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 anaemia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'

And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its
colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue
where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose
magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose
strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious
inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is
peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have
done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel,
but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master
it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr