674 



REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



September 1, 1913. 



LYRIC VERSE. 

 But none of these longer works have 

 had the same success as the lyric verse, 

 which seems to have so few points of 

 contact with Victorian England, except 

 perhaps in its rather Puritan note. He 

 was saturated with the poetry of the 

 1 6th and i/th centuries, and many of his 

 verses might have adorned an Eliza- 

 bethan anthology. Take, for example, 

 one beginning : — 



Dear lady, ivhen thou frownest, 

 And my true love despisest 

 And all my vows disownest 

 That sealed my venture wisest. 



The popular appreciation of his work 

 has justified a collected edition of his 

 works in six volumes, and in a single 

 volume edition of his poems, exclusive 

 of his dramatic works. 



HIS PROSE WRITING. 

 His critical prose writings in the mean- 

 time had attracted a very great amount 

 of interest and discussion. After the 

 failure of Edmund Spenser's friend, the 

 inept Gabriel Harvey, Nashe's " good 

 Gabriel Huffe-Snuffe," to impose on 

 English verse the restrictions of classical 

 verse-writing, by which our " barbarous 

 and balductum rymes " were to be ex- 

 changed for artificial verses, it came 

 gradually to be assumed, that English 

 verse was governed by perfectly simple 

 and more or less mechanical laws of 

 syllable and accent. The critical writ- 

 ings of S. T. Coleridge dispelled the 

 idea that all was so easy as this, but it 

 is Dr. Bridges who has made a serious 

 and systematic effort to explain the why 

 and the wherefore of the music of the 

 verse of Milton and his great successors, 

 to show that though the number of 

 stresses in a line is an essential part of 

 the technique of English poetry, many 



other considerations, even considerations 

 of quality, may enter into it. 



RHYTHM FOR RHYTHM'S SAKE. 

 " There are very few persons indeed," 

 he says in his severe, didactic way, " who 

 take such a natural delight in rhythm 

 for its own sake that they can follow « 

 with pleasure a learned rhythm which is 

 ver}' rich in variet}-, and the beaut>- of 

 which is its perpetual freedom to obey 

 the sense and diction." And he makes 

 it his business to give us a reason for 

 the faith that is in us when we admire 

 great poetry. This prepossession with 

 the machinery of verse and the boldness 

 of his own experiments explain why his 

 fellow craftsmen admire him. 



PHONETIC SPELLING. 



Then Dr. Bridges is perhaps the first 

 living authority on the phonetics of the 

 English language. We pride ourselves 

 that if we conform to the ordinary stan- 

 dard of the educated southerner, as prac- 

 tised at the two older Universities, for 

 instance, we are speaking the King's 

 English at its best. But Dr. Bridges, in 

 a learned pamphlet on!}' recently pub- 

 lished in the ordinary way, shakes us 

 roughly out of our placid contentment. 

 What future for that musical English 

 speech, which is the material of poetr)', 

 can there be in a generation which com- 

 mits such enormities as " Cheusdy " for 



1 uesday, pawring tor pouring, 

 and declaims " ter be or not ter be " ? 

 "Audjins" for "audience" he quotes 

 from the mouth of a learned professor. 

 Dr. Bridges goes so far as to threaten 

 us that if we are to retain the graces of 

 our mother tongue we shall have to 

 resort in our schools to some system or 

 other of phonetic spelling. 



The next of Mr. Henry Stead's articles upon his 

 Father v^ill appear in the October Number. 



