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Aunty May’s Footsteps

My Aunty May was one of that legion of women constrained to spinsterhood by the slaughter of the First World War. She devoted herself to good works, commanding half of Kent for the St John Ambulance Brigade, and being a lifelong carer of old folk. Her private consolation was reading, and her book collection, which never ceased to grow, ran riot through every room of her various successive small houses in Hythe. One of her strong suits was poetry, and she was a disciplined reader, noting in the margins every occasion on which she consulted a particular passage. She read through Robert Bridges’ anthology The Spirit of Man ten times, taking one quotation a day, from 1942 (when she received a copy of the 23rd impression as a Christmas present) to 1973. Her last notation, on 16 January 1973, was two-thirds of the way through her eleventh trawl, at a quotation from Paradise Lost . . .

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream,
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

This must have been the point at which Aunty’s failing eyesight at last let her down. She turned for several years to Braille, but then dementia set in, and all her former state and being sank into the River of Oblivion.

Bridges’ anthology was conceived and assembled as a national morale-boosting exercise and first published in January 1916, at a time when it was becoming clear that the Great War was going to go on for some time and was already an unprecedented slaughterhouse. Bridges brought High Victorian sensibilities to the task; the calligraphic title page, designed by Emery Walker, laid the matter out plain: The Spirit of Man, An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 & dedicated by g

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My Aunty May was one of that legion of women constrained to spinsterhood by the slaughter of the First World War. She devoted herself to good works, commanding half of Kent for the St John Ambulance Brigade, and being a lifelong carer of old folk. Her private consolation was reading, and her book collection, which never ceased to grow, ran riot through every room of her various successive small houses in Hythe. One of her strong suits was poetry, and she was a disciplined reader, noting in the margins every occasion on which she consulted a particular passage. She read through Robert Bridges’ anthology The Spirit of Man ten times, taking one quotation a day, from 1942 (when she received a copy of the 23rd impression as a Christmas present) to 1973. Her last notation, on 16 January 1973, was two-thirds of the way through her eleventh trawl, at a quotation from Paradise Lost . . .

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream, Lethe the River of Oblivion roules Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets, Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

This must have been the point at which Aunty’s failing eyesight at last let her down. She turned for several years to Braille, but then dementia set in, and all her former state and being sank into the River of Oblivion. Bridges’ anthology was conceived and assembled as a national morale-boosting exercise and first published in January 1916, at a time when it was becoming clear that the Great War was going to go on for some time and was already an unprecedented slaughterhouse. Bridges brought High Victorian sensibilities to the task; the calligraphic title page, designed by Emery Walker, laid the matter out plain: The Spirit of Man, An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 & dedicated by gracious permission to His Majesty King George V. (Bridges was no fan of wordy title pages and noted later in a letter to a friend, ‘The King’s private secretary spoilt the title page by the insertion of some useless words!’) The idea for the book was suggested to Bridges in November 1914 by the publisher Charles Longman, who had lost a son in the very first months of the war. Bridges promptly wrote off to various friends soliciting help and suggestions. In his letter to Logan Pearsall Smith he said, ‘Of course I want you to help me . . . The unity of the book will be that it only has things that I like in it.’ In another letter he described the project as ‘a sort of miscellany with a purpose’. Throughout 1915 he was fully engaged in the selection, ranging across literature and philosophy, from east and west, excluding as a category only the Germans, of whom more later. The Oxford Companion to English Literature says with faint politesse of Bridges, ‘his general reputation does not stand as high as it once did’. He is perhaps the second most forgotten Poet Laureate of the twentieth century, only Alfred Austin outdoing him in the famous-for-being-forgotten stakes. His own poetry already seemed old-fashioned when compared to that of the Georgians and the coming voices of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But he was to have his biggest ‘hit’, published on his birthday at the grand age of 85 in 1929, with Testament of Beauty, in which he laid out his spiritual philosophy, and which he regarded as his crowning work. He gets four entries in the current Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Austin gets none), of which the following, from 1894, gives the best flavour:

So sweet love seemed that April morn, When first we kissed beside the thorn, So strangely sweet, it was not strange We thought that love could never change.

But I can tell – let truth be told – That love will change in growing old; Though day by day is naught to see, So delicate his motions be.

In going about assembling The Spirit of Man, Bridges was particular to the point of pedantry; he wanted to be sure the punctuation and scansion were absolutely right as he – a founder of the Society for Pure English – saw it. So he wrote to W. B. Yeats, ‘I should like to know what your feelings are about punctuation . . . I want especially to know whether the punctuation of “Ragged Wood” is as you wish it.’ Yeats good-humouredly replied, ‘Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops and commas.’ Bridges notes in the index, ‘My punctuation substituted for printer’s’:

O hurry where by water among the trees The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh, When they have but looked upon their images, – O that none ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky, When the sun looked out of his golden hood, – O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I’ll hollo all those lovers out and cry – O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.

The 449 quotations in The Spirit of Man are arranged thematically, according to a rhythm that Bridges felt rather than thought. Unusually, the source of each extract is not given on the page, so that the reader is invited to follow without interruption. Each quotation is numbered and there are brief scholarly notes at the back. The most-quoted contributor is Shelley, with 43 entries, followed by Shakespeare (37), Milton (30), Keats (22), Amiel (en français) (21), Blake and Wordsworth (16 each), Dixon (15), Coleridge (11), and the Bible and Plato (10 each). Alert readers will perhaps say, ‘Dixon? Who he?’ Well, Richard Watson Dixon was a minor canon in Carlisle whose poetry was admired by Bridges but not, alas, by many others. He may be said to head the list of poets of the tertiary class whom Bridges had counted as friends and whose work he liked, and which he therefore included in The Spirit of Man, while excluding, for example, Robert Browning, whom he couldn’t stand. The names of Digby Mackworth Dolben, Lord John de Tabley and George Darley will mean nothing to modern readers, but there they are, part of Bridges’ ensemble. There was, however, one poet among the list of comparative unknowns in The Spirit of Man whose contributions were seized upon with unrestrained praise on all sides: Gerard Manley Hopkins, a friend of Bridges from Oxford days, whose poetry hitherto had had only limited exposure. Such was the impact of his contribution that Bridges was invited to put together the first collection of his poetry, which was published in 1918. When you reach him in The Spirit of Man, on the heels of a bit of Rimbaud, it is the wonderful . . .

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleafing? . . . Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Tho’ world of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow’s springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no, nor mind express’d, What heart heard of, ghost guess’d: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Poignantly, Bridges asked his friend Henry James for something, but the novelist was gravely ill (he died three weeks later), and nominated instead a passage from the writings of his late brother William, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher, part of which Aunty May underlined:

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight, – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.

Which brings us back to the Germans. When The Spirit of Man was published, anti-German sentiment in Britain was particularly high; they were not merely the enemy, they were perceived also as fighting dirty – Zeppelin raids over London had caused civilian casualties, and Edith Cavell had been shot in October 1915. Bridges wrote to a friend around the time he was marshalling his thoughts for the preface, the last piece of the book to fall into place, ‘I never liked the Germans. I always felt antipathetic towards them, and avoided them as I should sauerkraut at dinner – but I never thought that they were such slavish unprincipled pigs as they prove to be. The idea that such contemptible filth can turn the world upside down is the sad side of it all.’ Not surprising then that The Spirit of Man has no room for Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hesse und so weiter . . . Some of Bridges’ friends were worried by the anti-Teuton flavour of the preface, and he did tone down parts, but, he wrote, ‘The progress of mankind on the path of liberty and humanity has been suddenly arrested and its promise discredited by the apostasy of a great people . . . From the consequent miseries, the insensate and interminable slaughter, the hate and filth, we can turn to seek comfort only in the quiet confidence of our souls; and we look instinctively to the seers and poets of mankind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies of loveliness and lovingkindness.’ In that last sentence he captures the very reason why his anthology works so well; in wartime people acquire a hunger for culture, for finer things. The presence of possible imminent death sharpens the senses: in the Second World War, people who’d never previously seen a grand piano eagerly attended Dame Myra Hess’s lunchtime recitals, and when, in 1944, Field Marshal Wavell published Other Men’s Flowers, a poetic anthology consisting only and wholly of works he knew off by heart, his stock as ‘the soldiers’ general’ went up another couple of notches. Just lately we learn that when the Bolivian authorities went through Che Guevara’s clothes after his execution, they found two notebooks, one a list of codewords for communications with Havana, the other a collection of poetry written out in Che’s own hand which, his companions testified, he used to read in the evenings, usually sitting in the branches of a tree. It is now to be published, forty years after his death. The Spirit of Man closes with the end of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a note of forgiveness and optimism:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Dear Aunty May reached this passage on 22 February 1944, and passed through again on 14 June 1945, 6 September 1946, 1 December 1947, 23 February 1949, 18 May 1950, 11 August 1951, 8 November 1956 and 22 March 1960. While her example may be daunting for the averagely busy Slightly Foxed reader, it surely indicates this anthology is a rich cake with plenty to nibble at, well worth looking out for in a second-hand bookshop.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © John Sheppard 2010


About the contributor

The late John Sheppard was a documentary film maker, once of World in Action and Disappearing World. His account of The Doors at the Roundhouse, his portrait of Olga Korbut and his celebration of Sgt Pepper’s twentieth anniversary are remembered with affection.

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