Laureate Testifies

(See front cover) THE TESTAMENT OF BEAUTY--Robert Bridges--Oxford University Press ($25).

The Poetry. My writing is at end. I have seen such things revealed

that what I have written and taught seemeth to me of small worth.

Robert Bridges, 85, Poet Laureate of England, takes leave of literature in The Testament of Beauty, a philosophical poem of some 5,600 lines. Despite his age, he hardly resembles a sere and yellow leaf. His is an oaken maturity; at a great age he has produced his magnum opus, at an unlikely age he is still a poet and in a way a revolutionary. The poem is in four "books." What plot it possesses is concerned with Poet Bridges' life experience. His poetical conclusions about that cannot be translated into prose, but can perhaps be indicated by saying that the poet still believes in life, although he has little of it left. Poet Bridges has faith in spiritual evolution. The unreasoning faith of youth is only a hoarded memory: Poet Bridges' faith is bulwarked by reason and stern, disciplined experience. Says he: Time eateth away at many an old delusion.

Since Robert Bridges has been allowed a longer life than most, he has probably suffered more than his share of delusions. But as the furrows have gathered around his eyes, the eyes have sharpened, have discerned a glorious, persistent quality in life which, no delusion, resists the years, but which most men lose in middle age-- the quality nebulously expressed as Beauty.

It is not an impulsively perceived and fleeting loveliness that he proclaims, but a solid, enduring vision which appears only to one who has sampled all learning --medicine, anthropology, natural history, physics, history, philosophy, the arts. It is intellectualized, ordered, disciplined, a beauty akin to that of Plato. Spiritual evolution is essential before Laureate Bridges' discoveries are manifest:

Knowledge accumulateth slowly and not in vain;

with fiew attainment new orders of beauty arise.

The poem is the final utterance, always dignified, sometimes majestic, of a patriarch who has refused to be disheartened by the chaos of the world, but instead, as the years pass, perceives life as lustrous and wonderful. It is a monumental piece of work, compelling the attention of all who would follow the best of modern thought and feeling.

The Poetics. The poem is cast in a form of such specialized metrical technique that few besides its author will be able to scan its lines as they were meant to be scanned. But readers will not be bogged by what Laureate Bridges calls his "loose alexandrines,"* for though the layman may not be able to recite them correctly their music will be apparent:

Sometimes when slowly from the deep sleep of fatigue

a man awakeneth, he lyeth for awhile amazed,

aware of self and of his rested body, and yet

knowing not where he is, bewilder'd, unable

to interpret sight or sound, because the slumbering guards

in Memory's Castle hav lagg'd at his summons

for to let down the drawbridge and to uplift the gate:

Anon with their deliverance he cometh again

to usual cognisance of the things about him,

life, and all his old familiar concepts of home.

So 'tis with any Manchild born into the world,

so wondereth he awhile at the stuff of his home,

so, tho' slowly and unconsciently, he remembereth--

With ease of long habit his lungs inhale the air, his muffling wraps,

his frill'd and closely curtain'd cot

and silken apparel of wealth are stranger things to him

than the rough contacts wherefrom they are thought to shield him,

the everlasting companionships of his lang syne.

A lifelong student of language, Laureate Bridges has now justified his reputation. The English language, unlike Latin, Greek or French, is supposedly incapable of quantitative versification: i. e., the scansion of English verse is not dependent on "long" or "short" syllables since there is no such formal distinction between syllables in English. Sensitive ears, like those of Laureate Bridges, however, permit a treatment of English as Virgil treated Latin, with heed to both "long" and "short" syllables. When he speaks of "loose alexandrines" he is cracking a scholarly joke, for his careful quantitative measurement makes every line scan perfectly. The spelling, sometimes apparently archaic, sometimes apparently futuristic, is a guide.

The Poet. The Testament of Beauty is dedicated by the Poet Laureate to his King. Hitherto the Bridges Laureateship has been characterized by inactivity. Of all the line of laureates (which has included Dryden, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson) he has written the least official poetry. For his annual stipend of -L-72, and -L-27 in lieu of a butt of Canary wine, he has produced one thin official volume, October and other poems. Unlike the late great Laureate Tennyson, he has refused to vamp up verses for patriotic occasions and royal birthdays. When he visited the U. S. in 1924 and refused to commemorate the event in rhyme, a Manhattan tabloid carried what newspapermen call the classic headline of all time: KING'S CANARY WILL NOT CHIRP.

The Testament of Beauty, which evidently required years in gestation, which is already being compared in England with Chaucer, Keats and Milton, should compensate for Laureate Bridges' silence. Indeed, it may prove to be the last utterance of the last of the Laureates, for the present Government talks of abolishing the post should it fall vacant in its tenure of office.

Robert Bridges was born on the Isle of Thanet, was educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Until he was 38 he practiced medicine. Then he began publishing poetry, much of it experimenting in Classical metre.* In 1913, aged 69, he was appointed Poet Laureate by Premier Asquith, succeeding Laureate Alfred Austin. Laureate Bridges is a founder of the Society for Pure English, serves as arbiter of pronunciation in British radio broadcasting.

Tall, white-bearded, leonine, he walks scholarly, reflective paths at his home on Boar's Hill, near Oxford. Careless of the social niceties, when his tea is too hot he pours it into the saucer to cool it. Careful of pennies, he will stamp out of a tobacconist's shop in high dudgeon if he thinks the pipe-tobacco a halfpenny dearer than it should be. His life has been unexciting. He pays little attention to young critics who dismiss his poetry with the same adjective.

*An alexandrine is a poetical line consisting of six iambics. An iambic consists of two syllables with the second stressed.

*Bridges books: Poetical Works; Demetcr, a Mask; Humdrum and Harum-Scarum, A Lecture on Free Verse.

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