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.