Mr. Masefield: Some Characteristics

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IT be true that there is a small circle of readers and critics by whose opinion reputations are made. It is quite certain that the reputations which seem to be made there have a way of escaping the control of their putative creators. Nine years ago Mr. Masefield published The Everlasting Mercy in the English Review. Before he did so his name was known to a comparatively small number of persons who regarded him with some admiration and more curiosity; but afterwards he received fame instead of expectant attention. For some time he bulked large in two worlds. He made modern poetry popular before Rupert Brooke; and critical opinion, broadly speaking, agreed in owning the novelty and ambition of his work and the adequacy of his talents. In the theatre he seemed to be the inheritor of Synge, destined to make Synge's methods his own on a larger scale and before a wider audience. Mr. John Galsworthy, then at the zenith of a reputation which has followed a somewhat similar course, proclaimed him "the man of the hour, and the man of to-morrow, too, in poetry and the playwriting craft." At the universities, among the rising generation, his name had great power; and a new book by him was genuinely an event of importance. Elderly and academic persons confirmed his adherents by attacking him on the ground that he was coarse, violent, gratuitously ugly, that he chose subjects unfitted for poetrycharges which, as they were preferred, were insufficient and might be cheerfully accepted as a challenge. For a little while it really seemed to many that a

new writer had emerged of the rare stature and originality which engage the interest both of the general public and of the sceptical and selective readers who attempt to anticipate the judgment of their descendants.

But I do not think that this is true any longer. Mr. Masefield's works were not found wanting in the qualities at first discerned in them. But radical defects, which had hitherto somehow escaped general notice, were revealed; and some of the very qualities turned out, on cooler examination, not to have the value with which they had been credited. Worse still, the defects became apparent through, as it were, a sort of rash on the surface, an outcrop of awkwardnesses and ineptitudes which lent themselves quite charmingly to ridicule. The public continued to admire, possibly even more than ever; but first one voice was raised among the critics, then another and another.

In this swing of opinion there is some danger that Mr. Masefield's real achievements may be overlooked; and the danger continues so long as his demerits are not clearly stated. The general public, once he had been forced on its notice, liked him to a considerable extent for excellent reasons. The general public does indeed like good qualities in, for instance, Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens, and even in its unworthy favourites, in cheap and trashy novelists, it has a way of feeling after virtues which better writers would be better for possessing. Mr. Masefield actually has originality, enterprise, ambition, and some degree of force: he is one of the most interesting figures in modern literature. Assuming that he has genius, that he did not capture opinion only by pretence, the mere range

of his work must be considered and may be reckoned to his credit. He has experimented in many forms He has written lyrics and sonnets and a series of successful narrative poems, plays both in prose and in verse which have stood the test of production, several novels and collections of stories, a book on Shakespeare, and books about the war. His sincerity as an artist may often be questioned, will certainly be questioned in the pages that follow; but his personal sincerity, in the broadest and most fundamental sense, is beyond doubt. If he has pandered to anything, it has been to his own mistaken artistic ambitions, not to the taste of the public which admires him. His work, now considerable in bulk as well as wide in range, is almost all thoroughly characteristic, almost all shot with virtues and vices, almost all offering substantial material for the process of sifting and distinction which must assuredly be applied to it. It is more than worth while, it is important, that the attempt should be made to distinguish between the virtues for which he will be remembered and the vices which, on discovery, rendered his critical following so profoundly distrustful, if not completely disillusioned.

Mr. Masefield's earliest work is a tangle of influences and themes; and its most interesting characteristic was the way in which these were combined. He had experience of ships and the sea, knowledge and love of English country, and the beginnings of a view of life; and he expressed the themes thus suggested to him in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Yeats, Yeats, with occasional assistance from Mr. Kipling. One opens his second book, Ballads, to find the following

lines:

"Would I could win some quiet and rest, and a little ease,

In the cool gray hush of the dusk, in the dim green place of the trees,

Where the birds are singing, singing, singing, crying aloud

The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas.'

One turns over a few pages and discovers Cargoes, that celebrated poem without a finite verb, of which the first verse describes a quinquereme of Nineveh," and the second a stately Spanish galleon,"

and the third a

Dirty British coaster with salt-caked smoke stack Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays.

Subject, rhythm, and implication are alike derived from Mr. Kipling; and the first feelings of a reader who saw these two passages in juxtaposition might be wondering respect for a writer who could quench his thirst at two so dissimilar springs.

His first prose shows traces of an influence not so incompatible with that of Mr. Yeats. Just as Synge had so used the peasant speech of the west of Ireland as to create from it a medium of expression for poetry of a highly cultured sort, keeping its flavour and yet turning it into the channels of civilised literature, so Mr. Masefield attempted to manipulate the language of old seamen telling fo'c'sle yarns. The prose of A Mainsail Haul is

by no means merely reported dialect. It is a finished literary product in which fo'c'sle expressions and turns of speech are worked up on paper by a man of letters into rhythms no less cunning and refined than those of Pater or Wilde. Take this, from A Sailor's Yarn:

"Now the next morning that fellow Bill I told you of was tacking down the city to the boat, singing some song or another. And when he got near to the jetty he went fumbling in his pocket for his pipe, and what should he find but a silver dollar that had slipped away and been saved. So he thinks: If I go aboard with this dollar, why the hands'll laugh at me; besides it's a wasting of it not to spend it.' So he cast about for some place where he could blue it in.

"Now close by where he stood there was a sort of great store, kept by a Johnny Dago. And if I was to tell you of the things they had in it I would need nine tongues and an oiled hinge to each of them. But Billy walked into this store, into the space inside, into like the 'tween decks, for to have a look about him before buying. And there were great bunches of bananas a-ripening against the wall. And sacks of dried raisins, and bags of dried figs, and melon seeds and pomegranates enough to sink you. Then there were cotton bales, and calico, and silk of Persia. And rum in puncheons and bottled ale. And all manner of sweets and a power of a lot of chemicals. And anchors gone rusty, fished up from the bay after the ships were gone. And spare cables, all ranged for letting go. And ropes and sails and balls of marline stuff. Then there was blocks of all kinds, wood and iron. Dunnage there was, and scantling,