Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/224

198 198 THE YELLOW PATCH The spring bubbled up, stirring the sand-grains with its trembles. It rilled past the rush-clump, past the ooze where the marigolds sucked. With a cluck and colour it slid across a quartz, loitered in bubbles below, bobbed round, curtsied and continued. It rippled away, cleaving through the grasses, in all the perpetual miracle of an April brook. A bramble had fallen across it. It sent it ducking up and down, bright with wet. It drove sodden leaves, and a twig with a lime crust on it, against the bramble. A pool spread, curdling with scum, yeasty near the bramble, like working ale. Then on. Then on. Over a run of pebbles it glugged and tinkled. The leap and collapse of the run of the water on the stone is a continual miracle. The change and inter- change, the sudden smooth of the glide, cold, brown, glassy, bursting into bubbles, twinkling into dapples, gold suddenly, instantly blue or brown, a jobble, a plowter, a collapse, always a rush, a hurry, always deliberate, pausing, circling, making up its mind, headlong at last, anon quiet, menacing even, secret. Those are from The Street of To-day. The reader will see what has happened. It is the same tune, the same tempo ; and the same sailor's mode of cataloguing, item by item, made to serve the writer's own brain. It is a kind of passionate reporting, a logic of vision. It works minutely, with tiny details ; then makes them magnificent by rhythm. The reader's mind progresses strictly, every step a state- ment, and yet it is roused and uplifted as by rhetoric. The periods rattle like drum-taps. The small bright pictures flash intensely. There is something hypnotic in the recurrent tick and flash. A kind of trance exalts the onlooker, he tastes the cleansing power of vision, he is granted the happiness of illusion per- fectly fulfilled. And this percussive, pointillist, exact and stabbing way of writing is so extraordinarily successful, simply because it excites, summons, and employs at their keenest pitch all Masefield's powers of appre- hension. The beat of this music is the very step of his mind. It is the exact oral equivalent of that