The Collected Works of John Masefield. Poems, Vols. I, Ii; Verse Plays; Prose Plays

New York: The Macmillan Company. 1925. 12mo. x+446+291+331+438 pp. 4 vols. $3.00 each.

THE publication of John Masefield’s collected works in four volumes, two of poems, one of plays in verse, one of prose plays, is a significant event, representing one of the enduring literary achievements of our time. Here we have in permanent form the work of one who will have permanent place among those who have sought truth, and have created in the light of it.

It is a pity that in this attractive edition of the Poems so few dates are given. For those who wish to study the author’s development this is a serious omission. Are those poems which give echoes of other authors, of Yeats in ‘The Ballad of Sir Bors,’ of Swinburne in ‘ The Seekers,’of Kipling, among the earliest?

Whatever influences of form or of feeling have touched Mr. Masefield, his mature work is unmistakably his own, with very definite characteristics. His masters—and he has been a close student of the great English poetry of the past, especially that of Chaucer — have but quickened his thought and his sense of form, their influence soon transmuted by his individuality.

Nowhere else is that individuality so apparent as when he is dealing with the sea. Sea and ships made him a poet, as he himself says in many places, notably in ‘Biography,’ ‘Ships,’ and ‘Roadways.’ Seaward he goes

In quest of that one beauty
God put me here to find.

In ‘Dauber’ the leaping splendor and color of phrase are comparable to nothing but the sea itself. In reading we feel its impact, are in it, a part of its awful beauty and its terror.

Mr. Masefield’s work can stand better than that of many others the shock of change in the troubled period in which he has lived and written. We find here a grappling with hard fact that well meets the requirements of the new era, but with it a wise hold on the past. There is a steady and courageous gaze at things as they are, first-hand observation, realism; but it is realism that gives evidence of a mind at work upon the data of experience, not the heterogeneous realism of the rummage sale of the mind.

This author has set the realism of hard fact to the music of long tradition. His wise hold on the past is as evident in the use of traditional verseforms as in his sense of ethical and spiritual values. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Gray, Keats, Byron, have influenced him here. Without study of his predecessors he could not have attained such mastery — harsh, it is true, in the early work — of music, rhythm, rhyme: who but a spendthrift would throw away his birthright?

Among the poems are stirring lyrics, notably ‘Salt Water Ballads’ and others dealing with the sea; also meditative poems of beauty and quiet intensity, such as ‘August, 191 4.’ Marked is a sonnet sequence, whose theme is the quest for beauty. This shows great sensitiveness of feeling, and has charm; but the individual sonnets lack the compression, the singleness of thrust, of the lyric at its best. Using the Shakespearean form, he is trying conclusions with the greatest; it is apparent that thought and feeling have not often crystallized into the magic perfections of concrete phrase by which the greatest summon up a world of suggestion, of meaning. Yet there are many places in the poems, lyrics and others, where the author shows himself ‘keen to the shaken soul to give a hint that might suggest the whole,’ and aware of the necessity ‘of beating thought into the perfect line.'

The closely constructed ‘ Tragedy of Nan,’ by far the best of the prose plays, is true tragedy. The verse plays show finely wrought spiritual reactions, insight, deft handling of verse, but Mr. Masefield is more at home nearer his own observation and experience; in some of these there is something too exotic, too remote, for reality.

It is in poetic narrative that he is at his best. Here is wide variety of theme, from the stark tragedy of ‘The Widow in the Bye Street’ and ‘The Daffodil Fields’ to the lighter notes of ‘Reynard the Fox.’ Among the verse tales ‘Dauber, ‘ with its stinging realism, is surely the most distinctive. Here the spiritual compensation of the creative instinct appears in all its beauty and in all its tragedy; nowhere, perhaps, in all the work do we come nearer the poet’s inner consciousness. Certain changes in the later editions are not wholly fortunate; phrases giving the very quick of youthful passion for creating are tamed into didacticism.

There is throughout Mr. Masefield’s work a quest for beauty, often over hard and thorny paths. That beauty which is truth is hard to win, and sometimes hard to bear when found. His work has strength; it has depth—the creation of a mind constantly aware of the professed mystery of existence, and with a true sense of tragedy, of the causes within the human soul, and without leading to defeat. Here are spiritual insights and sympathies such as only those who have shared the suffering can offer.

Only the unafraid
Before life’s roaring threat,
Touch Beauty’s feet.

M. S.