truism; all the world admits it, England does not deny it. But the English
retort is ready. You have not prospered, they say, because you would not
settle down contentedly, like the Scotch, and form part of the Empire.
"Twenty years of good, resolute, grandfatherly government," said a
well-known Englishman, will solve the Irish question. He possibly made the
period too short, but let us suppose this. Let us suppose for a
moment--which is impossible--that there were to arise a series of
Cromwells in England for the space of one hundred years, able
administrators of the Empire, careful rulers of Ireland, developing to the
utmost our national resources, whilst they unremittingly stamped out every
spark of national feeling, making Ireland a land of wealth and factories,
whilst they extinguished every thought and every idea that was Irish, and
left us, at last, after a hundred years of good government, fat, wealthy,
and populous, but with all our characteristics gone, with every external
that at present differentiates us from the English lost or dropped; all
our Irish names of places and people turned into English names; the Irish
language completely extinct; the O's and the Macs dropped; our Irish
intonation changed, as far as possible by English schoolmasters into
something English; our history no longer remembered or taught; the names
of our rebels and martyrs blotted out; our battlefields and traditions
forgotten; the fact that we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight
and memory, and let me now put the question--How many Irishmen are there
who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly
such a question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference
between the English and Irish race. Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump
to make the exchange, and I as firmly believe that nine Irishmen out of
ten would indignantly refuse it.
And yet this awful idea of complete Anglicisation, which I have here put
before you in all its crudity, is, and has been, making silent inroads
upon us for nearly a century.
Its inroads have been silent, because, had the Gaelic race perceived what
was being done, or had they been once warned of what was taking place in
their own midst, they would, I think, never have allowed it. When the
picture of complete Anglicisation is drawn for them in all its nakedness
Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly a power and refuses to surrender its
birthright.
What lies at the back of the sentiments of nationality with which the
Irish millions seem so strongly leavened, what can prompt them to applaud
such sentiments as:
"They say the British empire owes much to Irish hands,
That Irish valour fixed her flag o'er many conquered lands;
And ask if Erin takes no pride in these her gallant sons,
Her Wolseleys and her Lawrences, her Wolfes and Wellingtons.
Ah! these were of the Empire--we yield them to her fame,
And ne'er in Erin's orisons are heard their alien name;
But those for whom her heart beats high and benedictions swell,
They died upon the scaffold and they pined within the cell."
Of course it is a very composite feeling which prompts them; but I believe
that what is largely behind it is the half unconscious feeling that the
race which at one time held possession of more than half Europe, which
established itself in Greece, and burned infant Rome, is now--almost
extirpated and absorbed elsewhere--making its last stand for independence
in this island of Ireland; and do what they may the race of to-day cannot
wholly divest itself from the mantle of its own past. Through early Irish
literature, for instance, can we best form some conception of what that
race really was, which, after overthrowing and trampling on the primitive
peoples of half Europe, was itself forced in turn to yield its speech,
manners, and independence to the victorious eagles of Rome. We alone of
the nations of Western Europe escaped the claws of those birds of prey; we
alone developed ourselves naturally upon our own lines outside of and free
from all Roman influence; we alone were thus able to produce an early art
and literature, _our_ antiquities can best throw light upon the
pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe, and--we are our father's sons.
There is really no exaggeration in all this, although Irishmen are
sometimes prone to overstating as well as to forgetting. Westwood himself
declares that, were it not for Irishmen, these islands would possess no
primitive works of art worth the mentioning; Jubainville asserts that
early Irish literature is that which best throws light upon the manners
and customs of his own ancestors the Gauls; and Zimmer, who has done so
much for Celtic philology, has declared that only a spurious criticism can
make an attempt to doubt about the historical character of the chief
persons of our two epic cycles, that of Cuchullain and of Finn. It is
useless elaborating this point; and Dr. Sigerson has already shown in his
opening lecture the debt of gratitude which in many respects Europe owes
to ancient Ireland. The dim consciousness of this is one of those things
which are at the back of Irish national sentiment, and our business,
whether we be Unionists or Nationalists, should be to make this dim
consciousness an active and potent feeling, and thus increase our sense of
self-respect and of honour.
What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the Ireland of to-day
is the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school
of Europe and the torch of learning. It is true that Northmen made some
minor settlements in it in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is true that
the Normans made extensive settlements during the succeeding centuries,
but none of those broke the continuity of the social life of the island.
Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a
generation or two fully Irishised, and more Hibernian than the Hibernians
themselves, and even after the Cromwellian plantation the children of
numbers of the English soldiers who settled in the south and midlands,
were, after forty years' residence, and after marrying Irish wives,
turned into good Irishmen, and unable to speak a word of English, while
several Gaelic poets of the last century have, like Father English, the
most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of
the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster, where
the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our
dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult
to absorb, and in the ownership of the land, eight-ninths of which belongs
to people many of whom always lived, or live, abroad, and not half of whom
Ireland can be said to have assimilated.
During all this time the continuation of Erin's national life centred,
according to our way of looking at it, not so much in the Cromwellian or
Williamite landholders who sat in College Green, and governed the country,
as in the mass of the people whom Dean Swift considered might be entirely
neglected, and looked upon as hewers of wood and drawers of water; the men
who, nevertheless, constituted the real working population, and who were
living on in the hopes of better days; the men who have since made
America, and have within the last ten years proved what an important
factor they may be in wrecking or in building the British Empire. These
are the men of whom our merchants, artisans, and farmers mostly consist,
and in whose hands is to-day the making or marring of an Irish nation.
But, alas, _quantum mutatus ab illo_! What the battleaxe of the Dane, the
sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have
accomplished ourselves. We have at last broken the continuity of Irish
life, and just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to
largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived
and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from the past, yet
scarcely in touch with the present. It has lost since the beginning of
this century almost all that connected it with the era of Cuchullain and
of Ossian, that connected it with the Christianisers of Europe, that
connected it with Brian Boru and the heroes of Clontarf, with the O'Neills
and O'Donnells, with Rory O'More, with the Wild Geese, and even to some
extent with the men of '98. It has lost all that they had--language,
traditions, music, genius, and ideas. Just when we should be starting to
build up anew the Irish race and the Gaelic nation--as within our own
recollection Greece has been built up anew--we find ourselves despoiled of
the bricks of nationality. The old bricks that lasted eighteen hundred
years are destroyed; we must now set to, to bake new ones, if we can, on
other ground and of other clay. Imagine for a moment the restoration of a
German-speaking Greece.
The bulk of the Irish race really lived in the closest contact with the
traditions of the past and the national life of nearly eighteen hundred
years, until the beginning of this century. Not only so, but during the
whole of the dark Penal times they produced amongst themselves a most
vigorous literary development. Their schoolmasters and wealthy farmers,
unwearied scribes, produced innumerable manuscripts in beautiful writing,
each letter separated from another as in Greek, transcripts both of the
ancient literature of their sires and of the more modern literature
produced by themselves. Until the beginning of the present century there
was no county, no barony, and, I may almost say, no townland which did
not boast of an Irish poet, the people's representative of those ancient
bards who died out with the extirpation of the great Milesian families.
The literary activity of even the eighteenth century among the Gaels was
very great, not in the South alone, but also in Ulster--the number of
poets it produced was something astonishing. It did not, however, produce
many works in Gaelic prose, but it propagated translations of many pieces
from the French, Latin, Spanish, and English. Every well-to-do farmer
could read and write Irish, and many of them could understand even archaic
Irish. I have myself heard persons reciting the poems of Donogha More
O'Daly, Abbot of Boyle, in Roscommon, who died sixty years before Chaucer
was born. To this very day the people have a word for archaic Irish, which
is much the same as though Chaucer's poems were handed down amongst the
English peasantry, but required a special training to understand. This
training, however, nearly every one of fair education during the Penal
times possessed, nor did they begin to lose their Irish training and
knowledge until after the establishment of Maynooth and the rise of
O'Connell. These two events made an end of the Gaelicism of the Gaelic
race, although a great number of poets and scribes existed even down to
the forties and fifties of the present century, and a few may linger on
yet in remote localities. But it may be said, roughly speaking, that the
ancient Gaelic civilisation died with O'Connell, largely, I am afraid,
owing to his example and his neglect of inculcating the necessity of
keeping alive racial customs, language, and traditions, in which with the
one notable exception of our scholarly idealist, Smith O'Brien, he has
been followed until a year ago by almost every leader of the Irish race.
Thomas Davis and his brilliant band of Young Irelanders came just at the
dividing of the line, and tried to give to Ireland a new literature in
English to replace the literature which was just being discarded. It
succeeded and it did not succeed. It was a most brilliant effort, but the
old bark had been too recently stripped off the Irish tree, and the trunk
could not take as it might have done to a fresh one. It was a new
departure, and at first produced a violent effect. Yet in the long run it
failed to properly leaven our peasantry who might, perhaps, have been
reached upon other lines. I say they _might_ have been reached upon other
lines because it is quite certain that even well on into the beginning of
this century, Irish poor scholars and schoolmasters used to gain the
greatest favour and applause by reading out manuscripts in the people's
houses at night, some of which manuscripts had an antiquity of a couple of
hundred years or more behind them, and which, when they got illegible from
age, were always recopied. The Irish peasantry at that time were all to
some extent cultured men, and many of the better off ones were scholars
and poets. What have we now left of all that? Scarcely a trace. Many of
them read newspapers indeed, but who reads, much less recites, an epic
poem, or chants an elegiac or even a hymn?
Wherever Irish throughout Ireland continued to be spoken, there the
ancient MSS. continued to be read, there the epics of Cuchullain, Conor
MacNessa, Déirdre, Finn, Oscar, and Ossian continued to be told, and there
poetry and music held sway. Some people may think I am exaggerating in
asserting that such a state of things existed down to the present
century, but it is no exaggeration. I have myself spoken with men from
Cavan and Tyrone who spoke excellent Irish. Carleton's stories bear
witness to the prevalence of the Irish language and traditions in Ulster
when he began to write. My friend Mr. Lloyd has found numbers in Antrim
who spoke good Irish. And, as for Leinster, my friend Mr. Cleaver informed
me that when he lived in Wicklow a man came by from the County Carlow in
search of work who could not speak a word of English. Old labourers from
Connacht, who used to go to reap the harvest in England and take shipping
at Drogheda, told me that at that time, fifty years ago, Irish was spoken
by every one round that town. I have met an old man in Wicklow, not twenty
miles from Dublin, whose parents always repeated the Rosary in Irish. My
friend Father O'Growny, who has done and is doing so much for the Irish
language and literature at Maynooth, tells me that there, within twenty
miles of Dublin, are three old people who still speak Irish. O'Curry found
people within seven miles of Dublin city who had never heard English in
their youth at all, except from the car-drivers of the great town. I gave
an old man in the street who begged from me, a penny, only a few days ago,
saying, "_Sin pighin agad_," and when he answered in Irish I asked him
where he was from, and he said from _Newna_ (_n' Eamhain_), _i.e._, Navan.
Last year I was in Canada and out hunting with some Red Indians, and we
spent a night in the last white man's house in the last settlement on the
brink of the primeval forest; and judging from a peculiarly Hibernian
physiognomy that the man was Irish, I addressed him in Gaelic, and to the
intense astonishment both of whites and Indians we entered into a
conversation which none of them understood; and it turned out that he was
from within three miles of Kilkenny, and had been forty years in that
country without forgetting the language he had spoken as a child, and I,
although from the centre of Connacht, understood him perfectly. When my
father was a young boy in the county Leitrim, not far from Longford, he
seldom heard the farm labourers and tenants speak anything but Irish
amongst themselves. So much for Ulster and Leinster, but Connacht and
Munster were until quite recently completely Gaelic. In fact, I may
venture to say, that, up to the beginning of the present century, neither
man, woman, nor child of the Gaelic race, either of high blood or low
blood, existed in Ireland who did not either speak Irish or understand it.
But within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity,
deliberately thrown away our birthright and Anglicised ourselves. None of
the children of those people of whom I have spoken know Irish, and the
race will from henceforth be changed; for as Monsieur Jubainville says of
the influence of Rome upon Gaul, England "has definitely conquered us, she
has even imposed upon us her language, that is to say, the form of our
thoughts during every instant of our existence." It is curious that those
who most fear West Britainism have so eagerly consented to imposing upon
the Irish race what, according to Jubainville, who in common with all the
great scholars of the continent, seems to regret it very much, is "the
form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence."
So much for the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation, the loss of
our language. I have often heard people thank God that if the English gave
us nothing else they gave us at least their language. In this way they
put a bold face upon the matter, and pretend that the Irish language is
not worth knowing, and has no literature. But the Irish language _is_
worth knowing, or why would the greatest philologists of Germany, France,
and Italy be emulously studying it, and it _does_ possess a literature, or
why would a German savant have made the calculation that the books written
in Irish between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, and still extant,
would fill a thousand octavo volumes.
I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman,
who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage
the efforts which are being made to keep alive our once great national
tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that
the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to
de-Anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the language.
We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their
tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to
understand it. We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among
the peasantry who still use the language, and put an end to the shameful
state of feeling--a thousand-tongued reproach to our leaders and
statesmen--which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when
overheard speaking their own language.[19] Maynooth has at last come
splendidly to the front, and it is now incumbent upon every clerical
student to attend lectures in the Irish language and history during the
first three years of his course. But in order to keep the Irish language
alive where it is still spoken--which is the utmost we can at present
aspire to--nothing less than a house-to-house visitation and exhortation
of the people themselves will do, something--though with a very different
purpose--analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout
Ireland when he found her like a corpse on the dissecting table. This and
some system of giving medals or badges of honour to every family who will
guarantee that they have always spoken Irish amongst themselves during
the year. But, unfortunately, distracted as we are and torn by contending
factions, it is impossible to find either men or money to carry out this
simple remedy, although to a dispassionate foreigner--to a Zeuss,
Jubainville, Zimmer, Kuno Meyer, Windisch, or Ascoli, and the rest--this
is of greater importance than whether Mr. Redmond or Mr. MacCarthy lead
the largest wing of the Irish party for the moment, or Mr. So-and-So
succeed with his election petition. To a person taking a bird's-eye view
of the situation a hundred or five hundred years hence, believe me, it
will also appear of greater importance than any mere temporary wrangle,
but, unhappily, our countrymen cannot be brought to see this.
We can, however, insist, and we _shall_ insist if Home Rule be carried,
that the Irish language, which so many foreign scholars of the first
calibre find so worthy of study, shall be placed on a par with--or even
above--Greek, Latin, and modern languages, in all examinations held under
the Irish Government. We can also insist, and we _shall_ insist, that in
those baronies where the children speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, and
that Irish-speaking schoolmasters, petty sessions clerks, and even
magistrates be appointed in Irish-speaking districts. If all this were
done, it should not be very difficult, with the aid of the foremost
foreign scholars, to bring about a tone of thought which would make it
disgraceful for an educated Irishman--especially of the old Celtic race,
MacDermotts, O'Conors, O'Sullivans, MacCarthys, O'Neills--to be ignorant
of his own language--would make it at least as disgraceful as for an
educated Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew.
* * * * *
We find the decay of our language faithfully reflected in the decay of our
surnames. In Celtic times a great proof of the powers of assimilation
which the Irish nation possessed, was the fact that so many of the great
Norman and English nobles lived like the native chiefs and took Irish
names. In this way the De Bourgos of Connacht became MacWilliams, of which
clan again some minor branches became MacPhilpins, MacGibbons, and
MacRaymonds. The Birminghams of Connacht took the name of MacFeóiris, the
Stauntons became MacAveelys, the Nangles MacCostellos; the Prendergasts of
Mayo became MacMaurices, the De Courcys became MacPatricks, the Bissetts
of Antrim became MacEóins, and so on. Roughly speaking, it may be said
that most of the English and Norman families outside of the Pale were
Irish in name and manners from the beginning of the fourteenth to the
middle of the seventeenth century.
In 1465 an Act was passed by the Parliament of the English Pale that all
Irishmen inside the Pale should take an English name "of one towne as
Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as white, black,
brown; or art or science, as smith or carpenter; or office, as cooke,
butler; and that he and his issue shall use this name" or forfeit all his
goods. A great number of the lesser families complied with this typically
English ordinance; but the greater ones--the MacMurroghs, O'Tooles,
O'Byrnes, O'Nolans, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys,
&c.--refused, and never did change their names. A hundred and thirty years
later we find Spenser, the poet, advocating the renewal of this statute.
By doing this, says Spenser, "they shall in time learne quite to forget
the Irish nation. And herewithal," he says, "would I also wish the O's
and Macs which the heads of septs have taken to their names to be utterly
forbidden and extinguished, for that the same being an ordinance (as some
say) first made by O'Brien (+brian borúma+) for the strengthening of the
Irish, the abrogation thereof will as much enfeeble them." It was, however,
only after Aughrim and the Boyne that Irish names began to be changed in
great numbers, and O'Conors to become "Conyers," O'Reillys "Ridleys,"
O'Donnells "Daniels," O'Sullivans "Silvans," MacCarthys "Carters," and so
on.