Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England.
From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues....
How we did rant and roar the wonderful up-Channel verse, with its clever use of the high-sounding promontories of the south!
The first land we made, it was called the Deadman,
Next Ram Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight,
We passed up by Beachy, by Parley and Dungeness,
And hove our ship to off the South Foreland light....
Our glasses were empty. We drove out the cat, gutted some fish, extinguished the lamp, and came upstairs to the tune, repeated, of "Rolling Home." All the tunes are ringing in my head.
ART THAT IS LIVED
There is something about this singing of sea-songs by a seafarer which makes them grip one extraordinarily. They are far from perfect in execution, they are not always quite in tune, especially on Tony's high notes, yet, I am certain, they are as artistic in the best sense as any of the fine music I have heard. Tony sings with imagination: he sees, lives what he is singing. Between this sort of song and most, there is much the same difference as between going abroad, and reading a book of travels; or between singing folk-songs with the folk and twittering bowdlerised versions in a drawing-room. However imperfect technically, Tony's songs are an expression of the life he lives, rather than an excursion into the realms of art—into the expression of other kinds of life—with temporarily stimulated and projected imagination. His art is perpetual creation, not repetition of a thing created once and for all. The art that is lived, howsoever imperfect, has an advantage over the most finished art that is merely repeated. Next after the music of, as one might say, superhuman creative force—like Bach's and Beethoven's—comes this kind, of Tony's.