Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/229

203 THE YELLOW PATCH 203 B.M. "This is my field." S.K. "This is my wire." B.M. "I'm ruler here." S.K. "You ain't." B.M. "I am." S.K. " I'll fight you for it." B.M. "Right, by damn." No mock-piety there ! — and in spite of the moral tag, the whole prodigious holocaust — firebells, brick- bats, copper nozzles, Jimmy Jaggard — is simply unregenerate harlequinade. It is because the thing is a harlequinade that it bubbles melody and beauty ; it sings just because it is a lark. Sheer excitement, as always, set Masefield's imagination glowing ; and the celestial passages granted it are really, technically, the direct reward for Kane's career of horrid crime. But that could not last. A sense of mischief, of reaction, might supply zest for one such effort — but in the end it was bound to die down ; and the moment it did so the old enemy would advance. Poetry would punish him ; Poetry would beat him to his knees — and in The Daffodil Fields you see her doing it. For that is the dire truth about them : their gold is that of the Yellow Book. It is literary, liturgical ; it is strewn with vague symbols ; it is the work of a man writing with reverential, half -closed eyes. It has been condemned, indeed, as prosaic. The truth is that it is far too " poetical." It employs *' Death's red sickle " and Michael's " manly grace " ; " Time crawls " in it and " rumours run " ; Mary " trembles like a leaf," turns " cold as a corpse," goes " sick with shame " and "white to the lips." The lines are all stuffed with such relics, old metaphors — once marvellous, but now dirtied by much handling into meaninglessness. And the sense of appropriateness, of tradition, which makes him use these things makes him muffle his own gestures : " many a grey-goose " — " some grass fields " — " all the rooks " — " adjoining land " — " enormous rings "