SNAP SHOTS
Middleton, George
Snap Shots By GEORGE MIDDLETON JOHN MASEFIELD has for some years been one of the most interesting of the younger English writers. A cosmopolitan by inclination, his travels and diverse...
...She is sustained through all her struggles by the hope of the help he will give her when he grows up...
...The widow makes shrouds and with all her earnings keeps her little son alive and gives him an education...
...Masefield brings out so tragically is the relative claims of motherhood and passion, showing how in the scheme of life the stranger may with a look sweep aside the service of years...
...At first, on coming into maturity, he is all that she could ask...
...A cosmopolitan by inclination, his travels and diverse occupations have brought him into intimate contact with all sorts and conditions of men...
...But this poem appears so logical in its human treatment of this phenomenon that perhaps our surmise is not incorrect...
...It is with considerable expectation that the new volume is approached and it lives up to its hopes...
...Through nature and love this newer sense of Kane's relationship with the spirit comes, and if Mr...
...In fact, it is one of the happiest blends of poet and dramatist that the contemporary stage possesses...
...The boy gives the first flush of his idealizing manhood, and in the reaction that comes from his discovery of her perfidy kills the other man...
...The Widow in the Bye Street is a relentless tragedy tinged with fate and the pathos of human relationship...
...The verse itself is colloquial to a degree and makes its appeal by reason of its versimilitude...
...It is not long before he learns his lesson of sex and, as is so frequently the case in our disjointed world of men and women, he learns it from a parasite of passion, who is merely using him as pawn to win back an old admirer...
...it is the poet finding his vocabulary in the gutters and not wiping it off...
...Not merely as a novelist has he utilized his pen but as poet and dramatist...
...The story itself is the mental narrative, told in the first person, of Saul Kane's spiritual rebirth...
...but Mr...
...It is not long ago, that his Tragedy of Nan thrilled a jaded English public—so brilliant was its insight and so powerful was its pathos...
...The poem contains one phillipic against the established order of formalized religion which is a little classic of bitterness...
...but her life is haunted by the fear that some woman may take him from her...
...But it establishes the author as one of the most interesting men now writing and anything may be expected from one with his gifted pen and human understanding...
...Perhaps this will be the more popular of the two poems because of its dramatic plot...
...It is this note that gives a universal quality to a poem otherwise grim, sordid and at times a trifle melodramatic...
...He has the courage of his good Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for seldom does one find such frank and vigorous expression...
...Kane goes through many experiences and does not hesitate to tell us how far he has fallen in the well of human uselessness, but depths are necessary in art as well as in life to make the proper rebound...
...Not only content to picture these contacts he has the vision to interpret them...
...and so we find a deep appeal for the understanding of many of the wild ones of life, as well as the social outcasts and under dogs who grovel so frequently because they do not know their own strength...
...Masefield is too true an observer of the emotion itself not to bring about a revelation of the real spirit which is the basis of a religious individual...
...Readers of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience will recall with what detail that celebrated psychologist analyzed spiritual and emotional "uprush" from the subconscious self which makes the basis of so much of the so-called conversions...
...The boy is hung for his crime and the mother goes on making shrouds...
...The Everlasting Mercy (MacMillan), which is the first and title poem, is a pitiless contrast of the form and substance of religion...
...What Mr...
...Desultory verse has from time to time graced the magazines, also an eloquent plea for woman suffrage, and now a new volume containing two long poems has appeared...
...Masefield has occasionally appeared to touch a reminiscent chord with George Meredith, it is merely an example of his good taste and the sameness of big themes...
...Certainly, one feels the author's dramatic capacity here though he has chosen a verse form to outline the pictures of this poignant series of episodes...
...We suspect a reading of this by Mr...
...Masefield, though, of course, poets have a way of anticipating the scientist and of verifying his deductions in advance...
Vol. 4 • August 1912 • No. 31
