_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, by John Masefield. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author's special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield's plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned. Masefield's great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life _is_ full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey "saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man's fire." The old warrior lies awake, thinking. "What are we?" he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, "Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end." Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, "Tragedy!" And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a "tragic purpose," but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a "purpose" inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says: And all their passionate hearts are dust, And dust the great idea that burned In various flames of love and lust Till the world's brain was turned. God, moving darkly in men's brains, Using their passions as his tool, Brings freedom with a tyrant's chains And wisdom with the fool. Blindly and bloodily we drift, Our interests clog our hearts with dreams, God make my brooding soul a rift Through which a meaning gleams. _The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, unlike any Shaw play or even _The Tragedy of Nan_, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one's soul.