Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/225

THE YELLOW PATCH 199 optical greed for a bead-like lucidity and brightness which filled his early books with doubloons, gems, moidores. It is Masefield's way of realizing the world, of expressing it to himself. He has to clutch and grip it to make sure of it ; he has to resolve life into little pellets and reduce ideas to tense images. The sense of safety these things yield him is the secret of the fascination which all small pellucid things have had for his art ; bubbles, eddies, notes of music, script, maps, the ticking of a clock, mouse-scamperings. It is this that dots so many of his pages with a kind of dogma. "Vitality is shown by capacity for thought." "Science is the art of the twentieth cen- tury." " Any resolute endurance of life is comforting to the perplexed." They are to be thought of more as diagrams than epigrams. It is his love of particu- larity that makes him generalize. It is the something neatly gnomish in the result that makes him gnomic. Sentences like these are probably due to a desperate clutch, a kind of nervousness, far more than any desire to be oracular. For it is perfectly possible that this queer keenness of apprehension is due to a kind of apprehensiveness. That sailor's doting love of solid detail, from which this method was derived, is itself a symptom of a state of dispossession, and it is possible that these sentences owe their determined definition to a pressure made convulsive by uncertainty. But, with the awful inhumanity of reading, we do not let that depress us. For if this is the case, then fear has brought us something that courage lacked the energy to conquer. These short sentences may be written gaspingly, but they reach us like commands. They rap out authoritatively, they kindle, reassure. They are sentences in the court-room sense : they deliver judgment and pass on ; and the quick pulse seems the panting beat of splendid swiftness.