own line. It was unfortunate that the craze for
experiment and innovation should, for a time--probably a brief
time--have had so strange and uncouth an effect upon so fine and
sensitive a genius. Mr. Masefield was--and is--a lyrical poet, fitted
to express the personal emotions which lyrical poetry can support. But
he became obsessed with the conviction that poetry ought to be made to
do something else than suggest feelings and ideas in a beautiful way;
that it ought to serve a social purpose; that it ought to become a
direct contributory force to the social morality of the time; that it
ought to concern itself with practical modern questions in a practical
way; that it ought to present actual life, realistically. The same
feeling affected a lesser poet, Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who, being
a story-teller in verse and a moralist, has been acclaimed as a
powerful poet in both England and America. Mr. Gibson has not yet
shown that he is a considerable poet. But Mr. Masefield undoubtedly
does possess the poetic talent, perhaps even genius, which Mr. Gibson
has not yet revealed. But the most recent poems of the former have
been praised for just the same reasons that Mr. Gibson's have been
praised. The New York _Outlook_ said of Mr. Gibson: "He is bringing a
message which might well rouse his day and generation to an
understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited--the
overworked masses." Mr. Masefield's _The Everlasting Mercy_ and his
series of realistic poems of the same order have been lavishly
eulogised in exactly the same way--and for a similar reason. Each of
these poems contains a rousing story; each subserves the purpose of an
excellent moral. They are realistic enough, but only in rare passages
are they beautiful. "Nothing," said Shelley, "can be equally well
expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." I
have felt that Mr. Masefield's long narrative poems might equally well
have been expressed in prose.

I believe this to be no more than a passing phase in Mr. Masefield. A
poet who could write the charming lyrical poem which, by a curious
accident, was published at the end of _The Everlasting Mercy_ in the
_English Review_ will not long be content to write sensational tracts;
we may even be glad that these tracts have been written if they bring
the public to attend to the more significant work of so finely gifted
an author.

But I am very far from suggesting that the effort made