by Tim Robinson
Throughout the early centuries of the growth of the Normans’ walled town of Galway, the Aran Islands belonged to the O’Briens, the traditional Irish rulers of Munster. In the 1560s they were captured from them by the O’Flahertys, a former ruling clan of Connacht who had long been confined to the wildernesses of Connemara by the Norman advance. In trying to regain their lost islands the O’Briens appealed to the new system of law emanating from England, and Queen Elizabeth took the opportunity of appropriating the islands, which in the context of her war with Spain were of some strategic importance, and granting them to an Englishman on condition he maintain a garrison there. A fort was built in Árainn, which had its days of drama in 1652, when Parliamentarian soldiers were crushing the last gasps out of the Irish rebellion which had broken out in response to England’s civil strife. Aran had surrendered to Cromwell’s general when he took Galway city, and then was recaptured by an expedition from the Confederate Catholics’ last strongholds in Connemara and Inishbofin. The Parliamentarians shipped 1300 foot soldiers and a battering piece out to Aran and, having finally secured the castle, proceeded to enlarge it with ancient stone from the ruined churches and the round tower of St Enda’s monastery. For some years Aran was a holding-camp for half-starved Catholic priests rounded up by the fanatically Protestant regime of the Commonwealth. There was an English military presence on Aran thereafter until early in the next century, with the result that today Aran’s bloodgroup pattern is similar to that of northern England, where Gaelic and Saxon stock have intermingled.3
Aran’s population, like that of Ireland as a whole, was at its peak just before the Great Famine of 1845–9, but the islands rode the demographic storm more smoothly than Connemara, for instance, where many villages were totally abandoned. In 1841 there were 3521 persons in the three islands; in 1851 there were 3333. The potato-blight seems to have been less severe in Aran than on the mainland, and it is said that only one person on the islands died of starvation in those years. But the leech of emigration had been applied to the Aran community, which has never since been able to shake it off. By Synge’s time the population was 2863 (421 of them in Inis Meáin), and today it is about 1350. The fragmentation of the terrain into tiny fields expresses the desperation of those nineteenth-century generations, hoarding every tuft of grass for their cattle. Inordinate rents drained the community of capital, forced it to live almost exclusively on potatoes and made its life an unceasing struggle, in the stony fields, in little wooden boats and canvas currachs on the sea, or collecting seaweed on the shore and burning it for kelp. As in much of rural Ireland, long-suffering exploded into violence against the exploiters in the 1880s.
The very seclusion of Aran had occasionally attracted revolutionary influences before that date. It is said that after the defeat of the French invasion of 1798 and the rebellion that welcomed it in Mayo, there was a French officer on the run here with numerous United Irishmen, one of whom set up a hedge-school in Árainn. Similarly, one of the hunted leaders of another revolutionary generation, Young Ireland, passed through after their pitiful attempt at a rising in 1848; a stone is still pointed out on the stormbeach, under which John Blake Dillon hid for a time before escaping to America. Later on the Fenian conspiracy had members among the Aran tenantry, so that when the Land League came into existence in 1879 it found in Aran as elsewhere a nucleus of political awareness and even a number of activists armed with guns stolen from the local police barracks. Aran was at this time the property of absentee landlords, the Digbys of Landenstown in Kildare.4 Its owners knew little of such a remote source of a tiny fraction of their rents as the Aran Islands, which were administered for them by agents who themselves visited only periodically. The more immediate power over the islanders’ lives was the O’Flaherty family of Kilmurvey House in Árainn, a dwindled branch of the Connemara O’Flahertys; they had built up a holding of the best of the land, from which other tenants had been evicted for non-payment of rent, and sublet much of it to the less fortunate. Patrick O’Flaherty and his son James, each in his turn chief middleman, Justice of the Peace and representative of civility in the islands, were in a position of almost feudal power, and they bore the brunt of the islanders’ accumulated resentments when Aran, like much of the rest of rural Ireland, was shaken by the Land War. In 1881 the Land Leaguers drove the O’Flahertys’ cattle over the highest cliffs of Árainn, a deed still remembered but only reluctantly spoken about in the islands. Aran life at that time was further embittered by involved disputes, boycotts and scandals arising out of attempts by the little Protestant elite – the Church of Ireland minister Mr Kilbride, the landlord’s agent, an evangelical school-teacher and others – to persuade the lower orders of the sinfulness of papistry. This murky series of events was copiously reported in the Galway press and in such national organs as the Freeman’s Journal; Aran was well known to be one of the most hard-done-by communities in all the immiserated West. A branch of the National League was founded in the islands in 1886 to organize support for Home Rule, and rapidly became a power in the community. When the government responded to the terrorism of the Land War not only by coercion but by reform, and tried to ‘kill Home Rule by kindness’, Aran shared in the benefits. In 1885 a Land Court sitting in the islands’ capital, Cill Rónáin, reduced rents by 40 per cent.5 The Aran fishing industry had dwindled almost to extinction in the dreadful years of recurrent hunger since the 1840s. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board was set up by the government to develop those localities of the West in which the population far exceeded what their productive capacities could support. A steamer service from Galway had already been established in that year, and on this basis of access to markets the Board undertook to nucleate a modern fishing industry, by paying a bounty to boats from Arklow to come and work out of Aran, by inaugurating a telegraph link to the mainland and by improving the harbours.
While thus badgered and solicited by sectarian and secular politics, the Aran Islanders also found themselves elected to a literary and even a metaphysical status by the romantic nationalism which was transforming Ireland’s image of itself. Successive generations of Irish thinkers – many of them members of the Protestant ascendancy – were founding their separatist claims on the rediscovery of the Celtic soul, essentially at odds with the mundane progressivism of the Anglo-Saxon. And this ancient, mysterious, spirit guide of the nation was to be called forth from the humble cottages of the last living representatives of Celtic purity, the Irish-speaking farm-and fisherfolk, and pre-eminently those of the western seaboard. Aran, that forlorn outcrop of want, was to become one of the chief shrines of this Ireland of the mind.
The rediscovery of Aran’s Celtic and monastic magnificence had been begun by George Petrie, ‘the father of Irish archaeology’, in 1821; it was consolidated by the excited reports of John O’Donovan in 1839 when he was employed by the Ordnance Survey to record Ireland’s ancient monuments, and crowned in 1857 by the visit of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, who, accompanied by many Irish scholars and led by Dr William Wilde, feasted within the walls of Dún Aonghasa.6 The enlistment of the contemporary islander in the reconstruction of Irishness followed closely. Here all that was most pungently characteristic of this relict state of being had been hoarded, like treasure buried in troubled times, now to be disinterred. Petrie had also collected folksongs, and O’Donovan placenames, from the Irish-speaking natives; the poet Samuel Ferguson and the painter Frederick Burton made the life of the Aran fisherfolk their subjects. The living culture of Aran, it was realized, was a repository of venerable antiquities. The Celticist Kuno Meyer visited Inis Meáin. Foreign scholars – the linguists Pedersen of Copenhagen and Finck of Marburg, the mediaevalist Zimmer of Berlin, the folklorist Jeremia Curtin of America – made the pilgrimage and paid their respects in learned treatises.7 The islands’ ancient monuments were re-examined by an excursion of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1895, and in the same year the Irish Field Club Union, led by the naturalis
t Robert Lloyd Praeger, came to marvel at their fauna and flora. The revival of the Irish language, in retreat for centuries, was the dream of such founder members of the Gaelic League as Eoin MacNeill and Fr Eugene O’Growney, who sought out the living language in Aran in the 1880s.8 W.B. Yeats came in 1896, looking for a setting for his proposed novel, The Speckled Bird, which was to oscillate between mystical Paris and peasant Ireland. In the year of Synge’s first visit, 1898, the young Patrick Pearse was there and founded an Aran branch of the Gaelic League, and Lady Augusta Gregory collected fairylore. Thomas MacDonagh, later to be Pearse’s colleague at his school, St Enda’s in Dublin, and to join him in the sacrificial Easter Rising of 1916, also spent time in Inis Meáin, where he organized rifle practice on the crags. Thus by Synge’s time Aran, and Inis Meáin in particular, had been widely identified as the uncorrupted heart of Ireland. (This attribution of a particular degree of Gaelic purity to the middle island was first made by Petrie, who thought that the morals of the big island had been contaminated by people introduced to build the lighthouse in 1818, and those of Inis Oírr by its proximity to the Clare coast.) The cottage of Páidín and Máire MacDonncha, in which Synge also stayed, was sometimes so full that the overflow had to sleep within the cashel walls of Dún Chonchúir nearby, and it was very reasonable of the islanders to conclude, as one of them told Synge, that ‘there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic’.
Nowadays each of the islands has its airstrip, its small industries and its electricity generators. But the increasing implication of Aran with the outside world since Synge’s day has scarcely dulled its alluring legend. The American director Robert Flaherty’s famous 1932 ‘documentary’, Man of Aran, situated his hero in a timeless world of rock and wave, and the many subsequent treatments in words and images have threatened to bury the little islands Pompeii-deep in interpretations. If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two. Whether the grain of wonderful truth in this can survive the trampling of the hundred thousand tourists who now visit the islands each year, remains to be seen.
THE PERSON
The Synges came to Ireland in the seventeenth century from England, produced a succession of bishops for the Protestant Church of Ireland, and married land. J.M. Synge’s father, John Hatch Synge, was a younger brother of the owner of Glanmore Castle in County Wicklow; he inherited a small estate in County Galway, became a barrister in Dublin, and married the daughter of an Ulster-born rector of intemperate evangelical zeal. As landowners and clerics of the Established Church, standing on the apparently natural and divinely sanctioned economic and cultural rights of the Anglo-Irish community in Ireland, families like the Synges were loftily remote from such aboriginals as the Catholic, Irish-speaking and illiterate peasantry of the Aran Islands. At the same time the tiès between the two classes were close and necessary (at least to the well-being of the former). The Synges’ income derived in part from the rents paid by the small tenants of their Galway estates (as J.M. Synge’s mother sharply reminded him once, when his social conscience was troublesome), while for his proselytizing forebears the rural Irish were a field of souls for the harvesting; in fact Synge’s uncle had been the Church of Ireland minister in the Aran Islands in the 1850s.
But by J.M. Synge’s generation the attitudes of the Anglo-Irish to the peasantry had become more complex and problematic, as the Protestant hegemony cracked before the rise of the Catholic middle classes. Among the Synges’ peers were some of the intellectual leaders of the new version of Irish nationalism which found its inspiration in the hitherto despised folk of the countryside – but the Synge family itself had no truck with such an abdication of the duties of civilization.
John Millington Synge9 was born in 1871 in Rathfarnham, then a village, now absorbed into the suburbs of south Dublin. His father died in the following year, and Mrs Synge, left with five children and a reduced income, moved to a house next door to her mother in nearby Rathgar. John was a sickly, asthmatic child, and laboured under the burden of his mother’s vivid belief in hell-fire. An early love of the countryside and wildlife afforded some relief from the fond oppressions of home, but his reading of Darwin (when he was fourteen) introduced the new pain of religious doubt. Within a few years he no longer regarded himself as a Christian but as a worshipper of a new goddess, Ireland. His disbeliefs and beliefs formed rift-valleys of incomprehension between himself and his relatives, though he always preserved his status as a member of the family household. He gulped the patriotic balladry published in a nationalist newspaper, The Nation, and scoured the countryside in search of the Irish antiquities he read about in the writings of George Petrie. And in Petrie he would have read:
The Araners are remarkable for fine intellect and deep sensibility … If the inhabitants of the Aran Islands could be considered as a fair specimen of the ancient and present wild Irish … those whom chance has led to their hospitable shores to admire their simple virtues, would be likely to regret that the blessings of civilization had ever been extended to any portion of the inhabitants of this very wretched country. But, fortunately for them, they cannot be so designated; much of their superiority must be attributed to their remote, insular situation, which has hitherto precluded an acquaintance with the vices of the distant region.10
Synge’s enthusiasm for Irish matters did not close his mind to a wider cultural heritage. He took up the violin, and, while scraping through a second-class degree at Trinity College, which introduced him to the Irish language11 and to Hebrew, he worked for and won a scholarship in counterpoint from the Royal Irish Academy of Music. It seemed that music was going to be his life. In 1893 a distant relative, Mary Synge, a concert pianist, arranged for him to stay with friends of hers, the Von Eiken sisters, in Oberwerth on the Rhine. After two months of studying music there, he moved to Würzburg. But he came to feel he would never be sufficiently confident to perform in public, and that his compositional talents were of little worth. He moved to Paris, and in 1895 he commenced courses in modern French literature, mediaeval literature and comparative phonetics at the Sorbonne, with the idea of becoming a critic of French literature. He lived the student’s life of cold attics and introspective scribbling; he read such subtle adversaries of his mother’s simple words of God as Mallarmé, Huysmans and Baudelaire. Holidays with his family in Wicklow alternated with a visit to Rome and further eclectic studies in Paris: the anarchist Sébastian Faure, Marx, Morris, Petrarch, St Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (a discipline of meditative practice he seems to have tried to adapt to aesthetic contemplation). In Ireland he was pursuing an unpromising attachment to a girl called Cherrie Matheson, the daughter of a Unionist barrister prominent among the Plymouth Brethren; she would not have him because of his atheism. On the Continent he got to know a number of young women with whom he corresponded – all too often, some of them felt, on the subject of Cherrie – and with whom he obviously found it easier to form close friendships than with the men of his aquaintance.
In 1896 W.B. Yeats, who was a member of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, and his even more revolutionary muse Maud Gonne were in Paris, founding L’Association Irlandaise (‘the Irish League’) as a focus for Irish nationalists in France. Synge met Yeats in December of that year and joined the League, but soon resigned: ‘I wish to work in my own way for the cause of Ireland and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement.’ But other sides of the multifaceted Yeats probably influenced him, through such works as The Celtic Twilight, which enlists the fairies and ghosts of the Irish countryside into the shadowy battalions of European mysticism. Like so many others at that period he ‘dabbled’, as they say, in psychical research, in company with a new friend, Stephen MacKenna. MacKenna, then an impecunious journalist, had already translated The Imitation of Christ and was soon to begin his life’s great
work, the translation of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus.12 But whatever degree of objective existence Synge might have allowed to the manifestations of the séances, he was always too much the realist to have shared Yeats’s prodigal credences as expressed in The Celtic Twilight: ‘Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.’