TRAMORE
"If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in
early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to
that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if
you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the
fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once
breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean,
and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers....
When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars
dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning
hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of
the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long
intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some
memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand
and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'?
"So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself
revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles
away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has
the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and
shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant
of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new,
is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace
you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails
are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the
gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky
and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly
ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a
delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life
restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder
of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your
eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the
awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its
own thick breath.'"
Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end
of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the
picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite
resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light
wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule
supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves
come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break
with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay
presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever
on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.
There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea
listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of
sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent
of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness,
something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse,
raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos,
sometimes of inspiration.
Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
unconsciously, memories of these childish days.
At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black
beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable
in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly
there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a
coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of
which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....
Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had
listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he
remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world,
the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion
was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries,
the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.
The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a
fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best.
Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the
_Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls
the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the
marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain
has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of
last century.
[3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was
published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic
production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that
constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then
memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with
sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Cheniere, conquering her terror of
the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters
curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the
dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_
learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which,
the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds,
darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in
level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own
childish existence at Tramore.
For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no
obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb
revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no
cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in
gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter
in the trees without.
When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long
days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his
especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest
for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every
Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian
warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are
to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.
Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he
was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many
additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often
too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered
for his habit of "drawing the long bow."
Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly
during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was
not distinguished by accuracy of statement.
The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those
surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford
fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from
wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world.
While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was
building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light
of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which
none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul
entrenched itself.
Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears
filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he
saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens
and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and
divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of
beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it,
recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and
existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing
of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from
countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from
the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."
It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in
the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as
having been found amongst his papers after his death.
His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with
a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure
after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediaeval creed
seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.
The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow;
the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books
disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places,
but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was
placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many
figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had
been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross
strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of
beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational
value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried
persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By
this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....
After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so
deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him
a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.
A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he
had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the
"Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of
her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and
difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city
of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.