Bridges, Robert Seymour

• Catherine Phillips

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930)

byFrederick Hollyer,1888

©National Portrait Gallery, London

Bridges, Robert Seymour (1844–1930),poet, was born at Walmer, Kent, on 23 October 1844, the fourth son and eighth child ofJohn Thomas Bridges (1805–1853) andHarriett Elizabeth Affleck (1807–1897), third daughter of theRevd Sir Robert Affleck of Dalham, Suffolk.

Ancestry and early years

TheBridges family had been yeoman farmers in the Isle of Thanet since the sixteenth century, butJohn Thomas Bridges, who inherited the property in the late 1820s, did not want to farm and moved his young family to Walmer, where in 1832 he purchased Roseland, a house with some6 acres of land perched on a height from which it was possible to look down to the sea and Walmer Castle, one of the coastal forts built byHenry VIII and a residence of theduke of Wellington in his capacity as lord warden of the Cinque Ports. There were several military bases in the area and two ofRobert's elder brothers were to enter the forces.Robert's early years were spent in a happy family with Puseyite religious belief, music, and games in the large garden or on the rolling countryside around Upper Walmer or its pebbly beach. The importance of these formative experiences is celebrated in poems such as'The Summer-House on the Mound' andBridges' memoir ofDigby Mackworth Dolben, both of which show his ability to evoke a range of sensory impressions, remembered with astounding precision. It is this capacity to create vivid lines and images that isBridges' main strength as a poet.

In 1853Robert faced the first of many tragedies in his life. After a short illness his beloved father died at the early age of forty-seven. The following year his mother married the eminent churchmanJohn Edward Nassau Molesworth (1790–1877), vicar of Rochdale in Lancashire, sold the family property, and moved her family to Rochdale.Robert was sent to Eton College, a school which his eldest brother,John Affleck Bridges (1832–1924), had attended. He was a good but not top student and his love of music, games, and mild pranks meant that he fitted in easily. He began lifelong friendships withLionel Muirhead, who was a fine artist, the musicianHubert Parry, andV. S. S. Coles, who later became principal of Pusey House in Oxford. Fascinated by language,Bridges wrote poems, exchanging criticism with his ‘cousin’Digby Mackworth Dolben until, comparing his efforts with those of the great literary figures, he despaired and wrote very little for a number of years. In 1860 his brotherGeorge (b. 1836) died; he had been a lieutenant aboard the royal yacht and had married the novelistSamuel Butler's sisterHarriet in 1859.

Bridges' years at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1863–7), were a continuation of his classical education, with leisure time given to music and sport where he was a distinguished oarsman. Among the friends he made at Oxford wereWilliam Sanday (later Lady Margaret professor of divinity) and the poetGerard Manley Hopkins. He belonged to the ascetic, high AnglicanBrotherhood of the Holy Trinity. But Oxford was entering a period of considerable change and his religious certainty was undermined by Darwinian debate and German higher criticism. The role religion was to play in his adult life was also altered in 1866 by the death of his younger brother,Edward (b. 1846), who had always had delicate health but with whomRobert had been hoping to live an informally religious life in which he would look after him. The drowning in July 1867 ofDolben, who was very devout, broke another of the religious ties of his youth.

Medical studies and practice

On leaving Oxford, from which he graduated with a second class inliterae humaniores,Bridges travelled in the Middle East, partly to test his religious beliefs. He was away from January to June 1868 and returned to find that his elder sister,Harriett Plow (1837–1869), was dying after a murderous attack in which her husband and new-born baby had been killed.Bridges, who like his elder brothers was expected to choose a career, decided on medicine. He spent eight months in Germany learning German, the language of many scientific papers at the time, and then in 1869 registered as a student at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. The explosion in scientific knowledge of the time was transforming medical training and making it more structured and rigorous. (Bridges later described it as the age of the microscope.) He balanced his heavy medical load with leisure spent with artistic friends, among whom at this period wereSamuel Butler, the publication of whoseErewhon (1872) he offered to help finance;Harry Ellis Wooldridge, later Slade professor of fine art;John Stainer, who became university professor of music at Oxford; andRobert Bateman, a painter on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite group.Bridges joined the Savile Club in 1872, getting to knowEdmund Gosse,Philip Rathbone, and the architectAlfred Waterhouse (1830–1905). In 1873 he published his first volume of poems, which gives hints of the crises through which he had been passing in lyrics such as'In my most serious thoughts o' wakeful nights' and'In that dark time'. Most of the poems were written in 1872–3. It was a review of this volume byAndrew Lang that first madeHopkins aware thatBridges wrote verse.

Bridges failed his final medical examinations in 1873 and, unable to retake the papers immediately, spent six months in Italy withMuirhead,Wooldridge, and theRathbones, who were collectors of art. He learned Italian and as much about Italian art as he could. He then spent July 1874 studying medicine in Dublin. Re-examined in December of that year, he obtained his MB and became a house physician toDr Patrick Black at St Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1876 he publishedThe Growth of Love: a Poem in Twenty-Four Sonnets, the oblique account of a love affair. The identity of the woman is unknown and he later expanded the volume, adding to its range of subjects and, unfortunately, altering its verb forms and pronouns away from current English. Early in 1876 he spent two extremely busy months working in the Hôpital de la Pitié in Paris. He saw as much French theatre as he could squeeze into his schedule, an experience which heavily influenced the plays he later wrote. It was a year in which he was elected a member of theRoyal College of Physicians but also grieved over the illness and death of his youngest sister,Julia (b. 1841), who was a Sister of Mercy and who died from tuberculosis.

Bridges' next medical appointment was as a casualty physician at Bart's, an account of which he published in 1878. The physicians were placed under immense pressure, expected each morning to diagnose the ailments of 150 patients in under two hours.Bridges was exceptionally conscientious, spending significantly more time on each case. In the year he saw nearly 31,000 patients in the casualty ward. In 1878, in addition, he became out-patients' physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, and assistant physician at the Royal Northern Hospital, Islington, giving some 50,000 consultations. The publication of his report on the casualty department of Bart's, in which he was critical of its organization for physicians and patients, probably explains his not being offered any further appointments there. He transferred his efforts to the other two hospitals, becoming full physician responsible for the training of some of the medical students at the Royal Northern.Edward Thompson, a friend inBridges' last years, later remarked that he had never known anyone as sensitive asBridges to others' physical suffering (Thompson, 7).Bridges also published in 1879 and 1880 two volumes of poetry which contain some of his finest lyrics, including his experiments in sprung rhythm in'London Snow','The Voice of Nature', and'On a Dead Child'.

In June 1881Bridges developed pneumonia. He took more than a year to recover and, looked after byMuirhead, spent much of the winter in southern Italy. The long recuperation gave him time to rethink his priorities. The deaths of so many of his siblings meant that he now had a greater share of the family wealth. When his mother, to whom he was devoted, had been widowed again in 1877, he had made a home for her with him in London, and their combined income meant that he no longer needed to earn a salary. In addition, as he later recorded, he had a poor memory and was badly worried by the strain on it at a time when doctors were not yet allowed to specialize and were even expected to remember the recipes for the drugs they prescribed. Since the volumes of poetry he had published had met with an encouraging response, he resolved to give up medicine and spend his time writing.

First writings, marriage, and literary friendships

In August 1882Bridges and his mother moved to a manor house in the village of Yattendon, near Newbury, Berkshire. The next two decades were ones of great productivity. He wrote eight plays, a masque (Prometheus the Firegiver), a translation ofApuleius'sEros and Psyche, a revolutionary study ofMilton's prosody, and more volumes of lyric poems. He collaborated with various musicians, includingHubert Parry andCharles Villiers Stanford, and, withHarry Ellis Wooldridge, producedThe Small Hymn-Book: the Word-Book of the Yattendon Hymnal (1899), which was important in the reform of English hymnody and the resuscitation of Elizabethan music.

These were also years of great personal happiness. On 3 September 1884Bridges married(Mary) Monica Waterhouse (1863–1949), the architect's elder daughter, who was some twenty years his junior[see below]. The couple had three children:Elizabeth (1887–1977),Margaret (1889–1926), andEdward Ettingdene Bridges,first Baron Bridges (1892–1969), secretary to thecabinet. It was to be an exceptionally successful partnership with shared interests, most especially in music and calligraphy. In 1903Monica andMargaret contracted tuberculosis and for some years the family spent periods living near sanatoriums where the mother and daughter were institutionalized, as well as nine months in Switzerland in 1905–6. In 1907, with money left them byAlfred Waterhouse, theBridgeses built Chilswell on Boars Hill, near Oxford.

ThroughMonica,Bridges came to know her cousinRoger Fry, who was the first of several prominent members of a younger generation with whomBridges was to become acquainted. They includedW. B. Yeats,Ezra Pound,Henry Newbolt,Mary Coleridge,Robert Graves,Virginia Woolf, andE. M. Forster, though, despiteBridges' friendliness, onlyNewbolt andMary Coleridge seem to have been at ease with him and few publicly acknowledged his assistance or their admiration for his poetry. The friendship with another young man,W. J. Stone, the son of a former master at Eton, promptedBridges to try writing English verse using classical quantitative metres. He translated parts of theAeneid and wrote two long discursive epistles and a number of lyrics. The first of the epistles,'Wintry Delights', and the lyric'Johannes Milton, senex' are attractive examples of the method.

In 1909Bridges published the first of several editions with memoirs of friends. This wasPoems by the Late Rev. Dr. Richard Watson Dixon, whose friendship he had made throughHopkins. The second wasThe Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben (1911). When he turned for a second time toThe Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)—his first attempt having been shortly afterHopkins's death in 1889—Bridges unfortunately found that his feelings were too complex for a biographical memoir and he wrote instead a critical introduction and, most unusually for a contemporary poet at the time, explanatory notes to the poems. He later composed a memoir to accompanyThe Collected Papers of Henry Bradley (1928) and an introduction toA Selection from the Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1880–1922 (1928). The memoirs were subsequently republished asThree Friends and are masterpieces of their kind: vivid, informative, and beautifully written. His other prose works includedCollected Essays (10 vols., 1927–36) on a range of topics from the writing of poetry,Shakespeare, the relation of words and music, and an important study ofJohn Keats, to shorter pieces which had been published from 1919 to 1930 in theTracts of theSociety of Pure English, an organization of which he was a founder member. These included one on English pronunciation for early use by theBBC.

The poet laureateship andThe Testament of Beauty

In 1912Oxford University Press publishedBridges'Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas in theOxford Standard Poets series. He was one of only two living poets to be included in the series, and the honour was based in part on the facts that his naturalistic handling of rhythm was influencing younger writers and that the demand for hisShorter Poems had necessitated their reprinting four times in five years.Poetical Works sold 27,000 copies in its first year alone, a popularity that led toBridges' being offered the poet laureateship a year later whenRudyard Kipling refused it. Had he known the sort of poem ‘written to order’ the post would entail in the First World War, he might not have accepted (and might well not have been asked). His main poetic interest in 1913 was in developing a prosody appropriate to modern subjects that was independent of traditional rhythm and rhyme but, unlike free verse, was able to play off poetic units against syntactic ones. His experiments centred on syllabics, which he developed simultaneously with and independently of the American poetMarianne Moore. The strengths and variety of which the metre is capable can be seen inNew Verse (1925) andThe Testament of Beauty (1929).

Bridges' contribution to the war effort included belonging to ‘Godley's army’, a regiment of Oxford citizens past military age. The better war poems he wrote can be found in‘October’ and other Poems andNew Verse. He also compiledThe Spirit of Man, a very popular anthology of poetry and prose extracts for soldiers and civilians. His sonEdward was posted to the western front in the autumn of 1915 and, shortly after theBridges' home was gutted by fire, was repatriated wounded in February 1917. Fearful of the long-term effect of what he saw as the vengeful nature of the treaty of Versailles,Bridges was a vocal advocate of theLeague of Nations. His political role gave him more contact with Americans than he had had previously and in 1924 he accepted an invitation from the University of Michigan to spend three months there talking to groups of students, including delivering a fascinating lecture to the medical school on his own medical experience.

In 1926Bridges' daughterMargaret died, and he and his wife were devastated. Urged byMonica, he tinkered with a poem he had begun two years earlier. Then, after a break, he returned to it and spent the next three years writing what becameThe Testament of Beauty, the longest of his poems. It is a discursive work, setting out his understanding of man's nature, spiced with scenes and incidents from his experience and reading. WhenOxford University Press published it, just in time forBridges' eighty-fifth birthday in 1929, they were unprepared for its success. Printings could scarcely keep up with demand, and by 1946 it had sold over 70,000 copies. On 3 June 1929Bridges was awarded the Order of Merit, which was the last of a list of distinctions that included an honorary fellowship of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, an honorary DLitt from Oxford University, honorary LLDs from St Andrews, Harvard, and Michigan universities, a fellowship of theRoyal College of Physicians, and an honorary fellowship of theRoyal Society of Medicine.

Bridges' health was failing, undermined by cancer and its complications. He died at his home, Chilswell, on 21 April 1930 and was buried at Yattendon. The poetHenry Newbolt, who wrote the obituary forThe Times (22 April), spoke of his

great stature and fine proportions, a leonine head, deep eyes, expressive lips, and a full-toned voice, made more effective by a slight hesitation in his speech. His extraordinary personal charm was, however, due to something deeper than these; it lay in the transparent sincerity with which every word and motion expressed the whole of his character, its greatness and its scarcely less memorable littlenesses. His childlike delight in his own powers and personal advantages, his boyish love of brusque personal encounters, his naïve pleasure in the beauty of his own guests and the intellectual eminence of his own friends and relations—none would have wished these away. … Behind them was always visible the strength of a towering and many-sided nature, at once aristocratic and unconventional, virile and affectionate, fearlessly inquiring and profoundly religious.

(Mary) Monica Bridges [née Waterhouse](1863–1949) was born at Barcombe Cottage, Victoria Park, Manchester, on 31 August 1863. Her early years were spent at the beautiful estate of Fox Hill, near Reading. TheWaterhouses were devout and musical andMonica became a competent pianist and composer. Her motherElizabeth,née Hodgkin (1834–1918), was a Quaker but joined theChurch of England a few years after her marriage. She taught the children painting and handicrafts and encouraged them to share her love of poetry.

In 1878Alfred Waterhouse bought the Yattendon estate near Newbury and built there a home for his family into which they moved in April 1881. TheWaterhouses were the local squires of the village of Yattendon, building a well, equipping a reading-room and lending library, and running evening classes. In the late 1870s, whenMonica first metRobert Bridges, she was no more than fifteen or sixteen.

Despite suffering a number of serious illnesses,Monica wasBridges' partner in many of his artistic projects. These ranged from music to modifications of spelling with a set of phonetic founts based on Anglo-Saxon letters, and development of typeface, especially the Fell types of the early sixteenth century which theBridges brought back into press use by choosing them for theYattendon Hymnal (1895–9). She helpedHarry Ellis Wooldridge to provide Palestrinal harmonization for nearly eighty plainsong melodies used in the hymnal. She also became an expert calligrapher, publishingA New Handwriting for Teachers (1899), which was influential in establishing an italic hand in schools, and helping with a tract on handwriting (S. P. E. Tract XXIII).Bridges placed great trust in her literary judgement, not letting his work out of his hands until she had seen it. She transcribed the pages ofThe Testament of Beauty as he wrote it between 1924 and 1929 andBridges instructed theOxford University Press to rely on her judgement should he die before it were published. In 1927Monica began to edit small volumes ofBridges' collected essays, partly as an experiment in his extended alphabet. After his death she guided the series to completion in 1936.

From its inception in 1919,Monica participated in meetings of the committee of theSociety for Pure English, for whichBridges had written a number of his essays. She collaborated with him on some tracts under the shared pseudonymMatthew Barnes, did much of the secretarial work in the early 1920s, and onBridges' death became a full member of the committee.Logan Pearsall Smith paid tribute to her 'enthusiastic interest' and 'clear and fine judgement'.Monica remained at Chilswell until 1943, when a bomb damaged it, and she then rented a room from a neighbour. By the time Chilswell could be repaired she was too frail to live there and moved to a rest home in south London run by theMisses Alexander. She died on 9 November 1949 and was buried withRobert Bridges at Yattendon. The family's monument there toMonica and her husband reads 'In omnibus operibus eius adjutrix'.

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition.

See also

• Bridges, (Mary) Monica (1863–1949)
• Bridges, Edward Ettingdene, first Baron Bridges (1892–1969), civil servant
• Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–1889), poet
• Molesworth, John Edward Nassau (1790–1877), Church of England clergyman
• Waterhouse, Alfred (1830–1905), architect

More on this topic

• Bridges, Robert, (23 Oct. 1844–21 April 1930), Poet-Laureate since 1913 inWho Was Who

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish history
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Archives
• Munk's Roll