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”—