By REV. P.S. DINNEEN, M.A., R.U.I.
"The distinguishing property of man," says Cicero, "is to search for
and follow after truth. Therefore, when disengaged from our necessary
cares and concerns, we desire to see, to hear, and to learn, and we
esteem knowledge of things obscure or wonderful as indispensable to
our happiness." (_De Officiis_ I., 4).
I claim for the Irish race that throughout their history they have
cut down their bodily necessities to the quick, in order to devote
time and energy to the pursuit of knowledge; that they have engaged
in intellectual pursuits, not infrequently of a high order, on a low
basis of material comfort; that they have persevered in the quest of
learning under unparalleled hardships and difficulties, even in the
dark night of "a nation's eclipse", when a school was an unlawful
assembly and school-teaching a crime. I claim, moreover, that, when
circumstances were favorable, no people have shown a more adventurous
spirit or a more chivalrous devotion in the advancement and spread of
learning.
Love of learning implies more than a natural aptitude for acquiring
information. It connotes a zest for knowledge that is recondite and
attainable only at the expense of ease, of leisure, of the comforts
and luxuries of life, and a zeal for the cultivation of the mental
faculties. It is of the soul and not of the body; it refines,
elevates, adorns. It is allied to sensibility, to keenness of vision,
to the close observation of mental phenomena. Its possessor becomes a
citizen of the known world. His mind broadens; he compares,
contrasts, conciliates; he brings together the new and the old, the
near and the distant, the permanent and the transitory, and weaves
from them all the web of systematized human thought.
I am not here concerned with the extent of Ireland's contribution to
the sum of human learning, nor with the career of her greatest
scholars; I am merely describing the love of learning which is
characteristic of the race, and which it seems best to present in a
brief study of distinct types drawn from various periods of Irish
history.
In the pre-Christian period the Druid was the chief representative of
the learning of the race. He was the adviser of kings and princes,
and the instructor of their children. His knowledge was of the
recondite order and beyond the reach of ordinary persons. The esteem
in which he was held by all classes of the people proves their love
for the learning for which he stood.
Patrick came: and with him came a wider horizon of learning and
greater facilities for the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge.
Monastic schools sprang up in all directions--at Clonard, Armagh,
Clonmacnois, Bangor, Lismore, Kildare, Innisfallen. These schools
were celebrated throughout Europe in the earlier middle ages, and
from the fifth to the ninth century Ireland led the nations of Europe
in learning and deserved the title of the "Island of Saints and
Scholars." Our type is the student in one of these monastic schools.
He goes out from his parents and settles down to study in the
environs of the monastery. He is not rich; he resides in a hut; his
time is divided between study, prayer, and manual labor. He becomes a
monk, only to increase in devotion to learning and to accentuate his
privations. He copies and illuminates manuscripts. He memorizes the
Psalms. He glosses the Vulgate Scriptures with vernacular notes. He
receives ordination, and, realizing that there are benighted
countries ten times as large as his native land beyond the seas, and,
burning with zeal for the spread of the Gospel and the advancement of
learning, sails for Britain, or passes into Gaul, or reaches the
slopes of the Apennines, or the outskirts of the Black Forest. The
rest of his life is devoted to the foundation of monasteries to which
schools are attached, to the building of churches, and to the
diffusion around him of every known branch of knowledge. He may have
taken books from Ireland over seas, and, of these, relics are now to
be found among the treasures of the ancient libraries of Europe.
Columcille, Columbanus, Adamnan, Gall, Virgilius occur to the mind in
dwelling on this type.
The hereditary _seanchaidhe_, who treasured up the traditional lore
of the clan and its chief, was held in high honor and enjoyed
extraordinary privileges. He held a freehold. He was high in the
graces of the chief, and officiated at his inauguration.
An important type is the Irish ecclesiastical student abroad in the
penal days. School teaching, unless at the sacrifice of Faith, was a
crime in Ireland, and the training required for the priesthood had to
be obtained on the continent. The Irish out of their poverty
established colleges in Rome (1628), Salamanca (1593), Seville
(1612), Alcala (1590), Lisbon (1593), Louvain (1634), Antwerp (1629),
Douai (1577), Lille (1610), Bordeaux (1603), Toulouse (1659), Paris
(1605), and elsewhere. As late as 1795 these colleges contained 478
students, and some of them are still in existence. The young student
in going abroad risked everything. He often returned watched by
spies, with his life in danger. Yet the supply never failed; the
colleges flourished; and those who returned diffused around them not
only learning but the urbanity and refinement which were a striking
fruit and mark of their studies abroad.
Another type is the Irish scribe. In the days of Ireland's fame and
prosperity and of the flood-tide of her native language, he was a
skilled craftsman, and the extant specimens of his work are
unsurpassed of their kind. But I prefer to look at him at a later
period, when he became our sole substitute for the printer and when
his diligence preserved for us all that remains of a fading
literature. He was miserably poor. He toiled through the day at the
spade or the plough, or guided the shuttle through the loom. At
night, by the flare of the turf-fire or the fitful light of a
splinter of bogwood, he made his copy of poem or tract or tale, which
but for him would have perished. The copies are often ill-spelt and
ill-written, but with all their faults they are as noble a monument
to national love of learning as any nation can boast of.
In our gallery of types we must not forget the character whom English
writers contemptuously called the "hedge-schoolmaster." The
hedge-school in its most elemental state was an open-air daily
assemblage of youths in pursuit of knowledge. Inasmuch as the law had
refused learning a fitting temple in which to abide and be honored,
she was led by her votaries into the open, and there, beside the
fragrant hedge, if you will, with the green sward for benches, and
the canopy of heaven for dome, she was honored in Ireland, even as
she had been honored ages before in Greece, in Palestine, and by our
primordial Celtic ancestors themselves. The hedge-schoolmaster
conducted the rites, and the air resounded with the sonorous
hexameters of Virgil and the musical odes of Horace.
In the Irish-speaking portions of the country the hedge-schoolmaster
was often also a poet who wrote mellifluous songs in Irish, which
were sung throughout the entire district and sometimes earned him
enduring fame. Eoghan Ruadh O'Sullivan and Andrew MacGrath, called
_An Mangaire Sugach_ or "the Jolly Pedlar," are well-known instances
of this type.
The poor scholar is another type that under varying forms and under
various circumstances has ever trod the stage of Irish history. From
an ancient Irish manuscript (See O'Curry, _Manners and Customs_, II,
79, 80) we learn that Adamnan, the biographer of St. Columcille, and
some other youths studied at Clonard and were supported by the
neighborhood. The poor scholar more than any other type embodies the
love of learning of the Irish race. In the schools which preceded the
National, he appeared in a most interesting stage of development. He
came from a distance, attracted by the reputation of a good teacher
and the regularity of a well-conducted school. He came, avowedly
poor. His only claim on the generosity of his teacher and of the
public was a marked aptitude for learning and an ardent desire for
study and cultivation of mind. He did not look for luxuries. He was
satisfied, if his bodily wants were reasonably supplied, even with
the inconveniences of frequent change of abode. A welcome was
extended to him on all sides. His hosts and patrons honored his
thirst for knowledge and tenacity of purpose. He was expected to help
the students in the house where he found entertainment, and it may
not have been unpleasing to him on occasion to display his talents
before his host. When school was over, it was not unusual to find him
surrounded by a group of school-companions, each pressing his claim
to entertain him for the night.
Despite the hospitality of his patrons, the poor scholar often felt
the bitterness of his dependent state, but he bore it with
equanimity, his hand ever eagerly stretched out for the prize of
learning. What did learning bring him? Why was he so eager to bear
for its sake
"all the thousand aches
That patient merit of the unworthy takes"?
Sometimes he became a priest; sometimes his life was purposeless and
void. But he was ever urged onward by the fascination of learning and
of the cultivation of the nobler part of his nature.
As might have been expected, the Irish who have emigrated to the
American and Australian continents have given touching proof of their
devotion to the cause of learning. I have space only for a few
pathetic examples.
An Irish workman in the United States, seeing my name in connection
with an Irish Dictionary, wrote to me a few years ago to ask how he
might procure one, as, he said, an Italian in the works had asked him
the meaning of _Erin go bragh_, and he felt ashamed to be unable to
explain it.
A man who, at the age of three, had emigrated from Clare in the
famine time, wrote to me recently from Australia in the Irish
language and character.
An old man named John O'Regan of New Zealand, who had been twelve
years in exile in the United States and forty-eight on the Australian
continent, with failing eyesight, in a letter that took him from
January to June of the year 1906 to write, endeavored to set down
scraps of Irish lore which he had carried with him from the old
country and which had clung to his memory to the last.
"In my digging life in the quarries," he says, "books were not a part
of our swag (prayerbook excepted). In 1871, when I had a long seat of
work before me, I sent for McCurtin's Dictionary to Melbourne. It is
old and wanting in the introductory part, but for all was splendid
and I loved it as my life." (See _Gaelic Journal_, Dec., 1906.)