Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

CHAPTER III

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.