The Press Saturday, April 26, 1930. Robert Bridges.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19912, 26 April 1930, Page 16

The Press Saturday, April 26, 1930. Robert Bridges.

When Robert Bridges, whose death at the age of eighty-five was reported this week, became Poet Laureate seventeen or eighteen years ago, the appointment puzzled and offended thousands of readers. To-day it seems strange only that when he was approaching his seventieth year and had written and published nearly all that abundance of good work on which his fame is now secured he should have been unknown or disregarded except by a small group of devoted admirers, a /'fit audience "though few" that included Andrew Lang, W. M. Dixon, J. W. Mackail, Quiller Couch, and Mr Asquith, who named him for the laureateship. Nobody now, unless an uproariously ignorant newspaper for uproar's sake, refuses Dr. Bridges poetic genius. Few would dissent from the view that his death is that of the chief of contemporary poets. This is no slight revolution contributed to by several causes. His methods of publication exhibited a certain indifference to public esteem, which proceeded as much from his independent position as from hi 3 independent character. Mr Asquith's happy choice counteracted this privacy, and the missionary efforts of apologists or critics like Miles, Dowden, Arthur Symons, Brett Young, and later Mr Squire, gradually produced their effect. But the most potent influence, and of course the only one that in the end levels reputation with desert, was that of his own work as it found readers more numerous and itself taught them to recognise its original beauty. What Wordsworth said of the true poet's having to create ihe taste by'which he is to be enjoyed is no less true of Bridges than it was of Wordsworth himself, and if this needs to be explicitly proved the proof lies in the fact that the very poems whoso music i 3 now heard with the keenest delight, such as "London Snow" or "Whither, 0 Splendid Ship," were once objected to as unmusical. We remember Johnson's deafness to the harmony of Lycidas. What Bridges has done in these and many other poems to fit English verse more sensitively to the' rhythm of speech requires more than brief and, superficial treatment, but it is worth mentioning perhaps that rumotirs of his prosodical arguments and treatises and experiments have frightened away from the risk of crabbed pedantry many readers who would welcome the poet's gracious practice wherein he moves as

They that In play can do the thing ■ they would Having an instinct throned in reason's place. / Perhaps no good poet is ever for his poetry's sake alone a popular poet. Certainly it is impossible to feel that Bridges will ever be popular unless artistic purity ceases to exclude more than it attracts. Yet it is one of the remarkable facts about him that he is easy to read f He is not intellectually difficult or in any way remote or complex. But —he has nothing to offer except beauty, beauty as poetry and revealed through poetry; there is no adventitious appeal in it such as is provided in Masefield by the dramatic story and the curses, and no mere intoxicant such as Swinburne's metre, which dissolves syllables, and sense in its own fluency. It seeks and makes no effect but what is poetic; none that is riot contributory to'a poetic harmony and to be valued as part of it. His singularly fresh vision of Nature, his simple view of human happiness and pain, borrow nothing from what is abnormal. He never goes out of the way to "make excellence difficult." His method consists in revealing what is familiar and giving it the precise yet magical beauty of new revelation. How well and how often he succeeds in this those know best who have many of the Shorter Poems and the sonnets in The Growth of Love by heart; "their "loveliness increases" with that intimacy. This loveliness glows and is alive, strong and delicate. It animates in a hundred different way 3 the body of the poet's work, which is as a whole the most noble poetic tribute of our day to " beauty, which is the soul's " familiar angel."