In his new pageant play, The Coming of Christ (Heinemann,
Ss. 6d.),. Mr. Masefield has given us vivid and decorative scenes for recitation to music. Four angels, the Power, the Light,- the Sword, and the Mercy, try in vain to dissuade the Spirit of Christ from descending among mankind :—
" First, know that man is cumbered so with clay That the spirit in him is as stars in cloud. Small comfort in much darkness."
Notwithstanding all they reveal of the evil nature of man, the Spirit of Christ is firm in the determination to take on human flesh. We pass from the courts of heaven to earth and there find the three journeying Kings and the three Shepherds. Here Mr. Masefield allows himself some by- comment on the strifes of our modern world : he sees, in short, the coming of Christ as a reconciliation between kings and rich traffickers, shepherds and workers. It is a simple small play, written with rapidity of verse and without affecta- tion. The thought is never deep, and the allusions to myths of liberation, the Prometheus myth, for example, rather overweight the poem ; for Mr. Masefield is no Aeschylus. None the less it is unpretentious and written throughout with the peculiar transparent freshness of English which is Mr. Masefield's greatest gift.
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