Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/227

201 THE YELLOW PATCH 201 Solitude was to be about twentieth-century science, those of us who had watched him eagerly chuckled, sure the trick was done. Multitude — it was the very thing ; in The Street of To-day, with its surge of swift detail, its myriad faces and reverberant beat, his curious genius, with its eagerness, its glorious power of making circumstantial statements simply sing, would get its supreme opportunity. And what hap- pened? Something which we might indeed have foreseen, so often has it fretted modern art. The mere murk and bitterness, rancour and filth, which have always formed a superficial wrapper round reality, a film which the poet has to pierce, clogged up the bright machinery, embittered the machinist, and sent him, by revulsion, off again in the vague. There are noble chapters in both these books ; three- fourths of each is superb ; but it was, and it always will be, technically impossible for Masefield to write a masterpiece round a hero who sees modern life as a gigantic misery, London as a cancer, its crowds a suppurating rabble. A Shaw, with his love of a fight, with his verbal sentences specially forged to thrust like spears, could use such a hero quite happily — could use, indeed, no other kind, for his creative energy is only kindled by destruction, he can only fiddle when Rome burns. But Masefield's gift is of the rarer, fresher, finer sort, that can only create among felicities. It has to work in detail : and there- fore it must always work constructively, for destruc- tion deals with masses, movements ; insults are of all things the least pointed. And so, when Roger Naldrett set to work to preach and propagate a hatred of " the weariness and filth of cities," he was really mutinying against his maker. He was cutting down his masts. For Masefield's methods, if they are going to fight to win, must always sail beneath a Jolly Roger.