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may conceivably be said that this is not of the very rarest attar, that it never quite touches the supreme wonder of phrase that is the last delight of poetry. But for all that it seems to me that it has more uniformly than any other poetic kind what we mean by greatness. It is the poetry that takes easily into its processes great vistas of humanity with their background. The highest masters, such as Shakespeare, can by habit encompass this end and at the same time touch their work at every point with the rarer precision of which I have spoken. Others in their creative impetus passing humanity under rapid review may inform their work less frequently with the high lights of distinction, and yet by the very liberality and sweep of their perceptions come to greatness. The most notable example of this kind is Chaucer, and with him William Morris may fairly claim rank.

And now in 'Reynard the Fox' and 'Right Royal' Mr. Masefield has added this distinction to many that were already his. His lyrics, at their best, have a tenderness that is not surpassed in contemporary poetry. In his previous narrative poems he has been able to bring this tenderness to longer work that has always seemed to me to be essentially lyric in character. The most affecting quality in "The Everlasting Mercy' and 'The Daffodil Fields' and the rest of them is that same tenderness relating Mr. Masefield's own personal-.

ity to the people of whom, and the events of which, he is writing. We do not quarrel with this; we are grateful for it, as we are always when beauty is the end. But with 'Reynard the Fox' there was a change. It would not be difficult to select a passage here and there for the isolated beauty which is common in the other poems, but here it would be to miss the presiding excellence of the work. In this poem and the later 'Right Royal' a motley of life passes with a gusto that is new in Mr. Masefield's work and brings it far more nearly than it has been before into the region of Chaucer's profound and moving comedy.

It is a habit of mind with most people who think about poetry to give to the narrative a relatively humble rank in the art, and it is a habit which Mr. Masefield is constantly challenging by his work nowadays. Here is a poet, whose lyric and tragic notes are as sure as any of his time, turning repeatedly from these to the call of romantic narrative. It often happens that this peculiar method has a certain narcotic quality which, although it is invaluable in the scheme of things, does generally mean a slackening of imagination. It accounts for the difference between a great man like Dumas and a greater man like Shakespeare. Dumas, probably, has loyaller readers than any other writer in our modern literature. That is to say, people who read Dumas at all return to him over and over again.

But the return is nearly always made from a more or less tired or distracted mood. Then it is that the magnificent narrative power and the slightly unreal ethical world of Dumas combine to give ease and delight, but it is that very unreality which in our more vigorous moments is apt to make him less stimulating than Shakespeare with his uncompromising truth. The fact would seem to be that with the writers to whom the narrative scheme is a matter of first importance there is the tendency always to accept a spiritual convention which is not sincerely their own creation at all, but one which it is easy to apprehend and difficult to dispute, and we, when our own spirit is not quite at concert pitch, are not only willing to do our part of the acceptance, but even grateful for the lowering of tension. But because this often happens in narrative it does not follow that it is necessary to the form, and Mr. Masefield is with Chaucer and Morris in reminding us of this. He, too, has splendidly the gift of telling a story; that the most prejudiced of his critics could hardly dispute. His gifts as a dramatist are unquestionable, but in the technique of drama he has always been apt to fail his creations in some apparently trivial but really vital movement. In his narrative poems he makes no such mistakes.

Mr. Masefield's manner is now perfectly assured. This is not to say that he is quite at all

moments master of his style, but rather that the work which he is now doing could not conceivably be mistaken for that of anybody else. That he writes extremely well is not the whole point, though the ease to which he has come after long and patient discipline is in itself a much more admirable thing than may commonly be realized, and Mr. Masefield is curiously careless in the opportunities which he gives to detraction. It may be that he is indifferent, but if so it is an indifference which a poet does well to avoid. No preoccupation with the movement of his work can excuse Mr. Masefield, or any writer, for saying of his hero, at a moment which not only is intended to be but actually is charged with feeling, that

'As he left the room for the Saddling Paddock
He looked as white as the flesh of haddock,'

which is not alone in its ineptitude. These lapses in a writer of the first distinction are, however, Mr. Masefield's peculiar prerogative, and at this time of day his readers must make up their minds to accept them as part of the contract, and that once done they do not really amount to very much when the reckoning is made. In his narrative poems, especially, it might be that something of his rare impetuousness would be lost to Mr. Masefield if his mood in writing were one of more exact perfection. And although that is obviously a very

dangerous admission to make, it would seem to be fully justified in this case by the experience of what is now a long sequence of remarkable achievements in narrative poetry. Allowing for all blemishes, the manner here is the manner of mastery, and through five centuries the masters have shown that with all their faults they know better than they can be taught.

In so far as 'Reynard' is a narrative, its hero is the fox. The fine body of folk who come to the meet are used admirably by the poet for the purpose of setting before us one deftly outlined character after another character here always of comedy strain - but beyond a formal connection here and there with the main scheme of the poem they might have been used much to the same end and in much the same way as a crowd in a country market-place or, say, a village church congregation. This is no defect; the Ghost Heath Run is as fair a device as another for assembling the poet's figures -as fair as the Canterbury Pilgrimage. Mr. Masefield justifies his method by giving us an exhilarating group of men and women, all rich in quality, and compounded of type and personality in the way which the best comic art always contrives. But apart from this scheme in the poem, which might have been as well served by making the chronicle begin and end with the meet as by carrying it through the long run by Ghost Heath,

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