The first sentence was addressed to himself, the second to the taxi-driver, but as we were by now in the office the driver heard nothing. Chesterton called for a back file of The Daily Herald, sat down, lit a cigar and began to read some of his old articles. I watched him. Presently, he smiled. Then he laughed. Then he leaned back in his chair and roared. “Good—oh, damned good!” exclaimed he. He turned to another article and frowned a little, but a third pleased him better. After a while he pushed the papers from him and sat a while in thought. “And as in uffish thought he” sat, he wrote his article, rapidly, calmly, drowsily. Save that his hand moved, he might have been asleep. Nothing disturbed him—neither the noise of the office nor the faint throb of his taxi-cab rapidly ticking off twopences in the street below.... He finished his article and rolled dreamily away.
His brother Cecil has the same gift of detachment. He can write anywhere and under any conditions. I have seen him order a mixed grill at the Gambrinus in Regent Street, begin an article before his food was served, and continue writing for an hour while the dishes were placed before him and allowed to go stone cold. Like most men [73] ]in Fleet Street who do a tremendous amount of work, he has always plenty of time for play, and I do not remember ever to have come across him when he was not ready and willing to spend a half-hour in chat in one of the thousand and one little caravanserai that lurk so handily in the Strand and Fleet Street.
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Of poets of the younger generation I have met only three—Lascelles Abercrombie, Harold Monro, and John Masefield. Abercrombie I remember as a lean, spectacled man, who used to come to Manchester occasionally to hear music and, I think, to converse intellectually with Miss Horniman. Of music he had a sane and temperate appreciation, but was too prone to condemn modern work, of which, by the way, he knew nothing and which by temperament he was incapable of understanding. He struck me as cold and daring—cold, daring and a little calculating. He appeared unexpectedly one day at my house, stayed for lunch, talked all afternoon, and went away in the evening, leaving me a little bewildered by the things he had refrained from saying. Really, we had nothing in common. My personality could not touch his genius at any point, and the things he wished to discuss—the technicalities of his craft, philosophy, æsthetics and so on—have no interest for me. If I had not studied his work and admired it whole-heartedly
, I should have come to the conclusion that he had written poetry through sheer cleverness and brightness of brain. No man was less of a poet in appearance and conversation. He professed at all times a huge liking for beer, but I never saw him drink more than a modest pint, and his pose of “muscular poet” (a school founded and fed by Hilaire Belloc) deceived few.
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Harold Monro I used to see occasionally in the Café Royal, and I met him a few times at the Crab Tree Club. [74] ]I remember going with him, early one morning in June, 1914, after sitting up all night, to the Turkish baths in Jermyn Street. We swam a little in a tank and were then conducted to a cubicle, where I wished to talk, but Monro was heavy with sleep and soon began to breathe stertorously. A few days later he received me rather heavily at his office at The Poetry Bookshop, read some of my verses, and told me quite frankly that he did not consider me much of a poet. A sound, solid man, Monro, and he has written at least one poem—Trees—as delicate and as beautiful as anything done in our time.
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But neither Monro nor Abercrombie, greatly gifted and earnest in their work though they be, fulfils one’s conception of a poetic personality. There is no mystery about them, no glamour; they do not arouse wonder or surprise. John Masefield, on the other hand, has an invincible picturesqueness—a picturesqueness that stamps him at once as different from his fellows. He is tall, straight and blue-eyed, with a complexion as clear as a child’s. His eyes are amazingly shy, almost furtive. His manner is shy, almost furtive. He speaks to you as though he suspected you of hostility, as though you had the power to injure him and were on the point of using that power. You feel his sensitiveness and you admire the dignity that is at once its outcome and its protection.
There are many legends about Masefield; he is the kind of figure that gives rise to legends. And, as he is curiously reticent about his early life, some of the most extravagant of these legends have persisted and have, for many people, become true. But the bare facts of his life are interesting enough. As a young man he grew sick of life, of the kind of life he was living, and went to sea as a sailor before the mast. He had neither money nor friends; or, if he had, he relinquished both. The necessity to earn a living drove him into many adventures, and [75] ]I am told that for a time he was pot-boy in a New York drink-den. Here his work must have been utterly distasteful, but the observing eye and the impressionable brain of the poet were at work the whole time, and one can see clearly in some of Masefield’s long narrative poems many evidences of those bitter New York days. How Masefield came to London and settled in Bloomsbury, becoming the friend of J. M. Synge, I do not know. For six months he was in Manchester, editing the column entitled Miscellany in The Manchester Guardian, and writing occasional theatrical notices. I have been told by several of his colleagues on that paper that Masefield’s reserve was invulnerable; he quickly secured the respect of his fellow-workers, but not one of them became intimate with him. He lived in dingy lodgings, he worked hard and, at the end of six months, withdrew to London on the plea that he found it impossible to do literary work at night.