’Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
  A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
  Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
  And bright with joy at riding there. 
  She was as good as blowing air,
  But shy and difficult to know. 
  The kittens in the barley-mow,
  The setter’s toothless puppies sprawling,
  The blackbird in the apple calling,
  All knew her spirit more than we. 
  So delicate these maidens be
  In loving lovely helpless things.’

And here is the Prioress:—­

  ’But for to speken of hir conscience,
  She was so charitable and so pitous,
  She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
  Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde. 
  Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
  With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
  But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
  Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte: 
  And all was conscience and tendere herte.’ 
  Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
  His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
  Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
  But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.’

There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which Mr Masefield’s demonstration and underlining seem almost malsain.  How far outside the true picture now appears that ’blackbird in the apple calling,’ and how tainted by the desperate bergerie of the Georgian era!

It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield’s prologue beside Chaucer’s.  But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is at bottom just.  Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that belong to one:  but he has perdurable qualities.  He is at home with his speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems nervous and uncertain about both.  He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading every rift with ore.  The question is whether such a man can hope to express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.

Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate impulse is a nostalgie de la boue that betrays itself in line after line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal?  Mr Masefield, in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there otherwise.  For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.  Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:—­