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.