XV

Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère,Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi;Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ma foi,Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colère.Je ne veux seulement que notre chambrièreVienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon ni toi;Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer à recoi,Pour folâtrer après une semaine entière.Mais, si quelqu'un venait de la part de Cassandre,Ouvre-lui tôt la porte, et ne le fais attendre,Soudain entre en ma chambre et me viens accoutrer.Je veux tant seulement à lui seul me montrer;Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendreDu ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer.

Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère,Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi;Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ma foi,Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colère.

Je ne veux seulement que notre chambrièreVienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon ni toi;Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer à recoi,Pour folâtrer après une semaine entière.

Mais, si quelqu'un venait de la part de Cassandre,Ouvre-lui tôt la porte, et ne le fais attendre,Soudain entre en ma chambre et me viens accoutrer.

Je veux tant seulement à lui seul me montrer;Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendreDu ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer.

Nine years after Cassandre came Marie, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an Angevin villager, nut-brown, smiling, and with cheeks the colour of a May rose. She died young, but not before she had made Ronsard suffer by coquetting with another lover. What is more important still, not before she had inspired him to write that sonnet which has about it so much of the charm of the morning:—

Mignonne, levez-vous, vous êtes paresseuse,Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonné,Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonné,Dessus l'épine assis, sa complainte amoureuse.Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse,Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronné,Et vos oeillets aimés auxquels aviez donnéHier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse.Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeuxD'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée:Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee.Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin,Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin.

Mignonne, levez-vous, vous êtes paresseuse,Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonné,Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonné,Dessus l'épine assis, sa complainte amoureuse.

Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse,Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronné,Et vos oeillets aimés auxquels aviez donnéHier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse.

Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeuxD'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée:Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,

Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee.Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin,Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin.

Ronsard was old and grey—at least, he was old before his time and grey—when he met Hélène de Sorgères, maid of honour to the Queen, and began the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a young lover over again. They went to dances together, Hélène in a mask. Hélène gave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrels and swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the most exquisite of his sonnets:Quand vous serez bien vieille-a sonnet of which Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English.

It is in referring to the sonnets for Hélène that M. Jusserand calls attention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that one seems to see the women Ronsard loves far more clearly than the heroines of many other poets. He notes the same genius of realism again when he is relating how Ronsard, on the eve of his death, as he was transported from priory to priory, in hope of relief in each new place, wrote a poem of farewell to his friends, in which he described the skeleton horrors of his state with a minute carefulness, Ronsard, indeed, showed himself a very personal chronicler throughout his work. "He cannot hide the fact that he likes to sleep on the left side, that he hates cats, dislikes servants 'with slow hands,' believes in omens, adores physical exercises and gardening, and prefers, especially in summer, vegetables to meat." M. Jusserand, I may add, has written the just and scholarly praise of a most winning poet. His book, which appears in theGrands Ecrivains Françaisseries, is not only a good biographical study, but an admirable narrative of literary and national history.

Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in the essentials of beauty than Browning's—it is not, indeed, nearly so rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmament of gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god. To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead world.Jennymay, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. ButJennywas an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best, perhaps, inThe Blessed Damozel, written when he was little more than a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion must either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. InHand and Soul, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul—and he constantly troubles about it—he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with beautiful furniture—for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry—are implicit inThe Blessed DamozelandTroy Town.It is not that Rossetti could command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase; but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How beautifulTroy Townis, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could leave a verse like:—

Venus looked on Helen's gift;(O Troy Town!)Looked and smiled with subtle drift,Saw the work of her heart's desire:—"There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"(O Troy's down,Tall Troy's on fire!)

Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothing to correspond toThe Skylarkor theOde to a Grecian UrnorChilde Roland to the Dark Tower Camein his work. The truth is, he was not a great poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorations in verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued, are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they are never, as it were, light and alight with it, as areShall I compare thee to a summer's day?andWhere lies the land to which yon ship must go?They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often weary before the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lines like:—

O love, my love! if I no more should seeThyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—How then should sound upon Life's darkening slopeThe ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,The wind of Death's imperishable wing?

And, beautiful as this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines a little more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of the great singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds in themselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti. He loved them as pictorial properties—as a designer rather than a poet loves them.

In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicated chiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters have expressed their vision of religion. HisAveis a praise of the beauty of art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are told how, on the eve of the Annunciation,

Far off the trees were as pale wands,Against the fervid sky: the seaSighed further off eternallyAs human sorrow sighs in sleep.

The poem is not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is a sincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it from being artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague. His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of words and colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means of ritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I can make nothing of Christianity," he said, "but I only want a confessor to give me absolution for my sins." That was typical of his attitude to life. He loved its ceremonies more—at least, more vividly—than he loved its soul. One is never done hearing about his demand for "fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a "life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief, of regret—the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged sandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free.

Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far more than Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which has been a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is the Pagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of Francis Thompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influence on either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared the world for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott and the decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible for the change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was more distinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man of letters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century.

People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet, and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said to Burne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he should paint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it," he gave convincing proof that painting, and not poetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawing and twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that show him as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how well he can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny's wanderings in the Haymarket:—

Jenny, you know the city now.A child can tell the tale there, howSome things which are not yet enrol'dIn market-lists are bought and sold,Even till the early Sunday light,When Saturday night is market-nightEverywhere, be it dry or wet,And market-night in the Haymarket.Our learned London children know,Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe;Have seen your lifted silken skirtAdvertise dainties through the dirt;Have seen your coach wheels splash rebukeOn virtue; and have learned your lookWhen wealth and health slipped past, you stareAlong the streets alone, and there,Round the long park, across the bridge,The cold lamps at the pavement's edgeWind on together and apart,A fiery serpent for your heart.

In most of his poems, unfortunately, the design, as a whole, rambles. His imagination worked best when limited by the four sides of a canvas.

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people, it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw's gift of infuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men who can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture—and he does express an opinion on everything—without making a multitude of people shake their fists in impotent anger. His life—at least, his public life—has been a jibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket of illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has gone, an innumerable growl has followed him.

Not that he has not had his disciples—men and women who believe that what Mr. Shaw says on any conceivable subject is far more important than whatThe Timesor theManchester Guardiansays. He has never founded a church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at his disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularity as other men have courted popularity. He has refused to assume the vacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the result those of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins are filled at times with a wild lust to denounce and belittle him. He has been called more names than any other man of letters alive. When all the other names have been exhausted and we are about to become inarticulate, we even denounce him as a bore. But this is only the Billingsgate of our exasperation. Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever else he may be. He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting us beyond any other writer of his time.

He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as a public figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him. Whether he could have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted that elongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say. Probably he was doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was. If he had not told us legends about himself, other people would have told them, and they could scarcely have told them so well: that would have been the chief difference. Even if Mr. Shaw's plays should ever become as dead as the essays inThe Rambler, his lineaments and his laughter will survive in a hundred stories which will bring the feet of pilgrims to Adelphi Terrace in search of a ghost with its beard on fire.

His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shaw myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. And Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an advertiser in an age of advertisement. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:—

Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true?

One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw's advertisement. Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if he were the inmate of a workhouse. He is something of a natural peacock. He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone through! life with so fine a swagger of words. This only means that in his life he is an artist.

He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is a moralist in his art. The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in thinking that his story ends here. The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite so simple as that. The truth about Mt. Shaw cannot be told until we realize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life, but in the observation of the lives of other people. His Broadbent is as wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw. Not that his portraiture is always faithful. He sees men and women too frequently in the refracting shallows of theories. He is a doctrinaire, and his characters are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections of men and women. "When I present true human nature," he observes in one of the many passages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinks it is being made fun of. In reality I am simply a very careful writer of natural history." One is bound to contradict him. Mr. Shaw often thinks he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his opinions about human nature—the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women. Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of human nature and his opinions about it.

This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy. Certainly, from the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history. But it is not always a virtue. Thus inThe Doctors Dilemma, when Dubedat is dying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirably true both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw's view of the human nature of artists. But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artistic creed: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen, Amen," these sentences are no more natural or naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R. Sims's ballads. Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not have said these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure, without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw's opinion of the nature of the creed of artists. There is a similar falsification in the same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at Dubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the widow. "Do you think," he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'How it Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good title for an article, isn't it?" These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr. Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists. Mr. Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of atmosphere in this manner. Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter. But, compared with the degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality is not overwhelming. It has been enormously exaggerated.

After all, if the character of the newspaper man inThe Doctor's Dilemmais machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius.

Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors. It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Molière has never drawn a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more characteristic figures of women than those in the same play,The Philanderer.The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the characterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Molière:—

In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or passions than those of Molière, and more representative of class, profession, or sect. Molière depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor. A few only of these latter types are given us by Molière.

M. Hamon's comparison, made in the course of a long book, between the genius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Molière is extraordinarily detailed. Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a passage as that which informs us regarding the work of both authors that "suicide is never one of the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be made fun of." The comparison, however, between the sins that have been alleged against both Molière and Mr. Shaw—sins of style, of form, of morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and so forth—is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure that the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book is intended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as a comparison between his work and Molière's. It contains, it must be confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so do all books about Mr. Shaw. And it has also this fault that, though it is about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of a smile. Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself: M. Hamon's volume is an offering at a shrine.

The true things it contains, however, make it worth reading. M. Hamon sees, for instance, what many critics have failed to see, that in his dramatic work Mr. Shaw is less a wit than a humorist:—

In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the situations. He does not labour to be witty, nor does he play upon words.... Shaw's brilliancy does not consist in wit, but in humour.

Mr. Shaw was at one time commonly regarded as a wit of the school of Oscar Wilde. That view, I imagine, is seldom found nowadays, but even now many people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the ruling characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with witty conversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision of human society.

His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia or Dickens; but then neither was Molière's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Molière anticipated Mr. Shaw in outraging the sentiment, for instance, which has gathered round the family. "Molière and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is worth."

The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real or imaginary resemblance of his plays to Molière's. His joy and his misery before the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and his expression of them is his own. He has studied with his own eyes the swollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and lovers and politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been derided on the English stage before. He has derided them with both an artistic and a moral energy. He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth, where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling frankness. He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth, sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist. Even his bitterness is never venomous, however. He is genial beyond the majority of inveterate controversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound and he does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice. The geniality of his comedy, on the other hand, is often more offensive than malice, because it is from an orthodox point of view geniality in the wrong place. It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service.

It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on the war. He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy that led up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision. I do not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote about the war. But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in the higher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist. He sees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, to the lyric poet. He was so occupied with his satiric vision of the pretences of the diplomatic world that, though his attitude to the war was as anti-Prussian as M. Vandervelde's, a great number of people thought he must be a pro-German.

The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread the vision of the satirist and the sceptic. It is a vision of only one-half of the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to be more or less irrelevant. And, even at this, it is not infallible. This is not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion of politics. That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane, and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and the sentimentalist. It may be said of Mr. Shaw that in his politics, as in his plays, he has sought Utopia along the path of disillusion as other men have sought it along the path of idealism and romance.

Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also the secret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite the admirably just verdict which Jeffrey delivered on Wordsworth'sExcursion: "This will never do." We miss in his lines the onward march of poetry. His individual phrases carry no cargoes of wonder. His art is not of the triumphant order that lifts us off our feet. As we read the first half of his narrative sea-poem,Dauber, we are again and again moved to impatience by the sheer literary left-handedness of the author. There are so many unnecessary words, so many unnecessary sentences. Of the latter we have an example in the poet's reflection as he describes the "fiery fishes" that raced Dauber's ship by night in the southern seas:—

What unknown joy was in those fish unknown!

It is one of those superfluous thoughts which appear to be suggested less by the thing described than by the need of filling up the last line of the verse. Similarly, when Dauber, as the ship's lampman and painter is nicknamed, regards the miracle of a ship at sea in moonlight, and exclaims:—

My Lord, my God, how beautiful it is!

we feel that he is only lengthening into a measured line the "My God, how beautiful it is!" of prose. A line like this, indeed, is merely prose that has learned the goose-step of poetry.

Perhaps one would not resent it—and many others like it—so much if it were not that Mr. Masefield so manifestly aims at realism of effect. His narrative is meant to be as faithful to commonplace facts as a policeman's evidence in a court of law. We are not spared even the old familiar expletives. When Dauber's paintings, for example—for he is an artist as well as an artisan—have been destroyed by the malice of the crew, and he questions the Bosun about it,

The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"

Similarly, when the Mate, taking up the brush, makes a sketch of a ship for Dauber's better instruction,

"God, sir," the Bosun said, "You do her fine!""Aye!" said the Mate, "I do so, by the Lord!"

And when the whole crew gathers round to impress upon Dauber the fact of his incompetence,

"You hear?" the Bosun cried, "You cannot do it!""A gospel truth," the Cook said, "true as hell!"

Here, obviously, the very letter of realism is intended.

Here, too, it may be added, we have as well-meaning an array of oaths as was ever set out in literature. When Mr. Kipling repeats a soldier's oath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation. When Mr. Masefield puts down the oaths of sailors, he does so rather as a melancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but like a virtuous man. He does not, as so many realists do, love the innumerable coarsenesses of life which he chronicles; that is what makes his oaths often seem as innocent as the conversation of elderly sinners echoed on the lips of children. He has a splendid innocence of purpose, indeed. He wishes to give us the prosaic truth of actual things as a kind of correspondence to the poetic truth of spiritual things of which they are the setting and the frame. Or it may be that he repeats these oaths and all the rest of it simply as a part of the technicalities of life at sea.

He certainly shows a passion for technicalities hardly less than Mr. Kipling's own. He tells us, for instance, how, in the height of the fury of frost and surge and gale round Cape Horn,

at last, at lastThey frapped the cringled crojick's icy pelt;In frozen bulge and bunt they made it fast.

And, again, when the storm was over and Dauber had won the respect of his mates by his manhood, we have an almost unintelligible verse describing how the Bosun, in a mood of friendship, set out to teach him some of the cunning of the sea:—

Then, while the Dauber counted, Bosun tookSome marline from his pocket. "Here," he said,"You want to know square sennit? So fash. Look!Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread.I've known an engineer would give his headTo know square sennit." As the Bose began,The Dauber felt promoted to a man.

Mr. Masefield has generously provided six pages of glossary at the end of his poem, where we are told the meaning of "futtock-shrouds," "poop-break," "scuttlebutt," "mud-hooks," and other items in the jargon of the sea.

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. Masefield has given us inDaubera poem of genius, one of the great storm-pieces of modern literature, a poem that for imaginative infectiousness challenges comparison with the prose of Mr. Conrad'sTyphoon. To criticize its style takes us no nearer its ultimate secret than piling up examples of bathos takes us to the secret of Wordsworth, or talking about maniacal construction and characterization takes us to the secret of Dostoevsky. There is no use pretending that the methods of these writers are good because their achievements are good. On the other hand, compared with the marvel of achievement, the faultiness of method in each case sinks into a matter almost of indifference. Mr. Masefield gives us inDaubera book of revelation. If he does this in verse that is often merely prose crooked into rhyme—if he does it with a hero who is at first almost as bowelless a human being and as much an appeal for pity as Smike inNicholas Nickleby—that is his affair. In art, more than anywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end ofDauberis vision—intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision. Here we have in literature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on his inexpert canvases:—

A revealingOf passionate men in battle with the sea,High on an unseen stage, shaking and reeling;And men through him would understand their feeling,Their might, their misery, their tragic power,And all by suffering pain a little hour.

That verse suggests both the kind and the degree of Mr. Masefield's sensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea. His is the witness less of a doer than of a sufferer. He is not a reveller in life: he is one, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides of anguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar of beauty or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the spiritual pain of the world. He communicates to us, not only the horror of humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, "cut to the ghost" by the polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship's doom, having been

ordered up when sails and sparsWere flying and going mad among the stars,

How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm, as the ship gets nearer the Horn:

All through the windless night the clipper rolledIn a great swell with oily gradual heaves,Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled,Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:

Like the march of doomCame those great powers of marching silences;Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:

She bayed there like a solitary houndLost in a covert.

Morning came, bringing no release from fear:

So the night passed, but then no morning broke—Only a something showed that night was dead.A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke,And the fog drew away and hung like lead.Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red;Like glowering gods at watch it did appear,And sometimes drew away, and then drew near.

Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm, catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress."

The blackness crunched all memory of the sun.

Henceforth we have a tale of white fear changing into heroism as Dauber clambers to his giddy place in the rigging, and goes out on the yard to his task,

Sick at the mighty space of air displayedBelow his feet, where soaring birds were wheeling.

It was all a "withering rush of death," an orgy of snow, ice, and howling seas.

The snow whirled, the ship bowed to it, the gear lashed,The sea-tops were cut off and flung down smashed;Tatters of shouts were flung, the rags of yells—And clang, clang, clang, below beat the two bells.

How magnificent a flash of the fury of the storm we get when the Dauber looks down from his scramblings among rigging and snapped spars, and sees the deck

Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.

In that line we seem to behold the beautiful face of danger—a beauty that is in some way complementary to the beauty of the endurance of ships and the endurance of men. For the ship is saved, and so is the Dauber's soul, and the men who had been bullies in hours of peace reveal themselves as heroes in stress and peril.

Dauber, it will be seen, is more than an exciting story of a storm. It is a spiritual vision of life. It is a soul's confession. It is Mr. Masefield'sDe Profundis. It is a parable of trial—a chant of the soul that has "emerged out of the iron time." It is a praise of life, not for its own sake, but for the spiritual mastery which its storms and dangers bring. It is a paean of survival: the ship weathers the storm to go boldly forward again:—

A great grey sea was running up the sky,Desolate birds flew past; their mewings cameAs that lone water's spiritual cry,Its forlorn voice, its essence, its soul's name.The ship limped in the water as if lame,Then, in the forenoon watch, to a great shout,More sail was made, the reefs were shaken out.

Not even the death of the Dauber in a wretched accident defeats our sense of divine and ultimate victory. To some readers this fatality may seem a mere luxury of pathos. But it is an essential part of the scheme of the poem. The poet must state his acceptance of life, not only in its splendid and tragic dangers, but in its cruelty and pathetic wastefulness. 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.

And as she sits in Valparaiso harbour, a beautiful thing at peace under the beautiful shadow of "the mountain tower, snow to the peak," our imagination is lifted to the hills-to where

All night longThe pointed mountain pointed at the stars,Frozen, alert, austere.

It is a fine symbol of the aspiration of this book of men's "might, their misery, their tragic power." There is something essentially Christian and simple in Mr. Masefield's presentation of life. Conscious though he is of the pain of the world—and aloof from the world though this consciousness sometimes makes him appear—he is full of an extraordinary pity and brotherliness for men. 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. They strike one as being the most innocent swear-words in literature.

Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He has a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetry repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this innovating high priest.

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself. For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had to pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps, it is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision. He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask. There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are apparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that setsThe Wind Among the Reedsapart from every other book that has ever been written in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the attitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy legend.

One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works of intellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and that here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the book are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heard before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume,Reveries over Childhood and Youth, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft ofInnisfreewill remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in writing prose.

Reveriesis the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us, "little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught at school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man." Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind."

Though he was always near the bottom of his class, and was useless at games—"I cannot," he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal or made a run"—he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look for butterflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when living on the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about the changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the rock."

These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show that he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation—a boy with a remarkable intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

Reveries Over Childhood and Youthis the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth in Dublin:—

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