by J. M. Synge
As the road rises gradually along the side of the hill to pass out across the top of the waterfall one can look down on one’s left on a little settlement of three or four cottages at the bottom of the glen where one can nearly always make out a boy shearing sheep or a tall girl with bare feet and something that looks like a sack for a petticoat and perhaps a weather-toned scarlet hat getting water from the river....
Apart from the effects of the brilliant showery weather there is an eastwind haze peculiar to September that has wonderfully golden effects near sunset on the hills. The air on these times is quite still and the coming up and passing of such hue on the heather seems an important interesting event. All round in the valleys geese and cattle can be heard calling in the mist, and in the sky very often flocks of golden or green plover fly round and round in an infinity of crying. The sheep one sees against the light are transfigured by a golden halo that makes them appear like symbolical figures on stained glass. The foreground of flowering heather and dwarf furze gains new importance by the sharpness of the hill, and the skeletons of burnt furze that stick up here and there have a curious desolate symmetry....
At the end of the Upper Lake at Glendalough one is quite shut off from the part that has been spoiled by civilization, and when one fishes there from dusk to midnight a feeling of isolation creeps over one that it would be hard to pass. A little wind is of use when one is fishing, but it is on perfectly still nights that the lake is most beautiful. The water catches and returns in a singular half-interpreting way the last light of the sky and the coloured depth and shadow of the cliffs. In some places a lip of white sand cuts off the real cliff from its double, but in other places the two are nearly unified. As the night comes on herons cry with a lonely desolate note that is echoed backwards and forwards among the hills, and stars begin to glitter in the sky and at one’s feet in the water. One seems to be set on the side of a solitary cliff between two reaches of stars, yet in one’s face the other cliff stands out with a purple density that is much more than darkness...
T have met an old vagrant who... believes he was a hundred years old last Michaelmas.... Though now alone... he has been married several times and reared children of whom he knows no more than a swallow knows of broods that have flown to the south. Like most tramps he has the humour of talk and ideas of a certain distinction... and this old marauder who has lived twice as long and perhaps ten times more fully than the men around him is aware of his distinction.... If you do not follow his sometimes mumbled phrases he will call a blight from heaven on your head, though your silver is only warming in his pouch.
Man is naturally a nomad... and all wanderers have finer intellectual and physical perceptions than men who are condemned to local habitations. The cycle, automobile and conducted tours are half-conscious efforts to replace the charm of the stage coach and of pilgrimages like Chaucer’s. But the vagrant, I think, along with perhaps the sailor, has preserved the dignity of motion with its whole sensation of strange colours in the clouds and of strange passages with voices that whisper in the dark and still stranger inns and lodgings, affections and lonely songs that rest for a whole life time with the perfume of spring evenings or the first autumnal smoulder of the leaves...
This old man I have spoken of wanders about Wicklow. As he sleeps by Lough Bray and the nightjar burrs and snipe drum over his head and the grouse crow, and heather whispers round him, he hears in their voices the chant of singers in dark chambers of Japan and the clamour of tambourines and the flying limbs of dancers he knew in Algeria, and the rustle of golden fabrics of the east. As the trout splash in the dark water at his feet he forgets the purple moorland that is round him and hears waves that lap round a boat in some southern sea. He is not to be pitied.
His life has been a pageant not less grand than Loti’s or George Borrow’s and like all men of culture he has formed a strong concept of the interest of his own personal aspect. He is no leech-gatherer such as Wordsworth met upon the moors but is still full of scorn and humour and impatience.... There is something grandiose in a man who has forced all kingdoms of the earth to yield the tribute of his bread and who, at a hundred, begs on the wayside with the pride of an emperor. The slave and beggar are wiser than the man who works for recompense, for all our moments are divine and above all price though their sacrifice is paid with a measure of fine gold. Every industrious worker has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, perhaps served him in chalices of gold....
‘These vagrants have no resemblance with the mendicants who show their sores near the churches of Italy, for mobility is a condition of the existence of a tramp in Ireland, and the greater number that one sees are vigorous women and men of fine physique. When they beg for money they do not make any pretext of infirmity, but ask simply.... These people commit crimes as rarely as any average class, and I have never seen a tramp who was drunk or unseemly. If they are treated with tact they are courteous and forbearing, and if anyone does not give them the recognition they think due to them in Wicklow, they are content to avenge themselves with a word of satire. I was in Arklow a few years ago with a man who had spent most of his life in tropical countries where he had acquired a certain brusqeness in dealing with the poor and a feeling for cold that made him carry many overcoats when travelling in his own country. As we were coming out of the station an old woman begged from him, and was refused a little sharply. She said nothing till he was arranging his coats on an outside car, then she edged towards him and called out in a shrill voice that could be heard all over the station, ‘Are you sellin’ coats?’... This freshness of wit which is equally sure in the women and the men and never loses a point that can be made for profit or revenge is a peculiarity of Irish tramps and distinguishes them, I think, from the rural beggars of other countries of Europe....
Horse races are nowhere more thoroughly appreciated than in County Wicklow, where the people seem to frequent them in a pure holiday spirit that is little inflamed by the fever of gambling. This primitive love of the sport is more apparent on the courses at some distance from Dublin, which are out of reach of the horsey riff-raff that cities always produce.
The races in Arklow, for example, are singularly unconventional, and no one can... watch them on the sand-hills in suitable weather, when the bay and the wooded glens in the background are covered with sunshine and the shadows of clouds, without thrilling to the tumult of humour that rises from the people.
A long course is indicated among the sand-hills by a few scattered flag posts, and at the portion nearest the town a rough paddock and grandstand — draped with green paper — are erected with about a hundred yards of the course roped off from the crowd.... Some half dozen fishermen, with green ribbons fastened to their jerseys or behind their hats, act as stewards at this place, and as they are usually drunk they reel about poking the public with a stick and repeating with endless and vain iteration, ‘Keep outside the ropes.’
At either side a varied crowd collects and straggles round among the faded roulette tables, little groups of young men dancing horn-pipes to the music of a flute, and the numerous stalls which supply fruit, biscuits and cheap drinks. These stalls consist merely of a long cart covered by a crescent awning which rises from one end only, and gives them at a little distance a curious resemblance to the cars with sails which the Chinese employ. They are attended to by the semi-gipsy or tinker class, among whom women with curiously Mongolian features are not rare. All these are extraordinarily prolific, and at a few paces from each stall there is usually a pile of hay and sacking and harness that is literally crawling with half-naked children.
The wharfs of Arklow are within a stone’s throw of the Racecourse, and close to them are a number of roughly-cut trunks of trees where the mothers and babies of the fishermen and sailors of the place collect in multitudes, while the younger women who are more smartly dressed go down into the crowd. On the other side of the course high sandbanks go up which are utilized as another grandstand by the poorer families who wish t
o see the sport without mixing in the press of people. Here there are usually some groups where Irish is spoken, for some of the comparatively recent immigrants have revived Gaelic in this neighbourhood.
In the centre of the course there are a number of farmers from up the country riding about on heavy mares, sometimes bare-backed, sometimes with an old saddle tied on with rope, and often with a certain dignity of costume that is heightened by the old-fashioned rustic tall hat. A few old gigs and outside cars also camp on the sand just beyond the mass of the people who are on foot. These latter consist very largely of boys and girls who come by train, full of humour and enjoyment, but dressed modernly without any local distinction.
At length a few horses appear from the paddock and take a turn about the course to clear off the people, and the racing begins....
It is hard to go far anywhere in this country without meeting some person of real psychological or pictorial interest. The other day near Ballyduff I met one of the most delightful old women that I have yet fallen in with. She was coming along with a bottle of milk in one hand and a bundle of some sort in the other. When I got near she set down her bundle and looked at me with a little rogue-like smile.
‘Have you any money?’ she asked when I was opposite her. I told her I might find some about me.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am very poor.’ I told her I was poorer than she was because she had a bottle of milk and I had none. She pulled the cork out of her bottle and handed it to me.
‘Take a sup,’ she said, ‘maybe you’re drouthy with walking in the sun.’ She wore her hair, which was still a warm tint, in a great bush on her shoulders, and her little face had wrinkled up to a dimpled humorous pose, that is quite unique in this country. One could no more meet or talk to this old woman without smiling a little than one could look sternly at a rollicking, quizzical infant.
We were both too weary to talk for very long, and I was soon on my way again. At the next turn in the road near Laragh I came on a tinkers’ camp in a fragment of a wood that grows at the apex of the meeting between the Annamoe river and the waters from Glendalough and Lough Nahanagan. Dusk was coming on rapidly yet no one seemed to be at the camp but two young children that I could see through a gate sitting up with the light of the fire full on their faces. They were singing a few bars of some droning song over and over again, that I could just hear above the noise of the two rivers and the waving of the black fir trees that stood above them.
People like these, like the old woman and these two beautiful children, are a precious possession for any country. They console us, one moment at least, for the manifold and beautiful life we have all missed who have been born in modern Europe....
When night comes on after a day spent among these people one is faced again by questions no one can answer. All day in the sunshine in the glens where every leaf sparkles with peculiar lustre, and where air, foliage and water are filled with life, one has inevitable sympathy with vitality and with the people that unite in a rude way the old passions of the earth. Then twilight comes, and the mind is forced back to the so-called spiritual mood when we cry out with the saints. Often after these hot days I have spoken of a peculiar fog rises in the valleys of Wicklow so that the whole land seems to put a white virginal scarf about it to meet with the stars and night. Then through the mist lights come out in a few places from the cottages, and the person who knows their interiors... can sense the life of each separate group. How can one reconcile the often coarse liveliness of healthy men with the rapt mood that comes with the night? It is one of the endless antinomies....
I have come round Carrick and up a narrow road that leads back to Annamoe between two bare hills. Where it comes out through a gap — at its highest point somewhat like the Wicklow Gap but much smaller — there is one lonely cottage and a row of larches that are bent and broken by the wind. Tonight the sun had set when I came up and this cottage stood against the blue hills that stretch round the valley behind Glendalough to Luggalaw and one luminous bar of cloud. No building could merge more perfectly in the country round it. Any decoration would have seemed misplaced against this timorous radiancy of colour but the low thatched roof and the stack of turf, with the bare-footed children that were running everywhere round them in the bogs gave the singular accent that is often absent in places where there is no trace of human life.
White mists were beginning to rise in the low marshy ground between these hills and the townland of Castle Kevin, and I could hear dogs barking through it and geese cackling on the bog. A lane runs round the valley to join the road to Laragh, and the few cottages along it were sending up blue lines of smoke. Quite near me an old man was driving sheep down from the hills through dense masses of purple heath.
What has given this vague but passionate anguish to the twilights of Ireland? At this season particularly when the first touch of autumn is felt in the evening air every cottage I pass by among the mountains, with an unyoked donkey cart lying by it and a hen going to roost on the three-legged pot beside the door, or perhaps a pool with rushes round it and a few children with the sadness of night coming upon them, makes me long that this twilight might be eternal and I pass these doors in endless pilgrimage. Yet they make me and, I believe, many or most people who feel these things, more dejected than any sight of misery.
At such moments one regrets every hour that one has lived outside Ireland and every night that one has passed in cities. Twilight and autumn are both full of the suggestion that we connect with death and the ending of earthly vigour, and perhaps in a country like Ireland this moment has an emphasis that is not known elsewhere. In another sense moments of supreme beauty and distinction make the impulses of the diurnal temperament jar against the impulses of the perpetual beauty which is hidden somewhere in the fountain from whence all life has come, and this jar leads us to the most profound and vain remorse anyone can experience....
‘I lay in the grass in a sort of dream with a near feeling of a number of scenes that I have been in. I saw the wet roads in Wicklow with sky and sunshine in the ruts, and corners of old woods, and the moving seaweeds that are round Aran; I saw Kerry with bright bays and many scattered people cutting patches of oats or driving their donkeys. Then I came back to the cottage with my throat dry thinking in what a little while I would be in my grave with the whole world lost to me.
In the laneway as I was turning in there were a number of tinkers yoking up for a journey. One of them took a nose bag from a pony he had been feeding and threw it to a man with a red mare across the road.
‘There,’ he said, ‘put her nose into that.’
‘I will surely,’ said the man, ‘what would I want putting her — into it, I ask you in the name of God?’
IN CONNEMARA
FROM GALWAY TO GORUMNA
SOME of the worst portions of the Irish congested districts — of which so much that is contradictory has been spoken and written — lie along the further north coast of Galway Bay, and about the whole seaboard from Spiddal to Clifden. Some distance inland there is a line of railway, and in the bay itself a steamer passes in and out to the Aran Islands; but this particular district can only be visited thoroughly by driving or riding over some thirty or forty miles of desolate roadway. If one takes this route from Galway one has to go a little way only to reach places and people that are fully typical of Connemara. On each side of the road one sees small square fields of oats, or potatoes, or pasture, divided by loose stone walls that are built up without mortar. Wherever there are a few cottages near the road one sees barefooted women hurrying backwards and forwards, with hampers of turf or grass slung over their backs, and generally a few children running after them, and if it is a market-day, as was the case on the day of which I am going to write, one overtakes long strings of country people driving home from Galway in low carts drawn by an ass or pony. As a rule one or two men sit in front of the cart driving and smoking, with a couple of women behind them stretched out at their ease among sacks of flour or young pi
gs, and nearly always talking continuously in Gaelic. These men are all dressed in homespuns of the grey natural wool, and the women in deep madder-dyed petticoats and bodices, with brown shawls over their heads. One’s first feeling as one comes back among these people and takes a place, so to speak, in this noisy procession of fishermen, farmers, and women, where nearly everyone is interesting and attractive, is a dread of any reform that would tend to lessen their individuality rather than any very real hope of improving their well-being. One feels then, perhaps a little later, that it is part of the misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in countries like Brittany the best external features of the local life — the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved furniture — are connected with a decent and comfortable social condition.
About twelve miles from Galway one reaches Spiddal, a village which lies on the borderland between the fairly prosperous districts near Galway and the barren country further to the west. Like most places of its kind, it has a double row of houses — some of them with two storeys — several public-houses with a large police barracks among them, and a little to one side a coastguard station, ending up at either side of the village with a chapel and a church. It was evening when we drove into Spiddal, and a little after sunset we walked on to a rather exposed quay, where a few weather-beaten hookers were moored with many ropes. As we came down none of the crews was to be seen, but threads of turf smoke rising from the open manhole of the forecastle showed that the men were probably on board. While we were looking down on them from the pier — the tide was far out — an old grey-haired man, with the inflamed eyes that are so common here from the continual itching of the turf-smoke, peered up through the manhole and watched us with vague curiosity. A few moments later a young man came down from a field of black earth, where he had been digging a drain, and asked the old man, in Gaelic, to throw him a spark for his pipe. The latter disappeared for a moment, then came up again with a smouldering end of a turf sod in his hand, and threw it up on the pier, where the young man caught it with a quick downward grab without burning himself, blew it into a blaze, lit his pipe with it, and went back to his work. These people are so poor that many of them do not spend any money on matches. The spark of lighting turf is kept alive day and night on the hearth, and when a man goes out fishing or to work in the fields he usually carries a lighted sod with him and keeps it all day buried in ashes or any dry rubbish, so that he can use it when he needs it. On our way back to the village an old woman begged from us, speaking in English, as most of the people do to anyone who is not a native. We gave her a few halfpence, and as she was moving away with an ordinary ‘God save you!’ I said a blessing to her in Irish to show her that I knew her own language if she chose to use it. Immediately she turned back towards me and began her thanks again, this time with extraordinary profusion. ‘That the blessing of God may be on you,’ she said, ‘on road and on ridgeway, on sea and on land, on flood and on mountain, in all the kingdoms of the world’ — and so on, till I was too far off to hear what she was saying.
