894
AN GAOḊAL.
asserting the truth. The reason of it is transpar¬
ently obvious. When they lose the language they
lose also the traditional unwritten literature
which, inculcating and eulogising what is court¬
teous, high-minded, and noble, supplied continu¬
ously an incentive to the practice of those qual¬
ities. ....
"Wherever Irish is the vernacular of the people
there live enshrined in it memories and imagin¬
tions, deeds of daring, and tragic catastrophes, an
heroic cycle of legend and poem, a vast and varied
store of apothegms, sententious proverbs and
weighty sentences, which contain the very best
and truest thoughts, not of the rude forefathers of
the hamlet, but of the kings, sages, bards, and
shanachies of bygone ages. Such a stream of
collected thought as is everywhere found where
the Irish language remains spoken must exercise
an influence on those who come into contact with
it, and such an influence must be an advantageous
one. ....
"If by ceasing to speak Irish our peasantry
could learn to appreciate Shakespeare and Milton
to study Wordsworth and Tennyson, then, indeed,
we might let it go without any very acute pang.
But this is not the case. We lay aside a language
which for all ordinary purposes of everyday life
is more pointed and forcible than any with which
I am acquainted, and we replace it by another
which we learn badly, and speak with an attro¬
cious accent, interlarding it with barbarsims and
vulgarity.
"The language of the western Gael is the lan¬
guage best suited to his surroundings, it corres¬
ponds best to his topography, his nomenclature,
his organs of speech, and the use of it guarantees
the remembrance of his own wierd and beautiful
traditions. Around the blazing bog-fire, of a
winter's night, Dermod O'Duibhne of the Love
Spot, Finn with the coat of hairy skin, Conan the
Thersites of the Fenians, the old blind giant Ess¬
heen (Ossian), the speckled bull with the movable
horn, the enchanted cat of Rathcrogan, and all the
other wild and poetic offspring of the bardic imag¬
ination pass in review before us. Every hill,
every lios, every crag and gnarled tree, and lone¬
ly valley has its own strange and graceful legend
attached to it, the product of the Hibernian Celt
in its truest and purest type, not to be improved on
by change, and of infinitive worth in moulding the
race type, of immesurable value in forming its
character. But with the loss of the Irish language
all this is lost.
"The native Irish deal in sententious proverbs
perhaps more than any other nation in Europe ;
their repertoire of apothegms, is enormous. It is
a characteristic which is lost with their change of
language, and, consequently, has not been obser¬
ed or noticed. Let their language die, and not
one of their proverbs will remain. Of the hund¬
reds of stereotyped sayings and acute aphorisms
which I have heard aptly introduced upon occas¬
ons where Irish was spoken, I cannot say that I
have heard five survive in an English dress where
the language has been lost. And if this is the case
with aphorisms and sayings, much more does it
hold good of the songs, the legends, and the he¬
roic cycle of stories. I believe, for example, that
the character of the people is no longer the same
in the east of the county Leitrim and in the coun¬
ty Longford, where Irish died out a generation or
two ago. There Dermod of the Love Spot is un¬
known, Finn Mac Cool is barely remembered as a
'giant,' Ossian is never heard of, the ancient mem¬
ories have ceased to cling to the varios objects of
nature; the halo of romance, the exquisite and
dreamy film which hangs over the Mayo mount¬
ains has been blown away by the blast of the most
realistic materialism; and the people, when they
gather into one another's houses in the evening for
a cailee (ceilidhe — a night visit), can talk of noth¬
ing but the latest scandal, or the price Tim Roon¬
ey got for his calf, or the calving of Paddy Swee¬
ny's cow. ....
"I do not believe in resuscitating a great na¬
tional language by twopenny-halfpenny bounties.
If the Irish people are resolved to let the national
language die, by all means let them. I believe the
instinct of a nation is often juster than that of any
individual. But this, at least, no one can deny,
that hitherto the Irish nation has had no choice in
the matter. What between the Anglo-Irish gen¬
try, who came upon us in a flood after the confis¬
cations of 1648, and again after 1691, whose great
object it was to stamp out both the language and
institutions of the nation, with their bards and
shanachies, ollamhs and professors; and with the
brutalized, sensual, unsympathetic gentry of the
last century, the racing, blustering, drunken squir¬
eens, who usurped the places of the O'Connors,
the O'Briens, the O'Donnells, the O'Cahans, the
MacCarthys, our old and truly cultured nobility,
who cherished hereditary poets and historian:
what with the purblind, cringing pedagogues of
the present century, whose habit it was to beat
and threaten their pupils for talking Irish; what
with the high-handed action of the authorities,
who, with cool contempt of existing circumstances,
continued to appoint English speaking magistra¬
tes, petty-sessions clerks, and local officials among
a people to whom they could not make themselves
intelligible, what with the hostility of the Board
of Education, who do not recognise the language
of those baronies where no English is spoken, even
to the extent of publishing school books in it, what
with this, and our long slavery as a nation, we as¬
sert that the Irish language has had no chance of
showing its capabilities, or those who speak it of
