THE WORLD OF, BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18603, 30 January 1926, Page 13

THE WORLD OF, BOOKS.

HALF-HOURS IN A LIBRARY. (SFZCIALLT WRITTZK TOE "THB PRBSS.") By A. H. Gbin-linu. CL.—OX SCHOOLS AND' SCHOOLMASTERS (3) "l'adraic Pearse, First President of the Irish Republic." How strange the phrase reads to-day, now that a happier day has dawned for Ireland in the creation of an Irish Free States and the reconciliation of North and South. The Irish Republic was proclaimed on Easter Monday, April -4th, 1916, in Dublin. On Wednesday, May Ist, P. H. Pearse, together with T. MacDonagh and T. J. Clark, three of the signatories of the notice proclaiming the Irish Republic, having been tried by Field General Courts-Martial, were sentenced to death and shot. hether, as some hold, the death of Pearse hastened the march of events, and paved the way for the subsequent settlement, is a matter upon which 1 do not propose to enter, llie outstanding fact is that in Padraic Pearse, both literature and education suffered -a severe loss. "He was a man," says bis biographer, "who personified in himself the noblest traditions of the country he loved, and for which he sacrificed his life." P. H. Pearse was born in 1880, and thus was only thirty-six when he died. Educated at the Christian Brothers School, Westland Row, Dublin, and at the Royal University, he was only seventeen when he founded, and became first President of, the New Ireland Literary Society. Both he and his brother William James Pearse were ardent students of Irish history, and the Irish language, and when mere boys they took a vow that they would work and, if need be, die for Ireland.

l'adraic Pearse is described as shy, earnest, rath.er pale, but strikingly handsome, and with the appearance ot the student and the scholar. He was essentially an enthusiast in all that he undertook, and he evinced that enthusiasm wheui in 1899 he became teacher of a language class under the Gaelic League. He made a hobby ol Irish linguistic studies, diving deeply into Irish folk lore, and early Irish music and poetry. Called to the Iris bar in 1901, he at once set to work to found St. Enda's College (Sgoil Eanna) at Rathfarnam County, Dublin. Mr James Stephens says of Pearse

If there was an idealist among tho men concerned in this insurrection it; was he and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he also. I never could "touch or sense in him the qualities which other men epoke of, and which made him military commandant of the rising. None ot these men were magnetic in the sense that Mr Larkin is magnetic, and I would have said that Pearse was leas magnetic than any of the others. Yet it was to ; him and around him they clung. Men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about which they may group themselves, and I thinK that Poarse became the loader because ni« temperament was more profoundly em« tional than any of the others. _ He waa emotional not in a flighty but in a. serious way,, and one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed. . He had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act differently from their own desires and interests.

Mr Stephens givies a curious instance of this power of Pearse s which reveals him in his capacity as schoo l master. Il( His schoolmasters did not always receive their salaries with regularity. The reason that he did not pay them" was the simple one that he had no money. Given by another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so logical that even a child could comprehend it. These masters did not always leave l him. -Iney remained, marvelling perhaps, and even with stupefaction accenting the theory that children must be taught, but that no such urgencv is due towards the payment of wages. One of his boys said there was no fun in telling a lie to Mr Pearse, for, however outrageous the lie, he always believed it. He built and renovated his school because the results were good for his scholars, and somehow he found builders to undertake these forlorn hopes. Asked to write an account of how St. Enda's came to be, Pearse replied:— "There is very little to tell. high and patriotic motives have been assigned to m© in tli© Press and elsewhere. I am conscious of one motive only, namely a love of boys, of the'ir wavs, of t)ieir society; and a desire to help as many bovs as possible to become good men. To me a boy is the most interesting of all living things, and I have for years found myself coveting the privilege of being in a position to mould or help to mould the lives dtf boys to noble ends."

It is Btated by an authority that St. Enda's was the only Irish Coliege founded on a conception of all that was best in Irish life and tradition. There were other Irish Colleges such as that at Ballingeary, where the Irish language was taught j but St. Enda 8 was a College, where a thorough modern education was provided in all its branches, and where the spirit of the Gael was predominant in everything. "Had Pearse done nothing else than found St. Enda's," says the same writer, "and thus demonstrate how a modern system of education need not exclude the true spirit of the Gael, he would have accomplished a work deserving of the gratitude of every man, woman, and child of the Irish race. _ Apart entirely from its national significance, St. Enda's v was a most important contribution to the science of pedagogy, and its importance will be realised, and conceded later when men turn away from destruction to peaceful pursuits." Under the title of "The Story ot A Success." Pearse has related the beginnings of St. Enda's or L Sgoil Eanna," as. adopting the Gaelic pliraseologv, he loved to hear it_ called. Ur those beginnings Pearse writes: I interested a few friends in «» project of a school which should aim .at the makin-r of good men rather than of learned men, but of men truly learned rather than of persons qualified to pass examinations; and_ as my definition of a pood man as applied to an Irishman, - eludes the being a good Irishman (for

there are sis selections. fromi the Sr Sov e e S ral h AmerTc r an er ' author ™ lk p £ SC The D book lias been compiled "with less thought of robust and resounding patriotism than of that a*d hallowed emotion , for * ' should possess any™standing before tlie tomb of Blac * Prince in Canterbury Cathpdral ; sense of the wonderful history written silently in books and buildmgs. aU per suading that we are he,rs of g spiritual wealth than, may ~. . „ surmised or hitherto begun to d vme.^ Let me close on this note, thology is a history of our ,sof%U. P T abused tongue. Here 8 nwi»

you cannot mako an Irish ixiy s good i-nghshman or a pood Frenchman), and aa my definition of learning as applied to an Irishman includes Irish learning as lts basis and fundament, it followed that my school should be an Irish school not known or dreamt of in Ireland since the Flight of the Earls. This project, I oay, appealed to two or three friends whose hearts were pat with mine; and Sgoil Eanna ia the re3ult.

Pearse first of all took a big dwell-ing-house in llathmiues, a suburb of Dublin —Cullenswood House—where the historian Lecky once lived—and opened there a secondary school for boys, which had the distinction of being bilingual. TV hile instruction was given in both the English and the Irish languages, the atmosphere of the school ■was essentially Gaelic. At the same time an intermediate education was given, and students were prepared for entrance into the Universities. Thomas MacDonagh, ivho was shot with Pearse after the 1916 rising, was one of the first teachers whom Pearse placed upon the staff of ''Sgoil Eanna." Two years later Culienswood House was turned into a girls' school. ';Sgoil Ide," or St. Itas, and St. Enda's was transferred into the country and housed in a big eighteenth century mansion -.villa extensive grounds, known as the Hermitage. Rathfarnham. At that time St. Enda's and St. Ita's were the only lay Catholic schools in Ireland. Pearse was a fervent Catholic, but his father was an Englishman, who had been a Protestant. l'adraic Pearse was unmarried, and he lived with his mother, a brother, and two sisters. Pearse writes anent his enterprise :—-

.1 feel very grateful wlien I remember how fortunate I have been in all the things that are important to the success of such an undertaking as mine. I huvc been fortunate in the site which accident threw in my way; I have been fortunate in the fellow-workers whom I have gathered about me; I have been fortunate in my first band of pupils, 6eventy boys the memory of whose friendship will remain fresh and fragrant in my mind however many generations of their successors may tread the class-rooms of Sgoil Eanna.

Pearse defined an Irish school as a school which takes Irish for granted. "You itced not praise tho Irish language," he insisted, ''simply speak it. You need not denounce English games—play Irish ones; you need not ignore foreign history, foreign literature—deal with them from the Irish point of view. An Irish school need no more be a purely Irish-speaking school than an Irish nation need be a purely Irish-speaking nation; but an Irish school, like an Irish nation, must be permeated through and through by Irish culture, the repository of which is the Irish language. I do not think that a purely Irish-speaking school is a thing to be desired; at all events, a purely Irish-speaking secondary or higher school is a thing that is no longer possible." The ideals of education after which he strove at St. Enda's are outlined by Pearse in a striking passage:

Philosophy is as old as the hills, and the science of to-day is only a new flowering of the science that made lovely the ancient citie3 and gardenß of the East. With all our learning we are not yet as cultured as were the Greeks who crowded to hear the plays of Sophocles; with all our art institutions we have not yet that love for tho beautiful which burned in the heart of the middle ages. All the problems with which we strive were long ago solved by our ancestors, only their Bolutions have been forgotten. Take the problem of education: that i 6 the problem of bringing up a child. We constantly speak and write as if a philosophy of education were first formulated in our own time. But all the wise people of old faced and solved that problem for themselves, and most of their solutions were better than ours. Professor Culverwell thinks that the Jews gave it the best solution. For my part I salute the old Irish.

Pearse claims that the philosophy of education preached to-day was practised by the founders of the Gaelic system two thousand years ago. In proof of this contention, he cites the Gaelic words for "education," "teacher," and "pupil." The word for education among the old Gael was the same as the word for "fostering"; the teacher was a "fosterer," and the pupil was a "foster-child." To "foster," Pearse declared, is exactly the function of a teacher, "not primarily to 'lead up,' to 'guide,' to 'conduct through a course of studies,' and still less to 'indoctrinate,' to 'inform,' to 'prepare for exams,' but primarily to 'foster' the elements of character already present." The similarity between the ideas of Pearse, of Tagore, and of Tolstoy, are well brought out in the following passage from "An Macaomb," the school magazine of St. Enda's for Christmas, 1909:

I think the old Irish plan oi education as idealised for boys in the story of the Macadh of Emmhain and for girls in that of the Grianan of Lusga, was the wisest and most generous that the world has ever known. The bringing together of children in eome pleasant place under the fosterage of some man famous among his people for his greatness of heart, for his ■wisdom, for his skill in some gracious craft—here we get the two things on which I lay most stress in education, tha environment and the stimulus of a personality which can address itself to the child's worthiest self. Then the chapter of free government, within certain limits the right to make laws and maintain them, to elect and depose leaders—here was scope for the growth of individualities, yet provision for maintaining the suzerainty of the common weal; the scrupulous co-relation of moral, intellectual, and physical training, vthe open air life, the very type of the games which formed so large a part of their learning—all these things were designed with a largeness of view foreign to the little minds that devise our modern makeshifts for education. Lastly, the "aite," fosterer or teacher, had as colleagues in his work cf fosterage no ordinary hirelings, but men whom their gifts of soul, or mind, or body, had lifted high above their contemporaries—the captains, tha poets, the prophets of thnir people.

Like Tolstoy, like Tagore, and indeed like all true teachers, Pearse wrote stories, poems, and plays for the use of the boys under his charge. Highly valued among my books is the volume containing the works of Padraic Pearse —Plays, Stories, Poems — which have been said to constitute "a mystical book of the love of Ireland." There is abundant material for a dissertation upon the purely literary side of Pearse's life, apart altogether from Ids achievement as schoolmaster; but I will content myself with an extract from the introduction to the volume contributed t>y P. Browne, of Maynooth:

These who look in these pages for a ■vision of Pagan Ireland with its preChristian gods and heroes will be disappointed. The old divinities and figures of the sagas are there, and the remnants of the old worship in the minds of the people are delineated, but everything is overshadowed by the Christian concept and the religion that is found here centres in Christ and Mary. Xo, the Ireland of which Pearse writes is noh the land of the early heroes, but of peop'.e deeply imbued with the Christian idea and will. And yet we feel that tha ancient and medieval and modern Gaelic currents meet in him. By his life and death he has become one with Cuchulainn and Fionn and Oisin, with the early teachers, terrible or gentle, of Christian-' itv, with Hugh of Dungannon and Owen Roe. and all the chieftains who fought against the growing power of the Sassenach.. with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, with Kossa, O'Learv, and the Fenians. He will appeal to the imagination of times to come more than any c-f the rebels of the last hundred and thirty years, because in him all the tendencies of Iri3h thought, culture, and nationality were more fully developed. His name ana ideas will be taught by mothers to their children long before the time when they will be learned in echoo! histories. To o.der peopie lis will be a watchword in the national fight, a symbol of the unbroken continuity of permanence of this Gaelic language. And they will think of h:m forever in different ways, as a poet who sane songs of his country, as a soldier who died for it,' as a martyr who bore witness with his blood to the truth of his faith, as_ a hero, a second Cuchulainn, who battled with a divine frenzy to stem tha wavea of the invading tide.