Nothing will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or
conscientious endeavour. And the sailing of any vessel afloat is
an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on its way to
the overshadowed Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a modern
steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its
responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature,
which, after all, is an indispensable condition to the building up
of an art. It is less personal and a more exact calling; less
arduous, but also less gratifying in the lack of close communion
between the artist and the medium of his art. It is, in short,
less a matter of love. Its effects are measured exactly in time
and space as no effect of an art can be. It is an occupation which
a man not desperately subject to sea-sickness can be imagined to
follow with content, without enthusiasm, with industry, without
affection. Punctuality is its watchword. The incertitude which
attends closely every artistic endeavour is absent from its
regulated enterprise. It has no great moments of self-confidence,
or moments not less great of doubt and heart-searching. It is an
industry which, like other industries, has its romance, its honour
and its rewards, its bitter anxieties and its hours of ease. But
such sea-going has not the artistic quality of a single-handed
struggle with something much greater than yourself; it is not the
laborious absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate result
remains on the knees of the gods. It is not an individual,
temperamental achievement, but simply the skilled use of a captured
force, merely another step forward upon the way of universal
conquest.