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, the vapourings. Sane minds, like healthy bodies, crave strong meats, and the strong meats of literature are usually the worst cooked. I am inclined to think that the taste of the poor, the uneducated, is on the right lines, though undeveloped, whilst the taste of the educated consists of beautifully developed wrongness, an exquisite secession from reality. As Nietzsche pointed out, degenerates love narcotics; something to make them forget life, not face it. Their meats must be strange and peptonized. Therefore they hate, they are afraid of, the greatest things in life--the commonplace. Much culture has debilitated them. Rank life would kill them--or save them.