JOHN MASEFIELD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20472, 25 January 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

JOHN MASEFIELD.

THE MAN.

BY KOTARE,

The cables this week record the fact that Jslm Masefield was once poor. A valuable piece of information that to flash to the ends of the earth. If one is to judge srom tho sort of things published in England about the great, the chief interest in any man who has raised himself above the ordinary level of humanity is not tin!) work that has given him his distinction, but tho spicy personal titbits that can b3 gleaned of his past history, or his present preferences in food or cocktails or socks and ties.

There must bo a public that absorbs these momentous details. In a way I suppose they tend to fill out the picture of tho prominent man or woman, give a touchi of humanity to figures that otherwise might be vague, aloof, lost in the splendours of their own distinction. But it seems akin to the peculiar attitude of mind '.hat remembers Leonardo da Vinci becau ;ij ho invented the wheol-barrow, and forgets tho Last Supper. Of course Masefield was poor. A man that eegun his adolescence by running away ':o sea and served for years as cabinboy and deck-hand on an ocean-going windjammer was not likely to accumulate a fat banking account. And tho life liter ary does not hand out its rewards to the genuic.e artist at the first time of asking. W. I!. Davies, ono of the sweetest singers of our own or any time, was a genuine tramp, a hobo, a sundowner in earnest, not u Bohemian playing at poverty and the life nomadic, with an acute sense of the line romantic figure he was cutting. And probably at least 50 per cent, of our prominent artists and literary men know what it was to go hungry and ill-clad in tho days of struggle for recognition. Chatterton, seeing only starvation ahead, took! tho easiest way out. Goldsmith bowed his mighty talent to the most uninsp'ring hack-work. And Burns knew to the full the clutch of " poor-tith caul J," • ' At Sea. With Masefield the hard struggles of his early days made a man of him. We don't know much of his history. There are some men that are always telling the sad story of their lives. Give, them half a chaliicc and they are launched oh the ofttold talc. Masefield does not speak of himself. He was born in Shropshire in 1874. He must have served on the grain ships running from the West of England to Kan Francisco. His sea poems have as tliey.- setting the long run round the Horn, and the days of waiting with the grain fleet in the Golden Gate. Think what that intimate experience of the old days of sail must have meant to him. Here is a shy boy who has slipped the old moorings like many another at the call of the sea, and whose life in its moiit formative years is spent in the forecastle of a wind-jammer, or in the company tho deep-sea sailor would meet when his ship touched port. How many years he spent at sea we do not know. But whnia at last lie broke free ho had left his firsli youth behind. He faced life with a §pe|';jalise4,-.knovvledgO:>_of' one calling, apparently tho only calling he had decided he .would not follow. Environment.

Bat lie had found himself in the years of hard toil amid uncongenial surroundings. It was idealism that had sent him to 'sea iu the first place. The miracle was that he preserved that idealism, refined it, expanded it, transfigured it, in circumstances of physical and mental and moral strain that in almost any other boy would have killed it for ever. There are many things in Masefield that one regards with respectful homage and admiration; but Minefield's greatest achievement, the one on which all the rest depend, was his victoiy over hard circumstance, his grim struggle with life in its hardest forms, an :1 his refusal to yield one fraction of his vision and aspiration. Adversity may be ugly and venomous, but it bears a precious jewel in its head. Not only did he hold his own in these years of lonely struggle, but he came out of the testing fires with the dross purged away. A boy rail away to sea; a man in every fibre of him left" it to follow strange roads and to fli:ig his new challenge to Fate. In " Dauber " ho comes as near to autobiography as a reticent shy nature will let him. It is the picture of the artist thrust into a hopelessly uncongenial environment. Dauber is a sailor with or;e passion, the lovo of beauty. A sunsot, a ship at sea, the moonlight on the w iters thrill him like a trumpet call. The artist in him stands rapt and breathless btfore the beauty that ceaselessly pours in upon him from the sky and the sea. A voyage round the Horn does not give much scope for the cultivation of the aesthetic soul. Physical weariness, incessant discomfort, • danger always on the threshold, tho routine of a sailor's life, the mockery of his shipmates—theso are his daily portion. But. ho will not yield h:;s vision. Dauber. Blunderingly he tries to capture the btauty that sets his soul singing._ His canvas occasionally catches the gleam; bit it never fails to excite tho boisterous mirth of his companions. It seems that brutal ridicule will crush him, when n thought strikes through the painter s brain like a bright bird. Ho has felt hilherto that the human element spoils th<s picture. Nature is pulsing with beuity; the intrusion of t}ie human element always brings discord. Tho world is ;beautiful, man is ugly. That was his original view—a sort of artistic snobbeiy developed in self-defence to keep his dmains alive. And now in a flash it comes to him that life even in the crude manifestations of it lio sees around liirn is fill,3d with a strange majesty and beauty. Th's, and bo much liko it of man's toil. Compassed by naked manhood in strango places, \Vn ; 9 all heroic, but outmde tho coil "Whhin which modern art gleams or grimaces: That it he drew that lino of sailors faces, Sweating the sail, their play and change, It -irould be new and wonderful and strance. Thiil was what his work meant, it would bo A training in new vision.

A wild night at (lie Horn ended poor Dauber's hopes and dreams. But Masefield survived the physical perils as he iiiad conquered the enemies of his soul. There was the discovery lie brought with him: from the years that had made a, man of him. His love of beauty had found a wider, richer field in ordinary humanity. Life itself was good. You need not look at Uie saint to believe that. Man the primitive, struggling against time and fate-, humanity in the raw—crude, hard, sav.-igc—the old proud pageant of man, the fighter—here was a wonderful strange beauty that gave man his fitting place in a world made primarily for beauty. Man wai; not a discordant element ; he contributed the richest part of that celestial harmony. Tho ceaseless cpest of beauty, liis ability to find it in unsuspected plaices, his clear vision of reality linked with his faith in humanity, thoso are the factors that have mado him ono of the groat literary forces of our time. lie embodied this creed in tho noblo hy.tin of Consecration which he prefixed to his first book of poems, tho " Saltwater Ballads."

Of the maimed, of the halt, and the blind, in the rain and tho cold, , Of Iheso shall ray songs bo lishioned, my talea be told.