by Tim Robinson
I was in Arran at a time when great distress yet prevailed after the famine of 1885—a small, a scandalously small sum had been given by Government for relief works, and a little harbour was to be made. The sum allowed of the employment of but one out of each family proved to be in dire necessity, that one to receive one shilling a day—six shillings a week for perhaps ten in family. I saw the poor men besieging the priest, the gentleman in charge of the works—even begging us to intercede for them for work…. It was no fit labour for women, yet one fine young girl came weeping and praying so earnestly that it was impossible to refuse her, and she joyfully toiled as hard as anyone, carrying huge stones and doing all required of a strong man, that she might get that pittance with which to support her little orphan brothers and sisters—for father and mother were dead.
What must have appeared to the islanders as the tourists’ curious fetishism about certain minor aspects of Aran life was already proving a marginal economic resource:
Sitting on the edge of the pier and darting here and there amongst the men were a number of boys carrying for sale pampootys and large bunches of the beautiful maiden-hair fern which grows in the chinks of the rocks … and they patiently waited that I might examine the relative merits of brown or white pampootys, before finally deciding on one all brown and one sweetly mottled.
The “pampooty,” a moccasin-like shoe made of a single strip of untanned cowhide, hairy side out, with a few stitches at heel and toe and shaped to the foot by draw-strings above, was simply the bróg úrleathair, raw leather shoe, to the islanders; the more exotic word, which has been speculatively derived from words for “slipper” in a wide variety of languages and is seemingly a seventeenth-century introduction, has always appealed more to the tourist. Mary Banim repeats what was to become a standard trope of Aran literature, that the light and graceful carriage of the islanders is due to this footwear. Synge was later to make the pampooty, as contrasted with “the heavy boot of Europe,” the very emblem of the Araners’ closeness to nature.
In that same period certain young men who would become internationally renowned Celticists and linguists visited Aran. The first of them, Heinrich Zimmer, saw the island during the Land War in 1880, and was moved to address the islanders at a Land League meeting in Cill Rónáin, urging them to stand together and protect their land. I have mentioned his unravelling of the genealogy of St. Enda, which forms an aside to an extraordinarily dense study of The Voyage of St. Brendan. He later became professor of Celtic philology at Berlin (and the father of another Heinrich Zimmer, the great Indianologist). Kuno Meyer, who was to found the School of Irish Studies in Dublin in 1903 and later to succeed Zimmer at Berlin, first visited the islands in 1889 during his lectureship in Celtic and German at Liverpool University. Both the Copenhagen linguist Holger Pedersen and his disciple Franz Nikolaus Finck came; the latter’s two-volume work Die araner Mundart of 1899 being the first detailed study of an Irish dialect. The American Jeremiah Curtin collected material in Aran for his Myths and Folklore of Ireland, published in 1890. Irish-language enthusiasts of the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, who came to the islands as to a shrine of the reviving spirit of the nation, include Eoin MacNeill, Eugene O’Growney, Dr. O’Hickey, Una Ní Fhaircheallaigh, Thomas MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse. Glancing ahead to the roles these people were to play, it seems the nation itself went to school in Aran. MacNeill was the first professor of Early and Medieval Irish History at UCD, Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers from 1913, and the first Minister of Education under the Free State; McDonough (whom an old man told me used to lead the Volunteers in rifle-practice out on the crags of Inis Meáin) taught at St. Enda’s, Pearse’s school in Dublin, and both of them were among the leaders of the Easter Rising elevated to martyrdom by the British in 1916. O’Hickey was Professor of Irish at Maynooth from 1896, and Una Ní Fhearcheallaigh became Lecturer in Modern Irish in University College Dublin on its foundation in 1909, and Professor there in 1932. Fr. O’Growney was Professor of Irish at Maynooth from 1891, and his Simple Lessons in Irish began to appear from 1893; his successor at Maynooth, Fr. Donncha Ó Floinn, much later wrote of them:
It is difficult for people today to imagine the zeal and zest for learning that possessed every class of person in Ireland as a result of those little green books composed by Fr. Eugene. Clergy and laity, high and low, scholars and tradesmen, every one of them had the little green books in his pocket, the first book and the second book and the third book…. “I knew Irish once,” said Frank Fay to me long ago. “I had done the Third Book of O’Growney.”
However, to these zealots, Cill Rónáin was already touched with linguistic corruption. O’Growney, at the time of his first visit in 1885 a seminarian at Maynooth for whom only his soul’s salvation was closer to his heart than Irish, came in search of the spoken word. He was met here by his college friend, Peadar Yorke, whose father was from Aran and who visited his grandmother here every summer. Yorke has described O’Growney’s thirst for uncontaminated springs of Irish:
I remember one day we exhausted our store of Irish, and our patience too, trying to get the word for “round” out of an old woman we met on the road. Devil a word of English she had, and we drew a little circle in the dust of the road and asked her to name it, but we couldn’t get anything out of her but “roundáilte.”
The next summer O’Growney told him it was a waste of time trying to learn Irish in the big island because it was so polluted by béarlachas (mixed formations like roundáilte, an English word with an Irish suffix), and took himself off to Inis Meáin. In fact so many other scholars did the same that the one lodging-house there became known as Ollscoil na Gaeilge, the university of Irish, and the overflow of visitors sometimes had to sleep out in the Dún overlooking it.
Pearse was another of these intemperate adolescent lovers of Aran—his sister wrote of him, “He went to Aran a boy, and came back a man!” On his first visit in 1898 he met an Inis Meáin man recently returned from Mexico, Tomás Bán Ó Concheanáinn (his brother had founded the famous Concannon vineyards in California, which supplied Ireland with communion wine). Tomás Bán was already a League member, and later became its most respected and formidable roving organizer. The two of them decided to set up a local branch, and took a currach across to Cill Rónáin to consult with the parish priest Fr. Farragher, and the schoolteacher David O’Callaghan. On the next Sunday the inaugural meeting was held in the Cill Rónáin school house; Pearse described it for the League’s journal in his school-essay Irish:
People came from Inis Meáin, Inis Oírr and Galway. I think there were at least seven hundred people gathered there. Father Muircheartach [Farragher] was in the chair. We had talk and chat and speeches without a single word of English. Aran of the Saints found its soul that day and it’ll be a long time, with God’s help, before it is lost again…. Will the Irish language ever die in Aran? I think not. Now that they have set up a branch, people will be interested in Irish, it will be taught to the young and soon they will be able to read and write it. It will not be allowed to decline but will be supported until Aran will again be a university and a torch of knowledge for all the people of Ireland as she was in the old times.
Nevertheless, in his own speech Pearse had to refer to
… the pain with which he noticed that while Irish was the language of the grown people of Kilronan, a marked and growing tendency to use English was visible in the children.
Simultaneously the islands were being mined for themes by the English-language writers of the Irish literary revival. Previous appearances of Aran in literature, admittedly an Aran entirely concocted out of his imagination, had been as the setting of Charles Lever’s Luttrell of Aran and of scenes in his The Martins of Cro’ Martin. Emily Lawless’ Grania, the Story of an Island, set in an Inis Meáin that owed something to at least one visit, and published in 1892, was evidently required reading, as both Yeats and Synge had it with them on their first trips. Yeats came in 1896, looking for local colour
for a novel he never finished, The Speckled Bird, the action of which was to oscillate between the Paris of the mystical sects and an equally spirit-ridden Aran; as he explains in a letter to a friend, “The book is to be among other things my first study of the Irish Fairy Kingdom and the mystical faith of that time, before I return to more earthly things.” He and the English littérateur Arthur Symons were staying at Tullyra with Edward Martyn at the time, and hired a Connemara hooker to bring them out to Aran. Symons describes their coming:
Nothing is more mysterious, more disquieting, than one’s first glimpse of an island, and all I had heard of these islands, of their peace in the heart of the storm, was not a little mysterious and disquieting…. Here one was absolutely at the mercy of the elements, which might at any moment become unfriendly, which, indeed, one seemed to have but apprehended in a pause of their eternal enmity. And we seemed to be venturing among an unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own language, were further away from us, more foreign, than people who spoke an unknown language and lived beyond other seas.
He goes on to describe their arrival at the Atlantic Hotel (“a very primitive hotel; it had last been slept in by some priests from the mainland, who had come on their holiday with bicycles, and before that by a German philologist who was learning Irish”), and their meeting with a man who for two generations of enquirers had represented Aran, and who must have been totally satisfactory to this boatload of dreamers:
… a professional story-teller, who had for three weeks been teaching Irish to the German philologist who had preceded us on the island. He was half blind and of wild appearance; a small and hairy man, all gesture, as if set on springs, who spoke somewhat broken English in a roar. He lamented that we could understand no Irish, but, even in English, he had many things to tell, most of which he gave as but “talk,” making it very clear that we were not to suppose him to vouch for them. His own family, he told us, was said to be descended from the roons, or seals, but that certainly was “talk”; and a witch had, only nine months back, been driven out of the island by the priest; and there were many who said they had seen fairies, but for his part he had never seen them. But with this he began to swear on the name of God and the saints, lifting up his hands, that what he was going to tell us was the truth; and then he told how a man had once come into his house, and admired his young child, who was lying there in his bed, and had not said “God bless you!” (without which to admire is to envy and to bring under the power of the fairies), and that night, and for many following nights, he had wakened and heard a sound of fighting, and one night had lit a candle, but to no avail, and another night had gathered up a blanket and tried to fling it over the head of whoever might be there, but had caught no one; only in the morning, going to a box in which fish were kept, he had found blood in the box; and at this he rose again, and swore in the name of God and saints that he was telling the truth, and true it was that the child had died and as for the man who had ill-wished him, “I could point him out any day,” he said fiercely. And with many other stories of the doings of fairies and priests, (for he was very religious), and of the “Dane” who had come to the island to learn Irish (“and he knew all the languages, the Proosy, and the Roosy, and the Span, and the Grig”), he told us how Satan, being led by pride to equal himself with God, looked into the glass in which God only should look, and when Satan looked into the glass, “Hell was made in a minute.”
Two people who were later to be associated with Yeats and Martyn in the Irish National Theatre, Synge and Lady Gregory, made their first visits to Aran in May 1898; they were not acquainted at the time, and though they saw each other at a distance they took care not to meet, for outside of the summer season Aran was still unfrequented enough to afford the luxury of solitude and the excitements of anthropological pioneering; Lady Gregory later wrote:
I first saw Synge in the north island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt quite angry when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and sea-weed gatherers.
Lady Gregory’s findings eventually appeared in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). Synge was there for reasons so deep it is doubtful if he understood them himself at that time, and he too was to become passionately possessive, especially of Inis Meáin; in his private notebook he wrote:
With this limestone Inishmaan I am in love… and hear with galling jealousy of the various priests and scholars who have lived here before me. They have grown to me as former lovers of one’s mistress, horrible existences haunting with dreamed kisses the lips she presses to your own.
Yeats had met Synge, who was pursuing desultory studies in medieval literature, in Paris in 1896, and according to Yeats’s own account of it, had said to him, “Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.” Perhaps then Yeats had really enjoyed a moment of second-sight and been inspired to a matchless matching of place and person, for the outcome was that modestly titled love-story, The Aran Islands; and the whole series of Synge’s plays, which draw their themes from tales heard and incidents observed by him in Aran, their language from the Irish he learned there, and their energy (I suspect) from the initiation into the world’s amoral loveliness he underwent during long lonely vigils on the cliff-tops.
On that first visit, the old man, Máirtín Ó Conaola or Martin Conneely, whom Symons had described, called on Synge in the Atlantic hotel:
He told me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many living antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr. Finck and Dr. Pedersen, and given stories to Mr. Curtin of America. A little after middle age he had fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had little eyesight, and a trembling of his hands and head. As we talked he sat huddled together over the fire, shaking and blind, yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an ecstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit or malice, and growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of religion or the fairies.
He had great confidence in his own powers and talent, and in the superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world. When we were speaking about Mr. Curtin, he told me that this gentleman had brought out a volume of his Aran stories in America, and made five hundred pounds by the sale of them.
“And what do you think he did then?” he continued; “he wrote a book of his own stories after making that lot of money with mine, and he brought them out, and the divil a halfpenny did he get for them. Would you believe that?”
Although after a fortnight on the island Synge confided to his journal that “the very bareness of the rock has lured from me a limpet-like attachment,” he found little worth describing in Cill Rónáin itself apart from the picturesque groupings of the womenfolk sitting on the sea-wall to watch the excitement of the arrival of the Indian meal sent as relief, and the almost Italianate sumptuousness of colour in their dress, “the dull red of the petticoat especially if surmounted by a deep blue shawl,” which remind him of what Petrie had written about it; in fact the description in The Aran Islands of the effect of the red petticoats against the grey limestone closely echoes Petrie’s own words. But Synge is the first writer on the islands to go a little beyond a carefully aestheticized response to the beauty of the island girls. In his private notebook he confesses that “I cannot dare under the attention I excite to gaze as I would wish at a beautiful oval face that looks out under a brown shawl near where I stand.” In Inis Meáin he was to get to know at least one girl who made him dream of lingering there and marrying a woman who would personify what the place meant to him. And this unknown beauty on the quayside at Cill Rónáin is also spiritualized by his prose into a tutelary goddess of the territory:
The whole day
I spent wandering with Martin Connolly, my blind guide, through the western wonders of the islands. As we set out among the groups of girls who smile at our incongruous fellowship—by Martin himself we are compared to a cuckoo with its attendant pipit—I saw suddenly the beautiful girl I had noticed on the pier and her face yet haunted me all day among the rocks. She is Madonna like yet has a rapt soul wrought in a jesting … as far from easy exaltation as from the maternal comeliness of Raphael’s later style that she speaks rather as a immaculate unfearing goddess than the awe weighed mother of a God. I understand for the first time as we go further and Martin tells me of a beautiful young woman who has just been taken by the fairies in her first childbed that an interposition may have seemed needful to the older poets of Ireland to lift these women—these “averties” of Maeterlinck—by some mysterious glamour from the profane sacrilege of life and that they pressed pre-extant fairy-land to their aid.
This walk was on Synge’s last day in the big island. Having decided that the Cill Rónáin of the CDB era was too banal to satisfy his thirst for the primitive and for the aboriginal purity of Gaelic, he left for Inis Meáin, and in so doing transcended the orbit of this chapter. I merely add that his book, appearing in 1907 when The Playboy of the Western World was provoking riots in Dublin, spread word of Aran famously, and that his memory has obliterated the name “Ollscoil na Gaeilge,” for the lodgings occupied by so many great scholars is known to countless visitors from all over the world simply as “Synge’s Cottage.”
While Synge was at least flirting with the idea of sentimental attachments, the most “statistic” of all investigators of Aran were at work in the big island. A.C. Haddon, Professor of Zoology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, and C.R. Browne of Trinity College Dublin had recently set up an Anthropometric Laboratory, and the paper on Aran they published in 1893, inaugurating a series of systematic studies of the communities of the western seaboard, they describe as “the first fruits of the Anthropometric Laboratory in its peripatetic form.” Utterly different from Synge’s descriptions, but perfectly confirming them, are such of their findings as these: