’His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
  He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
  Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
  Where scent would hang like breath on glass). 
  He loved the English country-side;
  The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
  The lichen on the apple-trees,
  The poultry ranging on the lees,
  The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
  His wife’s green grave at Mitcheldover,
  Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw. 
  Under his hide his heart was raw
  With joy and pity of these things...’

That ‘raw heart’ marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia.  Apart from the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the question of Mr Masefield’s style in general.

As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already been discussing Mr Masefield’s style under a specific aspect.  But the particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield’s general condition.  Overstrain is permanent with him.  If we do not find it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic effort.  He is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows he can never wholly possess.

  ’From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
  There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
  All wet red clay, where a horse’s foot
  Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root. 
  The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
  Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
  The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
  He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw. 
  Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
  Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
  With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
  And a man saying “Zook,” and the red earth bleeding.’

The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken.  It comes, we believe, from a consciousness of anaemia, a frenetic reaction towards what used, some years ago, to be called ‘blood and guts.’

And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our sympathy with him.  His work, for all its surface robustness and right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for this ‘epic of fox-hunting’ a place in the library of every country house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time.  Its colour is hectic; its tempo feverish.  He has sought the healing virtue where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose