He lived at a
tension too great to be maintained without incessant stimulus. It was
an existence like that of the heroes of Valhalla, who recruited at
night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing
bumpers of inexhaustible mead. In these essays we have the Berserker
in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and
there a glint, as of sun-ray on harness, to remind us of the sinking
in the glory and pride of his strength.
The essays abound with traces of that consummate mastery of English
which distinguished all his writings. He, better than any man of our
time, could use such subtle magic of woven words as to make the green
water of the ocean surge and boil into white foam on the printed page.
As befitted a dweller on the north-east coast, he passionately loved
the sea. The sea and the sky are the two exits by which dwellers in
the slums of Deptford and in North Shields can escape from the inferno
of life. He was a close observer of nature and of men. In his pictures
of life in the depths he was a grim and uncompromising realist, who,
however, was kept from pessimism by his faith in good women and his
knowledge of worse men in the past than even "the Squire" and the
valet-keeping prize-fighters of our time.
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