I have to admit I didn't like Robert Bridges much formerly. I didn't care much for his poetry, though it has warmed on me some, and I thought he was too severe to and unappreciative of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins. The truth is, though, that none of us would know about Hopkins if it weren't for Bridges. And, if we look beneath the manly exterior and mannerisms, Bridges is found out to be quite a shy and sensitive person himself, which explains some of his coolness. Hopkins biographer Robert Bernard Martin suggests that one reason Bridges kept Hopkins' poetry a private for so long was that he was afraid that it wouldn't be appreciated.
On the other hand, I have a little bit of an infatuation for Bridges' beard. Perhaps the most viral thing I ever posted on Tumblr was a photo of Robert Bridges, which was ping-ponged among beard blogs for weeks thereafter. It seems that not only us, but the Oxford guys of Bridges' day were taken by his manly beauty. This is how Martin describes it:
'His extraordinary personal charm ... lay in the transparent sincerity with which every word and motion expressed the whole of his character, its greatness and its scarcely less memorable littleness.' Behind the physical presence '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.
A photograph of Bridges taken a decade after he first met Hopkins shows a face that one might expect of an athlete who had neglected to take care of himself: heavy, mustachioed, looking as if he were more interested in beer and bulldogs than in poetry. But the testimony of those who knew him is of someone who looked very different. Two of his friends, who were probably not unusually affected by good looks in other men, recorded that they could hardly take their eyes off him and thought him 'the possessor of the most beautiful face ever seen in a man'. (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, p. 60, emphasis original)
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