are the Downs; his rivers are clear and gentle streams; his trees oak
and beech, elm and larch; he is as surely of the South of England as
Wordsworth is of the North. And the second obvious thing is that,
being a true landscape poet and not a romantic who exploits nature to
find backgrounds for his passions, it is of ordinary landscapes that
he writes. Tennyson, too, was an observer, but many of his best-known
landscapes are of the selected kind. It is one thing to write of the
sort of natural scene traditionally approved as remarkable: sunset on
a marsh, sunrise on the Alps, stupendous cliffs, high cataracts, and
breakers in the moon. It is another to describe, giving the breath
of life to your description, what any man, going out on any day in
any season, will see when he looks over a five-barred gate or takes
a footpath through the woods. Mr. Bridges writes of nature like a
countryman. His abnormal scenes are rare; he sees the beauty in the
normal. He sings of nightingales when he hears them, but rooks are
far more frequent in his verse; his suns seldom go down in flaming
splendour, but drop red into the grey or die invisibly. One by one
scenes from his familiar landscape have moved him to verse, until his
books contain a complete catalogue of the English rural year, all its
ordinary recurrent colours, and scents and sounds, trees, flowers,
birds, skies and waters.
Spring. A village in the downs, and men winnowing in a barn. The
palm-willows and hazels. The first flowers, primroses and green
hyacinth spikes, shooting up amid moss and withered undergrowth. Brisk
ploughmen. Birds happily courting in the jocund sun.
Summer. The garden, with bees on the flowers and in the overhanging
limes, and rooks cawing in the elms. The hayfields in the sun; fields
green with waves of rustling wheat; the hum of insects and the song
of larks in a sky pure blue, or heaped with "slow pavilions of
caverned snow," "sunshot palaces of cloud"; the downs, starred with
small flowers, where rabbits nibble the grass; the noise of scythes.
The river: still water, the dip of oars, a boat that glides with its
reflection past flowering islets and dipping branches and meadows,
where "the lazy cows wrench many a scented flower"; bathers; fish
leaping in the pools; the peace of evening as it falls over water and
trees; moonlight on the flashing weir. There are storms that blacken
the sea and beat down the corn, but they pass and the sun comes out
again, gathering strength.
Autumn. The garden in September, with late flowers. The ripe orchards
and fields where "the sun spots the deserted gleanings with decay." The
winds of October that come and fill ruts and pools with golden leaves.
The later storms that mingle the leaves with snow.
Winter. The short days and the infrequent sun on lonely songless lands.
Rooks after the plough, the team against the skyline. A rough sea and
snow on the beach. Robin on the leafless bough. Dark afternoons and
evenings by the fire, companioned or alone.
All those signs of the seasons and hundreds more could be illustrated
from Mr. Bridges. One cannot do more here than huddle together a few
characteristic fragments from which the whole may be deduced. If the
first three are records of the shape, colour and movement of clouds,
it is fitting: all Mr. Bridges's landscapes have skies, and most of his
skies (being English) have clouds:
From distant hills their shadows creep,
Arrive in turn and mount the lea,
And flit across the downs and leap
Sheer off the cliff upon the sea;
And sail and sail far out of sight.
But still I watch their fleecy trains,
That piling all the south with light,
Dapple in France the fertile plains.
And o'er the treetops, scattered in mid-air,
The exhausted clouds laden with crimson light
Floated, or seemed to sleep; and, highest there,
One planet broke the lingering ranks of night.
The upper skies are palest blue
Mottled with pearl and fretted snow:
With tattered fleece of inky hue
Close overhead the storm-clouds go.
Their shadows fly along the hill
And o'er the crest mount one by one:
The whitened planking of the mill
Is now in shade and now in sun.
With gentle flaws the western breeze
Into the garden saileth,
Scarce here and there stirring the single trees,
For his sharpness he vaileth:
So long a comrade of the bearded corn
Now from the stubbles whence the shocks are borne,
O'er dewy lawns he turns to stray,
As mindful of the kisses and soft play
Wherewith he enamoured the light-hearted May,
Ere he deserted her;
Lover of fragrance, and too late repents;
Nor more of heavy hyacinth now may drink,
Nor spicy pink,
Nor summer's rose, nor garnered lavender,
But the few lingering scents
Of streakèd pea, and gillyflower and stocks
Of courtly purple and aromatic phlox.
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, or--on business bent,
If aught their ancient polity displease--
Come gathering to their colony, and there
Settling in ragged parliament,
Some stormy council hold in the high trees.
In the golden glade the chestnuts are falling all;
From the sered boughs of the oak the acorns fall;
The beech scatters her ruddy fire;
The lime has 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.
Out by the ricks the mantled engine stands
Crestfallen, deserted--for now all hands
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:
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;
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.
The best of all (such as _The Downs_ and _The Storm is Over_) cannot be
quoted except entirely; they are landscapes complete, earth and sky.
But let it not be supposed that Mr. Bridges is ever a mere describer
who sits down mechanically in front of any scene with his little box
of water-colours. We have known such, and sometimes they have been
learned in botany; their exactitude of detail is dull, their serried
statements useless; only the man who is touched by the beauty in a
scene, or aroused by a scene to an awareness of beauty behind it, will
fuse the several things he sees into a whole. The writer who has felt
no emotion communicates none, and the greatness of Mr. Bridges's poems
of landscape is derived not solely from his knowledge of landscape, the
wary eye, but from his feeling for it, the eye of love. His scenes are
precise, but they are never photographs; there is no doubt about the
sentiment that he felt when he saw them.
IV
And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet,
but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his
poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact
has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love
poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The
proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms
but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence,
no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth
and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose
suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal
assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old
composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or
burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet
stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or
the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have
a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In _When
My Love was Away_, _My Spirit sang all day_, _I will not let thee go_,
and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons
elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in
which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all
the tempered sound, nevertheless there:
Her beauty would surprise
Gazers on Autumn eves,
Who watched the broad moon rise
Upon the scattered sheaves.
He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe
for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the
problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot
of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many
poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about
Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say
about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:
I never shall love the snow again
Since Maurice died,
and the other _On a Dead Child_: "Perfect little body, without fault or
stain on thee...."
So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing--
Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed--
Propping thy wise, sad head,
Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.
So quiet! doth the change content thee?--Death, whither hath he
taken thee?
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?
The vision of which I miss,
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail
us.
In _Winter Nightfall_ there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in
_Pater Filio_ the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal,
inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity,
yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets
the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few
distresses. Intense joy--nobody has given it better definition than
he--is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at
worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more
pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country
life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major
things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is
temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.
V
Mr. Bridges has not made the easy appeal by violence of expression; and
he has not made the easy appeal by violence of doctrine. If he has been
less discussed than many inferior writers, it is not so much that he
is without doctrine as that he is without novel doctrine and has never
been a doctrinaire. Any noisy demonstrator with a new lie may attract
attention, if it is only the attention of those who wish to dispute
with him; and it is easier to dispute (or agree) with the man whose
"views" are explicit than with him who leaves them implicit. The mere
fact that Mr. Bridges's practical philosophy has been held by hundreds
of millions of ordinary people in many ages does not prove that he has
no philosophy. He is a Christian, but he says little about that. He is
politically sceptical of systems, but he says little about that. He
accepts life, with its pains and pleasures, and he is happy that his
life has been cast in an ordered traditional civilisation. He sees life
in proportion, with the greater goods clear: childhood, the love of a
woman and of children, the beauty of the earth, days of peace, joyful
work, friendship. He does not proclaim a way of life, but it will be
easy for his critics to deduce one from his poetry: if he does not
tell people how to enjoy life it is because he is too busy enjoying
it himself, and if he does not expound his religion, it is because
he probably holds it to be "the religion of all sensible men." He
never loses hold of his settled philosophy. In depression he does not
imaginatively revel in the gloom of a Universe gone black, but consoles
himself out of his knowledge:
O soul, be patient: thou shalt find
A little matter mend all this,
Some strain of music to thy mind,
Some praise for skill not spent amiss.
In the peace of a churchyard he can write:
Nay, were my last hope quenched, I here would sit
And praise the annihilation of the pit.
He lives through the moments of dejection and awaits, with sure hope,
those moments when
Life and joy are one--we know not why--
As though our very blood long breathless lain
Had tasted of the breath of God again.
There are times when he is at almost that pitch of bliss for days
together, and he says with each evening:
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.
And with any dawn may come the exhilaration and the resolve
I too will something make
And joy in the making.
Very rarely some slight dogmatic statement is actually present, the
affirmation of something which is not necessarily false because it
is as old as man, and modestly put. "For howso'er man hug his care,
The best of his art is gay." He sees Spring in Winter more often than
Winter in Spring:
And God the Maker doth my heart make bold
To praise for writing works not understood,
Who all the worlds and ages doth behold,
Evil and good as one, and all as good.
It may by some be called an easy acceptance; by others the answer will
be made that the refusal to accept does not get us much further. Mr.
Bridges's own answer would perhaps be Lycomedes':
men who would live well
Weigh not these riddles, but unfold their life
From day to day.
No attempt has been made in these brief notes to do more than indicate
the artistic virtues and the outlook of Mr. Bridges: the elucidation
is scant enough, and there was no space for reasoned criticism or
for discussion of the qualities which he lacks and which other poets
have possessed. But it may, in conclusion, be repeated that he
is, as an artist, as careful and skilful as any poet who has ever
written, and that as a man he has never lied, never posed, never
assumed a factitious mood because it might impress or a factitious
opinion because it might startle. He _is_ sensible, and he is (in
the best sense) commonplace in his outlook and in his affections
and admirations; the changing conditions of our times have affected
him little; he thinks more of the "man harrowing clods" than of the
"breaking of nations"; the river, the cornfields, the village church,
the domestic fireside, do obscure for him the mental and physical
struggles of our world; he has his ideal of the sound mind in the
sound body, and he cannot see why anything should modify it. But his
philosophy will not stale when many of our controversialists have
gone the way of Godwin and Malthus; and a reader who went to him for
knowledge of how to live would certainly not be led on the rocks,
little as Mr. Bridges may directly say on the subject. Nobody could be
less like an apostle, but serenity, delight, cleanliness, and honesty
are in him--and courage. The thought of death does not appal him, it
braces him to work and joy. "Man hath his life," says Thetis in one of
his dramas, "that it must end condemns it not for naught." The same
certainty is in the lyrics:
Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace
Draweth surely nigh,
When good-night is good-bye;
For the sleeping shall not cease.
Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away
Deem, nor strange thy doom.
Like this sorrow 'twill come,
And the day will be to-day.
The greatest of practical truths could not be put more stoutly, nor
with a finer imaginative touch.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
MR. YATES THOMPSON'S ILLUMINATED BOOKS
These lines are written before the date at which the second portion of
Mr. Yates Thompson's illuminated books are to be sold at Sotheby's.
They have no reference therefore to the relative value of the books
as realised under the hammer. The intrinsic value of books, however,
should not be measured merely by their market price. Splendid as are
the French and Italian manuscripts and the eight printed books which
are included in the sale, the greatest interest of all has its centre
in the fourteen books which show the gay piety of English illumination
between the last quarter of the twelfth century and the middle of the
fifteenth. Indeed, no other group in all the hundred books to which
Mr. Yates Thompson definitely limited his famous collection has quite
the same claims of artistic and historical interest as these. They
do not, of course, cover the whole range of English illumination.
There is no example of the art of outline drawing, which flourished
with amazing vigour in England for a century and a half before the
Norman Conquest, convicting Mr. G. K. Chesterton of inexactitude when,
in a recent number of THE LONDON MERCURY, he suggests that mediæval
illuminators used their paints before they had learned how to draw.
The vivacity and grace shown in those early drawings, chastened but
not subdued by Continental and Byzantine influences, left traces in
English books, and continued to afford a firm groundwork for English
illumination for more than three centuries. There are but few examples
of them in private hands. Neither has Mr. Yates Thompson any example
of the great Winchester School, represented in the tenth century by
the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, now the property of the Duke
of Devonshire, and in the twelfth by the great Bible at Winchester
Cathedral. But English art had its flowering time in the fourteenth
century, and its late summer in the fifteenth; and amongst the books
offered for sale at Sotheby's are brilliant examples of both these
periods.
* * * * *
Taking the more important of these English books in the order of their
date, we have first the _Life of St. Cuthbert_, with its series of
fifty-six lovely full-page miniatures, probably painted at Durham about
1180, a delightful example of a rare type of book. _The Apocalypse_
has an important chapter to itself in the history of painted books,
and the late thirteenth-century copy in the collection is one of the
finest surviving copies of that favourite picture-book of the Middle
Ages. It has much in common with the copy at Lambeth, and Dr. M. R.
James traces them both to the same birthplace, probably St. Augustine's
at Canterbury. The copy in the sale has no less than 152 miniatures,
some of which seem to have been painted in Italy, whence more than six
centuries later Mr. Yates Thompson brought it back to England.
* * * * *
The three fourteenth-century manuscripts in the group are a Psalter of
Northern origin, probably written for a member of the Yorkshire family
of de la Twyere; an early Sarum Missal, with historiated initials, in
which some of the figure-drawing recalls that of Queen Mary's _Psalter_
in the British Museum; and the _Psalter_ of John of Gaunt, to whom it
is believed to have been given, perhaps on his marriage with Blanche
of Lancaster in 1359. Many of the miniatures in this splendid book are
enshrined in Gothic canopies and painted in gold and silver; and the
silver, so apt to turn black through oxydization, has on most of these
pages kept its lustre. This _Psalter_ is one of the finest examples of
English work which has survived from the second half of the fourteenth
century. Mr. Yates Thompson confesses that it cost him a bigger price
than any other of his books.
* * * * *
The _Hours of Elisabeth y^e Quene_, so called from the signature of the
Queen of Henry VII. written at the foot of one of the pages, is a very
rich and beautiful example of that new spirit in English illumination
which has been connected with the marriage of Queen Anne of Bohemia
to King Richard II. in 1382. Dating from that event, English work
for almost the first time takes a character which is quite distinct
from contemporary French or Flemish illumination, and the change is
attributed to the work and influence of the artists whom the Bohemian
princess brought in her train. The strong, clear outline, made by pen
or pencil, which had been a tradition from the beginning of English
pictorial art, now yields place to soft brushwork. The human figure,
which has hitherto been represented by types, assumes individuality and
realism. There is found, too, a new character in portraiture, with the
features carefully and delicately moulded. The rich borders of books of
this period have details unknown in the French work, which, hitherto,
has been so nearly akin to that done in England. The kinship can be
traced rather to contemporary books painted in Italy and Southern
Germany. These English borders are apt to have a certain heaviness in
design, especially when compared with the graceful ivy-leaf pattern in
French illumination of the same date. Thanks, however, to the greater
brilliancy and gaiety of the colouring, which is also a note of the new
English style, this heaviness in design is hardly felt. In this _Book
of Hours_ the colours, which for the most part are delicate shades of
red and blue, heightened with white, and richly gilt, are especially
brilliant. The class of illumination which it represents belongs to a
limited and distinct period of English art which has yet to be fully
explored.
* * * * *
The group of eight books printed on vellum which follows the English
books in the order of lots, and in the catalogue is sandwiched
between them and the French and Italian manuscripts, is quite worthy
of such good company. These printed books show how deliberately and
how successfully the first printers sought to copy the manner and
also the special beauty of the finest manuscripts of their own age.
Amongst these fine volumes are the Mainz _de Officiis_ of 1466; Peter
Schoeffer's _Justinian_ of 1468; an illuminated copy of Jenson's
_Pliny_ of 1472--the type of which had so notable an influence on the
work of the Kelmscott and Doves Presses; John of Verona's _Valturius_
of 1472, the earliest book to be printed in Italy with Italian
woodcuts--and this copy is illuminated too. The group shows how far
from vain even in an artistic sense was the boast made in the colophon
of one of the earliest Venetian printers that already by his new craft
"Calami superaverat artem."
B. H. N.
GENERAL NOTES
Messrs. Dobell's catalogue for March, 1920, contains mention of a very
curious and beautiful book of designs made exclusively of feathers.
There are about one hundred and fifty of these designs, which were
made, according to the inscription on the title-page, by "Dionisio
Minaggio Giardinero Di s^a e^a Guobernator Del Stat di Milano.
Inventor et Feccit Lano Del 1618." His Excellency the Governor of the
State of Milan was fortunate in possessing so talented a gardener.
Dionisio Minaggio was, in his way, a remarkable artist. His feather
pictures, which include a beautiful series of birds portrayed in their
own plumage, a series of hunting scenes, illustrations of musical
instruments, and a number of charming figures from the Old Comedy, are
often quite enchanting. The designs are reminiscent of the best sampler
work, while the feathers give a richness, variety, and unexpectedness
of colouring such as no sampler has ever possessed. Feather work of a
much later period is not uncommon; but we should imagine that so large
a series of such an early date is something quite unique. The book is
priced at £200.
* * * * *
The catalogue of the library of Mr. Walter Thomas Wallace, which is
to be sold in the last days of March by the American Art Association,
in New York, has just reached us. Mr. Wallace's astonishingly rich
collection includes copies of the four Folios of Shakespeare and of
several of the Quartos. Among the Elizabethan rarities are _The Palace
of Pleasure_, Sidney's _Arcadia_, _The Faerie Queene_, and other poems
of Spenser. Among the eighteenth-century treasures is to be found one
of the two known copies of Goldsmith's _Threnodia Augustalis_. Keats
and Shelley are well represented. There is a very complete collection
of Tennyson first editions and an almost unique series of Lamb books,
including a copy in the original binding of the almost extinct first
edition of _Poems for Children_ (1809). There are also remarkably
complete sets of first editions of such American authors as Poe,
Bryant, Longfellow. We anticipate some new records in the way of prices.
* * * * *