John Masefield/In Behalf of John Masefield
IN BEHALF OF JOHN MASEFIELD
John Masefield has a grave musical voice, and when, with sharp little gushes of emotion, he reads "The West Wind" and makes one hear his lark singing "above the green wheat," I swear no sweeter song has been sung in my time or more soothing to a tired heart. Why should I not go on and say that I am not ready to sift him yet, because nearly all of his work, perhaps barring the adaptations from Racine, still seems alive?
This lean, sad-eyed master of song-craft, who has plowed Gloucestershire with oxen and the deep sea with ships, has given me more poetic pleasure than any other English poet living. Through his awakened personality I have felt mighty rhythms pulsing through forms of life that dissolve and decay; through waves that break, fields sown and harvested, foiled tragic lovers, hot races ending with blown steeds and fallen horsemen, and forlorn hopes ebbing out in blood-drenched, frost-bitten trenches by the Hellespont. His glorification of the invincible vanquished stirs me, I confess, profoundly. It is the inside story of human life. He tells it with swift, bright speed, and yet with a pathos which bites to the bone.
Without going through any critical processes, I have but to glance at the fifteen volumes which preceded this collected edition to my shelves to see that in the long race of this last twenty-five years Masefield has now for a decade or more been in the lead. My favorites of the old time, Stephen Phillips and John Synge, fell long ago into the blind cave of night. Masefield's immediacy and sincerity and fresh color are unfavorable to most of the others.
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Of course, I know that John Masefield has had his quarter-century of productivity and his decade of fame, and that it is high time now for him to be slipping off the stage and leaving elbow room for the critics to haul the ascending stars into heaven. I know what the voguish critics are saying that—Masefield began with echoes of Kipling and Synge; that he spells Beauty with a capital letter; that the introduction of "closhy puts" and bar-room oaths into verse is no great feat once the trick has been suggested; that the tragedies are melodramatic through inadequate characterization; that the narratives are prolix; that the verse is padded with moral platitudes; that "lasted" is rhymed with "Bastard," as it is by many speakers; and that throughout the works there is a culpable indifference to the poetic uses of the file, just as there is in the works of the Master of all Makers.
Some of this critical pawing is captious. Masefield's apprentice debt to Kipling in Salt Water Ballads and to Synge in The Tragedy of Nan was soon stricken off the score. The mature Masefield is nobody's echo. He is a figure as independent and original as any man can be who works, as all the great English poets have done, for the vital continuation of an ancient and splendid tradition. Obviously, he learned his craft of the masters. For the forms and instruments of his music his debt is immense to Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer. The Everlasting Mercy is, if you please, an English Tam O'Shanter; The Widow in the Bye Street, a modern Troilus and Cressida; Reynard the Fox, a resuscitation of the Canterbury Pilgrims; Dauber is Childe Harold or Don Juan gone on a fresh pilgrimage; and the chief sonnet sequence carries on the Elizabethan quest for the soul and the divine idea behind the shadows of things. But that a poet suggests such comparisons, while writing with sharp realism of his own times and out of his own experience, marks him not a slave but an heir.
Some of these exceptions, however, are well taken, and Mr. Masefield himself would probably sustain them. In the heat of the race, he has not always avoided knocking the top-rail off the fence. In his brief introduction to this edition, glancing back over the performance of his generations, he says: "Often their work has been harsh, violent, and ill-considered." But their mission, he intimates, was not to gild the refined Tennysonian gold nor to paint the late Victorian lily white. Tennyson himself had kept an even balance between the native English tendency toward a robust rendering of life and the imported cult of artifice and technical finish. His imitators declined into a mere respectability, devoid of poetic courage or hope. The mission of Masefield's generation was to sally boldly into nature and restore vitality by reemphasizing the native qualities: "character-drawing, humor, liveliness, and truth."
Certainly the apologist for Masefield should frankly concede his flaws and foibles to Mr. Squire and other parodists. He should take positive ground and defend him for the passionate expression of his tragic realism, his strength, and his sincerity. An English critic, Dixon Scott, moved to comment by The Daffodil Fields, began with a protest against the solemnity with which people take their poets. They, the poets, are just like other people, he would have us believe, not a race of "wilted priests," but "simple, jolly, frank, and friendly souls . . . engrossed in the grubby, glorious work of growing flowers." Well, a good many contemporary poets are like that. That is the trouble with their poetry. It is a kind of passionless floriculture. But John Masefield stands out as not in the least like that. Poetry has been in the place of religion to him; and he has served it like a priest not—with a linen ephod, but with Carlyle's "baphometic fire-baptism."
In that interesting novel of his, Multitude and Solitude, there are many cutting observations on contemporary literature, and, in Roger Naldrett, there is a portrait of the poet's mind which we may accept as strikingly similar to that of its author. Roger declares that the Celtic love of the beautiful is "all bunkum." He finds the distinctive quality of Irish verse "in that kind of windy impersonality which one hears in their talk." "I maintain," he says, "that the Irish have no imagination. Imagination is a moral quality." Before he settles down to a literary life, Roger wishes to get the whole of himself involved and incandescent in the flame of his imagination. "I begin to think that a writer without character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ. . . . Good God, Heseltine, it seems to me that a man should not be permitted to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the state."
Masefield's long narrative poem, Dauber, is ordinarily praised as a superb picture of the sea. It is that, but it is more than that. It is a superb picture of artistic dedication. It illustrates the author's sense of the means by which a moribund art may live again. Here is a man who desires to paint the "windy, green, unquiet sea," ships scudding before the wind, and the destinies of men whose ways are on the great deep. Nautical pictures he might make from models in his studio. To know the might and mystery of the sea, he must give himself to it as the saint gives himself to God. Three years before the mast, he hopes, will teach his hand to paint the living truth when he shows the landlubber how billows break and a ships goes up the wave. From the fore-topgallant yard, the dedicated dauber tumbles too soon to his death. But such prices the gods exact of those who mimic the Creator's art.
The point is that with Masefield literature ceases to be hypnotic, a dreamily recreative "escape from life." It becomes a probe to the quick of the spirit, stabbing us "broad awake." It becomes an exultant hymning and glorification of life, even while it rushes on catastrophe. I do not know whether he became a sailor in order to learn to sing, or whether he sang because he had been a sailor. But that fine poem about his great joys, "Biography," is proof enough that the prime sources of his passion were not "literary." He loves the taste of his own days, bitter and sweet, and his physical immersion in experience: swimming, racing, the first glimpse of strange mountains; but heavy labor, too, in quarry and mill, roads tramped in the rain, the rough talk of peasant and sailor, the long road westward through the springing wheat, the comradeship of hard-palmed men following the sea.
Whose feet with mine wore many a bolt head bright
Treading the decks beneath the riding light.
The last line of this poem has been rather often quoted: "The days that make us happy make us wise." There is a good bit of Masefield in it. It is happiness, peace, and beauty which give a man new eyes and put "compassion" into his work. Yes, but reverse the saying and you have the other half of the poet's wisdom: "The days that make us wise make us happy."
In this world, a wise man learns to derive a great part of his happiness from discovering how much misery he can endure, how tough the human heart is, the blows it can take and still fight on, the wounds it can receive and still recover. I doubt whether any living poet save Thomas Hardy has meditated so deeply and so fruitfully on disastrous things as John Masefield.
Among the tragic narratives I have a partiality for The widow in the Bye Street, which many of the commentators rate below its deserts. It is notable for dramatic characterization. The title suggests that the interest centers in the mother, a figure treated with overwhelming pathos, though at the same time with an impartial disclosure of the jealous self-preservative elements in her affection for her son. A case might be made out for the central interest of Anna, who abides with singular
Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
vividness in my memory, dropping her spray of scarlet hips as a signal to Ern, and holding the dazzling light so that he may see to bash in Jimmy's face. Jimmy himself is, to my thinking, a pretty striking piece of characterization.
But there is a fifth person in this "sordid" affair, a fifth unnamed person, "exulting and eternal." She it was who made Jimmy desert his mother; she infatuated him with a harlot, she frenzied his arm to the murderous blow, she brought him to the hangman's noose, and among the ancients she was known as the divine Cytherea. Her defeat in the bloody squalor of these English circumstances was, I believe, for Mr. Masefield, one of the high interests of the occasion. Now many contrasted elements enter into the effect of this complete, symmetrical, and intense narrative—mother-love, lust, jealousy, and murder; but the stinging beauty and terror of it depend, I believe, upon Masefield's vision of the authentic Cytherean casting her illusive radiance over a heartless drab.
This is not Anna, whom he describes, hiding in the pastoral country after the execution of Jimmy—though it has her shape and name. This is the Cytherean illusion:
There, in the April in the garden close,
One heard her in the morning singing sweet,
Calling the birds from the unbudded rose,
Offering her lips with grains for them to eat.
The redbreasts come with little wiry feet,
Sparrows and tits and all wild feathery things,
Brushing her lifted face with quivering wings.
As W. H. Hamilton has pertinently remarked, there is something "fundamental in our poet's insistence upon another than the easy popular verdict on the unsuccessful." In his little book on Shakespeare, Masefield observes the Elizabethan dramatist's brooding sympathy with tragical Kings, such as Richard II, who failed "because they did not conform to a type lower than themselves." Perhaps the idea is a little too subtle or too exalted for our common feeling that virtue resides with the victor and that the justice of a cause is to be gauged by its success.
But this notion of a moral splendor in the dead and defeated, Mr. Masefield pursues through his tragedies: Pompey the Great, in which the hero has traits of resemblance to Woodrow Wilson; Philip the King, serene with religious faith after the destruction of the Armada, dismissing the tragic messenger with the thought: "In bitter days the soul finds God, God us"; the tragedy in Oriental mask, called The Faithful; the noble tragic narrative of Gallipoli, in which fragments from the Song of Roland give the keynote; and so on through the two recent dramas dealing with the invincible "lost cause" of Christ.
To Masefield I think that the most beautiful and exulting thing in the world—the fairest form into which our transitory lives can flame, rushing into darkness—is the courage of men who have been faithful unto death. The heroic thrills him to his heart's core. Yet for him the World War was a long overshadowing agony, lit only by the blazing glory of human endurance. He followed the Red Cross to one of the most desperate battlefields to share its perils and to alleviate its miseries. These lines remind us in what mood men of peace in those days bowed to doom and
sadly rose and left the well loved Downs.
And so by ship to sea; and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
Nor the dear outline of the English shore.
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolting second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air.
From that tragedy Masefield returned with an immense and desperate compassion for the animula—God's waif, the human soul—poor, thin, little tenant of this falling house of flesh, bewildered wanderer among his own juggernauts and thunders, along the roaring abysses of oblivion. The Sonnets dedicated "To My American Friends" in 1916 are an intensely realistic expression of a bitter quest, ending in the impersonally consolatory thought that
The sun will rise, the winds that ever move
Will blow our dust, and boy and girl will love.
Since the War Mr. Masefield has, I suspect, steadied himself by leaning heavily on the joy of people who do not think and feel deeply. In Reynard the Fox, Right Royal and King Cole—outstanding narrative poems of these later years—friendly critics have hailed a recovery of that fluent, exuberant, creative energy, objective, dramatic, and sensuous, which first astonished and delighted them in The Everlasting Mercy. Here are indeed high spirits and blithe scenes; sunlight and dew on English meadow and woodland; the barking of dogs; the excitement of horses; the pungency of the stable and the reek of the groom's strong pipe on the morning air; jolly, beef-eating, red-coated huntsmen; English girls with roses in their cheeks; jockeys, farmers, hucksters, peasantry—all the countryside—gayly assembling for the old English sports, the fox hunt, the horse race, the travelling circus. Here are the bright speed, the galloping rhythms, the brilliant colors, the odor and zest of ruddy life.
One is tempted to say that the sensitive author of the sonnets and the lyrics, full of haunting cries and gushes of poignant sadness, has tossed his melancholy and the heartbreak of the animula into the west wind, and has voided the chamber of his personality in order to fill it with the ancient traditional emotions of the folk. It is one of many signs that John Masefield is a true poet of the taller sort, that he rises to a serene and joyous contemplation of the whole course of the "river of life" streaming down from Chaucer's time—with the eternal rhythm, and the fleeing waters that sparkle and pass. After sharp hunger, passionate seeking, nostalgia of the spirit, and tragic illumination, he has come to the clear high point from which Arnold described the full murmurous flowing of the Oxus to the sea. His personal feeling is discernible in the scene only in the softening of the light and in the almost inaudible undertone of compassion.
Lean'd on his fate, he gazes—tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.
Before him he sees life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole—
That general life, which does not cease. . .