JOHN MASEFIELD.*
MASEFTELD'S latest volume is made up of a narrative poem and two one-act plays, all of which exhibit the qualities of swiftness of movement, picturesqueness of expression, and graphic character-drawing that we have learned to expect of him. The poem deals with an episode in the life of Jutin Manuel Rona, the Dictator of the Argentine, who, notwithstanding that he was accused of the pleasing total of some twenty-two thousand murders during his career of active usefulness, escaped such of his enemies as had survived the vigorous methods of his administration, and died peacefully in his bed near Southampton at the ripe age of eighty-fotir. His simple, downright character lends itself admirably to illustration at the hands of Mr. Mose- field, who retains an altogether boyish and Elizabethan delight in bloodshed, and has told in these poignant stanzas a tale of tender love and death and vengeance that would have delighted the heart of John Ford. The path of the narrative poet is beset with difficultiee ; when the emotion falls below tragic intensity he has to choose between maintaining a false diction elaborated out of key with his theme, and subsiding into matter-of-fact statement which may easily become ludicrously pedestrian. Dr. Grainger's famous periphrasis for the prosaic word " rats "— " The whiskered vermin race "—may serve as an example of one danger, and the two dreadful lines-
" And when they buried him the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral "- which ruin the close of " Enoch Arden," will exemplify the other. We cannot any that Mr. Masefield has quite succeeded in avoiding both these perils. His mental honesty and directness save him from sham eloquence and tawdry ornamentation, and he keeps the action of his story moving so fast that he can usually sustain the note of tragedy without effort, but at times he hovers on the brink of bathos ; " As City Chaplain he Was widely known throughout the Bishop's see " is deplorably reminiscent of The Bah Ballade. On the other hand, " Lorenzo'e lamp still binned ; he paced his room ; His shadow like a great bat flitted gloom," has the Shakespearean touch by which ennobling dignity and pathos are infused into a plain statement of fact. We quote one stanza to show Mr. Masefield's power of condensing a picture into a few lines ; it describes Buenos Aires at the time of the White and Red feuds :— " And in the city where the Senate sat So violent this bloody quarrel was That men stole to their business like the cat By silent streets where pavements sprouted gram, And at the corners crouched with stealthy eyes, Peered, and drew back, or flashed upon their prize."
The two plays which complete the volume were written thirteen years ago, and have not the same high literary merits as their companion. They are thoroughlyinteresting and actable little pieces, but they have no finesse, no memorable appeal, no development of motive or personality. Their type is humanized melodrama ; incidents crowd upon one another at breakneck speed, and although the characters speak and comport them- selves more like men and women than is popular in the trans- pontine theatre, they are drawn in too hard outlines, their foibles are repeated at such brief intervals that they give but little more than a passing illusion of reality. Sketches such as these would be an intense relief from the monotony of the average music-hall performance, but they do not seem to us to be altogether worthy of the- author of Nate
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