Chapter 5

Perhaps Hutton's figure may describe it better--"The Leap to God." At least ten years ago John Masefield, a wanderer on the face of the earth, found himself in New York city without friends and without means, and it was not to him an unusual thing to accept the position of "bar-boy" in a New York saloon. This particular profession has within its scope the duties of wiping the beer bottles, sweeping the floor, and other menial tasks.

And now John Masefield has within recent months come to New York city to be the lauded and feted. Newspaper reporters met him as his boat landed, eager for his every word; Carnegie Hall was crowded to hear him read from his own poetry; and his journey across the country was just a great triumph from New York to San Francisco.

Something had happened in those ten years. This man had achieved. This poet had climbed to God. This man had experienced the "Soul's Leap to God." He had found that Man of all men who once said, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." He always lifts men out of nothing into the glory of the greatest achievement. Yes, something had happened in those ten years.

And the things that had happened in those ten years are perfectly apparent in his writings if one follow them from the beginning to the end. And the things that had happened I shall trace through this poet's writings from the first, boyhood verses of "Salt Water Ballads" to "Good Friday"; and therein lies the secret; and incidentally therein lies some of the most thrilling human touches, vivid illustrations for the preacher; some of the most intensely interesting religious experiences that any biography ever revealed consciously or unconsciously.

I. THE SOUL PSYCHOLOGY OF HIS YOUTH IN "SALT WATER BALLADS"

One may search these "Salt Water Ballads" through from the opening line of "Consecration" to "The Song At Parting" and find no faint suggestion of that deep religious glory of "The Everlasting Mercy." This book was written, even as Masefield says, "in my boyhood; all of it in my youth." He has not caught the deeper meaning of life yet--the spiritual meaning--although he has caught the social meaning, just as Markham has caught it.

1. _Social Consciousness_

Even in "Consecration" we hear the challenging ring of a young voice who has wandered over the face of the earth and has taken his place with the "Outcast," has cast his lot with the sailor, the stoker, the tramp.

"Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, 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. "Others may sing of the wine and the wealth, and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth; Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust, and the scum of the earth!

* * * * *

"Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 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. Amen."

Salt Water Poems and Ballads.

And it is a most fascinating story to see him climb from his boyhood, purely social, sympathetic interest in the outcast to that higher, that highest social consciousness, vitalized with religion. Here, seems it to me, that those who possess true social consciousness must come at last if they do their most effective work for the social regeneration of the world. Many have tremendous social consciousness, but no Christ. Christ himself is the very pulse beat of the social regeneration. Without him it must fail.

One feels, even here in his youth poems, however, a promise of that deeper Masefield that later finds his soul in "The Everlasting Mercy."

2. _Faith in Immortality_

In "Rest Her Soul," these haunting lines with that expression of a deep faith found in "All that dies of her," we find a ray of light, which slants through a small window of the man that is to be:

"On the black velvet covering her eyes Let the dull earth be thrown; Her's is the mightier silence of the skies, And long, quiet rest alone. Over the pure, dark, wistful eyes of her, O'er all the human, all that dies of her, Gently let flowers be strown."

Salt Water Poems and Ballads.

But most of these ballads, as their title suggests, are nothing more than the very sea foam of which they speak, and whose tale they tell; as compared with that later, deeper verse of Christian hope and regeneration.

And then pass those ten years; ten years following the period of "The Salt Water Ballads"; and ten years following the time when he was a "bar-boy" in New York; ten years in which he climbs from a simple "social consciousness" to a social consciousness that has the heart beat of Christ in its every line. The poems he writes in this period are all of the Christ. "Good Friday," perhaps the strongest poem dealing with this great day in Christ's life, is full of a close knowledge of the spirit of the Man of Galilee. But it is in "The Everlasting Mercy" and not "The Story of a Round House" that we find Masefield at his big best, battering at the very doors of eternity with the fist of a giant and the tender love of a woman, and the plea of a penitent sinner.

Something had happened to Masefield in those ten years. A man's entire life had been revolutionized; and his poetry with it. He still feels the want and need of the world, and the social injustice; but he has found the cure. In a word, he has been converted. I do not care whether or no Masefield means to tell his own story in "The Everlasting Mercy," but I do know that he tells, in spite of himself, a story that fits curiously into, and marvelously explains, the strange revolution and change in his own life from "Salt Water Ballads" to "Good Friday."

II. CONVERSION

It is an old-fashioned Methodist conversion of which he tells, which links itself up with the New Testament gospel of the regeneration of a human soul in such a fascinating way that it gives those of us who preach this gospel an impelling, modern, dramatic putting of the old, old story, that will thrill our congregations and grip the hearts of men who know not the Christ.

1. _Conviction of Sin_

Saul Kane was an amateur prizefighter. He and his friend Bill have a fight in the opening lines of the tale, and Saul wins. This victory is followed by the usual debauch, which lasts until all the drunken crowd are asleep on the floor of the "Lion." No Russian novelist, nor a Dostoievesky, nor another, ever dared such realism as Masefield has given us in his picture of this night's sin. He makes sin all that it is--black and hideous:

"From three long hours of gin and smokes, And two girls' breath and fifteen blokes, A warmish night and windows shut The room stank like a fox's gut. The heat, and smell, and drinking deep Began to stun the gang to sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But this was too much for Saul Kane. He had still enough decency left to be ashamed. He wanted air. He went to a window and threw it open:

"I opened window wide and leaned Out of that pigsty of the fiend, And felt a cool wind go like grace About the sleeping market-place. The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly, The bells chimed, Holy, Holy, Holy; And in a second's pause there fell The cold note of the chapel bell, And then a cock crew flapping wings, And summat made me think of things!"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

There it is: sin, and conviction of sin. Perhaps he thought of another man who had virtually betrayed the Christ, and the cock crew and made that other "think o' things."

Then came the reaction from that conviction; the battle against that same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ; and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet how insistently, how pleadingly she speaks:

"'Saul Kane,' she said, 'when next you drink, Do me the gentleness to think That every drop of drink accursed Makes Christ within you die of thirst; That every dirty word you say Is one more flint upon His way, Another thorn about His head, Another mock by where He tread; Another nail another cross; All that you are is that Christ's loss.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

These searching words were beyond defeat. They went home to his already convicted heart and mind like arrows. They hurt. They cut. They awakened. They called. They pierced. They pounded with giant fists. They lashed like spiked whips. They burned like a soul on fire. They clamored, and they whispered like a mother's love, and at last his heart opened:

2. _Forgiveness_

"I know the very words I said, They bayed like bloodhounds in my head. 'The water's going out to sea And there's a great moon calling me; But there's a great sun calls the moon, And all God's bells will carol soon For joy and glory, and delight Of some one coming home to-night.'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then came the consciousness that he was "done with sin" forever:

"I knew that I had done with sin, I knew that Christ had given me birth To brother all the souls on earth,"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

which was followed by two "glories"--the "Glory of the Lighted Mind" and the "Glory of the Lighted Soul." I think that perhaps in our preaching on conversion we make too little of the regeneration of the "mind." Masefield does not miss one whit of a complete regeneration.

3. _The Joy of Conversion_

"O glory of the lighted mind. How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind! The station brook to my new eyes Was babbling out of Paradise, The waters rushing from the rain Were singing, 'Christ has risen again!'"

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And then the soul glory:

"O glory of the lighted Soul. The dawn came up on Bradlow Knoll, The dawn with glittering on the grasses, The dawn which pass and never passes."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

But that wasn't all. Masefield knows that the other self must be completely eradicated, so he makes Saul Kane change his environment entirely. He goes to the country. He plows, and as he plows he learns the lesson of the soil and cries:

"O Jesus, drive the coulter deep To plow my living man from sleep."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And more word from Christ as he plowed:

"I knew that Christ was there with Callow, That Christ was standing there with me, That Christ had taught me what to be, That I should plow and as I plowed My Saviour Christ would sing aloud, And as I drove the clods apart Christ would be plowing in my heart, Through rest-harrow and bitter roots, Through all my bad life's rotten fruits."

The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.

And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry, pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes, "Would make the dead arise!"

VIII

ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY [Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.]

A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES; OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD

A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you quoted--they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death.

And the lines that gripped the layman were:

"I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow That's plumb-full of hush to the brim; I've watched the big husky sun wallow In crimson and gold, and grow dim; Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming And the stars tumbled out neck and crop; And I've thought that I surely was dreaming With the peace o' the world piled on top."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who read:

"The summer--no sweeter was ever, The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river, The bighorn asleep on the hill; The strong life that never knows harness, The wilds where the caribou call; The freedom, the freshness, the farness; O God! how I'm stuck on it all!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:

"Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro, Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be the last to go.

"Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand, Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God:

"But the stars throng out in their glory, And they sing of the God in man; They sing of the Mighty Master, Of the loom his fingers span, Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole, And weft in the wondrous plan.

"Here by the camp-fire's flicker, Deep in my blanket curled, I long for the peace of the pine-gloom, Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled, And the wind and the wave are silent, And world is singing to world."

The Spell of the Yukon.

"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:

"Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"--the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs:

"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--."

The Spell of the Yukon.

SIN AND DEATH

The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"

"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting; It's luring me on as of old; Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold. It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Or another verse:

"I wanted the gold, and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it; I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it-- Came out with a fortune last fall-- Yet somehow life's not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn't all."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,

"All you can take in your cold, dead hand Is what you have given away."

And how the warning against sin hurtles its way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:

"It grips you like some kinds of sinning; It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it's been since the beginning; It seems it will be to the end."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you." Service says the same thing in "It grips you."

GOD AND HEAVEN

Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?

"I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings; It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the timeless things, And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

This God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:

"Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond For us who are true to the trail; A vision to seek, a beckoning peak, A farness that never will fail; A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal, A manhood that irks at a bond, And try how we will, unattainable still, Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail:

JUST THINK!

"Just think! some night the stars will gleam Upon a cold, grey stone, And trace a name with silver beam, And lo! 'twill be your own,

"That night is speeding on to greet Your epitaphic rhyme. Your life is but a little beat Within the heart of Time.

"A little gain, a little pain, A laugh lest you may moan; A little blame, a little fame, A star-gleam on a stone."

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical rules of conduct that they do, expressed in Service's "The Woman and the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him:

"Then sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled: 'You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child. We have outlived the old standards; we have burst like an overtight thong The ancient outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'" "Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His side, For O, the woman was wondrous, and O, the angel was tried! And deep in his hell sang the devil, and this was the strain of his song: 'The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And I doubt not, but that we all need that warning not to give up "The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."

RHYMES OF A RED CROSS MAN

Here it is that we find a consciousness of the Eternal creeping through the smoke and din and glare. Here, like the hard, dangerous life of the Alaskan trails, only harder and more dangerous; here amid war in "The Fool" we catch six last lines that thrill us:

"He died with the glory of faith in his eyes, And the glory of love in his heart. And though there's never a grave to tell, Nor a cross to mark his fall, Thank God we know that he "batted well" In the last great Game of all."

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

And even amid the terrible thunder of war the "Lark" sings, as Service reminds us in his poem of that name, sings and points to heaven:

"Pure heart of song! do you not know That we are making earth a hell? Or is it that you try to show Life still is joy and all is well? Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain You beat into that bit of blue: Lo! we who pant in war's red rain Lift shining eyes, see Heaven too!"

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

To close this study of Service, which has run from the hard battle ground of the Alaskan trails to the harder battle ground of France; which has run from a study of white peaks and white lives, to high peaks and high hopes, through sin and death to heaven and the Father himself, I quote the closing lines of Service's "The Song of the Wage Slave," which will remind the reader in tone and spirit of Markham's "The Man with the Hoe":

"Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've done thy bidding, and the light is low in the west, And the long, long shift is over--Master, I've earned it--Rest."

IX

RUPERT BROOKE [Footnote: The poetical selections from the writings of Rupert Brooke appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, published by John Lane Company, New York.]

PREACHER OF FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, COUNTRY, GODS, AND GOD

Wilfred Gibson expressed it for us all; voiced the sorrow and the hope in the death of Rupert Brooke, a victim of the Hun as well as that other giant of art, the Rheims Cathedral; expressed it in these lines written shortly after Rupert Brooke died:

"He's gone. I do not understand. I only know That, as he turned to go And waved his hand, In his young eyes a sudden glory shone, And I was dazzled by a sunset glow-- And he was gone,"

Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines, and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.