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The Cult of Beauty: A Study of John Masefield
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
John Masefield, William Butler Yeats, A.E., and others, continually using the word, have made of ‘beauty’ and ‘Beauty’ a phenomenon at which Thackeray, again alive, would laugh as he once laughed at Beauty-with-a-big-B. Masefield, particularly, trying to create a moral consciousness in the people, takes it for granted that the word ‘beauty’ is at once concrete, specific, and, therefore, self-explaining; and that the things, beauty and Beauty, are to be understood at once as vital, moving forces. He is consequently disconcerting, for he himself has various understandings of the word and the things.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930
References
Note 1 in page 1218 “Now, Beauty, mind them feet of yours.” Reynard the Fox, or The Ghost Heath Run (New York, Macmillan, 1920), 7. In “Right Royal,” too, a horse is called “Beauty,” not because that is its name, however. Poems by John Masefield, vol. II (New York, Macmillan, 1935),
Note 2 in page 1219 The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art.
Note 3 in page 1219 “Introduction,” Seven Lamps of Architecture.
Note 4 in page 1220 Modern Painters, iii.
Note 5 in page 1220 Definition of Greatness in Art.
Note 6 in page 1220 The Renaissance, Introduction.
Note 7 in page 1220 How Architecture Expresses a Soul.
Note 8 in page 1221 The Renaissance, “Introduction.”
Note 9 in page 1221 The Renaissance.
Note 10 in page 1221 The Renaissance.
Note 11 in page 1222 Lionel Stevenson, “Brooke's Universal Beauty,” PMLA, XLIII (1928), 198–209.
Note 12 in page 1222 Robert Millikan, “Science and Religion,” Science and Life (1924).
Note 13 in page 1223 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction” to Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York, Knopf, 1921).
Note 14 in page 1223 Edwin Muir, “Betrayal.”
Note 15 in page 1223 William Yerington, “Guerdon,” East Windows (Syracuse, 1926).
Note 16 in page 1224 “Introduction” to Collected Poems of John Masefield, vol. I (New York, 1925).
Note 17 in page 1224 “The Everlasting Mercy,” Poems, I, 132.
Note 1 in page 1224 Prose Plays (New York, Macmillan, 1925), 130.
Note 2 in page 1224 “Beauty,” Poems, I, 89.
Note 3 in page 1225 “Reynard the Fox,” 24. Poets have naturally dramatized the woman's own objection to being prized for her visible rather than inward beauty. Cf. Hardy's “The Beauty,” H. Wolfe's “The Common Woman,” Yeats' “When you are Old.”
Note 4 in page 1225 Cf. Yeats' “Adam's Curse.”
Note 5 in page 1225 Melloney Holtspur, Prose Plays, 368.
Note 6 in page 1225 But Masefield is not this sort of æsthete at least. Lonny made a great mistake and suffered for it: “I flung away life and power, when I did not know what they were. Now I have neither forever and forever and forever.” Yet Lonny had had this virtue, “that for all my wickedness, I cared for beauty and truth and color; three things which never let a man down. .... I called these things noble with all my strength.” So Melloney forgave him eventually. Ibid., 406, 437.
Note 7 in page 1226 Captain Margaret (New York, Macmillan, 1916), 124.
Note 8 in page 1226 Ibid., 251.
Note 9 in page 1226 Ibid., 5.
Note 10 in page 1226 Odtaa (New York, Macmillan, 1926), 413.
Note 11 in page 1226 Ibid., 71. So, too, in H. D.'s “Charioteer,” seeing his brother at the start of the race, beautiful, the sculptor “dedicate(s) all of my (sculptor's) soul to you, God of beauty,” if the brother wins:
I will fashion a statue,
of him, of my brother,
out of my thought,
and the strength of my wrist,
and the fire of my brain.
Note 12 in page 1226 Captain Margaret, 41.
Note 13 in page 1226 The Faithful, Prose Plays, 318.
Note 14 in page 1227 Respectively in Captain Margaret, Odtaa, Sard Harker (New York, Macmillan, 1924), Odtaa, The Taking of Helen (New York, Macmillan, 1924), Multitude and Solitude (New York, Macmillan, 1916).
Note 15 in page 1227 Multitude and Solitude, 330. See “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 416, for two kinds of living defined by Masefield.
Note 16 in page 1227 Ibid., 259.
Note 17 in page 1227 Captain Margaret, 327. Cf. “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 472.
Note 18 in page 1227 See below, p. 1254.
Note 19 in page 1228 The Faithful, Prose Plays.
Note 20 in page 1228 The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, Prose Plays, 182.
Note 21 in page 1228 Odtaa, 406.
Note 22 in page 1228 Respectively in Odtaa; Captain Margaret; Philip the King, Verse Plays (New York, Macmillan, 1925); The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, Prose Plays; “The ‘Wanderer,‘ ” Poems, I.
Note 23 in page 1228 A. E. is less confident about failure than Masefield. But in “Hope in Failure,” Collected Poems by A. E. (London, Macmillan, 1926), 273, he notes:
The eyes that had gazed from afar on a beauty that blinded the eyes
Shall call forth its image forever, its shadow in alien skies.
The heart that had striven to beat in the heart of the Mighty too soon
Shall still of that beating remember some errant and faltering tune.
Note 24 in page 1228 Odtaa, 409.
Note 25 in page 1228 Captain Margaret, 370.
Note 26 in page 1229 The War and the Future (New York, Macmillan, 1918).
Note 27 in page 1229 Jim Davis (New York, Macmillan, 19—).
Note 28 in page 1229 Good Friday, Verse Plays, 36.
Note 29 in page 1229 Respectively in Sard Harker, “Enslaved,” Poems, II; Multitude and Solitude, Odtaa, “The Dauber,” Poems, 1; The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, and The Faithful, Prose Plays.
Note 30 in page 1229 According to James Stephens, though, “All that is loneliness is beautiful For all that is, is lonely.” “On a Lonely Spray,” Collected Poems of James Stephens (New York, 1926), 244. And in “The Lonely,” describing him as lonely to whom “no invisible mother is nigh,” A. E. emphasizes the danger of loneliness:
No elfin comrades
Come at his call,
And the earth and the air
Were as blank as the wall.
Collected Poems, 366. See below, p. 1255n.
Note 31 in page 1229 Quoted in “Play-writing” in The Taking of Helen (New York, Macmillan, 1924).
Note 32 in page 1230 Reynard the Fox, 60.
Note 33 in page 1230 “Sonnets,” Poems, II, 288.
Note 34 in page 1230 “Ships,” Poems, I, 70.
Note 35 in page 1230 The War and the Future.
Note 36 in page 1230 “The Everlasting Mercy,” Poems, I, 153.
Note 37 in page 1230 And Masefield's King Cole is not unlike Yeats' Countless Cathleen.
Note 38 in page 1231 Philip the King, Verse Plays, 59.
Note 39 in page 1231 “The Dauber,” Poems, I, 266.
Note 40 in page 1231 Multitude and Solitude, 38.
Note 41 in page 1231 “Ships,” Poems, I, 68. Cf. Yeats' “He tells of the Perfect Beauty.”
Note 42 in page 1231 The Trial of Jesus.
Note 43 in page 1232 “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 468.
Note 44 in page 1232 The Tragedy of Nan, “Introduction,” Prose Plays. Masefield here is not far removed from Ruskin. Cf. Yeats, “He [Synge] once said to me, ‘a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a Puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as much beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an æsthete.’” “More Memories.”
Note 45 in page 1233 “Consecration,” Poems, I, 3.
Note 46 in page 1233 “Invocation,” Poems, I, 100.
Note 47 in page 1233 “Beauty,” Poems, II, 291.
Note 48 in page 1233 The Taking of Helen.
Note 49 in page 1233 Gallipoli (New York, 1918), 12.
Note 50 in page 1233 Melloney Holtspur, Prose Plays, 375.
Note 51 in page 1233 The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, II, i; Prose Plays, 202.
Note 52 in page 1234 Multitude and Solitude, 7–8.
Note 53 in page 1234 Ibid., 149.
Note 54 in page 1234 Ibid., 154.
Note 55 in page 1235 Ibid., 330.
Note 56 in page 1235 But note Gallipoli, The War and the Future, etc.!
Note 57 in page 1235 Multitude and Solitude, 148, 190-1. Yeats says in “The Death of Synge,” “The self-conquest of a writer who is not a man of action is style.” But, in “Estrangement,” “I cry out against my life. I have sleepless nights, thinking of the time I must take from poetry—last night I could not sleep—and yet, perhaps, I must do all these things that I may set myself the life of action and express not the traditional poet but that forgotten thing, the normal man.” Action as the proper training for poets is a recipe as old as a classic, of course.
Note 58 in page 1236 The Trial of Jesus.
Note 59 in page 1236 “Introduction,” Plays in Verse.
Note 60 in page 1236 “Introduction,” The Tragedy of Nan, Prose Plays, 98.
Note 61 in page 1236 Multitude and Solitude, 246. “A thought that stirs me in Time is that ‘only women and artists love time, others sell it,’ but what is Blake's ‘naked beauty displayed,’ ‘visible, audible wisdom,’ ‘to the shop-keeping logicians’? How can they love time or anything but the day's end?” Yeats, “The Death of Synge and Other Pages from an Old Diary.” Cf. Stephens, “MacDhoul”; H. Wolfe, “Huckster.”
Note 62 in page 1236 “King Cole,” Poems, II, 253.
Note 63 in page 1236 “Play-writing,” The Taking of Helen.
Note 64 in page 1237 Captain Margaret, 151.
Note 65 in page 1237 The Sweeps of Ninety-Eight, Prose Plays, 51.
Note 66 in page 1237 Multitude and Solitude, 8.
Note 67 in page 1237 Ibid., 17.
Note 68 in page 1237 The Sweeps of Ninety-Eight, Prose Plays, 46.
Note 69 in page 1238 “June Twilight,” Poems, I, 93.
Note 70 in page 1238 See “When Boney Death,” “C. L. M.,” “Waste,” etc. At this point many poets begin and end, which fact furnishes the reason for Mencken's protest in “Exeunt Omnes,” Prejudices, 2nd Series. Synge's poetry, for example, is morbid enough almost to remind one of Masters'
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull.
Yet Synge's Deirdre and her lover rejoice that they die, for, thus, they will remain eternally young and beautiful in memory. Yeats is troubled. The beauty of his Deirdre “can but leave among us Vague memories, nothing but vague memories,” yet “in the grave all, all shall be renewed.” Yeats believes (“Adam's Curse”) that even for artists and beautiful women the curse is labor: “It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring,” yet
“I heard the old, old men say
All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.“
In “The Folly of Being Comforted,” Yeats finds little, or very remote, comfort,
But heart, there is no comfort, not a grain;
Time can but make her beauty over again,
Because of that great nobleness of hers.
James Stephens is almost lackadaisical (“A Woman is a Branchy Tree”):
.... cold and rain and slow decay
On woman and on tree till they
Droop to earth again and be
A withered woman, a withered tree;
While wind and man woo in the glade
Another tree, another maid.
With the same idea in mind, Stephens is a strong contrast to the highly serious Masefield in “Sonnets,” and “Tomorrow,” Poems, I, 431, 49.
Note 71 in page 1239 “The Everlasting Mercy,” Poems, I, 139. Cf. Psalms 37:2, 90:5, 103:15, concrete where Masefield is abstract.
Note 72 in page 1239 Philip the King, Verse Plays, 68.
Note 73 in page 1239 The Passing Strange,“ Poems, II, 159.
Note 74 in page 1239 The Trial of Jesus. Cf. A. E.'s “A Murmur in the Grass:”
Note 75 in page 1239 “August, 1914,” Poems, I, 448; Collected Poems, 344.
Note 76 in page 1240 But in Masefield, as in Yeats, there are surprising approximations to a pre-Freudian belief in dreams, particularly in Masefield's prose.
Note 77 in page 1240 “Fragments,” Poems, I, 107. Cf. Sassoon's
Belov'd and faithful ....
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrances of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of paradise.
Also (“The Vision” by Sassoon),
I love all things that pass: their briefness is
Music that fades on transient silences.
Winds, birds, and glittering leaves that flare and fall—
They fling delight across the world; they call
To rhythmic-flashing limbs that rove and race. ....
A moment in the dawn for Youth's lit face;
A moment's passion, closing on the eye—
“O Beauty, born of lovely things that die!”
Note 78 in page 1240 “The Frontier,” Poems, I, 487. Though Yeats believes in the beauty of the past, he leaves no room for it in “The Lover Pleads with his Friend for old Friends,”
Time's bitter flood will rise
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.
A. E. is skeptical in “The Great Breath,”
I saw how all the trembling ages past,
Moulded to her (Beauty) by deep and deeper breath,
Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last
And knows herself in death.
In “Respectable Woman II,” H. Wolfe is positive
It is a common lie—who would believe it?—
that, as men lose their beauty, the slow earth
does in her tranquil moment reweave it
into a bird—into a flower-birth.
It isn't true. The earth has no such power.
But spring to spring is hostile.....
Note 79 in page 1241 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 405. In “The Unknown God,” A. E. describes a similar experience:
The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
In “A Summer Night,” A. E. seems to recollect a child-experience:
And think how far apart are I and you,
Beloved, from those spirit children who
Felt but one single Being long ago,
Whispering in gentleness and leaning low
Out of its majesty, as child to child.
But in the prose “Retrospect” (in The Candle of Vision), he says, “I had not always this intimacy with Nature. I never felt a light in childhood which faded in manhood into the common light of day, nor do I believe that childhood is any nearer than age to this being.”
Note 80 in page 1242 “Sonnets,” I, 405.
Note 81 in page 1242 Sard Harker, 266.
Note 82 in page 1242 “The Everlasting Mercy,” Poems, I, 156.
Note 83 in page 1242 Multitude and Solitude, 330, 262.
Note 84 in page 1243 “Daffodil Fields,” Poems, I, 347.
Note 85 in page 1243 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 423. Cf. Yeats, “The Land of Heart's Desire,”
For life moves out of a red flare of dreams
Into a common light of common hours,
Until old age bring the red flare again;
A. E., “Recollection,” “It is we who have passed from ourselves, from beauty which is not dead.”
Note 86 in page 1243 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 406.
Note 87 in page 1243 Also confused by abstractions, Rupert Brooke paused before platonism. See, particularly, his “Mutability,” “Beauty and Beauty.”
Note 88 in page 1243 Ibid., p. 407. So, also, Stephens, “Thy Soul,”
There is no beauty, truth or wit,
But That alone! And thou art it!
A. E. is more subtle here than Masefield or Stephens, and more evasive:
But never visible to sense or thought,
The flower of Beauty blooms afar withdrawn;
If in our being then we know it not,
Or, knowing, it is gone.—“Winter.”
Note 89 in page 1244 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, ed. cit., p. 407.
Note 90 in page 1244 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 411.
Note 91 in page 1244 “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 470–1.
Note 92 in page 1244 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 410. Cf., “But perhaps we'll become part of cosmic positive and electric charges and meet again.” Eugene O'Neill, The Strange Interlude. O'Neill and Masefield have much in common, in experience, thinking, and feeling.
Note 93 in page 1245 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 406.
Note 94 in page 1245 “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 473.
Note 95 in page 1245 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 414.
Note 96 in page 1245 Ibid., 424.
Note 97 in page 1245 “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 477.
Note 98 in page 1246 “Sonnets,” I, 427.
Note 99 in page 1246 Ibid., 420. See also “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 475.
Note 100 in page 1246 The War and the Future.
Note 101 in page 1246 “Sonnets,” Poems, II, 289-90.
Note 102 in page 1247 “King Cole,” Poems, II, 250-1.
Note 1 in page 1247 “The Widow in the Bye Street,” Poems, I, 216.
Note 2 in page 1247 “The Seekers,” Poems, I, 281, 290. Cf. Yeats, “The Land of Heart's Desire,” “Where Beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.”
Note 3 in page 1247 “Enslaved,” Poems, II, 124.
Note 4 in page 1248 “Dream of Daniel,” Poems, II, 267. Edna St. Vincent Millay's “Euclid only looked on Beauty bare,” is like a severe, sane comment on this passage.
Note 5 in page 1248 Good Friday, Verse Plays, 28.
Note 6 in page 1248 The Trial of Jesus.
Note 7 in page 1248 Good Friday, Verse Plays, 33–34. This theology of abstractions was evolved by the Madman. But Masefield has faith in the essential sanity of kinds of madness. See his “The Madman's Song.” Curiously, Synge and Yeats resurrect the same old convention. In Synge's Deirdre, Ainnle believes “It's many times there's more sense in madmen than the wise.” In Yeats' Hour Glass, the Fool (who asks for pennies, like Masefield's Madman!) is wise in a curious way in view of his similarity to Masefield's Madman dreaming of beauty. Early in the play, the Wise Man evaluates him, “Though they call him Teigue the Fool, he is not more foolish than everybody used to be, with their dreams and preachings, and their three worlds.” Of course, not ironically, Masefield, Synge, and Yeats would say the matter-of-fact man was really the fool.
Note 8 in page 1249 “The Sheltered Garden.” See also “Cities,” “Orchard,” “The Gift,” “The Tribute,” by H. D.; “When You Walk,” by Stephens; “The City,” by A. E.
Note 9 in page 1250 Even Stephens (“The Breath of Life”), A. E. (“The Symbol Seduces”), Yeats (“The Land of Heart's Desire”) make more of a distinction between truth and beauty than Masefield. In Yeats, truth is almost as obscure a term as beauty. See “The Hour Glass,” “Estrangement,” etc. Only occasionally does one suspect that truth and beauty are coupled because truth rimes with youth, of which beauty is most often a property; or because beauty rimes with duty, between which and truth there are obligations. A. E. is not above this suspicion.
Note 10 in page 1250 “Why does the struggle to come at truth take away our pity, and the struggle to overcome our passions restore it again?” Yeats, “The Death of Synge and Other Pages from an Old Diary.” “Truth has put an end to hope,” A. E., “Sung on a By-way.”
Note 11 in page 1250 Ellis' fundamental idea of beauty expressed here is even better expressed in Masefield's “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 476:
Out of the special cell's most special sense
Came the suggestion when the light was sweet;
All skill, all beauty, all magnificence,
Are hints, so caught, man's glimpse of the complete.
Immediately, however, Masefield, the optimist, obscures the idea so that it is scarcely recognizable in the poem.
Note 12 in page 1252 DeRegnier writes, “For Poetry has neither yesterday nor tomorrow, nor today. It is the same everywhere. What it desires is to see itself beautiful, and is indifferent, if only its beauty be reflected, whether the glass is the natural spring of the forest or some mirror in which a subtle artifice shows unto it its divine countenance in the crystal limpidness of a fictive and imaginary water.” Stuart Merrill says, “A poet, in the etymological sense, remains a poet everywhere and it is his duty to bring back some loveliness upon the earth.” Mr. Lewisohn sums up deGourmont's critical belief: “A work of art is precious, not through the tribal or social elements in it, but through the personal, that art knows no ought-ness of convention or precedent and that the test of beauty, different in this respect from truth, is a pragmatic one.....” Actually, however, the symbolists and Masefield are not far removed; even the symbolists use the lazy symbol, Beauty. See deGourmont's “Exile of Beauty.”
Note 13 in page 1253 Personifying “love” in “The Hound of Heaven,” Francis Thompson indicates one way of avoiding the empty word. Cf. Masefield's “Hounds of Hell.” It is significant that in neither Shropshire Lad nor Last Poems does A. E. Houseman use the word “beauty,” although, occasionally, he speaks, abstractly, of truth, Death, Sin.
Note 14 in page 1253 Tristan and Isolt (New York, Macmillan, 1927), 142. Cf. “I ain't on oith and I ain't in heaven, get me? I'm in de middle, takin' de woist punches from bot' of 'em.” Eugene O'Neill, The Hairy Ape. It is curious that Masefield and O'Neill, both wanderers, men of action, should have this sense of not belonging.
Note 15 in page 1255 In imagery and general conclusion, Masefield's entire Works seems almost a gloss of Yeats' “Hour Glass.” Double Masefield's susceptibility to visions and substitute his life of action for Yeats' plan of self-discipline, his sea for Yeats' Ireland, and you have Yeats' brother, if not twin. But Yeats is more careful than Masefield in using the word “beauty.” He believes, apparently, that the best in man survives and, if it does, that best is probably beautiful. He personifies “beauty” only occasionally, as in “Rose of Battle.” A. E., like Masefield, personifies “beauty” frequently. But beauty means not nearly so much to him as to Masefield or, even, Yeats. Beauty may be defeated; A. E. distrusts it (see “Time,” “The Man to the Angel”). He avoids ambiguity of phrase and explains his unity with the eternity of nature by a system of images of which “The Mother” and “The Everlasting” are significant. In terms of beauty, there are suggestions in A. E. (as in James Stephens) not found in Masefield; of decadence rather than progress (“Dawn of Darkness,” “The Earth,” “Children of Lir,” “Natural Magic”; yet see “The Heroes”); of a dual birth “The Twins”; Stephens, “In Waste Places”); of the necessity of a Coleridgean joy (“Waiting”; Stephens, “Dance”), of pain (“Apocalyptic”), of knowing virtue by its opposite (“Kinship”; Stephens, “The Twins”).
Note 16 in page 1255 “Forget,” Poems, II, 167. Cf. Yeats, “He remembers Forgotten Beauty.”
Note 17 in page 1255 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 405.
Note 18 in page 1255 “Lollingdon Downs,” Poems, I, 477.
Note 19 in page 1255 “Sonnets,” Poems, I, 432.
Note 20 in page 1256 “Strength and Weakness of Masefield,” Fortn., CXX (1923), 345-52.
Note 21 in page 1256 T. S. Eliot, “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama,” Sacred Wood.
Note 22 in page 1256 “Daffodil Fields.”
Note 23 in page 1256 On Pasteur's tomb.