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"Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man. * Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord." Masefield's fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible visions. He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull mediocrity.
So much for Mr. Masefield's literary method. Let me be equally frank about his genius, and confess at once that, in any serious estimate of this, all I have said will scarcely be more relevant than the charge against Burke that he had a clumsy delivery. Mr.
I suppose the memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the little voices that call and they sometimes call as the memory of "a tall ship and a star to steer her by" calls John Masefield's seamen "down to the sea again." I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances, the lure of the little voices I know then at its strongest.
For, where there is a seeming blend of lyricism and naturalism, it will on examination be found, I think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or settings as in Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan" are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained.
Look here, here's something I found the other day in John Masefield's preface to one of his plays: 'The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned.
For, where there is a seeming blend of lyricism and naturalism, it will on examination be found, I think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or settings as in Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan" are so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained.
After four years, I should put at the head of all the immense number of verses inspired by the war John Masefield's August 1914, Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous with Death, and Rupert Brooke's The Soldier; and of all the poems written by men actually fighting, I should put Alan Seeger's first.
Near John Masefield's house was the garden where Keats had written his immortal Ode to a Nightingale. Hampstead was prodigal of associations, and they stirred the boy's imagination like a trumpet call.
"Nothing," said Shelley, "can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." I have felt that Mr. Masefield's long narrative poems might equally well have been expressed in prose. I believe this to be no more than a passing phase in Mr. Masefield.
Masefield knows how to supply them. Yet I am not sure that the self-denial of Enoch and the timid patience of Philip do not both indicate a certain strength absent in Mr. Masefield's wildly exciting tale. Of course Tennyson's trio are all "good" people, and he meant to make them so.
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