THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 40, 1 February 1895, Page 8

THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

{Continued )

The purest nobili'y in the three kingdoms ia not in the peerage list, but in the Irish cabins and shielings, where lives more than one descendant of the great princely families, whose origin is lost in the night of time, and whose ancestors s'ood on Irish soil long ceturiee before Greece contended with the Persian ; while the towers of Troy yet stood ; when the Italian shepherd drove his flock about the lonely hills on which Golden Rome aa yet had not been built. So deep has the Saxon iron eDteied into our souls that we have forgotten the heroic days of the old Gaelic world, and are content slavishly to repeat the ignorant and silly tales of our enemies, and to abandon the grand and reliable old lineage of which »he ancient leaders of our race were once so proud. The lying deeds and fraudulent parchments of Elizibeth and James, and 'Jromwell and William, not only robbed the people of the land, but made them forget the immemorial noble titles by which they held it, with all the romance and poetry that still clung to every acre of their country. These aucient invaluable records of uur race are in the Gaelic tongue, handed down by a long succession of writers, and controlled by regjlar parliaments of the land ; and there, too, interwoven with them, ia ihe glonouß history of our race, which Eugene O'Curry declared could never be written until the old Gaelic records and annals were published. And what a history I Saturated with all the sympathies and all the fervid feeling of tbe Irish, from the legendary days of thu Firbolgs and the De Danaans down to the sad extinction of our rank in the nations. What glory and pathos and romance ! What high deeds of valour, which have made the greatest of modern historians say that the Gael is the ideal soldier of the world ! What unexampled endurance under all tbe rugged impacts of adversity, and what Bwift, elastic reaction I What blithe, gay humour ! What infinite ele^anco of wit ! What great consuming pity, and what unfathomable depths of tenderness ii that long and checkered career of the Gie! t Quae regio in terris noitri non plena lahons ? The Gael moved with glory up >n every st«ge of the world's hisiory, be it ia the domain of war or peace, adventure or adversity, labour, learning or a t

His plastic, receptive soul is the soil on which all the noblest ideas and tublimest schemes fiad qui''k>;Ht growth, and his history is in a measure the most exquisite and sustained romaoce of the world's life, iv which tbe tragic, the sad, and the humorous blend their varying charms, and altema'ely rouse the soul to highest passion, flood it with an infinite melancholy, or pour in upon it the soothing and

tefreßhiog aroma of the most delicate wit, To understand all this ourselves and to bring it home to the world about us, we must know the treasnres of our own history and literature, which God, in biß Providence has kept locked up in the Gaelic tongue as a balm for this Buffering society of ours ; a salve for the corruption and craas materialism of our age ; a refreshing breeze for the wearied and disgusted heart of the modern world, There breathes in the ancient Irish literature a pure and healthy sentiment, a deep and tender affection for humanity, a piety and a reverence for the sublime past. It is not filled with hate, contempt and cynicism, as is so much of our modern writing, but looks out upon the world with eyes of infinite pity and love. The Christian faith idealised all the purest and noblest Gaelic traits, converted the race into paladins of Christ, and coloured henceforth all thought and expression with Christian tints. All that we have, even of the old pagan Irish world, has come down to us through Christian interpreters, and it would seem as though in that pure and spiritual atmosphere the Irish literature became literally drenched with the sweet saving dew of Chrisiian principles, views and sympathies, and preserved of the ancient pagan life only the substratum of natural character and natural virtue, the solid, indestructable concrete of experience, spirit and ideals, which forms the golden link between the Irish G iel of to-day and those grand ideal Gaels of the long-gone shadowy ages, the Cuchullainns aDd the Ferdiadhs, the Finns, the Osßian Caoiltes, the Cormack Mac Arts, and the chivalrous race of Niall. But some one says — this tongue is de\d or dying. Yes, alas, the Irish are flinging away their nchest heirloom, the priceless casket in which was saved their charter of nationality — their speech' They themselves are doing it, and to-day they can no longer l-iy the fault upon foreign shoulders. I know the excuses given— ihe hard needs of daily life, ihe exactions of commerce and society, the multitudes of Irish who are gone beyond the set to the golden lands of plenty and independence, the debißin*, cankering actiou of contempt and ignorance and neglect. L^t those excuses excuse the sad past— they are valid. But they will not do fjr the future, now that the conscience of the race has b-en stirred up, aid its sublime folly pictured in the strong«st colours. We are coniemned by the action of foreigners who are not of our blood and who cannot feel as we do upon this subj 'Ct, with wnom it is a matter of the heal and not tha heart. Tney know that the Gael.c tongue is the oldest, purest, and richest in Europe; that it is so old and vigorous that it has renewed itself three sever J times to their knowl- d c since the days of our Lord, and that it contains the answers o a hundred perplexing problems concerning the ongiu of the na'ions of E iropa an i the na'urd of ancient law and ins nutions in the c imaiun Oriental knd from ' whence we have all come. They kiow that it is most cloaflv allied to the ancient langu ge of India, the Sauscn', and that both are the oldest forms of that mysterious Aryan s^e'eh which we on^e had in common. The best approach to a serious I ish dicti mary is the work of a German ; the discovery of the most ancient for'n of the language was done by another Garman, and f jrma a most lotnantic chapter of liternture, equal to the rinding of the ttis.tta stone or the decipherment of the inscriptions of Persj'.iolis and th ) Cua iform literature. The greatest m igazine of Gaelic stul'ed ih wrU en in French and others are carried on in German anil lull ia. f h *su foreigners comyearly to Ireland te learn the soft, rich pronunci .tion of the old tongue from Irish peisanta, and then they go to Djblin to burrow among the great old manuscripts, ab ut which ihe Irish se ra t > know little and to care less. If any other nation had the B )ok of L j inster or the Book of khe Dun Cow. or the Sp-'cklei B jok, or th i writings of Duald MacFirbis, or the Annuls of ibe Four Masters, they would have long since made the world rigi g with tae value of these old writings. We alone, the own rs of the-D, are c >n'ent to prote-.s a total ignorance of their nature and value, although every fihre of our being, every drop of our blood, every beat if our heart, every flash of our in f ellect|ha9, centurits sine ,ben saturated in our forefathers with the inextinguishable, djep op -ra, ive lnfliiacos of the Gaelic tongue. [swrjgWe are told that in the Gaelic language there are no Homers, no Virgila, no Shakespeares, no Milton?, no Dantes, no Petrarchs, no

Moheres, no writers so fioished and elegant as our modern novellists and lilerateurs. I will reply in the words of an excellent scholar and a very great patriot, William O'Brien, that the influences which have made English literature great in the last three centuries are the influences of Catholic France and Italy; that in the fifteenth century, when they began to operate, th« Irish literature was incomparably superior to the old English ; that the tongue waß then, &b now, far richer, more flexible, more poetic, with a world of pathos and tenderness and hearty emotional feeling totally alien to the Engliah speech, by nature slow and rugged, dark and creeping, where the Irish is all grace and fire, fitted with the wings of the lightning, and melting in the mouth like distilled honey. I will add that the fifteenth century marked the ebbing hour of Irish fortune, and that all the powers of earth turned against her on the day when they began to smile upon her rival, England The Latin language was ruined in two centuries, and the culture of Carlovingian Europe broken in two more— but the Irish tongue has withstood every adverse influence for over one thousand years, and is to-iay as glorious an instrument of speech as when MacLiagh, Brian's great bard sang in sweetest numbers the world-important vic'ory of Clontarf, | or O'Hussey poured f^rth in verse of which the grim genius of Dante might be proud, his immortal lament for Hugh Maguire. Who will dare deny the rich fund of G>elic thought in Shakespeare, when every scholar knows that the quaint, delicate charm of the " Tempest " and the "Midsummer Nigit's Dream" is of pare Gaelic origin, and that '• the natural magic," the immortal touches of style, of quick, perfect delineation, are so often the fUshes of the Btrain of Gaelic blood which flowed in tbe West Briton Shakespeare, or the reminiscences of Gaelic life and feeling, which were ever more vig. oarous in his country than elsewhere in Saxon England. The Gael is a mighty leaven of humanity, the mysterious alloy which God mixes up with the nations of the West from time to time, " tempering their strength and their tenderness." Goi scattered abroad in the seventh and eighth centuries our saints like a sacred wheat to fructify for religion all Europe over. Again in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen uries He scattered us, for somj mysterious reason, among the nations of Europj to fight toreiga ba Mes and perish upon the heights of Fontenoy or famed " Ramilhea' bloody fisld." And once more, as the need of humanity is groit, and the p>rtils of the West are thrown open by His mighty hand to the oppressed of all the worl I, He cho sea His usual instrument, the Gael, and sands him abroad over the new worl 1, an apos le of Cuho.ici y and an ardent champion of thai powerful a-id popalur dem icracy whisa steady, irresistible much, th-ink Ox*, is now heard oa every shore, and whose CJtnmg conq jests already shine before the eyes ot the weighed anddoomei montichiesof the put. But in all this tima Providence has also been scittertng the thought of the Gael. As the world is full of fragments of our race, so is its literature full of the tragmets of our aacieac writings.

(To be Continued )