e'll roar like true British heroes,
We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas,
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.

[Sidenote: _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.

Cultured people talk about the artistic tastes of the poor, would have
them read--well, they don't quite know what--something 'good,'
something namely that appeals to the cultured. It has always been my
experience in much lending of books, that the poor will read the
literature of life's fundamental daily realities quickly enough, once
they know of its existence. What they will not read, what in the
struggle for existence they cannot waste time over, is the literature
of the _etceteras_ of life, the decorations, th