murdered, the seaman on the Greek ship which has carried him to Egypt haul on the sheets to the accompaniment of a chanty conceived in the following terms: THE CHANTY "Kneel to the beautiful women who bear us this strange brave fruit." "Man with his soul so noble: man half god and half brute." CHORUS "So away, i-oh." This in spite of its form, in spite of the fact that this galley of the first century before Christ carries a Bosun" and an officer who is addressed as "Mr. Mate," is clearly not intended for a piece of realism. It is the author frankly endeavouring to transcend his own setting in order to appear from without as a moralist on the action-because, one cannot help thinking, he does not trust the action to speak for itself. Compare with this two lines. from the last conversation in the condemned cell between Jimmy Gurney and his mother. (Jimmy, it will be remembered, was, before he killed his man, a navvy on the railway): "I s'pose they've brought the line beyond the Knapp ?" 666 Ay, and beyond the Barcle, so they say.'" Nothing could be barer, nothing, in the context, could be more moving. A long passage of reflection could never bring home to the reader, as this does, the inarticulate agony of the condemned man and his widowed mother. It is simply a statement of fact; but a statement so contrived that all the comment that is necessary is, as it were, resonant in its overtones. Mr. Masefield is pre-eminently the poet of fact. His power lies in invention, and it is thus, rather than directly, that he conveys the reflections which occur to him. It is when he does otherwise that he spoils his own achievement, by an additional irrelevant turn of the screw or by a moralising passage less impressive than the moral the reader has already drawn. Thus, in Captain Margaret, a book with some beautiful pages, he attempts to increase the hero's tragedy by exaggerating the wickedness of the villain and by making the heroine so stupid that one cries out against her as impossible or worthless. Thus in Multitude and Solitude, after Roger Naldrett's play has been ignominiously hissed off the stage, he spends a night so full of minor discomforts that the first effect is lost and passion degenerates into fretfulness. Thus, in a hundred vague and inconclusive lyrics and sonnets, Mr. Masefield reiterates the abstract noun "Beauty,' proclaiming that "Beauty" is his faith and principle of movement: "Beauty across the darkness hurled, Be it through me you shame the world" -but never once providing the reader with any definite impression of what he means by that comprehensive word. Yet, by reference to those of his writings in which it does not appear, one can discover easily enough what he means by it. There is beauty in the faith and love of Jimmy's mother; there is beauty in the courage which sends the Dauber, weakest and most timid of the crew, first on deck to go aloft in the storm when the ship is rounding Cape Horn; there is beauty in Nan's trusting surrender to Dick Gurvil. These are the things which make Mr. Masefield's faith and the substance of his poetry; but they are convincing only when he shows them, never when he talks about them. It is because he is a genuine poet, with a besetting and genuinely dangerous temptation, that none of his work is perfect, much of it seriously flawed and little of it quite negligible. The attempt to distinguish throughout between the passages in which he has written naturally and those in which he has written counter to his own gifts would require a long book and would make, perhaps, a very tedious book. It might show how in Good Friday the deadly quietness and matter-of-factness of the opening create an impressive atmosphere which is afterwards dispelled by the introduction of a symbolic and generalising madman. It might show that it would be appropriate for Kurano, in The Faithful, to feign madness did not his oracular responses imitate too faithfully all the wise lunatics in Shakespeare. A differentiating catalogue in this style might possibly be useful, but would certainly be hard reading. It will be more to the point in this brief inquiry to discover if we can the work in which Mr. Masefield's virtues are most prominent and his faults least conspicuous. There can be little doubt that this is to be found in Reynard the Fox, his last book but one, his longest, and, as I think, his most nearly perfect poem. It suffers a little, but almost negligibly, from the piling on of the horror, in that the fox has extraordinarily bad luck in the way of stopped earths; but setting this aside, together with minor blemishes of diction and rhyme, it is tolerably free from sentimentality or ill-judged moralisings. We might have had a fox that symbolised Beauty, or a fox that ran to pluck Beauty out of the heart of peril, or a disquisition on the unjust sufferings of the fox and their brutalising effects on the hunt. But here the poet avoids symbolism, and, for the rest, he is wisely impartial. He sees the hunt, the effort of the fox, and the exhilaration of the pursuers vividly and objectively. He accepts the fact and in all aspects of it he lays beauty bare. It is for him a spectacle, and the spectacle, as he conveys it, has a meaning; but he does not spoil our appreciation of the meaning by calling attention to it with a capital letter. Here, for once, he has observed a reasonable degree of reticence, trusting to the picture which he sees to awaken in others the emotion it has awakened in him-an emotion which is at once clear and definable, united and various. It is true that he is still over-anxious about the effect of his work. He does now and again force the pace, force the emotion, underline where it is not necessary, and he comes once or twice very close to the maudlin. But these faults are less frequent, and less destructive, than elsewhere in his work. This poem has been called "Chaucerian"; and the opening pages are not unworthy of that majestic epithet. The persons are The persons are no doubt less vivid, less definite than those of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; their outlines are not so sharp, their colours are paler. But the gusto with which their characteristics are presented has in it something of Chaucer's relish of the difference in human nature, from old Steven, who to "Shone on people like the sun Bill, that big-mouthed smiler, They nick-named him the mug-beguiler." and Sal Ridden: 66 A loud, bold, blonde, abundant mare, And a dozen more, as accurately and tersely drawn, characteristic of time and place and not uncharacteristic of the people from which they spring. It is in the joy in real things, in people, places and events, that Mr. Masefield's power lies; and he has never expressed this better than in Reynard, in such passages as the description of the hounds moving off: "Round the corner came the Hunt, Those feathery things, the hounds, in front, Smiling at people, shoving, playing, |