Part 12 (1/2)

we feel that he is only lengthening into a measured line the ”My G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l from here!”

Similarly, when the Mate, taking up the brush, makes a sketch of a s.h.i.+p for Dauber's better instruction,

”G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l!”

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 coa.r.s.enesses 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 pa.s.sion 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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,”

”p.o.o.p-break,” ”scuttleb.u.t.t,” ”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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+p'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 s.h.i.+p gets nearer the Horn: