III
It is possible, and it has often been stated, that Mr. Bridges will chiefly live as a poet of the English landscape. Certainly he would live if only his landscape poetry were preserved. It may seem a large assertion, but no Englishman has written so large a body of good landscape poetry. There are two obvious things to be said about it.
The first is that his landscape is the landscape of the South of England, more particularly of the Thames Valley and the downs by the sea—two regions which he significantly chooses as typical, when, in The Voice of Nature, he wishes to point an argument. He never describes foreign or remote scenes; and—it may be regarded as symbolic of his attitude to the more violent things of life—he never leaves the land for the sea. Even British territorial waters he never sails; there is much of the sea in his work, but it is the sea as seen from the shore, blue and smiling and dancing, or whipped by the wind, caught in a narrow peep between shoulders of the downs or watched from a hill through a telescope:
There many an hour I have sat to watch; nay, now
The brazen disk is cold against my brow,
And in my sight a circle of the sea
Enlarged to swiftness, where the salt waves flee,
And ships in stately motion pass so near
That what I see is speaking to my ear.
Mr. Bridges's landscape is bounded by the English Channel; his hills 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.