But if the circumstances of Masefield’s life are little known, his spiritual history is more than indicated in his work. Here one sees a stricken soul; a nature wounded and a little poisoned; a nervous system agitated and apprehensive. His mind is cast in a tragic mould and his soul takes delight in the contemplation of physical violence. His personality, as I have said, is furtive. He shrinks. His intimate friends may have heard him laugh. I have not.
It must be nearly six years since I visited him at his house in Well Walk, Hampstead. It was a miserably cold afternoon in February, and though it was not yet twilight the blinds of the drawing-room were drawn and the lights already lit. Masefield’s conversation was intolerably cautious, intolerably shy. In a rather academic way he deplored the lack of literary critics in England; the art of criticism was dead; the essay was moribund. He expanded this theme perfunctorily, walking up and down the room slowly and never looking me in the eyes [76] ]once. It was only when, at length, he had sat down—not opposite me, but with the side of his face towards me—that, very occasionally, his eyes would seek mine with a rapid dart and turn away instantly, and at such moments it seemed as though he almost winced. Such shrinking, such excessive timidity, whilst arousing my curiosity, also made me feel no little discomfort, and I was glad when a spirit kettle was brought in, with cups and saucers, and Masefield began to make tea.
This making of tea, a most solemn business, reminded me of Cranford. The poet walked to a corner of the room, took therefrom a long narrow box divided into a number of compartments and proceeded, most delicately, to measure out and mix two or three different kinds of tea. The teapot was next heated, the blended tea thrown in, and boiling water immediately poured on it. And then the tea was timed, Masefield holding his watch in his hand and pouring out the fluid into the cups at the psychological second.... He ought, I think, to have taken a little silver key from his waistcoat pocket and locked up the tea-box. He ought to have taken his knitting from a work-box. He ought to have asked me if I had yet spoken to the new curate. But he did none of these things....
Though for an hour he continued talking, he said nothing—at least, he said nothing I have remembered. The extraordinary thing about him was that, in spite of his timidity, his seeming apprehensiveness, he left on my mind a deep impression of adventure—not of a man who sought physical, but spiritual, risks. I think he is a poet who cannot refrain from exacerbating his own soul, who must at all costs place his mind in danger and escape only at the last moment. I believe he is intensely morbid, delighting to brood over dark things, seeing no humour in life, but full of a baffled chivalry, a nobility thwarted at every turn.
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[77]
]A man of a very different type is Jerome K. Jerome, whom I met at the National Liberal Club and elsewhere in the early days of the war. Like all humorists, he is an inveterate sentimentalist; his belief in human nature is as wide-eyed and innocent as that of a child. He is an untidy, prosperous, middle-aged man—very kindly, but a little intolerant. His mental attitude is that of a man sitting a little apart from life, alternately amused and saddened by the things he sees. In the drawing-room of his flat at Chelsea he seemed a little out of place; he did not harmonise with his surroundings. But in the Club he was easy, natural, at home. More than twenty years ago I heard him lecture in Manchester; the Jerome of to-day is the Jerome of those far-off years, a little mellower perhaps, a little quieter, a little more sentimental, but essentially the same in appearance, in manner and in his attitude towards life.
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I have met other humorists, but of a type very different from that represented by Jerome. Sir Owen Seaman I met at a little dinner given by the Critics’ Circle at Gatti’s to a colleague of ours who was on the point of leaving for the Front, and who, alas! is now no more. Sir Owen was made both by nature and training for a squarson—that useful but fast-dying gentleman who combines the duties and responsibilities of squire and parson. His personality, rather beefy and John Bullish, confirms one’s expectations. He made an excellent chairman at this particular dinner.
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His very brilliant assistant, A. A. Milne, I once interviewed for a now defunct Labour paper. I was invited to the office of Punch, and met a tall, slim, yellow-haired and blue-eyed youth, who was so inordinately shy that, after half-an-hour’s perfunctory conversation, I discovered that I had not sufficient material for a paragraph, [78] ]whereas I had orders to make a column article of the interview. I knew instinctively that Milne must find, as I do, a good deal in W. S. Gilbert’s writings that is in deplorable taste, and I did my utmost to induce him to say something very rude about Sullivan’s collaborator. But he would not “bite.” He nodded and smiled at, and appeared to agree with, all the savage things I said of Gilbert, but he would say very little—and certainly not enough for my purpose—on his own account. I tried other subjects, but without success; finally, I got up in despair, thanked him for the time he had given me and prepared to depart.