59
Chapter V
Phase, (l) 1Q02-10; Literary Probation.
How that we have grouped the writings of tlasefield under
the POUR Phases, our next task will he to examine each of Them
critically.
Uncer this Phase there are only two volumes of
•Verse * and we can take them together for evaluations
(1) Salt-ffater Ballads (1902)
(2) Ballads and Poems (1903)
It is significant that almost all the poems and ballads
in the first two volumes are romantic.
While 81 lyrics are
out-and-out romantic we find that in about 2? of them realism
3us b peeps in as in Fever-Chills and Cardigan Bay t
’’But the Chief comes forward ’n 1 he says, says he,
* I give you a straight cips
Come none o * your Cape Horn fever lays aboard o ’ this
yer ship.
On wi ' your rags o * duds, my son, rn * aft, ‘n ' down
the hole:
'Ihe best cure known for fever-chills is shove sling
bloody coal. '
It
HARD, my son, that's what it is, for us poor
sailor-men."
Fever-Chi110.
’’Clean, green, windy billows notching out the sky,
Grey clouds tattered into rags, sea-winds blowing high,
And the ships under Topsails, beating, thrashing by,
And the mewing of the herring gulls.”
Cardigan Bay.
In the first illustration, sailor's slang and curses and oaths
give the touch of realism to a romantic sentiment.
In fact, in these
'Ballads * Masefield is trying to do
for the sailor what Kipling had done for the soldier in his
Barrack-Room Ballads which abound in the ar/zy-slang of the
Nineties with its crude brass-band music or its saloon-bar
mechanical music,
Masefield's sailors' vernacular brims
with slang and queer pronunciation not to speak of the rich
harvest of oaths and curses of the normal tongue that have
become their second nature.
So perfect is Masefield's
mastety that we almost mistake the poet for the sailor
drifting on and on on the surface of this
'salt-water',
Masefield admires his Bohemian sailor and he is even
enchanted by his rough brutality, bawdy songs and his
devil-may-care disposition.
He revels in his flesh-and-hlood
orgies, rough-handlings and bullyings of fellow-sailors
(so richly and yet distinctly and distantly reminiscent of
'loro Brown's School Bays)
In the ballad Evening- Re g-ar-ta Bay
the rower who caused the Prize Cup to be missed due to his
lethargy is
'lynched * and insulted with such names as
port Mahone baboon ' -
'calling names ’ so dear and
fou
’sacred '
to the sailor.
On examining Masefield's second volume of verse - Ballads
and Poems - we find that it is totally free from such language.
In the second extract from the Cardigan Bay we have a
romantic picture with a bias for realism and we have very
many examples of this kind in such lovely poems as the
following*
l’he Yarn of the Loch Achrav. Port of Holy Perer. London fown.
ffhird Mate. Spanish fa ter and An Old Song He sung.
61
O ’
Masefield sailed before the mast to start -with and
his nomadic life has left its imprint on the initial volumes.
As for his romantic nostalgia it can just be said that
Youth is generally a period of day dreamings and cravings.
That is how a poet finds his moorings gradually,
1
And
*
Masefield betrays such propensities in the early lyrics*
\
As an illustration we have just to read the famous lyrics*
Sea Fever. The West Wind. Twilight. C.L.M, and Tewkesbury
t
j
Road.
Some lyrics are coloured by wistfulness, some by a
meditative melancholy, and others by a nostalgia*
2h the 54 poems and ballads like Beauty.. Laugh and be
Merry, Born for Hought Else. C.L.M., Tewkesbury Road.
Twilight. Sea Fever and The West ¥ind there is hardly any
place for realism.
and content*
They are out-and-out romantic in tone
While it would rather be superfluous to quote
those oft-quoted lines from Sea Fever. Laugh and be Merry.
Tewkesbury Road or The West Wind it would be quite in place
toffeeljMssef ield* s meditative melancholy in poems like
C.L.M. (which is the poet*s tribute to his mother)
1
5
or the
,
romantic yearning,in Personal or the brooding wistfulness
in Twilight;
or the exalted lyrical ecstasy exuding in the
lovely poem Beauty;
uIn the dark womb where I began
My mother*s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her*
• • • •
• « * •
* t • •
• • •«
* * * »
62
“5
What have I done, or tried,, or said
In thanks to that dear mzxtrn dead "?
Men triumph over women still,
Hen trample women’s right at -will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed,
$
0 grave* keep shut lest I to shamed*
(C.B.m#)
tramping at night in the
And an old tune, a sweet
It was full of the laugh
It brought the tears and
cold and wet, I passed the lighted inn,
tune, was being played within,
of the leaves and the song the wind sings?
the choked throat, and a eat^h to the
heart strings.
And it brought a hitter thought of the days that now *ere dead tom
She merry days in the old hose before I went to sea
Days that were dead to me indeed# I hewed sy head to the rain,
And I passed by the limited inn to the lonely roads a ?a 5n. *
’’Twilight it is, and I travel the road with my friend,
I think of the friends who are dead, who were dear long ago
In the past,
Beautiful friends who are dead, though I know that death
cannot last;
Friends with the beautiful eyes that the dust has defiled,
Beautiful souls who wore gentle when I was a child* 15
(TMttjm-'
HI have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain;
I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils,
Bringing the springing grass and the soft warn April rain,
I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of
the sea,
And seen strange lands from under the arched white sa~ls
of ships;
But the loveliest things of beauty God ever had showed
to me,
Are her voice, and her hair, end eyes, and the dear r*f curve
of her lips*"
We may note that fche yearning and meditation are of bhe
surface*
It would be wrong to expect a young man of 24 to
have the same soul-searching introspection as that of a feats
or Blake or Wordsworth.
He is not yet burdened with the
ijystery of life, though-we see Masefield following the footprint of his master in the deeply reflective poems,
but
there is, in almost all of the essentially romantic pieces,
a nostalgic bent where the young poet is seen m various moods
of wistful pensiveness, sentimental cogitations and meditative
melancholy.
Bhey are mainly imitative though a few of them
are extremely lovely.
However, the young Masefield is also capable of giving
a unified picture in which the subjective and ^he objective
are perfectly fused with each other.
In Consooration a realis­
tic theme takes on a romantic conception: the theme is labour,
the misery of the underdog, the sufferings ox the
scum
’dust, the
the down and outs
"Mot the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the
road,
She slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on
with the goad,
She man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load."
*««
•••
•**
BHEIHS be the music, bhe colour, the glory, the gold;
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.
/UKH."
Similarly realism enters as an integral part in Cargoes
in which the romantic past is placed in juxtaposition with the
ugly, mechanical present, full of the smell of mobile oil and
tar-barrel.
Bhe "Dirty British coaster with the salt-caked
64
smoke stack” is accepted and integrated with the marvel of
the QTJTNQUIREMB of Nineveh and of the Spanish galleon of
those palmy days of antiquity ’’with a cargo of diamonds,
emeralrds, amethysts, topazes, and cinnamon and gold noidoree"
MQUINQUIREME of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
•••
•••
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the fropics by the palmgreen shores,
St * 4
I * •
# * #
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked araoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Syne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays,"
Shese are the two picturest the familiar and the mysterious
(or the romantic).
And Masefield has successfully brought
together these two dominant notes either by assimilating (or
grafting) the mysterious into the realistic or (as in some
other instances), by incorporating the familiar amidst the
unfamiliar as in August 1914 in which Masefield - like the
great Wordsworth - sees the familiar in an unfamiliar light.
A similar integration is noticeable in the lovely poems
The farrv Buccaneer. A Ballad of John Silver, She G-alley
Rowers. Dawn and Fragments:
"The dawn comes colds the haystack smokes,
She green twigs crackle in the fire,
She dew is dripping from the oaks,
And sleepy men bear milking-yokes
Slowly towards the cattle-byre.
••*
• ••
Beyond the stack where we have lain
She road runs twisted like a snake
(She white road to the land of Spain),
She road that we must foot again,
Shough the feet halt and the heart ache."
(Dawn)
65
In Masefield *s first two volumes we can see many
influences at work and chiefly the influence of W. 3 .Gilbert
and Swinburne.
Begarding the former Masefield declares thus
in So Long to learn?
'* ....'but my favourite poems in ay 00 MAI time we ye the Bab
Ballads by ?/• S'. Gilbert.
She grace, the skill and ^he fun of
Gilbert % verse have enchanted nearly three generations of men.
They enchanted me from the first. Mo light verse has ever been
written with more charming talent. .. but it was as a poet of
the sea that he won me, then.’1
Echoes of such Bab Ballads as the following a-e traceable
in Masefield *s first two volumes: Haunted» The Tar* of Haney
Bell. Bob Bolter. The Captain & the Mermaids. Brave Alum fiev.
and The Sailor Bov to His Lass.
The picturesque images in Sea' Fever have a Srjnburnian
splendour and they remind us of such dazzling sea-pictures of
Swinburne as the following:
"A blind grey dawn -- moved on the shadowy sea.”
"By the white wandering waste of sea."
"let the wind shake our flag Ixke a feather,
like the plumes of the foam of the sea."
"As the brighc sail with the brightening wine was drawn."
The spell that Swinburne had cast on Masefield was lasting,
partly because the passion for the sea was inborn in Masefield
just as the sea-obsession was Swinburne *s birthright.
The
gorgeous sea-pictures in Dauber, Philip the King and elsewhere
prove that it was the sea that inspired 8bsefield ’c highest
lyric achievement.
Nostalgia and wander-lust and escapism are very universa3
among poets and a comparison of bea Never with lea-fa '
The lake
Isle of Innisfree. Stevenson’s The Vagabond. Hopkirs * I Have
Desired to go. Gerald Gould’s Wandey-Tixirst and Bridges ’ There
is a Hill Beside the Silver Thames would reveal no us
that
-t - \#2>
66
Sea Pever can claim fco stand very high among them with ita
verbal seduction
by its rhythmic incantation and the
sweeping surge of language.
The moving sincerity and the sense of personal desolation,
though subdued to a more quietly elegiac mood, of CS. L.M.
compare very well with that noble poem of Cowper On the
Receipt of My Mother's Picture.
Masefield's Christmas Bye,
at Sea remembers us of Stevenson 's Christmas at Seas
but
while the latter is personal, the former is sweefely impersonal,
lastly, while reading Masefield *s The Golden Giby of St.Mary
and london 'Town, one is inclined bo recapitulate the equally
felicitous poem of Kingsley, The Pleasant l3le of Aves. with
its stunning climax t
,fOne comfort is, this world’s so hard, I can't be worse
off there.”
DRAMAiThe tragedy of Han (1909 )s
In Han Masefield has chosen a realistic situation and
has succeeded in being quite contemporary.
But his realism
at times becomes repellenb while his romanticism verges on the
sentimental.
Shis aspect may be briefly examined.
The verbal battle between Han and Mrs Pargetter, the
squalor and stink at the Pargetfcers *, the crude way in which
Han forces- the putrefying mutton pasty down Jenny *s
throat -
these are overdone and they appear to be somewhat repellent.
Mr Pargetter’s crazy attachment to his Toby jug, Nan *s
tears over her soiled coat (torn in The scuffle), Old Gaffer's
G7
semi-distraught mutterings over his past, his erratic references
to the blossoms, flowers, grave, bells, beauty, blood and the
gold rider blowing the horn, and the sombre Severn hign-Tide
on the moonlit night (though finely wrought) - all these -send
to excess,
let us take but one instances
"Gaffer* She gold rider blew a 'orn. And she rose up, my
white ♦lower done,
And blood, oh, blood... It be foil moon
to-night, maidy.
There ’ll be a high tide to-night... They be
afraid of the tide,.. A girt water snake with its ’ed up..*.
The horn. The horn. 0 night owl laughing In The wood,...
The tide...Singing, Singing. Bearing it come. Hearing it
home.
Over the breast...Over the lips. Over the eyes...”
The hollow sentimentalities and rhetorical exclamations
of Mrs Pargetter tend to mar the play.
times inclines towards melodrama.
Even Han’s eloquence at
But There are compensating
factorss the love scene between Han and Dick is drawn with a
distilled simplicity.
And we shall do injustice
forget that she is a betrayed maiden;
to Han if we
that she cannot brook;
the vulgarity and philandering of Dick, outraged as she is,
Dick's appalling complacency and egotism, disguised even to the
speaker himself, as humility, are cumulatively revealed, and
deftly handled.
Han’s spirited attack on legal incorapetenoe and
religious hypocrisy, and the emergence of self-pity at the end-rall these are most natural and there is hardly any touch of
attitudinising.
And the ending is masterly.
Masefield *s tragic conception is grand no doubt;
but he
has nob given Han the necessary ’inwardness* so as to make her
essentially universal.
She lacks the depth or the
of a Cordelia or a Teas, though she approaches the
’inner life *
tragic stacure*
The tragical appeal of the play is not expansive as In the
_^**.2
68
unique play Riders to the Sea to which Masefield seems to be
indebted.
In this context a remark about Browning may as well
be adapted to apply to Masefield*
"Browning wrote many plays, but his interest was so much
stronger in the inner life of men than in their external actions
that it was impossible he could ever have been a great writer
for the theatre." 1
- Han's inner life has no depth;
nor is the external action
described in Ian convincing enough to make it stage-worthy.
The Tragedy of Ian is a domestic tragedy.
The characters
are mostly drawn from the lower strata of society and their life
is narrow, gross and wretched.
In Ian Masefield attains part
of his realism by selecting the characters from the humblest
walks of life and further, the action seldom deviates from the
normal day-to-day experience.
Masefield employs prose and the
language is colloquial with its strong aroma of slang and
mispronunciation.
The
’dramatis personae * are the
the scum of the earth'?
ignorance;
'dust and
they are comrades to poverty and
and the scene is set near G-loucester at the mouth
of the Severn.
2. The Tragedy of Bompey the Great (1310)*
The play records the triumph of the Spirit over the flesh.
Amidst a banal background of naked treachery and double-dealing
is held aloft the soul of Pompey which remains undaunted,
unsullied and inspiring.
Sven in the face of death he has
the moral courage to say* “life is nothing.
It is the way of
life which is so much."
1. leilson & Thorndike* “A History of Kng.lit." p 3VldT
69
Masefield has employed poe tie prose and the language is in
keeping with the exalted sentiments expressed.
But there is
so much of sermonising and so little of external action or
’movement ' that the play oan hardly succeed on the stage,
further, we cannot help feeling that Pompey is no otner than the
mouthpiece of his creator;
that he is the echo of the pacifist
Masefield's ideals.
3?he poet hardly succeeds in persuading us
to admire his hero.
On the other hand, we see thus champion
as one who puts on a complacent air and haughty superiority.
When action is the crying need he loses himself m airy nothings.
What he cannot achieve by stern action he tries to compensate
by his indecision, vacillation, day-dreaming and ludicrous
inability.
Pompey is a nice play for the library though not for the
theatre.
Such starry sentiments ass
MA brave man enters court of his free will
Even though the judge may bind him when he enters,H
and the many mellifluous sea-chanties are impressive.
As a
study of exploring the human heart and of projecting new moral
insights Pompey is convincing.
Devoid of self-pity and rich
in visionary integrity Pompey*s idealism has its own high
splendour.
flCTIOH:
1. A Tarpaulin Muster (1907):
Phis volume contains 24 short stories which are quite
interesting.
Phe purpose is entertainment to the reader and
literary training for the author.
Phe title of the hook is very
suggestive: it is a collection of stories and anecdotea mostly
about sailors and sea-lif®, pirates and ghosts and fairies.
Phey
70
are meant to keep off monotony and boredom at sea.
We my
as well call them 'prose-chanties’ which are so current and
popular among sailors.
Particularly interesting are the following stories?
A Raines law Arrest. The Cane Horn Calm. Being Ashore. The
Bottom of the Well. The Pirates of Santa Ana. Edvrard Herr lea.
Big Jim, and A White Eight.
2. Multitude & Solitude (1909)s
The stories in A Tarpaulin Muster are mostly imitative;
there Masefield is trying to
’find himself *.
It is only when
we oome to Multitude & Solitude that we find the writer speaking
through his own idiom.
reform.
The purpose of the novel is social
It deals, with the story of a medioal expedition.
As
the Hovel (as a form of literature) gathered strength at the
dawn of the 20th century it became a fashion with novelists to
deal with popular science in their novels,
further, as a youch,
Masefield was himself interested in a medical expedition.
Multitude and Solitude is one of the memorable novels that
Masefield has written.
There are descriptions of Mature in
all her moods? the description of the storm scene in Africa, the
description of desolation of the pest-stricken village, the
loneliness and utter helplessness of Boger Haldrett when all
equipment has been ransacked, pillaged and thrown helter-skelter
by the run-away negroes, the river in torrent, the changing scenes
the varying weather - all these are highly picturesque and
admirable.
There are powerful debates too.
Masefield grows
most eloquent and red-hot when he lashes out at social injustice
or when he expects young men to mind their responsibility to
71
society in the scheme of things.
One has only to need such
passages as -che followings
"A writer without character, without high and austere character,
in himself, ana in the written image of himself, is a panderer,
a hawd, a seller of Christ...."
Roger *s personality is neatly drawn because he does not
suffer from the psychological complex that Lionel Heseltme,
the arch-figure in The Street of fo-day. suffers froo.
3. Martin Hyde or The Pule *s Messenger (1910 it
The novel deals with the adventure that the boy Martin Hyde
went through when he was (by a queer chance/ employed as a spy
by the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II,
The narrative moves quickly and the story is gripping.
Sea pictures, tempests and blizzards, battles, scenes of mad
destruction and desolation are particularly memorable.
portrait of the Lady, Aurelia is very fascinating.
The
Masefield
has succeeded in infusing some element of psychological and
dramatic liveliness into the steadily moving prose,
a
fine
insight into human weaknesses, the social and political back­
ground with its confusions and upheavals, spying and betrayals
and hypocrisy - all these varied details are domiciled in the
richly textured narrative.
' 4. Lost Endeavouc (I910)s
This is a story of 'lost' endeavour.
A critic's verdict
on Masefield's novels in general is that they are 'frankly dull
and this novel underlines this opinion m ample measure.
It is
lengthy and labyrinthine, spun-oub and wanting in sustained
direction.
The sfcory moves in a laboured way though there is
72
ample use of the romantic, remote and mysterious material*
sequestered spots among the remote isles, creeks, prime7a1
settings in South America, savages, pirates, buccaneers, Red
Indians, kidnappers, summary trials and merciless murders,
though Masefield seems to be following
the meticulous
artist, he has not caught hxs master 'a enchantingly lucid way
of dealing with an out-of-the-way story.
Further, Hardinge’s early adventures are picturesque and
somewhat clear-cut*
and unrealistic.
but his later exploits become misty, thin
On the top of ir all comes in Masefield *3
didacticism as an unwelcome guest* and sentimentalism is not
entirely absent too.
Phase (l) of Masefield's literary career richly deserves
to be called a period of literary Probation.
It shows nor only
the apprentice hand that worked under and aped many an influence
but it also anticipates the strength and weakness of Masefield.
Ihat is, the type of literary*’medium most suited to his tempera­
ment the following up of which would have given him a much
higher place in literary history;
and the type in which ho
was never at home and in which he never found himself till the
very end - a type which in fact meant his literary graveyard,
a medium the adoption of which denied him the most lasting and
resplendent laurels of literature, though laureate he could be.
Salt-Water Ballads and Ballads and Poems, we have noticed,
are suffused with an exuberant romanticism.
experimental and imitative;
Moot of them are
yet there are poems which make
*
imitation justifiable and felicitous because of the touch of
73
individuality.
The fo 13owing lyrics deserve bo be included in
any distinguished anthology:
Sea fever. Cargoaaf Cardigan Bay. Consecration. Dawn. The West
Wind. Twilight. Tewkesbury Road. Beauty. Laugh and be
Merry, Personal. The Tarry Buccaneer. The Galley Howers and
Fragments.
Further, they undoubtedly anticipate the compelling lyricism
of Dauber. Shins. August 1914. King Cole. Dicier at the Care.
Australia. A Ballad of 'Sir Francis Drake and Ife Is.
The Tragedy of Han owes much to Riders to the Sea.
1fc
displays many weaknesses like a bias for melodrama, an overdoing
of emotions and crude sentiment.
Yet the inherent strength of
the play is so transparent that one regrets that Masefield
did nob follow up this line.
It is clearly a play of premise.
Domestic tragedy is a type in which "asefiold could have found
his moorings and made his mark.
Curiously enough he never
brought forth a sister to Man.
The Everlasting Mercy of course does catch the resplendent
fire of Man.
It is a great verse tale;
but it is a diversion
of Masefield *s innate strength into obher channels.
%ile
Man displays the rich possibilities of the might-have-become
Masefield, his very next play The Tragedy of Pompey the Great
broadly suggests the yawning pitfalls that he ought to have
avoided.
Ke&ts took the clue and eschewed a medium for which
he was not fitted;
bolder;
but Masefield is made of sterner stuff, he is
he would go straight into the very heart of trouble
and augment the world of English drama with such spineless and
soon-forgettable-plays like Philip the King. Good Friday,
Mel lone v Bolbspur. A Ming *s Daughter. The Trial of Jesus.
Tristan and Ieolt. Easter and End and Beginning.
If one wishes
74
to enjoy a rich feast of sentimentality descending into
mawkishness, and pathos degenerating into bathos, one is well
advised to pore over these ornaments of literature,
^hile
dramatic action is something alien to their spirit, they would
weave out endless argumentation by way of compensation.
Shat
ffhe faithful is not a failure is beside the point.
Perhaps the explanation is that as time passed ly ..'asefield
turned more and more to the arena of the soul an3 wanted fco
display, not physical but spiritual triumph.
But that does
not absolve him from the charge that he ought not tc have
persevered in pursuing a medium which was clearly fcreign
to his genius.
In the third division, namely, fiction, it is easy to
see the two trends of Masefield the novelists
(a)
Multitude & Solitude (1909) anticipates
the very impressive
novels - She Street of To-flay and IVgs and Baker.
(b)
Martin Hyde (1910) looks forward to similar moving stories
of adventure - Jim Davis. Sard Barker, The Bird of Pawning.
She faking of the PRY, and Basilissa.
Ihe other novels of Masefield are a reminder oi what he
should have avoided.
One feels that he could have pursued the
line of lyric, drama of domestic background, novels of social
reform and of adventure instead of dissipating his energies
over spineless plays brimming with lugubrious sentiments - plays
with a mythological and historical background, tne objectivity
and atmosphere of which he is not able to catch ond conjure up.