THE PINES. Oh, shall I never, never be home again! Meadows of England shining in the rain, Spread wide your daisied lawns, your ramparts green With briar fortify, with blossoms screen Till my far morning-and O streams that slow, And pure and deep through plains and playlands go, For me your love and all your king cups store, And-dark militia of the southern shore, Old fragrant friends-preserve me the last lines Of that long saga which you sung me, pines, When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree I listened, with my eyes upon the sea. O traitor pines! you sang what life has found The falsest of fair tales. Earth blew a far-borne prelude all around, That native music of her forest home, While from the sea's blue fields and siren dales, Shadows and light-noon spectres of the foam, Riding the summer gales On aery viols plucked an idle sound, seas That beat on vaster sands Where the wise snailfish move their pearly towers To carven rocks and sculptured promont'ries, Hearing you whisper, Lands Beneath me in the valley waves the palm, Beneath, beyond the valley, breaks the sea, Beneath me sleep in mist, and light, and calm, Cities of Lebanon, dream-shadow-dim, Where Kings of Tyre and Kings of Tyre did rule In ancient days in endless dynasty. And all around the snowy mountains swim Like mighty swans afloat in heaven's pool. But I will walk upon the wooded hill Where stands a grove O pines! of sister pines, And when the downy twilight droops her wing, And no sea glimmers and no mountain shines, My heart shall listen still. For pines are gossip pines the wide world through, And full of runic tales to sigh and sing; "Tis ever sweet through pines to see the sky Blushing a deeper gold or darker blue; 'Tis ever sweet to lie On the dry carpet of the needles brown; And while the fanciful green lizards stir, And windy odors, light as thistledown, Breathe from the laudanum and lav THE POETRY OF ROBERT BRIDGES." One of the pleasantest features in the intellectual landscape of the moment is unquestionably the revival of poetry. Not that anyone who knew anything at all about poetry could suppose it would really die. It has had too many deaths, followed by too many resurrections, for that. We are now grown older and wiser than the people who, in the age of Spenser and the Elizabethan drama, declared poetry to be useless and provoked Sidney to write the "Apology," without which their very existence would be forgotten; or than Peacock, who, in the age of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, asserted that poetry was obsolete and absurd, and had the same good fortune as his obscurer predecessors by provoking a reply from Shelley which has saved his attack from total oblivion. All such fears have now passed away for ever from the minds of intelligent people. Criticism, which has often injured poetry, has now done for it the supreme service of showing the essential eternity of its nature. It has taught us to see in poetry the highest and most permanently satisfying of all interpretations of life, a thing which has the potentiality of being as manycolored, as transcendental, as infinite and therefore as immortal as life itself. So long as man lives he will have an ear, a mind, an imagination and a spirit; and all four, especially if, as we may hope, they gradually develop in power, will more and more claim poetry as the only food which they can partake in common, and in the strength of which they realize their unity in themselves and their hold on ultimate and immutable truth. #1 "Poetical Works of Robert Bridges," excluding the eight dramas. London: Henry Frowde, 1912. 2 "Poetical Works of Robert Bridges." Vols. I to VI. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1898-1905 But This being so, believers in poetry were not likely to be led away by the voices which, after the deaths of Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, proclaimed that English poetry was dead in their graves. Nor are they likely to be taken by surprise by the present revival. This, like everything else in a Democratic age, seems at present to be more remarkable for extent and size than for distinction. we need not quarrel with that. The thing is genuine; the stuff is honest poetic material, not shoddy; and if some of the treatment tends at present to give us a kind of rhetorical realism in place of that musical and imaginative interpretation of life which is poetry, that is not unnatural in an age dominated by melodramatic journalism; and will pass away as those who practise it learn its emptiness by experience. Even if these defects were more marked than they are, they would afford no reason for failing to rejoice in the fact that poetry now makes monthly magazines go into second editions; that it has established a bookshop of its own, selling nothing but its own wares, a thing probably unknown before on this, hitherto, mainly prosaic earth; that it has issued a volume of "Georgian poetry" which includes nothing published before the accession of George V; finally that it has now established a quarterly review devoted solely to poetry and the discussion of poetry. All these things are of the best omen; they mean that the young poets believe in themselves and have found a public which believes in them too. But in poetry, as in life itself, there are no absolutely new departures. The new which is to live is rooted in the old and knows that it is. So these young poets-and it is not the least in teresting fact about them-have dedicated their volume, not to some revolutionary critic who flatters them by saying that they are the people and that wisdom was born with them, but to the most scholarly of English poets, to the intensely Etonian and Oxonian Robert Bridges. In him they rightly recognize the greatest living master of their art in this country, and at his feet they lay their work, an offering which does as much honor to them as to him. Mr. Bridges has been as careful, not to say perverse, in avoiding fame as other men are in seeking for it: but even he must, we should suppose, take some pleasure in this striking tribute from his young fellow-craftsmen, poets so unlike him, and yet so like in that likeness which obliterates all unlikeness, in the sincere love and earnest practice of the greatest of the arts. Only a few months after the appearance of this significant dedication, an event occurred which gives it a special interest. The death of Mr. Alfred Austin leaves the office of Poet Laureate vacant. That office, if it is to be continued at all on the present lines, demands from its holder certain special gifts which many great poets have not possessed. Mr. Austin was not a great poet; he had neither the high imagination nor the large utterance of the great poets. But he had in abundance some of the qualifications which the Laureate needs. The poet who is to speak in verse for the whole nation, almost as the Sovereign or the Prince of Wales may occasionally speak for it in prose, must be a patriot, proud of his country, full of pride in her past and faith in her future. He must be something of a politician at least to the extent of believing, as poets have not always believed, in the greatness of political issues; and he must accept, and indeed honor, the traditions of his country. These gifts are the indis pensable outfit of the Laureate; and they were as clearly possessed by Mr. Austin as they were lacking to greater men, like Shelley, for instance, or Blake. And he added other gifts almost equally desirable for the part it fell to him to play. The strongest and perhaps the best thing in him was his genuine love of all that is specially English in meadow, wood and garden, English birds and trees and flowers. And the type of humanity in which he saw his ideal was also one that was obviously built on very English lines. All these things, which for some other purposes might be weaknesses, were sources of strength for the Laureate ship, and though neither they nor the title of Laureate could raise a mediocre poet out of his mediocrity, they did give him the best possible field for the powers he had. His death leaves the office vacant, with no obvious successor marked out by universal opinion. Some suggest that the opportunity should be taken to abolish a post which has become an anachronism. But that is not the English manner of dealing with anachronisms. We do not abolish; we transform. The King may no longer wish for a versifier to present him with complimentary odes on his birthday; but the poet is still the greatest of all national voices, and both King and nation may well desire to speak through him. If this be so, it will scarcely do to abandon the official and political position of the Laureate, and make the title a mere compliment to the greatest living English poet. For fifty fortunate years the greatest of our poets was also the most national. But we cannot expect that the happy accident, which united in Wordsworth, and still more in Tennyson, all possible claims on the Laureateship, will always recur. We may be content with the unquestionable fact that there are several living poets who would do no dishonor to the laurel. But probably, as that dedication of "Georgian" poetry tends to show, the appointment which would be received with most satisfaction among those who love and practise English letters is that of Mr. Bridges. All see in him a master of their art, a lover of its past, a builder of its future, a true and genuine poet, who has not only "uttered nothing base" but nothing empty or insincere. All feel that while he has never in any way courted popularity, he has all through his life been intensely and passionately English, cherishing and honoring all that is best in the traditions and character of the English people. And, what is not unimportant, all have found in his poems a loving observation of all that lives and grows in English fields such as none of our poets have surpassed. There is one other thing too. His Eton ode, to refer to only one instance, shows that he possesses not a little of the gift, seen at its highest in Horace, at not very far from its highest in Tennyson, of being able to take the set theme provided for him by an official occasion and make of it an opportunity for the production of a noble poem. That is the gift of gifts for a Laureate; and if the Laureateship should be offered to and accepted by Mr. Bridges, one may be sure that his official utterances will give us poetry fitly expressing, but also far transcending, the mere event which they celebrate. However this may be, those who are interested in these questions have now a better opportunity than they ever had before of forming their own opinion on the work of Mr. Bridges. His poems have just been issued for the first time in one volume; and the library edition of his works will soon be completed. The single volume contains all that we get in the seven of 3 Mr. Bridges was appointed Poet Laureate, July 17th.-Editor of The Living Age. the larger edition except the dramas and some work now published for the first time. Altogether independent, therefore, of the question of the Laureateship, the present is a convenient moment for an examination of the poetical work and position of Mr. Bridges. We He was born in 1844 and consequently will be seventy next year. may hope that his old age will be as long and as fruitful as Landor's or Tennyson's; but in his case, as in theirs, it is not likely to alter his position as a poet. His work may be divided into three parts; the plays and masks, the metrical experiments, and the lyrics. Almost all that is of final importance belongs to the third class. Indeed, the plays and the poems of prosody are mainly important just so far as they give scope to the poet's lyrical genius, and not much further. Drama asks a certain demonic energy which is not in Mr. Bridges. It can scarcely be written by a man whose whole life, after a few years spent in the study and practice of medicine, has been given to the labors and pleasures of a literary retirement. A dramatist is a man who has the capacity for being caught and carried away out of himself in the whirl of things, the particular things out of which the plot of his drama is to come; and part of the price that has to be paid for a life so wise and pleasant as that of Mr. Bridges is just the loss of that capacity. The gifts of reflection, meditation, judgment, even sympathy are developed; the gift of absorption in the delight and fury of that battle of life which is the stuff of drama is almost inevitably lost. Indeed, to the spectator who looks at it through Cowper's "loopholes of retreat," both the delight and the fury are apt to seem a little ridiculous. The world for him seems a stage and all its men and women merely players; and it is one of life's truest paradoxes that, directly they seem that, they cannot be made into a play. Hamlet and Jaques would by themselves be fatal to drama. The dramatist, to be a dramatist, has got to get far enough away from such people to confront them with others who wholeheartedly believe in the sufficiency of the business and pleasure of living. That the meditative recluse can rarely do. Consequently the plays of Mr. Bridges are the plays of a scholarly dilettante, accomplished and graceful, with all sorts of interesting things in them, especially to scholars, but not great dramas. The poet says that they were all intended for the stage, except the first part of Nero, but they are in fact scholarly exercises quite unsuitable for the boards. They are wanting not only in the action and business, but in the concentration of interest and definitely marked characters necessary for the stage. By far the best of them is "Achilles in Scyros"; and in this as in the two masks, "Prometheus" and "Demeter," the strength lies, not in anything dramatic, but in the beautiful poetry to which Mr. Bridges' loving and watchful observation of nature, and his meditations upon human life, often give occasion, especially in the Choruses. Worshipper of the spring, and of the joyous and relentless purpose of earth, as he has been throughout, he has never perhaps put either the beauty of it, or its pitilessness, better than in the first Chorus of "Achilles." Here is the beauty of the spring birds: "And on the day of relenting she suddenly weareth Her budding crowns. O then, in the early morn, Is any song that compareth With the gaiety of birds, that thrill the gladdened air In inexhaustible chorus To awake the sons of the soil With music more than in brilliant halls sonorous (-It cannot compare-) Is fed to the ears of kings Or a heart oracle dumb, Here may it taste the promise of joy to come." The Chorus goes on to describe "The omnipotent one desire" of earth and the end "whereto it leapeth and striveth continually, and pitieth nought nor spareth"; the whole recalling the Greek tragedians, who so often in their choral songs took some one or other of these ancient and slumbering commonplaces of human experience, and touched it to new life and energy by adding to it a personal note of their own, and applying it to the business in hand. Before going to the lyrics a few words may be added on the "Poems in Classical Prosody" with which the collected volume concludes. It is impossible here to discuss Mr. Bridges' metrical views and practices which exhibit an attempt to write quantitative verse in English. The earlier ones follow closely the rules elaborated by the poet's friend, Mr. Stone; the later show a gradual emancipation from them. This emancipation, which partly arises from disagreement with Mr. Stone as to the length of certain syllables, is an illustration of what appears to most people to be the fatal difficulty in the whole system, that is, the scarcely disputable fact that quantity is too uncertain in English to be capable of use as the decisive element in a metrical system. However, here the poems are, the experiments of a man who is at once poet and scholar; quantitative English hexameters, elegiacs, alcaics and others; things obviously worth looking at. But for our present purpose it must suffice to say that even those who care least for the technicalities of poetic workmanship will be unwise to pass these poems |