READINGS IN IRISH HISTORY

New Zealand Tablet, 2 November 1916, Page 11

READINGS IN IRISH HISTORY

B? ‘ Shanachie.’

ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION. ‘There was once civilisation in Ireland. We never were very eminent, to be sure, for manufactures in metal, our houses were simple, our palaces rude, our furniture scanty, our foreign trade small. Yet was Ireland civilised. Strange thing! says some one whose ideas of civilisation are identical with carpets and cutglass, fine masonry, and the steam engine; yet ’tis true. This country of ours is no sandbank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honored in the archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valor, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and selfmighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and a hopeless People.’ Thus wrote that brilliant essayist and poet, Thomas Davis, calling upon each fellow-countryman, as Tennyson invited the English of his day ‘ Love thou thy land, with love far-brought From out the storied past and used Within the present, but transfused . Thro’ future time by power of thought.’ Dr. Orestes Brownson, philosopher, essayist, reviewer, writes thus of ancient Irish civilisation:—‘lf we give any credit to the Irish annals, and the tendency of recent investigations is to confirm them, the Irish, at the epoch of the Roman conquest of Gaul, were a more polished people and had a higher civilisation than the Gallic tribes who were subdued by Caesar and his legions. The Irish had at that time, and had had long before, a rich and peculiar literature, of which numerous fragments still remain but, if Julius Caesar is to be believed, the Britons and the Continental Kelts had none, and certainly no trace of a literature of any sort have they left behind them. . . We do not seek to settle the affiliations of the Irish people. They are peculiar, with distinctive features of their own. We do not find their chief characteristics in any other people. They have more resemblance to the ancient Spanish" or Iberian race, than to the Gallic tribes conquered by Caesar, and even to the modern Spaniards than to the modern French, which we regard as in their favor, for after the Irish, we count the Spanish race the finest and noblest in the world. . . They (the Irish) were never an uncivilised, a barbarous, or an idolatrous people; only they were civilised after the Noachic pattern, not after that of Nimrod, and perhaps that of Cain, which alone, in the estimation of the modern world, is civilisation. This easily explains the facility and the thoroughness with which the Irish people received the faith, when preached to them by their great apostle. (Brownson’s Works, vol. 13.) Such was ancient Ireland, the long-faded glories of whose pagan past we have but faintly and feebly portrayed. Such a land was our forefathers’ land:—• ‘ This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea.’ What manner of men and women were the Pagan Irish ? Ancient Irish epic poems and romances are full of references to the wonderful courage, endurance, strength, comeliness, and personal charms of the men and women of pagan times. We have however no contemporary account of the personal appearance of the

Pagan Irish from foreign sources. Caesar and other Roman writers described the Celts of Britain and Gaul, but knew nothing directly of the Irish Celt. If we suppose, and it seems reasonable to do so, that the Pagan Irish differed little from the people who lived in Ireland when the Anglo-Normans invaded the country, we shall get a fair idea of the men and women of ancient Ei*e. Giraldus Cambrensis, an English writer, son of a Norman baron, who accompanied Prince John to Ireland in 1185, thus writes of the physique of the race: In Ireland man retains all his majesty. Nature alone has moulded the Irish, and, as if to show what she can do, has given them countenances of exquisite color, and bodies of great beauty, symmetry, and strength.' Thomas' Rinuccini, brother of the Papal Nuncio, writing from personal observations made during his visit to Ireland in 1645, has -given us the following account of the inhabitants at that period :—' The men are fine-looking; they are swift runners, and bear every sort of hardship with indescribable cheerfulness. They are all devoted to arms, and especially now that they are at war. Those who apply themselves to the study of literature are most learned ; and you meet persons of every profession and science amongst them. The women are remarkably tall and beautiful, and display a charming union of gracefulness with modesty and devotion. Their maimers are marked with extreme simplicity, and they freely mix in conversation everywhere, without suspicion or- jealousy.' Let us quote Brownson once more : ' The power of endurance of the Irish race is most wonderful. Naturally the race is remarkable for its rare physical development and it furnishes specimens of both manly and female beauty and strength unmatched in any other known race. The Irish, and their congeners the Scotch, surpass in physical strength and hardiness, it. has been ascertained, every other European people. This may, in part at least, be explained by their general freedom from vice and immorality, by the pure and virtuous lives of the women of the race, for which they have been distinguished in all ages, before as well as since their conversion to Christianity, which goes to prove the primitive and normal character of Irish civilisation, and that it always remained free from the gross corruptions and abominable superstitions into which all other gentile nations fell.' (Works, vol. 13, p. 557.)