John Masefield

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2009-04-27T08:33:00.012+12:00

John Masefield
(1878-1967)

THE EARLY NOVELS OF JOHN MASEFIELD
1908 – 1911

by

John Mackenzie Ross

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in English

University of Auckland

1985

The major event in Masefield scholarship in the twenty-five-odd years since this Masters thesis was composed is undoubtedly the appearance of Philip W. Errington's massive John Masefield: The "Great Auk" of English Literature. A Bibliography (London: The British Library / New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004). This 900-page tome looks set to become the Bible of Masefield studies; it clears up a number of questions and problems, bibliographical and otherwise, and focuses attention back where it should be: on the complexity of Masefield's work, rather than his fading reputation as a rhymester and old sea dog.

Masefield has to be seen as a figure of great cultural interest, if only because he published so much, in so many different fields, and enjoyed such a variety of responses at different times in his long career. His separate reputations as poet, dramatist, novelist, and popular historian have tended to be seen in isolation from one another, but (put together, as they should be) they continue to shine a revealing light on the ups-and-downs of literary life in the twentieth century.

Besides that, though, he's well worth reading in his own right. His writing is uneven but (at its best) unmatchable. The strongest among his novels (Lost Endeavour, Sard Harker, The Box of Delights, The Bird of Dawning, and Dead Ned, to name just a few), alongside the cream of his narrative verse, together with the various fascinating collections of letters which have come out since his death, combine into a body of work which has to be seen as at least equal to that of many far more highly rated contemporaries.

Errington's work (in particular), as well as the ongoing work of his fellow-enthusiasts in the John Masefield Society, gives every promise of keeping interest in him alive well into the twenty-first century.

- Dr Jack Ross, Massey Albany, November 2009

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Abstract

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Novel in 1908

Chapter 2 – Masefield – Verse vs. Prose

Chapter 3 – Captain Margaret

Chapter 4 – Two Novels of Contemporary Life

Chapter 5 – Boys’ Books

Conclusion

Chronology

Bibliography

Appendix 1 – My John Masefield collection

Appendix 2 – John Masefield’s South America: Anatomy of a ‘Rattling Good Yarn’ (1991)

[John Masefield: A Mainsail Haul (1905)]

Abstract

2009-04-26T08:27:00.006+12:00

[John Masefield]

John Masefield is still known principally as a poet, despite the twenty-three novels he wrote between 1908 and 1947. The contention of this thesis, however, is that the novels are at least as important as the verse in judging his overall artistic achievement.

The text deals only with the seven novels Masefield published between 1908 and 1911, and this allows greater attention to be paid to his general literary context - though the later novels, from 1923 on, are listed briefly in the introduction.

Chapter One considers Edwardian fiction as a whole, and isolates three basic impulses – realism, romanticism, and didacticism – through the discussion of a few selected novels of different genres. This introductory chapter is followed by another comparing Masefield's poetry with his prose, which concludes that while the verse better satisfies the requirements of its form, the prose is more imaginatively rich. Both are therefore necessary for any fair assessment of his writing.

The third chapter discusses Captain Margaret, Masefield's first novel, and sees certain aspects of the "love triangle" portrayed in it as being explicable only in terms of Masefield's own private emotional life. The book is finally characterized as a Psychomachia, or allegory of the author's repressions and desires.

Chapter Four looks at Masefield's two novels of contemporary life: Multitude and Solitude and The Street of To-Day. Both tend to dramatize the various options lying before him at a crisis in his career, rather than dealing "objectively" with society – but this avoidance of easy generalizations seems, in some ways, to imply a more honest approach than that of the traditional "novel of ideas".

Masefield's four boys' books are the subject of Chapter Five, and are all seen to represent different approaches to the problem of balancing the credulous and sceptical sides of his nature. Lost Endeavour, which embodies these principles in two different characters, is perhaps the most successful of them.

The conclusion discusses Masefield in the same terms as the other Edwardian novelists treated in Chapter One. However, the dichotomy in his works is more between the "natural" and "supernatural" than the realistic and romantic. Children's books are perhaps the ideal medium for conveying this emotional mysticism – since "grown-up" novels require powers of organization which Masefield lacked. His literary affinities are seen to lie more with Blake and Traherne than with his novel-writing contemporaries.

Acknowledgements

2009-04-25T09:25:00.009+12:00

[John Masefield]

English reading people in the world - 300,000,000
People who read me - 3
People who write criticisms of me - 4

– John Masefield: Letters to Reyna (1983, p.197).

Acknowledgements

I should like to acknowledge the assistance of Professor D. I. B. Smith (who deserves all of the credit and none of the blame!). Also of my brother K. M. Ross, who read this work in manuscript and proof, and made many valuable suggestions. Also of my mother, and the rest of my family, who advised me on points of detail. Also of my typist, Hilary Elvidge, who managed to decipher my somewhat deceptive handwriting. Also – and finally – of the Interloan Department of Auckland University Library, without whom this thesis would not have been possible at all.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHRONOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: The Novel in 1908
1. The Edwardian Context
2. Selected Examples

CHAPTER 2: Masefield – Verse vs. Prose

CHAPTER 3: Captain Margaret
1. The Novel
2. Masefield
3. Conclusion

CHAPTER 4: Two Novels of Contemporary Life
1. Multitude and Solitude
2. The Street of To-day

CHAPTER 5: Boys' Books
1. Martin Hyde
2. A Book of Discoveries
3. Lost Endeavour
4. Jim Davis

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Major Works of John Masefield
2. Selected Works about Masefield
3. Other Material Consulted

[John Masefield: Sea Life in Nelson's Time (1905 {1984})]

Introduction

2009-04-24T08:34:00.018+12:00

[John Masefield]

To those who recognize the name at all (and nowadays this tends to imply people over the age of thirty), John Masefield is still known almost exclusively as a poet. This despite the twenty-three novels he published over a period of forty years – at least one of which, Sard Harker (1924), was a best-seller in its time. Some of his children's books, too, are still in print and selling well after half a century (the recent (1984) production of The Box of Delights for B.B.C. television is apparently the most ambitious and expensive ever undertaken by the Children's Department).

Why, then, this neglect? Perhaps it is his failure to develop significantly in style over so long a period which is principally to blame (though that reproach could be levelled against his poetry as well). After all, when his first novel, Captain Margaret, appeared in 1908, Henry James and Thomas Hardy (as a poet, at any rate) were still publishing. When the last, Badon Parchments, came out in 1947 (in England only: not in America), Norman Mailer was putting the finishing touches to The Naked and the Dead, and Saul Bellow was already writing his second novel. Half the contents of our libraries have their origin between these two dates.

But Masefield – at a cursory inspection (the only kind of inspection his novels have hitherto received) – seems to have sailed impervious through the midst of all these artistic upheavals and revolutions. Having found a formula, he clung to it religiously – and most of the novels, early or late, are in some sense adventure stories. Very few of them contain anything that would not have been topical before 1914. Only at a cursory inspection, though – even W. H. Hamilton, writing in the 1920's, noted that: 'Imaginative agonies, at all events, must have been his who wrote The Street of To-day' (1925, p.38); and the turbulence exhibited by so many of the novels, both early and late, gives the lie to such complacent assessments of Masefield as John Betjeman's:

His life … seems to have been one long psalm of thanksgiving. His goodness shone out from him. (Betjeman, 1978, p.ix)

The later novels, perhaps even more than the earlier, (there is a long gap between 1911 and 1923 during which he wrote none), show Masefield passing through a dizzying galaxy of moods – from rabid and indiscriminate reaction (in The Square Peg, 1937), to majestic celebration of the sea and the age of sail (The Bird of Dawning, 1933).

The earlier novels, it is true, are more closely linked to the social and intellectual currents of their time – which makes them, perhaps, more fruitful sources for the researcher – but they are also more conventional in form and style. Part of the interest of this thesis will lie in charting Masefield's gradual emancipation from novelistic commonplaces – divisions into 'chapters' and 'parts', for instance – and his development of a characteristic idiom and tone (culminating in the gloriously idiosyncratic Lost Endeavour, 1910). The story, of course, must remain incomplete without a detailed discussion of the novels after 1923 – which are, in a sense, to be regarded as the "mature" expressions of Masefield's art – but most of the themes which would preoccupy him later are already present, if only in embryo, in the seven novels I have chosen to discuss.

Nevertheless, a brief listing of the later novels will perhaps be found useful – if only for reference – and I have therefore decided to give some account of each of them, in their various natural groupings (fuller publication details will be found in the Bibliography).

•

His first novel after a ten years' silence, The Taking of Helen (1923), seems to have taken on many of the characteristics of the narrative poems which he had been writing in the intervening period since 1911. Actually, it is more a novella than a 'novel', although it is described as such in the bibliographies of both Geoffrey Handley-Taylor (1960, p.53); and Charles H. Simmons (1930, p.95). After its first separate publication in a limited edition, it was included in a subsequent volume of essays entitled, in Britain, Recent Prose, and, in America, The Taking of Helen and Other Prose Selections (1924). The affinity with Masefield's narrative poems which it displays is shown not only by coincidences of form and size, but by the actual passages in verse which link the various sections (and, in fact, Masefield retold the story – that of Paris's abduction of Helen from Menelaus - in verse on more than one occasion.[1]) It was a distinctly equivocal and cautious return to the field of the novel.

The same could not be said of his next two novels, however. Sard Harker (1924) and Odtaa (1926) are set in a sort of "mythical" South America – the result of long brooding on its jungles, mountains and endless dusty plains – and represent Masefield's attempt to compose a truly "metaphysical" adventure story (like a Rider Haggard romance with an added dimension of spiritual implication). Perhaps the closest analogy is with Charles Williams' so-called 'supernatural thrillers' (Williams, 1947), which make a similar effort to transform the 1930s detective story. It is difficult to judge such books by ordinary standards; but suffice it to say that, at their best, these two books come as close as anyone ever has to representing the simultaneous inexorability and unexpectedness of nightmare.

Masefield's next novel, The Midnight Folk (1927), is an acknowledged children's classic (though T. H. White once proposed giving a lecture on 'Luck in Literature (i.e. my own pure luck, like winning the pools, when Sylvia [Townsend] Warner and The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights are practically unknown, and Hopkins had to die before publication)' (Garnett, 1968, p.296). Certainly the book and its sequel The Box of Delights (1935) are not so well known as they should be – but it is with rather mixed feelings that one greets the appearance of an unnecessarily abridged edition of the latter book, based on the recent television series (Masefield, 1984). They both deal with the adventures – often magical – of the young boy Kay Harker, and are almost a compendium of Masefield's favourite themes and fantasies (being able to fly, becoming an animal, meeting a mermaid, and seeing the siege of Troy). Masefield was very fond of cats, and they figure largely in the first of these two books. As Judith Masefield tells us:

His favourite cat was called Naboth, and he wrote about him in his book for children, The Midnight Folk, which he liked the best, incidentally, of any of his books. (Lamont, 1972, p.12)

The Hawbucks (1929) is an ambitious but rather formless attempt to sum up the spirit of the rural England of Masefield's childhood. The older values of stewardship and care for the land are displayed by the hero, George Childrey; while his brother, Nick, 'a red-lipped, somewhat loose-mouthed man' (Masefield, 1929, p.1) represents the "new-fangled" town. The 'hawbucks' of the title are the young men competing for the hand of the local belle, Carrie Harridew – and it is Nick who is (somewhat implausibly) finally successful in this contest. George, however, wins her somewhat mystical and "fey" half-sister in marriage – so virtue is not entirely untriumphant. Generally speaking, The Hawbucks is a much less successful novel that its immediate predecessors – it is clear that Masefield was attempting to provide a sort of prose analogue to his Reynard the Fox, 1919 (in fact, many of the characters in the poem reappear in the novel), but prose proved a less successful medium than verse for this purpose. In any case, Masefield delayed longer than his usual two years before publishing another novel – perhaps discouraged by his lack of success in this one.

It was in his next novel, The Bird of Dawning (1933), that Masefield first decided to treat his old love, the sea, in full detail. He had done it before in poetry – in Dauber (1913) – but it had perhaps taken him this long to assimilate the somewhat overwhelming experience of being a sailor on a sailing-ship. The book has always been acknowledged to be one of Masefield's finest – and he continued to exploit this rich vein in two further "nautical" novels: The Taking of the Gry (1934 – set in a port in Sard Harker's South America); and Victorious Troy (1935) – a "hurricane" novel to compare with the classics of the genre: Conrad's Typhoon and Richard Hughes' In Hazard. The spirit and atmosphere of life at sea is, one suspects, better conveyed in prose than in verse (by Masefield, at any rate) – and these books, especially the first, have done a good deal to earn him his reputation as a "writer of the sea".

Eggs and Baker (1936) and The Square Peg (1937) – two novels dealing with different generations of the same family – show Masefield's interest in the "state of England" still persisting a quarter of a century after he wrote The Street of To-Day (for a discussion of which see Chapter Four). The first is concerned with injustice in rural England in the nineteenth century, and is faintly Dickensian in tone – particularly in the courtroom scenes (the book is subtitled The Days of Trial). The second, however, is a much more curious production, and seems to represent a purging of the spleen Masefield had been collecting against fox-hunters, philistines, and blockheads in general over a period of decades. Parts of it must be meant ironically – unfortunately, by no means all – and its hero, Frampton Mansell, a present-day armaments manufacturer, is among the most frightening characters Masefield ever drew. Both of the books are interesting, and would repay further study, but neither can be said to be a great success as a novel.

Muriel Spark considers Dead Ned (1938), Masefield's next novel, 'his best prose work' (1953, p.182). Certainly this book and its sequel Live and Kicking Ned (1939) must be acknowledged to be among the very best of his adventure stories – possibly superior even to Sard Harker. The first of the books is set in eighteenth century London (Masefield handles the tone and idiom with consummate ease), and tells of the trial and unjust execution for murder of the young doctor Ned Mansell. His 'corpse' however is cut down and revived. – to tell the tale (which explains the title: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse). The second book carries the story to Africa, where Ned flees after his recovery (he is still legally liable to death by the laws of England). There he finds a Rider Haggard-like "lost city"; but Masefield's description of his attempts to awaken the moribund town council to a threatened invasion from outside seems to have definite topical undertones – an allegory of Britain's unpreparedness for war with Germany in 1939. Live and Kicking Ned is a little uneven and disjointed, but still contains some of the best writing Masefield ever did. Dead Ned, however, is a complete triumph – it has an extraordinary, haunting atmosphere which cannot easily be described.

Masefield's last three novels reflect his growing interest in the history and civilization of Byzantium (perhaps, after the death of Yeats, he felt he was at last free to take up the topic). The first of them, Basilissa (1940), is the story of the Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian. This is certainly not the Theodora of Procopius's Secret History, however – Masefield sees her as the manager of a troop of dancing-girls, rather than a prostitute famed for her exceptional depravity; and generally romanticizes the story in a rather "gentlemanly" way (he seems to have seen Theodora as a kind of analogue to Edward VIII's Mrs. Simpson, for whom he felt a great deal of sympathy.[2] The next one, Conquer (1941), deals with another incident from Justinian's reign – the 'Nika Rebellion' - and again is applicable to conditions in wartime England. Finally, in 1947, came Badon Parchments – a tale of Arthurian Britain, but conveyed in the form of a series of dispatches from Byzantine envoys at the famous battle (Arthur had already made a brief appearance in Basilissa, as a guest of the Emperor). It is a curiously pallid and lifeless novel – particularly considering Masefield's lifelong obsession with the Arthurian legend. Certainly it is far inferior to his verse treatment of the stories in Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928).

In fact, all three of these novels show signs of fatigue. Novel-writing is hard work – and it is understandable that Masefield in his old age should wish to reserve his energies for poetry, his first love. He seems, in any case, to have been "summing up" his career in the late 1940's – with a last novel, on a subject dear to his heart (which he must have been intending to write about for years past); a last play (A Play of St. George, 1948); and what must have seemed at the time a last collection of verse – On the Hill, 1949 (in fact he was to live to publish three more new collections of poems – one of them, In Glad Thanksgiving, in the last year of his life); not to mention a book of criticism about the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti entitled Thanks Before Going (1946).

•

It remains to specify some of the typographical and bibliographical conventions I have adopted:

I use double inverted commas to represent a word accentuated by myself, and single for a quotation from another author. I have not always supplied references for repetitions of quotations already in the text, or well-known phrases from standard works.

All books in the Bibliography or Notes are published in London, unless otherwise specified.[3]

The Bibliography does not include all books mentioned, but only those which have been quoted from or consulted for details or which have otherwise influenced the text.

[John Masefield: Conquer (1941)]

1. The Taking of Helen is the story of Prince Nireus, 'son of the King of Symé Island' (Masefield, 1924, p.1), who is a friend of Paris and helps him to elope with Helen, even though he is in love with her himself. In the same year, 1923, Masefield published a verse play about Queen Jezebel – entitled A King's Daughter – which contains a series of contextually rather irrelevant choruses about Nireus and Helen (subsequently published separately as 'The Tale of Nireus' in Poems (Masefield, 1946, pp. 593-605). This poem deals not only with the events described in the novel, but also with Nireus and Helen's subsequent adventures. A Tale of Troy (1932), a series of 12 linked poems about the Trojan war, starts off with a poem entitled 'The Taking of Helen', which treats the story of the abduction in highly compressed form.

2. This is shown in a number of the letters printed in Corliss Lamont’s selection of letters to his mother Constance (1979). Notably on p.227:

Do you remember the marvellous mosaic at Ravenna, of the Empress Theodora? Why should she [Mrs. Wallis Simpson] not rise to her destiny as Theodora did and become our most famous Queen?

On p.232 he speaks favourably of the way both the King and Mrs. Simpson have behaved during the crisis:

I liked and love the way the King, my master, whom may God preserve, stood up for the woman he loved. He is such a man as has not been promised to our throne for 300 years, when the young Prince Henry died ... In this woman, whom we call Theodora, he found one with whom he could live and work ... She is a lovely woman; she would have made a royal queen; she would have perfected him, and given to our throne a sense and simplicity well suited to the time … Queen Theodora might have been the greatest Queen to the greatest King we have ever had.

3. In this online reprint I have changed these conventions to suit a more contemporary style of inline citations.

[John Masefield: Badon Parchments (1947)]

Works Cited:

Betjeman, John, ed. John Masefield: Selected Poems. London: Heinemann, 1978.

Garnett, David, ed. The White/Garnett Letters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.

Hamilton, W. H. John Masefield, A Popular Study. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925.

Handley-Taylor, Geoffrey, ed. John Masefield, O.M., A Bibliography. London: Cranbrook Tower Press 1960.

Lamont, Corliss, ed. Remembering John Masefield. London: Kaye & Ward Ltd., 1972.

Lamont, Corliss & Lansing, ed. Letters of John Masefield to Florence Lamont. London & New York: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979.

Masefield, John. A King's Daughter. London: Heinemann, 1923.

Masefield, John. Recent Prose. London: Heinemann 1924.

Masefield, John. The Box of Delights. 1935. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. Illustrated by Faith Jaques. 1984. A Fontana Lion. London & Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1984.

Masefield, John. Poems. London: Heinemann 1946.

Masefield, John. The Hawbucks. London: Heinemann, 1929.

Simmons, Charles H.. A Bibliography of John Masefield. New York: Columbia U.P. 1930.

Spark, Muriel. John Masefield. London: Peter Nevill, 1953.

Williams, Charles. All Hallows' Eve. 1945. London: Faber, 1947.

[John Masefield: On the Spanish Main (1906)]

Chapter 1:

2009-04-23T08:40:00.021+12:00

[John Masefield (1948)]

The Novel in 1908

(i) The Edwardian Context

Strictly speaking, the Edwardian age should be held to have begun in January 1901, when Queen Victoria died; and to have ended with the death of King Edward the Seventh, on the 6th of May, 1910. In terms of literature, however, when the writers who came to prominence or 'added to their reputations' (Larkin, 1974, p.v) during this time are being discussed, one is surely justified in setting slightly wider boundaries. The end of this larger period is fairly clearly demarcated by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914; and, while the beginning could be set at almost any point during the 1890's, 1897 – when Hardy's last published novel, The Well-Beloved, appeared – seems to mark, at any rate, a possible end for the former Victorian era.

What, then, were the general characteristics of the literature of this greater Edwardian period? Almost any immediate single statement would have to be subject to qualification, but it does seem distinguished from that which had gone before by, at least, a greater cosmopolitanism – a more ready recognition of the world outside the narrow field of English letters. Foreign influences, for almost the first time, became central rather than peripheral to English literature. Constance Garnett's translations of the great Russians - Turgenev (1894-99), Dostoyevsky (1912-20), and Chekhov (1916-23) (Heilbrun, 1961, pp.207-8) - were as essential to comprehension of the age as the novels of Arnold Bennett or H. G. Wells.

One could almost rank these foreign influences in order, thus:

The Irish, or Celtic school. It was certainly nothing new for Ireland to have a decisive effect on English literature (as the names of Swift, Berkeley, Sheridan, and Thomas Moore should testify), but perhaps it was never so great as at this time. George Bernard Shaw (Three Plays for Puritans (1901), Man and Superman (1903)), and John Synge (The Playboy of the Western World (1907)), were reforming the theatre (in their very different ways); the dominance of W. B. Yeats in poetry was becoming more and more indisputable (In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)) as he showed himself less and less a mere relic of the nineties; and there were numerous secondary figures all loosely grouped around him – AE, Lady Gregory, T. Sturge Moore, and James Stephens. Nor was this "Celtic Twilight" the extent of Irish influence. The fall of Oscar Wilde (imprisoned 1895, died 1900) was still fresh in everybody's memory, and supplied a clear directive indicating where the new literature would not easily be allowed to go.

"Decadence", and "Art for Art's sake" were out. It was too robust an age – too consciously robust – to spare much sympathy for perversion, or aberrations of other kinds – witness the neglect of that remarkable figure: Catholic, homosexual, paranoiac; Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (Hadrian the Seventh (1904), The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1909) - though not published until 1934). The young James Joyce, impatient with the claustophobic nationalism of Ireland, left for Paris in 1902, though he did not publish his first book, Chamber Music, until 1907. Dubliners appeared, belatedly, in 1914, at the same time as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was being serialized in the Egoist, the Imagist periodical. Nor can one ignore George Moore, who, together with Henry James, had done most during the last decades of the Victorian era to introduce the rigorous standards of the French novel into English. Though he had now turned to assisting the Irish cause and the Abbey Theatre, he was to be responsible for one of the most characteristic products of the age, his three volume autobiography, Hail and Farewell: Ave (1911), Salve (1912), and Vale (1914).

Which brings us to:

The French influence. On the one hand we have a writer actually born in France and educated in England, Hilaire Belloc, who later returned to do his military service in the pre-war French artillery (The Path to Rome (1902), The Servile State (1912)); on the other, the near-universal influence of French canons of taste on the contemporary novel. John Synge and Masefield, as they walked together through the streets of London, talked of French authors (Masefield, 1924, p.189). Ford Madox Hueffer and Joseph Conrad quoted long passages from Flaubert's Trois Contes at each other (Ford, 1924, pp.31 & 208). Turgenev (another Francophile) in French translation – as well as Flaubert, the Gourmonts, Maupassant – were the major influences on Henry James.

Mention of Hilaire Belloc reminds us of another feature of the age – the renewed news-worthiness of Roman Catholicism. G. K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Orthodoxy (1908)), and his friend Belloc, the "Chesterbelloc", were merely the most vocal of its adherents. Priests, or the reaction against them (Joyce's Holy Office (1904)), were, understandably, prominent in the new Irish writing ('The holiness of monks, and after / Porter-drinkers' randy laughter' (Yeats, 1977, p.400): Yeats; not to mention his 'Ballad of Father Gilligan'). There were also other figures such as Corvo and, more importantly, Francis Thompson (1859-1907), a former tramp and the author of 'The Hound of Heaven' (1890) (Meynell, 1941, p.356), asserting its paramountcy.

Tramps, too: the Edwardian age was open to all layers of "honest experience”, and former tramps were not disqualified from entering the lists of literature. W. H. Davies published his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp in 1908 (he had once actually encountered Francis Thompson in a Lambeth doss-house, but had not had the courage to speak to him (Davies, 1951, p.xxv)0. Masefield also had been "on the tramp" in America, and was disapproved of in consequence by Yeats's old housekeeper (according to Lady Gregory): 'Her back stiffened and her nose went up higher as she caught fragments of the reminiscences of one she no doubt considered to be no better than a tramp' (Smith, 1978, p.61). Yeats and his friends, however, saw this simply as good potential literary material, and advised Masefield to write an early autobiography on the strength of it.

The whole class structure of literature was coming under attack – especially the statute that said a gentleman could write about the lower classes, but the lower classes could not write about gentlemen (the one which Hardy had contravened with his first, unpublished novel, The Poor Man and The Lady). D. H. Lawrence, a miner's son, was writing about miners and their wives – but also about his views on the rest of society, and his own agonizing internal class struggle (Sons and Lovers (1913), The Prussian Officer (1914)). Galsworthy, outraged by his own ostracism from bourgeois society, was denouncing the middle classes (The Man of Property (1906) – Strife, the first play to present the case of a striking trade union sympathetically, in 1909).

Victorian low-life had had its Mayhew and its Dickens, but their work was now being extended by a number of commentators on the "lower depths". Arthur Morrison (Tales of Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), Hole in the Wall (1902)) was perhaps the most celebrated of these; but one should not forget Somerset Maugham's Liza of Lambeth (1897); or Jack London, whose book The People of the Abyss (1902) was to exert a strong influence on Orwell's researches a quarter of a century later.

Jack London should serve to remind us of another strong foreign contingent: The Americans. To begin with, the Imagists: Ezra Pound, who arrived in Europe in 1908, and promptly published A Lume Spento in Italy; H.D., who followed him in 1911 (and married Richard Aldington, the editor of the Egoist, in 1913); Wyndham Lewis, born in America but brought up in England, who edited Blast during 1914-15. Another protégé of Pound's (for a time, at any rate) was Robert Frost, whose first two books, A Boy's Will 1913, and North of Boston 1914, were published in England, and who was largely responsible for persuading Edward Thomas to start writing poetry. Besides, of course, the omnipresent Henry James, whose move to Lamb House, Rye, in 1898 marked the beginning of a new phase in his work (The Golden Bowl 1904, The American Scene 1906).

The most remarkable case of all is that of Joseph Conrad, a tri-lingual Polish seaman who became not a curiosity but a central pillar of the English novel (even according to the somewhat selective line of descent prescribed by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition). No other single fact could make so clear just how un-claustrophobic was the Edwardian literary atmosphere. Stuffy, yes – guarded, in a number of directions (especially those where Oscar Wilde's baleful precedent loomed), but open to experiment and fresh influences. W. H. Hudson (Green Mansions (1904)), and R. B. Cunninghame Graham (13 Stories (1900)), represented South America for the English; J. M. Barrie and John Buchan the Scottish. Samuel Butler, our honorary New Zealander, revisited Erewhon in 1901, though his real contribution to the new age was that classic analysis of Victorian hypocrisy, The Way of All Flesh (finally published, posthumously, in 1903); which was followed by Gosse's Father and Son in 1907. (Lytton Strachey published his first book, Landmarks in French Literature, in 1912; but Eminent Victorians, and with it the full flood of reaction against Victorianism, did not appear until 1918).

Then there was the growing literature of colonialism reporting the actual life in Britain's far-flung Empire. Kipling had been writing of India since the 1880's (Barrack-Room Ballads appearing in 1892), but Kim itself did not come out until 1901; after which he turned to the exploration of his own country and its past (Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Rewards and Fairies (1910)). Kipling was undoubtedly a far more popular poet than Yeats at the time (for that matter, than the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin) though the two appealed to different classes of reader; and the Nobel Prize for literature awarded to him in 1907 showed just how influential he was in establishing Britain's image overseas. 'What do they know of England, who only England know?' (Orwell, 1977, 2: 224) could perhaps be seen as the central dictum of the age – especially if one takes into account the negative, "little Englander" reactions to it, as well as the proud endorsements. Kipling probably meant it only of the Empire, but if we extend it to include France, the rest of Europe, and America, it goes a long way towards summing up the Edwardian spirit – the desire to see one's own country in a new way, through new eyes.

(ii) Selected Examples

Having given a thumbnail sketch of the broader movements in Edwardian literature, it remains to explain how they relate to our subject, John Masefield, before going on to examine some of them in greater detail.

Yeats was perhaps the strongest influence on Masefield poetically, and Yeats's circle provided him with most of his literary friends (he could, in fact, almost be said to have been an "acolyte" in the Irish school). One of the things he had in common with them was a strong devotion to French canons of taste: (when defining the novelist in a later essay on playwriting, he naturally chose an illustration from Stendhal: 'a looking glass sauntering down the street' (Masefield, 1924, p.117) – though with Masefieldian elements added (that 'sauntering)).

So much for the French and the Irish. As for Conrad, though very different as writers, they at least shared a common subject, the sea – and it is instructive to compare their very different methods of dealing with it (even in Captain Margaret, the earliest of his novels, Masefield's concentration on the minutiae and technicalities of seafaring is greater than Conrad's, who was always more concerned with the effects of his settings on the characters in the foreground).

Like Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy, though in a much more idealized way, Masefield was concerned with the plight of the working-man - hence his famous poem, 'A Consecration':

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years, –
Rather the scorned – the rejected – the men hemmed in with the spears (Masefield, 1941, p.3).

He also shared with them a passionate concern for the amelioration of society (as I will discuss in Chapter Four).

Although he decisively repudiated the influence, his Salt-Water Ballads (1902) must have seemed at the time, at any rate, a direct echo, in a different context, of Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads, with which they have many stylistic features in common (though Masefield says that 'one might just as well say that Kipling got his manner from Burns as that I got mine from Kipling' (Smith, 1978, p.72)). In contrast to Yeats, the emerging Modernists seem to have affected him little; but the South America of Conrad, Hudson, and Graham was to provide settings for many of his works (he had passed through it on his way back from Chile in 1894; at the same time visiting the Caribbean and the Spanish Main.[1]

In order to systematize all of these influences – as well as diagnosing the trends in the novel, specifically, at the time when Masefield first began to write in that form – it seems best to discuss a few isolated examples, rather than giving a more generalized survey of each of the major figures in the field. This is in the hope of discerning in the process what is characteristic of each of these works individually, and what typical of the age as a whole.

•

The term "Realism" – in its many differing senses – is central to the comprehension of the Edwardian period. It was equally important to those accepting it as an ideal, and those rejecting it as an incubus. Of the former, everyone, from the followers of Zola (if one may so describe George Moore) to the Modernists, believed himself to be embodying it more effectively than his rivals and predecessors. It was the great criterion dividing one school from another.

The first novel I have chosen to discuss is Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago, a classic of realism, since its observations are sober sociological fact, and were accepted as such by later commentators on the East End (such as Jack London in The People of the Abyss). The most interesting thing about this novel, as a novel, is its resolute dependence on Dickensian tricks of style. The usual tone of the writing is inflated and bombastic, as we can see here at the very beginning of the book:

It was past the mid of a summer night in the Old Jago. The narrow street was all the blacker for the lurid sky; for there was a fire in a farther part of Shoreditch, and the welkin was an infernal coppery glare. (Morrison, 1946, p.9)

Morrison seems to have gathered a large amount of material – on slum life, the gradual processes of degradation, and the fate of the children born under such conditions – which he has then attempted to shape into a novel. Since Dickens (and, to a lesser extent, George Gissing), were his only real predecessors in this area, he naturally aped the former's style and technical tricks. The novel begins episodically, like Pickwick – though, to do Morrison justice, slum life does seem to naturally present itself to him in scenes and short vignettes (vignettes such as those he captured, with considerably less straining after stylistic effect, in Tales of Mean Streets). Towards the end, however, he has managed to link it all into a melodramatic "plot" – complete with murder (resembling that in Oliver Twist - or, for that matter, Martin Chuzzlewit), and trial (like Fagin's – even down to the trivialities around which the prisoner's thoughts obsessively turn: 'The judge stopped a witness to speak of a draught from a window. Josh Perrott watched the shutting of the window – they did it with a cord. He had not noticed a draught himself. But pigeons were flying outside the panes and resting on the chimney-stacks' (p.181)). The execution, with the relatives clustered anxiously around the prison-door, rather reminds one of Tess, but the resemblance could easily be coincidental – Dickens, too, has treated of hangings.

Thus Morrison's technique and his material can be seen to be rather at variance. His equipment as a novel-writer seems to be mainly observation and imitation of his masters, the great Victorians; but his subject-matter is that of an anthropologist. Strangely enough, this basic attitude of honest reportage is not greatly obscured by the mock-heroic pomposity of his language. It is almost as if the requirements in style and plot typical of the late nineteenth-century novel are felt by him as conventions no more obtrusive, and no more avoidable, than having to put a capital letter at the beginning of a line of verse. His attention is free to occupy itself elsewhere – with the true nature of the conditions he is describing. Thus, though his description of a fight among a group of slumwomen rather resembles in style the famous fight in the churchyard in Tom Jones, we are left in Morrison's case with the sense of an actual, everyday occurrence somewhat stiltedly narrated, rather than the stylistic tour-de-force of Fielding. We may regret that Morrison was not a good enough writer to forge a new style for himself; but, on the other hand, his lack of "individual vision" prevents him from ruthlessly shaping and trimming his matter to fit his particular view of things (a charge from which it would not be easy fully to absolve Dickens).

Some prejudice is, of course, still observable – the poor being roughly classified as "deserving" and "undeserving"; but he treats conventional attempts at philanthropy with scorn as mere face-saving hypocrisy (one gets the impression that he rather approves of Dicky's theft of the bishop's watch, at the opening of the new wing of the 'East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute' (p.18)). There is, however, a "right way" to react to these conditions – to apply "muscular Christianity" to the sufferings of the underprivileged; and that is the way exemplified by Father Sturt, who refuses to judge or preach, but tries, nevertheless, to help all he can without ever losing sight of the nature of his parishioners:

'An' 'ow jer find jerself, sir?' he asked, with pantomime cordiality. 'Hof'ly shockin' these 'ere lower classes, ain't they? Er – yus; disgustin', weally. Er – might I – er – prepose – er – a little refreshment? Ellow me.'

The parson, grimly impassive, heard him through, took the pot, and instantly jerking it upward, shot the beer, a single splash, into Kiddo's face. 'There are things I must teach you, I see, my man,' he said (Morrison, 1946, p.64).

Father Sturt is sympathetic and willing to help, but he knows he can get nowhere without the respect of those he serves.

To Morrison, then, these are indeed 'the people of the abyss' – the lost, the oppressed. They cannot be seen simply as human beings in their own right. One central message – reform – is clear in all he writes. Naturally enough, mind you – for. who could look on such conditions without feeling moral indignation? Nevertheless, the fact that he has a didactic aim rather than a desire to "see life steadily and see it whole", affects decisively the way in which he presents what he sees. There are some things about the Jago which simply cannot be revealed – incest, baby-bashing, and the grosser lapses of hygiene (Dicky is represented as loving his ailing little sister – but he might as easily have hated her). Jack London goes further than Morrison, but even he writes 'It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is untellable' (1962, p.166). This is partially because such things just did not get into print in those days; but also because neither Morrison nor London can afford to turn indignation into disgust by pointing out some of the true features of a slum – the mental and spiritual, as well as the physical degradation. In short, the "undeserving" aspects. As it is, Morrison goes quite far enough to shock most of his readers – any more might easily have tipped the scale.

It is interesting to examine Maugham's Liza of Lambeth in this context. Maugham's slums are, of course, on a less degraded level than the Jago – but, even so, he concentrates on the personal tragedy of Liza far more than on the collective horror of her surroundings. She is his subject in a way that Dicky never is Morrison's. Maugham's novel is "realist" in that it presents a picture of slum life without obvious romanticization, and with every appearance of authenticity – based on his observations as a young obstetric clerk (Maugham, 1950, pp.vii-viii) – but he has no particular message to preach. Morrison tells us more of the slums - is a more reliable witness – because he has a didactic purpose, and therefore cannot afford to falsify his information. But this purpose also dictates to him exactly how much of the truth he can afford to reveal without alienating his audience. Nor is his picture entirely undistorted by his own derivative novelistic techniques. Maugham is less reliable because less comprehensive – he is using the slums simply as background – but is, as far as one can tell, accurate within his own limits. His one selective principle is whatever serves his purposes as an artist – which distorts his picture in precisely the opposite way from Morrison's. His writing is, however, much less stylized – and his story is allowed to unfold naturally and without authorial moralizing (something which he had learnt from the French – especially Maupassant).

•

Novels of the slums are rather at the extreme end of the spectrum, but it would probably be fair to say that the twin elements of either "artistic selectivity" or "didacticism", exemplified by Maugham and Morrison, are central to any Edwardian novel readily definable as "realist". Both of these two authors are reticent at times – and about much the same things. Both of them do this in order to avoid shocking the public – which makes their works appear superficially similar. But in fact they are working from totally different premises – Morrison from the necessity of dramatizing social injustices; and Maugham from the necessity of having a well-defined background to balance the reactions and attitudes of his characters.

I have now, however, chosen to examine another sort of novel: the Bildungsroman, or novel of a young man's education in the world, of which the prototype is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. The genre is rather flippantly summed up by Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow:

Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future. (Huxley, 1949, p.26)

(The first version of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1915), one of the classics of the form, was entitled The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey (Maugham, 1968, p.5) – in much the same vein). Other Edwardian examples include Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger (1910), Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Butler's The Way of All Flesh. The one I have chosen to discuss, however, is Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street.

Mackenzie's novel was originally intended as part of a Roman fleuve, to be collectively entitled The Theatre of Youth, but which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I (vol. I of Sinister Street appeared in September 1913, but vol. II not until November 1914, after the war had begun). One reason, indeed, for abandoning the projected series was this rigid boundary. to the epoch it was designed to describe ('The First World War as a deus ex machina would soon have become intolerable to myself and to my readers' (Mackenzie, 1969, p.12)).

The title of Sinister Street refers to the hero, Michael's, illegitimacy ("bend sinister") – although this fact is not greatly enlarged upon in the text. Nevertheless, this is one of the several factors which gave it such a "questionable" reputation at the time. (George Orwell and Cyril Connolly were punished for having a copy of it in their possession at their prep. school in the 20's (Orwell, 1978, 4: 479) and this "notoriety" extended even into the 1950's, as is revealed by a passage from Geoffrey Trease's The Gates of Bannerdale, a children's book published in 1956:

On my sixteenth birthday Mr. Morchard had presented me with Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie.

"Strong meat in places, Bill," he had murmured with an apologetic cough, "but I think you're ready for it.

"Heavens, yes!" Penny had hooted. "I read it last year – and I'm younger than Bill. By the calendar," she added with a challenging flash of her dark eyes. (Trease, 1965, p.7))

This was, however, rather out of date by then, and Compton Mackenzie himself, introducing a new edition of the novel in 1949, admitted that 'It will not surprise me to find young people of today, heirs of two mundane wars, impatient of an adolescence than which their own adolescence is riper by a generation, because they will be feeling comparatively so much older and comparatively so much wiser' (1969, p.12).

A modern reader would, naturally, be rather hard put to it to find any cause for offence, but we must try to translate ourselves back into the position of those first readers (even Henry James congratulated Mackenzie for 'emancipating the English novel', (Mackenzie, 1969, p.l1)). The hero's illegitimacy had caused much of the fuss about the first volume, which worried Mackenzie because, as he said: 'I was sure that the second volume would be considered much stronger meat than anything in the first volume, and it seemed vital to beat them in the fight over that first volume' (1969, p.10). His worry was occasioned, presumably, by Michael's unfortunate love affair with Lily Haden, which dominates volume II. She is a "common", though extremely beautiful, girl whom he met when they were both children, and who finally betrays him with another man. Lily is really little better than a tart – and a rather successful one, at that; which prevents Mackenzie from taking refuge in the excuse that he is only presenting her as a warning to others.

Mackenzie was, in fact, describing the type of obsessive love affair which Proust so brilliantly anatomized in 'Un Amour de Swann'. ('For the journey back to Capri in that fateful October Edmund Gosse gave me a copy of Marcel Proust's Du Côté de Chez Swann which had just been published. "I seem to discern an expression of the same spirit in your Sinister Street," he said, "though I am not suggesting any positive resemblance between the two books.'" (Mackenzie, 1969, p.11)). Mackenzie, like Proust (who was, however, drawing on a long tradition in the French novel of objectivity in such matters), is trying to represent honestly the emotions involved in such an affair - irrational though they may be at times – and he cannot allow traditional moral judgements to hamper his accuracy. Not that the picture is not conventional enough – Michael is besotted and foolish, Lily "beautiful but bad"; however the shocking thing is that the affair does not seem to be profoundly damaging to either. To Michael, who, as an illegitimate son, should not be so unequivocally in the hero's role in any case – or who should at least be showing a little more guilt and shame about his status - it is a mere sowing of wild oats (Book Four of the novel is entitled 'Romantic Education', to contrast with the 'Classic Education' – Book Two – undergone at his public school). Its main consequence is simply to teach him a lot more about himself and about the world. Insofar as Mackenzie was setting out a guide for conduct at all, he could be said to be positively recommending such an adventure! Nor does the author disguise his fascination with the character of Lily (her similarly "gay" friend, Sylvia Scarlett, was later to have a whole book, in the same series, devoted to her: The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, 1918-19).

Sinister Street upset conventional expectations because of the subjects it dared to discuss – there was nothing particularly innovative about the views which Mackenzie held on these subjects. Today they would seem almost stuffily conventional. Nor would his book have given rise to much comment in France, where such matters were novelistic commonplaces. In short, we would tend to criticize the book for its lack of objectivity about sex (and for Mackenzie's obvious preference for the priggish Michael rather than the "unworthy" – in fact, exploited Lily); they, for daring to deal with such "unhealthy" matters at all.

Actually, one of the most interesting things about the whole controversy is just how irrelevant it was – managing to miss the whole point of the book. Its very real popularity ('until Sinister Street ... was allowed to go out of print just before the Second World War, it was still selling at its original price at least 1,000 copies a year' (Mackenzie, 1969, p.12)) was perhaps stirred up initially by the desire to read something "shocking", but it was sustained by the book's unclouded, idyllic romanticism – by its picture of that fabled "golden age" before the First World War. Mackenzie assures us that:

Sinister Street is so exactly dated that it remains alive, and although the public-school and university therein depicted may seem unimaginable to the Jacobeans and the St Mary's men of today, contemporary schoolboys and undergraduates can feel sure that at the beginning of this century life at a big London day school and life at a fashionable Oxford college were just as I have depicted them. (1969, p.12)

Nevertheless, one fears that some doubt must remain on this point. One might accept that there is no obvious falsification, but the very chapter titles imply a certain attitude of nostalgia for this vanished world : Book Three – about Oxford – is called (of course), 'Dreaming Spires', and there is no reason to suspect Mackenzie of meaning it ironically! It begins with 'The First Day', 'The First Week', 'The First Term' – the hero's gradual immersion in a new and exciting life; and ends with the agonies of his slow withdrawal: 'The Last Term', 'The Last Week', 'The Last Day'. Oxford, most romantic of English universities, is here seen in its Saturnian age – before the Fall, the First World War – and Mackenzie's triumph is to present this academic Arcadia convincingly and with verisimilitude. The faintest suggestion that it is a fantasy – that life neither is nor ever has been like that – would have destroyed the whole effect, and so a careful atmosphere of plausibility is built up around Michael's various successes – both social and academic. His apparently effortless first – we are told that 'He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to the final encounter' (Mackenzie, 1969, p.587), but this hardly seems enough to counterbalance three years of easy, leisured life – is a case in point; as is the Dons' obvious reluctance to have him finally leave them. It is all undoubtedly possible – such things happen. But it is not representative – they do not happen to many of us. Naturally we prefer to read of triumphs rather than failures – if we can believe in them; and Mackenzie's merit lies in never disturbing this will to believe.

If Philip Larkin's Jill occupies one extreme of the portrayal of life at a university – even worse than the reality – then, perhaps, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited represents the opposite pole. Sinister Street is certainly closer to Waugh (indeed the similarities between the two books – both recalling the glories of a departed past in the middle of a world war – are very striking). Nevertheless, Mackenzie is not Waugh – for one thing, he is far less of a reactionary. He writes of things as they seem to bim, and not, as is largely the case with Waugh, to "épater" the proletarian (rather than the bourgeois). (Perhaps this is to do an injustice to Haugh, though – we must remember that his book was written in war-time, in an atmosphere of 'soya beans and Basic English' (Waugh, 1982, p.9); whereas Mackenzie was writing before his war, in the full flush of the Edwardian summer, with an eye undistorted by hindsight). Mackenzie's, then, is certainly a selective picture – but not really a falsified one. The mood may be exaggeratedly idyllic, but the details are, we are informed on good authority, quite authentic ('far and away the most telling description even written of an English university': Raymond Mortimer).[2]

For all that, "Realism" in this novel equates with outspokenness, and "Romanticism" with nostalgia. Since realism dates faster, the manifestations of it in Sinister Street appear, at best, trite – at worst, questionable (the implicit condemnation of Lily's, rather than Michael's, sexual irregularities, for example). The romanticism is not "pure", either, but depends on the assertion that the golden age it depicts once actually existed – in a particular place, at a particular time. The Oxford scenes are the ones which everyone remembers – but the rest of the book is imbued with similar feelings of escape – escape from quotidian reality, from, it might seem in retrospect, the approaching shadow of war.

This is the other side of the coin from the impulses observable in Arthur Morrison and his followers. They wished to portray the brutal facts underlying the smooth and imperturbable façade of Edwardian society – prostitution, drunkenness, unemployment, ignorance, and grime. But such fervour breeds an equal and opposite reaction – the desire to dwell only on what is pleasant, to give readers what they want – to "entertain", to be cheerful. The opposite of Morrison's Cassandra is P. G. Wodehouse. There was a third aspect as well, however, which prevented the "unengaged" writer from falling immediately into the arms of Jeeves and the Earl of Emsworth – the belief that one's writings should be, as Horace put it: 'dulce et utile' – useful as well as pleasing. This desire to educate, to uplift – in effect, to entertain for a purpose – is noticeable in almost all Edwardian novelists in one form or another.

Almost by definition a novelist has to entertain his readers ('That book is good in vain, which the reader throws away' (Johnson, 1912, 1:334)) – which is why Arthur Morrison puts on the trappings of Dickens instead of setting out his findings in a tract. However, a writer who sees things in a sufficiently complex light may lose the propagandist's desire to subordinate his matter to a particular point of view. Joseph Conrad, for example, could not be said to have any obvious point to make (except, perhaps – in an equivocal way – about the horrors of colonialism and certain other aspects of the world we live in). Most Edwardians tended to follow Morrison's lead rather than Conrad's. True children of their age, they retained enough belief in human perfectibility to agitate unceasingly for change – assuming it must be for the better. (The First World War was, we must remember, the great disillusioning blow to a whole century of optimism – up till then, the accepted view had been that "every day, in every way, the world is getting better and better"). The Utopias and Anti-Utopias of H. G. Wells – the essential seriousness of Bernard Shaw – the generalized sympathy of Arnold Bennett even Henry James' revulsion at the corruption of innocence – all were part of this desire to leave one's reader a little better off for what he had read.

Compton Mackenzie was certainly no propagandist (indeed in later life pure escape – Whisky Galore, the 'Ben Nevis' books – became his forte), but even he reminds us, at the end of Michael Fane's long progress, that it has all been for a purpose – to make his hero into a better man and citizen:

'All that I have done and experienced so far,' Michael thought, 'would not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of other people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have been given knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man ...' (Mackenzie, 1969, p.828)

•

In summary, then, we appear to have isolated three trends in the Edwardian novel: "Realism" – showing things as they really are (in all the various different ways such a prescription can be taken). "Romanticism" – or Escape - the desire to ignore, for once, the "seamy side", and to sail off into a less harrowing realm of self-indulgent pleasure. And, finally, "Edification" – or Utility, or Uplift – the desire to leave your readers better in some way for having read your book. It is now appropriate to examine yet another type of novel – the novel of escape (in its various forms, "pure" and impure) – in order to see if it confirms, or modifies, our conclusions.

The Riddle of the Sands (1907), by Erskine Childers, seems to me a very good example of this genre, particularly considering its later reputation as "the novel which first warned us of the menace of Germany". There is an element in it, that is to say, of defiant paradox – implying that the really important business of life may just happen to be messing about in boats on the North Sea Coast of Germany, and incidentally helping to save the Empire, rather than in one's boring everyday occupation.

The protagonist, Carruthers, is left almost alone in London in the dead season of September, when everyone else is on holiday. Being a man of enterprise, he attempts to penetrate some of the "secrets of the metropolis" described in books such as Stevenson's New Arabian Nights; but this desire " … was finally quenched one sultry Saturday night after an hour's immersion in the reeking atmosphere of a low music-hall ... where I sat next a portly female who suffered from the heat, and at frequent intervals refreshed herself and an infant from a bottle of tepid stout' (Childers, 1955, p.16). We can certainly believe this aspect of Carruthers' adventures – initial deflation of "romantic" expectations is a commonplace of the real novel of escape, and Childers is careful to keep up the same appearance of verisimilitude throughout (the yacht, belonging to his friend Davies, from which they conduct their adventures, turns out to be a small, cramped, working boat, rather than the pleasure craft Carruthers was anticipating); but all this is simply to encourage us to credit some of the more extravagant portions of the plot. A fantasy, as I have argued above, à propos of Sinister Street, must be simultaneously believable and attractive to really satisfy.

Nor is it difficult to see roughly the same impulses at work in the initial rapturous welcome of the 1914 war by writers such as Rupert Brooke – even the enemy, Germany, is the same, while the 'world grown old and cold and weary' (Keynes, 1974, p.19) is precisely Carruthers' London – a life that has gone stale. Both Brooke and Childers desire escape from the 'half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary', and both have convinced themselves that what they are exchanging it for adventure, action, the open air – is both "cleaner" and more desirable, but also forced on them by honour – in effect, that it is their duty to go. One should not push this parallel too far – after all, a private adventure, however momentous, is not really analogous to a European war; but neither should we ignore the influence of swashbuckling adventure stories such as this on the actions and attitudes of those who sprang to the colours in 1914 (the book, after all, was written with the express intention of awaking England to its peril, as a 'record of Secret Service Recently Achieved'[3] – not just to entertain).

"Escape", then, it would appear, must at least pretend to have a useful purpose to justify its pursuit of fantasy. Even writers such as Wodehouse and J. M. Barrie (in his "whimsical" vein) must be seen to be pursuing the unattainable ideal of aesthetic perfection to justify their frivolity. And writers such as Childers, on a more mundane level, must pretend to be realistic in their descriptions and responsible in their intentions, however absurd their message really is. Childers' case is, of course, complicated by the fact that his warnings actually did turn out to be of some value – but, in the context or the novel itself, this simply shows a didactic subterfuge to cover up self-indulgent fantasy which was so successful that it fooled its own author; not to mention the rest of the world!

Perhaps, though, it would be better to examine a purer "novel or escape" if we are to give the form its due - Prester John (1910), the first in John Buchan's long series of adventure stories. The hero, David Crawfurd, a young Scotsman, tells the tale of how he foiled the plot of a negro messiah, the Rev. John Laputa, to set himself up as Emperor over Africa – a new 'Prester John'. The pretence of Crawfurd's narrative being simply a supplement to the official history of the campaign is, however, carefully kept up throughout (Buchan's concession to realism). Nor is the element of didacticism (one hesitates to call it "edification") forgotten – the imperial ideal, the notion of the "white man's burden" is expressed here so vehemently, with so little hesitation, that one rather suspects Buchan of preparing a counterblast to the more introspective and self-questioning adventure stories which were so typical of this era. One expects racial and national prejudice as a matter of course – the villain, Henriques, is described as having 'a face the colour of French mustard – a sort of dirty green – and blood-shot, beady eyes with the whites all yellowed with fever … and a curious, furtive way of walking and looking about him' (Buchan, 1960, pp.27-28). But when one is told that the description is insufficient: 'Tut, my man, most of the subjects of his Majesty the King of Portugal would answer to that description' (p.35), one feels that Buchan is exceeding the normal limits even of his age.

As for the negroes, they seem to be scarcely regarded as human – even their 'Emperor' Laputa, who 'had none of the squat and preposterous negro lineaments' (p.29), is 'also a Kaffir. He can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more. That is the native mind' (p.82). Buchan also throws in "subtle" hints to the reformers, notably in the scene where Crawfurd tries to convince Laputa that he is too stupid to pose a threat to the revolt:

I blush today to think of the stuff I talked. First I made him sit on a chair opposite me, a thing no white man in the country would have done. Then I told him affectionately that I liked natives, that they were fine fellows and better men than the dirty whites round about. I explained that I was fresh from England, and believed in equal rights for all men, white or coloured. God forgive me, but I think I said I hoped to see the day when Africa would belong once more to its rightful masters. (Buchan, 1960, p.90)

That is, in fact, the most pernicious aspect of this seemingly harmless piece of entertainment. The "message" which Buchan devises for his fantasy of African adventure actually bears on the real world. There actually was an Empire full of "Kaffirs" and foreigners – and it is unfair to devise a fantasy, bolster it up with plausible detail, and use it to denounce the filthy practices and habits of real people. It is irrelevant whether or not Buchan believed in what he was saying (though one suspects, from his vehemence, that he did – his narrator, at the end of the book, seeing the desert blossom like a rose, confides 'I knew then the meaning of the white man's duty' (p.202) (as Virgil put it, 'to exalt the humble, trample down the proud)). The fact remains: one cannot give a serious message through a deliberately distorting mirror – that is why "realism" is regarded as a virtue in art. Only the frivolous can afford to dispense with it; for without it, one cannot trust either the information one is receiving, or the conclusions that are drawn from this information. Buchan ignores this fact – and his story is only "harmless escape" as long as all its readers tacitly concur in ignoring any "serious" pronouncements on things in general contained therein.

One of the more interesting aspects of Buchan's adventure story (and reactionary tract) is his hero's admiration and respect for Laputa. Several times he warns the black leader not to trust the Judas in the rebel camp, Henriques – but he is also, at one stage, almost tempted to join the revolt:

By rights, I suppose, my blood should have been boiling at this treason. I am ashamed to confess that it did nothing of the sort … I had a mad desire to be of Laputa's party. Or rather, I longed for a leader who should master me and make my soul his own, as this man mastered his followers. (Buchan, 1960, p.112)

Crawfurd retreats from this experience feeling 'Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me' (p.116). It is difficult to know whether this echo of the title of Conrad's Heart of Darkness is intentional or not – but one suspects that it very likely is. Buchan, of course, is writing in the guise of a "simple Scottish Empire-builder", which gives him carte blanche to attribute any pernicious opinions to the narrator, and not to the author (notice that it is worship for power which draws Crawfurd to Laputa – 'I have already said that I might have made a good subaltern soldier, and the proof is that I longed for such a general' (p.112); Buchan too had his heroes – including T. E. Lawrence). The reference, then (ignoring its supposed attributability to Crawfurd), seems to be a reactionary gibe against Conrad's serious attempt to portray the implications of colonialism. Buchan obviously feels that all this is very unhealthy and "brainy" – an attitude revealed again in Mr Standfast, where he denounces, with laboured satire, a "modern" novel entitled Leprous Souls. Crawfurd, at any rate, pulls himself from the brink of an abyss of intellectual complexity with the reflection that:

Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future. (Buchan, 1960, p.100)

•

Our original picture, then, of three basic drives in the novel: Realism – its opposite, Romanticism (or "escape") and Edification (or didacticism), needs to be redefined to some extent. Among the different motives for "realism" are:

the aesthetic intention of showing things as they are (Joyce's Dubliners), &
the didactic intention of correcting abuses (A Child of the Jago).

"Escape", too, can be aesthetically motivated – using the cover of art to justify frivolity (E. F. Benson); or didactic, and therefore to some extent misleading – at times fairly harmlessly (Childers), when there is no real distortion of facts (simply a "rattling good yarn" woven around them); but also quite perniciously – when an exceptionally entertaining adventure story (Prester John), is used to put across some very dubious moral attitudes.

This framework, too, may prove inadequate to sustain the complexities of our material – but it at least provides us with a starting-point, and a paradigm, against which to measure Masefield in the chapters to come.

[Edwardian London]

1. See Chronology.

2. Quoted on the front cover of the Penguin edition (Mackenzie, 1969).

3. Sub-title on title page of Childers (1955).

[John Masefield: Collected Poems (1931)]

Works Cited:

Buchan, John. Prester John. 1910. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands. 1907. Mariners Library. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.

Davies, W. H. The Collected Poems. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.

Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1924.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Garnett Family: The History of a Literary Family. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961.

Huxley, Aldous. Crome Yellow. 1921. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949.

Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. World's Classics. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912.

Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke. London: Faber, 1974.

Larkin, Philip, ed. The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. 1902. London: Arco Publications, 1962.

Mackenzie, Compton. Sinister Street. 1913-14. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Masefield, John. Recent Prose. London: Heinemann, 1924.

Masefield, John. Collected Poems. 1923. 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1941.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Liza of Lambeth. 1897. London: Heinemann, 1950.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. 1915. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Meynell, Wilfrid, ed. The Poems of Francis Thompson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Morrison, Arthur. A Child of the Jago. 1896. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.

Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. 4 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975-78.

Smith, Constance Babington. John Masefield: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Trease, Geoffrey. The Gates of Bannerdale. 1956. London: Heinemann, 1965.

Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Yeats, W. B. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1977.

[John Masefield: A Book of Both Sorts (1947)]

Chapter 2:

2009-04-22T08:14:00.030+12:00

[John Masefield]

Masefield – Verse vs. Prose

In The Everlasting Mercy (1911), Masefield's first long narrative poem, there is a point where one of the subsidiary characters – (the parson) – is allowed to put his own case, after having been abused by the belligerent drunkard Saul Kane. He says, among other things:

We're neither saints nor Philip Sidneys,
But mortal men with mortal kidneys. (Masefield, 1941, p.112))

A number of points could be made about these lines, but let us note for the moment the almost Hudibrastic quality of the rhyme – which, rather than making the sentiment it expresses ridiculous, actually seems to lend it a certain unpretentious vigour. The words mean what they say: "We probably won't be giving up cups of water on our deathbeds, but let us try, even so, to do the best we can"; however 'mortal men with mortal kidneys' also links up with water with drink – (Saul Kane is drunk, as usual); and thus enables the parson to surreptitiously undermine his opponent. On one level, then, he is saying that we are not saints but mortal men – on another, in effect: "Never mind about water, you've been drinking too much" – which is not calculated to be very good for the kidneys.

In 'A Cooking Egg', published in his Poems, 1920, T. S. Eliot includes the lines:

I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney. (Eliot, 1975, p.44)

It is possible that Masefield and Eliot had a common source for this rhyme, or that Eliot borrowed it from Masefield, but, in any case, the immediate difference in tone is most striking. Eliot's lines are intended to be read with a particularly complex irony – as another example of the inflated dreams of the entrapped suburbanite. The truth of life, Eliot is saying, is the 'Views of Oxford Colleges ... on the table, with the knitting', or the 'Weeping, weeping multitudes' who 'Droop in a hundred A.B.C's' (1975, pp.44-45). It is a life made horrible by its very banality. But fantasies of 'Heaven' are no less banal – 'Lucretia Borgia will be my bride' – the famous names have become mere items in a catalogue: without personality, without meaning – an incitement to absurd delusion. The juxtaposition of Sir Philip Sidney and Coriolanus – both heroes famous for their self-abnegation, both dimly perceived through a haze of literary allusions – serves also to belittle them both. Sidney – or Lucretia Borgia – might still be impressive on their own. Coriolanus, in the play at any rate, has a certain ferocious dignity. But here, in association with 'other heroes of that kidney' – and the doggerel rhyme, the intentional cliche, has much to do with the effect – they are words on a page; printed ghosts: neither 'spirit of health or goblin damn'd' [Hamlet 1.iv.l.40] (Craig, 1939).

I have discussed these two sets of lines at such length because they serve to highlight the gap between the poetry of Masefield and that of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the other Modernists. Masefield's poetry is vigorous and fluent – arid does a "maker's" job in a workmanlike fashion – but it simply is not 'language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree' (Pound, 1974, p.23). Masefield, in fact, was a minor bête noire of Ezra Pound's – who felt angry at the sight of other, better (to his mind) poets having to give way before 'Masefield's diarrhoea' (Paige, 1951, p.195). Nevertheless, his hostility was mixed with a slight puzzlement – could it be that Masefield was in some sense good? He wrote in a letter in 1912:

Masefield was acclaimed. Nobody dared to say one word the other way. The people who cared were puzzled. Here was something strange – one liked his plays, or his sea-ballads, or something .... One lady said, 'It's glorified Sims,' Several people liked' the end.' Et ego suggested that he would probably be the Tennyson of this generation. One man said: 'He will appeal to lots of people who don't like poetry but who like to think they like poetry.' (Paige, 1951, p.47)

(By 'Sims' the lady presumably meant William Gilmore Simms (1806-70), prolific American writer of romantic verse and prose (Harvey, 1975, p.756); by 'the end', I imagine the end of The Everlasting Mercy is meant).

'The Tennyson of this generation' implies something a good deal less than total disparagement, even allowing for Pound's opinion of that poet – but no real rapprochement was possible between such very different definitions of the function of poetry as those of Masefield and Pound. He may have inherited it from Ford Madox Hueffer, but Pound was the most eloquent spokesman for the dogma that 'Poetry must be as well written as prose ... There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions .,. no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonian-ness of speech; nothing – nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say' (Paige, 1951, p.91). Thus Eliot (assuming him to assent to the precise terms of Pound's definition), would have to be able to imagine himself, or someone, saying – in an ironic, fantastical mood: 'I shall not want Honour in Heaven ...'

But would any parson ever really say 'We're neither saints nor Philip Sidneys … '? Masefield, in fact, has bolstered up an idea with a vivid (if slightly vulgar) phrase rather than dramatizing a credible piece of idiomatic English.

And so, Pound complains:

He has avoided all the difficulties of the immeasurably difficult art of good prose by using a slap-dash, flabby verse which has been accepted in New Zealand. (Pound, 1974, p.385)

Masefield, then, according to Pound, is not part of the 'movement' which has been making 'an effort ... during the last few years ... to proceed from the prose short story to the short story in verse' (Pound, 1974, p.385). Nevertheless, through the natural perversity of mankind, an editor was still more prone to print 'a weak pseudo-Masefieldian poem about a hired man ... one written in a stilted pseudo-literary language, with all sorts of floridities and worn-out ornaments' (Pound, 1974, p.384), than Robert Frost's 'Death of the Hired Man'.

However Masefield too represented a kind of 'new poetry' – for, as Frank Swinnerton puts it, 'quite by himself, before Edward Marsh schemed with his fellow-enthusiasts to produce an anthology, he made new poetry a rage' (1969, p.209) – he was, in fact, 'the first Georgian Poet'. Georgianism as a poetic movement has now been rather discredited, and we would, as a consequence, tend to think that Pound was "right" about Masefield. Certainly the future lay with a very different sort of poetry. Nor is there any reason to doubt that the poetic method outlined by Pound and Eliot produced greater and more subtle poetry than Masefield and his companions ever did. For all that, though, the Georgians do represent almost a "counter-culture" in twentieth century poetry one so widespread and pervasive that it cannot be ignored. The poetry of the First World War is, of course (except for T. E. Hulme), extreme Georgian poetry (even Wilfred Owen's – 'I am held peer by the Georgians' (Lewis, 1977, p.172)); and perhaps it is only the incorrect view of Rupert Brooke as the archetypal Georgian which has prevented this fact from being acknowledged. If we look at what poets like Masefield, Edward Thomas, James Elroy Flecker, and Walter de la Mare have in common, it will, I imagine, become obvious that to assess them as a group is far more fruitful than to isolate those considered more “respectable” and declare them “not Georgians”.

This is an important point to establish – for if "Georgian" is regarded as a pejorative rather than a descriptive term, then it will remain impossible to judge a poet like Masefield effectively. If, in short, the same standards are to be applied to Masefield as to H. D. or T. E. Hulme, then he will inevitably seem flabby and prolix. However if we look on him as 'the last, or almost the last, major narrative poet using English' (Berry, 1967, p.2), then, as Newman White puts it, 'it is hard to see how the future can reject him as one of the foremost English poets of the first half of the twentieth century without at the same time rejecting the whole tradition of English poetry' (Sternlicht, 1977, p.143). Within his own tradition – that of narrative poetry, which requires 'a sweep sufficient to charge the elements with as much density as can be grasped at a single hearing' (Berry, 1967, p.18) Masefield is a major poet. And there is no reason not to acknowledge this, while simultaneously admitting the superiority of Modernist standards in poetry. After all, we no longer have the excuse of a continuing controversy to prevent us from examining the "opponents" of Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Yeats on their own ground.

[Wyndham Lewis: T. S. Eliot (1938)]

•

Comme les comédies qui sont en prose ne sont pas moins des poèmes dramatiques que les comédies qui sont en vers, pourquoi les histoires fabuleuses que l'on raconte en prose ne seraient-elles pas des poèmes aussi bien que celles que l'on raconte en vers? ... Les vers ne sont qu'un ornement de la poésie, très grand à la vérité, mais ils ne sont point de son essence (Perrault, 1981, pp.xxvi-vii).

[Since plays in prose have as much right to be called dramatic poems as plays in verse, why should not fanciful tales told in prose be just as much poems as those which are told in verse? Verses are only an ornament to poetry – a most important one, to be sure – but they do not constitute its essence.]

So says Perrault, the author of the Contes, and his remarks perhaps provide as good a starting-place as any for our discussion of the contrast between Masefield's verse and prose. Which of them, indeed, is the more "poetic", if we accept the rather fin de siècle idea that "les vers ne sont pas de l'essence" of poetry? In his remarks already quoted above, Ezra Pound tells us that the onus should be on poetry to become as accurate and unaffected as prose – to achieve some of the subtlety and distinction of Stendhal or Maupassant. Others, W. B. Yeats for instance, seem to take the opposite view – that a prose compounded of extravagant metaphors, thereby resembling poetry, can actually be considered poetry (witness his famous printing of Walter Pater's description of the Mona Lisa as "poetry" in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse). This controversy should be borne in mind as we examine Masefield's numerous pre-war productions in both forms.

[Wyndham Lewis: Ezra Pound (1939)]

•

Masefield's first book of poems, published in 1902, was entitled (at his publisher's suggestion) Salt-Water Ballads. 'Written mainly in six exciting weeks,' it consisted, according to Masefield, 'chiefly of ballads expressing a longing for fresh air' (Masefield, 1967, p.viii). Most of the poems deal with sea-life, and draw on Masefield's own memories of his voyage around Cape Horn to Chile as an apprentice on a sailing-ship. The language in which it is written is most interesting – a sort of stylized colloquial argot:

Jake was a dirty Dago lad, an' he gave the skipper chin,
An' the skipper up an' took him a crack with an iron belaying-pin (Maseifield, 1941, p.21).

This also links up with his valiant attempts to introduce verisimilitude into the descriptions of life aboard ship. Masefield had himself served on a ship, had heard sailors talk – and he was prepared to describe the details of their daily round; even though, in the event, the language he used combined "literary" phrases with the pure vernacular (doctored with apostrophes and curlicues to give an effect of cohesion):

I'll never fare to sea again a-temptin' Davy Jones,
A-hearkening to the cruel sharks a-hungerin' for my bones (p.13).

This is obviously not an accurate transcript of seaman's conversation. Why, for example, is the 'g' left on 'hearkening' and taken off 'hungerin"? The prefix 'a-' frequently used by Masefield before the present participle _ seems also prompted more by considerations of metre and euphony, than by any suggestion that it represents a compound still actually to be heard.

It is more the atmosphere of ship-board life that Masefield is after, however, than the strict details – and his best tool for recreating this atmosphere is seaman's slang:

Loafin' around in Sailor Town, a-bluin' o' my advance,
I met a derelict donkeyman who led me a merry dance,
Till he landed me 'n' bleached me fair in the bar of a rum-saloon,
'N' there he spun me a juice of a yarn to this-yer brand of tune. (p.11)

Nor does a little judicious "heightening" of the language conflict with his intentions. In order to make almost any material into "poetry" a little writing-up is required how much more, then, for descriptions of "lower-class life" at sea!

Masefield's real achievement in this book lies in his ability to combine an accurate reflection of general tone and atmosphere, with a seeming verisimilitude in particulars (rather than in giving us a clear picture of the life of a sailor a hundred years ago). Nevertheless, he takes his pedagogical role seriously enough to provide us with a glossary of nautical terms and phrases at the back of the book:

Bloody. – An intensive derived from the substantive "blood", a name applied to the Bucks, Scowrers, and Mohocks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ...

Bollard. – ... A phallic or "sparklet"-shaped ornament of the dockside, of assistance to mariners in warping into or out of dock ...

Bull of Barney. – A beast mentioned in an unquotable sea-proverb. (p.45)[1]

This antiquarianism is seldom intrusive, though, and usually serves merely to give the impression of an author who knows what he is talking about. Still, perhaps the best moments in this early collection come when Masefield ignores quotidian reality and lets his imagination guide him, as in the poem 'Cape Horn Gospel':

'I'm a-weary of them there mermaids,'
Says old Bill's ghost to me;
'It ain't no place for a Christian
Below there – under sea.
For it's all blown sand and shipwrecks,
And old bones eaten bare,
And them cold fishy females
With long green weeds for hair.' (p.20)

Nor can this be regarded entirely as a flight of fancy, when one considers that Masefield is as much concerned with giving an accurate impression of sailors' yarns and folklore, as with delineating their everyday life. Indeed, it is this impression he gives of knowing everything there is to know about both which makes his readers prepared to accept a good deal that would otherwise ring false.

Salt-Water Ballads, then, would seem to owe as much to the example of other "balladeers", such as Dibdin or Bret Harte, as it does to direct contact with the sea and its mysteries. Masefield was a sailor, and must have known what they were like, but one suspects that few of them can have much resembled the 'old Bills' and 'Jakes' of his ballads. It is rather instructive, in this context, to examine his own remarks on the book:

Poet I'm not, and never shall be, but one or two of my rhymes have technical merits. Genius I'm not, but I'm pretty sure that I've kept my talents unrusted under pretty tough circumstances, and, by God's gilt-edged clouds, I'll have another smack at the shams and humbugs of this wicked world before I've done. (Smith, 1978, p.72)

The 'Poet I'm not' may be taken as false modesty – but phrases like 'by God's gilt-edged clouds' sound desperately "hearty" in a literary sort of way. Masefield is playing the "honest seaman" telling home-truths to shock the pampered aesthetes, whereas in fact he is as literary as any of them.

It is well known that Masefield – at the time, at any rate – hated the sea: 'The docks, and sailor town, and all the damning and heaving' (Smith, 1978, p.32) ('in comments that he wrote in the margins of the galley proofs of Ashley Gibson's article, "Mr John Masefield" [1909] ... Masefield explicitly denies ever having wished to go to sea at any time and dismisses sea life as something he had loathed unspeakably' (Drew, 1973, p.162)). He only, in fact, became reconciled to it when he saw how it could assist him in his real objective – becoming a writer. Even then, he actually wrote about it far less than people tend to assume – only one of his major narrative poems, and only eight of his 23 novels are substantially concerned with the sea.[2]

Constance Babington Smith quotes another three claims about the book from one of Masefield's letters:

I've copied no-one, and no capable critic with any knowledge of modern verse can deny that I have a literary personality uncoloured by extraneous influences ...

Speaking quite impartially I think the book deserves the recognition of a maritime people. It is something new said newly ...

There is such a deal of cant, shoddy, humbug, drivel etc. going around, it is quite likely the book'll get killed before Christmas, but I feel that, in any case, I've said a straight word sure to be recognized as such by some few in the Lord's good time. (1978, p.72)

“I’ve copied no-one ....” This is quite a considerable boast, and, as he himself admits, he can certainly be seen to have copied Yeats:

As to my debt to Yeats I am only too proud to admit it, but in one poem only ['The West Wind'] is there the slightest sign of imitation of his manner, and concerning that poem I talked with Yeats, and only put it into the book on his earnest recommendation. (Smith, 1978, p.72)

The influence certainly stretches beyond that one poem, and, indeed, the first line of what is still perhaps his best-known lyric, 'Sea-Fever': 'I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky'[3], echoes, without a doubt, Yeats's 'Innisfree': 'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree' (1977, p.44); (though Muriel Spark also quotes two suspiciously similar lines from Arthur Symons:

Give me a long white road, and the grey white path of the sea,
And the wind's will and the bird's will, and the heart-ache still in me.
– 'Wanderer's Song' (1898) (Spark, 1953, p.74)).

I mentioned in Chapter One that Masefield repudiated the influence of Kipling: 'I have never been influenced in any way by Rudyard Kipling's verse (which I hate, and which I haven't read for three or four years). Our methods are quite distinct' (Smith, 1978, p.72); but, as Gilbert Thomas puts it, 'Kipling, if he himself filled them with very different vintage, at least made the bottles into which Masefield's best inspiration was later to be poured' (Thomas, 1932, p.52). He provided, at any rate, a precedent for the use of a literary vernacular, and also inspired the title Salt-Water Ballads (which was not, as I have mentioned above, of Masefield's own choosing). Besides these two influences there is also that of the whole tradition of American lower-class balladry and popular song, as well as (more explicitly) that of the sea shanty – 'Many chanties are of great beauty and extreme antiquity' (Masefield, 1941, p.45), as he informs us in his 'glossary'.

'Speaking quite impartially I think the book deserves the recognition of a maritime people ... '. Having established his "literary" credentials as an original, Masefield now claims that his matter, too, is new – and is accurate enough to be of interest to his old shipmates as a true description of their (and his) world. Once again, one doubts that 'them cold fishy females / With long green weeds for hair' will be much more familiar to sailors than landsmen; though perhaps they might feel a sympathetic twinge when they read of Jake being battered with a belaying-pin! (In fairness to Masefield, however, one should mention that 'May Lamberton Becker reports that a sailor gave her a copy of A Mainsail Haul, saying "It's the real thing'" (Drew, 1973, p.165)).

'There is such a deal of cant, shoddy, humbug, drivel etc … '. The 'etc.' makes this seem a rather half-hearted repetition of the artist's traditional complaint against society: "Because of its truth and beauty, my work will probably go unnoticed". If it does go unnoticed, this will be a proof of its truth and beauty. If, however, it proves to be a success, then this is because 'some few' managed to recognize its merits 'in the Lord's good time'. There is perhaps some truth in the complaint, but there is also a good deal of posing. As it happens the book was neither a failure nor a huge success: in the words of his publisher, Grant Richards, it attracted 'immediate if not considerable attention' (Smith, 1978, p.73).

•

In the next year, 1903, Masefield published a second book of poems: Ballads. It has a rather complicated publishing history – reappearing, with considerable additions (and the omission of three of the original poems), in 1910; and again, in a form consisting of selections from both the 1903 and 1910 versions, in 1911. It will, however, be most convenient to confine ourselves here to the poems included in the 1903 edition.

The development had already begun in the latter poems of Salt-Water Ballads, but from now on he was to write no more poems in nautical "dialect" – that tone conveyed by missing out the letters of words and sprinkling the verse with bizarre technical expressions. No glossary was required for this new collection – instead, Masefield had started to experiment in the field of the conventional lyric; and was now prepared to speak in his own voice, rather than automatically adopting a "sailorman" or "jolly Jack Tar" mask.

Oh yesterday, I t'ink it was, while cruisin' down the street,
I met with Bill. – "Hullo," he says, "let's give the girls a treat" (Masefield, 1941, p.18)

has changed to:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. (p.54)

(Though Gilbert Thomas detects in this poem, too, 'something ... of Kipling's drier, scientific realism' (1932, p.54)). Or, perhaps less creditably, to:

Dusky it grows. The moon!
The dews descend.
Love, can this beauty in our hearts
end? (p.62)

Without having access to Masefield's earlier unpublished verse it is difficult to chart the precise stages of his poetic development, but one can feel fairly sure that he began with close imitation of his masters – especially Swinburne, Rossetti, and William Morris. This is revealed by an intensely romantic early sonnet, printed by Constance Babington Smith, which ends:

And all through noise of waters whose moist lips
Kissed the ribbed sand. Or wind whose gentle breath
Wakened Aeolian harps along the shore.
Yet from these chords my weary soul drew store
Of God, and though Sun, Moon and Stars eclipse
This harmony shall light me down to death. (1978, p.45)

Though quite a creditable pastiche of "nineties"-style verse, the lack of value of this sort of watered-down Swinburnianism was recognized by friends who complained 'He writes very young', and advised him to 'Get down from that high horse of yours' (Smith, 1978, p.45). This was while he was still in America.

Later, in England, he reacted violently against this initial romanticism – and, at first, went to the opposite extreme with vernacular ballads:

Now, Bill, ain't it prime to be a-sailin',
Slippin' easy, splashin' up the sea
Dossin snug aneath the weather-railin’,
Quiddin' bonded Jacky out a-lee? (p.29)

Even this, however, represents more of a revolution in the language than in the form of his verse – Masefield is still using the basic quatrains and ballad metre of his earlier poems.

And soon, mainly under the influence of Yeats, he managed to evolve a much more fluent and individual idiom – one which recalled all of the various influences on him, but which was still peculiar to himself. One can observe this process, at first in pieces of obvious Yeats-imitation, such as 'The Ballad of Sir Bors':

Would I could win some quiet and rest, and a little ease,
In the cool grey hush of the dusk, in the dim green place of the trees,
Where the birds are singing, singing, singing, crying aloud
The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas. (p.51)

(An echo of 'To the Rose upon the Rood of Time' which begins: 'Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!' (Yeats, 1977, p.35)). And later in more original and characteristic lyrics, such as 'Captain Stratton's Fancy', 'Cargoes', and 'Spanish Waters'. It is true that many of the most famous poems in the Ballads collection would only be added in the second edition – 'Twilight', 'A Creed','Fragments', 'C.L.M.' – but already in the 1903 version Masefield had attained maturity, and written lyrics of a standard he would never surpass.

[John Masefield: A Mainsail Haul (1905 {1918})]

•

A comparable development to the evolution of Masefield's verse can be traced in his prose over the next couple of years. His first prose work, a collection of sea-sketches and stories called A Mainsail Haul, was published in 1905. It was compiled mainly from the miscellaneous short articles which Masefield had been writing for a variety of periodicals for some years past, and shows the extent to which he was constricted by his "seaman" reputation in his choice of subjects. This may also explain why it echoes so closely the techniques already employed, in verse, in Salt-Water Ballads – which had a similar origin.

In fact the extent of the resemblance is quite uncanny (which is why I quoted, above, a tribute to this book as bearing on the verisimilitude of Salt-Water Ballads). There is the same stylized vernacular, the same dependence on sailors' "yarns", the same (in this case slightly obtrusive) antiquarianism – roughly half of the book consisting of detailed biographies of famous (or not-sofamous) pirates, with frequent quotations from obscure sources and citations of lists of authorities. What is more, at least one of the poems in Salt-Water Ballads, 'Port of Many Ships', is to be found in prose form, with the same title, in this book of "short stories".

The prose version begins with a description of how the 'great sea-snake' (Masefield, 1918, p.9) will rise up from his 'sea cave, all roofed with coral' on judgement day, and lead all the ships in the world to 'an anchorage in Kingdom Come'.

It will be a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands gathered forward, singing. They'll have no watches to stand, no ropes to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except singing and beating on the bell. (Masefield, 1918, p.12)

The poetic version is shorter, a mere description of this anchorage:

"It's a sunny pleasant anchorage, is Kingdom Come,
Where crews is always layin' aft for double-tots o’ rum,
'N' there's dancin' 'n' fiddlin' of ev'ry kind o' sort,
It's a fine place for sailor-men is that there port.
‘N’ I wish –
I wish as I was there. (Masefield, 1941, p.19)

As a journalist, Masefield must have realized that a single idea could provide two sets of "copy". (Of the stories in A Mainsail Haul, 'The best', according to Masefield, were ' ... told to me by an old sailor of the name of Wallace Blair' (Handley-Taylor, 1960, p.27), and this must apply to Salt-Water Ballads, too – especially as one of the poems there is entitled 'One of Wally's Yarns').

Considering the results of these two different methods, then, the prose would seem at first sight to have the better of the comparison. There are fewer abbreviations and apostrophes, more natural speech-rhythms – less, in short, of the Kiplingesque "lower-class language". More happens in the prose, too – there is movement, action, imagination – and a quite remarkable flight of ideas. But it is only fair to say that elsewhere in the book Masefield is capable of writing sentences like: 'and out he pulls a chart with a red crost on it, like in them Deadwood Dicky books' (1918, p.4), which is as stylized "low" language as any in Salt-Water Ballads. Generally speaking, though, Masefield's reflection of the vernacular is less trammelled and far more natural in the early prose stories than in the poems:

'Yes, ghosts,' says the parson. 'And by ghosts I mean sperrits. And by sperrits I mean white things. And by white things I mean things as turn your hair white. And there's red devils there, and blue devils there, and a great gold queen a-waiting for a man to kiss her.' (1918, p.53)

One could certainly claim that this was more genuinely "poetic" than most of Masefield's ballads. Note the beautifully balanced speech-rhythms going from 'ghosts', to 'sperrits', to 'white things', to 'things as turn your hair white'. It is not precisely parallelism, as in the Hebrew Old Testament – but something less restrictive: a sort of phrasal patterning which is very satisfying to the ear.

The comparison should not be allowed to go all one way, however. Masefield's short prose pieces suffer from a certain capriciousness, and tend to rely on the vigour of the language employed to disguise their lack of narrative movement. 'Port of Many Ships', as a story, is simply a progressive series of descriptions – there is no purpose to it except as an exercise of the "fancy". This is not to condemn the stories – in fact many of them are very charming – but they fail to do much more than report "poetic" scenes and incidents in prose. There is none of that 'immeasurably difficult art of good prose' with which Pound was concerned.

The poems, on the other hand, fulfil the expectations aroused by their form with far greater fidelity. 'Port of Many Ships', as a poem, is a pleasant vignette – and the refrain:''N' I wish – / I wish as I was there' provides it with as much point as can be expected of such a piece.

They are, as Masefield says, poems of longing – and this refrain expresses it very pithily. Similarly, the poem from which I quoted earlier, 'Cape Horn Gospel', succeeds because of the evocative power of its description of a drowned man under the sea:

And I've often wondered since, Jan,
How his old ghost stands to fare
Long 0' them cold fishy females
With long green weeds for hair. (Masefield, 1941, p.21)

We can perhaps best summarize, then, by saying that in these two early books – Masefield's first books, respectively, of prose and verse – the poems are certainly preferable in terms of form. That is to say, they more satisfactorily perform the function expected of them expressing a single image or emotion with all the concentration required of poetry (at the time, at any rate). The prose, however, is more successful in terms of language. Its phrases are more vigorous and felicitous, and its imaginative detail more striking. It still suffers, though, from a certain arbitrariness.

[John Masefield: A Tarpaulin Muster (1907 {1920})]

•

Some of these objections are rather more effectively countered by Masefield's second book of stories, A Tarpaulin Muster, published in 1907. The stories are now no longer generalized seaman's yarns, but tales written from his own experience (just as the lyrics of Ballads had begun to speak in the poet's own voice, rather than in the sailors' argot of Salt-Water Ballads). They begin with phrases like: 'When I was working in a New York saloon I saw something of the city police' (Masefield, 1920, p.201), or 'Ten years ago I was "in the half-deck" of a four-masted barque' (p.194).

Masefield, then, had learnt something of the art of stylistic register by the time of this second book. He writes in ordinary language when it is appropriate to do so – when speaking of his own observations, or talking generally; and only employs a more stylized vernacular when he is quoting someone else's speech. Just as in Ballads, this lends him a greater flexibility and range, and succeeds in giving the stories in A Tarpaulin Muster far more importance as stories. Indeed one of those in this collection, 'Anty Bligh', has often been reprinted in anthologies of ghost stories – a genre whose devotees are particularly impatient with tales where nothing "happens".

The most interesting of these early stories, though, in terms of later developments, is 'Edward Herries' – the story of a poet, the 'Herries' of the title, who sallies out to gain experience of life in order to make himself worthy of the woman he loves. It is a dreadful, lachrymose, overwritten story: "'I'm a lame crock, indeed," he said, "I blush when I pass two men at a street corner'" (Masefield, 1920, p.19); but it is also the first example of real fictional projection on Masefield's part.

It is difficult to decide whether Herries is more objectionable when he is feeling sorry for himself, or being exultant: '''Now, my beloved, my beauty, my share of God upon earth, your knight goes out into the sun'" (p.28). Certainly, in terms of merit, the story is far below even the simple sketches of A Mainsail Haul – but at least it has a plot and a character (of sorts). When Herries returns from his travels he finds himself too coarse for his ultra-refined lady, and has to stumble off again into the darkness. Herries may be fairly rudimentary, but he stands at the head of a long line of Masefield "suffering-martyr" heroes – from Captain Margaret to Pompey the Great – and thus marks a first step forward into the world of the novels; and out of the comparative dead-end of the folktale or sea anecdote.

'Edward Herries' is everyone's idea of a typical "poet's short story" – full of fulsome rhetoric and overblown emotions – but in plot it rather resembles some of Hardy's novels and stories. For one thing, it is in two parts the second beginning 'It was in autumn, five years later, that he came home again' (Masefield, 1920, p.31) – which recalls the "revenant" theme – the returned traveller finding out that he has come too late – which is so prominent in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge (the returning husbands, in both cases); and, indeed, in The Return of the Native itself. Masefield did not know Hardy well, 'only as a devoted disciple, who could not mean anything to the Master, yet longed to cut the throats of anyone who doubted the Master's mastery' (Masefield, 1983, p.456), but his influence – more in terms of mood than in specific resemblances of language and style – is strong throughout all of Masefield's fiction. (Perhaps the most pleasing link between them, though, was the model ship which Masefield made for Hardy:

in talk once TH said that as a little boy he had longed for a model & had never had one; so I asked if I might try to make him one; so I tried to make "The Triumph, the new-rigged ship", of the old song he quotes somewhere (in a poem). It looked quite gay when new, but I was a wretched hand at tools at the best. I blush to see it now, but I think TH was pleased: & that is much to remember. (Maseefield, 1983, p.114))

So, while Masefield, under the influence of Yeats, had reached maturity as a lyric poet – his prose, though helped along by Hardy's example, was still at a rather rudimentary stage. Discussion of further works in both forms will therefore be necessary before any really fruitful comparison can be made.

[John Masefield: A Tarpaulin Muster (1907)]

•

Besides these two books of short stories, Masefield had already, by 1907, written two extensive 'historical essays' – Sea Life in Nelson's Time (1905); and On the Spanish Main (1906), which is sub-titled 'Some English Forays on the Isthmus of Darien. With a description of the Buccaneers and a short account of old-time ships and sailors'. Both are written in a competent, straightforward prose without frills.

The Nelson book has recently (1971) been republished, with notes to bring it up to date, and is apparently still an important source of information on the period. But On the Spanish Main is of more interest for our purposes, particularly as it deals with many of the same subjects as Masefield's early novels. At least one major episode (Drake's raid on Porto Bello) was to reappear, substantially unchanged, in Captain Margaret (1908); and the mood of this early description, below, of the horrors of the South American jungle is echoed in innumerable passages in his later work, from Lost Endeavour (1910) to Live and Kicking Ned (1939):

They then set forward through the forest, over their ankles in swampy mud, up to their knees sometimes in rotting leaves, clambering over giant tree trunks, wading through stagnant brooks, staggering and slipping and swearing, faint with famine; a very desperate gang of cutthroats. So they marched, the things called garapatadas, or wood-ticks, of which some six sorts flourish there, dropped down upon them in scores, to add their burning bites to the venom of the mosquitoes. In a moist atmosphere of at least 90°, with heavy arms to carry, that march must have been terrible. Even the buccaneers, men hardened to the climate, could not endure it: they straggled back to the boats, and re-embarked. (Masefield, 1922a, p.144)

Masefield has drawn his story from contemporary accounts, and expanded it both with his knowledge of the terrain and the period, and his own 'vigorous fancy' (Graves, 1947, p.v). Phrases like 'that march must have been terrible' tell us when Masefield is embellishing an originally spare narrative but he is also careful to preserve any particularly picturesque phrases from the original account: ‘”His voice caused infinite joy to all the Pirates," who made sure that the fastness would be well provisioned, and that at last they might "afford something to the ferment of their stomachs, which now was grown so sharp that it did gnaw their very bowels"' (1922a, p.145). This gives a rather peculiar flavour to the narrative – as it is, on the one hand, very readable (Masefield was always good at writing clear, uncomplicated prose); and yet, on the other, rather antiquarian in atmosphere – what with the frequent quotations from (largely unnamed) authorities, and the little tit-bits of information which Masefield cannot resist including. ('A moist atmosphere of at least 90°' cannot be from a contemporary account; and neither, one suspects, is the information about 'garapatadas, or woodticks, of which some six sorts flourish there').

Would it be going too far to describe Masefield as labouring to make his book both 'dulce et utile' – using his skill as a writer for the one, and his large stores of specialized knowledge for the other? Certainly, it is a formula which would appear in many of his later novels with their carefully accounted-for "period" setting, brought to life by one of Masefield's customarily exciting stories.

[John Masefield: The English Review (1911)

•

Having discussed this example of Masefield's narrative prose, it would now seem appropriate to consider his long narrative poems – of which the first, The Everlasting Mercy, was published in 1911.

This poem had an almost unprecedented success. As Frank Swinnerton puts it 'he did something which at that time no other young poet could do – he made the general public read what he had written ... it was read, declaimed, interrupted, and discussed with a sort of inflamed fever of controversy such as, in a case of poetry, I cannot in memory match' (Swinnerton, 1969, p.209). Austin Harrison claims: 'Probably no poem ever created such a stir since Byron's Don Juan' (Simmons, 1930, p.34). Masefield, too, thought highly of it – it was 'In this year,' he tells us, that 'I first found what I could do' (1967, p.viii).

The Everlasting Mercy itself is an exceptionally vigorous and compelling narrative, told in a potent doggerel measure – the Hudibrastic couplet – which helps to sustain the drive of the story. The climax is well placed and well prepared-for, and the intense idealism observable in the poem is appropriate to the choice of subject (the conversion of the drunken poacher Saul Kane to a belief in the 'everlasting mercy' of Christ: 'The holy bread, the food unpriced, / Thy everlasting mercy, Christ' (Masefield, 1941, p.127)).

Like Sinister Street, The Everlasting Mercy attracted attention at first because of its outspokenness. It was not simply the fact that Masefield used the 'intensive' bloody (he had already done that in Salt-Water Ballads), but the number of times he did it. 'I think it contained eighty repetitions of the word "bloody" and ran to eighty pages of print' (Simmons, 1930, p.34), says the editor of the English Review, Austin Harrison. Mr. Frank Sidgwick corrects him, however, saying: '(The facts are that the poem occupied forty-four pages of the "English Review," and as written by the author contained the said word not eighty but eleven times.) Mr. Harrison further claims that ... "these eighty bloodies had saved the Review" which was struggling with adversity. But, as many readers will remember with amusement, and as can be readily ascertained by reference to the October, 1911, issue, the "English Review" did not print the offending word, preferring to leave eleven blank spaces to be filled in according to the taste and fancy of the reader. In preparing for press our less reticent edition, I had the painful duty of inserting the missing word in those eleven blank spaces' (Simmons, 1930, p.35). Of the most famous, and offensive, lines:

I’ll bloody him a bloody fix,
I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks. (Masefield, 1941, p.100)

Eric Partridge says 'Mr. Masefield was wrong to use bloody thus before burn: such a character would have said "bloody well burn'" (Partridge, 1970, p.81).

[John Masefield: The Everlasting Mercy (1911)]

Leaving aside these niceties of invective, however – the poem's continuing reputation was based, not on the word bloody, but on the sheer drive and energy of its short couplets. As Robert Graves puts it:

Those pungent, urgent, violent lines, with their careless breaches of long-standing taboos, exhilarated us youngsters (Lamont, 1972, p.105).

The poem is told in the first person, in a reasonably unobtrusive mixture of colloquial and standard English (managing to avoid the stylistic excesses of Salt-Water Ballads).

A few lines should suffice to show its general tenor:

But 'Spector Drew was sleeping sweet,
His head upon a charges sheet,
Under the gas-jet flaring full,
Snorting and snoring like a bull,
His bull cheeks puffed, his bull lips blowing,
His ugly yellow front teeth showing. (Masefield, 1941, p.95)

The advantages of verse to Masefield as a medium for storytelling are very apparent in this, his first long poem.

The vivid descriptive touches – 'bull cheeks', 'bull lips', 'ugly yellow front teeth' – are subordinated to his overall effect by the pull of the short couplet form (something which was never really to happen in his long prose works, which tend to lack structure, and to dissolve into a series of individual vignettes and scenes – impinging upon, rather than directly contributing to, the whole).

Verse also had disadvantages for him, however. As the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature puts it: 'he is said by some to have lacked the necessary technique for ... formal poems' (Mulgan, 1963, p.334). Bathos, and sheer badness, are always ready to rear their heads in a long Masefield poem, especially when writing them had become more of a routine – when he had reached his third, his fourth – his sixth. Lines like: 'She touched the lust of those who served her turn, / And chief among her men was Shepherd Ern' (1941, p.137) abound. It is true that on occasion the same tone of voice could yield quite effective results:

She sighed, to hint that pleasure's grave was dug,
And smiled within to see him such a mug. (1941, p.144)

However, it is difficult to avoid having one's teeth set on edge by arbitrary-sounding rhymes like:

Lest she, whose beauty made his heart's blood cruddle,
Should be another man's to kiss and cuddle. (1941, p.141)

No doubt Masefield could justify his use of the word 'cruddle' (a clear case of metathesis from 'curdle'), cite examples of its use, and show its accuracy in context – but all that remains extraneous to the poem, where we actually meet it. Where it stands, as the key word in a rhyming couplet at the end of a stanza of Rhyme Royal, it sounds, perhaps unjustly, like a word made up on the spur of the moment to get out of a hole.

Indeed, this sort of awkward rhyme is perhaps the most obtrusive single blemish on Masefield's work in verse:

"Why not a man like him?" she said. "What next?"
By this they'd reached her cottage in the dim,
Among the daisies that the cold had kexed. (1941, p.166)

He was fairly intransigent on the matter, however. A friend who questioned the use of the word 'drave' in the following lines:

O Passer-by, remember these two Friends,
Who loved this Church of Christ, and greatly gave
To build anew the wreck the bombings drave. (Lamont, 1972, p.55)

received the reply:

The word "drave" is one of the good old strong "pasts," altering the vowel, that were much in use here, when and where I was a boy. I like to use it, & keep it in use, just as we still keep "gave," about which there is now just a tiny tendency: a sort of recognizable weakness that Government ought to check. (Lamont, 1972, p.54)

In other words, he considered it to be his duty to use old words and dialect expressions' – obsolescent forms – in order to keep them in use. Any irregularity or incongruity in the poem was of minor importance by comparison. In this case, certainly, the antiquarian had overpowered the artist. (It rather reminds one of Robert Bridges' remark about the archaisms in Ezra Pound's Personae: 'We'll get 'em all back; we'll get 'em all back' (Paige, , 1951, p.247)). We can understand Masefield's motives, but, nevertheless – along with untidy rhymes like: 'High Street/ … lie sweet/ ... widow in the Bye Street' (1941, p.133) (in The Widow in the Bye Street, 1912) – it tends to leave his verse constantly in danger of degenerating into doggerel. And, as Muriel Spark discerns:

Nor can it be said, in these cases where in the course of a single work, the very bad and the very good stand side by side, that the good compensates for the bad. They are both so alien to each other, so drawn as it were from different reserves of consciousness, that the relationship of compensation is inapplicable. (Spark, 1953, p.19)

[John Masefield: The Tragedy of Nan (1909 {1922})]

•

In summary, then – from the comparison of Salt-Water Ballads and A Mainsail Haul, Masefield's first books of prose and verse, we have learnt that his prose is more fluent and flexible in expression, but his poetry more satisfactorily subordinated to an overall intention.

From the further comparison of Ballads (1903) with A Tarpaulin Muster, it has been possible to conclude that Masefield matured faster as a poet than as a writer of prose fiction – and that it is therefore not very helpful to set his more finished early lyrics against stumbling prentice-pieces like 'Edward Herries'.

Finally, from the separate discussions of his extended narrative prose, in On the Spanish Main, and at least two of his long narrative poems (The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye Street), we have learnt of his, at times uneasy, balancing of the twin roles of antiquary and artist. In the prose this seems fairly well under control; but in poetry it tended to encourage him in his fatal delusion that extrinsic explanations are sufficient to justify bizarre and obtrusive tricks of language. Masefield's poetry is therefore stylistically uneven, and can slip easily into doggerel in the course of a single stanza.

One charge against his prose which I have not yet dealt with is Frank Swinnerton's, that 'it took him a good many years to conquer a too staccato and highly self-conscious brevity of sentence' (84). This is said à propos of Captain Margaret, and is not really applicable to any of the extracts so far quoted; so I have chosen a passage from one of Masefield's early plays, The Tragedy of Nan (1909), to illustrate this tendency at its worst:

There was a strong man, a kind man. He was forty-nine years old. He was the best thatcher in the three counties. He was the sweetest singer. I've known teams goin' to the field stop to 'ear my dad sing. And the red coats come. And a liar swore. And that strong man was killed. Sudden. That voice of his'n was choked out with a cord. And there was liars, and thieves, and drunken women, and dirty gentlemen. They all stood in the cold to see that man choked. They stop up all night, playing cards, so as they should 'ear 'is singin' stopped. For it goes round the voice the cord do. And they draw a nightcap down so as 'e shan't see 'is girl a-crying. (Masefield, 1922b, p.65)

This is certainly staccato enough for anybody, but we must remember that it is the girl, Nan, who is speaking – at a moment of high emotion – and that the full-stops merely represent speech pauses. She is an uneducated girl (the dialect in which she speaks is, according to Wilson Knight (Handley-Taylor, 1950, p.31), Gloucester – although it seems a fairly typical stage "lower-class" English); and she therefore cannot be expected to speak in compound sentences. 'And the red coats come. And a liar swore' could be just as easily written 'And the red coats come, and a liar swore'. The only reason why commas are used to divide phrases in some places, and full-stops in others, is in order to show the actress playing the role (originally Lillah McCarthy) where to place her emphases. It may be, as Swinnerton says, 'self-conscious' – but it is also, in this context at any rate, effective. Only Masefield's dramatic prose is really susceptible to this criticism, in any case (the 'dialect' and pseudo-Syngean "poetic speech": 'That voice of his'n was choked out by a cord', is, to my mind, a much more sensible blemish).

Having said something of his dramatic prose – which seems in some ways as stylized and "questionable" as anything in the poems (though in the case of 'Nan' it is more the emotion than the actual language which is questionable) it is only fair to look at some of his dramatic verse.

This is because one cannot really judge a narrative poet – whose success depends on 'the grand sweeping effects that take a quarter of an hour to develop themselves' (87) – from isolated quotations (generally designed to reveal particular infelicities). And let me say at once that the verse play Philip the King (1914 – about the Spanish Armada) does seem to me to represent a higher standard of verse than the narrative poems immediately preceding it. This is partially because of the technical interest aroused by the constant alternation of metres for each new scene but also because Masefield's poetry intended for oral delivery tends to be clearer and, one must admit, more "heightened" than his poetry intended simply to be read. A single quotation will have to suffice:

PHILIP [alone].

De Leyva, friend, Whom I shall never see, never again,
This misery that I feel is over Spain.
O God, beloved God, in pity send
That blessed rose among the thorns – an end:
Give a bruised spirit peace.
[He kneels. A muffled march of the drums.]
(Masefield, 1941, p.361)

[John Masefield: The Tragedy of Nan (1909 {1922})]

•

I have deliberately postponed until now the question of whether it is the verse or the prose which is the more "poetic". The truth is – neither could satisfy the most rigorous definitions: Frost's poetry is 'that which gets lost ... in translation' (Burnshaw, 1964, p.xi), Eliot's 'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood'[4], Pound's 'language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree'. This is, in fact, the biggest problem with Masefield – both his prose and verse have persistent virtues; and persistent vices – both are "poetic"; neither great poetry. If, one feels, he could have combined the discipline of his verse with the fluency and originality of his prose, he might have created a masterpiece. As it is, we are left with a series of flawed works – some exhibiting a talent so great that it would be scant exaggeration to call it genius – others predominantly failures.

Which one prefers is a matter of choice – the controlled drive of the narrative poems, or the vivid action sequences of the novels. But the fact remains: neither would have been possible without the other; and neither can be truly assessed in isolation from its counterpart. As Muriel Spark says:

The abundance of Mr. Masefield's work is something that must be reckoned with, not in a spirit of quantitative judgement, but with the thought in mind that the abundance, in such variety as Mr. Masefield has given, is by itself a telling thing. (1953, p.13)

[John Masefield: The Daffodil Fields (1913)]

1. Alternative etymologies have been proposed for 'bloody': 'by'r Lady', for instance; but Masefield uses the one accepted by most commentators. See Partridge (1956, p.66); also the essay in his book Words, Words, Words! (1970, pp.79-90).

2. The poem is Dauber (1913); the eight novels: Captain Margaret (1908), Martin Hyde (1910), Lost Endeavour (1910), Jim Davis (1911), The Bird of Dawning (1933), The Taking of the Gry (1934), Victorious Troy (1935), and Dead Ned (1938).

3. First printed as 'I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky', in The Speaker, London (Feb 15, 1902). Then as 'I must down to the sea again' in The Living Age, Boston (March 22, 1902). Then (once more), as 'I must go down to the sea again ... ' in Salt-Water Ballads. London: Grant Richards, November 19, 1902. (Information from Simmons, 1930, pp.3-4). It was then revised to 'I must down to the seas again ... ' in Collected Poems. London: Heinemann, 1923. Then again to 'I must go down to the sea again ...' in Poems. London: Heinemann, 1946, which must be presumed to be the definitive version.

4. Quoted on back endpapers of the Penguin edition of T. S. Eliot's Selected Prose (1953).

[John Masefield: The English Review (1913)]

Works Cited:

Berry, Francis. John Masefield: The Narrative Poet. Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1967.

Burnshaw, Stanley, ed. The Poem Itself. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

Craig, W. J. ed. The Oxford Edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 3 vols. 1911-12. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939.

Drew, Fraser B. John Masefield's England: A Study of the National Themes in His Work. NJ: Associated University Presses, 1973.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose. Ed. John Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber, 1975.

Graves, Robert. Claudius the God. London: Methuen & Co. 1947.

Handley-Taylor, Geoffrey, ed. New Hyperion: A Symposium of Poetry and Criticism. Oxford: George Ronald, 1950.

Handley-Taylor, Geoffrey, ed. John Masefield, O.M.: A Bibliography. London: Cranbrook Tower Press, 1960.

Harvey, Sir Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 4th ed. rev. Dorothy Eagle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Lamont, Corliss, ed. Remembering John Masefield. London: Kaye & Ward Ltd. 1972, p.10s.

Lewis, C. Day, ed. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto & Windus, 1977.

Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. 1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Masefield, John. A Mainsail Haul. 1905. London: Elkin Mathews, 1918.

Masefield, John. On the Spanish Main. 1906. London: Methuen & Co., 1922a.

Masefield, John. A Tarpaulin Muster. 1907. London: Grant Richards, 1920.

Masefield, John. The Tragedy of Nan and Other Plays. 1909. London: Grant Richards, 1922b.

Masefield, John. Collected Poems. 1923. London: Heinemann, 1926.

Masefield, John. Collected Poems. 1923. 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1941.

Masefield, John. Poems. London: Heinemann, 1946.

Masefield, John. Poems: Complete Edition with Recent Poems. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967.

Masefield, John. Letters to Reyna. Ed. William Buchan. London: Buchan & Enright, 1983.

Mulgan, John, ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Paige, D. D., ed. The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. London: Faber, 1951.

Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.

Partridge, Eric. Words, Words, Words! New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1974.

Perrault, Charles. Contes de Perrault. Ed. Gilbert Rouger. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1981.

Simmons, Charles H. A Bibliography of John Masefield. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930.

Smith, Constance Babington. John Masefield: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Spark, Muriel. John Masefield. London: Peter Nevill, 1953.

Sternlicht, Sanford. John Masefield. Twayne English Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1977.

Swinnerton, Frank. The Georgian Literary Scene 1910-1935. 1935. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969.

Thomas, Gilbert. John Masefield. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1932.

Yeats, W. B. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1977.

[John Masefield: Captain Margaret (1908)]

Chapter 3:

2009-04-21T07:54:00.023+12:00

[John Masefield: Captain Margaret (1908)]

Captain Margaret

(i) The Novel

John Masefield in 1908 was not a contented man. As he himself put it: 'I was then living wholly in London, and thinking it a dark, dismal, and oppressive city. I longed for the open spaces and freedom of life that I had known in the past' (Masefield, 1967, p.viii).[1] The amount of hack work that he was being forced to do in order to support himself and his family was also a considerable burden. This hardship was, moreover, nothing new. For the past decade, as he attempted to establish himself in London, life had been a constant struggle for him.

On his return from America in 1897, Masefield had been prevailed upon to accept a job as a clerk in London, but this was never seen by him as anything but a temporary expedient. The ambition to become a writer which had originally impelled him to come home had not left him; and he seems, indeed, to have felt rather guilty about the "lowliness" of the function he was performing instead (as he reveals in a letter written to Laurence Binyon):

I have reproached myself, since our conversation, with having shown, perhaps, something of a lack of frankness in replying to your query as to my present occupation.

I think I ought to have answered you in a more straightforward manner.

I am a clerk in a bank.(Smith, 1978, p.65)

The grimness in that last sentence may sound a little over-portentous – but the depth of Masefield's discouragement cannot be doubted.

So it comes as no surprise to learn that when his friends conspired together to lift him out of this daily drudgery (as in the case of T. S. Eliot twenty years later); Masefield (unlike Eliot) was glad to accept their help. He worked at first as secretary to a picture exhibition in Wolverhampton, and later as a free-lance journalist; and managed to publish a first book of poems, Salt-Water Ballads, in 1902 – which established him (at least to those in the know) as a new poetic voice.

All this changed when, in 1903, he decided to marry Constance Crommelin, an Irish school-teacher whom he had met at one of Laurence Binyon's parties. Masefield knew that in order to marry he would have to greatly increase the amount of journalistic work he was doing, and perhaps even accept a regular job on a newspaper (since Constance had little money of her own), but this was a risk he was prepared to take. 'I am now going to grind out work like a barrel-organ on the August Bank' (Smith, 1978, p.81), as he wrote in a letter to Mrs. Jack Yeats. He began to review books for the Manchester Guardian, and eventually accepted an office job with them which involved 'working in Manchester' (Smith, 1978, p.88), in late 1904. The strain of this, combined with his other responsibilities, proved too much, however; and he was forced to resign after five months – continuing, nevertheless, to review books and write articles for the paper.

Anthologies, editions, introductions, essays, and sketches poured from Masefield's pen; but he was still, in 1908, having trouble making a living from writing. As he wrote to his sister and brother-in-law:

I'm afraid I can't possibly manage a weekend. I work seven days a week alas … You taste real luxury, fifty-two Sundays, four or five Bank Holidays, and three weeks clear, or 70-odd days a year. (Smith, 1978, p.93)

Some forms of writing are more profitable than others, however – as he appears to have been thinking when he wrote this complaint to W. B. Yeats in 1904:

I cannot write prose all day, and verses when the prose is done. I have written 160,000 words (the length of two novels) this year. (Smith, 1978, p.85)

This, in itself, explains why Masefield published no new books of poems between 1903 and 1910. It also shows him already thinking in terms of novel lengths. After all, if it were necessary to produce such a large amount of prose, why should one not put it in the less ephemeral form of a novel?

The theatre had already occurred to him as a possible way out of his difficulties. 'He had been writing plays for years – and, while his first to be produced, The Campden Wonder, had been more of a succès d'estime than a commercial venture, his second, The Tragedy of Nan, was hailed by public and critics alike.

Nevertheless, even this expedient proved insufficient for his needs. For years past he had been reviewing books – in a letter written in 1904 'he mentioned that he had got "a page of reviewing 20 books weekly", and in others he referred to "24 books to review at once" and "over 80 books to review'" (Smith, 1978, p.86) – and we know that most of these books were novels. What is more, his novel notices were 'the shortest and most incisive that we had. He could pack an extraordinary amount of criticism into a short paragraph' (Smith, 1978, p.86). In the Edwardian literary atmosphere – with the novelist in the preeminent position – a novel was the obvious solution to his dilemma.

Masefield certainly had the principal qualities required – most important of all, perhaps, a considerable experience of prose-writing, often at some length (as in his historical essays). He had also acquired a knowledge of what the contemporary novel was expected to contain – from reviewing, and (presumably) from general reading of novels in French and English. Finally, he had a subject-matter which came ready to hand – ships and the sea. (Masefield had reviewed some of Conrad's books – but, generally, their areas of interest cannot be said to overlap appreciably).

Even with all these arguments in favour of a novel, Masefield still required some prompting. He had, by now, acquired a literary agent: C. F. Cazenove, and, 'according to Grant Richards, who until 1910 was Masefield's main publisher, Cazenove and he "conspired" together, and as a result Masefield's two first novels were published in 1908 and 1909' (Smith, 1978, pp.696-97) – respectively, Captain Margaret and Multitude and Solitude. 'Fiction on this scale did not come easily to Masefield at first; he later admitted that he had to force himself to compose these two full-length novels' (Smith, 1978, p.97).

That Masefield – seeking to establish himself as a writer – would sooner or later produce a novel was almost inevitable. Nevertheless, he was obviously reluctant to begin – perhaps partially because he was intimidated by the sheer amount of work involved; but more probably because he was afraid of being "type-cast" as a novel-writer, and thus losing his impetus to produce poetry. After all, did not 'Mr. Nixon' tell Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it. (Pound, 1971, p.179)

(Arnold Bennett, the real-life 'Mr. Nixon', found The Street of To-Day (1911), Masefield's third "serious" novel, 'difficult to read' (Hamilton, 1925, p.47) – but he certainly expected him to go on and write 'more and better novels' (Hamilton, 1925, p.54)).

Nevertheless, the potential rewards – both in terms of financial gain and artistic recognition – were too great to be ignored. Whatever his scruples, Masefield had by now turned himself into a thoroughly professional writer; so the novel – a long novel, of around 130,000 words – did eventually reach a conclusion.

•

Captain Margaret, then, was published on the 17th of June, 1908, in an edition of 2,000 copies (1,000 of them for sale in America). Swinnerton, after complaining of the. 'staccato and highly self-conscious brevity' of Masefield's sentences (a charge I have cursorily dealt with in Chapter Two), goes on to say 'the first "Captain Margaret" I ever had in my hand was a library copy, in which some previous reader had written upon the first page: "This reads like the attempt of a child of five to write a book" (Swinnerton, 1969, p.210). Certainly, Masefield's prose does not remind us of Henry James's or George Meredith's – but that is, if anything, a recommendation to the modern reader.

The book begins:

The short summer night was over; the stars were paling; there was a faint light above the hills. The flame in the ship's lantern felt the day beginning. A cock in the hen-coop crowed, flapping his wings. The hour was full of mystery. Though it was still, it was full of the suggestion of noise. There was a rustle, a murmur, a sense of preparation. (1Masefield, 1974, p.1)

These sentences are short; but they build up a cumulative effect. In any case, their brevity is not obtrusive – what is more, Masefield was deliberately disciplining himself to avoid an opposite and perhaps more heinous error. As he complained earlier, in 1902, when his first autobiographical articles were appearing in the Speaker:

Writing plain narrative is the very devil ... I am too flamboyant and when I feel really 'inspired' I write the most turgid slush that ever sickened a critic. (Smith, 1978, p.71)

This fault, though (if it ever really existed), could only be said to apply to some of his earliest stories and sketches. By this time, at any rate, Masefield's prose had become what it has always been acknowledged to be: clear, simple and fluent.

It is difficult to understand what the rest of Swinnerton's comment (about the 'child of five') can be referring to. Certainly, as we shall see, some of the events and characterizations in the novel are rather strange; but, even so, it seems difficult to find fault with Masefield's basic technical proficiency as a novelist. It is, after all, a first novel – and first novels have certain characteristic defects, mainly of tempo and spacing. Things tend to happen too quickly in the story of a novice, without sufficient attention being paid to each event. Masefield, however, handles these problems of a lengthy narrative with consummate ease. Indeed – perhaps because of his training as a reviewer – if he errs at all, it is on the side of too slavishly supplying what his readers want. Novelists at that time were, as is well known, rather prone to luxuriate in long pages of description (Conrad is a case in point) – and Masefield obediently follows suit. Not until later would he develop his own particular non-stop, "breathless" idiom and tone.

Masefield, too, does anything but the unexpected in his choice of subject and period for this, his first novel. His early articles and poems had been about the sea, which gave him an obvious precedent. The sea implies a voyage – which, in its turn, requires three things: a crew, a ship, and a destination. The destination was natural – the Caribbean coast of South America – an area which fascinated Masefield throughout his life (and whose background he knew well from having written about it in On the Spanish Main two years earlier). In order to include the buccaneers and other picturesque denizens of the coast, the era would have to be the sixteenth or seventeenth century. And, in fact, his period is the reign of James II, 1685-88.

The ship in the novel, the Broken Heart, was perhaps even more important. Masefield had a lifelong passion for sailing-ships (as opposed to 'Dirty British coasters' (Masefield, 1941, p.54)) – something which is revealed most clearly in his long poem and book devoted to the Wanderer of Liverpool. There are also numerous ships in his later novels: notably, the Bird of Dawning, in the novel of that name; and the Pathfinder, in Sard Harker (1924), which appears to the hero, Sard, in a dream, in order to lead him over a mountain-range:

He told himself, 'This is all nonsense. The Pathfinder is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a woman.

But the figure said, 'I am the Pathfinder. I can find a path for you.' (Masefield, 1963, p.211)

The partial explanation given for this appearance is that 'He had put so much of his virtue into that ship, that she was almost part of him' (1963, p.214). Ships are, indeed, seen by Masefield almost as living beings, and the Broken Heart is no exception:

An artist's heart, hungry for beauty, had seen the idea of her in dream; she had her counterpart in the kingdom of vision. There was a spirit in her, as there is in all things fashioned by the soul of man; not a spirit of beauty, not a spirit of strength, but the spirit of her builder: a Peruvian Spaniard ... She came from a man’s soul, stamped with his defects. Standing on her deck, one could see the man laid bare melancholy, noble, and wanting – till one felt pity for the ship which carried his image about the world … Some of those who had sailed in her had noticed that the caryatides of the rails, the caryatides of the quarter-gallery, and the figurehead which watched over the sea, were all carven portraits of the one woman. But of those who noticed, none knew that they touched the bloody heart of a man, that before them was the builder's secret, the key to his soul. (Masefield, 1974, pp.2-3)

In a sense, then, all the elements of the unhappy love story of Captain Margaret are already prefigured in the ship where it unfolds. The ship, indeed, is a character not, we feel, precisely shaping the action; but feeling sympathy (in the fullest sense) for those involved. 'She had housed many wandering spirits' (Masefield, 1974, p.3) – and among them are Captain Margaret and Olivia.

Even a ship with a soul requires a crew, however – and the crew of this ship is a rather curious one. There is the owner, Captain Charles Margaret, whose heart has been broken by an unhappy love affair, and who is going on a voyage to Virginia and the Caribbean to forget his sorrows. There is his companion, Edward Perrin – who is, in theory at any rate, a Rochester-like rake 'broken by excess' – an 'emotional creature, attractive and pathetic, the stick of a rocket which had blazed across heaven' (Masefield, 1974, p.7). There is the sailing-master, Captain Cammock, an old buccaneer full of reminiscences of Morgan and the old days in the West Indies. Finally there are two unexpected arrivals who turn up at the last moment – Olivia, who is Margaret's beloved, but who has rejected him; and Tom Stukeley, her husband (also a 'Captain'), a brutal and obnoxious ruffian who is only tolerated for her sake, since he can do no wrong in her eyes.

Another necessity for a novel at this time was, of course, a "love interest". Masefield mentions of an earlier novel, started in America and left unfinished when he departed for England, that he 'wished that the dull parts might get done, so that I could get my heroine aboard the lugger, whose saucy decks, alas, she never trod' (Spark, 1953, p.43). One feels that the regret is, in this case, occasioned more by the decks than by the heroine; but there is no reason to suspect that Masefield included a heroine in Captain Margaret simply as a perfunctory gesture (like the obligatory females added to Hollywood versions of classic adventure stories – from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, to King Solomon's Mines). Masefield, in fact, subtitled his book: 'A Romance', and also gave it the motto:

I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine:
But, O, he lives in the moony light.

– thus making it clear that the softer passions were at least to be extensively treated in it.

The Western tradition of Romantic love as a rule requires pursuit rather than fulfilment as a precondition for "love interest"; but Masefield was perhaps helped in his choice of a love triangle (Stukeley – Olivia – Margaret) as the specific exemplum of frustrated love in his book, by his acquaintance with French fiction, and, probably, Hedda Gabler itself (his friend Mrs. Robins, a prominent Feminist, was also one of the first lbsenite actresses in London). Though in another sense, of course, the theme is as old as Lancelot and Guinevere.

•

A plot summary will, I fear, be necessary in order to expound the complexities of this book. Briefly, then:

Captain Margaret, before leaving for South America in the Broken Heart, pays a last visit to Olivia, who is celebrating her honeymoon at an inn in Salcombe. Tom Stukeley, 'a cad, born a gentleman' (Masefield, 1974, p.30), who is expecting at any moment to be arrested for debt, is behaving boorishly as usual – although he does wait until Olivia is out of the room before attempting to seduce the maid.

Women were attracted by him, perhaps because he frightened them physically. His love affairs were not unlike the love affairs of python and gazelle. 'They like it,' he would say. 'They like it.' (Masefield, 1974, p.29)

Margaret's interview with Olivia – still obviously infatuated with Stukeley – is inconclusive; but it gives Stukeley an idea for a possible way out of his dilemma. When Margaret returns to the ship he is informed by Captain Cammock that a small boat is pulling out to meet them. The boat proves to contain Olivia and Stukeley, who are being chased by his creditors – but Margaret decides to wait and pick them up (the ship is on the point of sailing), despite the protests of the King's officers in pursuit. A frigate, at anchor in the harbour, fires upon them as they make good their escape.

Margaret has thus put himself on the wrong side of the law by aiding and abetting a criminal. The most remarkable thing about the whole affair, however, is that Olivia has not realized what has happened:

'It was such a race,' said Olivia. 'But we beat them. They chased us all the way from Halwell. It was such fun.' (Masefield, 1974, p.58)

Stukeley has told her that he wants to go with Captain Margaret in order to help the 'poor Indians', whose support Margaret is planning to enlist for a scheme to set up an English settlement in Darien.

'Here,' he said, drawing them aside. 'We're coming with you. I'm wanted. And I'm coming with you. She thinks I'm coming to help – to help the Indians.' He seemed to choke with laughter. He was out of breath from rowing. (Masefield, 1974, p.57)

Even Margaret feels a little doubtful about this: 'His thought was, "Can she be such a fool? Surely she must know." But at that time he knew very little of Stukeley' (Masefield, 1974, p.62). Stukeley is, that is to say, simultaneously a 'mass of mucous membrane, boorishly informed, lit only by the marsh-lights of indulged sense' (Masefield, 1974, p.29), with 'the vulgarity and the insolence of a choice English bagman' (Masefield, 1974, p.28) – and a positive Machiavelli of diabolical cunning, able to bend the wills of all he meets to his own ends.

This cunning achieves even more remarkable – and implausible – results in the days to come. The next hundred pages are devoted to an account of their progress across the Atlantic to Virginia, where Margaret intends to buy up as much as possible of the tobacco crop for his backers in England. Stukeley manages to get away with just about everything obnoxious that it would be possible for him to do in the time. Knowing his hold over Margaret, due to the latter's continuing love for Olivia, he insults all of the ship's officers with maddening insistence. His attempts to foment mutiny are fortunately forestalled by Captain Cammock, who has little patience with Margaret's policy of "tolerance" towards a ruffianly bully – but he does succeed in seducing Hrs. Inigo, Olivia's maid. He also gets drunk, consorts with common sailors, and, at one point, even inspires a mild rebuke from Olivia:

'Tom dear,' said Olivia, conscious that the man she loved had made but a poor show. 'Tom, dear. You weren't very kind. I mean. I think you hurt Captain Cammock. And you made Edward angry. He can't bear to be teased. He's not easy-tempered like you, dear. I think sometimes you forget that, don't you, Tom? You won't be cross, Tom?

'Oh, nonsense, Polly,' he said, as he took her arm to lead her below. 'Nonsense, you old pretty-eyes. I can't resist teasing Pilly; he's such an old hen. As for Cammock, he's only an old pirate. I'm not going to be ordered about by a man like that. He's no right to be at liberty.'

Olivia was pleased by the reference to her eyes, so she said no more. (Masefield, 1974, p.139)

Margaret knows that the only one who will really suffer from the exposure of Stukeley's delinquencies will be Olivia; but it eventually becomes obvious even to him that he has made a mistake in putting up with this constant insolence. Stukeley has also noticed that his welcome is wearing a little thin; and decides, as a consequence, to pretend that Olivia is pregnant – knowing that none of the others will be indelicate enough to mention it to her, and that they will all have to be especially careful not to do or say anything to upset her.

A part, at least, of this edifice of deceit does not survive their landfall in Virginia. The governor (an old friend of Margaret's father) has received an account of Stukeley's misdeeds in a dispatch from England, and requires much persuasion from Margaret – still intent on protecting Olivia – before he is prepared to let them all go. Olivia, on reading the dispatch, urges Tom to go back and clear his name; and it is only on observing his reluctance to do so that she is finally awakened to the truth of the matter. Her reaction to this discovery is, however, somewhat unexpected – she blames Margaret:

'You think, Charles. You think, because. Because I'm not very happy. That I shall not notice. But I see. Oh, I see so well. You wish to poison me against Tom. You wish me to think. That. That. Him guilty.' (Masefield, 1971, p.271)

After the governor has brutally told her that 'If he returns to England, he will be hanged', the 'dazed creature' (Masefield, 1974, p.271) is carried away. (Incidentally, the main reason why Masefield's attempts to portray "halting" speech look so strange, is because he tends to use a full stop instead of the more usual ellipsis. Thus 'Him guilty' sounds more like 'He Tarzan. You Jane', than what it is the somewhat interrupted conclusion of 'You wish me to think':

You wish me to think – that – that … him guilty.)

Margaret and his companions have now put themselves in even worse odour with the authorities – but, since he is busily preparing to put the second part of his plan into action, their disapproval is of little moment. He intends to gather together a band of pirates, and with their help to defeat the Spaniards – who would undoubtedly oppose any English settlement on the coast of Latin America. His ambitions, however, soar even beyond this:

'Who knows? This place may be another Athens some day.'

'There's not much Athens here now. The colonials aren't much like Athenians.'

'I think they're very like, Edward. They're fond of liberty. They take a beautiful pride in their bodies. They are attached to the country. They're very like Athenians. The world doesn't alter much.' (Masefield, 1974, p.248)

Such more than sanguine hopes are, of course, doomed to failure. They fail firstly because of the treachery of Stukeley. On being taken ashore to act as an interpreter between Margaret and the Spanish, he seizes the opportunity to go over to the enemy; and Margaret almost loses his life going back to look for him. A more direct cause of failure, though, is the drunkenness and indiscipline of the pirates after the final assault on the Spanish town (it is this part of the book – Chapter XII, 'The End' – which so closely resembles Masefield's earlier account (mentioned above, in Chapter Two) of Drake's raid on Porto Bello).

One good thing that does come out of their short-lived capture of the town, however, is the discovery that Stukeley has died there of yellow fever. Characteristically, he has married in the meantime 'a black-eyed, hawk-nosed woman, of a crude and evil beauty' (Masefield, 1974, p.369), and turned Papist for the purpose. Margaret spends some of his time in the town – time better spent curbing the pirates – in digging a grave for him.

The desertion of the pirates, and the consequent failure of Margaret's ambitions, marks the effective end of the novel – especially as his absconding allies have gone back to destroy the beginnings of Margaret's Darien settlement. Olivia has finally come round, however, and the curtain falls on a tender scene of reconciliation between the two lovers:

'There is no dishonour, Charles. You failed. The only glory is failure. All artists fail. But one sees what they saw. You see that in their failure.' (Masefield, 1974, p.405)

•

To put it mildly, then, there would appear to be some curious features in this novel which demand explanation. Why, to begin with, is the book called Captain Margaret? The name inevitably inspires expectations of a story about a female pirate – yet at no point is any particular reference made to this unusual surname. It is difficult to avoid the conviction that it must be in some way linked with Shaw's Major Barbara (1905) – but at least in that case the "piquant" contrast between a military rank and its female incumbent was sustained. Masefield's choice has no such justification. Captain Margaret is, to be sure, an effeminate sort of hero:

from long brooding on this wayward beauty who had spoiled his life, he had learned much of women. He understood them emotionally, with a clearness which sometimes frightened him. He felt that he took a base advantage of them in allowing them to talk to him. Their hearts were open books to him. (Masefield, 1974, p.23)

(That, 'sometimes frightened him', in particular, seems to imply more of an identity with women, than a mere insight into their hearts). On the other hand, he is also described as giving 'the impression of a man who had lived fully, grandly, upon many sides of life' (Masefield, 1974, p.22). His indulgence towards Olivia and Stukeley is carried almost to the point of insanity (and appears to the reader more as exaggerated self-pity and masochism than magnanimity); but he is also shown impressing his more practical piratical colleagues with his boldness and decision, leading desperate ventures, and carrying out such business "coups" as cornering the tobacco market in Virginia! Margaret is a paradox – a sort of "man-woman" by nature – and perhaps this is what is intended to be implied by his name. It is, on the one hand, a feminine name applied to a masculine character; but it is also a feminine name linked to a "masculine" office held by a man – rather than the woman which the conventional, Shavian, paradox would have us expect. It is a man with a feminine name who has an unrequited love for a woman, and has, as a consequence (he believes – he proves unable to predict Olivia's reactions), grown to understand them – almost to be one of them. Perhaps one should also point out the resemblance of the name 'Margaret' to the name 'Masefield' – but more of that later.

A greater problem is that of Stukeley (who has the same name as an actual sixteenth century privateer, 'Thomas Stucley or Stukeley (1525?–78) ... said to be a natural son of Henry VIII' (Harvey, 1975, p.787)). Stukeley is too bad to be true - coarse, brutal, lustful, insolent: 'In company he was rude to all whom he did not fear. He was more rude to women than to men, partly because he feared them less; but partly because his physical tastes were gross' (Masefield, 1974, p.29). Perhaps his association with Henry the Eighth explains his being described as 'a creature of the body':

One could not like the man; for though his body had a kind of large splendour, it was the splendour of the prize cabbage, of the prize pig, a splendour really horrible. It is horrible to see any large thing without intelligence. The sight is an acquiescence in an offence against nature. (Masefield, 1974, p.28)

He is, that is to say, a type of John Bull – Masefield's bête noire – of whom another representative is Prince Hal in Shakespeare's King Henry IV plays:

Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him ... He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit ... There is no goodfellowship in him, no sincerity, no wholeheartedness. He makes a mock of the drover who gives him his whole little pennyworth of sugar ... When he learns that his behaviour may have lost him his prospective crown he passes a sponge over his past, and fights like a wild cat for the right of not having to work for a living. (Masefield, 1926, pp.112-13)

In short, animal man as opposed to intellectual, spiritual man – John Bull against St. George. It is a parallel which recurs throughout Masefield's work.

But this is not sufficient to explain the almost vitriolic glee with which Masefield demolishes his character. The one solitary virtue he can find for Stukeley is that 'The man loved animals; was truly kind and thoughtful with them' (Masefield, 1974, p.280). On board ship his behaviour is impossibly provocative:

He looked up as Cammock entered, took a good pull at his drink, and called to Margaret. 'You were going to have some sort of parish meeting here. Here's the beadle. Suppose you begin, and get it over.'

He took another pull at the brandy. 'Take a seat, beadle,' he said insolently. (Masefield, 1974, p.90)

He is not even allowed to be 'inventive ... in his cruelty' (Masefield, 1974, p.142). Certainly there is a failure of verisimilitude here – but it goes beyond mere inability to create a convincing character. Why is this animal man simultaneously so loathsome and so successful with women? He seems to fascinate and repel the author as much as he does the other characters – and the depth of feeling which he provokes certainly makes nonsense of this attempt by Captain Margaret to sum up Stukeley's reasons for marrying Olivia:

'Suppose a man saw a woman in his better moment, saw how beautiful and far above him she was, and loved her for that moment, truly, before falling back to his old greeds.' (Masefield, 1974, p.336)

And then there is Olivia. Continually described as a being of great refinement and sensitivity, her actions show her to be paralysingly blind and obtuse – not noticing, for example, when her husband practically rapes a maid-servant in the next room (perhaps because 'she loved her husband so dearly that to speak of him to anyone, to an innservant, for example, seemed sacrilegious to her' (Masefield, 1974, p.38)). Masefield tells us that 'She was not for the world; not at least for the world of men. She was the idea of woman; she should have been spared the lot of women' (Masefield, 1974, pp.70-71). Another way of putting this might be to say that she is beautiful but dumb – however, this fails to resolve the problem of why she is presented so contradictorily throughout: on the one hand stupid, on the other 'unspeakably refined and pure' (Masefield, 1974, p.39). One explanation is that all this refinement is in the eyes of the beholders: 'She was so strange, so mysterious, and her voice thrilled so' (Masefield, 1974, p.105) – and has little to do with her real self:

'She says nothing,' he said to himself; 'but life is often like that. I have talked with people sometimes whose bodies seemed to be corpses. And all the time they were wonderful, possessed of devils and angels.' (Masefield, 1974, p.105)

Conversely, people with bodies like angels may have nothing of consequence inside.

Masefield, however, does not confine himself to presenting her from the outside. Her mental processes are also described, and in terms which make it clear that Masefield does not mean to disparage her intellect, but simply her judgement of men:

During the voyage she had grown to dislike Margaret and Perrin, much as one dislikes the guests who have overstayed their welcome. She had been too much in the rapture of love to see things clearly, to judge character clearly; she had taken her judgements ready-made from Tom, who disliked the two men. (Masefield, 1974, p.213)

Is it love, then – apparently seen by Masefield as necessarily involving major mental aberration – which is to blame for all her obtuseness?

And yet Hugh Greene, who has reprinted Captain Margaret in his Bow Street Library series, speaks of it in terms of high praise:

One can read Captain Margaret at more than one level. It is an exciting story of adventure at the end of the seventeenth century among buccaneers on the Spanish Main, and as such it was one of my favourites when I was a boy. Now that I have re-read it after nearly fifty years it seems much more than that, a subtle study of human relationships with a sexual sophistication unusual in its time. (Masefield, 1974, p.viii)

In order to make sense of this discrepancy, it will be necessary to go beyond the discussion of surface flaws of verisimilitude and characterization to the explanations for those flaws – which I believe are to be found, in this case, in the emotional life of the author himself (insofar as this can be reconstructed from the evidence of his writings and letters).

[John Masefield]

(ii) Masefield

John Masefield wrote, in 1957:

When a writer dies, some say that he was a good chap but a poor artist, & others that he sometimes wrote interestingly but brought his parents to untimely sorrowful deaths, murdered his wife, ravished Jemima in the forest, & lived in sin with 3 choir boys & the curate. (Masefield, 1983, p.177)

Discussing an author's works through the medium of his life is always a perilous matter – but it is, nevertheless, sometimes necessary in order to grasp the full sense of a particular feature or stylistic anomaly.

In the case of Captain Margaret, it might be best to begin with the question of Masefield’s attitude towards women, raised by his treatment of Olivia (always hoping to avoid the scurrilities suggested by the quotation above).

•

His mother, Caroline, died of pneumonia when he was only six-and-a-half. It is interesting that Masefield believed this to have been partially caused by a hunting accident.[2] Despite having written perhaps the foremost celebration of fox-hunting in English literature[3], his attitude towards it remained ambivalent all his life: on the one hand, a thing of beauty – on the other, a destructive and terrifying threat. This dichotomy is highlighted by the two separate sections of Reynard the Fox – one devoted to the human hunters – the other (by far the most moving) to their quarry, the fox. He also wrote (at much the same time) a poem called 'The Hounds of Hell' (Masefield, 1920): which deals with a sort of Wild Hunt – led by Death that hunts down and kills travellers on the moors, until one of their victims, a 'saint' (St. Swithiel), turns and faces them, and discovers that their only power is fear. The huntsman proves to be 'A Woman Death':

A Woman Death that palsy shook
Stood sick and dwindling there;
Her fingers were a bony crook,
And blood was on her hair. (Masefield, 1941, p.652)

Death – and women – and hunting – are, to say the least, linked interestingly here.

With this information before us, it should come as no surprise to learn that Masefield went on to write a novel virtually consisting of anti-hunting propaganda – The Square Peg (1937). The immediate cause prompting the novel was a hunting accident in which the pack killed one of his beloved cats (the book caused so much fuss when it was published that he had to leave the neighbourhood (Smith, 1978, pp.210-11)); but one suspects that it also draws on memories of his mother especially as it is only after the death of his fiancée, Margaret, in a car-accident, that the hero – Frampton Mansell – decides to close off his wood (designated by him as a 'bird sanctuary') to the local hunt, which has met there from time immemorial.

All this should serve to point out how deeply a seemingly trivial aspect of his mother's death has affected Masefield's subsequent work. His apparent volte-face on the subject of fox-hunting mystified earlier critics – but now, with the publication of Constance Babington Smith's recent biography (which provides the clues to settle that and many other long-standing problems), it seems at least explicable. The influence her early death exerted on him was far more wide-ranging than that, however.

Masefield also wrote a famous poem about his mother, entitled 'C.L.M.', in which he reveals his guilt at having been born at all – thus causing pain to her (she had died after giving birth to her sixth child – a girl, Norah).

In 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. (Masefield, 1941, pp.74-75)

Masefield sees himself as 'common earth', on which her beauty was too abundantly lavished. He also emphasizes that his existence is only possible because of the death of 'some of her'. Perhaps, by the same reasoning, the births of all her children added up to the death of "all of her".

Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell
Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.

Masefield's life must be lived in order to make him worthy of this supreme sacrifice – yet, in his opinion, this is precisely what he has not done:

What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?
What woman's happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth's releasing hell was reached?

'Hell' for whom? – For the child, perhaps – but for the woman, certainly! The male is a 'leech', a parasite described in much the same terms as a cancerous growth. Nor is this 'leeching' confined to the inside of the womb:

Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women's rights at will
And man's lust roves the world untamed.

* * *

O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

These last lines contain elements of doctrinaire feminism (Masefield supported the suffragettes), but they are obviously also deeply felt. The unreasoning vehemence of some of the images should be enough to establish that. Masefield's body, after all, was not 'mouthless' in the womb – even though its mouth was not being used. And 'man's lust roves the world untamed' is a melodramatic way of linking 'women's rights' (voting), with women's sexuality (seen automatically as "submitting to the beastliness of men"). His guilt about his mother's death seems to have extended to the whole realm of sexuality – which he appears to have defined as men forcing themselves upon women.

The initials 'C.L.M.' refer to Masefield’s mother, but they could apply almost as well to his wife, Constance de la Cherois (pronounced 'Lashery' (Smith, 1978, p.74)) Masefield, née Crommelin. She was eleven-and-a-half years his senior, and, from the start, assumed a dominating, maternal role over their household (an early visitor described it as using 'Jan as a sort of aide-de-camp to her generalship', though she adds that 'it seems the one chance of making such a dreamer achieve anything' (Smith, 1978, p.87)). Masefield himself appears to have agreed with this – he had complained earlier, in 1900, that 'If only I could abstain from my romantic dreams of John Silver, the Spanish Main, and all the Tropic Island palm tree business I think I might succeed by and by' (Smith, 1978, p.58). He was therefore careful to stress how glad he was of this discrepancy in ages. He wrote to his sister:

She is a very wise, learned and gentle woman and you'll like her ... She is several years older than I am, God be thanked. (Smith, 1978, p.75)

and added, in the same letter, that her face was 'Very beautiful, of a rounded, calm and serious beauty, with a stateliness in it very fine to see'. Certainly very "stately" language for a young lover! (Masefield was twenty-four). To another sister he wrote, somewhat disingenuously:

My lady is slightly older than I am, which, with such a bun-headed person as myself, is a jolly good thing. (Smith, 1978, p.75)

Masefield undoubtedly did feel it to be a 'jolly good thing' – but he knew how the rest of the world would instinctively react, and therefore played down the true measure of the age difference. As it turned out, Laurence Binyon, who had introduced them, greeted the news of their engagement with 'astonishment, even dismay' (Smith, 1978, p.83).

It is a psychological commonplace that all wives have an element of the mother – but the condition is seldom so marked as in Masefield's case. From his childhood on, Masefield had been fascinated by sympathetic "older women", and – as a consequence – they abound also in his fiction: from Mrs. Cottier in Jim Davis (1911), to Caroline Louisa in The Midnight Folk (1927). These women are generally presented as friends of the hero's (deceased) mother, and stand in the relationship of "fairy godmother" to him.[4] Now Masefield had taken the further step of marrying one of these surrogate "mothers".

Constance herself was not without emotional entanglements with a friend of the same sex; and this fact also throws an interesting light on Masefield's emotional reactions. Before meeting 'Jan', she shared a ménage in London with Isabel Fry (sister of Roger); and this relationship was, according to Babington Smith, 'the decisive factor in her life' (Smith, 1978, p.77). Constance was determined not to let marriage alter her feelings for Isabel, a resolution she recorded in a 'small private notebook', in June 1903:

I want always to cherish, honour and protect Isabel. I will try always to have leisure for her every day and I know that in order to keep the bond of friendship as close as possible that I must keep absolutely parallel with her life.

I must always be as tender as I can, always remembering the dear character that I know so well, knowing that her temperament is melancholy and that it will never be any good pretending or assuming she has forgotten what she never can forget … we shall have one meal together daily whenever possible. I will pray for her always. (Smith, 1978, p.82)

Certainly it sounds as if the feelings were stronger on Isabel's side than Constance's – who appears to be acting mainly out of pity (was the thing which 'she can never forget' the "betrayal" of Constance's getting married at all?). Masefield accepted this intrusion on their solitude à deux 'quite happily, with no tinge of jealousy, as a friend – a very close friend – of the "gentle lady" whose judgement he so utterly respected' (Smith, 1978, p.82). Isabel, however, was not so sanguine – being observed, on the wedding day, 'weeping copiously in public' (Smith, 1978, p.85).

There are a great many such semi-lesbian "friendships" in Masefield's novels – and they seem to derive principally from the fact that Masefield's excessive idealization of women could not allow them any conventional sexual outlet, without "lowering" them in his eyes. Relationships with other women were, however, perfectly acceptable; and left them on the same exalted level as before. Thus his easy acceptance of Constance's "old flame" Isabel – and thus the fact that the closest thing to a torrid love scene in Masefield's fiction is the point in Tne Street of To-Day (1911) where Rhoda Derrick creeps into bed with her friend Dora (rather reminiscent of the similarly equivocal scene in Coleridge's “Christabel"):

Presently she slipped out of bed, and crept away, and tapped at Dora's bedroom door. Her friend was awake, too. She could not sleep. Rhoda nestled in beside her, and kissed her cheek ... Neither girl slept much. They passed the night in each other's arms, not understanding very well, but frightened and a little ashamed. (Masefield, 1911, p.114)

The same thing is seen in Multitude and Solitude (1909), where Roger Naldrett virtually has to apologize for mourning his fiancée’s death, to her closest female friend (her grief being naturally assumed to be far more clean and elevated than his) (Masefield, 1927, pp.99-101 & 117-19).

The "good" women, then, in Masefield's fiction, fall into a few clearly defined groups: virgins; mothers (usually widowed mothers); and "instinctively pure" young women.

Any physical relationship with a man has a degrading effect in his eyes – and therefore the representation of a happy, functioning, heterosexual couple becomes impossible for him (for all the frequent "marriages" at the ends of his books). A woman who lives up to these standards is a goddess, to be worshipped and never, under any circumstances, touched – but one who does not is, at best, something to be patronized and pitied. Witness Captain Margaret's thoughts of Olivia:

He looked at her eyes a moment, wondering with what love they had looked at Stukeley during the night-watches. The thought came to him that she was a beautiful soiled thing, to be pitied and tenderly reproved. (Masefield, 1974, p.39)

Constance was, it must be confessed, by no means the last of Masefield's "mothers". As her looks faded (physical beauty is always closely linked to spiritual perfection in Masefield's eyes), he began to prove a fickle son. The most important of these attachments – to the actress and feminist Elizabeth Robins – ended, however, when it became clear that Masefield's feelings for her were stronger than hers for him. The poem 'C.L.M. I was actually written for and presented to her (as he himself put it: 'Your son brings you his first fruits, your first fruits' (Smith, 1978, p.103)), and the whole situation provided the inspiration for Masefield's "tormented" third novel, The Street of To-Day - in which she is presented as the sympathetic older woman, Hary Drummond, who saves the hero when his marriage breaks down. After this, Masefield kept his emotions more within bounds – and when, in his old age, he began to write an extraordinary series of love-letters, or, as Babington Smith terms them, 'affection-letters' to younger female friends 'there was nothing clandestine about these friendships' (Smith, 1978, p.214) (the most important of these correspondences, Letters to Reyna – to Audrey Napier-Smith – has recently been published (at least in part)).

This is, of course, squarely in the tradition of aging Romantic artists like Goethe and Berlioz. But Masefield (like Berlioz with his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Fournier) was content to keep the relationships sentimental and affectionate; rather than attempting physical consummation (like Goethe and Fraülein von Lewezow).

Generally speaking, as Masefield grew older, his heroines became progressively younger and more ideal – losing even the faint traces of physicality observable in Olivia. There was, however, a darker side to this adoration of women: he was pitiless to those who seemed to him in any way "impure" – to have forfeited the high privileges and equally high responsibilities of their sex through sourness, unloveliness of spirit, or openly-displayed "animal" sexuality. Thus, when his aunt – who had brought him up, but whom he disliked intensely (she is probably the model for the wicked aunt in The Tragedy of Nan, who drives Nan to murder and suicide) – slighted Constance at their first meeting, he reacted violently:

a viler and more damnable reception than Con had could not be meted out in Hell to one of the worst of the lost. That sour curse in Eve's flesh nagged at her openly and covertly and I am not going to have anything more to do with a repulsive hag so dead to the requirements of decency, courtesy and reverence ... For her to go spitting her venom at a dear lady who was also her guest is a thing I will take care she shall regret (Smith, 1978, pp.83-84).

In a similar vein is his reference to 'four slimy female reporters' at Grand Rapids on his American tour, 'all dirty and evil looking, like retired whores' (Smith, 1978, p.149). This is the evil woman, the promiscuous woman, the temptress – represented in Captain Margaret by Jessie the tavern trollop, and, more especially, by Mrs. Inigo, Olivia's maid – both of whom make every effort to encourage the embraces of the unspeakable Stukeley (even the new wife he eventually ends up with is 'of a crude and evil beauty' (Masefield, 1974, p.369)). Anna in The Widow in the Bye Street is another of them; as is Rhoda Derrick in The Street of To-Day – she seemed nice enough until the hero, Lionel, married her, but then all the poison came spewing out – leaving him to be
rescued, finally, by a pair of clean-living (and motherly) lesbians.

One could easily multiply references of this sort ad infinitum, but perhaps a few more will serve to fill out the picture. This comment, for example, dating from the time of his service as a medical orderly during the war:

I like neither them [the female staff] nor their methods, but my job is mainly with men ... we have a lot of catty young minxes who have never worked in their lives, and they have catty society ways of wheedling, when it is a question of carrying stinking blood in a bucket ... They pet the young good-looking patients and neglect the others, and so destroy both. (Smith, 1978, p.126)[5]

In other words, either being 'petted' or being neglected by 'society minxes' is destruction for a man. There seems to be a real dislike of women implicit in this statement, and even more in his description of a woman's meeting where:

Hundreds of parochial matrons throng round to press your hand while you long for a good knobby club to clump them on the head with ... one most fearful elderly spinster who was mad, and laughed in a padded cell kind of way, came up time and time again literally almost to embrace me ...

My God it was a fearful time. (Smith, 1978, p.147)

Perhaps it is all in jest, but, even so, this horror of women's physical presence, of women's sexuality – this preference for keeping them at arm's length – must inevitably lead us to speculate whether Masefield was a heterosexual as he seemed. Was he, in fact, a repressed homosexual? What was his attitude towards men?

•

And, at first sight, the evidence would appear to be good for this hypothesis. For a start, there is his straightforward physical appreciation of male beauty witness the following passages from Gallipoli (1916):

They were ... the finest body of young men ever brought together in modern times. For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen; they walked and looked like the kings in old poems (Masefield, 1935, p.19).

Or, even more revealing, the 'half-naked men ... with the bronze bodies of gods', whose:

... half-nakedness made them more grand than clad men. Very few of them were less than beautiful; whole battalions were magnificent, the very flower of the world's men. They had a look in their eyes which those who saw them will never forget. (pp.165-66)

One must of course remember that this was during the war, which naturally intensified feelings of male comradeship but many of the comments in his letters also become suggestive, seen from this point of view:

I never knew I loved men so much. They are a fine lot, a noble lot. I love them all.
...
I never felt brotherhood before, for anybody, since I was a boy. (Smith, 1978, pp.125 & 128)

Nor is it perhaps a coincidence that on his return from France it took him a while to readjust to a female-dominated environment:

he took care to warn Constance that when he first arrived they must keep at arm's length, for he was probably soaked with germs from septic wounds ... 'The days that followed were a little sad,' she went on. 'He had got this great new experience – the first independent one since we were married. But gradually his experience became mine to me.' (Smith, 1978, p.129)

On the one hand, this new-found "comradeship" of his inspired Masefield to become, in thought at least, a "man's man”:

Goldie [G. L. Dickinson] and those other eunuchs with their messy points of view simply make me sick … To fight is bad enough, but it has its manly side, but to let the mind dwell on it and peck its carrion and write of it is a devilish unmanly thing (Smith, 1978, p.128).

On the other hand, it is interesting to note the impression which he made on other men at the same time. The reaction, for example, of some French war correspondents:

They could not understand his shy, unassuming manners. 'Mais voyons, c'est une jeune fille', they said (Smith, 1978, p.166),

wrote Neville Lytton, whose friendship 'meant a great deal to Masefield', and whom he described as 'a most winning attractive person' (Smith, 1978, p.167).

All this is strikingly reminiscent of his own character Captain Margaret, who, besides being the 'manly' comrade of men of action, also has something of the 'jeune fille' about him. Particularly on the occasion when he 'burst out crying':

'I've got such white hands. Such white hands, like a girl.' He laughed in a shrill, silly cackle. 'You must think me a silly girl,' he said. (Masefield, 1974, p.331)

Masefield, in fact, notes that Margaret's 'hands were singularly beautiful' (Masefield, 1974, p.23).

All this does perhaps add up to some homosexual (or "homoerotic") inclinations on Masefield' s part – but, in the case of his novels, with which we are principally concerned here, we must remember that (paradoxically) single-sex relationships were the easiest vehicle for expressing deep emotion in the prudish Edwardian literary atmosphere. Close, physical descriptions of heterosexual love were unthinkable – and the innocent aura surrounding male "comradeship" made the most excessive expressions of it seem quite natural and "clean". The same holds true for the lesbian friendships in Masefield's fiction.

It is also true that Masefield's strongest feelings for men seem to have been expressed in the comparatively mild form of hero-worship. That, in fact, he was just as prone to put men on pedestals as his "ideal" women. 'I don't know what it is in such men,' he wrote of Sir Douglas Haig (!) 'it is partly a very fine delicate gentleness and generosity, and then partly a pervading power and partly a height of resolve. He made me understand Sidney and Fairfax and Falkland and all those others, Moore and the rest ... No enemy could stand against such a man. He took away my breath' (Smith, 1978, p.165). I don't think that it would be an appreciable exaggeration to say that Masefield had "fallen in love" with Haig – just as, earlier, with another general, Sir Ian Hamilton, whom he compared to Roland (Smith, 1978, p.158). Perhaps his strongest infatuation of this type was with the poet W. B. Yeats, however:

One saw at once that he was unlike anyone else in the world ...

His hands were the most lovely of his time;
His greeting, of the right hand gravely lifted,
Half, benediction, half, old courtesy,
Was such as Hector might have given in Troy (Smith, 1978, p.60).

He also greatly admired Swinburne – that is, until he actually saw the aging Master – whose appearance failed to match his reputation: 'The magnificent head was all that remained of the prophet and seer; the rest was a little shrunken stalk' (Masefield, 1967, p.vi). Masefield was not a public-school boy, but he seems to have imbibed something of the same spirit during his period as an apprentice aboard the training-ship Conway. Perhaps the first male for whom he felt such admiration was the apprentice 'H. B.', who, during Masefield' s first term as a 'new chum', 'invited Jack – to his amazement and joy – to "spin some ghost yarns" for him' (Smith, 1978, p.20). Other senior boys on the ship 'kindled his adoration' in a similar way.

The addition of this element to our discussion of Captain Margaret certainly helps to resolve some of the most notable problems in the text. Masefield's intense appreciation of male beauty – attested to by Gallipoli, and by other works, both early and late (such as the 'superb men, dark as dark-brown horses', who 'have such beauty in their supple strength' (Masefield, 1941, p.1110), in 'The Spanish Main', a poem written in 1936) – is always linked to some (supposed) spiritual quality. Thus the 'coarsely coloured face' of Tom Stukeley, which 'passed for beauty' (Masefield, 1974, p.29), 'seen ... so often, full of life and health, going with a laugh to sin, in the pride of the flesh' (Masefield, 1974, p.369), upsets his expectations, and inspires a sort of "attraction-repulsion" in him.

Stukeley represents a single raging volcano of sexuality in the repressed atmosphere of the Broken Heart:

his physical tastes were gross, so that he found pleasure in all horse-play – such as the snatching of handkerchiefs or trinkets, or even of kisses – in gaining which he had to touch or maul his victims, whether protesting or acquiescent. Women were attracted by him, perhaps because he frightened them physically. (Masefield, 1974, p.29)

It is, however, not so much Masefield, as his inferior, exaggerated shadow: Captain Margaret – the 'silly girl', whose 'fancy' it was 'in the latter years of his passion [for Olivia], to sublime all human experience, to reduce all action to intellectual essence, as an offering to her' (Masefield, 1974, p.24) – who feels attracted to Stukeley.

Olivia, of course – like all women – prefers the animal magnetism of Stukeley to the 'sublimated' intellect of Margaret. (As Yeats put it:

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. (Yeats, 1977, p.212))

And it is perhaps this which prompts Margaret – the man with a woman's name, who 'understood them emotionally, with a clearness which sometimes frightened him' – to look on his rival with new eyes.

Hugh Greene has already described Edward Perrin, Margaret's companion, as a 'shy and frail little homosexual' – citing in justification that Olivia recognised him as 'the nearest thing to a lady in the ship' (Masefield, 1974, pp.viii-ix) (he could have added the long scene – on pp.133-34 – where Perrin discusses the dress he would like to design for Olivia) – and ignoring (rightly, in my opinion) 'his one hopeless passion, as he called it': 'the memory of a woman who had once refused his offer of marriage' (Masefield, 1974, pp.6-7). Masefield has, in fact, made the identification easy, since he adds 'He had not loved the woman, for he was incapable of love; he was only capable of affection', and goes on to say:

He hated men, and loved his master [Captain Margaret] 'whom he worshipped with touching loyalty; he despised women, in spite of his memory of a woman; but he found individual women more attractive than they would have liked to think. (pp.6-7)

Greene, however, does not take the next step, and observe the kinship in the temperaments of master and man. He sees Margaret as firmly in love with Olivia, and Perrin with Margaret – not realizing that Perrin's relationship with Margaret is much like his relationship with Olivia – based on a recognition of the affinity of their temperaments, rather than on actual physical attraction. (Stukeley is not fooled, though – it is to this that he is referring when he tells Margaret: 'You ought to have been a woman. Then you could have married that damned fool Perrin' (Masefield, 1974, p.123)).

The real object of Perrin's affection is, I believe, the old buccaneer, Captain Cammack. I deduce this from the attentiveness with which he attends to his needs – refilling his glass, encouraging his anecdotes:

'You're a thoughtful young fellow to me,' said Captain Cammock, regarding him with favour. (Masefield, 1974, p.96)

The attraction, however, is not mutual: 'His thought was, "You'd make a steward, perhaps, boiled down a bit"; but this he kept to himself' (p.96). Cammock is sentimentally in love with Olivia; and with the past:

he lived very much in his past, thinking that such a thing, done long ago, was fine, and that such a man, shot long since, outside some Spanish breastwork, was a great man, better than the men of these days, braver, kindlier. (Masefield, 1974, p.140)

Captain Margaret – against his will and against his better judgement – is unmistakably fascinated by the gross physicality of Stukeley, who senses the truth of the matter and uses it as an additional taunt to goad him with, always calling him 'Maggy':

You'll lick my boots, Maggy. And hers. Lick, lick, lick, like a little crawling cat ... Don't go, Maggy. I'm just beginning to love you. (Masefield, 1974, p.124)

Both Stukeley and Margaret continue to pretend, nevertheless, that his only hold over Margaret is as Olivia's husband – though in passages like the one above the pretence is wearing a little thin: 'Olivia shall let you kiss her hand, shall she. Or no, you shall have a shoe of hers to slobber over, or a glove' (Masefield, 1974, p.125).

This heightened tension between Margaret and Stukeley communicates itself even to Olivia, and accounts for her otherwise inexplicable hostility towards her erstwhile suitor: 'Tom, I don't think they've been straightforward with us. There's something hidden. I'm sure of it' (Masefield, 1974, p.243). She feels jealous of her (aptly-named) Tom, without knowing exactly whom to fear, and without knowing that he has despised her all along.

Stukeley, in fact, behaves much like a homosexual tart at a public-school – spreading dissension among all those to whom he offers his favours, while remaining emotionally aloof himself. He is, in fact, a tease – since the people who attract him (barmaids and sluts, for the most part) are not the people who will help him remain alive, at liberty, and out of debt (he married Olivia for her money before he discovered the powers of 'the trustees of her father's estate, who viewed him with no favour' (Masefield, 1974, p.30)). This is noticeable also in his relations with the crew - particularly the second mate, Mr. Iles, whom he incites (purely for his own amusement) to defy Captain Cammock, thus causing him to lose his rank and privileges. There is a most curious scene where Stukeley encourages the sailors to have a 'leg-showing' contest which has definite unspoken undercurrents of trying to win his "favour" (Masefield, 1974, pp.150-53).

Stukeley has to balance a lot of claims against each other – and, like all "proud beauties" who promise more than they can perform, he always has to bear in mind the danger he runs from disappointed suitors.

Stukeley is not a nice man, but he is in a minority of one aboard the Broken Heart – the only active heterosexual among a society of introspective intellectuals, who have perhaps not 'sublimated' their instincts as much as they would like to think. Even the crew – lacking the company of the opposite sex – have been driven to the traditional Naval expedients of "rum, sodomy and the lash". Some of his protests against the sort of company he is forced to keep obviously come from the heart:

'Don't you like intellectual people, Stukeley?'

'I don't like prigs, and I don t like bluestockings, and I don't like –'

'People who care for beautiful things? Is that it?'

… 'I'd like my dinner in peace, without a lot of cross-examination. Talk about beauty with Perrin there. He likes to hear you. I don't.'

'No,' said Perrin, 'No, Stukeley. I shouldn't think you ever liked to hear of anything noble.' (Masefield, 1974, pp.163-65)

In face of this sort of sanctimonious condescension, Stukeley's reactions are at least comprehensible, though perhaps not laudable. He is disgusted by the hypocrisy of those who pretend to be so far above him, and yet cannot conceal their fascination with his "animal" nature – easy, pleasure-loving, sensual. He uses them, but despises them:

Stukeley watched him with amused contempt; he laughed. 'Maggy's in a paddy,' he said. 'No, Maggy. I'm a married man, now, ducky. I've gone into the stud.' (Masefield, 1974, p.123)

Stukeley fears that 'Maggy ... might turn sullen, and give him up in spite of Olivia' (p.127) prove groundless, however. Margaret carries toleration of his "favourite" to an absurd degree – putting up with his insolence and insubordination during the voyage; refusing to allow him to be arrested in Virginia (though it is by no means clear how this benefits Olivia, whom he is ostensibly protecting); even – the final absurdity – trusting Stukeley, a noted malcontent and actual mutineer (!), to act as his interpreter and chief negotiator with the Spanish.

Stukeley knows the largely discreditable emotions which lie behind this "tolerance" – and therefore exploits it, rather than faking any gratitude for the "indulgence" extended to him. He betrays the whole crew with perfect equanimity, and goes over to the Spanish; who are, at least, people he can understand. Margaret's disproportionate reaction at the news betrays the depth of his feelings. He refuses to believe that Stukeley is a traitor, and is almost killed going back to "rescue" him. His excessive grief – it is at this point that he calls himself a 'silly girl' – has to be charitably explained away as chagrin at not having guarded Olivia's husband better!

•

The interesting thing about Captain Margaret is that it is written entirely from the point of view of one of the two parties in a debate. It is the Margarets and Perrins who are sustained at every clash of opinion. Yet, paradoxically, it is an honest book – the author argues for one side, but he cannot prevent his "good" characters from revealing their deeper motivations with every word they utter. He is sure they are in the right – but is too honest to alter the evidence, even when it seems to call for sympathy for the unspeakable Stukeley. It is perhaps this which Hugh Greene meant when he spoke of the book's 'sexual sophistication' – not so much that Masefield is laying a sophisticated trap for his readers; but that he is, almost against his own will, giving us the clue to a labyrinth in which he himself was embroiled.

[John Masefield: Captain Margaret (1908)]

(iii) Conclusion

There remains something more to be said about Captain Margaret, however. The "homosexual hypothesis", though it undoubtedly gives us part of the answer, does not give it all. For that, we must go deeper into Masefield’s intentions for the book.

Masefield, after all, seems to have been largely successful in sublimating his own feelings into the appreciation of abstract "beauty". One of the most predominant themes in his writing is the extent to which all forms and beauties are mere foreshadowings of some higher reality elsewhere. This obsession with the thing behind the thing – the "idea", or Platonic archetype – can be observed in his attitudes towards ships, ballet, the countryside, and the physical beauty of both men and women (even, at times, the spectacle of a fox-hunt). He described his favourite ship, the Wanderer, as being:

Tense, like a supple athlete with lean hips,
Swiftness at pause ...

Come as of old a queen, untouched by Time,
Resting the beauty that no seas could tire,
Sparkling, as though the midnight's rain were rime,
Like a man’s thought transfigured into fire. (Masefield, 1941, p.372)

The very mixture of images – a "suggestively" posed athlete, a queen, a thought – seems to show how all these things merged into a single principle in Masefield's mind (it would be irrelevant, within the bounds of a critical study, to decide whether or not the same was true of his life). A perhaps slightly absurd, though telling, illustration of this is in the poem 'Tristan's singing', where the lovers Tristan and Isolt, instead of physically consummating their union, are translated into spirits at the moment of climax, and go about 'blessing sorrowing men' (Masefield, 1941, p.983).

Others may long for something a little more concrete – but that was the ideal after which Masefield strove. It therefore seems rather unlikely that he would write so extensive and serious a novel as Captain Margaret simply as a homosexual roman à clef. I say 'simply' because I believe that much of the novel is inexplicable on any other hypothesis – but I also believe there to be another, deeper, level present as well.

I have said that Margaret is an 'inferior, exaggerated shadow' of his creator – and perhaps the most fruitful wav to see Captain Margaret is as a kind of symbolic, Psychomachia – presenting the forces at conflict within a single human soul.

This is not to say that the novel is intended allegorically – but rather that the major characters are best interpreted as condensed aspects of the psyche of (presumably) their creator.

Margaret, of course, is the purified intellect – or, more specifically, the rationalized, externally-imposed code of behaviour which goes to make up the Freudian "superego". To put the thing entirely in his own terms, he 'was one of the few who had escaped from the world, escaped from that necessity for tooth and claw which is nature; and ... by being no longer natural, instinctive, common, he had risen to something higher, to a point from which he could regard the pirate as an interesting work of art' (Masefield, 1974, pp.194-95). There is still something missing, though – something denied; repressed – he still envies the pirate's freedom from restraint.

At the opposite pole is Stukeley – the "id", or Jungian "shadow". He is free, coarse, unrestrained, sensual, savage – the perfect example of emotion without intellect only a primitive dark cunning, without scruple or remorse. He is the Mr. Hyde to Margaret's Dr. Jekyll (or, perhaps, his 'secret sharer') and, as in Stevenson's novel, we tend to prefer the dark side to the light.

There is no underlying centre, no ego, to the book – the book itself, ideally (or the impression it produces in the reader's mind), should constitute that. Stukeley alone can remain static – self-contained and self-obsessed. Margaret is torn between his passion to move upwards – to love an ideal, an Olivia – and his fascination with Stukeley: in effect, with the darker side of himself. He shudders, like Shakespeare (Sonnet 144) to see his 'angel' and his 'devil' combine:

her child would be a monster, a goat-footed boy, a Stukeley. He shuddered to think of the child's hair, curling and black like the father's hair, negro hair; his nerves were shaken ... No man's love could bear that, could forgive that; though it glorified her, in a way, and made her very sacred. (Masefield, 1974, p.186)

Like the ritual prostitutes in an Eastern temple; like the King's daughter given up to the beast, 'it glorified her, in a way, and made her very sacred'.

•

Extrinsic explanations cannot make Captain Margaret a good novel, but they can point out some of the complexities which are undoubtedly there. Masefield failed to project the Othello-like tragedy of "larger-than-life" passions and personalities which I believe him to have intended – but he wrote, nevertheless, better than he knew. Much of the novel remains puzzling because Masefield himself could not explain it – but that is no reason for us not to try. Masefield, after all, was not just Captain Margaret: he was Stukeley as well. And while Margaret may have been holding the pen and shaping the sentences – it is Stukeley who lies at the heart of the action.

Captain Margaret is a novel about love, insofar as it provides a critique of the Romantic theory of love – from the hand of one of its staunchest adherents Margaret 's worship of Olivia – and denial of her physical needs – is, ultimately, self-defeating; for all their "happy ending" in each other's arms. Stukeley is an extreme – but he represents a factor that has been denied too long and cannot, ultimately, be entirely suppressed. It is the immaculate whiteness of Margaret and Olivia that makes their shadow stretch so black and long.

[John Masefield: On the Spanish Main (1906 {1922})]

1. He was speaking of a slightly earlier period.

2. See Chronology.

3. Reynard the Fox (1919) – see also the essay on 'Fox Hunting', originally published as a preface to the poem, in Recent Prose (1924).

4. Another example is Mr. Hampden's 'elderly lady friend' in A Book of Discoveries (1910). Mary Drummond, In The Street of To-Day, is an old friend of Lionel's mother.

5. Two comments telescoped.

[John Masefield: On the Spanish Main (1906 {1922})]

Works Cited:

Hamilton, W. H. John Masefield: A Popular Study. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925.

Harvey, Sir Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 4th ed. Rev. Dorothy Eagle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Masefield, John. Captain Margaret. 1908. Ed. Hugh Greene. Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head, 1974.

Masefield, John. Multitude and Solitude. 1909. London: Jonathan Cape, 1927.

Masefield, John. The Street of To-Day. 1911. London: T. Fisher Unwin, n.d.

Masefield, John. William Shakespeare. Home University Library. 1911. London: Williams & Norgate, 1926.

Masefield, John. Gallipoli. 1916. London: Heinemann, 1935.

Masefield, John. Reynard the Fox. London: Heinemann, 1919.

Masefield, John. Enslaved and Other Poems. Heinemann, 1920.

Masefield, John. Collected Poems. 1923. 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1941.

Masefield, John. Recent Prose. London: Heinemann, 1924.

Masefield, John. Sard Harker. 1924. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Masefield, John. Poems: Complete Edition with Recent Poems. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967.

Masefield, John. Letters to Reyna. Ed. William Buchan. London: Buchan & Enright, 1983.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1971.

Smith, Constance Babington. John Masefield: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Spark, Muriel. John Masefield. London: Peter Nevill, 1953.

Swinnerton, Frank. The Georgian Literary Scene 1910-1935. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969.

Yeats, W. B. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1977.

[John Masefield: Multitude and Solitude (1909 {1927})]

Chapter 4:

2009-04-20T08:44:00.028+12:00

[John Masefield (1930)]

Two Novels of Contemporary Life

'There was only one question to those men, the condition-of-England question'
(Masefield, 1919, p.10)

•

Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writes, on the eve of his departure for Paris:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. (Levin, 1974, p.252)

There is, however, a rather interesting near-parallel to this statement in the remark of an earlier fictional "writer" – Roger Naldrett, in John Masefield's Multitude and Solitude (1909). He says, of 'a literary life':

That life, if it be in the least worthy, is consecrated to the creation of the age's moral consciousness. (Masefield, 1927, p.172)

The remarks are similar, but the effects they give are quite different. They both contain roughly the same idea – 'conscience' for 'consciousness' and 'race' for 'age' are not sufficiently disparate to make much difference to the meaning – but the two tones of voice could hardly be more at variance. Joyce's is bold, impetuous – almost arrogant in the strength of its enthusiasm. Masefield's, on the other hand, sounds pious, a little smug, and rather boringly "earnest".

The dichotomy may seem to be harshly presented, but there is, nevertheless, a reason for this distinction, and it is one which is not wholly favourable to Joyce. A few pages earlier, in his famous conversation with Lynch, Stephen had outlined various aspects of his aesthetic theory, among them his belief that:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak ... The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

– Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch. (Levin, 1974, p.221)

The somewhat irreverent remarks of Lynch provide an ironic commentary or chorus – a sort of 'Damn braces. Bless relaxes' (Keynes, 1948, p.185) – on the young Stephen's intense and ideal intellectualism. Lynch goes on to say:

– What do you mean ... by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country. (p.221)

Lynch, in other words, is trying to keep the discussion in the realm of the concrete – to examine the motives of the 'artist' in his everyday life, rather than in his imagined subordination to the 'mystery of aesthetic' (p.221). And even Stephen is forced to acknowledge that such a level does indeed exist:

– As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all animals. I also am an animal.

– You are, said Lynch.

– But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire and loathing excited by improper aesthetic means are really not aesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. (p.213)

And this is, of course, perfectly respectable intellectually. If one did happen to be discussing things on the physical level, a lot would be relevant that, as it is, serves merely as a distraction to the theoretician.

Nevertheless, while one can hardly reject the concept of intellectual registers as such, there is still a good deal to be said for questioning the motives of those who seem determined to confine themselves exclusively to the plane of the ideal and theoretical. "How do you, yourself, justify being an artist in this country, Ireland, at this particular moment?" is what Lynch is really asking (most of the time). And, while one suspects that Stephen is right to ignore so comprehensive and unanswerable a question (if there is an answer at all, it lies in the Portrait as a whole – the later Joyce's synthesis of his early life), one also feels that Lynch has some justice on his side.

Masefield, in Multitude and Solitude, has attempted to answer precisely this question of Lynch's – only in the case of Roger Naldrett it is a semi-successful playwright and novelist who is trying to justify himself and his position in society. His comments and theories are desperately sincere – and bear directly on the real world, since Roger and Masefield were in such closely parallel situations. One feels that it is not really possible to disentangle the two when Roger says:

An artist had no right to create at pleasure, ignoble types and situations, fixing fragments of the perishing to the walls of the world, as a keeper nails vermin ... Great art called such work 'sin,' 'denial of the Holy Ghost,' 'crucifixion of our Lord.' (Masefield, 1927, p.53)

And yet, it is more as if Masefield is trying out the idea than actually committing himself to a particular point of view. His is a "novel of ideas" only in the sense that various ideas are expounded in it at different times. One feels no sense of a synthesis – of a guiding purpose. It is more as if the book is an experimental culture for testing bacilli – with the pious hope that only those best fitted to defend themselves will survive.

Roger expounds the basic dilemma facing Masefield (and himself) in this way:

an artist is concerned above all things with moral ideas. He is not limited, or should not be, to particular truths. His word is the entire world, reduced, by strict and passionate thinking, to its imaginative essence ... At the same time, there is nothing the man of thought desires so much as to be a man of action ... Byron went liberating Greece. Chaucer was an ambassador; Spenser a sort of Irish R.M.; Shakespeare an actor-manager and money-lender, or, as some think, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Writing alone is not enough for a man. (Masefield, 1927, pp.142-43)

The first part of this statement is rather reminiscent of Joyce – the two share, at any rate, an equally high sense of the artist's responsibility; and neither believes him to be confined to narrow sectarian concerns. 'There is nothing topical in good literature' (Masefield, 1927, p.20), as Roger had intimated earlier, or, even more revealing: 'for a military man, who merely wants food for powder, for no grand creative principle, I would not write even if the Nicaraguans were battering St. Paul's' (p.140).

The second part, though – about the 'man of action' – is venturing into realms that Joyce left strictly alone. Why does a man write? And how does he fit himself for writing? Roger feels little doubt about the artist's ideal function:

My province is to induce emotion ... My work is to find out certain general truths in nature, and to express them, in prose or verse, in as high and living a manner as I can. (Masefield, 1927, p.136)

And it is for this reason that he does not 'believe in mixing art with propaganda' (p.136). How a man is to reach that high level is, however, a rather more difficult question. Nevertheless, the fact remains, 'Without action we are stagnant. If you sit down to write, day after day, for months on end, you can feel the scum growing on your mind' (Masefield, 1927, p.173). (Here, one suspects, one is hearing the experience of Masefield himself). Roger now enriches his list of Byron, Chaucer and Shakespeare with a still more illustrious predecessor:

Homer never existed, of course, but the old idea of a poet's being blind is very significant. Poets must have been men of action, like the other men of their race. They only became poets when they lost their sight, or ceased ... to be efficient in the musters, when, in fact, their lives were turned inwards. Nowadays that is changed, Heseltine. A man writes because he has read, or because he is idle, or greedy, or vicious, or vain, for a dozen different reasons; but very seldom because his whole life has been turned inward by the discipline of action, thought, or suffering. (Masefield, 1927, pp.172-73)

That last series of motivations for writing 'nowadays' rather resembles Freud's famous statement about the artist: 'He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy' (Freud, 1978, p.423). Roger, too, sees the danger in the artist's turning away entirely from reality – from life in the world – and argues about it with his companion, Lionel Heseltine, who is, himself, a real 'man of action' – a scientist – just back from Africa, where he has been combatting sleeping sickness:

'Good God, Heseltine, it seems to me terrible that a man should be permitted to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the State.'

'Well,' said Lionel, picking up his cigarette ... 'Yes. But look here. I met
that French poet fellow, Mongeron, the other day ... He said that action was unnecessary to the man of thought, since the imagination enabled him to possess all experience imaginatively.'

'Yes. I know that pleasant theory. I agree,' said Roger. 'But only when action has formed the character.' (Masefield, 1927, pp.173-74)

Mongeron's position is basically that of Freud – the artist can achieve 'through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy – honour, power and the love of women' (Freud, 1978, p.424) – though Mongeron's view of what he hopes to achieve is a little more elevated. Roger, however, feels that this is too simple – that it is the formation of character which is the essential thing, and that this can only be accomplished by active involvement in life:

I begin to think that a writer without character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ. (Masefield, 1927, p.173)

Lionel and Roger, indeed, sound almost like the representatives of C. P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' having a debate – only with the normal positions reversed. Roger has been seized with a passion for 'action', for getting in the thick of it, and he has begun to suspect that 'Science, so cleanly and fearless, was doing the poet's work, while the poet, taking his cue from Blake, maligned her with the malignity of ignorance' (Masefield, 1927, p.156) – even though 'He knew so little of science that his thought of it was little more than a consideration of sleeping sickness' (p.157). Lionel, on the other hand, would 'give the world to be able to write. To write poetry. Or I'd like to be able to write a play' (p.165). He has read a book by Roger, which impressed him greatly:

'That was a fine book. I liked your little word-pictures.'

'I am sorry you liked that book. It is very crude. I remember Ottalie was down on me for it.' (Masefield, 1927, p.167)

(Ottalie is Roger's fiancée – and guiding star).

Roger's "practical" concern for what a man should do in order to be a worthy artist proves, therefore, to be largely theory. The real 'man of action' – Lionel – only tolerates him because Lionel, in his turn, has been greatly impressed by a 'crude' and superseded book of Roger's. Each admires the other as a result of his own ignorance – a somewhat uncertain basis for successful emulation. Nor does either of them change his way of thinking appreciably during the course of the narrative. Roger remains an amateur scientist – a 'griff' – who gets results by intuition rather than scientific method:

'But did you look at the blood microscopically?'

'No,' said Roger, ashamed. 'I looked at my sera for streptococci.'

'You juggins!' said Lionel. 'Yet you come out and land on a cure. Well, well! You're a lucky dog.' (Masefield, 1927, p.290)

And Lionel remains as inartistic as ever. ('They're not bad at all,' Roger had said of some of his verses earlier in the story. 'You haven't got much ear; but that's only a matter of training. People can always write well if they are moved or interested' (p.167) – rather damning him with faint praise!)

•

Perhaps, then, after all, there is something to be said for Joyce's notion of concentrating on the difficulties of writing rather than the supposed consequences of being a writer. Taking some decisive action in your personal life – Stephen's (and Joyce's) departure for Paris at the end of the Portrait, for instance – is one thing. Theorizing about the necessity for action, and then acting on the strength of your theories (like Roger) is quite another.

Nor is Joyce's decision to present his aesthetic theory in so 'static' a fashion the result of any hasty decision. The earlier version of the book, Stephen Hero, is – in its mode of presentation, at any rate – far more analogous with Multitude and Solitude:

the aesthetic theory with which we are familiar in the Portrait is already fully outlined in Stephen Hero ... In the Portrait Stephen outlines his aesthetic programme in a conversation with Lynch, and the intellectual integrity and hardness of Stephen's ideas are contrasted with the coarse ejaculations and comments of his companion ... But ... Stephen merely expounds his views; we are made to feel that he is so convinced of their truth that it doesn't in the least matter to him whether anybody else agrees with him or not ...

Not so the younger Stephen of the present text. To him the setting forth of his ideas is a matter of great personal importance, and he delivers them, not in the casual form of a conversation with a friend, but in the form of a public paper to a literary society; it is a public event, an event for which Stephen prepares with great care ... in the present text [the theory] is expounded kinetically. Stephen is personally interested in the success of his paper, his intellectual fortunes seem to depend on it, and we are moved – not necessarily to do something – but to sympathy and concern for the outcome. The later text is, as usual, more mature, and shows Joyce, as the earlier version does not, illustrating his theory by his practice. (Theodore Spencer, "Introduction," in Joyce, 1961, pp.14-16)

In other words, the truly Joycean "novel of ideas" does not just introduce them artfully into the conversation, but must weave them into the very structure of the book. Stephen Hero does not live up to this ideal because the techniques it employs are too conventional – scenes, confrontation, clashes of interest:

In the manuscript Stephen does, to be sure, discuss his aesthetic theory with a friend ... But it is interesting to note that the friend is Cranly, not Lynch, that the conversation comes long after the main theory is expounded in the public essay, and that Stephen is personally disappointed in Cranly's failure to be interested in the argument. (Joyce, 1961, p.15)

The techniques employed in Multitude and Solitude are on a more rudimentary level still. They can be summed up under three basic headings:

Dialogue – as Dr. Johnson put it: 'It is indeed much more easy to form dialogues than to contrive adventures. Every position makes way for an argument, and every objection dictates an answer. When two disputants are engaged upon a complicated and extensive question, the difficulty is not to continue, but to end the controversy' (Johnson, 1912, 1:147). With Masefield, too, it is much easier to talk about ideas than to embody them effectively in the action. Dinner parties, tea parties, and even strolls in the woods, become mere vehicles for impromptu monologues – and Socratic dialogues – between the author's mouthpiece and whoever happens to be serving as his foil.

The second technique is a little more difficult to define one hesitates to label it simply as suspense, action, or adventure. It is the faculty that Masefield undoubtedly possessed of getting his readers involved in the adventures and tribulations of a single hero. One of Masefield's major disabilities as a novelist, actually, was his lack of any sort of detachment – ironic or otherwise – from his characters. He identifies with the "good" and relentlessly blackens the "bad" ones (there is never very much difficulty in working out which is which) – and this leads him, on occasion, into condoning some quite remarkable behaviour on the part of his "chosen people".[1] While this defect tends to cripple Masefield as a serious novelist (particularly as a novelist of "ideas" – which depend largely on detachment), it is of considerable use to him as an adventure writer. His books are always at their best when one hero – Sard Harker, for example; or one of his boy heroes – is presented in conflict with a hostile world (as is the case in Multitude and Solitude when Roger is left to shift for himself in the middle of Africa).

The third technique is simple description – and, again, it is something that Masefield does very well. Not for him the "purple patches" and lengthy word-pictures of a Conrad or a W. H. Hudson. His.descriptions tend to support very well the underlying machinations of the plot, and help to create a richness of atmosphere which does much to offset his other shortcomings:

The bones were covered with lichen now; but the skull grinned at Roger friendlily, as it had often grinned. Riding on, and glancing back over his shoulder, at risk of going into the ditch, he saw the skull's eyes fixed upon him. (Masefield, 1927, p.94)

Some of the best descriptions in the whole book, however, are of dreams – which Masefield always handles superbly, with just the right blend of the inconsequential and the significant:

He ceased to fumble at the net. He began to see an endless army of artillery going over a pass. The men were all dark; the guns were all painted black; the horses were black. They were going uphill endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. He cried out to them to stop that driving, to do anything rather than go on and on and on in that ghastly way. Instantly they changed to tsetses, riding on dying cattle. They were giant tsetses, with eyes like cannon-balls. An infernal host of trypanosomes wriggled around them. The trypanosomes were wriggling allover him. A giant tsetse was forcing his mouth open with a hairy bill, so that the trypanosomes might wriggle down his throat. A flattened trypanosome, tasting.as flabby as jelly, was swarming over his lips. (Masefield, 1927, p.197)

That 'tasting as flabby as jelly' is worth a whole paragraph on the poetic imagination in itself!

•

The one great failing in Masefield's novels is their lack of what might be called "significant structure". As we have seen above, he was perfectly competent in the various major branches of the novelist's art – narrative excitement, dialogue, description – but he lacked the ability (possessed in such overflowing measure by Joyce) to link all these elements together, and subordinate them to an overarching design. Unfortunately, this is the one talent that a novelist must not lack:

It's a writer's business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. (Le Guin, 1979, p.111)

Nevertheless, like most writers, Masefield was well aware of his own principal failings, and was quite ingenious in avoiding them. His usual expedients in his later novels were either to employ first-person narration (as in Dead Ned and its sequel Live and Kicking Ned (1938 & 1939)), which supplies a sort of natural structuring device – the exigencies of memory – in itself; or to concentrate on the fortunes of a single hero or protagonist almost to the exclusion of all else: Sard Harker (1924), Odtaa (1925), Basilissa (1940). Another successful variation on this device was to devote a whole book to the reactions of his hero to a single crisis, lasting a few hours or days: The Bird of Dawning (1933), Victorious Troy (1935). This latter book, which deals with a ship struck by a hurricane, is rather reminiscent of Conrad's Typhoon (1903), or, more particularly – presumably as an analogue rather than an antecedent – of Richard Hughes' In Hazard (1938).

In the present novel, Multitude and Solitude, Masefield does not so much resolve his problems by embodying them in the form of fiction, as create a principal character to argue about them, and test out the various proposed solutions to them "in the field". It is no accident that Roger's obsession with sleeping sickness parallels the young Masefield's desire to become a doctor in order to fight yellow fever:

To be a doctor and to work at yellow fever, that hope shone like a star. I had been brought up in a generation which had suffered much from yellow fever. De Lesseps' Canal scheme had been wrecked by it. Cape Horn was still made necessary by it. I had known many sailors who had seen it at close quarters, and had shuddered at its deadliness and mystery. I had had a friend suddenly killed by it. I longed to work at that enemy, and to help to find 'its unseen, small, but million-murdering cause'. (Masefield, 1941c, p.95)

It was the discovery of poetry – the works of Chaucer, Keats and Shelley – which deterred him from this ambition; though he did later (in 1923) describe the discovery by Sir Ronald Ross of 'the part played by the mosquito in conveying the malarial parasite' as 'the greatest thing done in our time by one man' (Handley-Taylor, 1960, p.18). In 1909, in the state of depression and overwork described in Chapter Three of this study, it was natural for Masefield – a writer who seemed unable to achieve a real, substantial success – to resume his old plans, and to dream of a freer, more satisfying life of "service to mankind". This cannot be called "escape" in the sense in which we applied it to Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, since Masefield is testing his plan in action, in the pages of a novel, rather than using it simply as the excuse to indulge in largely irrelevant adventures.

The purpose of this preamble, then, has been to clarify precisely what sort of "discussion of ideas" can be expected from Masefield's two early 'condition-of-England' (or of contemporary society) novels – Multitude and Solitude and The Street of To-Day (1911) – so that one can concentrate on their very real virtues, without too much reference to their faults of comprehensive structure. Joyce is, of course, a better novelist – but the virtues of the Portrait lie more in ruthless selectivity than in wide-ranging "human sympathy" (though this is undoubtedly present – perhaps in a greater measure than in the unfortunately fragmentary Stephen Hero). Masefield's merits lie in his inclusiveness – the interest inherent in each separate plot-line, rather than in its direct contribution to the whole. Both are writing "autobiographically" – but Masefield in a spirit of openness and experiment; Joyce with magisterial condescension – definitively.

[John Masefield: Multitude and Solitude (1909 {1927})]

(i) Multitude and Solitude

The novel Multitude and Solitude opens with Roger Naldrett watching the failure of his tragedy, A Roman Matron, on stage. As I have already stressed, Roger represents not so much Masefield himself, as a sort of dramatization of the various options that lay before him at that particular time, 1909. Like Masefield, Roger is a playwright (The Matron sounds a little like a mixture of The Tragedy of Nan and The Tragedy of Pompey the Great) and novelist (we are told that 'His agent sent him a very welcome cheque for £108, for his newly completed novel' (Masefield, 1927, p.54); and Roger has mentioned, a little earlier, that 'I've a novel half finished: I told you the fable, I think' (p.27) – respectively, Captain Margaret, and Multitude and Solitude itself?). He has also published a book of sketches, entitled The Handful, of which we are told that they 'had been self-conscious experiments in style, detached, pictorial presentation of crises, clever things in their way, but startling, both in colour and in subject, the results of moods, not of perfected personality' (p.53). They sound, in short, more like Dubliners than either A Mainsail Haul or A Tarpaulin Muster. This is not simply the result of wishful thinking, however – Roger Naldrett is a more mainstream, less specifically "nautical" writer than Masefield – perhaps in order to make him more representative; a more standard yardstick against which to measure the age-old dilemma of "artist and society". As it happens, Masefield identifies too closely with his character for any real distance to exist between the two; but the fact that Roger is not (as far as we are told) a poet, and that he has no specific associations with the sea, does in fact help us to see him rather as a parallel or analogue to Masefield, than as a 'Stephen Dedalus' author-surrogate.[2]

After seeing the ruin of his play, Roger goes off to have supper at a small restaurant with his friend John O'Neill, who was also present at the performance. O'Neill is a mysterious figure:

Nobody knew him. Nobody knew what he was. There were some who held that John was the Wandering Jew, others that he was a Nihilist, a Carlist, a Barmacedist, a Jacobite, the heir to France, King Arthur, Anti-Christ, or Parnell. All had felt the mystery, but none had solved it. (Masefield, 1927, p.25)

Roger, however, is beginning to feel that 'John was a kind of John the Baptist, a torch-bearer, sent to set other people on fire, but without real fire of his own' (p.25). O'Neill is about to leave for Spain with a young Spanish scholar called Centeno, and is already there in spirit: 'His friend was already in those secret rooms at the top of a house in Queen Square. His spirit was there, bowed over the work with the Spanish scholar; the earthly part of him was a parcel left behind in a restaurant to follow as it might' (p.28). As Roger sees him off in a cab:

It struck Roger then that the evening had brought him very near to romance. He had seen his soul's work shouted down by the Minotaur. Now the man whom he had worshipped was going away to die. (Masefield, 1927, p.29)

The terms in which he is described make it obvious that O'Neill is, in fact, a personification of the artistic instinct. In his "occult" preoccupations he resembles W. B. Yeats a little; but the reason why he remains so shadowy as a character (we are never even allowed to meet 'Centeno', the young scholar) is because his significance is largely symbolic. His departure for Spain represents a sort of 'god abandoning Antony' for Roger – whose hopes are at their lowest ebb, and who is uncertain of his vocation and of all the ideals he has hitherto held dear.

Before leaving, O'Neill mentions the other major call on Roger's affections – his fiancee, Ottalie Fawcett. It is to thoughts of her that Roger now turns, resisting his impulse to 'creep in upon the secret, up the stairs, through the corridor piled with books, to the dark room, hung with green, where the work went forward ... to surprise those conspirators [O'Neill and Centeno] over their secret of the soul, and to be initiated into the mystery, even at the sword's point' (pp.29-30).

His equanimity is further threatened, however, by an encounter with a drunkard on his way home:

As he bent over the flame, someone struck him violently between the shoulders. He turned swiftly, full of anger, to confront a halfdrunken man whose face had the peculiar bloated shapelessness of the London sot. The man unjustly claimed, with many filthy words, that Roger had jostled against him, and that he was going to – well, show him different. A little crowd gathered, expecting a fight. When the man's language was at its filthiest, a policeman interfered, bidding the drunkard go home
quietly ...

The mistake, and the foul talk, and the sudden attentions of the crowd at such a moment when he hoped to be alone, gave Roger a feeling of helpless hatred of himself and of modern life. (Masefield, 1927, p.30)

In order to recover, Roger goes into a small restaurant nearby:

As he smoked the memories of the evening assailed him. He saw his work hooted from the stage, and John passing from his life, and the sot's bloated mouth babbling filth at him. His nerves were all shaken to pieces by the emotional strain of the past fortnight. He was in a child's mood: the mood of the homesick boy at school. He was as dangerously near hysteria as the drunkard. He longed to be over in Ireland, in the house of that beautiful woman whom he loved ... away from all these horrors and desolations. (Masefield, 1927, p.31)

Roger is, in short, under assault on all sides. The atmosphere of depression, of aimlessness, is built up carefully by Masefield in a series of short scenes and vignettes, each fitting neatly into the next.

When he gets home, Roger is unable to sleep, because the woman who lives next door, the wife of an M.P., 'an irregular, eccentric lady, fond of late hours', who is 'musical, in a hard accomplished way', is inspired by 'some wandering devil ... to begin to play at midnight' (p.35). Roger gets up, and, after doing a little reading in a desultory fashion, goes out on his balcony to admire the night.

His reverie is interrupted by the M.P.'s wife, who has come out on her own balcony, just adjacent, and who asks him for a cigarette. After a little more talk she invites him over, and Roger, who was 'used to unconventional people', agrees. 'He knew that Templeton [her husband] seldom went to bed before two. He took it for granted that Templeton was in the sitting-room; possibly within earshot' (p.43).

Roger and Hrs. Templeton talk for a little while, but then are interrupted by the return of her husband, who has been attending a late sitting of the house.

In the doorway stood Templeton – a tall, bald, thin-faced man, with foxy moustache and weak eyes. His face showed amazed anger. (Masefield, 1927, p.47)

He orders Roger to leave, and Roger, who is angry at having been put in a false position, hastens to do so; but first he 'looked hard at Mrs. Templeton. Never again would he speak civilly to a woman with high cheekbones, steel eyes, and loose mouth. He bowed to her. "I didn't deserve it," he said quietly' (p.48).

... For a moment Roger felt furious with Templeton. Then he blamed the lady. She had played him a scurvy trick. Lastly, as he began to understand her position, he forgave her. He blamed himself. He felt that he had mixed himself with something indescribably squalid. (Masefield, 1927, p.48)

The incident reinforces Roger's growing disillusionment with the life that surrounds him, and the life that he himself is leading. He thinks again of Ottalie and the clean Irish countryside she inhabits before he goes to sleep. The contrast between her and Mrs. Templeton is immense:

Ottalie sang with all the beauty of her character, giving to each note an indescribable rightness of value, verbal as well as musical, conveying to her hearers a sense of her distinction of soul, a sense of the noble living of dead generations of Fawcetts; a sense of style and race and personal exquisiteness. This lady sang as though she were out in a hockey field, charging the ball healthily, in short skirts, among many gay young sprigs from the barracks. She sang like the daughter of a nouveau riche. (Masefield, 1927, p.36)

This sounds, on the surface, like the most appalling snobbery; but it is, at least, based on Ottalie's "gentilesse" of soul, rather than simply her distinction of birth. It is true that Masefield seems to suppose that the two are linked, but he does so in the same sense as Yeats seeing in aristocratic virtues a way of protesting against the unmistakable ills of contemporary society:

My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept – (Yeats, 1977, p.369)

Ottalie, too, is doomed to destruction by this modern world, where the old standards have disappeared, and 'A large proportion of English people, having lost faith in their old ruler, supernatural religion, fly about wildly in motor-cars' (Masefield, 1927, p.137).

Having finally fallen asleep, Roger now dreams of Ottalie but the dream is not an encouraging one. He sees himself waiting at her door:

he had stood upon the stair-top knocking vainly at the door of an empty house. It came upon him then with an exhaustion of the soul, like death itself, that he had come too late. She had gone away disappointed, perhaps angry. The door would never open to him; he would never meet her again; never even enter the hall, dimly seen through the glass, to gather relics of her. (Masefield, 1927, pp.51-52)

•

The next long section of the novel is devoted to an account of Roger's pursuit of Ottalie. He suspects she is in London, but is distracted, on his way to see her, by a summons to a friend whose wife has just fallen ill (she fainted when she saw him lying stunned on the hearth-rug). Roger has to go and search for a nurse for Mrs. Pollock, and then accompany Pollock (who is a painter) to the National Gallery, in order to "take him out of himself". By the time he reaches Ottalie's flat, she has left again.

On returning to the Gallery, he discovers that Pollock has gone – and, after a vain attempt to find him, Roger goes to a restaurant, where he is accosted by various friends and critics of his play. He still hopes to catch up with Ottalie before she leaves London, as he fears that she is going to the continent, but finds no trace of her at the railway-station, the only place left to look.

When he finally reaches home, he finds a letter from Ottalie which had arrived just after he left: 'Five minutes' patience would have altered his life' (Masefield, 1927, p.83) – but it is now too late. His landlady tells him that a lady came to see him, and that 'She seemed very put out at not finding you' (p.83). The lady was, of course, Ottalie:

All his misery seemed rolled into a leaden ball, which was smashing through his brain. The play I.as a little thing. The loss of John was a little thing. Templeton was farcical, the critics were little gnats, but to have missed Ottalie, to have lost Ottalie! He tasted a moment of despair. (Masefield, 1927, p.84)

Indeed, Roger suspects 'some juggling against him of the powers outside life' (p.84). He is not yet beaten, though. He determines to go to Ireland to intercept her (her letter had told him that she was returning home from Greece, and would only be in London for a short time). The sense of impending catastrophe is growing all through this long series of futile manoeuvres, however. As he drives to the station 'He saw one newsbill flutter out from a man's hand. "British Liner Lost," ran the heading. He felt relieved that the monkey-mind had now something new to occupy it' (p.85).

On arriving in Ireland, Roger immediately feels better:

As he rode, he thought burningly of what that afternoon would be to him. Ottalie might not be there. She might be away. She might be out; but something told him she would be there. With Ottalie in the world, the world did not matter greatly. (Masefield, 1927, p.93)

On arriving at the house, he asks for Ottalie. As he predicted, she is there:

'Is Miss Fawcett in?'

'Have you not heard, sir?'

'Heard what?'

'Miss Ottalah's dead, sir.'

'What?'

'She was drowned in the boat that was run into, crossing the sea, two days ago. There was a fog, sir. Did no one tell you, sir?'

'No.'

'There was eleven of them drowned, sir.'

'Was she ... Is she lying here?'

'Yes, sir. She's within. The burying will no' be till Saturday. She is no' chested yet.' (Masefield, 1927, p.97)

The whole of this episode is splendidly done. It is a little difficult, in.such a brief summary, to do justice to fifty pages of gradually accelerating narrative, building up to this abrupt and curt finale – the cumulative effect of so many frustrations, distractions, and forebodings must be experienced; not simply described. One should certainly mention, though, (leaving aside for a moment the significance of the episode in this particular book), that this is the first appearance of what would later become one of Masefield's most obsessive themes. The novels Sard Harker and Odtaa consist of little more than one frustration after another hindering their respective heroes from reaching their objectives (Sard Harker's famous battle with an almost sentient swamp occupies almost ten pages in the former book (Masefield, 1963, pp.106-15); while the significance of the latter's title: One damn thing after another, prefigures the fact that its hero, Highworth Ridden, does not in fact ever achieve his purpose). Masefield's "theory" of frustration is perhaps best summed up in a passage from the book Conquer (1941):

When, in those hours of moments, one tried to do any one thing, a hundred other things rose up to stop its doing, and to thrust forward things to be done first. Frustration and retardation are the enemies in war; it is the being unable to act freely that is the curse in life. In childhood, sickness, war and old age, all the four curses of man, this being tied, this being unable, is the annulling thing. (Masefield, 1941b, p.85)

Though one suspects that this technique may have its roots in Hardy – the episode of the boots, or of the letter, in Tess, for example – there is no denying that Masefield has carried it much further. Indeed, in books such as Sard Harker – or Live and Kicking Ned, where the hero and his friends struggle to alert the administration of a mythical "lost" city in Africa to the menace from outside – it has been elevated almost to a law of the Universe.

In Multitude and Solitude, however, its main function is to knock away the last prop from Roger's already shaky worldview. He goes to see Agatha, Ottalie's closest friend long an enemy of his (a sort of Isabel Fry figure?) – and finds that neither of them now feels anything but sympathy for the other. Even jealousy is dead:

He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained, in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies ... There she was, in that quiet room, behind the blinds, lying on the bed, still and blank ... And here were her two lovers, listening to the clock, listening to the spadestrokes in the garden, where old John was at work. (Masefield, 1927, pp.101-2)

Roger is now at a loose end – having had all his ties with society (the 'multitude' of the title) severed one by one. His work has been hissed, his mysterious 'torch-bearer' friend has departed, and now his beloved is dead. London, and London people – from Mrs. Templeton to the 'Newsboys, with debased, predatory faces,' peering 'with ophthalmic eyes into betting news' (p.176) (the tautology, 'ophthalmic eyes' (perhaps he means "myopic") shows Masefield, as usual, laying it on a little too thick) – are now loathsome to him as mere 'symptoms of disease' (p.176).

•

The second major section of the book begins with Roger talking to Leslie, Ottalie's brother, an author in his own right. Leslie believes that:

the art life is strangely like the life of the religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great Spanish saints ... says that many novices deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. (Masefield, 1927, p.111)

Under this "gentle persuasion", Roger realizes that he has not been serious enough about his art in the past, and that there is something else still expected of him. He dreams again of Ottalie before he leaves Ireland:

Last of all came an elderly lady carrying a light. She was dressed in a robe of dim purple. She, too, knocked sharply on the door. She lingered there, long enough for him to study her fine intellectual face. It was the face of Ottalie grown old. The woman was the completed Ottalie. (Masefield, 1927, p.113)

He is sure that she has some message for him. Next day, he talks to Agatha, who intends to 'start a little school for poor girls' (p.117). Roger is shamed by her example: '"I loved Ottalie, too," he answered. "I won't say as much as you did, for you knew her intimately. I never was soul to soul with her as you were; but I loved her. I want now to make my life worthy of her, as you do. But it won't be in my work. I don't know what it will be in'" (p.118). Before leaving, he picks up a small scrap of newspaper, and determines to keep it as a 'relic' of Ottalie's home. It proves to contain a short paragraph about sleepingsickness, and reminds him of another article he once read about the affliction.

Roger stops at an inn on his way to the steamer, and, while looking over the recent papers, sees a photograph representing 'A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS
BELT ... two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present, is believed to be incurable' (p.122). He discusses the disease with Leslie, who is accompanying him to the ship, and then, just before he boards, hears a singer with a banjo singing a song:

'0, I'm so seedy
So very seedy,
I don't know what to do.
I've consumption of the liver
And a dose of yellow fever
And sleeping sickness, too.
0, my head aches
And my heart ... ' (Masefield, 1927, p.124)

It is a voice Roger has heard before. A singer in one of his dreams.

•

The "sleeping-sickness theme" – introduced gradually in much the same way as the hints that Ottalie has been drowned – dominates most of the rest of the book. As a motif, it is, unfortunately, much less successful that the "pursuit of the beloved" – perhaps because, with the best will in the world, it is difficult to take it seriously as a solution to the dilemmas of the artist in the modern world. Fighting disease was a dream of Masefield's – but it is not sufficiently universal to strike us as a likely "message" to be sent by the sainted Ottalie in the next world. There is something quintessentially Masefieldian in the passage where he tells us that:

He thought that little chance happenings in life were signals from her in the other world, or if not signals, attempts to move him, attempts to make him turn to her; things full of significance if only he could interpret them. He felt that in some way she was trying to communicate. It was as though the telephone had broken. It was as though the speaker could not say her message directly; but had to say it in fragments to erring, forgetful, wayward messengers, who forgot and lost their sequence. (Masefield, 1927, pp.126-27)

Woman-worship and the supernatural – the idea of the dead continuing to guide the living – two of Masefield's favourite themes, are most satisfactorily blended here. But it comes as a distinct anti-climax to hear what Roger actually supposes the message to be: 'He thought that she had sent him some message about sleeping sickness, using the torn page, the magazine, and the naval officer [the singer], as her messengers' (p.127).

In any case, it is at this point in the book that the really full-dress debates begin, so I shall treat the rest of the narrative in considerably less detail – especially as I have already considered some of the implications of Roger's, and his friend, Lionel Heseltine's, views above, in the introductory section to this chapter.

Roger, then, meets Lionel on his return to London – and pumps him for information on sleeping sickness – while Lionel, in his turn, asks him about art. The somewhat subjective nature of Roger's disenchantment is shown by comments like:

One feels very clever, with these wise books in one's head; but they don't go down to bedrock. Tney don't mean much in the great things of life. They don't help one over a death. (Masefield, 1927, p.174)

Only the last sentence, one suspects, reveals the true reason for Roger's grievance against art. Nevertheless, he continues to "generalize" his most painful impressions:

I sometimes feel that all the thoroughly good artists, like Dürer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Dante, all of them, sit in judgement on the lesser artists when they die. I think they forgive bad art, because they know how jolly difficult art of any kind is ... But they would never forgive faults of character or of life. They would exact a high strain of conduct, mercilessly. (Masefield, 1927, p.173)

If one could be sure that Masefield meant it in that way, one might say that this is an extremely interesting study of the personal experience underlying even the most seemingly "general" conclusions. Roger's feelings about Ottalie obviously influence the sentence excised from the passage quoted above: 'I don't believe that art was ever easy to anybody, except perhaps to women, whose whole lives are art'." However it may be rather because Masefield as a novelist is unable to motivate – or to introduce – ideological discussion in any other way. In any case, I shall refer to this subject again at the end of my analysis.

•

From chapter eight on, almost an entirely new book begins. The first sentence of this new section is:

Ten months later Roger sat swathed in blankets under mosquito netting, steering a boat upstream. (Masefield, 1927, p.177)

This is a narrative of adventure in Africa, and it bears only a tenuous relation to what has gone before (it is the 'solitude' referred to in the title Multitude and Solitude).

Lionel has come down with fever, and Roger has been forced to take charge, under a chorus of constant carping criticism from the petulant invalid:

'Don't you dare to give me medicine' Lionel answered, knocking the dose away. 'I believe you're poisoning me. I've watched you. You're poisoning me.'

'Don't say things like that, Lionel,' said Roger. 'You're awfully tired, I know, but they hurt. I wish I could get you well,' he mused. 'It's not so easy as you seem to think,' he added. (Masefield, 1927, p.194)

Roger too is feverish, but he forces himself to keep going. They land the supplies and set up camp in an old stone fortress or 'Zimbabwe' ('a native name for ruins' (p.200)) on the hill. And there they encounter a lavishly-described tropical storm (rather reminiscent of the one in A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) – another example of Masefield anticipating Richard Hughes). When Roger finally extricates himself from a sodden tarpaulin next morning he finds that all of their bearers have absconded, taking with them the boat and most of the supplies. A few boxes have been left strewn along the shore, but most of them, when opened, prove to have been emptied and then "salted" by thieves at some point along the way:

'A quaker,' he said grimly, after one look. 'It's a quaker case.'

'What's a quaker?'

'This case here is what we call a quaker. Why? Because it makes one quake. Look at these bottles. They're full of paper and sawdust. Look at this one. Old rags. (Masefield, 1927, pp.218-19)

Most of their drugs – except for one bottle of 'atoxyl', the only remedy against sleeping sickness they have – are gone. The expedition is in ruins.

Outrage against the people who have done this prompts Lionel and Roger to further diatribes against society:

'It's not the crime itself,' said Roger. 'Not knowing the criminal, I cannot judge the crime; but it s the state of mind which sickens me. The state of mind which could prompt such a thing.'

'It's a common enough stage of mind,' said Lionel. 'In business it's common enough ... You may say what you like about war. Business is the real curse of a nation. Business, and the business-brain, and, oh, my God, the business man! Swine. Fatted, vulpine swine.' (Masefield, 1927, p.221)

The interesting thing about these statements is how clearly they show the much greater care which is taken to substantiate specific statements than generalizations. 'Not knowing the criminal, I cannot judge the crime' says Roger – but he is not so scrupulous about the general 'state of mind' that that crime shows. After all, nobody can ever know the 'state of mind' of an era as well as he can know an individual – and therefore nobody can be debarred from talking about it. The syllogism may seem a little faulty, but that would appear to be the burden of what the two are saying.

Finally, Lionel sums up:

It is one of the mysteries of life to me that a man tends to lose ... tenacity and efficiency for life as soon as he becomes sufficiently subtle and fine to be really worth having in the world. I like Shakespeare because he is one of the very few men who realize that. He is harping on it again and again ... in lots of the plays, in the minor characters, too, like Malvolio; even in Aguecheek. And people call that disgusting, beefy brute, Prince Henry, 'Shakespeare's one hero ... '! (Masefield, 1927, p.229)

It is, indeed, one of the mysteries of life – to John Masefield – and that is why his character has been made to say it, and to back it up with a lot of Masefieldian interpretations of Shakespeare. Lionel may speak about these things a little more vehemently than his creator allowed himself to do (though not by very much – see the remarks on 'Prince Hal' quoted in the analysis of Stukeley in Chapter Three), but this simply highlights one of the great advantages of fiction to Masefield – one can express one point of view wholeheartedly, and then counter it with another, or a mere variation of the first, without having to make up one's mind between them! Indeed, that is one of the principal uses of Multitude and Solitude to Masefield - a means of venting spleen, without having to be tiresomely "reasonable" all the time.

In any case, Masefield is by now wholeheartedly absorbed in his adventure story, and has (mercifully) little time to spare for more abstract concerns.

Refusing to admit defeat, Lionel and Roger go down to the native village below the 'Zimbabwe', and attempt to doctor the people. There is a rather nauseating scene where they go about 'choosing who are to inherit the earth' (p.233) – as their supply of atoxyl, the only remedy, is severely limited:

They looked at the boys, noting their teeth, skulls, and physiognomies. Several showed signs of congenital malignant disease; others were brutish and loutish looking; but they were, on the whole, a much nicer-looking lot than the boys who sell papers in London. They narrowed the choice to four. One of them showed signs of pneumonia. He was rejected. The others were examined carefully. Their prefrontal areas were measured ... The matter was doubtful for a time. The lad with the best head was more drowsy than the other two. The question arose, should the doubtful cure of a genius be preferred to the less doubtful cure of a dunce? 'Nature has made an effort for this one,' said Lionel, 'at the expense of the type. This fellow has got a better head than the others, but he is not quite so fine a specimen .. That means that he will be less happy. Nature would probably prefer the other fellows.' (Masefield, 1927, pp.235-36)

Now this is really rather subtle. The arguments which Lionel and Roger use about these boys are, of course, generalizations about the probable fate of the genius and the normal man in society. But it is on the basis of these arguments that they choose who is to be saved. It is almost like a little parody or punning-match on the value of generalized ideas. After all, the choice must be made somehow – and it was not impossible (at least not in 1909) that skull-size had something to do with intelligence. One suspects that here Masefield's artistic instinct (one might as well call it his "daemon") has caused him to stifle his usual didacticism in order to make fun of Lionel and Roger and their half-baked attempts to set up 'an outpost of progress'!

The other reflection which this passage inspires is the question of Masefield's attitude towards people of other races. Certainly, Lionel and Roger are not shewn as being particularly enlightened – their rowers are called things like 'Merrylegs', 'Jellybags', 'Toro', 'Buckshot', and 'Pocahontas' (pp.179 & 293). And there are certainly some rather unfortunate passages:

One of the stroke-oars, clambering over the boxes in the stern-sheets, beat the dying man upon the chest. He was beating out the devil, he explained. He soon grew tired. He shouted in the sick man's ear, laughed delightedly at his groans, and went forward to explain his prowess. He broke into a song about it.
Kilemba has a big devil in his belly.
Big devil eat up Kilemba. Eat all up.
But Muafi a strong man. Very strong Man.
Devil no good.
Not eat Muafi. (Masefield, 1927, p.182)

Nevertheless, as a general rule, Masefield seems more fascinated by the negroes – as a strange, alien race with an unfathomable way of thinking – than contemptuous of them. Even the passage quoted above is a scene observed from the outside, and reproduced with Masefield's uncanny gift for mimicry, rather than the usual "Black Sambo" mockery. This wonder – almost awe – at the strangeness of other peoples is perhaps more notable in Masefield's novels about South America (Sard Harker, or Lost Endeavour (1910)), but it is present even here. Lionel and Roger do, it is true, act a little patronizingly towards the negroes – but they have come to Africa, at the risk of their own lives, to save them; so it would perhaps be rather invidious to rebuke them too roundly. In any case, in the sheer interest of historical accuracy, it would be wrong to expect Masefield, writing in 1909, to portray a couple of heroes with the attitudes of today – wnether he shared their opinions or not. There is certainly nothing like the blatant racism – or even the sidelong sneers – of John Buchan in any of the works of John Masefield (there are not even any anti-Semitic remarks in Multitude and Solitude[3] – a rare accolade for a book written before 1914).

The two chosen boys are duly dosed with atoxyl (and run off again shortly afterwards), but then Lionel, who has had sleeping sickness before, suffers a relapse – and the atoxyl bottle is nowhere to be found. Roger, knowing that his friend's life depends on it, undertakes a massive search for the bottle 'over a space of Africa a hundred yards long by eighty broad';

After it was over, Roger thought that his search for the lost bottle was the best thing he had ever done. He had trampled carefully over every inch of the measured ground. He had taken no chances, he had neglected no possible hole or tussock. A wide space of trodden grass and battered shrub testified to the thoroughness of his painful hunt. And all was useless. The bottle was not there. The ataxyl was lost. (Masefield, 1927, pp.250-51)

Masefield has made a valiant attempt to imply that this search – and the singleness of purpose it represents – is the linking factor between the two halves of the book. 'To do something very difficult, which would "tax all his powers, that was his task. When that was done he would feel that he had won his bride' (p.227). Roger's task in Africa, that is, is to make himself worthy of Ottalie – and here, where his motive is pure necessity, a question of life or death, and he makes every conceivable effort, he can finally feel satisfied.

The idea of 'failure', too, was always an interesting one to Masefield. There is almost a "cult of failure" in his works – from the Wanderer of Liverpool: 'Mocked and deserted by the common man, / Made half divine to me for having failed' (Masefield, 1941a, p.369); to Captain Margaret: 'There is no dishonour, Charles. You failed. The only glory is failure' (Masefield, 1974, p.405); to Christ himself.[4] It recurs endlessly in Masefield's poetry:

Life's battle is a conquest for the strong;
The meaning shows in the defeated thing. (1941a, p.372)

Man with his soul so noble: man half god and half brute.
Women bear him in pain that he may bring them tears.
He is a king on earth, he rules for a term of years.
And the conqueror's prize is dust and lost endeavour.
And the beaten man becomes a story for ever. (1941a, p.83)

This last quotation links it with the theme of 'frustration' discussed earlier. Virtue in life can only be obtained through struggle – not because struggle is good in itself, but because that is the only way to build a beautiful soul. Failure is good because it prevents the distractions caused by success – even after great struggles – on the earthly plane. Masefield's natural Platonism made him automatically relate things here to their significance on a "higher" plane.

When one knows this much, Roger's failure to find the atoxyl takes on a new meaning – but, in context, it seems a rather disproportionate significance to attach to such an trivial event.

In any case, Roger now fears that he himself may be coming down with the disease. Having no atoxyl, he is forced to try and concoct a serum – although he has been warned against this by Lionel: 'You will try none of your sera on me, my friend. If you like to go getting sera from dying, dirty, anthraxy wild beasts, do so; but don't put any of the poison, so got, into me' (Masefield, 1927, p.231). Roger does so – goes out and shoots an animal, and then fulfils another part of Lionel's prophecy: 'I see you so plainly strangling a deer in a mud-wallow, and drawing off the blood into a methylated spirits can' (pp.231-32). Masefield mentions that Roger took the animal he shot to be a 'koodoo cow', but says in a footnote that 'It was probably an oryx' (p.279) perhaps merely from an antiquarian impulse, but more probably to show how dispassionate and "scientific" he can be about details.

And, indeed, the book gets far more "scientific" from now on. Roger carefully prepares a batch of cultures and injects them into Lionel (who has been in a coma since before the two boys ran away) and himself. Both of them are saved by this, although all the other patients Roger injects are killed.

Lionel refuses to believe, on first coming to, that he has been lying in delirium for five weeks. His first act is to point out the bottle of atoxyl, where it stood 'in the dimness of a hole in the wall. Roger must have passed it some fifty times' (p.287). Lionel also explains why the serum saved them and killed the others:

My good Lord! It's as plain as measles. You inject the dead culture. That's the first step. That makes the trypanosomes agglutinize. Very well, then. You inject your serum when they are agglutinized; not before. When they are agglutinized, the serum destroys them, after raising queer symptoms. When they are not agglutinized the serum destroys you by the excess of what causes the queer symptoms. (Masefield, 1927, p.290)

If immunology were as simple as that, even I might be able to understand it! However, this explanation is sufficient to satisfy Roger.

Masefield now rather hastily wraps up his story in a few pages. He gives a sort of summary of the achievements of the expedition in the closest he can get to the style of a scientific case-study:

They had been the first to cure cases with animal serum. They had been the first to study in any way the effect of nagana upon the young of wild game, and to prepare (as yet untested} vaccine from young antelopes, quaggas, and elands ... They had cleared some three miles of fly belt. They had studied the tsetse. They had surveyed the whole and excavated a part of the Zimbabwe. (Masefield, 1927, p.291)

The funny thing is that Masefield seems to be treating this farrago of implausibilities quite seriously. Perhaps the explanation is that he has gone so far beyond his own area of expertise that he can no longer tell fantasy from probability. In any case, he undercuts this "splendid achievement" by making the two friends discover, on the way home, that all their results have been anticipated by 'The Japanese bacteriologist ... Hiroshiga' (pp.293-94). One could interpret this as Masefield cannily hedging his bets in case anyone took his heroes' claim to have discovered a cure for sleeping sickness seriously; or else – as a final ironic twist contradicting our natural expectations as to how the novel was likely to end (perhaps he thought that too big a success might ruin his heroes' characters).

In any case, on arriving home, Lionel, Roger and Leslie decide to band together to form a new world full of light and hygiene – and Roger walks off into the garden, convinced that by promoting such a scheme, he will be helping to fulfil the will of Ottalie for his life:

Thinking of the woman who had waited for him there in his vision, he prayed that her influence in him might help to bring to earth that promised life, in which man, curbing Nature to his use, would assert a new law and rule like a king, where now, even in his strength, he walks sentenced, a prey to all things baser. (Masefield, 1927, p.296)

•

Criticizing the novel Multitude and Solitude can become almost as bewildering as writing it must have been – which is one reason why I have adopted a basically linear approach. Certainly, when one considers the kaleidoscopic variety of ideas, plot-lines, narrative devices, and motifs in the book – that last, summarizing passage quoted above becomes almost a miracle of lucidity!

This is, indeed, the book's great strength – just as it is its great weakness. Time after time one thinks one has pinned down its central message – only to find a contradictory paragraph a few pages further on.

I think, however, that one can summarize by saying that, as a novel of ideas, the book is crippled by its own author's too equivocal viewpoint – the fact that he tests ideas rather than resolving them. One must add, however, that his witty and extremely cogent demolition of the idea of "objective" generalizations (whether performed intentionally or not) – accomplished by showing the personal and arbitrary bases for almost everyone of Lionel and Roger's "general" notions – throws great doubt on the whole concept of "summarizing" ideas in a book.

It is also fair to say that the novel falls into two halves – that set in London and Ireland; and that set in Africa which seem to be pursuing almost entirely separate objectives. The title, Multitude and Solitude, attempts to imply some purpose for this separation – but it is really an unbridgeable divide. Masefield, too, must have realized that this was the case – for his next "contemporary" novel, The Street of To-Day, is set entirely in England, without abrupt changes of scene or of stylistic direction. The "African adventure" portion of the book, however, was to serve as a model (almost a forefather) for many more stories of exciting happenings in exotic parts of the globe – from South America to Byzantium.

Nevertheless, for all its lack of "rigorous" form and finish, Multitude and Solitude remains a fascinating novel. It obviously truthfully reflects the young Masefield's sense of being trapped in the seething turmoil of London and also his dreams of a "cleaner", more satisfying life in the open air. Yet this raw material is skilfully woven into a series of "knots" of action – each of which draws the reader inexorably into its embrace. First the gradually accelerating and infinitely frustrating hunt for Ottalie, with its atmosphere of impending doom and moral constriction. Then the long, strange aftermath – with voices in dreams, and the growing sense of an occult purpose in life. Finally, and perhaps most successful of all, Roger's solitary battle against fever, loneliness, the alien surroundings of Africa – in effect, the forces of Nature itself:

Nature was enduring; Nature the imperfect; Nature the enemy, which blighted the rose and spread the weed. (Masefield, 1927, pp.295-96)

[John Masefield: The Street of To-Day (1911)]

(ii) The Street of To-Day

Many of the things which have already been said about Multitude and Solitude (particularly in the section comparing Masefield to Joyce at the opening of this chapter) apply also to The Street of To-Day; and for this reason I will confine myself here to tracing two main themes which seem to me to sum up the essential purpose of the book. The first of them is the 'Nietzscheism'[5] of the hero, Lionel Heseltine (the book is a direct sequel to Multitude and Solitude – though some of Masefield's, and therefore Lionel's, preoccupations have changed a little since then); and the second is the theme of love especially married love – which runs through it.

The first impression that anyone might gain of The Street of To-Day is that it is a tissue of epigrams – and one must admit that in this it is simply accentuating the habitual usage of Multitude and Solitude. This was, of course, a convention of the period; but, although he applies himself manfully, I think it would be fair to say that Masefield was never very much at home in the "demesne" of Oscar Wilde. Almost every page, for long tracts at a time, is covered with remarks such as: 'Women aren't a sex. They're a free-masonry' (Masefield, 1911, p.6), or:

'Perhaps art bores you, though. Does it?'

'Not at all,' said Lionel. 'It interests me. Especially modern art. I look on it as a morbid state, due to the turning inward of the healthy activities. It's an hallucination, Miss Derrick, caused by life in towns.' (Masefield, 1911, p.36)

One suspects, therefore, that much of the atmosphere of "intellectuality" which surrounds the book is due to the style, rather than any real complexity of thought.

Once again the book reflects certain overmastering concerns in Masefield's own life – particularly his entanglement with Elizabeth Robins, and, through her, with the woman's suffrage movement.[6] And, indeed, W. H. Hamilton says of the book that it is 'contemporary with the more hysterical phase of the feminist agitation just prior to the war with Germany ... and under the mental strain it becomes as extravagant and hysterical and obsessed as many of the most sensitive souls – both women and men – were apt to do at that time' (Hamilton, 1925, p.50). Hamilton was, of course, writing in the 1920s (the first edition of his book appeared in 1922) – and whether or not this sympathy with 'feminism' recommends Masefield to us more in retrospect, I will leave you to decide after reading the rest of my comments on the book.

Hami1ton also says: 'It must have been agony to conceive and write such a book. To read it is hardly less' (1925, p.47); and quotes a remark of Masefield's, à propos of all his early novels, that he 'could not remember in what order they appeared, but it does not matter much since they are all (I hope) forgotten by now' (Hamilton, 1925, p.39).[7] This is, however, hardly a fair summary. It is true that the book is 'difficult to read' (Hamilton, 1925, p.47), as Arnold Bennett put it, but it contains a wealth of interesting material, and is, indeed - in some respects – the most original and disturbing of Masefield's early novels.

•

Lionel Heseltine had already shown some distressing tendencies in Multitude and Solitude (indeed, in some senses, the two books are more like parallels than novel and sequel – one dealing with the artist's struggle to come to terms with society, and the other with the reformer's (or 'man of action's') attempts to change it). His reactions were always more extreme and violent than Roger's – as they walked through the streets of London:

'Plenty of disease here,' said Roger.

'All preventable,' said Lionel. Only we're not allowed to prevent it. People here would rather have it by them to reform. Science won't mix with sentiment, thank God!' (Masefield, 1927, p.176)

Now, after nine months 'grilling in an African pest-house' (Masefield, 1911, p.6):

As he wandered on, the vastness of London, its incredible grossness of life, began to stimulate him. Here was all this vast disease spread out for a surgical Balzac. Here was all this great floppy cancer ready for his probe, his lance, his surgical saw.' (Masefield, 1911, p.25)

Apart from a string of demands for "cleanness" and "efficiency", it is never quite clear what Lionel actually intends to do about his ideas. Indeed, he himself seems a trifle unsure:

I don't much mind what I do to help the world, as long as it's something vigorous. (Masefield, 1911, p.84)

Now this is a rather dangerous point of view, and when one adds comments like: 'I don't believe methods matter as long as you're in earnest' (p.91), and 'if a man has strength enough to conceive a possible political good, he is strong enough to enforce it on his fellows' (p.86); then one begins to see that – like a later colleague of his, Frampton Mansell, in The Square Peg (1937) – Lionel would 'make a good dictator' (Masefield, 1937, p.23). It all adds up to a Masefield far further down the path of reaction, far more disenchanted with his lot, than when he wrote Multitude and Solitude.

There, when Roger looked out over London:

he found himself wondering whether all the squalor of the town, its beastly drinking dens, its mobs of brainless, inquisitive shouters, might not be changed suddenly to beauty and noble life by some sudden general inspiration, such as comes to nations at rare times under suffering. He decided against it. (Masefield, 1927, p.81)

Reactionary and disillusioned, perhaps – but also a little sad. This was a mood which would be swiftly dispelled by the coming of World War I.

Here, on the other hand, is Lionel on much the same subject:

States thrive while they preserve a strong and stern efficiency for life, while they look things in the eye, straight, without any cant about what might be ... I believe that if we looked at things straight, and killed off cur rogues and inefficients, instead of keeping them healthy so that they may have every opportunity for breeding, we should soon begin to show that enthusiasm. (Masefield, 1911, pp.19-20)

It is true that this sort of thing sounds a little different now, after two World Wars and a succession of regimes attempting to introduce 'efficiency' into political life, but it is the awful enthusiasm of Lionel that is so hard to take – he is, without a doubt, as clear an example of a "proto–fascist" as any on record.

When the three friends, Roger, Leslie and Lionel – who had decided to join together to agitate for reform at the end of the last book – meet again at the beginning of this one (along with Mrs. Drummond, an "older woman" whom Lionel has recently encountered), they find it rather difficult to agree on a programme. Roger wants to work for woman's suffrage, as he feels that the presence of women in parliament would automatically make politics more moral.

Leslie thinks they should start a laboratory, with a periodical to publish their research. Mrs. Drummond wants to improve public health. Lionel sums up:

'Whatever we do,' said Lionel, 'whatever anybody does, he must first upset something fat and sleepy which has had its use. That's a natural law. Things are in a mess. Leslie thinks they can be improved by pointing out the way. You think they can be improved by giving women the vote. Mrs. Drummond thinks they can be improved by the reform of the Poor Law ... What's wanted is some jolly big reform. It's not giving women the vote. It's not reforming the Poor Law. What the State wants is complete control of the life within it, in the interests of humanity. Nobody cares a twopenny rush for humanity except the scientist. (Masefield, 1911, p.85)

This is precisely the sort of right-wing idealism – hazy both about ends and the means necessary to achieve them – which was so effectively and cynically exploited by demagogues such as Mussolini and Hitler. The embattled bourgeois pins his hopes on anything that is 'vigorous' and whole-hearted – in this case the transforming power of Science. It is, essentially, an élitist creed; and Lionel is nothing if not élitist.

Nevertheless, Lionel, although Masefield's protagonist, holds views which are not entirely endorsed by him. His over-violent speech is perhaps caused by the fact that, as a man of action, he believes that "talk is cheap" in any case. Certainly some of the other characters – especially Mary Drummond, who is perhaps more closely representative of Masefield's own point of view – think he goes too far on
occasion:

'You don't believe that, really,' she said, feeling vexed and sorry at the same time. (Masefield, 1911, p.91)

The situation becomes still more interesting when one examines what Lionel's principles actually achieve. He begins by founding a popular, mass-appeal newspaper called 'Snip Snap' – designed to propagandize the people – and organizes a 'brigade of news-boys' to distribute it. This 'brigade' is also designed to serve as a channel for the untapped energies of the undernourished youth of London. It would be perhaps exaggerating slightly to refer to the brigade, without further ado, as "black-shirts" or "storm– troopers"; but the fact is that they are organized along military lines:

On the day before the day of the first publication of Snip Snap, Lionel muste~ed the brigade in Hyde Park. He had a force of four hundred infantry, fifty bicyclists, and a band of thirty instruments, mostly drums and fifes. Lionel put them through a little simple drill, in the presence of some hundreds of loafers. He then marched them down Oxford Street singing to a new catchy quickstep. (Masefield, 1911, pp.303-4)

This sounds like a prophetic account of one of Oswald Mosley's rallies; but it would sceem probable that Masefield is really envisaging little more than a kind of glorified, dynamic Boy Scouts (Baden-Powell's first, experimental camp on Brownsea Island was in l907 – and the idea seens to have caught Masefield's imagination; as I shall discuss in my account of A Book of Discoveries in Chapter Five).

Both Masefield and Lionel feel a little ambivalent about the methods employed to sell Snip Snap: including 'the well-known comedian', Lorenzo Ike's 'new topical
song' -

'Snip Snap
Have you seen Snip Snap?
If you haven't, you're a pip, chap.'

'When once heard, the song stayed in the brain till death released the sufferer' (Masefield, 1911, pp.304-5). It all sounds rather like the famous "advertising scene" in H. G. Wells' Anti-Utopia "A Story of the Days to Come" (1899):

For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf and deafness was not uncommon in the London of that age, inscriptions of all sizes were thrown from the roof above ... and on one's hand or on the bald head of the man before one, or on a lady's shoulders, or in a sudden jet of flame before one's feet, the moving finger wrote in unanticipated letters of fire "ets r chip t'de,' or simply 'ets' ...

'Look!' said the anaemic woman: 'there's yer father.'

'Which?' said the little girl.

''Im wiv his nose coloured red,' said the anaemic woman.

The little girl began to cry (Wells, 1948, pp.758-9 & 761).

As it happens, Lionel's paper fails in spite of all these efforts: 'Papers as vulgar, as silly, as cheap, as sensational, sold and sold well. His paper did not sell' (Masefield, 1911, p.323). The brigade inspires a strike among the other newsboys, and becomes a mill-stone around his neck. Worst of all, Lionel cannot even console himself with having been too far above the public taste to appeal – he had deliberately lowered himself to the level of his competitors, and still he had not succeeded. When he watches the start of an advertising campaign for Tip Top, a paper started in opposition to his own: 'He felt that he was seeing his ideas under a magnifying glass. He did not like the sight' (Masefield, 1911, p.371).

In the event, Lionel is saved from complete collapse (he is worried most of all for the boys in the brigade) by a rather unlikely buyer for the paper, 'Sir Pica Galley' (an old friend of Mary Drummond's), who agrees to keep on the brigade as well.

Masefield is, throughout, dangerously sympathetic to Lionel's megalomaniac ambitions; but this is partially, of course, because he is incapable of not identifying with his protagonist – especially a protagonist so beleaguered by enemies as Lionel. In the end, in any case, moral sanity reasserts itself – Masefield's passion for honourable failure causes him to undermine Lionel's vulgar taste for success – and his hero is left a wiser, chastened man, who has been shown his own limitations.

We are left with the hope that:

Some day, in the future ... sin will be prescribed for, not sentenced. A little 'cutting' with a lancet, a little spurt of blood to the shrunk veins, and the beast is tamed, the devil expelled. (Masefield, 1911, p.259)

Science – the advance of knowledge – is the only way out of the cul-de-sac in which society is trapped. we have not, however, yet reached the level where that remedy could be safely applied, so our present attempts at radical reform are doomed to failure:

'The stamping out of disease might, for all we know, be a very fatal thing. We don't know what disease is' (Masefield, 1911, p.88).

Masefield thus, at the eleventh hour, saves himself from becoming a reactionary (it would, strictly speaking, be anachronistic to label him a "fascist"), and remains what he was forever afterwards to be: a sentimental, aristocratic idealist.

•

The second theme which I intend to examine in The Street of To-Day is the saga of Rhoda Derrick, who is wooed by Lionel throughout Book I of the novel, marries him at the beginning of Book II, and leaves him at the end of Book II.

Lionel first comes across her in a 'dangerous, sentimental mood':

To be loved by a woman. That was glory enough for one life. They were so far above men. They were so sacred. So beautiful. He was in love with his work, of course; but work was not everything. Wanting love, he wanted inspiration. What would it be like to have a woman like that in his life? ... To know what went on in the brain there. To have that life merged into his. To be the body to that soul. (Masefield, 1911, p.6)

In fact, so far does this intoxication extend, that 'He wished that the great lamp beside him might explode, so that he might stifle the flames for them' (p.13). Rhoda is more the "object" than the "subject" of these passions; and he fails to notice, during their whirlwind courtship, how little they have in common.

Nature reasserts itself after the marriage, however:

Lionel's teeth gritted at the thought of the obsolete indignities of marriage, of wedding breakfasts and the like. (Masefield, 1911, p.239)

While Rhoda, in her turn, 'was suddenly conscious that she was entering life with a creature of whom she knew nothing. Lionel was as strange to her as the hotel servant at the desk. What were men like? What was Lionel like?' (Masefield, 1911, p.240).

Their "honeymoon", aboard a steamer, is an unmitigated disaster. Rhoda is sea-sick, and orders Lionel out; and they are forced to return home ignominiously before even reaching Madrid, their destination. There is, in fact, no evidence in the text that the marriage is ever consummated – 'don't let's talk of body' (p.288), says Rhoda.

It would take too much time to trace all the various vicissitudes of their relationship in detail, but its implications are most interesting. Lionel proves himself an archetypal "male chauvinist pig" – always too busy to talk to Rhoda, full of half-baked theories on the nature of sex:

The physical side of marriage was ugly, he thought, without children. And more important than children was cleanness. In his thought he was contemptuous of women. 'They cannot think. They've not been trained to think. And they've contrived to keep men's thoughts upon themselves. And they've played the devil, and taught men to play the devil.' (Masefield, 1911, p.241)

These misogynist reflections come about an hour after the wedding; and lead, later, to the following remarkable reflections:

'I've thought of this sex-business ... I made up my mind that as far as I'm concerned it will stay as Nature meant it. Nature means it to be the perfectly normal expression of a temporary, strictly seasonal mood, lasting, perhaps, for two or three weeks in each autumn. He stopped. He looked gravely at her; waiting for her reply. 'That is my attitude, he said. (Masefield, 1911, p.292)

Under the circumstances her reply that 'It is more than that' is almost superhumanly restrained (perhaps she is the true 'Nietzschean'!).

The strange thing is that Masefield shows his hero to be pompous and insensitive; and yet, simultaneously, takes his part in all of the couple's disagreements. It lis ahlways Rhoda's fault (presumably, for "entrapping" him in the first place); never Lionel's. It is only when set against the saintly Mary Drummond, a widow – who lives with her "friend" Kitty Minot in the country – that Lionel is ever shown as being definitely in the wrong. Once again, as in the case of Captain Margaret, Masefield's innate honesty as a writer (his freedom from irony, what might be described as his "refusal to take out insurance" on what he writes) has led him to give a very different picture from that which he intended.

Rhoda's position is, after all, so difficult – and her reactions so understandable. She goads Lionel, whom she cannot understand; and is goaded by him in her turn: 'She thought him too stupid to know when he was being pricked. Bitter women make that mistake, and wonder that they have no votes' (p.323). That last reflection is obviously Masefield's; but the fact remains, he was uniquely wellqualified to present a woman like Rhoda, and he made a remarkable job of it. The whole thing hinges on Rhoda's very real distaste for sex and physical contact, her frigidity:

'A little child would be very much to us, Rhoda.' She shook her head to his pleading. 'I can imagine,' she said. 'But, no. It is something against my nature. It isn't dread. It's horror.' (Masefield, 1911, p.293)

Masefield gets all the evasions, all the euphemisms precisely right:

'I've been ill, as you know. My nerves aren't quite under control. I can't bring myself to face. I'm ... I find it difficult, since my illness, to face things which I never really realised before it. You mustn't blame me altogether. I think women don't play quite fair with girls; perhaps men don't.' (Masefield, 1911, p.290)

Apart from a little adolescent lesbian flirtation with her friend Dora (for which see Chapter Three), Rhoda's sexuality seems entirely confined to the realm of daydreaming and vague sentiment. Her previous "beau", before Lionel, was called Colin Maunsel; and she becomes very preoccupied with thoughts of him when the marriage begins to go sour. Far from wishing to commit adultery with him, though, she much prefers the dream-image to the real man. 'Colin made her a little afraid. She had run away from Colin' (p.285); but she loves to dream about him:

'Oh, Colin, Colin, I wish we were dead together somewhere on the hills.' She had a pathetic sight of two white faces senseless in the fern, with the rain falling on them. 'That would be peace,' she thought. 'Up there on the hills.' Drying her eyes, while her misery fattened on the melancholy picture, she flung herself upon her bed. (Masefield, 1911, p.319)

When Lionel, near the end of the book, proposes that they run away together and make a new start:

She saw the life à deux in a hired cottage in South Devon or Cornwall. She knew then that the proposal came too late. The work which had been her rival was now her opportunity. It gave her peace from him. It gave her leisure for her dreams. She could dream of Colin all day long. And that was sweet to her. She had not realised how sweet. She could not give up that intimate dream-life. (Masefield, 1911, p.339)

The representations of sensuality and physical love in Masefield (Tom Stukeley and Jessie the barmaid in Captain Margaret, for instance) never have much life about them and I suspect this to be the reason why he made such a triumphant success of Rhoda. Her gradually growing preference of the shadow to the reality is presented most subtly; and indicates, in my opinion, a far greater 'sexual sophistication' than that which Hugh Greene has claimed for the earlier novel (Masefield, 1974, p.viii).

Masefield lacks the specifically metaphysical concerns of Charles Williams (in this novel, at any rate) – but Rhoda's dreams of Colin remind one very clearly of the passages in Descent into Hell (1937) where Wentworth exchanges an uncertain relationship with a real girl, Adela, for complete mastery over an "eidolon" or soulless image of her.

•

I have, I hope, said enough to convey the interest that lies in these two early novels of John Masefield's. One rather despairs, however, of conveying just how simultaneously chaotic (particularly The Street of To-Day), and compelling (especially Multitude and Solitude), they can be. Masefield has made a deliberate attempt to pour into them everything he was thinking at the time; everything he was reading – and everything that he was concealing. In a sense, the man who was so reticent in his autobiographical writings is almost masochistically self-revealing in his fiction. And yet, the confusion is too great – for every definite statement there is a counterstatement or an argument – and one is left, finally, grappling with the kaleidoscopic bewilderment and confusion of a human brain. (As in Borges' mysterious 'Tlön': 'A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete' (Borges, 1979, p.37)).

[John Masefield: The Street of To-Day (1911)]

1. See, for example, some of the antics of Frampton Mansell in The Square Peg (1937).

2. I realise in how specialized a sense 'Stephen Dedalus' represents even the young James Joyce, but the fact is he is avowedly 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. His role in Ulysses is something else again.

3. Despite its comparative political extremism, the one mention of Jews in The Street of To-Day is also fairly mild: "'I'll not give up my work," Lionel muttered, "for all the wives in Christendom. Nor for all the middle-men in Jewry." (1911, p.344).

4. See the plays Good Friday (1916) and The Trial of Jesus (1925). The Coming of Christ (1928) is about the Nativity.

5. 'You get your philosophy from Athens, Mrs. Drummond. I get mine from Germany. You can't get over fifteen degrees of latitude' (Masefield, 1911, p.75).

6. See Chronology, and Chapter Three, for brief details of this affair. For a more extended account, see Smith, 1978, pp.101-5.

7. It is only fair to record that Hamilton quotes this comment in order to dissent from it.

[James Joyce]

Works Cited:

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Pscychoanalysis. 1915-1917. The Pelican Freud Library, 1. Trans. James Strachey. 1963. Ed. James Strachey & Angela Richards. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Hamilton, W. H. John Masefield, A Popular Study. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925.

Handley-Taylor, Geoffrey, ed. John Masefield, O.M., A Bibliography. London: Cranbrook Tower Press 1960.

Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. World's Classics. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912.

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Ed. Theodore Spencer. 2nd ed. rev. John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon. London: Ace Books, 1961.

Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. Poetry and Prose of William Blake. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1948.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979.

Levin, Harry, ed. The Essential James Joyce. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

Masefield, John. Captain Margaret. Ed. Hugh Greene. Bow Street Library, London: The Bodley Head, 1974.

Masefield, John. Multitude and Solitude. 1910. London: Jonathan Cape, 1927.

Masefield, John. The Street of To-Day. 1911. London: T. Fisher Unwin, n.d.

Masefield, John. Good Friday. London: Heinemann, 1916.

Masefield, John. St. George and the Dragon. London: Heinemann 1919.

Masefield, John. Sard Harker. 1924. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Masefield, John. The Trial of Jesus. London: Heinemann, 1925.

Masefield, John. The Coming of Christ. London: Heinemann, 1928.

Masefield, John. The Square Peg. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937.

Masefield, John. Collected Poems. 1923. 2nd ed. 1932. 3rd ed. 1938. London: Heinemann, 1941a.

Masefield, John. Conquer. London: Heinemann, 1941b.

Masefield, John. In The Mill. London: Heinemann, 1941c.

Smith, Constance Babington. John Masefield: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Wells, H. G. The Short Stories. London: Ernest Benn Ltd. 1948.

Yeats, W. B. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1977.

[John Masefield: Martin Hyde (1910)]