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.