II
Mr. Bridges is often written of as though he were primarily a technician. He has always taken a keen interest in prosody; he has written books, and formulated theories, about it; his experiments in classical metres and his notions about English spelling have, to those who have not troubled to discover the intellectual strength and the strong common sense which commonly marks his linguistic writings, given him something of the air of a pedant. But the theoriser and the innovator of the "shorter poems" has nothing to do with pedantry. There are poems in which the scrutinous eye may detect very elaborate pains. April 1885 is a fabric of internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration which it would be hard to parallel in English:
Wanton with long delay the gay Spring leaping cometh;
The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.
Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower
At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth:
On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.
That may be called a tour-de-force; as a rule, though Mr. Bridges's variety of stanza and rhythm is immense, the craftsman never intrudes. His ingenuities merely serve their purpose; his music cannot be separated from his sense; his rhythms are sought, and found, as the only suitable rhythms for the words and the scenes that are being expressed and described. How otherwise than in the beautiful movement used can we imagine the picture of A Passer By?—the fresh blue day, the crowded sail, the vision of a queenly progress across the world to a far harbour in the south? It is one of fifty such feats, triumphs of fastidious art, never completely understood until the poems are read aloud. His power of music has developed steadily throughout his career, but scarcely a poem of any period can be quoted without illustrating his surpassing technical gifts. We shall come to many presently; here, when we are thinking primarily of the skill with which he weaves a close-fitting garment of sound for his thought, we may take as a single example, London Snow:
When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof, and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven....
The accuracy of the description is extraordinary and continues as the town awakes, and boys go snowballing to school, a few carts creak along, and the pale sun rises to awake the noisier day. But the observation, the accuracy, the response of the heart to the beauty of the scene, might have been found elsewhere: the astonishing management of the rhythms, which, even when divorced from the meaning of the words, translate the steady falling, the wayward criss-crossing, the lightness and crispness, and soothing persistence of snow in an almost windless air, is peculiar to Mr. Bridges. Words and music are with him always inseparable: he is at the opposite pole from the man, often not unintelligent in other ways, who forces his material into a strait-jacket of jingle. In this respect his taste is as flawless, his subtlety as unfailing, as any in the records of literature.