laces; for
things, as things; for the emotions, as the ironies of life; for the
ludicrous, as the surface aspect of the pathetic--for the whole male
side of existence which poetry for a hundred years has been inclined
to ignore.

It is quite evident in the very early poetry of Mr. John Masefield
that the loudly reverberating ballads of Rudyard Kipling had had their
effect upon him; that something of their sheer vehemence and lustiness
had mingled with his own feeling for the tropical seas into which he
had adventured, with the vivid sense of men and things in strange
places which had wrought upon his imagination, as years before they
had wrought upon Mr. Conrad. Needless to say, Mr. Masefield in most
respects stands at the opposite pole of temperament from Mr. Kipling.
He is a lyrical poet whose poetry springs not so much from intense
interest in the lusty vigour of common life as from an intense feeling
for sheer beauty, for that exquisite refinement which may be extracted
from life; and it may be mingled with equally intense pain when the
beauty is removed. He is, perhaps, more nearly akin to the type to
which Keats belonged. But certainly the arrival of the spirit
represented by Kipling, added to the discipline of his own early
adventures, braced him and energised him; and almost his first
literary effort took the form of ballad poems uniting a fineness and
sweetness which were entirely his own with a kind of lusty vigour
which was superimposed. It is easy enough to see the influence of
Kipling in a ballad such as that which begins:

Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are singing in my ears,
Like a slow sweet piece of music from the grey forgotten years;
Telling tales, and beating tunes, and bringing weary thoughts to me
Of the sandy beach at Muertos, where I would that I could be.

Those early ballads had some of the emotional vigour without the
characteristic defects of Kipling, and in many cases a charm which was
entirely his own. But he very early shook off what there was of that
Kipling influence. It was superficial and transitory. Mr. Kipling, as
I have said, represented a transition period; and another--an
experimental period--has followed. It is probable that Joseph Conrad
became a far more potent influence on the imagination of Mr.
Masefield than any one other author; though he was assuredly not
content to follow any single example, and began steadily to experiment
and to strike out his