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.
What I have above written of the “Songs of the Sea” is equally true of
the other ballads in this volume. They also form a series of eccentric
pictures of American life after the war, brought together, not like
chance pictures in a scrap-book, but as I before said, to carry out one
idea in reference to a special subject. In this spirit and to this end
were they written, from current prose tales. Nor have I ever forgotten
that there is in them for the future a kind of folk-lore which is never
so apparent to those who live in it as to those who inherit it. When I
was a small boy, there was in my aunt’s kitchen in Milford,
Massachusetts, a cheese-knife, which had no special interest to anybody
save to me, because it had been the very sword carried by General Eaton
in his famous march over the Desert to attack Algiers. Nowadays it would
be greatly prized. So it is sometimes worth while to think of these
things which we now possess, and how rapidly they are hastening to
become curiosities—I myself having lived to see every object familiar
to me in youth become bric-à-brac. In the last age, everything not in
the newest fashion was despised—in this there is a highly-cultured
class just beginning to show itself beyond the Realists and disciples of
Mental-analytical Chemistry, who look alternately at the Past and
Future,
Even as Janus on the Capitol
Saw all that was or ever yet would be.
There may be a few among the jealous guardians or spokes around the Hub
who may demand by what right I invade the sacred precincts of Boston,
and sing about its past. Well, my boyhood was half passed in Boston or
near it; there the romance of sailor life, which was marvellous in those
times, imbued me, and then and there in common with my mates I devoured
the _Mariners’ Chronicle_, _Shipwrecks and Disasters of the Sea_, _Lives
of the Buccaneers_, and listened with avidity to the tales of those who
had been on the briny deep. Nearly all my first-cousins had at one time
or other run away and gone to sea or taken long voyages. Among the
former were Benjamin Stimson, the “S” of _Two Years Before the Mast_;
Charles Leland, who afterwards grew like Samuel Jackson to the height of
seven feet; and Samuel Godfrey. From these and many more I learned an
incredible number of sea stories and songs, none of which I ever forgot,
being to an extraordinary degree accustomed to keep repeating to myself
these “stranger legends of the olden time.” Hence it comes that I have
in my mind such vivid memories of the old North End of Boston.
I would say in conclusion what will be apparent enough to many, that
these Ballads make no great pretence to be poetry. They consist of
incidents or small “motives” cast into rhyme or measure, as the easiest
method of giving them a certain value, just as a tune brings out a song.
Most rhymers are criticised more or less severely for pretending to be
poets; all that I can claim for this volume is, that it is a kind of
collection of curiosities which, as they have seemed to me to be worth
remembering, will, I trust, be regarded by others as worth reading.
CHARLES GODFREY LELAND.
FLORENCE, 1894.