Old magical writers speak of the elemental affinity which is the veiled
door in each of us. Find that door, and you will be on the secret road
to the soul, they say in effect. Some are children of fire, and some
of air, some are of earth, and some of water. They even resolve mortal
strength and weakness, our virtue and our evil, into the movement of
these elements. This virtue, it is of fire: this quality, it is of air:
this frailty, it is of water. Howsoever this may be, some of us are
assuredly of that ancient clan in whose blood, as an old legend has
it, is the water of the sea. Many legends, many poems, many sayings
tell of the Chloinn-na-Mhara, the children of the sea. I have heard
them from fishermen, from inland-shepherds, from moorlanders in inland
solitudes where the only visitors from the mysterious far-off deep
are the wandering sea-mews or the cloud that has climbed out of the
south. Some tell of the terror of the sea, some of its mysteriousness,
some of the evil and of the evil things that belong to it and are in
it, some of its beauty, some of its fascination (as the Greeks of
old-time told of the sirens, who were the voices and fatal music and
the strange and perilous loveliness of alien waters), some of the
subtle and secret spell deep-buried in the hearts of certain men and
women, the Chloinn-na-Mhara, a spell that will brood there, and give no
peace, but will compel the spirit to the loneliness of the wind, and
the outward life to the wayward turbulence of the wave. More than two
thousand years ago the great Pindar had these in mind when he wrote of
that strange tribe among men ‘who scorn the things of home, and gaze
on things that are afar off, and chase a cheating prey with hopes that
shall never be fulfilled.’
Elsewhere I have written much of this sea-spell, of the _Brònavara_
(to Anglicise an island word), or Sorrow of the Sea, and do not wish
to write here of that strange passion or sinister affinity: but of
that other and happier Spell of the Sea which so many of us feel,
with pleasure always, with delight often, at times with exultation,
as though in our very heart were the sharp briny splash of the blue
wave tossing its white crest, or of the green billow falling like
a tower of jade in a seething flood. But, first, I recall that old
legend to which I have alluded. Perhaps some folklorist may recognise
it as gathered out of the drift common to many shores, may trace it
even to those Asian inlands where so many of our most ancient tales
mysteriously arose; but I have nowhere met with it in print, nor seen
nor heard allusion to it, other than in a crude fashioning on the lips
of simple Gaelic folk, nor even there for years upon years. There were
once four cities (the Western Gael will generally call them Gorias and
Falias, Finias and Murias), the greatest and most beautiful of the
cities of those ancient tribes of beauty, the offspring of angels and
the daughters of earth. The fair women were beautiful, but lived like
flowers, and like flowers faded and were no more, for they were filled
with happiness, as cups of ivory filled with sunlit dancing wine, but
were soulless. Eve, that sorrowful loveliness, was not yet born. Adam
was not yet lifted out of the dust of Eden. Finias was the gate of Eden
to the South, Murias to the West: in the North, Falias was crowned
by a great star: in the East, Gorias, the city of gems, flashed like
sunrise. There the deathless clan of the sky loved the children of
Lilith. On the day when Adam uttered the sacred name and became king
of the world, a great sighing was heard in Gorias in the East and in
Finias in the South, in Murias in the West and in Falias in the North:
and when morn was come the women were no more awakened by the stirring
of wings and the sunrise-flight of their angelic lovers. They came no
more. And when Eve awoke by the side of Adam, and he looked on her,
and saw the immortal mystery in the eyes of this mortal loveliness,
lamentations and farewells and voices of twilight were heard in Murias
by the margin of the sea and in Gorias high-set among her peaks; in the
secret gardens of Falias, and where the moonlight hung like a spear
above the towers of Finias upon the great plain. The children of Lilith
were gone away upon the wind, as lifted dust, as dew, as shadow, as the
unreturning leaf. Adam rose, and bade Eve go to the four solitudes,
and bring back the four ancient secrets of the world. So Eve went to
Gorias, and found nothing there but a flame of fire. She lifted it and
hid it in her heart. At noon she came to Finias, and found nothing
there but a spear of white light. She took it and hid it in her mind.
At dusk she came to Falias, and found nothing there but a star in the
darkness. She hid the darkness, and the star within the darkness, in
her womb. At moonrise she came to Murias, by the shores of the ocean.
There she saw nothing but a wandering light. So she stooped, and lifted
a wave of the sea and hid it in her blood. And when Eve was come again
to Adam, she gave him the flame she had found in Gorias, and the spear
of light she had found in Finias. ‘In Falias,’ she said, ‘I found that
which I cannot give, but the darkness I have hidden shall be your
darkness, and the star shall be your star.’ ‘Tell me what you found
in Murias by the sea?’ asked Adam. ‘Nothing,’ answered Eve. But Adam
knew that she lied. ‘I saw a wandering light,’ she said. He sighed,
and believed. But Eve kept the wave of the sea hidden in her blood. So
has it been that a multitude of women have been homeless as the wave,
and their heritage salt as the sea: and that some among their sons
and daughters have been possessed by that vain cold fire, and that
inappeasable trouble, and the restlessness of water. So it is that to
the end of time some shall have the salt sea in the blood, and the
troubled wave in the heart, and be homeless.
But thoughts like these, legends like these, are for the twilight
hour, or for the silent people who live in isles and remote places.
For most of us, for those of us who do not dwell by lonely shores and
seldom behold the sea but in the quiet seasons, it is either a delight
or an oppression. Some can no more love it, or can have any well-being
or composure near it, than others can be well or content where vast
moors reach from skyline to skyline, or amid the green solemnities of
forests, or where stillness inhabits the hollows of hills. But for
those who do love it, what a joy it is! _The Sea_ ... the very words
have magic. It is like the sound of a horn in woods, like the sound of
a bugle in the dusk, like the cry of wind leaping the long bastions of
silence. To many of us there is no call like it, no other such clarion
of gladness.
But when one speaks of the sea it is as though one should speak of
summer or winter, of spring or autumn. It has many aspects: it is not
here what it is yonder, yonder it is not what it is afar off: here,
even, it is not in August what it is when the March winds, those
steel-blue coursers, are unleashed; the grey-green calms of January
differ from the purple-grey calms of September, and November leaning
in mist across the dusk of wavering horizons is other than azure-robed
and cirrus-crowned May moving joyously across a glorious tossing
wilderness of blue and white. The blue sea frothed with wind has ever
been a salutation of joy. Æschylos sounded the note of rapture which
has since echoed through poetry and romance: that ‘multitudinous
laughter’ struck a vibration which time has never dulled nor lessened.
It has been an exultation above all in the literatures of the north.
Scandinavian poetry is full of the salt brine; there is not a
viking-saga that is not wet with the spray of surging seas. Through all
the primitive tales and songs of the Gael one feels the intoxication of
the blue wine of the running wave. In the Icelandic sagas it is like a
clashing of shields. It calls through the Ossianic chants like a tide.
Every Gaelic song of exile has the sound of it, as in the convolutions
of a shell. The first Gaelic poet rejoiced at the call of the sea, and
bowed before the chanting of a divine voice. In his madness, Cuchulain
fought with the racing billows on the Irish Coast, striving with them
as joy-intoxicated foes, laughing against their laughter: to the dark
waves of Coruisk, in the Isle of Skye, he rushed with a drawn sword,
calling to these wise warriors of the sea to advance in their proud
hosts that he might slay them. Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunhild and Olaf,
Torquil and Swaran and Haco, do they not sound like the names of
waves? How good that old-world rejoicing in the great green wilderness
of waters, in the foam-swept blue meads, in the cry of the wind and
the chant of the billows and the sharp sting of flying scud? It is of
to-day also. A multitude of us rejoice as those of old rejoiced, though
we have changed in so much with all the incalculable change of the
years. To-day as then the poets of the isles ... the poet in the heart
of each of us who loves the glory and beauty and in any degree feels
the strong spell of the sea ... answer to that clarion-music: as in
this _Evoë!_ by one of the latest among them:--
“_Oceanward, the sea-horses sweep magnificently, champing and whirling
white foam about their green flanks, and tossing on high their manes
of sunlit rainbow-gold, dazzling white and multitudinous far as sight
can reach._
“_O, champing horses of my soul, toss, toss on high your sunlit manes,
your manes of rainbow-gold, dazzling-white and multitudinous, for I
too rejoice, rejoice!_”
And who of us will forget that great English poet of to-day, that
supreme singer of--
“_Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea,_”
who has written so often and so magically of the spell of the sea and
of the elation of those who commit themselves to the sway and rhythm of
its moving waters:--
“The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,
Pale and sweet as a dream’s delight,
As a dream’s where darkness and light seem dimmer,
Touched by dawn or subdued by night.
The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad,
Swings the rollers to westward, clad
With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer,
Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.
“Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder,
Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud,
Fill the world of the skies whereunder
Heaves and quivers and pants aloud
All the world of the waters, hoary
Now, but clothed with its own live glory,
That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder
With light more living and word more proud.
* * * * *
“A dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer
At once and brighter than dreams that flee,
The moment’s joy of the seaward swimmer
Abides, remembered as truth may be.
Not all the joy and not all the glory
Must fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary;
For there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer,
And here to south of them swells the sea.”
What swimmer too, who loves this poet, but will recall the marvellous
sea-shine line in ‘Thalassius’:
“Dense water-walls and clear dusk waterways ...
The deep divine dark dayshine of the sea----”
It is this exquisite miracle of transparency which gives the last
secret of beauty to water. All else that we look upon is opaque: the
mountain in its sundown purple or noon-azure, the meadows and fields,
the gathered greenness of woods, the loveliness of massed flowers,
the myriad wonder of the universal grass, even the clouds that trail
their shadows upon the hills or soar so high into frozen deeps of
azure that they pass shadowless like phantoms or the creatures of
dreams--the beauty of all these is opaque. But the beauty of water is
that it is transparent. Think if the grass, if the leaves of the tree,
if the rose and the iris and the pale horns of the honeysuckle, if the
great mountains built of grey steeps of granite and massed purple of
shadow were thus luminous, thus transparent! Think if they, too, as
the sea, could reflect the passage of saffron-sailed and rose-flusht
argosies of cloud, or mirror as in the calms of ocean the multitudinous
undulation of the blue sky! This divine translucency is but a part of
the Sea-Spell, which holds us from childhood to old age in wonder and
delight, but that part is its secret joy, its incommunicable charm.