A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People

Nineteenth Century and After, 1 February 1901, pages 285-295, 4,816 words

A language may be compared to a seed, for a seed is a potential flower, and every language is a potential literature; the beauty of the flower and the literature vary according to the quality of the seed and the language, and the influences they meet when they rise into the upper air. Rain, wind, storms, and frosts will destroy the flower, adverse circumstances may destroy a literature. A good deal, too, depends on the gardeners who await the flower and the language.

The Latin and Greek languages, as we know them to-day, are the husks and shucks of the seeds out of which grew tales of Troy and Carthage. It would seem that a language has a certain thing to say, just as a seed has a certain flower to produce, and once it has said its say a language remains silent or repeats itself. For ten centuries the Latin language was the language of every country in Europe. It was the language of the State, the Court, the Church, and the Library — thousands of volumes were written in this language. Not one of these remains for literary reasons; some half-dozen remain for theological reasons: so we are forced to conclude that no man of literary talent was born in Europe for nearly a thousand years, or that what remains of a language after it has said what it was created to say is a dried husk or shuck. And the second conclusion seems forced upon us when we consider that Dante began as a Latin writer, that he wrote several works in Latin, and that all these are without literary importance. Moreover, he began one of the greatest poems of the world in Latin, but found himself obliged to write it in Italian, which was then an obscure dialect, Latin, even in his hands, proving itself incapable of further literary expression. And the great English epic poet, John Milton, Dante’s great rival, wrote in Latin to a considerable extent. Latin was not Milton’s language in the same native sense that Latin was Dante’s, but even in Milton’s time Latin was spoken, and Milton’s knowledge of the language was as complete as his knowledge of his own. Yet neither Milton’s nor Dante’s Latin poems would be considered for a moment as serious contributions to Latin literature by the poets of the Augustine age. Horace and Catullus would smile politely and admire them as the works of barbarians, using the word barbarian in the Latin sense. But Milton wrote poems also in Italian, and I should not be surprised to hear that his Italian poems are nearer literature than his Latin. Our own Rossetti, too, wrote poems in Italian, and Mr. Swinburne has written French poems, and these poems in French and Italian, I think, will be admitted to approach nearer literature than any poems they have written in the dead languages. Many Englishmen have written French verse, and I know of one English writer at least who, though imperfectly acquainted with the French language, has written French verses that have passed the most critical French eyes without detection of any barbarism or anything that would show them to be different from the verses of a mediocre French poet. But to appreciate a language in its different stages of decay a knowledge of foreign languages is not necessary — we have only to compare seventeenth-century English with nineteenth-century English. The nineteenth-century writer may have more individual talent than the seventeenth-century writer, but the language is not so beautiful; it is not so spontaneous, it is less like spring water and more like some carefully prepared beverage. Our fathers and mothers used to drink something called negus, and in nineteenth-century writings we detect cloves, lemon-peel, and sugar. The nineteenth century has produced some of the most beautiful poetry and prose in the world, because some writers of extraordinary literary talent lived in this century. Their works are efforts of individual genius, and owe very little to the language, which they had to re-make. The beautiful use and the fearful misuse of language which we find in Byron and Shelley respectively could not be exampled in any two seventeenth-century writers. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century every one wrote well, and every one wrote without style. There was no need for style then, any more than there is need for a filter when the water is taken straight from the well-head. Style becomes necessary when a language becomes corrupt, just as a filter becomes necessary when a stream has left the mountain and has passed through a town. The writers of our dramatic literature and the translators of the Bible knew nothing of style; they wrote the popular speech of their time, which was as beautiful as the architecture of their streets. Style began with Milton — Milton was the first stylist, and since Milton the necessity for style has become more and more pressing. A dozen years ago Walter Pater said that he wished to write in English as in a learned language, and since the death of Walter Pater — whom I shall always regard as England’s last great writer — we have seen the language pass into the patty-pans of Stevenson and many various pint pots. And seeing that English is now spoken in every quarter of the globe, and has absorbed several continents, it would seem as if the language were going to become the commercial language of the world, just as Latin has become the theological. It seems impossible to believe that the English language, which has already produced so long a literature, will be able to enwomb the many aspirations latent in Australia, America, and South Africa. It seems impossible that the unwieldy bulk of literature which will pile itself up in the English language in the next fifty years will not compel those who desire a work of art to isolate themselves in some less vulgar speech; it is imperative to believe that the poets of that time will find a refuge in the dialects and the small languages, and that the universal language will be left to the free and fearless use of bankers and popular novelists.

Literature has ever flourished in the virgin languages. In the middle of last century French threatened to become the language of Russia, and if it had been accepted by Russian writers as their literary medium do you think that Tolstoi and Tourgueneff would live with the same intense life in French as they do in Russian?

A story is told of how, thirty or forty years ago, three men, the last three who could speak literary Bohemian, met in a library and decided to revive the language of which they were the last literary representatives. A more audacious adventure was hardly ever undertaken, but it has succeeded, and the Bohemian language is to-day spoken and written by all the inhabitants of Bohemia. The Flemish language, which five-and-twenty years ago was rarely heard in the streets of Brussels, is now heard frequently, and it is not improbable that the next generation of Belgian writers will write in Flemish. In fact, it may be said that all over Europe the desire to preserve the small languages is manifesting itself, as if Nature were aware in its subconsciousness of the danger of uniformity which a great empire imposes, and in her own obscure way were remedying the evil. When we see Nature working in this way it is well to listen, for she alone knows the whole truth. In Ireland, just as in Bohemia, the nation became suddenly aware of what it was losing, and in five years 150 branches of the Gaelic League have sprung up. In five years it has become an honour to know the language which in my youth was considered a disgrace. In five years prejudice has melted away; those, whose minds are alive in Ireland to-day, desire the language, in the north, in the west, in the south, and in the east; and the question whether Irish children may learn their own language in the schools they pay for was debated for the first time in the last Session of the last Parliament. On both the English and the Irish side the debate was a disappointment. It was generally assumed, on the English side, that the English language was capable of expressing every thought that could enter the human mind, and that there was no reason why as great a literary heritage as Shakespeare’s and Milton’s might not await the next generation. On the Irish side, I think I can say that no speaker spoke with either knowledge or conviction. The desire of the Irish language is, as I have said, no more than five years old, and in the last five years the Irish members have been engaged in bitter party politics, in internecine strife, and at the close of the last Parliament they had forgotten that, below the religious question and the Home Rule question, the fundamental desire of Ireland is to possess her own soul. It is only within the last five years that Ireland has come to see quite clearly that the saving of her soul is inseparable from the saving of her language.

We have always missed securing an Irish Secretary of psychological insight. We have had Irish Secretaries who have planned county boards and railways, and thought they were solving the problem by such petty expedients. Irish Secretary after Irish Secretary has missed his chance, but none missed the chance that Mr. Gerald Balfour missed in the last Parliament. It has been admitted by Conservatives as well as Liberals that Ireland has a right to govern herself on all points which do not conflict with the integrity of the Empire, with the rights of property, or religious equality. The language movement was therefore an enticing invitation to Mr. Gerald Balfour to leave English intolerance for Irish sympathy. He could have won all Ireland’s sympathy by bowing to Ireland’s wish while confessing his inability to understand it. I would have had him say: ‘I think you are mistaken, I think no literature can ever come out of the Irish language, I believe it to be a fast decaying patois of no value in the world.’ I would have had him say: ‘Children will start ill equipped in the race for life if they learn the Irish language.’ I would have had him repeat the entire contents of the article which The Times wrote on the letter I sent to it on the language question, and having said all these things I would have had him add: ‘But you have a perfect right to learn the language if you please — you are not children. It is no affair of mine. So long as your desire does not conflict with integrity of the Empire, with the rights of property, and with religious toleration, you are perfectly free. The Irish language does not conflict with any of these; learn it.’ I would have had him say: ‘If the language is to be revived, education in that language must be made compulsory. I shall do this as soon as I possibly can. In the meantime I will take a step which I think will prove efficacious. You see I am anxious to lose no time in conforming to your wishes. There are about 1,000 or 1,200 schools in Ireland in which a considerable proportion of the children speak Irish. To every one of these schools I shall make a grant of 2l. 10s. a year: 1l. to go to the child who speaks most Irish in and out of school, this prize to be voted for by the children themselves; 1l. to the teacher; and 10s. to the child who writes the best essay in Irish. The Irish soldiers have fought bravely for the Empire in South Africa, and I think the Empire can afford three thousand a year to enable the Irish to learn their own language if they wish to do so.’

If Mr. Balfour had said these words instead of seeking excuses and hiding himself behind the Educational Commissioners, he would have crossed the gulf which separates the English from the Irish mind. He has left this crossing to be achieved by some successor — the next, or the next, or the next.

The language question will be raised again in the new Parliament, and perhaps by that time some further knowledge of that subject will have permeated. The Times newspaper by that time may awake to the fact that it is not wise to embitter Ireland still further by telling her that what she asks for is not good for her, and that England will give her something else instead; that it would be wrong for England to allow children to grow up ill-equipped in the race for life, etc. Perhaps The Times before then may not only reconsider its opinions on this question, but also inform itself regarding the present state of the Irish language. For in its article on the language movement it said that Irish had ceased to be a literary language for the last two hundred years. I will answer this statement by producing some poems written within the last ten years in the Irish language more distinctive than any poems written in the same period in the English language. These poems were written for an audience of as few people as the Sagas which were composed and recited around the fires of the Norse houses in the tenth century. But the size of an audience that a poet addresses cannot be taken as a measure of the value of his poetry. If we may infer anything from the size of the audience, it would seem that the best poetry is addressed to the smallest audiences. Homer's audiences were hardly larger than Douglas Hyde’s. Man’s reason leads him to think that a hundred millions all speaking the same language are more likely to produce a great poet than a few thousand people speaking an obscure and despised language, amid rocks and barren shores. But Nature’s logic is different from our logic, and she seems to have decreed journalists to great nations, and poets to small ones. And as Nature has her way in the end, it would be well in this moment of popular Imperialism to consider her opinions regarding the value of small States and small languages. She has expressed herself on this subject more than once very forcibly — more forcibly lately in Norse than in Irish. He who would ponder this subject must remember that in Norway and Denmark there are not ten million people, and yet in these countries in the last thirty years has arisen a literature which will compare favourably in all its branches with the literatures which have arisen in the same period in all the great empires. Ibsen, addressing a theatrical audience of probably not more than one hundred thousand, has produced a dramatic literature which outweighs all modern dramatic literature; and it is scarcely less remarkable that Douglas Hyde, writing for an audience of a few thousand peasants, should have written poems that will, I think, compare with any poems written in the English language within the last ten years. In bringing these poems to the test, I am put at a great disadvantage — I am forced to have recourse to translation, to the bareness of word-for-word translation. A verse translation would be repudiated; it would be said the merit was in the translation and not in the originals.

Lady Gregory, who has put these poems into English, has performed the delicate task of straining the English language without breaking it; rhyme and metre and the common order of English words are alike sacrificed to the idiom of the original. A veil there must be always, but in prose translation the veil need not be so dense that those who are gifted with literary insight may not divine the original face behind it, and I think that those few will agree with me that no such distinctive lyrics have been written in English during the last ten years. Here the touch seems to me as distinct as Villon’s:

There are three fine devils eating my heart;

They left me my grief, without a thing:

Sickness wrought and love wrought

And an empty pocket, my ruin and my woe.

Poverty left me without a shirt,

Barefooted, barelegged, without any covering;

Sickness left me with my head weak

And my body miserable, an ugly thing;

Love left me like a coal upon the floor,

Like a half-burned sod that is never put out.

Worse than the cough, worse than the fever itself,

Worse than any curse at all under the sun,

Worse than the great poverty

Is the devil that is called ‘love’ by the people.

And if I were in my young youth again,

I would not take, or give, or ask for a kiss.

The next, in the form of a little folk-song, expresses the cry of the idealist of all time, the grief of his spirit bound by the wants of the flesh, the bitterness of isolation among his own people, that makes him cry, as one of the oldest of the poets cried long ago, ‘Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her.’

It is my grief that I am not a little white duck,

And I'd swim across the sea to France or to Spain;

I would not stay in Ireland for one week only

Without eating, without drinking, without a full jug.

Without a full jug, without eating, without drinking,

Without a feast to get, without wine, without meat,

Without high dances, without a big name, without music,

There is hunger on me, and I astray this long while.

It is my grief that I am not an old crow;

I would sit for awhile up on the old branch,

I would stop my hunger, were I not what I am,

With a grain of oats, or a white potato.

It is my grief that I am not a red fox,

Leaping strong and swift up on the mountains,

Eating cocks and hens without pity,

Carrying off ducks and geese as a conqueror.

It is my grief that I am not a fair salmon,

Going through the strong full waters,

Catching the mayflies by my craft,

Swimming my strongest or swimming with the stream.

It is my grief that I am of the race of the poets;

It would be better for me to be a high rock,

Or a stone, or a tree, or an herb, or a flower,

Or anything at all but the thing that I am.

The next is extraordinarily simple and pathetic, and expresses in more homely words the feeling of ‘lonesomeness’ that is looked upon as almost the worst of ills by the Irish peasant, as we know from his proverb, ‘It is better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome’ ‘I would be lonesome in it’ is often the reason given for a refusal to go from a bog or mountain cabin to some crowded place ‘where there is no heed for one or love.’

O! if there were in this world

    Any nice little place

To be my own, my own for ever,

    My own only,

I would have great joy, great ease,

    Beyond what I have,

Without a place in the world where I can say

    ‘This is my own.’

It’s a pity for a man to know,

    And it’s a pain,

That there is no place in the world

    Where there is heed for him or love,

That there is not in the world for him

    A heart or a hand

To help him on his way

    To the mearing of the next world.

It is hard and it is bitter,

    And it is a sore grief,

It is woe, it is pity,

    To be by yourself.

It’s nothing what way you are

    To any one at all;

It’s nothing what way you are

    To yourself at last!

The sea, and the winds blowing from the sea, can never be very far from the dweller in Ireland, and often in these poems they echo the loneliness of the lonely listener:

Cold, sharp lamentation

In the cold bitter winds,

Ever blowing across the sky —

O! there was loneliness with me.

The loud sounding of the waves

Beating against the shore,

Their vast, rough, heavy outcry —

O! there was loneliness with me.

The light sea birds in the air,

Crying sharply through the harbours;

The cries and screams of the birds

Of my own heart — O! that was loneliness.

The voice of the winds and the tide,

And the long battle of the mighty war;

The sea, the earth, the sky, the blowing of the winds —

O! there was loneliness in all of them together.

Here is one in which the storm outside and the storm within answer to one another:

The heavy clouds are threatening,

And it’s little but they’ll touch the roof of the house.

The heavy thunder is answering

To every flash of the yellow fire.

I, by myself, within my room,

That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting;

I look at the surly skies,

And I listen to the wind.

I was airy, lively,

On the young morning of yesterday,

But when the evening came

I was like a dead man.

I have not one jot of hope

But for a bed in the clay —

Death is all the same as life to me

From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.

Let the thunder roar, let the lightning leap,

Sweeping down out of the mountain —

I would not move a limb or a vein

If it should fall on me and bruise me.

Let the thunder crash, let the rain come down,

Till it hides and it drowns the world;

Gladness and good luck have gone past me —

Death is the same as life to me since yesterday.

There are love-songs in the volume from which I am quoting, and this one seems to recall the moment at eventide when under the shadows of the tall hedges a hand distractedly gathers a fragile blossom: —

Look on my complaint,

Listen to me, aroon —

I am like a sheep,

A sheep without its lamb.

Will you be as hard,

Colleen, as you are quiet?

Will you be without pity

On me for ever?

Listen to me, Noireen,

Listen, aroon —

Put healing on me

From your quiet mouth.

I am in the little road

That is dark and narrow —

The little road that has led

Thousands to sleep.

‘There is another charming song,’ Lady Gregory says, ‘but I will not venture to translate it, for its musical refrain, Shule na mona, shule na mona, shulenu mona slieva, does not keep its music in the English words, “Going to the bog, going to the bog, going to the mountain bog.”’

Douglas Hyde has written in English, and whoever likes may compare these translations with his English poems. His knowledge of the English language is equal to his knowledge of the Irish; yet even in translation his Irish writings are superior to his English. An analogy exists between Douglas Hyde’s position towards the English language and Dante and Milton’s position towards the Latin language. I can think of no more plausible explanation of a curious fact; and inseparably linked to the fact that all great literatures have been written in the small languages is the fact that the destruction of small nations means the destruction of art and literature. The teaching of history is that the danger of empire is uniformity, and those in charge of the English Empire must guard against it if the English Empire is to escape the artistic and literary sterility of the Chinese, the Babylonian, and Persian and Roman Empires. We can only escape from a new dark age, in which literature and art will crumble into the monotony of empire, by the preservation of languages and all local characteristics. To those who believe, as I do, that nothing in the world is useless — that an ode is equal to a battle, a prayer to a railway station, that the wastes are as necessary as the ‘open door,’ and the pure sky as the fume of the chimney — there is something inexpressibly shocking in the destruction of a language. The destruction of an individual soul is a mournful spectacle, but the destruction of a nation’s soul is an act of iconoclasm more terrible than the bombardment of the Parthenon, or the burning of Persepolis. Leave the soul and the soul will create more literature, destroy the soul and there is a measure of aspiration and divinity less in the world. This article is a plea for the soul of the Irish people. Destroy the language and you destroy it. I plead for the preservation of that mysterious background of legends and traditions out of which Ireland has come, and which a hundred years of determined Anglicisation has not altogether blotted out. The peasant of to-day is acquainted with the heroical tales of the Fenian cycle, and to him Dairmuid and Usheen and Caoelte are a part of his inheritance. In stealing from him the traditions of his race, his songs and legends, you do not give him what is best in England — Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats — but the gutter press of London. The seemingly undying hatred of the Celt for the Saxon springs from the desire of the Celt to keep the soul which God gave him, and which he feels instinctively has been taken from him. It is not too late to stop this rape. I have sufficient faith in England to believe that there are many who will agree that this revolt is a noble revolt. I believe that in the country of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats, Hogarth and Josiah Wedgwood, there will be very many who will understand quite well that an Ireland superlatively Celtic, divested from all desire to imitate England, would be a beautiful and interesting thing in the congeries of States which form the Empire, whereas an Anglicised Ireland would be as disgraceful and as useless as a repainted picture. Think of those Dutch pictures which an ignorant and brutal collector has had repainted to make them match the Italian pictures which form the large part of his collection, and you will see what Ireland will be when she has been deprived of her language, of her soul. But I repeat that I believe that there are many in England who well understand that no Land Acts, nor Catholic universities, nor county boards can kill the desire for Home Rule, who will understand that Home Rule truly interpreted merely means Ireland’s desire to save her own soul — the soul which has come down to her through centuries — which came to her whence all things come.

It makes, indeed, a subject to ponder on, that men, otherwise intelligent, should be unable to see that what makes Ireland disloyal is that Ireland is not allowed to think for herself on any point. If, for instance, the New Zealanders wished to speak Maori in their schools, is there any English Minister who would tell them they should not do so? So intolerant a policy, if extended to the colonies, would break up the Empire in a twelvemonth. It is curious that a policy which is followed nowhere else in the Empire should be followed in Ireland, and should still be followed after a hundred years of failure. And it is curious, too, that, while writing this article, I should read in the paper that Lord Curzon is speaking the very words to the Sikhs that I would have every English Minister speaking in Ireland. The daily paper reports him as speaking of the difficulty of transplanting the best in Western thought and tradition without impairing the Indian’s love of home and country, and he said it was a great mistake to suppose that ‘because boys were given an equivalent to an English public-school education, the aim of the college was to turn its pupils outright into English boys — Anglicised Indians were not any more attractive than Indianised Englishmen. He told the Sikhs they should remain Indians, true to their beliefs and traditions, and that copying the habits of an alien country would not make them rememberable. Lord Curzon’s words will, I suppose, meet with universal approval in England, yet if the Irish Secretary were to speak the same words he would read severe criticism in the English papers.

GEORGE MOORE.