As to the moods thus stimulated, the one most frequently provoked would seem to be that of sadness. Or would it be truer to say that those whose thoughts are tinged with melancholy, or weighted with sorrow, find in the restless, endless tossing and breaking of the waves their fittest companions?
How sad this passage from the French poet-philosopher, Guyot. "I remember that once, sitting on the beach, I watched the serried waves rolling towards me. They came without interruption from the expanse of the sea, roaring and white. Beyond the one dying at my feet I noticed another; and farther behind that one, another; and farther still another and another—a multitude. At last, as far as I could see, the whole horizon seemed to rise and roll on towards me. There was a reservoir of infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide seemed to me the image of the whole of nature assailing humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in, to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts. Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. That is because he does not look far enough ahead, and because he does not notice far out on the horizon the great waves which, sooner or later, must destroy his work and carry himself away."
Similar is the train of thought which finds poetical expression in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
. . .
Sophocles heard it long ago,
Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought;
Hearing it by this distant northern sea."
And the thought! "The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith, retreating down the "naked shingles of the world!"
But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence. Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal!
"Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing,
Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea
Laughing in waves innumerable!"
To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring, indomitable energy—the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as varied as the human experiences to which they are akin.
Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the phenomena of the wave—the group which rouse and nurture the aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus and the Teutons, the goddesses of beauty were wave-born. When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air.
The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides—each and all giving substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of the physical beauty of the ocean.