“’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled
By the softest, gentlest breeze,
When a ship set sail with her cargo laden
For a land beyond the seas.
Did she never come back? No, she never came back,
And her fate is yet unlearned.
Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting
Yet the ship she never returned.”
NOTE V
I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil, working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is, first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written—and for every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally that will never be printed—has also read much and often with great joy.