JOHN MASEFIELD
John Masefield
Were I put to select the four or five poets who are most typically modern—most essentially of our own time, I think I should name Kipling, Hardy, Wilfrid Gibson, Siegfried Sassoon and John Masefield, and Masefield perhaps before all. There are others who have written poetry as fine, or even finer, but nearly all of them, had they been contemporary with Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, might have written very much as they are writing now without seeming to have been born out of their due period. The five I have named could not have done this: either in theme or manner their poems are too intimate a growth of our own generation, as unmistakably of to-day as the motor-bus or as wireless is. I am not forgetting Crabbe, the father of modern realistic poetry, but he mitigated his unorthodoxies by observing a respectable reticence of phrase, by subscribing to poetical conventions of language, and clothing his newness in the old-fashioned mantle of Pope.
The philosophy of my chosen five may be sometimes akin to that of Fitzgerald’s Omar, but the old wine is in aggressively new bottles. And I am not forgetting that Hardy was Tennyson’s contemporary, and not a little of his poetry was written in the 60’s and 70’s, though it was not published then. If it had been published, the tastes and standards of that formal age would have found it so wanting that it never would have won for Hardy then the fame it has given him now. Think of Tennyson, with his conviction that
“the form, the form alone is eloquent,”
trying with his hyper-sensitive ear the wingless, rugged lyrics of Hardy, setting himself to read them aloud, like the poet in his own “English Idyls,”
“mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,”
and finding it couldn’t be done, for here was a poetical nonconformist who sacrificed verbal beauty to naked truth and was more earnest about what he had to say than about mouthing it in grandiose orotundities of phrase.
Certainly, by the time Tennyson had done with it, poetry was becoming too much a matter of phrase-making; the poet himself was contracting a sort of sentimental snobbery, segregating himself from the crowd, losing touch with common life, and for their own sakes and that of their art, many of us felt, as Dixon Scott put it, that we wanted to “flatten out Parnassus. For poetry has been looked up to far too long; it is time the reader looked down on it; nothing is doing its dignity more damage than the palsying superstition that it is something excessively sublime. The reader picks out his prose-men; he is familiar with philosophers; but the moment he mentions verse he remembers the proprieties; up go his eyes and down drops his voice; and from what is no doubt just a nice, natural desire to do nothing offensive to refinement, he invariably speaks of the specially simple, jolly, frank and friendly souls who make it as though they were wilted priests. Whereas, in reality, of course, they are of all writers, exactly the men whom it is most needful to see as human beings; for of all forms of writing theirs is the most personal, intimate, instinctive—poetry being, after all, simply essence of utterance—speech with the artifice left out.”
To this it now approximates, but it was not this, nor were the poets such simple, unaffected souls until Kipling had begun to outrage their delicacies, shock their exquisite, artistic refinements with the noise and dazzle of his robust magic, and others, like Hardy, Gibson and Masefield, had brought poetry out of her sacred temple and made her at home in inns, and kitchens, and workshops, cottages and mean streets and all manner of vagabond places, restored her to plain nature and human nature and taught her to sing her heart out in the language of average men—sometimes in the language of men who were quite below the average. But even this was better than limiting her to expressing her thoughts and emotions in artificial elegancies that no man ever uses except when he is posing and perorating on public platforms.
In his beginnings Masefield was not unaffected by the Kipling influence; you can trace it in the lilting measures of some of his early “Salt Water Ballads”; perhaps here and there in his early prose stories and sketches, “A Tarpaulin Muster,” “A Mainsail Haul.” He was realizing and naturalizing the seamen there, as Kipling had realized and naturalized the soldier. But he was already doing more than that; he put into those first Ballads, and the “Poems and Ballads” that soon followed them, a grace of fancy, a charm and beauty, also true to the life he pictured, that do not come within the range of Kipling’s genius. He was feeling after and foreshadowing there, too, his own special mission as a poet—if one may use so portentous a word as mission without having it taken in any but its artistic significance. His business was not to be with dignitaries and classical heroisms, he says in “Consecration,” but with sailors and stokers and men of no account—
“Not the rulers for me, but the rankers, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load ...
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.”
And of this purpose have come that most poignant and effective of his dramas, “The Tragedy of Nan,” his stories, “The Street of To-day,” “Multitude and Solitude,” and those narrative poems that are his highest and most distinctive achievement, “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street,” “Dauber,” and “The Daffodil Fields.” In these he is still on that quest for beauty—
“that one beauty
God put me here to find—”
to which he consecrated his gift at the outset, when he claimed as his kingdom
“the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth,”
though he is following it here less obviously than in the statelier, noble sonnet sequence of “Lollingdon Downs.” In the narrative poems he is seeking for the soul of beauty in things evil, in things common and sometimes unclean, in lives that are broken and that the world’s rough hands have soiled. His passion for realism, for the stark truth of life as it is lived, is transparently sincere; it is absurd to object that his stories are melodramatic, since they are not more so than life itself is, but there is reason in the protest that he pushes the crudities of his dialogue too far, is apt to be overviolent in language and uses ugly expletives so freely that, instead of adding to the reality of his characters and incidents, they detract from it, come to seem artificial, till one suspects an affectation in them and is more irritated than impressed. Take, for example, the close of that squabble between Saul Kane and Billy Myers, in “The Everlasting Mercy”—
“You closhy put.”
“You bloody liar.”
“This is my field.”
“This is my wire.”
“I’m ruler here.”
“You ain’t.”
“I am.”
“I’ll fight you for it.”
“Right, by dam.”
Whether such a man would say “I’m ruler here” is of small consequence, but no man swears “By dam,” and you feel that the word is either used arbitrarily for the sake of the rhyme, or with an idea of being forceful at all costs. And though a man might say, “I’ll bloody well put him in a bloody fix,” and “I’ll bloody well burn his bloody ricks,” there is the same sense of desperate straining after effect in making him say,
“I’ll bloody him a bloody fix.
I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks,”
because no ruffian was ever heard to speak so elliptically, and you feel it is only done in order that the meter may be made to accommodate a startling plethora of profanity. Such excesses sound a false note and are out of tune with the general truth, the vivid reality that give the stories their authentic power and greatness.
I have heard it said that these aberrations represent the efforts of one who is naturally reticent and fastidious to present with due forcefulness certain brutal and lawless types of character that are not within his personal knowledge; but I doubt this. He may have exercised his imagination, and if so he exercised it potently, in writing “Reynard the Fox” and “Right Royal,” for I should guess he never went fox-hunting or steeple-chasing, but for “Dauber” and the raw human creatures of “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street” and “The Daffodil Fields” he may very well have drawn on memory and experience of people he has known. For he was not reared in cotton-wool nor matured among the comparative decorums of office-life. From a training vessel, he went to sea in the merchant service, knocked about the world on sailing-ships and has put some of his old shipmates into his ballads and some of them and some of their yarns into “A Mainsail Haul” and his first novel, “Captain Margaret.” Quitting the sea, he went tramping in America, picking up a livelihood by casual work on farms, and after a while settled down to serve behind a bar in New York, escaping from the noise and squalor and drudgery of it at night to solace himself with the “Morte d’Arthur” after he had gone up to his garret to bed. It was a harsh apprenticeship, that on sea and on land, but it broadened his outlook and his sympathies, and fitted him to be, as he was presently resolved to be, the interpreter of “the men of the tattered battalion”—
“He had had revelation of the lies
Cloaking the truth men never choose to know;
He could bear witness now and cleanse their eyes;
He had beheld in suffering; he was wise.”
His work as a critic is in a certain newspaper where he used to review new poets before he was recognized as one, and in his scholarly, revealing study of “Shakespeare”; but his finest, most imaginative prose is in that poignant book “Gallipoli” which he wrote after he came home from serving there in the Great War.