LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1895
PREFACE
Among the songs in this collection are the Brand New Ballads already known more or less to the public, several of them having an American newspaper circulation, while a few are given at times in public readings; since I have learned, for example, that “In Nevada” was one of the stock-pieces of Mr. Clifford Harrison. They now reappear amended and with additions.
In the “Songs of the Sea” the reader will not fail to observe that three or four, such as the “Mermaid” and “Time for Us to Go,” are not by me at all. They are sailors’ songs of the olden time, introduced as suggestions for other lyrics, as I have indeed declared in the text, and also to aid in the main purpose or idea which inspires the whole collection—they being in this respect like stones from more ancient edifices built into new houses, as was the wont of men in the middle age.
This main purpose was to set forth with scrupulous care, as of a statue photographed from many sides, the mariner of the sailing—not steaming—ship, who is now rapidly passing away, although some tens of thousands of the species are still to be found in the remoter routes of travel. This kind of man should be interesting, because he is almost the only one who is drawn into his calling by a desire to rove about the world and lead an adventurous, reckless, manly life. Into this life entered, I may say, as “vitalising elements,” “shipwrecks and disasters of the sea,” the extremes of discipline and dissipation, as well as those of cynical scepticism and superstition, the seeing, like Ulysses, cities and men, and the consciousness, so clear to undeveloped minds and smaller natures, of belonging to a “peculiar” class. This I have borne in mind most earnestly, and those who perceive it will also find that in this spirit the following notes and sketches in song illustrate, I trust accurately, a consistent ideal text, and that all the songs unite to form a single poem.
As for the many scraps, “chanties,” choruses, sayings, similes, and bits of sea-lore worked up into the lyrics here and there, I make no attempt whatever to indicate what is borrowed; all that I can say of it is, that if the mere gathering the stones is all the merit of making a mosaic picture (as many seem to think), then I could claim little merit for originality. But as this is not a folk-lore book, in which a writer is held sternly accountable “to give authority for every word,” and as a mass of notes would have simply defeated the whole aim of the book, I have preferred making myself amenable to the charge of plagiarism to boring my reader—even as an Italian devoted servant of whom I once heard, preferred to be carried off by the police, on the charge of stealing oranges, rather than awaken and disturb his master who could have explained the matter. I can, however, truly say that as regards ideas, incidents, tales, turns of speech and idioms, current sayings, and so on, from poetry down to vulgarity, I have literally taken so much from sailors themselves that the work, if analysed, would be a curiosity of collocation, like the poems made up entirely of proverbs, or the Sermon of Texts.
Here I would mention my obligation to more than one ancient mariner, and specially to my old friend, Captain Stead, now so long a dweller at the Langham Hotel, for advising about, and revising, these ballads. These friends having carefully studied the work and corrected or modelled its every sentence into ship-shape, have been kind enough to assure me that it would hold its own in the forecastle, as a real thing, and not an imitation; which saying uttered in sooth and truth especially by a friend of forty years’ experience in sailing-vessels, mostly “before the war,” was to me greatly encouraging.