Chapter 12

Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also the secret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite the admirably just verdict which Jeffrey delivered on Wordsworth's _Excursion_: "This will never do." We miss in his lines the onward march of poetry. His individual phrases carry no cargoes of wonder. His art is not of the triumphant order that lifts us off our feet. As we read the first half of his narrative sea-poem, _Dauber_, we are again and again moved to impatience by the sheer literary left-handedness of the author. There are so many unnecessary words, so many unnecessary sentences. Of the latter we have an example in the poet's reflection as he describes the "fiery fishes" that raced Dauber's ship by night in the southern seas:--

What unknown joy was in those fish unknown!

It is one of those superfluous thoughts which appear to be suggested less by the thing described than by the need of filling up the last line of the verse. Similarly, when Dauber, as the ship's lampman and painter is nicknamed, regards the miracle of a ship at sea in moonlight, and exclaims:--

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.

He certainly shows a passion for technicalities hardly less than Mr. Kipling's own. He tells us, for instance, how, in the height of the fury of frost and surge and gale round Cape Horn,

at last, at last They frapped the cringled crojick's icy pelt; In frozen bulge and bunt they made it fast.

And, again, when the storm was over and Dauber had won the respect of his mates by his manhood, we have an almost unintelligible verse describing how the Bosun, in a mood of friendship, set out to teach him some of the cunning of the sea:--

Then, while the Dauber counted, Bosun took Some marline from his pocket. "Here," he said, "You want to know square sennit? So fash. Look! Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread. I've known an engineer would give his head To know square sennit." As the Bose began, The Dauber felt promoted to a man.

Mr. Masefield has generously provided six pages of glossary at the end of his poem, where we are told the meaning of "futtock-shrouds," "poop-break," "scuttlebutt," "mud-hooks," and other items in the jargon of the sea.

So much for Mr. Masefield's literary method. Let me be equally frank about his genius, and confess at once that, in any serious estimate of this, all I have said will scarcely be more relevant than the charge against Burke that he had a clumsy delivery. Mr. Masefield has given us in _Dauber_ a poem of genius, one of the great storm-pieces of modern literature, a poem that for imaginative infectiousness challenges comparison with the prose of Mr. Conrad's _Typhoon_. To criticize its style takes us no nearer its ultimate secret than piling up examples of bathos takes us to the secret of Wordsworth, or talking about maniacal construction and characterization takes us to the secret of Dostoevsky. There is no use pretending that the methods of these writers are good because their achievements are good. On the other hand, compared with the marvel of achievement, the faultiness of method in each case sinks into a matter almost of indifference. Mr. Masefield gives us in _Dauber_ a book of revelation. If he does this in verse that is often merely prose crooked into rhyme--if he does it with a hero who is at first almost as bowelless a human being and as much an appeal for pity as Smike in _Nicholas Nickleby_--that is his affair. In art, more than anywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end of _Dauber_ is vision--intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision. Here we have in literature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on his inexpert canvases:--

A revealing Of passionate men in battle with the sea, High on an unseen stage, shaking and reeling; And men through him would understand their feeling, Their might, their misery, their tragic power, And all by suffering pain a little hour.

That verse suggests both the kind and the degree of Mr. Masefield's sensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea. His is the witness less of a doer than of a sufferer. He is not a reveller in life: he is one, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides of anguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar of beauty or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the spiritual pain of the world. He communicates to us, not only the horror of humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, "cut to the ghost" by the polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship's doom, having been

ordered up when sails and spars Were flying and going mad among the stars,

How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm, as the ship gets nearer the Horn:

All through the windless night the clipper rolled In a great swell with oily gradual heaves, Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled, Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:

Like the march of doom Came those great powers of marching silences; Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:

She bayed there like a solitary hound Lost in a covert.

Morning came, bringing no release from fear:

So the night passed, but then no morning broke-- Only a something showed that night was dead. A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke, And the fog drew away and hung like lead. Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red; Like glowering gods at watch it did appear, And sometimes drew away, and then drew near.

Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm, catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress."

The blackness crunched all memory of the sun.

Henceforth we have a tale of white fear changing into heroism as Dauber clambers to his giddy place in the rigging, and goes out on the yard to his task,

Sick at the mighty space of air displayed Below his feet, where soaring birds were wheeling.

It was all a "withering rush of death," an orgy of snow, ice, and howling seas.

The snow whirled, the ship bowed to it, the gear lashed, The sea-tops were cut off and flung down smashed; Tatters of shouts were flung, the rags of yells-- And clang, clang, clang, below beat the two bells.

How magnificent a flash of the fury of the storm we get when the Dauber looks down from his scramblings among rigging and snapped spars, and sees the deck

Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.

In that line we seem to behold the beautiful face of danger--a beauty that is in some way complementary to the beauty of the endurance of ships and the endurance of men. For the ship is saved, and so is the Dauber's soul, and the men who had been bullies in hours of peace reveal themselves as heroes in stress and peril.

_Dauber_, it will be seen, is more than an exciting story of a storm. It is a spiritual vision of life. It is a soul's confession. It is Mr. Masefield's _De Profundis_. It is a parable of trial--a chant of the soul that has "emerged out of the iron time." It is a praise of life, not for its own sake, but for the spiritual mastery which its storms and dangers bring. It is a paean of survival: the ship weathers the storm to go boldly forward again:--

A great grey sea was running up the sky, Desolate birds flew past; their mewings came As that lone water's spiritual cry, Its forlorn voice, its essence, its soul's name. The ship limped in the water as if lame, Then, in the forenoon watch, to a great shout, More sail was made, the reefs were shaken out.

Not even the death of the Dauber in a wretched accident defeats our sense of divine and ultimate victory. To some readers this fatality may seem a mere luxury of pathos. But it is an essential part of the scheme of the poem. The poet must state his acceptance of life, not only in its splendid and tragic dangers, but in its cruelty and pathetic wastefulness. He must know the worst of it in order to put the best of it to the proof. The worst passes, the best continues--that is the secret enthusiasm of Mr. Masefield's song. Our final vision is of the ship in safety, holding her course to harbour in a fair wind:--

Shattering the sea-tops into golden rain. The waves bowed down before her like blown grain.

And as she sits in Valparaiso harbour, a beautiful thing at peace under the beautiful shadow of "the mountain tower, snow to the peak," our imagination is lifted to the hills-to where

All night long The pointed mountain pointed at the stars, Frozen, alert, austere.

It is a fine symbol of the aspiration of this book of men's "might, their misery, their tragic power." There is something essentially Christian and simple in Mr. Masefield's presentation of life. Conscious though he is of the pain of the world--and aloof from the world though this consciousness sometimes makes him appear--he is full of an extraordinary pity and brotherliness for men. He wanders among them, not with the condescension of so many earnest writers, but with the humility almost of one of the early Franciscans. One may amuse oneself by fancying that there is something in the manner of St. Francis even in Mr. Masefield's attitude to his little brothers the swear-words. He may not love them by nature, but he is kind to them by grace. They strike one as being the most innocent swear-words in literature.

XVIII

MR. W.B. YEATS

1. HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF

Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He has a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetry repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this innovating high priest.

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself. For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had to pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps, it is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision. He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask. There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are apparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets _The Wind Among the Reeds_ apart from every other book that has ever been written in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the attitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy legend.

One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works of intellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and that here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the book are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heard before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in writing prose.

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us, "little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught at school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man." Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind."

Though he was always near the bottom of his class, and was useless at games--"I cannot," he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal or made a run"--he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look for butterflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when living on the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about the changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the rock."

These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show that he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation--a boy with a remarkable intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth in Dublin:--

sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours--especially by the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his father's, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:--

I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature. _Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinary freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, set forth the full account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is a delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser. Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

My father had read to me some passage out of _Walden_, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....

I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spacious and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen and raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

Merchant skipper that leaped overboard After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.

Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as the characters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped with romance or comedy--the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who--

passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood.

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example and becoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin that he first met A.E. He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was then:--

He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.

Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of verse called _Responsibilities_ is almost equally autobiographical. Much of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries--quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and mine":--

You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another's said or sung, 'Twere politic to do the like by these; But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:--

But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called _A Coat_:--

I made my song a coat, Covered with embroideries, Out of old mythologies, From heel to throat. But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eye, As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be--at once harsher and simpler. One would not give _Responsibilities_ to a reader who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of _The Wind Among the Reeds_. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh" inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement. Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the first verse of _A Woman Homer Sung_.

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in _The Second Troy_:--