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 to the question of Mr Masefield's style in general. As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows he can never wholly possess. 'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops, All wet red clay, where a horse's foot Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root. The fox raced on, on the headlands firm, Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm; The rooks rose raving to curse him raw, He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw. Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled, With a bay horse near and a white horse leading, And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.' The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe, from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used, some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'