vividness in my memory, dropping her spray of scarlet hips as a signal to Ern, and holding the dazzling light so that he may see to bash in Jimmy's face. Jimmy himself is, to my thinking, a pretty striking piece of characterization.
But there is a fifth person in this "sordid" affair, a fifth unnamed person, "exulting and eternal." She it was who made Jimmy desert his mother; she infatuated him with a harlot, she frenzied his arm to the murderous blow, she brought him to the hangman's noose, and among the ancients she was known as the divine Cytherea. Her defeat in the bloody squalor of these English circumstances was, I believe, for Mr. Masefield, one of the high interests of the occasion. Now many contrasted elements enter into the effect of this complete, symmetrical, and intense narrative—mother-love, lust, jealousy, and murder; but the stinging beauty and terror of it depend, I believe, upon Masefield's vision of the authentic Cytherean casting her illusive radiance over a heartless drab.
This is not Anna, whom he describes, hiding in the pastoral country after the execution of Jimmy—though it has her shape and name. This is the Cytherean illusion:
There, in the April in the garden close,
One heard her in the morning singing sweet,
Calling the birds from the unbudded rose,
Offering her lips with grains for them to eat.
The redbreasts come with little wiry feet,
Sparrows and tits and all wild feathery things,
Brushing her lifted face with quivering wings.
As W. H. Hamilton has pertinently remarked, there is something "fundamental in our poet's insistence upon another than the easy popular verdict on the unsuccessful." In his little book on Shakespeare, Masefield observes the Elizabethan dramatist's brooding sympathy with tragical Kings, such as Richard II, who failed "because they did not conform to a type lower than themselves." Perhaps the idea is a little too subtle or too exalted for our common feeling that virtue resides with the victor and that the justice of a cause is to be gauged by its success.
But this notion of a moral splendor in the dead and defeated, Mr. Masefield pursues through his tragedies: Pompey the Great, in which the hero has traits of resemblance to Woodrow Wilson; Philip the King, serene with religious faith after the destruction of the Armada, dismissing the tragic messenger
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