il to make its own impression, beside which
Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. How
far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple
calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgian
era!

It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's
prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield
that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is
at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he
has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that
belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his
speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems
nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.

Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--

'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
He loved the English country-side;
The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
The lichen on the apple-trees,
The poultry ranging on the lees,
The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
Under his hide his heart was raw
With joy and pity of these things...'

That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from
the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the
first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would
be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come