THE TURNING POINT
It is not easy to say whether the policy of peaceful penetration which was
pursued in Ireland in the nineteenth century was planned beforehand,
whether Pitt actually carried the Union with a comprehensive assimilating
policy in his mind. The probabilities are against that, and in favour of
the supposition that, the one vital step of the Union having been taken,
the rest of the policy followed inevitably. At any rate, once it did get
going, its operations continued and developed logically and methodically,
with ever-increasing ramifications, until it had the whole of Ireland in a
strangle grip, a grip mental as well as physical. And while the political
fervour of the people, under Parnell, seemed to be most strongly and
determinedly pro-Irish, yet in reality they were becoming less and less
Irish with every year. Silently but relentlessly English culture flowed in
and attacked every artery of Ireland's national life.
Up to the Sinn Fein Movement Irish Patriotic Movements have all been
specialist rather than comprehensive. They aimed at political freedom, or
they aimed at the control of the land, or they had some definite one
object which at the time stood for everything, and often they mistook the
one thing for the whole. Their non-comprehensiveness has been made a
reproach to them in certain Nationalist speculations of recent years, but
this cannot with justice be done. The first thing which Ireland lost was
her political independence and naturally it was the thing she then tried
to recover. She had not lost her language, or her culture, or her memory,
and naturally she could only frame a movement for the recovery of what she
had actually lost. In the eighteenth century, which in some ways was the
darkest, she was yet much more of a Nation than ever she was in the
nineteenth; for, even though her thoughts in that century were directed to
the bare hope of keeping herself alive, of not starving and not becoming a
herd of illiterates and degenerates, even then her full National
consciousness went on, _en rapport_ with her past and undisturbed in the
broad sense by the froth and fustian of the Garrison persecutions: and at
the end of the century she had lost nothing but her political independence
and her ownership of the land. The nineteenth century, therefore, saw her
devoted to the recovery of these two things, of the loss of which she was
conscious; and the closing years of the century, which brought her the
perception of the loss of other things, of language and all that goes with
it, brought with them for the first time the possibility of a
comprehensive movement for the recovery of everything lost, for an attack
upon the dominant civilisation at every point of contact. And the
twentieth century brought the movement itself in the Sinn Fein movement.
There were throughout the nineteenth century various short and ineffective
attempts at a revival of Irish industries, but the first evidence of a
sense of spiritual loss was the successful attempt in the eighties at a
revival and strengthening of Irish games and athletics, which resulted in
the removal of English games and athletics from the dominant position and
their gradual decline to their proper position as the games of a Garrison.
But the turning point of all modern Irish development was the foundation
of the Gaelic League in 1893. That definitely and irrevocably,
insignificant though it seemed at the time and for a long time, arrested
the assimilating process, provided a last fortification, as it were,
behind which the still unassimilated forces of the Nation gathered
strength, and unity, and courage, and turned the mind of Ireland away from
everything foreign and inward towards herself and her own concerns. There
had always been in Ireland Archaeological Associations and learned persons
who studied Irish as a dead language, and there actually was in existence
at the time the present "Society for the Preservation of the Irish
Language": but the Gaelic League was a League of common men and women who
took up Irish not for antiquarian or academical reasons, but because it
was the national language of Ireland, and because they were convinced that
Ireland would be irrevocably lost if she lost it. They were seers and
enthusiasts, not archaeologists, and in twenty years they had all Ireland,
all Nationalist Ireland at any rate, behind their banner.
It would be difficult to over-emphasise the influence which the Gaelic
League has had upon Ireland. It may be said with absolute truth that it
stemmed the onflowing tide of assimilation to English civilisation, and
not alone stemmed it but turned it back. Its fight for the Irish language
reacted upon everything else in Ireland, set up influences, currents, out
of nowhere, which fought firmly for this or that Irish characteristic,
dinned into the ears of the people everywhere an insistence upon things
Irish as apart from things foreign. And it gave the first great example of
the support of a thing because it is Irish. The Gaelic Leaguer had, and
has, many weapons in his armoury, and the reasons for the revival of Irish
are many. But although in case of necessity he is prepared to justify the
revival upon utilitarian grounds, upon philological grounds, and upon
historical grounds, the chief weapon in his armoury is a sentimental one,
being "[Gaelic: Ar dteanga fein]"--Our own language. That is the
battle-cry which has appealed irresistibly to the man in the street, and
the principle behind it, first enunciated as a fighting principle by the
Gaelic League, has come to be applied to all Irish questions and
practically to mould the thoughts of the present generation.
The foundation of the Gaelic League has been attributed to the _debacle_
which had just then overwhelmed the Parliamentarian Movement, but the two
things had no connexion. The young men who founded the Gaelic League, and
who did the desperate work of its early years, were men whose interests
were intellectual rather than political, and who neither had, nor were
likely to have, any intimate connexion with any political movement such as
the then Parliamentarian Movement. The origin of the Gaelic League goes
farther back, back to the early days of the century when the Nation began
to lose the language. Once the people began to shed their own language a
movement for its recovery was inevitable if the Nation was not to be
wholly annihilated; and as in other things a perception of loss rarely
arises until a thing is either lost or well on the way to it, so in this
case a perception of the meaning of the loss of the language did not come
until the language was almost lost. But it did come. And to a few young
men it was given to see that Ireland might gain riches, gain empire, gain
everything, but that if she lost her language she lost her soul. And they
raised their battle-cry accordingly, and led their Nation out of the bog
of Anglicisation, took the people's eyes from the ends of the earth and
turned them towards the West, where their language still lived and their
national life kept its continuity.
The Gaelic League was not, is not, a mere movement for the revival of a
language. Literally it is that, but philosophically it is a movement for
the revival of a Nation. Resurrecting, as it did, the chief essential to
Nationality, it inevitably resurrected also the subsidiary ones. Its
constitution debars it from taking any part in politics, and it holds
within its ranks men and women of all parties, but no constitution can
prevent the leaven of the language working on the individual to its
fullest extent once it gets into him. And the language brought with it old
ideas, old values, old traditions. There is in the very sound of Irish
music a quality which wipes out at once the whole of the nineteenth
century and brings one face to face with the days when Ireland had an
individuality and a proud civilisation: the roots of the language are away
back in the very golden age of Irish civilisation; and the enthusiast who
began with the language has been irresistibly impelled to a quest which
embraces many things besides, industries, games, government--everything
which concerns a Nation.
Since its inception the Gaelic League has influenced, in one way or
another, the best of the young men and women of Ireland. It has set them
thinking, with the language firm in them. And it has led them irresistibly
to disregard altogether the whole current of Irish evolution since 1800,
to realise that when Ireland began to lose her language she began to lose
her Nationality, and to send them back to take up the broken thread of
Irish civilisation where the English onrush broke it, and rebuild it.
That force has worked just as all-embracingly as the English aggressive
onrush of the nineteenth century worked. It has neglected nothing. And
while the older politicians went on in their well-worn grooves, uneasy at
the apathy of the young people towards them, but ignorantly content so
long as they were undisturbed, the leaven of the Gaelic League
self-reliance principle was undermining their political foundations, in
common with all other foundations in Ireland which were the result of a
bastard connexion with any of the manifestations of English civilisation
in Ireland. That is also the secret of the Irish Literary Movement in
English. It gets its inspiration from Irish tradition, Irish convention,
Irish speech, and even though it expresses itself in English it is an
English which is half Irish. Its whole spirit is the spirit of an Ireland
which is looking back to Eoghan Ruadh and Keating rather than forward to a
development of the perfectly reputable, perfectly colourless, and
perfectly uninspiring work of, say, Mr. Edward Dowden. That work is the
work of a mind perfectly assimilated to English civilisation, and it has
no future save absorption. The Gaelic League leaven has driven it home to
the people of Ireland that any similar work or effort in any sphere has no
future save absorption, and it has sent them, in everything, in
literature, politics, economics, back to their native culture and its
traditions.