitaphs on seamen
in the Greek Anthology. Again, we have
1
As yet unpublished.
181
 ROBERT BRIDGES
already seen how, with a baffling misuse of
the Terentian material, he has caught the
spirit of Terence in the Feast of Bacchus :
but to consider these masks as derivative
work in any sense of the word is to miss the
flavour of three poems which belong to the
present day as much as to any.
For the purpose of this study I have included
Achilles in Scyros, which is either a delightful
mask or an execrable drama, under the former
heading. As a play it has all the defects
which we have noticed, in an exaggerated
form. There is no vital attempt at characteriza-
tion except in the case of the rather shadowy
"
Ulysses of the wide brow and restless eye."
The action too is negligible and the one;

dramatic moment Achilles' choice of the

sword from the pedlar's pack has been robbed
of all delicacy by the arrangement of the
trick on the stage. Deiadamia's chorus of
maidens, not distantly related to the fays of
A Midsummer Night's Dream, are only more
convincing than the Christian Captives by
virtue of their setting. Abas is an elementary
Sala Ben Sala in chiton. And we are sorry for
none of these things. They are all forgotten
in the lucidity of a consummate poetical
technique, in the overflowing measure of

beauty that drowns this starry island of the

182
 CLASSICISM
jEgean in its bathing blue fresh-blown ;

beauty of scattered wind-flowers, the beauty

of tall ships, and, overspread, the flush of joy
and of un wither ing youth. Take for example
the picture of the Cretan ships joining the
anchored fleet at Aulis, as the old king saw
them on a misty morning :

The next day at dawn

Iplayed the spy. 'Twas such a breathless morning
When all the sound and motion of the sea
Is short and sullen, like a dreaming beast :

Or as 'twere mixed of heavier elements

Than the bright water, that obeys the wind.
Hiring a fishing boat we bade the sailors
Row us to Aulis when midway the straits,
;

The morning mist lifted, and lo, a sight

Unpicturable. High upon our left
Where we supposed was nothing, suddenly
A tall andshadowy figure loomed then two, :

And three and four, and more towering above us ;

But whether poised upon the leaden sea

They stood, or floated in the misty air,
That baffling our best vision held entangled
The silver of the half-awakened sun,
Or whether near or far, we could not tell,
Nor what at first I thought them rocks, but ere
:

That error could be told, they were upon us

Bearing down swiftly athwart our course and all
;

Saw 'twas a fleet of ships, not three or four

Now, but unnumber'd like a floating city,
:

Ifsuch could be, with walls and battlements

Spread on the wondering water and now the sun
:

Broke through the haze, and from the shields outhung

183
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Blazed back his dazzling beams, and round their prows
On the divided water played as still
:

They rode the tide in silence, all their oars

Stretched out aloft, as are the balanced wings
Of storm-fowl, which returned from battling flight
Across the sea, steady their aching plumes
And skim along the shuddering cliffs at ease :

So came they gliding on the sullen plain,

Out of the dark, in silent state, by force
Yet unexpended of their nightlong speed.
Those were the Cretan ships, who when they saw us
Hailed for a pilot, and of our native sailors
Took one aboard, and dipping all their oars
Passed on, and we with them, into the bay.

Here, then, a fine piece of classicism. The

is

appendix will tell you, if you do not know it

already, that it is an imitation from Calderon :

Muley's well-known speech from Principe

Constante. Whether it were imitated from
Turner or from ^Eschylus would make little

difference to the fact that a beautiful

it is

piece of writing, that shows, if there were need

to show, the poet's unrivalled mastery of blank
verse. It bristles with technical subtleties.
Consider (at random) that exquisite chiasma
of ideas :

But whether poised upon the leaden sea

They stood, or floated in the misty air.

But beauty is squandered here so lavishly

that it is difficult to quote. What does it

184
 CLASSICISM
matter that the chorus are impossible dramatic-
ally when, in answer to Deiadamia's,
Be not afraid,
whose flowery songs
I will begin, sweet birds,

Sprinkle with joy the budding boughs above,

The airy city where your light folk throngs,
Each with his special exquisite of love
Red-throat and white-throat, finch and golden-crest,
Deep murmuring pigeon, and soft-cooing dove,
Unto his mate addrest, that close in nest
Sits on the dun and dappled eggs all day.
Come red-throat, white-throat, finch and golden-crest,
Let not our merry play drive you away.

they reply :

And ye brown squirrels, up the rugged bark

That fly, and leap from bending spray to spray,
And bite the luscious shoots, if I should mark,

Slip not behind the trunks, nor hide away.

Ye earthy moles, that burrowing in the dark
Your glossy velvet coats so much abuse ;

Ye watchful dormice, and small skipping shrews,

Stay not from foraging dive not from sight.
;

Come, moles and mice, squirrels and skipping shrews,

Come, all, come forth, and join in our delight.

And let this speech of Achilles stand for love

in idleness :

See, while the maids warm in their busy play,

We may enjoy in quiet the sweet air,
And through the quivering golden green look up
To the deep sky, and have high thoughts as idle
And bright, as are the small white clouds becalmed
In disappointed voyage to the moon.
185
 ROBERT BRIDGES
But were ever necessary to convince a
if it

reader that Achilles is very far from being a

hawking of old goods, I should point to the
great chorus a Lydian chant, he calls it
" "
in praise of music makers for Lydian ;

hill-sides never knew such music, and the

philosophy which informs it is as modern as

Whitman. As a lyric it is fit to take its place
with the greatest of the Shorter Poems, for to
these it is akin in its vernal rhapsody but ;

the recognition in the later stanzas of this

Hymn of Earth of
The omnipotent one desire
Which burns at her heart like fire

And hath in gladness arrayed her

reveals that happy wisdom which often marks

the highest poetic achievement in this man's
work.
For God, where'er he hath builded, dwelleth wide,
And he careth,
To set a task to the smallest atom.
The law-abiding grains,
That hearken each and rejoice :

For he guideth the world as a horse with reins ;

Itobeyeth his voice,

And lo ! he hath set a beautiful end before it.

This chorus is more than a Hymn of Earth

or of Poetry. It is another fountain of Joy.
Achilles in Scyros seems a thing fragile with
186
 CLASSICISM
the beauty of its own anemones in comparison
with the first of the Masks proper Prometheus :

"
the Firegiver, which is written in the Greek
manner." The very name suggests a massive
treatment ;for this myth of suffering and
revolt has already stirred so many passionate
intelligences. One thinks of the first Prome-
theus, and those of Shelley and Goethe,
realizing that this, of all the old stories, has
been chosen as most worthy to carry the
burning fire of a poet's metaphysic.
1

The expected massiveness is there there ;

is much that is statuesque and Greek about

the whole of the poem, which is indeed of

rare and finely-chiselled perfection but you ;

will look in vain for the flaming metaphysic

of revolt, or indeed for any other metaphysic.
The title is suggestive of this intent Prome- :

theus the Firegiver. It is neither a philosophical

treatise nor a tract, but a poem, pure and

simple, wherein
Nature had kissed Art
And borne a child to stir
With jealousy the heart
Of heaven's Artificer.

It is only concerned with the rebellious spirit

that wooeth Beauty, with the gift of fire, the
1
Just as Scriabin, to-day, has chosen it to express his theo-
sophical ideas in music.
187
 ROBERT BRIDGES
beauty of fire, and the joy that radiates from
its beauty.
The Miltonic east of the Prologue declares
itself in such lines as :

He with brute hands in huge disorder heaped,

but no sooner have we come to the Servant's

unfired faggot than we stumble upon a passage
which is as surely characteristic of Bridges :

I see the cones

And needles of the fir, which by the wind
In melancholy places ceaselessly
Sighing are strewn upon the tufted floor.

Or again :

Such are enough

To burden the slow flight of labouring rooks,
When on the leafless tree-tops in young March
Their glossy herds assembling soothe the air
With cries of solemn joy and ca wings loud.

A note which finds a faint echo in the flight

of Hera's doves, a hundred lines later, drifting

Down to the golden tree :

As tired birds at even

Come flying straight to house
On their accustomed boughs.

The first chorus too is full of exquisite

rhythmical subtleties which only show how
freely he moves within the limits of a strict
form ; while the tissue of the verse is shot with
188
 CLASSICISM
strange sea-lights, ruffled by the breath of
winds, and chequered with shadows of moving
cloud. The chorus closes with the lovely
movement of the Hesperides dance :

And 'neath the tree, with hair and zone unbound,

The fair Hesperides aye danced around,
"
And jEgle danced and sang O welcome, Queen,"
"
And Erytheia sang The tree is green "
!

And Hestia danced and sang

"
The fruit is gold."
And "
Arethusa sang Fair Queen, behold,"
And all joined hands and danced about the tree,
"
And sang, O Queen, we dance and sing for thee."
Whether Prometheus would even satisfy the
very slender demands which the stage makes
upon the Mask form another question. I
is

doubt if the story, as here related, would

sustain much interest. The long pages of
dialogue, always technically interesting in the
study, would hardly survive the superficial
judgments of the theatre for in spite of their
;

technical perfection the thought is never very

original, and the expression often runs to
platitude. There was certainly no necessity
in the scheme of the poem for this kind of

thing :

Tho' weak thy hands to poise, thine eye may mark

This balance, how the good of all outweighs
The good of one or two, though these be us.

Perhaps it is partly because they are imbedded

189
 ROBERT BRIDGES
in such stiff deposits of unrhymed heroic that
the two great Odes, " A coy inquisitive spirit,
the spirit of wonder," and " My soul is drunk
with joy," shine here so brightly. Indeed the
"
stanzas O my vague desires " always seem
to me to read better in Prometheus than in
the slightly different version of the Shorter
Poems. Even so, the bulk of the blank verse
is noble and dignified while in one passage,
;

the climax of Prometheus' narration of lo's

fated wandering, where he leads his hearers
through frozen Thrace and Scythia to the
shuddering desolation which surrounds his
own martyrdom, is a crescendo of horror
unequalled since the Elizabethans.
In Demeter the conditions are reversed.
The opening is magnificent : but as one
proceeds the work seems to lose grip and
impetus, almost as if a task entered upon with
enthusiasm has been finished listlessly or
under protest. As a matter of fact the whole
poem was written within the limits of a single
month a point which should be of interest
:

to the writers who have seen in Bridges' work

"
a slow and deliberate carpentry of metre,"
seeing that it happily disposes of their theory.
It is noticeable that in this the first long poem
since the publication of the Experiments in
Classical Prosody he makes a free use of
190
 CLASSICISM
quantitative measures in his choruses. Such
is the first chorus of Oceanides whose lovely

choriambics seem to swim into new fields of

rhythmical beauty and such are the iambics
;

"
of the Ode O that the earth, or only this
fair isle wer' ours." And I think that through-
out the blank verse, as well as in the choric
measures of this poem, it is obvious that
" "
Bridges has been thinking in quantity ;

so that what it loses in perfection of polish it

gains, as surely, in suggestiveness. It is a pity
that such beautiful things as the Iambic Ode
should have been hidden from those who only
know well the Shorter Poems. I quote it as
one of his loveliest lyrics :

O 5
that the earth, or only this fair isle wer ours
Amid the ocean's blue billows,
With flow'ry woodland, stately mountain and valley,
Cascading and lilied river ;
Nor ever a mortalenvious, laborious,
anguish or dull care opprest,
By
Should come polluting with remorseful countenance
Our haunt of easy gaiety.
For us the grassy slopes, the country's airiness,
The lofty whispering forest,
Where rapturously Philomel invoketh the night
And million eager throats the morn ;

With doves at evening softly cooing, and mellow

Cadences of the dewy thrush.
We love the gentle deer, and nimble antelope ;

Mice love we and springing squirrels ;

191
 ROBERT BRIDGES
To watch the gaudy flies visit the blooms, to hear
On ev'ry mead the grasshopper.
5
All thro' the spring-tide, thro the indolent summer,
(If only this fairwer' ours)
isle
Here might we dwell, forgetful of the weedy caves
Beneath the ocean's blue billows.

In a very different vein is the charming

" "
version of Apuleius' story of Eros and
Psyche. Mr. Symons thought it cold with
"
the coldness of work done, however sym-
"
pathetically, as task work," and but half
alive." I find in Eros some of the most con-
sistently beautiful and delicate of all Bridges'
work. It is no easy matter to avoid monotony
through three hundred and sixty-five stanzas
of which a dozen, without really skilful hand-

ling, would bore one to distraction. The

pleasant conceit of dividing the story into
" "
four seasons and these again into months,
each with proper complement of days, may
its
contribute to the debonair lilt with which the
story moves along. But apart from its many
well-concealed devices, it is a delightful work,
with frequent moments of a very rare beauty.
It shows, too, a consummate mastery of
narrative which owes very little to its original.
Apart from a fairly strict faithfulness to the
order and incident in Apuleius' story, the
colour and spirit of the poem is as different as
192
 CLASSICISM
it could well be. The languid and artificial
prose of the Alexandrian gives place to a
vivacious delight in the narrative possibilities
of the legend.

Properly considered, I suppose Eros and

Psyche is an allegory on the worn theme of
the relation of love to the soul. But one may
conveniently forget this in the sheer charm of
the narrative without losing a single merit in
the poem. From the splendid first line :

In midmost length of hundred-citied Crete

we taste the clear air of the Eastern Mediter-

ranean. hardly a stanza that does
There is

not hold some special beauty a charming

rime effect, an exquisite stroke of natural
description, or a touch of almost Vergilian
tenderness. Its tints are vivid and delicate,
like those of some old tapestry that has kept
its colour unimpaired, but touched with a
certain mellowness. We feel that the poet is
"
telling of old forgotten far-off things," and
yet we see the very colour of the grass, the
mountain peaks, and the wide landscape. The
method of is really that of a series
this Epyllion
of miniatures joined by the thread of the narra-
tive, each leading inevitably to the next. Here
and there is a little touch of philosophy so skil-
fully laid on that it even enhances the charm
of the story.
N 193
 ROBERT BRIDGES
The them are so many
special beauties of
that hardly one stands out beyond the rest.
Some of the best things seem to be deliberately
concealed, so carefully is the classic mean
preserved. Even the tiresome behaviour of
some of the characters, especially the celestial
chagrin of Aphrodite, only lends variety to the
limpid flow of the verse. From the moment
when Psyche is left on the mountain-top to
her mysterious lover, when
Now the sun was sunk, only the peak
Flash'd like a jewel in the deepening blue . . .

and she iswafted to her grassy plateau, we

step into a fairyland that has all the luxuriant
loveliness of Spenser's. The only flaw in the
description of her entertainment by the
servants of Eros is an anagram on the name

of Purcell ; and even here the beauty of the

verse excuses the lapse in taste. And the
commonplaces of mythology have never been
used in English verse with such charming
effect. Here is a stanza from the picture of
the tapestry in Eros' house :

Here Zeus, in likeness of a tawny bull,

Stoop'd on the Cretan shore his mighty knee,
While off his back Europa beautiful
Stept pale against the blue Carpathian sea ;

And here Apollo, as he caught amazed

Daphne, for lo her hands shot forth upraised
!

In leaves, her feet were rooted like a tree.

194
 CLASSICISM
Frequently in the earlier part of the poem
are passages of a curiously fragrant quality
that reminds one of the most famed tellers of
old tales. The charm of such lines as these is
too frail to bear analysis :

Which said, when he agreed, she spake no more,

But left him to his task, and took her way
Beside the ripples of the shell-strewn shore,
The southward stretching margin of a bay,
Whose sandy curves she pass'd, and taking stand
Upon its taper horn of farthest land,
Lookt left and right to rise and set of day.

And this clear and tender note meets us

often in some casual passage of description.
The actual scenery of Crete, the lie of the land,
isbrought in occasionally with excellent effect.
Here is a charming piece of geography :

On the Hellenic board of Crete's fair isle,

Westward of Drepanon, along a reach
Which massy Cyamum for many a mile
Jutting to sea delivers from the breach
Of North and East returning to embay
The favoured shore an ancient city lay,
Aptera, which is Wingless in our speech.

And again :

She came by steep ways to the southern strand,

Where, sacred to the Twins and Britomart,
Pent in its rocky theatre apart,
A little town stood on the level sand.
Very pleasant, too, is the poet's loving
195
 ROBERT BRIDGES
treatment of the magic Greek names, and,
with the same delight with which Vergil must
have written
Amphion Dircaeus in Actaeo Aracintho

he gives us this exquisite string of Hellenic

jewellery, the nymphs of Poseidon's train :

Apseuds and Nemertes, Callianassa,

Cymothoe, Thaleia, Limnorrhea,
Clymene, laneira and lanassa,
Doris and Panope and Galatea,
Dynamene, Dexamene and Maira,
Ferusa, Doto, Proto, Callianeira,
Amphithoe, Orethuia and Amathea.

Psyche's trials are told with a fine sense of

what is demanded by the manner of the poem
with just enough tenderness not to disturb
the dreamy detachment of the tale. The
almost ecstatic picture of Pan on the river-
bank, of Hera's temple, of the kindly tower
which saved Psyche from death, and Aphro-
dite's seagull, are of their kind quite flawless.
Of her descent into Hades we see nothing, but
we remember it by the exquisite picture of her
return, when she
Gave Cerberus his cake, Charon his fare,
And saw through Hell's mouth to the purple air,
And one by one the keen stars melt in day.
I would place Eros and Psyche very high
among Bridges' work. If not the best, it is

196
 CLASSICISM
the most beautiful narrative poem in the
language. abounds in
It lines which Keats
would have been glad to write, things like
this :

But night was crowding up the barren fells

or,
A drowned corpse cast up by the murmuring deep
Or this, of Psyche's fatal curiosity :

Only of sweet simplicity she fell :

Wherein who fall may fall unto the skies.

Even the picture of Psyche has a distant

clarity which the least faltering would have
marred ; though I confess I do not see in her,
"
with Dr. Warren, a picture of sweet English
girlhood." In truth, the story is told for its
own sake, and if the reader wants the true
allegory, he may turn to the last stanza :

Now in that same month Psyche bare a child,

Who straight in heaven was named Hedone
In mortal tongues by other letters styled ;

Whom all to love, however named, agree :

Whom in our noble English JOY we call,

And honour them among us most of all

Whose happy children are as fair as she.

With the characteristic

ENVOY
It is my prayer that she may smile on all
Who read my tale as she hath smiled on me.

197
 XI
CLASSICAL PROSODY
IF English prosody is to make any immediate
advance from its present standard if one
can give the name to a thing so indefinite it
is not improbable that it will be by way of the

quantitative hexameter. Judging the hexa-

meter by the experiments of any poet except
Bridges, the prospect would be sufficiently
appalling. But Bridges is really the first poet
to write the English hexameter at all with a
realization of what the form implies. One
may dismiss at once the authors of reams of
accentual hexameters, of which Clough's work
holds both the best and worst examples.
It is to the late Mr. Will Stone that we owe
the possibility of such a form in English, and
it was at his wish that Bridges made his happy

experiments in this manner. It is part of the

incredible confusion of thought which garbled
prosody into syllabic verse that hardly a
single critic or poet has seemed to understand
the first principle of the Greek and Latin
verse, the nice combat between accent and
198
 CLASSICAL PROSODY
quantity which seems to be the only sound
basis for a prosody. Mr. Stone 1 showed at
least that most attempts at English quantita-
tive verse had been founded upon a mis-
conception not only of the nature of classical
forms, but of the necessities which moulded
"
their familiar rules." The few writers who
realized that the hexameter was not merely a
matter of a recurrent beat did not get so far
as to realize that in Latin, as in Greek, its
form resulted inevitably from the inherent
stubbornness of the language. To avoid in
English what Vergil avoided is only to pile the
difficulties of Latin upon our own quite
sufficient allowance.

Bridges has developed this point in theory

as well as in his experiments. 2 He has done a
very necessary service in pointing out that
the stereotyped dactyl-trochee ending of a
Latin hexameter was the result of sheer
necessity. The language refused to take any
other form. If Vergil could by any means
have reproduced such effects as j/e^eX^yepeVa ZeJ?,
there can be no possible doubt that he
would have done so. His fondness for ending
"
a line with hominum rex" and the pains to
which he puts himself to find other monosyllabic
1 "Classical Metres in English Verse/' Oxford, 1901.
"
Essay on the Vergilian Hexameter, New Quarterly," January,
2

1909.
199
 ROBERT BRIDGES
endings are enough to show that he found his
chains irksome. The caesura " rule," too,
was formulated by the Latin language. These
are the stumbling-blocks that have been
cheerfully accepted as objects for imitation
by the few English experimenters in classical
prosody.
Now it is obvious that if any advance is to
be made in the handling of the English hexa-
meter the language must find out rules of its
own. That is, the poets who handle it will
constantly be delighted by beautiful and
suggestive rhythms which cannot be made to
take more than an occasional part in the fabric
of the verse. Such are those of the beautiful
lines from Ibant Obscuri :

Cast him a cake, poppy-drench'd with drowsiness and

honey-sweetened,
and
Through Ereban darkness, through fields sown with
desolation.

The difficulty of the monosyllabic ending,

for which Vergil worked so hard, is, of course,
not nearly so hard to overcome in English.
Here are some very effective and natural
instances from the Vergil version :

He, rabid, and distending a-hungry his triply-cavern'd

jaws.
Red Phlegethon, and huge boulders his roundy bubbles be,
200
 CLASSICAL PROSODY
Some o'er whom a hanging black rock, slipping at very
point of
Falling, ever threateneth.

It is nearly always beautiful, and here he

uses it intwo consecutive lines with exquisite
effect :

. the wildwood's
. .

Flow'ry domain, the flushing soft-crowding loveliness of

Spring,
Lazy Summer's burning dial, the serenely solemn spells
Of Sibylline Autumn.

In quite a few experiments Bridges has

shown plainly that extremely fine things can
be done in English classical prosody. The two
epistles, Wintry Delights and To a Socialist in
London, though distinctly cumbrous in con-
struction and not particularly original in
thought, hold a surprising number of things
that are not only a perfect use of the spirit of
the hexameter but very fine poetry as well.
They have caught that deliberate fragrance,
a hint of essential melody delayed that we may
taste and absorb it, a something exquisite yet
lasting, that has been missing from European
poetry for nearly two thousand years. No
doubt this precious quality is partly an associa-
tion of the metre. There is peculiar joy in
speaking English syllables to the cadence of
Those Sicilian swains, whose Doric tongue
After two thousand years is ever young.
201
 ROBERT BRIDGES
It easily deceive us into reading too much
may
poetic worth into what are, after all, experi-
ments made more or less in the dark. But the
very crudeness that so often crops out in the
verse has its own charm. It seems to me to
have the curious blending of ruggedness and
speed that is common in Ennius or Lucretius
poets who were, after all, doing precisely
the same thing as Bridges, with less apparent
chance of success. Things like

Dono, ducite, doque volentibus cum magnis dis,

or
Curantes magna cum cura turn cupientes
Regni dant operam simul auspicio augurioque

suggest, I think, something of that rapture of

realized strength that I find in this :

Blandly the sun's old heart is stirred to a septennial smile,

Causing strange-fortuned comfort to melancholy mortals.
Or this wonderful picture of the tropical
forest :

. . . That mighty forest, whose wildness offends you,

And silences appal, where earth's life, self-suffocating
Seethes, lavish as sun-life in a red star's fi'ry corona ;
That waste magnificence and vain fecundity, breeding
Giants and parasites embrac'd in flowery tangle,
Interwoven alive and dead, where one tyrannous tree
Blights desolating around it a swamp of rank vegetation ;

Where Reason yet dreams unawakt, and thro' the

solemn day
Only the monkey chatters and discordant the parrot
screams,
202
 CLASSICAL PROSODY
The long line-for-line version from the sixth
book of the ^Eneid is very unequal. It con-
tains, in its four hundred and eighty-seven
lines, about thirty-five false quantities.
Possibly there are more, for in one or two
places one is doubtful of the pronunciation
intended. I cannot agree with the author
"
that a few false quantities do not make a
poem less readable." Certainly it is at first
no easy matter to think in quantities. But
once this difficulty is mastered, as Bridges
himself has apparently mastered it, to stumble
upon a short vowel in a long position is a
painful accident, whether the poem be in
English or in Latin. Lines like these are
terrible :

She to the ground downcast her eyes in fixity averted.

Soothed with other memories, first love and virginal
embrace.

Marching in equal step, and eager of his coming enquire.

Endeth in Elysi-wm our path but that to the leftward.
:

Such that no battering warfare of men or immortals.

The device of placing an acute accent on

the false syllable, as though to reinforce it,
is unworthy. That of doubling a consonant
That bright sprigg of weird for so long period unseen

is more picturesque, but it is not always

203
 ROBERT BRIDGES
available. The author would not, for instance,
have ventured to write "lovve" in the second
of the lines quoted.
But in spite of quantities and
its false

frequent liberties with the text, the version is

a very fine piece of work. There are places
where it fails badly but there are others
;

where it is nearly as good as the original.

Here is a terribly inadequate version of a
wonderful line :

. . . an' on the second morn

Saw, when a great wave raised me aloft, the Italyan high-
lands.

But in two lines at least it is better than the

original, the translation, already quoted, of
Ecce gubernator sese Palinurus agebat,
qui Libyco nuper cursu, dum sidera servat
exciderat puppi, mediis dlffusus in undis.

Above it is Vergilian.
all, There is no other
version, even in a far less difficult manner,
that has approached the Vergilian strength
and tenderness, as in lines like these :

Now to the wind and tidewash a sport my poor body

rolleth,
or
Here 'tis a place of ghosts, of night and drowsy delusion :

Forbidden unto living mortals is my Stygian keel :

or this magnificent translation of the farewell

to Deiphobus :

204
 CLASSICAL PROSODY
That last terrible night
Thou wert said to hav' exceeded thy bravery, an' only
On thy fain enemies wert fain by weariness o'ercome.
Wherefor' upon the belov'd seashore thy empty sepulchral
Mound I erected, aloud on thy ghost tearfully calling.
Name and shield keep for thee the place, but thy body,
dear friend,
Found I not, to commit to the land ere sadly I left it.

Very beautiful, too, are the few elegiacs in

the collection and here the technical diffi-

culties are greater, for the pentameter does

not lend itself at all easily to the
English
vocabulary. The four epitaphs are among
the most beautiful things Bridges ever wrote.
The first of them attains, by some miracle, the
true accent of the best epitaphs in the Antho-
logy. What English epigram was ever so
magnificently simple and tender as this ?
Fight well, my comrades, and prove your bravery. Me too
God call'd out, but crown'd early before the battle.

The fourth has a passion that is quite un-

Greek, though it moves superbly in the chains
of its metre. It has rather the fire and subtlety
of some fine englyn 1
:

Where thou art better I too were, dearest, anywhere, than

Wanting thy well-lov'd presence anywhere.

I suppose the chief difficulty in the way of

1
A form in which one always feels that Bridges might have
done wonderful work.
205
 ROBERT BRIDGES
writing English verse in classical metres is
the lack of words ending in a short open
vowel. The result is an enforced use of more
spondees than the metre can reasonably be
expected to bear. The apparent stiffness
which at present strikes one in most dactylic
lineswhich may be metrically quite sound is
principally the result of unfamiliarity. With
a use the mechanism should run smoothly
little

enough. But the other difficulty is more

serious, and I think it will have to be partly
met by conventionalizing certain departures
from strict Bridges has made a move
form.
"
in this direction in his use of and the " or
" "
in the as the second half of a dactyl,
" an' the ' :

writing them, not very prettily, as

"
i' the." Small proclitic words generally will
bear a good deal of shortening without any
offence against proper diction. I foresee another
danger in the readiness with which endings of the
" " "
type of caverned jaws" bubbles be" sudden
smile" suggest themselves. In fact any mono-
syllabic noun beginning with a consonant
preceeded by any disyllabic, iambic adjective,
will form the end of a hexameter. This
threatens to become the commonest type of
ending. Singly it is excellent ; but after a
few successive lines it has a very irritating
effect. The lack of short open final syllables
206
 CLASSICAL PROSODY
makes the pentameter a tough problem. I
do not believe that the English hexameter will
ever be really successful, though excellent
things may be done in it but it is evident
;

that ifEnglish prosody to make any ad-

is

vance from its present standard the element

of quantity will have to be definitely recog-
nized. Poets will have to learn to think in
quantities. The hexameter with its great
traditions will be the most convenient field
for the experiment.

207
 XII

CONCLUSIONS
THE small collection of pieces which are
grouped together under the heading of Later
Poems in the Oxford Edition and have all
appeared since the close of the nineteenth
century are of less importance than one
might imagine. Beside the other work of this
period, which includes Demeter as well as the
Poems in Classical Prosody, they are incon-
siderable. I do not suggest that they are
lacking in colour or in beauty, though the
whole collection falls far below the attainment
of any book of the Shorter Poems ; but they
do not show the concentration of form, the
enthusiasm for perfection, which infects the
reader of almost all his other work. It is as
though the hand were a little tired, and ready
to accept forms of expression which the eager
mind has long ago outgrown. Apart from the
first Elegy, the thoughtful Recollections of

Solitude, there is that holds one

little even :

the trivial domestic pieces such as Millicent

208
 CONCLUSIONS
are not as happy as those of the previous
volume, while the forced sprightliness of the
Epistle on Instinct is hardly to be borne. One
passage, at least, cannot be forgotten the
beautiful sestet of the sonnet addressed to
Thomas Floyd, which seems to me one of the
rarest tributes Oxford has ever received in

poetry.
The lovely city, thronging tower and spire,
The mind of the wide landscape, dreaming deep,
Grey-silvery in the vale a shrine where keep
;

Memorial hopes their pale celestial fire :

Like man's immortal conscience of desire,

The spirit that watcheth in me ev'n in my sleep.
It is obvious, too, that the Odes written for
Sir Hubert Parry's musical settings have no
place in so serious a volume as the Collected
Works. It is disheartening to one who has
compared the spirit of the Nature poems with
that of the enchanted morning of L'Allegro to
stumble on such a careless imitation of the
original as :

Or in some walled orchard nook

She communes with her ancient book,
Beneath the branches laden low ;

While the high sun o'er bosomed snow

Smiteth all day the long hill-side
With ripening cornfields waving wide.

There if thou linger all the year,

No jar of man can reach thine ear,
o 209
 ROBERT BRIDGES
Or sweetly comes, as when the sound
From hidden villages around,
Threading the woody knolls, is borne
Of bells that dong the Sabbath morn.

The inclusion of the octave of that fine sonnet

" "
Rejoice ye dead, where'er your spirits dwell
only serves to show up the loose construction
of the verse that surrounds it. That the Ode
is eminently suited for musical treatment I
would not for a moment deny indeed it is ;

probable that if the poetry had been as finely

fashioned as usual, no musician could have
set it. Indeed it is significant that none of the
Shorter Poems, many of which are as good
"stuff" to use Wagner's expression for music
as the lyrics of Morike or Heine, to which a
resemblance has been traced, have yet found
an adequate musical setting. Of course, the
Ode to Music is a much more satisfying libretto
from the poetic standpoint, than, say, the
words of the great love duet in the second act
of Tristan, which are not poetry at all. I
quote at random :

Mein Tristan !

Mein Isolde !

Tristan !

Isolde !

Mein und dein !

Immer ein !

Ewig, ewig ein !

210
 CONCLUSIONS
But the poet has seen fit to leave so many
if

gaps inhis expression for the musician to

supply, he should not venture to offer us the

skeleton as poetry. Unaided by the eloquence
of an orchestral setting, a great part of these
two odes means very little more (even though
itreads very much better) than the string of
words which I have quoted.
It so happens that the second of these poems,
and the last of the volume, comes to a close
"
with that sturdy hymn Gird on thy sword,
O man; thy strength endue," and thereby
suggests a characteristic which we have already
noticed the strong religious sense of which
:

one is always conscious in reading Bridges'

poetry. His first complete work, The Growth
of Love, reaches culmination in the splendid
its

and sonorous paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer,

a thing informed with the fair strength of
early Gothic. At the end of the fourth book
of Shorter Poems (originally the end of the

series) comes the finely simple Laus Deo.

Let praise devote thy work, and skill employ
Thy whole mind, and thy heart be lost in joy.
All three poems give the effect, which I cannot
think unintentional, of a dedication, while the
last actually defines the poet's attitude of

spontaneous praise for the gift of beauty,

" "
leading the pilgrim soul to beauty above ;
211
 ROBERT BRIDGES
and I think one is often aware of this devo-
tional feeling in places where it
implied is

rather than expressed. Nothing, indeed, could

be more simple and straightforward than the
spirit of those poems which are definitely
religious. In none of them and besides those
which I have mentioned there are not more
than half a dozen, exclusive of the translations
in the Yattendon Hymnal is there any
attempt to explain the mysteries of religion by
those imaginative symbols which weight some
poems of Francis Thompson like the mock
jewels incrusted upon a gilded chasuble. This,
it may be urged, only to say that in this
is

particular case, as in others, Bridges is not a

mystic, but the point has more than a negative

value. These religious poems show a positive
simplification of method, a deliberate sacrifice
of all decoration, which is remarkable in the
work of a man who has embroidered his verse
so richly. This is a very fine simplicity ; it
lends an added dignity to work which has
never failed to be dignified.
his spiritual courage we have already
Of
seen a token in his ready acceptance of life
as it is. The unwavering optimism, the
steadiness of faith which tempers his stoicism,
are qualities which make him a most heartening
companion ; when, as in the climax of those
212
 CONCLUSIONS
"
stanzas written in dejection, Wherefore to-
night so full of care," he breaks out into this
paean of gladness :

O happy life ! I hear thee sing,

rare delight of mortal stuff !

1 praise my days for all they bring

Yet are they only not enough,

or when, beneath the shadow of death's wing,

he urges the sorrowing father to
Gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger.

I do not wish to labour a point which has

been already expounded, but it seems to me
that the consideration of these religious poems,
or rather of the religious sense pervading all
his poetry, has only brought us back to another

aspect of the essential directness of outlook

which appeared so characteristically in the
lyrical work, in the sonnets and in the two
Epistles, for this a quality which provides
is

a key to the whole of his poetic method,

imaginative or technical. It is responsible for
the prevailing sense of nature clearly seen
and expressed as clearly in the Shorter Poems,
showing us that this cunning worker in colours
is also a master of pure line. It determines the
fastidiousness of his choice of material, the
scrupulous care submitting each fine phrase
to the judgment of that tribunal where (to
213
 ROBERT BRIDGES
quote from one of the sonnets) "the master
reason sits " so that it is difficult to find in
;

any of these poems an imaginative epithet or

figure, however widely suggestive, which
cannot ultimately be justified in that high
court ; and this, I imagine, is why there is so
little in all his work that is obscure
or equivocal.
The singular freshness of vision, as of one
whose eyes are unclouded by experience, which
he has brought to the study of nature, pervades
also his philosophy of life and in this con-
;

nection one sees that the isolation from

" life's "
affairs
meagre which I have already
deplored in
his equipment as a dramatist,
may atone in candour for what it assuredly
loses in breadth. Again, the conscious severity
of such poems as the Laus Deo and the Lord's

Prayer Sonnet, marks a type of religious

feelingwhich is found in its perfection through-
out the Liturgy of the English Church, and
the orthodox version of the Bible. They are
inspired with the undecorate spirituality of the
Anglican faith and it is this spirit which
;

places them, along with the nature poems

which we have already examined, among
the most English things in the language,
typical of the English genius, and English
taste at its finest. The intense racial quality
in Bridges' poetry, apart from all questions
214
 CONCLUSIONS
of imaginative or technical excellence, should
make it work of rare significance in our litera-

ture.
It a curious paradox that in making a final
is

estimate of a poet so peculiarly English, a

parallel should suggest itself in the judgment
of a French novelist upon an intensely French
musician ; but the passage is so strikingly
applicable and such a fair summary of his
genius, that I quote it. After an acute recog-
nition
"
of Debussy's honte hautaine de
r emotion," M. Holland writes :

II a, entre tous ses dons, une qualite qu'on ne

trouve a un tel degre chez presque aucun autre

grand musicien . c'est le genie du gout.
. . II 1'a

jusqu'a 1'exces, jusqu'a lui sacrifier au besoin les

autres elements de Tart, les forces tumultueuses
jusqu'a 1'appauvrissement apparent de la vie. Mais
il ne faut pas s'y tromper. Get appauvrissement
n'est qu'apparent. Il-y-a dans toute 1'oeuvre une
passion voilee.

THE END
 PRINTED BY
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD,
PLYMOUTH
PR Young, Francis Brett
Robert Bridges
B6Z95

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