John Masefield/Rule Brittania
We learn from time to time that the Englishmen are all dead. Some fomenting soul hints darkly that Anglophiles are poring over English tripe at the reviewing stand. Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy are dead upon their feet; old age has overtaken Hardy; Kipling has pneumonia; and Joseph Conrad is home from the sea.
We also learn that English poetry is now laid low. Housman has quit. Bridges never does anything, and the Sitwells and Huxleys are rightly mad. The young men of England, so it is said, are vainly attempting to fit the glass slipper of Lord Alfred of Victoria upon their feet or wear the clog shoes of T. S. Eliot. And as for the theatre, Shaw alone maintains the tradition, and he an Irishman. The rest are so many Michael Arlens laid hat to hat.
All this being the case, it is disconcerting for John Masefield to dump his collected works upon the unsuspecting and preening American self-esteem. We Americans, one hears everywhere, are on the up-grade in literachoor. We have a hey-nonny-nonny lilt of virility for new forms, new things, new gods. Then comes another collected edition from England, this time John Masefield's.
Whaddye mean, the English are all dead? Macmillan's sends the Masefield collection down to Park Row. Masefield dead? Masefield isn't nearly through. He has simply collected four volumes of the things he wishes preserved. If it is newness of verse you seek, there's the volume containing The Widow in the Bye Street and The Everlasting Mercy. If it is excellence in the classic style, you might read again "Be With Me, Beauty, for the Fire Is Dying." If it be drama or plays, you may have your choice between good plays in verse and good plays in prose. For narrative there is Dauber and for the crude, uncut rhythms of verse you may again read Right Royal or Reynard the Fox.
Masefield has not yet included his prose in the collection. His study of Gallipoli is absent—that long, straight flight of writing which preserves forever still another crowd of bright and deathless figures on the beaches near Troy. One recalls fugitive other pieces. The English are all worn out and awry? Just so many Cosmo Hamiltons running from WJZ? Ho! Ho! Ho! Stop me if you've heard this one.
I wish to God we had one American who gave the promise of some day living, on a hill somewhere, comparable to Boar's Hill in Oxford, who might dump four volumes of Masefield's stuff down upon this desk. Then there would be another Anglo-phobe following the trail which Sinclair Lewis blazes anew whenever he returns from London, monocle in eye, stars and stripes forever.
It seems to me that Masefield can take his own epitaph from a thought expressed in one of his own prefaces: "It is only by such vision that the multitude can be brought to the passionate knowledge of things exulting and eternal." His stuff is "exulting and eternal" in its essence. That icy climb of Dauber over the futtock shrouds, the flight of the boy in The Everlasting Mercy, the core of Masefield's shorter songs, the penetration in his play of The Faithful, these things are filled with exultation, and they possibly will survive as long as English is read.—New York World
