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Updated: May 31, 2025
If that poem is ever put on in an Art Museum film, it will have to be staged like one of Æsop's Fables, with a man acting the Fox, for the children's delight. And I earnestly urge all who would understand the deeper significance of the "chase-picture" or the "Action Picture" to give more thought to Masefield's poem than to Fairbanks' marvellous acting in the school of the younger Salvini.
Perhaps he was young and doctrinaire: but he devised this theory for himself all time is wasted that does not give you some awareness of beauty or wonder. In other words, "the days that make us happy make us wise," he said to himself, quoting Masefield's line. On that principle, he asked, how much time is wasted in this city? Well, here are some six million people.
He wanders among them, not with the condescension of so many earnest writers, but with the humility almost of one of the early Franciscans. One may amuse oneself by fancying that there is something in the manner of St. Francis even in Mr. Masefield's attitude to his little brothers the swear-words. He may not love them by nature, but he is kind to them by grace.
And among the six are not Tintern Abbey or the Intimations of Immortality. Meditative poetry is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival volcanoes. Every man with him was God or Devil.
For, as Clyde Fitch used to say, the great things do not happen to the great writers; the great things happen to the little people they describe. Although Mr. Masefield's reputation depends mainly on his narrative poems, he has earned a high place among lyrical poets. These poems, at least many of them, are as purely subjective as The Everlasting Mercy was purely objective.
The line of communications that linked the Achi Baba position with Maidos and Gallipoli was to be cut by our forces operating from Suvla and Anzac, and the Narrows were to be opened to our fleet by the capture of Sari-Bair. The epic of the actual Suvla effort has been nobly told in both Sir Ian Hamilton's dispatches and Mr Masefield's Gallipoli.
The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of the Odyssey, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read after it Masefield's "To-morrow": "Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through, Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few, And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew; But to-morrow, By the living God, we 'II try the game again!"
Within recent years, "Masques," an organization of University women, has given unusually artistic performances of Pinero's The Amazons, , and Barrie's Quality Street, . The Department of Oratory has also interested itself in the drama and is responsible for several well-considered presentations of such plays as Galsworthy's Silver Box; Kennedy's The Servant in the House, ; Ibsen's Pillars of Society, ; and Masefield's Tragedy of Nan, .
He must know the worst of it in order to put the best of it to the proof. The worst passes, the best continues that is the secret enthusiasm of Mr. Masefield's song. Our final vision is of the ship in safety, holding her course to harbour in a fair wind: Shattering the sea-tops into golden rain. The waves bowed down before her like blown grain.
Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic episodes. These two poets illustrate a tendency to introduce a new realistic poetry.
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