WELL-DESERVED HONOURS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20324, 3 August 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

WELL-DESERVED HONOURS.

BRIDGES AND GALSWORTHY.

Everybody with books on his shelves and a soul in his body will welcome the bestowal of tho Order of Merit on Dr. Robert Bridges, tho Poet Laureate, and Mr. John Galsworthy, writes " Colophon " in John o' London's Weekly. As men they differ widely, but as artists they have one tiling in common —a fastidious taste and a ruthless habit of self-criticism, which has never allowed them to bo false to their standards.

Dr. Bridges has often been twitted on tho smallness of his output, but ho has had flic good sense not to vary his habit; that is, ho has continued to wnto only when ho has something to say. " I will not force my Muso," he onco said. As a matter of fact he has written more than most people realise. Thirty years or so ago he published six volumes of collected plays and verse, and in the last ten years he has published two more, as well 'as several essays. Many of us remember with gratitude, too, his extremely fine anthology, " The Spirit of Man," issued during tho war, which did more to keep tho spirit of poetry alive in those dark days than all the official odes ever written. But, in any case, why should anyone want to measure poetry with a yard stick'! It is quality, not quantity, that matters. Like Keats, Dr. Bridges started life in a hospital' ward—he was a doctor of medicine long beforo he became a doctor of literature, but he retired from practice in 1882. He is now 84, and lives at Boar's Ilill Oxford. Until recently ho used to take a ten-mile walk every day, and, on his return from a lecture tour in the United States five years ago, ho used to enjoy telling how Americans did their best to make him give up the habit. Time after time he was overtaken on his tramps by people in cars, who, taking pity on his white hairs and dusty boots, insisted on giving him a lift! Mr. Galsworthy's work is too familiar to need more than passing mention. He is in tho succession of great novelists who have captured in print the spirit of an ago, and for that reason he is sure of immortality. I remember once, in conversation with a witty Hungarian friend of mine, comparing his work with that of Thackeray. "Yes," said my friend, " there ii a "close affinity between them—one wrote of . 1 anity Fair and the other of ' Vanity Mayfair.' "