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_THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE AND OTHER ADDRESSES_
THE REVIVAL OF
IRISH LITERATURE
ADDRESSES BY SIR CHARLES
GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.,
DR. GEORGE SIGERSON,
AND DR. DOUGLAS HYDE
LONDON: T. FISHER
UNWIN, PATERNOSTER
SQUARE. MDCCCXCIV
CONTENTS.
PAGE
1. THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE.
BY SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G. 9
i. What Irishmen may do for Irish Literature.
ii. Books for the Irish People.
2. IRISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT.
BY GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY 61
3. THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND.
BY DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D. 115
The Revival of Irish literature.
TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED BEFORE
THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY, LONDON,
_IN JULY, 1892, AND JUNE, 1893_,
BY THE PRESIDENT,
THE HON. SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.
WHAT IRISHMEN MAY DO FOR IRISH LITERATURE.
Speaking to a Society of young Irishmen who love their country and burn to
serve her, I am tempted to broach a subject which has long lain in my
mind, waiting for the fit audience.
The famine of 1846 paralysed many forces in Ireland, and none more
disastrously than our growing literature. How little has been done in the
region of mind since that calamity, and by what isolated and spasmodic
efforts? The era on which the famine fell was intellectually a singularly
fruitful one. A group of young men, among the most generous and
disinterested in our annals, were busy digging up the buried relics of our
history, to enlighten the present by a knowledge of the past, setting up
on their pedestals anew the overthrown statues of Irish worthies,
assailing wrongs which under long impunity had become unquestioned and
even venerable, and warming as with strong wine the heart of the people,
by songs of valour and hope; and happily not standing isolated in their
pious work, but encouraged and sustained by just such an army of students
and sympathisers as I see here to-day. The famine swept away their
labours; and their passionate attempts to arrest and redress the
destruction which the famine inflicted, delivered them over to
imprisonment and penal exile. Their incomplete work, produced amid the
tumult and conflict of a great political struggle, has been a treasure to
two generations of Irishmen; and it supplied the impulse of work which
rivalled their own. The publisher of Petrie's "Round Towers," and John
O'Donovan's translation of "The Four Masters," assured me that he could
not have ventured to issue books so costly, but for the enthusiasm kindled
in the public mind by the young nationalists, and Butt and Lefanu, who at
that time were strict Conservatives, confessed that while writing "The Gap
of Barnesmore" and "The Cock and Anchor," they constantly thought how
welcome such works would be to Young Irelanders. The patriot's library has
not been burthensome in latter times. But Moore's melodies, Griffin's and
Banim's novels, the histories of MacGeoghegan and Curry, and the writings
of these young men have been a constant cordial to the sorely-tried spirit
of our people. Since their day, individual writers have done useful work
from the unquenchable desire God has planted in men's heart to serve their
own race, but there has been no organised attempt to raise the mind of the
country to higher and more generous ideals of life and duty, or to quicken
its interest in things which it behoves us to know. No nation can with
impunity neglect the mind of the growing generation, the generation which
after a little time will guide its counsels and guard its interests. The
thought which has long haunted my reveries, and which I desire to speak
out to-day, is this--that the young men of your generation might and
should take up anew the unfinished work of their predecessors, and carry
it another stage towards the end which they aimed to reach. Why should
they not? Every generation of men furnishes its own tale of thinkers and
workers. The mind of Ireland has not grown barren, nor can I believe that
it has grown indifferent, though public cares have diverted it away from
intellectual pursuits. There are men, I do not doubt, fit and worthy and
willing to undertake such a task.
Have you reflected on all we have lost, and are losing by the subsidence
of the intellectual enthusiasm of half a century ago? It is not alone that
we are deficient in knowledge essential to equip us for the battle of life
by an acquaintance with the character, capacities, and history of our own
country; but, far worse than that, the mind of the generation destined
some day to fill our place, the youthful mind which used to be kindled and
purified by the poetry and legends of Ireland, runs serious risks of
becoming debased, perhaps depraved, by battening on literary garbage.
I have made inquiries, and I am assured that the books chiefly read by the
young in Ireland are detective or other sensational stories from England
and America, and vile translations from the French of vile originals. It
is for the moralist, and indeed for all of us who love Ireland, to
consider whether the virtues for which our people were distinguished,
purity, piety, and simplicity, are not endangered by such intellectual
diet. I have been vehemently warned that these detestable books can only
be driven out by books more attractive, and I will not dispute the
proposition. There are histories and biographies that delight the student,
there is a poetry that is an inspiration and a solace to healthy minds,
which it would be useless, I admit, to offer to young men accustomed to
the dram-drinking of sensational literature. To them, at any rate, you
must bring books which will excite and gratify the love of the wonderful,
and carry them away from the commonplace world to regions of romance. And
why may not this be done? Why may there not be opened to them a nobler
world of wonder, the story of transcendent achievements, the romance of
history, the "fairy tales of science"? In the dominion of intellectual
wonders there are many fair fields, and only one corner which is a
stagnant fen. To the student, using that word in the wide sense which
covers all who study, you must bring solider and more attractive offerings
than the things you ask him to reject, and, again I ask, why should you
not?
It may be demanded: where are the writers to supply these captivating
books? Let me ask, Where, in 1840, were the writers who were exciting
universal enthusiasm in 1843? Like them, the men of the future are
consciously or unconsciously preparing for their task; they are waiting
the occasion--occasion which is the stage where alone great achievements
are performed. I could name, if it were needful, a few writers not
unworthy to succeed the men of '43, but their work will speak for them. I
prefer to say that if there were not one man of genius left of the Irish
race, there are already materials sufficient to furnish useful and
delightful books for half-a-dozen years.
With a memory running back over six decades of reading, I confidently
affirm that there are scattered in magazines and annuals, in luckless
books neglected in the hurry of our political march, in publications the
very names of which are forgotten by the present generation, Irish stories
of surpassing interest, fit to win and fascinate young Irish readers,
which would not degrade or debase them, but make them better men and
better Irishmen. And in the other domains of intellect, Irish writers
living in or belonging to a country where unhappily there was no market
for books, carried their work to periodicals where it has lain interred
for generations. How many rare and interesting books there are of which we
have lost all trace and memory! I put lately into the hands of a friend of
large intellectual appetite half-a-dozen little volumes of which he had
never heard. "This," I said, pointing to the first, "was written by a
Presbyterian minister, who describes with infinite humour the relations
between the squire and the peasant a hundred years ago, and it is almost
as true to-day as it was then. The writer was hanged as a rebel in '98 by
the very squire whom he had depicted, but his little book is read with
enthusiasm to this day by northern farmers who call themselves Orangemen
and Unionists. This second volume, I said, is the first poem written by
Bulwer Lytton, and the hero is an O'Neill who rallied his nation against
England. Here's a brochure on the Land Question, published in America
fifty years ago by a poor exiled Irishman, which anticipates the alarming
proclamation of first principles by Fintan Lalor and Henry George, and it
is as unknown in Ireland as the lost books of Livy." I do not suggest
that you should publish these books or any of them, but surely they are
finger-posts pointing to an unexplored territory. While I am speaking of
the resources for a popular library, which we have in hand, I may say that
one-third of the writings of Thomas Davis or Clarence Mangan has not been
collected in volumes. Davis's most remarkable achievement as an historian,
"The Patriot Parliament" he calls it--not the Parliament of Grattan, but
the Parliament of Tyrconnell, was prepared for publication by his own
hand, and it has remained without a publisher for two generations. Nothing
of the miscellaneous writings of John Blake Dillon, John O'Hagan, Thomas
Meagher, or Charles Kickham, have been gathered into books. And how much
of the wealth of our ancient Gaelic literature still lies buried in
untranslated MSS., or in the transactions of learned societies.
A perfectly honest and respectable blockhead asked me recently, "What is
the use of books for men working for their daily bread, or for young
fellows whose first business in life is to make some way in the world?"
From the highest class in the nation to the humblest, good books are the
salt of life. They make us wiser, manlier, more honest, and what is less
than any of these, more prosperous. It is not the least of their merits
that good books make manly men and patriotic citizens. Robert Burns
declared that reading the "Life of William Wallace" poured a tide of
Scottish sentiment into his veins, which would boil till the flood-gates
of life shut in eternal rest. A man who has done and suffered much for
Ireland during the last forty years, has often avowed that he was made a
patriot by reading the Poems of Thomas Davis; and how many other Irishmen
have confessed the same debt to him and his associates? The great
Dominican, Father Burke, and Professor Tyndall of Belfast, the fierce
Unionist, are equally warm in their acknowledgment of the effect produced
upon them in their youth by the writings of the Young Irelanders. The late
Judge O'Hagan, one of the most upright and gifted of Irishmen, used to
declare that the evening when he first read the address of John Blake
Dillon to the College Historical Society, he was a Whig, but the next day,
and ever after, he was a Nationalist. To how many of us is that Address
still inaccessible? Would it not be a beneficent work to republish it?
Surely there is no Irishman of any political persuasion who would not
welcome the opportunity of reading a work which produced such an effect on
such a man.
But the discipline of education is not for ornament merely, but for
practical use. Without it men and nations miss their path in life, and see
not at all, or only with purblind eyes, open roads to national prosperity.
In Australia I have known a generation of shepherds and sheep-farmers, who
long trod a soil seamed with gold, knowing nothing of the treasures
beneath their feet. Is not the Irish farmer often as ignorant of the
wealth which other nations draw from the earth, or from the enterprise
born of the leisure and security which the possession of the soil creates?
The domestic industries which help to make French farms prosperous are
just as suitable to our own country, and just as feasible in it. London is
supplied from Normandy with farm produce which would come more naturally
from Munster, and the French make their households pleasant with dainty
preparations of vegetables which the Irish fling away with contempt;
Switzerland is more destitute of coal than Ireland, but Switzerland
competes successfully with England in her own markets with manufactures
for which she does not possess even the raw material. When I met in
France, Italy, and Egypt the marmalade manufactured at Dundee, I felt it
like a silent reproach. Oranges do not grow in Dundee, and sugar is not
manufactured there, but enterprise and industrial education are native to
the soil. Is not this a department in which there is something to be
taught to the people by useful books? Ideas are the root of action, and
books are the cabinets of ideas. If work of a practical and patriotic
spirit is to be done in any country, books must be the beginning of that
work; and why should we not have such books?
What do we hope to make of Ireland?--this is the fundamental question on
which the character of education ought to depend. In Switzerland the bulk
of the people live on their own farms, not needing or desiring great
wealth, but enjoying free, simple lives, ennobled by the perfect liberty
which the poet declares is a child of the mountains. In Belgium there are
many husbandmen thriving on the benign industries cultivated at home,
which rear a nobler class of men than the stricken legions who serve the
steam-engine and the water-wheel. It is not for me to dogmatise on the
proper development of Ireland, but assuredly to be wise and successful it
must harmonise with the nature of the people, and correct it where
correction is needful. Education is far stronger than nature, and there is
no doubt the deficiencies in national character may be repaired by
discipline. The highest teaching of a people is to accustom them to have a
strict regard for the rights of others, to be prudent and temperate in
action, and to regard the whole nation as members of a common household.
To make our people politically free, yet leave them bond-slaves of some
debasing social system like that which crowds the mines and factories of
England with squalid victims, or make the artisans of France so often
godless scoffers, would be a poor result of all Ireland's labours and
sacrifices.
Liberty will do much for a nation, but it will not do everything. Among a
people who do not know and reverence their own ancestors, who do not
submit cheerfully to lawful authority, and do not love the eternal
principles of justice, it will do little. But moral sentiments, generous
impulses, religious feelings still survive in the Irish race, and they
give assurance that in that mystic clime on the verge of the Western
Ocean, where the more debasing currents of European civilisation only
reach it at high tide, there is place for a great experiment for humanity.
There within our circling seas we may rear a race in which the fine
qualities of the Celtic family, fortified by the sterner strength of the
North, and disciplined by the Norman genius of Munster may at last have
fair play; where, at lowest a pious and gallant race may after long
struggles and nameless sufferings possess their own soil and their own
souls in peace.
Let me say, though I have said it more than once before, that the Celts
are among the most teachable of races. The drill, the jacket, the
discipline, transform an Irish peasant into a sub-constable with almost as
military a carriage, and as expert an eye and hand as a veteran of the
Peninsula. A few years in a National School, and the boy who emerged from
a smoky and squalid cabin, shared with a pig, is turned into a clean and
shapely youth, fit to wrestle with the world, and perhaps to win the
match. Look at a railway porter, or a railway policeman--the decent
uniform and the punctual system soon make a new man of the peasant. An
English priest in Paris, with little prejudice in favour of our race,
assured me that no girls crossed the sea who acquire so speedily the
carriage, deportment, and grace which distinguish French women, as girls
from Munster, coming perhaps as servants to some great lady. And this
physical training is a small achievement compared with the result of
discipline on the _intellect_ and _practical power_ of cultivated,
aspiring men. The one multiplies iron, the other multiplies rarest gold of
Ophir. But we have not, I fear, made even a beginning in the practical
education which makes industry prosperous. I lived for a quarter of a
century in Australia, and there rarely came an English ship into the port
of Melbourne that did not bring me letters of introduction with young
Irishmen who hoped to make their home in the new country. Such of them as
it was possible to place in the public service, and that was a limited
number, did their work extremely well. But after I had done all that I
reasonably could do--for I was administering the affairs of a colony where
three-fourths of the inhabitants were English and Scotch, and the
patronage had to be distributed in just relation to the population--an
enormous remnant remained to be provided for. Some of them were as bright,
intelligent young fellows as I ever met in the world, but they were wholly
untrained in any business. They had no profession and no trade; they were
merely nice fellows, and agreeable idle gentlemen. Now what became of them
in the new country, where there was work and pay for everybody who was
willing and able to work, and brought to the public service some capacity
worth paying for? Multitudes of them sank to be waiters in hotels,
barbers, and cabmen. The man who had a trade prospered in a wonderful
manner, the man who had a profession prospered, according to his capacity,
but the man who was ready "to do anything" generally found nothing to do.
It has been asked scornfully what we can hope to effect in a little
country with diminishing population and limited resources? Ought not some
Irish student to teach our people that it is not great states like those
which the greed of conquerors has aggregated, but states scarcely larger
than an Irish province which have done the most memorable work for
humanity and civilisation? The achievements in arts, arms, science, and
discovery, and in the art of government of the Greek Republics, of the
Italian Republics, of the trampled provinces of Spain in the Low
Countries, of the little rib taken out of the side of Spain, and called
Portugal, how emphatically they teach the lesson that it is not by the
quantity but by the quality of their men that states are glorified! A
little book which told this great story would be a boon to our people.
It would be presumptuous to name the books which ought to be published in
such an enterprise, but we may profitably consider the class and character
to be preferred.
Big books of history are only for students, they are never read by the
people. But they will read picturesque biographies, which are history
individualised, or vivid sketches of memorable eras, which are history
vitalised. A dozen lives of representative Irishmen would teach more of
the training and growth of Ireland than a library of annals and State
papers. They would familiarise us with great men, whom the Celt loves
better than systems or policies. This is the class of books in which we
are most deficient; there is no memoir of Roger O'Moore, none of Luke
Wadding, none of Patrick Sarsfield, none of a man as fertile in intellect,
as firm in judgment as any of these, a man whom some of us have seen in
the flesh, the wise and fearless J. K. L. Mr. Fitzpatrick has collected
his letters and literary remains with commendable care, it only needs that
some sympathetic student should ponder over them till the electric spark
is kindled, that a new figure may be given to our imagination for ever.
The first great poet who sang the wrongs of Ireland with civilised Europe
for an audience, has never had an adequate memoir. He has been singularly
unfortunate in his biographer; Lord John Russell discharged on the public
several cart-loads of undigested diaries as "The Memoirs and Journals of
Thomas Moore." They are of little use to anybody at present, but a skilful
literary workman, or a chemist of the intellect, could extract a
delightful little volume from the chaotic mass.
How profitable it would be if the best men of this time would contribute
each of them a study to a gallery of representative Irishmen! We are
accustomed to say, with not unjust reproach, that England knows little of
our country; but, alas! my friends, we Irishmen know too little of it
ourselves. 'Tis a great possession given to us by a gracious God, which we
do not take adequate pains to comprehend; and the philosopher has declared
with profound truth that men only possess what they understand.
And we want works reproduced which have disappeared out of circulation.
The hundred best Irish books have been skilfully discussed in the
newspapers, but the young student soon discovers that half of the hundred
are out of print, or locked up in costly editions. Fifty pounds would not
purchase the volumes recommended. But it would not be impossible to
produce a library containing these very books, or a collection varied by
admitting some books more pertinent to our present wants, for fifty
shillings, to be paid over a period of three or four years--an expenditure
which would be burthensome to few Irishmen accustomed to read.
How are the good books to be circulated effectually? I have always
insisted, and I do now emphatically insist that if this thing is to be
well done the young men of Irish birth at home and abroad must regard it
as their work, and be determined it shall succeed. They must supply
canvassers in every centre of Irish feeling in Ireland, England, Scotland,
America, and Australia. And where the young men are still struggling for a
foothold in the world, the work ought not to be made burthensome to them,
but reproductive. There exists in America a system of canvassing agents by
which books are brought to the remotest farmhouses, and the canvassers
paid a reasonable compensation. Ought we not to imitate this method in our
enterprise?
It will be our duty to see that the literary labourers also shall be
fairly paid, for they are commonly neither a sordid nor even a provident
race. It will be a labour of love to them to feed the mind of their
country, as it has been a labour of love to the men of their class
everywhere. Who can read without a glow of sympathy how the struggling
Scotch farmer and exciseman who gave immortal songs to Scotland, refused
pecuniary reward for a work which he desired to be one of pure
patriotism; or how the indigent French poet, living contentedly in an
humble Pension in the Champs Elysees, on an annuity from his publisher,
declined a seat in the Chamber of Deputies from the Republic which he had
done so much to make possible, and still more emphatically declined all
aid or recognition from the Bonaparte family, to whose cause he had
recalled the French nation by splendid but too indiscriminate panegyrics
on its founder; or how our own national poet, who alone in modern times is
fit to be named with the other two as a writer of songs that will live for
ever, rejected in turn a national tribute, a seat in Parliament, and the
assistance of opulent friends under unexpected calamity--Moore, like Burns
and Beranger, being determined that the purity of his devotion to his
country should run no risk of being misunderstood?
Wherever there is an Irish bookseller, at home or in the two new worlds,
who has taken an intelligent, not merely a sordid interest in his
business, he is the natural agent of this design; and in the many
districts where there is no bookseller at present a _quasi_ bookseller
might be created. If the popular journals in Dublin encourage their agents
to act on behalf of the enterprize, a solid body of retail dealers would
be at once available. I have spoken only of Irish readers, our duty begins
with them, but it does not end with them. Ireland has many friends in
England, and good books have friends everywhere. The volumes of such a
Library ought to be found on the bookstalls from Liverpool to Edinburgh,
they ought to be proffered to the passengers by the great transatlantic
routes, and to the eager crowd of purchasers who throng the book arcades
of Melbourne and Sydney. Can all this be done? Who will be our Minister of
Public Instruction, to organise it and set it in motion? If there be such
a one, I think I see here many who will be his willing associates and
assistants. For one old man who can only hope to see the good work fairly
begun, I can promise that whatever he can do with his moderate resources
to help it in money, or with his waning powers to help it with cordial
co-operation, shall not be wanting.
If we can revive the love of noble books among our people, that is a
result which standing alone is worth striving for. To love noble books is
to share with statesmen and philosophers the pleasure on which they set
the highest price. Time has made trite and commonplace the great saying of
Fénélon, "If the crowns of Europe were laid at my feet in exchange for
books and the love of reading, I would spurn them all." Our own Goldsmith
declares that taking up a new book worth reading is like making a new
friend; a friend from whom we will never be separated by any of the
melancholy mischances on which human friendships are so often wrecked. But
good books will do more than this--they will awaken all that is best in
our nature, and teach us to live worthier lives. They will do for us what
we rarely permit the closest friend to do--they will teach us our faults
and how to amend them. What they might do, not for the individual, but for
the nation, I dare not predict--the possibilities are so prodigious. One
of the keenest intellects of the eighteenth century declared that the
world was ruled by books. What, think you, has most profoundly altered the
condition of the world in the last hundred years? Kings, statesmen,
conquerors? Not so; an armful of books, about as many as a schoolboy
carries in his satchel. The result of these books was not always
beneficent, but it was always immense. The war of arms and of diplomacy
which England carried on against the French Republic and the French Empire
for a dozen years, and which left us the National Debt as a memorial, took
its first impulse from a little book written by Edmund Burke. The
Revolution which it combatted was as certainly the fruit of other books.
The declaration of Irish independence pronounced by the Convention at
Dunganon, and confirmed by the parliament in College Green, simply
formulated the doctrine of a little volume by Molyneux which the House of
Commons at Westminster had caused to be burned by the common hangman. All
that has been done in later days for Free Trade and unrestricted
competition, for the self-government of Colonies, and the education of the
people, was first taught in the treatise of an Edinburgh professor; a book
which has influenced the current of thought and legislation in the British
Empire, and far beyond it, more than any other book written since the
invention of printing.[1] The desire to unfetter the negro which
culminated in the decrees of Abraham Lincoln and the victories of Ulysses
Grant began in a work of genius written by a woman and read by the whole
civilized world. The successive despots expelled during the last sixty
years by the French people, from Charles the Tenth to Napoleon the Third,
were driven out less at the point of the bayonet than at the point of the
pen. The social changes wrought by books in the same era we would,
perhaps, relinquish less willingly than any of these political gains. The
humanising of English law long steeped in blood and tears, is less
attributable to bench and bar than to the books of Jeremy Bentham. If the
Court of Chancery is no longer the patron and factor of dilapidated
edifices and ruined fortunes, if the Dotheboys halls of Yorkshire are shut
up, is it not chiefly to a couple of novels by Charles Dickens we owe
these salutary changes? One little volume written by a woman, critics
assure us, routed filth and laziness out of the farmhouses of Scotland. It
was the novelist Charles Reade who made Englishmen ashamed of the
murderous silent system in prisons, and it was he and another novelist who
put an end (for I hope the end has come) to the shameful abuses of private
lunatic asylums. And it was only the other day that, by a little domestic
story, Walter Besant, with the magic wand of art, raised a Palace of
Delight, where the labouring poor find refreshment and culture in the
dreary desert of East London--so fertilising and fruitful are good books.
Our books may not achieve any of these marvels, but there are results not
beyond their reach. England holds the sympathies of all the communities
which share her blood, less by obeying the same laws than by loving the
same books. And if we do not fail in our task the volumes of the Irish
Library will be read by the Irish settler in Canada, the Irish digger in
California and Australia, our missionaries and soldiers in India, the
adventurous pioneer in Africa, the exile far away in Florida, in Michigan,
in Egypt, or in Siam, with more love and enthusiasm than even in the
homesteads of Leinster and Munster.
BOOKS FOR THE IRISH PEOPLE.
It is nearly a year since I opened to this Society the design of inducing
young Irishmen of the present generation to take up anew a task which
famine and political disaster interrupted among their predecessors--the
task of teaching the Irish people to understand their own country. The
Irish people have never ceased to love their country, they have never
shrunk from any labour or sacrifice to serve her, but they do not
understand Ireland as the Swiss understand Switzerland; as the Flemings
understand the sandbank which their industry has turned into a model farm;
or as the Venetians understand the primitive quagmire which Italian genius
transformed into one of the wonders of the world.
A year may seem a long time to have employed in preliminary arrangements;
but it was not wasted. There were many difficulties to overcome and they
have been overcome. We are now in a position to announce that our first
volume is printed, and ready to be issued, that the second volume is in
the printer's hands, and successive volumes for more than a year are in
preparation. I may mention that the original design of acting through a
Limited Liability Company was abandoned in favour of a better plan; a
successful and experienced publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, takes the
responsibility of producing the books, leaving the men of letters to the
task for which they are fitter, that of devising and writing them.
The new Irish Library will be offered to all who desire to welcome it, in
New York and Melbourne and the continents to which they belong, as well as
in Dublin and London; and we hope by an organised system of colportage to
carry the books to many districts where there are no regular booksellers
at present, or no market for Irish books.
When I say we do not understand Ireland, I do not mean merely that we are
imperfectly acquainted with its history, its literature, its art, and its
memorable men; but which of us studies Irish statistics till he
understands them as he does a current account with a tradesman or a
banker? Which of us studies the topography, the political and commercial
geography, the botany, the geology, the resources and deficiencies of the
country so as to qualify him to handle its interests, in a parish or a
parliament, if that task should present itself?
The prosperous wiseacre whom the Germans call a Philistine, and the French
an _épicier_, will tell you that study does not pay. But that respectable
citizen may be assured that whatever he values most in his narrow life,
whatever adds to its comfort and convenience, whatever simplifies and
facilitates his beloved trade (of which steam and electricity are the
nerves and sinews) is nothing else than the remote result of some
student's midnight toil. The garments he wears, the furniture of his trim
home, not less than the laws which protect his life and the customs which
render it easy and pleasant, even the ideas grown commonplace by time
which he daily thinks he is thinking, were discovered, invented, or
brought from regions more civilised, by men whose toil he undervalues; and
if all he owes to study and the intellectual enterprise it begets were
snatched away, his home would be almost as naked as the Redman's wigwam.
But if the man of business be moreover a man of meditation and culture, he
and his class are among the most indispensable forces of a nation, for it
is such men who turn the student's airy speculation into accomplished
fact.
Of all studies that one which a nation can least safely dispense with is a
study of its own history. Some one has invented the audacious axiom that
history never repeats itself, but it would be truer to affirm that history
is always repeating itself; assuredly in our own history identical
weaknesses and identical virtues recur from generation to generation, and
to know them may teach us where weak places in national and individual
character need to be fortified and strong ones developed.
Of politics, if it were only the politics of a parish, what can we know
worth knowing unless the lamp of history lights the misty way? And the
great problem of all--for what special career do the gifts and
deficiencies of our race, their position on the globe, their past and
their present career best fit them?--only a familiarity with their annals
will enable any one to say.
Another use of historical study is to enable us to vindicate our race from
unjust aspersions. This is no sentimental gain, but one eminently
practical; Ireland and Irishmen suffer wrong from systematic
misrepresentation, which only better knowledge will cure. Which of us has
not heard mimics of Macaulay disparaging the Irish Parliament of James II.
as a disgrace to civilisation, or Mr. Froude's gloomy devotees lift their
hands in horror at the Rising of 1641? We purpose to face these calumnies.
In the first volume of our series, Thomas Davis, reprinting the principal
Acts of James' Parliament, criticises them in careful detail, and finds
them for the most part just, moderate, and generous. Whoever takes up the
story of 1641, in the same judicial spirit cannot fail to pronounce that
though in the end barbarities were committed on both sides of that
struggle, according to the evil habit of the age throughout Europe, the
original design of the old inhabitants to repossess themselves of lands
taken from them by fraud and violence a generation earlier, was a design
which the twelve apostles might have sanctioned. I read quite recently,
with a good deal of surprise, a new reproach to Irishmen, derived from the
history of the last century. It was not Celts, we are told, but Normans
and Saxons, who served the Empire with distinction a century ago in peace
and war. Marvellous fact, indeed, that the Catholic Celt did not
distinguish himself as a statesman or a general when he was peremptorily
shut out by law from the Senate and the Council of War, and that he did
not make scientific and practical discoveries when he was deliberately
denied education. But history will teach us that wherever there was an
open door, as on the Continent and in the New World beyond the Atlantic,
and in later times in all the Colonies of the Empire, the Celt has done
notable work, and never in a solitary instance been unfaithful to the
trust so tardily and so reluctantly confided to him. These mordant critics
would exalt the men of English descent by disparaging the men of Celtic
breed, but in vain. We regard all Irishmen who love their country,
whatever be their creed or pedigree, as equally our countrymen. We
rejoice in the splendid record of success in arms, arts, literature, and
diplomacy which the Irish minority can exhibit; we acknowledge thankfully
that wherever the rank of native patriots became thin or broken, men of
the other race leaped into their perilous places; and we cannot look on
the noble edifices which adorn the Irish capital, two of them not excelled
by the Palace of Legislation or the Palace of Commerce in any capital of
Europe, without thankfully remembering how much our country owes to the
cultivated genius of the minority. If the races who inhabit these islands
are ever to understand and honour each other, it must be on condition of
comprehending the past, not hiding it away; and history is the reservoir
from which such knowledge is drawn.
I know no civilised country, except Ireland, whose history is not familiar
to its people. In England you encounter English history everywhere; in
literature, in art, on the stage, and even in the pulpit. In France, not
merely endless books, but museums and picture galleries are devoted to the
illustration of French history. In the United States the schoolboy is
taught the principles of the American constitution as part of the regular
curriculum. Even in Australia its brief history of a single century has
been made a school-book in State schools; but in Ireland the national
history is never named in the schools called national, and that it may be
known volunteers must attempt the task which the State has neglected and
forbidden.
If the statesman gladly acknowledges that such intellectual discipline
makes men better citizens, the moralist rejoices to know that it makes
them better men. I can confidently affirm, for I have seen the prodigy
wrought, that strenuous self-discipline, with love of country for its
inspiration, burns up the grosser sentiments in young men, and teaches
them that life has happier as well as nobler pursuits than
self-indulgence; teaches them to abjure sensual and slavish vices, and
warm their souls with the divine flame of patriotism. An Irish poet has
named the teacher "God's second priest," and a great ecclesiastic, who was
also a wise guide in mundane affairs, the illustrious J. K. L. declared
more than half a century ago that religion could not dispense with this
potent auxiliary.
"Religion herself," he said, "loses her beauty and influence when not
attended by education; and her power, splendour, and majesty are
never so exalted as when cultivated genius and refined taste become
her heralds and her handmaids. Many have become fools for Christ, and
by their simplicity and piety have exalted the glory of the Cross;
but Paul, not John, was the Apostle of the Nations; and doctors, even
more than prophets, have been sent to declare the truth before kings
and princes, and the nations of the earth."
One of the worst defects in our course of discipline in and out of school
(for a young man gives himself his most effectual education after he has
escaped from the hands of the schoolmaster) is that it is rarely
practical. We learn little thoroughly, and little of a useful and
reproductive character, and we commonly pay the penalty in a lower place
in the world. As far as I am able to judge Scotsmen are not gifted by
nature with qualities superior to those of Irishmen, but in more than one
country I have seen Irishmen performing some of the roughest and most
menial offices in gangs directed by Scotch overseers. And why? No
intelligent man has any doubt of the cause. For nearly two centuries
Scotland has had excellent parish schools, where the children of the
industrious population get a practical and religious education at the
cost of the State. In Dublin I have seen two of the most national
institutions in the country, a great Irish journal and a great Irish
publishing house, managed by Scotsmen. Again why? For no intelligible
reason except that the Scotch boy is taught mathematics and trained early
in business. This defect, like so many of our shortcomings, has an origin
which we must search for in history. Till 1833 there were no public
schools in Ireland which were not openly designed to proselytise the
people, and since there have been neutral schools, the principal condition
of their existence has been the exclusion from their teaching of the
history and religion of the people. I remember Mr. Bright saying to me
during some temporary repulse of the North in the American Civil War: "Be
assured the end is not at all doubtful; the States which have had three
generations of solid education must win against a mob of arrogant
self-indulgent slave-drivers." I felt bitterly that the converse of the
axiom might be applied to our own country. And if we look into the matter
the happiness and independence of nations seem everywhere to bear a
strict proportion to their moral and intellectual training. Switzerland
spends as much money on education as on soldiers and their costly
equipment; Denmark half as much, and Belgium about a third, and these are
all prosperous and contented little States. But the great empires which
clutch territory and ignore men, spend prodigally on their armies and
parsimoniously on their people. In Prussia education obtains scarcely a
fifth of the amount lavished on preparations for war; in England only
one-sixth the amount; in Italy less than a tenth; and in Russia a hundred
pounds are squandered on turning peasants into soldiers for every twenty
shillings spent on making the peasants fitter to perform their duties in
the world. For my part I would rather see our people developed according
to their special gifts than see them masters of limitless territory or
inexhaustible gold reefs. A Celtic people trained to become all that their
nature fits them to be--humane, joyous, and generous, living diligent,
tranquil lives in their own land, and sending out from time to time, as of
old, men whose gifts and faculties fitted them to become benefactors of
mankind--that is the destiny I desire for my country. None of us can be
ignorant of the fact that a change has come over the national character in
latter times which is not altogether a change for the better. The people
are more alert and resolute than of old, and that is well; but they are
more gloomy and resentful, and something of the piety and simplicity of
old seems to have disappeared. Nature made them blithe, frank, and
hospitable; pleasant comrades and trusty friends; but hard laws and hard
taskmasters have sometimes perverted their native disposition. To my
thinking that patient, long-suffering, bitterly wronged people still
preserve fresh and perennial many of the spiritual endowments which are
among the greatest possessions of a nation. But, like soldiers returning
from a long campaign, who bring back something of the manners and _morale_
of the camp, twenty years of agitation, which however just and necessary
was inevitably demoralising, has blunted their moral sensibility. Blessed
be those who will warn them that to be just and considerate towards
friends and opponents, to refrain from cruelty or wrong under any
temptation, and to speak and act and applaud only the rigid truth, are
the practices which make nations honoured and happy.
What writers ought to aim at, who hope to benefit the people, is to fill
up the blanks which an imperfect education, and the fever of a tempestuous
time, have left in their knowledge, so that their lives might become
contented and fruitful. Let me take an instance--I have sometimes
marvelled that no one has made it his special task to teach the "tenants
at will," who have become proprietors under the Land Purchase Act, what
wonders they may accomplish for themselves and the country. To become
prosperous and independent by systematic industry is not the greatest of
their opportunities; by liberal education and healthy spiritualised lives,
spent on the paternal estate, they may make their sons and daughters types
of whatever is best in the Celtic character. But they have much to learn
and few to teach them. In the United States there is a public department
whose business is to furnish settlers on the public lands with the latest
information on agricultural science, and with a supply of suitable seeds
for new experiments. In the Colonies they are helped also, though less
effectually I think. In Ireland scarcely any one has given them so much as
good advice or good wishes. I hope some one will write in the new Irish
Library a book for this class, describing the _petites cultures_, and the
localised industries of the Continent and the honest outdoor enjoyments
which help to make life happy. Why may these men not realise the dream of
the poet of what Irish farmers, free from feudal bonds, might become?
"The Happy Land,
Studded with cheerful homesteads fair to see,
With garden grace and household symmetry;
How grand the wide-brow'd peasant's lordly mien
The matron's smile serene!
O happy, happy land!"
I have refrained from specifying books which might be written, and books
which ought to be republished, because a design is fatally discounted by
promising too much at the outset. It is perhaps enough to say that they
must be issued at a price which the people can afford to pay, or they will
not buy them; and they must interest them, or they will not read them,
though they got them for nothing. Although it is an essential basis of the
enterprise to publish books useful to the people, that is not enough. If
you would drive out the impure and atheistical but sensational literature
borrowed from the French, you must replace it by stimulating stories of
our own land: and it will not be safe to neglect poetry, for as a recent
poet sings--
"Dear to the Gael's the clash of swords,
And dear the ring of rhyme."
The editors will not print anything which they do not believe useful and
beneficial, but they must not be held responsible for every sentence and
sentiment in books originated, or reprinted, under their direction. A too
rigid strictness might involve an amount of alteration, which would be
fair neither to the author nor the reader, and would be fatal to the
generous and liberal freedom in which alone literature thrives. I will
only add that if the Irish people second our design cordially, the stream
which will now begin to flow shall not soon run dry. But remember that
success depends mainly on you and your compeers. What is the use of
writing books if they are not read and pondered on, and their lessons
taken to heart? Without a sympathetic audience the orator is only a lay
figure, without a sympathetic circle of readers the writer is a wasted
force. We labour for the young men and young women of Ireland, on whom the
future of our race depends; and our hope is that they may respond as
cordially as their predecessors did fifty years ago; that they may aim to
gain a complete knowledge of their own country, and come forth from the
study steeped in Irish memories, proud of Irish traditions, panting with
Irish hopes. Every Irishman, anywhere in the world, who wishes well to our
design, can help it a little; but there is one class whose good wishes are
indispensable. Father Hogan, a professor of Maynooth College, has appealed
to his brethren in the ministry, in language which I prefer to any I could
employ on the subject:--
"None like the working clergy (he says) can realise the baneful
effects that are produced by pernicious books, and how fatal to the
innocence of youth, and to the strength of national as well as of
personal character, they so often prove. There are none, moreover,
who have the same responsibility cast upon them to oppose the current
of evil, and to maintain at the same time the noble and traditional
generosity of the Church towards literature and men of letters. Our
denunciations of dangerous books, and especially of light and
licentious reading, would be justly regarded as mere empty sound were
we unwilling to lend a helping hand to a movement, the chief object
of which is to stir up and encourage amongst the young men of Ireland
a wholesome desire for what is good, and a salutary contempt for what
is either silly or debased."