282 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



We have all known Dr. MacFie as a brilliant poet, and this work is full of 

 good things. The construction is simple ; but the isolated passages are 

 often perfect of their kind, the descriptions brief but complete, and the 

 wording various and euphonic. The author sees the immense effect of war 

 in evolution : 



Bodies and souls from a furnace came, and lo in a furnace still 

 War is moulding the human heart, smelting the human will. 



and 



These are the throes 



That make the rose. 



These are the precious pangs of birth. 



These are the woes 



Whence ever grows 



The myriad Beauty of the Earth. 



The poem is written mostly in (rhymed) vers libre — which Swinburne rightly 

 detested. Lines of all possible lengths, sometimes truncated even to a single 

 syllable, are not consistent with any real rhythm, and jog and jar the reader 

 like a jazz band. The line in verse is equivalent to the bar in music ; and 

 without rhythm we simply return to prose — 



Spawn 



Of a monstrous dawn 



suits the modem drawing-room elocutionist only ; and the rhymes do but 

 make the jogging more painful. I should have preferred, in a poem of 

 this serious nature, more august measures. In all these books, moreover — 

 not so much by defect of the authors as of the fashion of the day — there 

 is very little invention ; which to me is the chief thing lacking in modem 

 English poetry. 



This is not a fault, however, in Mr. Masefield's Reynard the Fox (Heine- 

 mann). The title is inadequate ; for the book may almost be called the 

 characteristic English epic — not of war but of the fox-hunt — bound to re- 

 main as a picture of our life of to-day. In the beginning it contains much 

 of Chaucer ; in the course of it, most of the sporting novelists ; and in the 

 end, pure Masefield. We commence with the Meet at the Cock and Pie — 

 a series of wonderful pictures, with vignettes of all the sportsmen of the 

 countryside, faces, figures, dress, characters, histories, touched one after the 

 other with consummate pencil — like the gathering of Xerxes' armies in 

 Herodotus ; but this is England, and the poet has pictured English men 

 and women at their best as perhaps they have never been quite drawn before 

 in so few words. Then he introduces the hero in Hilcote Copse ; then the 

 find, and then the run. The reader runs with the fox and becomes that 

 animal himself ! The excitement, the fear, " the red heart of the beast," 

 the cunning, the desperation, the exhaustion, and finally the hope of earth, 

 and then — the earth is stopped ! But the hero is not done yet ; he makes 

 for another earth ; it is stopped again ! What happens in the end ? — well, 

 the reader must find out. 



The poem is written throughout in brisk four-foot couplets, often split 

 between paragraphs in order to provide continuity — which I see a critic, 

 who has not studied technique, condemns. The design is perfect ; and 

 every episode is full of observation, knowledge, humour, and invention. The 

 Master of one of our Hunts told me that he could not detect a flaw in the 

 book except some detail regarding grooming — ^which I have forgotten. To 

 a scientific man the description of the psychology of the fox is wonderful 

 and obviously true. Yet animals have no souls ! 



