Joseph Campbell

“ Not a soul is in sight—only a blue feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts do beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me—the wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow that is the dominating passion of my life. Do many people go mad here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of the place. ”

“ And I have tried Wordsworth’s sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us,” by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. ”

“ The road was thick with them—old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. ”

“ BY LOCHROS BEAG A waste of blown sand. The Atlantic breakers white upon its extremest verge. A patch of sea-bog before, exhaling its own peculiar fragrance—part fibre, part earth, part salt. Ricks of black turf stacked over it here and there, ready to be creeled inland against the winter firing. The dark green bulk of Slieve a-Tooey rising like a wall behind, a wisp of cloud lying lightly upon its carn. The village of Maghery, a mere clachan of unmortared stone and rain-beaten straw, huddling at its foot. ”

“ IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE Through blown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white, ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in my ears. The hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset—a far-drawn, scarlet trail—with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey, ultimate land. ”

“ Those dark hills with the rack over them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land, and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the sunshine the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks, Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. ”

“ No other sign of life is visible. The walls of the gorge close in darkly on every side except the north. On that side is the sea, white on Maghery strand, and stretching away, a dull copper-green colour, into the sailless horizon beyond. Hearing the voices, a young man comes out from between two boulders serving as a sort of gateway to the house. His face is tanned with sun and exposure, and he is in his bare feet. We greet him in Irish and he answers—a little surprised, no doubt, at hearing the language from strangers. Then another man comes forward—a brother, if his looks don’t belie him. ”

“ After an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks, and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the stackers; and farther on a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to the Glen. ”

“ I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads—the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls—grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills—are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. ”

“ SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing near sunset. We pass a group of country boys playing skittles in the middle of the road—quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows, of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each other’s waists, like a procession on Bride’s Sunday. ”

“ Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see the chapel—a plain white cruciform building, with a queer detached belfry—the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses with slate roofs, some with thatch) , the crosses standing up like gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of peat everywhere ”

“ I can see nothing now but a wilderness of black hills, with black shadows chasing one another over them, a gleam of water here and there, and just the tiniest little patch of sunlight—extraordinarily brilliant by contrast with the general darkness—on half a field, say, with its mearing-stones, to relieve the sense of tragedy that one feels on looking at the landscape. ”

“ I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad—the makings of a priest or a scholar, by his look—and in a short time I am friends with the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish—an enthusiast, in fact—and they all want to tell me at once about the Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. ”

“ I love a brown face, a clear eye, and an honest walk more than anything; if in a man, good; if in a woman, better. And why people look for the cover of a roof, and the sun shining, I never can make out. Sunshine and the open, the wind blowing, travelling betimes and resting betimes, with my back to the field and my knees to the sky, a copy of Raftery or Borrow in my pocket to dip into when the mood is on me—and I am supremely happy! ”

“ It is as good as the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads! ”

“ SPACE In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but here there is no limit to one’s prospect—Perseus is as visible as Boötes—and one’s thought grows as space increases.
RABBITS AND CATS Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys you will see a common house-cat—miles from anywhere—stalking them up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. ”

“ A bridge has always a peculiar fascination for me—especially in an open country like this where one’s horizon is not limited by trees and hedges—and I could spend hours dawdling over it, watching the play of sun and shadow on the water as it foams away under the arches. ”

“ A HOUSE IN THE ROAD’S MOUTH A house in the road’s mouth—it is no roundabout to visit, but a short cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day’s wandering is done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told—or, maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O’Gallagher, the dark man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. ”

“ All around is bogland, of a dull red colour, and soaking with rain. We make through this, jumping from tuft to tuft, and from hummock to hummock, as best we can, going over the shoe-mouth occasionally in slush. In an hour or so we come on a bridle-path of white limestones, set on their flat in the spongy turf. We follow this for a while, and in time reach the poor village of Laguna. Entering into one of the houses I greet the bean-a’-tighe in Irish. She rises quickly from her seat by the hearth where she has been spinning—a crowd of very young children clinging to her skirts. ”

“ As we draw near they get up and face us with protruding necks, hissing viciously. Dogs bark at us occasionally, but not often. (I had heard ill accounts of the Donegal dogs from travellers, but on the whole, my experience of them has not been quite so bad as I had been led to expect.) Slieve League rises on our left, a dark, shadowy bulk of mountain, shutting off the view to the south. All around is moorland, with a stream in spate foaming through a depression in it, and little patches of tilled land here and there, and the inevitable brown-thatched cabin and the peat-reek over it. ”

“ The quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bunglass and the great view to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us, shouting and throwing their caps in the air—delighted, I suppose, at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the grass when we get to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the propagandists carp as they will! ”

“ And peasants’ thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant’s mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. ”

“ THE TRANSIENT Only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller; and Nature, in the incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms, is not averse to beauty. Beauty, said Turgenev, needs not to live for ever to be eternal—one instant is enough for her. ”

“ The heather-ale is in our hearts, the water sings and the wind blows, and one ceases to trouble about time and the multitude of petty vexations that worry the townsman out of happiness. Did I say one ceases to trouble about time? Even here it comes, starting one like a guilty thing. We reach Meenacross Post-office at four-thirty, and an hour later see the Atlantic tumbling through rain on the age-worn strand of Glen-Columcille. ”

“ WOMEN AND HARES It’s curious in Donegal sometimes, when going along the road, or crossing a footpath through the fields, to see a shawled woman, a perch or so off, dropping over the edge of a hill, and then when you get up to the edge there is no sign of her at all. ”

“ A wild waste of moorland stretches on every side of us, brightened here and there by little freshwater lakes, out of which we see the trout jumping in hundreds—Loch Unshagh, Loch Unna, Loch Divna, and another quite near the road, where we got, at the expense of wet feet and knees, some lovely specimens of the lilium aureum, or golden lily, which grows, I think, on every little shallow and flat and bywater in South Donegal. ”

“ The groups go in ages—the old women with the old women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys, too—active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by Loch O’Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared space by the high road. ”

“ Men address you on the road in that frank, human, comrade-like way of Irishmen, out of deep lungs and ringing larynxes that bring one back to the time when men were giants, and physique was the rule rather than the exception. ”

“ Why is it when a man’s soul is in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him about as you would an old cast shoe? And the minute the soul goes, and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. ”