etives. When Dauber's paintings, for example--for he is an
artist as well as an artisan--have been destroyed by the malice of the
crew, and he questions the Bosun about it,

The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!
Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"

Similarly, when the Mate, taking up the brush, makes a sketch of a ship
for Dauber's better instruction,

"God, sir," the Bosun said, "You do her fine!"
"Aye!" said the Mate, "I do so, by the Lord!"

And when the whole crew gathers round to impress upon Dauber the fact of
his incompetence,

"You hear?" the Bosun cried, "You cannot do it!"
"A gospel truth," the Cook said, "true as hell!"

Here, obviously, the very letter of realism is intended.

Here, too, it may be added, we have as well-meaning an array of oaths as
was ever set out in literature. When Mr. Kipling repeats a soldier's
oath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation. When Mr.
Masefield puts down the oaths of sailors, he does so rather as a
melancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but like a virtuous man.
He does not, as so many realists do, love the innumerable coarsenesses
of life which he chronicles; that is what makes his oaths often seem as
innocent as the conversation of elderly sinners echoed on the lips of
children. He has a splendid innocence of purpose, indeed. He wishes to
give us the prosaic truth of actual things as a kind of correspondence
to the poetic truth of spiritual things of which they are the setting
and the frame. Or it may be that he repeats these oaths and all the
rest of it simply as a part of the technicalities of life at sea.

He certainly shows a passion for technicalities hardly less than Mr.
Kipling's own. He tells us, for instance, how, in the height of the fury
of frost and surge and gale round Cape Horn,

at last, at last
They frapped the cringled crojick's icy pelt;
In frozen bulge and bunt they made it fast.

And, again, when the storm was over and Dauber had won the respect of
his mates by his manhood, we have an almost unintelligible verse
describing how the Bosun, in a mood of friendship, set out to teach him
some of the cunning of the sea:--

Then, while the Dauber counted, Bosun took
Some marline from his pocket. "Here," he said,
"You want to know square sennit? So fash. Look!
Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread.
I've known an engineer would give