BOOKS OF THE DAY
Magic Carpets
In the Mill. By John Masefield. (Heinemann. 7s. 6c1.)
MR. MASEFIELD has interwoven two books, each of great interest; i one is a " straight " account of his life in an American carpet- factory. The other is the reflections of a poet, a critical disciple
of William Morris, on his own evolution, in which the Mill played a great part, and on problems of industrial organisation and ethics. According to his own account, Mr. Masefield went to the Mill in
a state of remarkable political and social innocence. It was less his fault—or his merit—than the fault and merit of the times. The high noon of Victorian prosperity may have passed, but in those days of the Diamond Jubilee the average man and boy did
not know it, did not feel it. The worst side of Kipling, the appeal of the early Daily Mail, the world against which Mr. Lewisham and even Kipps reacted, is implicit in the story of young Masefield's good faith in the eternal power and righteous- ness of England—and the shock he got when he ran against the equally-deep American complacency and conviction of righteous- ness and manifest destiny. There survives in the modern world more of the American sense of being the chosen (and worthy) people of God than there does of the Victorian equivalent, but neither is more than a pale shadow of what it was It was the age of Kipling and Richard Harding Davis and Little Lord Fauntleroy and the young Northcliffe and the young Hearst. To learn that there were two sides to the question was to learn that there might be more than two—and that Mr. Masefield learned.
Otherwise, Mr. Masefield's Mill was remarkably free from social strain. There were no labour-laws, no adequate protective laws ; when bad times came and the Mill shut down, the whole community of the poor and near-poor bore the burden, the shop- keepers as much as the workers. The State, in whose glory and power the workers believed, for which they were willing to die, did nothing for them, even less than the English State was doing at the same time. But Mr. Masefield noted, and now rightly stresses, the lubricating power of equality. These American workers (nearly all of " Anglo-Saxon " or Irish stock) thought themselves the salt of the earth. They were as good as any man. If other people had more money it was because, on the whole, they had earned it by merit or luck. There was no sense of grievance at economic inequality (apart from unemployment and want); life was a perpetual contest, but in America the rules were fair, as they were not in caste-ridden Europe. Merit and luck. One of the most lively passages in the book is the account of the impact of the great boxing-match between the first of the modern champions, " Gentleman Jim " Corbett and the extraordinary Cornishman, Bob Fitzsimmons. It was not quite as much of an international incident as the Sayers-Heenan fight, but it was the news for the Mill. It ended, as all the world knows, in a victory for Ruby Robert, and Mr. Masefield, as the poet of sport, might have made it clearer how great was Fitzsimmons's achievement, for he was not a real heavy-weight at all but what we now call a " cruiser-weight " and barely that. He was as odd and as great a freak as Jimmy Wilde. But the main theme of the Mill is the mill. With great clarity, Mr. Masefield describes the intricate processes which, with the collaboration of hundreds of workers, none of whom saw the whose process, the carpets were produced. Looking back, he thinks that one of the flaws in the mill-system was just that no one saw the whole process through, that middle-aged men grew profoundly bored with the comparatively simple task they had mastered twenty years before, and would have been the happier and the better for a. change. They rejoiced when the Mill got an order for some favourite design of theirs. It did make a difference to them when the Mill was busy with something they liked.
- But, of course, the young Masefield was a very exceptional mill- hand. He was, by the English standards of the time, well-paid. He had by the standards of a farm or a ship (the only ones he knew) a good deal of leisure and he began to read, without guidance but not without system. America is so backward now in the provision of cheap editions that we are inclined to share Mr. Masefield's surprise when we read of the abundance of very cheap editions of modern English books. We do not share the surprise if we remember (as Mr. Masefield does not) that until about this time there was no international copyright as .far as the Land of the Free was concerned. The cheap American pub- lishers were the great international Barabbases. Mr. Masefield is too generous in another field, too. The New York Sun in Dana's time was s a remarkable paper and reflected its editor- owner's genuine interest in things of the mind, dating from his brilliant days at Harvard and his days of zeal andry
service at Brook i Farm. But at the time Mr. Masefield read it, the Sun was the despair of the righteous in New York and of some who were not• very righteous. It was the lament of a witty New Yorker that in the evening one had to choose between Godkin's Post (which made virtue odious) and Dana's Sun (which made vice attractive).
But however tainted the sources, the springs from which the young Masefield drank were genuinely Pierian. The English poets were now realities, and he began to try to write—naturally, given his age and environment, imitatively. The day of the young ape whose sedulousness was inverted, of the totally self- taught genius, had not yet come. By the shores of the Tappan Zee and on the untrodden wildernesses of the Palisades, not yet landscaped, young Masefield read and thought, and, of course, that led to " thinking long " of England. Then there were the ships. The day of sail was not yet over. South Street was still something like what it had been when William Bennett made his engravings. There were more seductive figures than " Spanish sailors with bearded lips "; there were the riggers aloft doing work more delicate, more important, more emotionally satisfying than carpet-weaving. And work which the young Masefield had been trained to judge. He could judge of the technical and aesthetic value of a system of rigging far better than he could judge of the merits of a carpet-weaving process. So he planned and dreamed of a return to England. He saved enough to pay a passage, but like a good old Conway he preferred to work his way. He had made friends on the waterfront and he found a passage. He had been through the Mill. And his life, his natural bent, had been revealed to him. It is a simple story told with
Previous page
