of the
brave. His sea, too, is haunted by invisible terrors, where more
ancient sailors dreaded marvels that had shape and bulk. Mr
Masefield's love of the sea is to a still greater extent dominated by
tragic shadows. There are few gloomier poems in literature than
_Dauber_ in spite of the philosophy and calm of its close. It is only
young men who have never gone farther over the water than for a sail
at Southend who think of the sea as consistently a merry place. Not
that all sailors set out to sea in the mood of Hamlet. The praise of
the sea life that we find in their chanties is the praise of cheerful
men. But it is also the praise of men who recognise the risks and
treacheries that lurk under the ocean--a place of perils as manifestly
as any jungle in the literature of man's adventures and fears. Perhaps
it is necessary that the average man should ignore this dreadful
quality in the sea: it would otherwise interfere too much with the
commerce and the gaiety of nations. And, after all, an ocean liner is
from one point of view a retreat from the greater dangers of the
streets of London. But the imaginative man cannot be content to regard
the sea with this ignorant amiableness. To him every voyage must still
be a voyage into the unknown "where tall ships founder and deep death
waits." He is no more impudently at home with the sea than was
Shakespeare, who, in "Full fathom five thy father lies," wrote the
most imaginative poem of the sea in literature. Even Mr Kipling, who
has slapped most of the old gods on the back and pressed penny Union
Jacks into their hands, writes of the sea as a strange world of
fearful things. When he makes the deep-sea cables sing their "song of
the English," he aims at conveying the same sense of awe that we get
when we read how Jonah went down in the belly of the great fish.
Recall how the song of the deep-sea cables begins:

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white
sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred
cables creep.

Mr Kipling's particularisations of the "blind white sea-snakes" and
"level plains of ooze" achieve nothing of the majesty of the far
simpler "bottoms of the mountains" in the song of Jonah. But, when we
get behind the more vulgar and prosaic phrasing, we see that