hought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse words
than to beat one's wife. Someone has said that in the last analysis style
is a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the
superficial, a passion for justice in language. Stylelessness, where it is
not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part
merely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. It is like the
rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of
life. It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It is
a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. One
cannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of
those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or
two. His line in _The Everlasting Mercy:_

And yet men ask, "Are barmaids chaste?"

is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet:

The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!
Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"

is like a Sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous
story. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling
with language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is
indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to
express. He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a
vision. So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet,
indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it
were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his
method but do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate with
equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr.
Masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius.

Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it
essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers.
Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the world
can do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it
is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to
insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are
like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of
sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often
nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to
find with what airiness a promis