THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 141
THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD
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the delight of Swiss tourists—were all Irishmen, speaking the same tongue and breathing the same aspirations which are still to be found among the Bens of Connemara. Where, indeed, are English boys to learn better unless they have French enough to dive into the Revue Celtique, or German enough to question Zeuss or Windisch? They can easily enough find sound English authorities on the Vedas, or the Sagas, or the folk-lore of the South Sea Islands; but they will search the shelves of the British Museum in vain for any English book which will discover to them the fact, long familiar to Continental students, that during three hundred years of the so-called Dark Ages Ireland was the only country in Europe which enjoyed culture, good government, and peace.
Irish history is the only department of human knowledge as to which ignorance is not only permissible among educated people, but is cultivated, obtruded, and gloried in. The treatment of Ireland is as shameful to English scholarship as it is to English statesmanship. The statesmen, out of one of the most fertile islands in the seas, have fashioned one of the most unhappy. The scholars have either failed to suspect that a literature unsurpassable in its hints as to archaic society was rotting under their hands, or they have deliberately disfigured the facts. In an island resounding with Ariel's music they have heard only the grunt of Caliban.
Still more woeful the tale, the Gaelic race themselves were cuffed, bribed and befooled into believing their own rich mother-tongue to be the coarse and lumpish thing its exterminators figured it. We all know what the French Terrorists did with the poor little Dauphin. They debauched, coerced, and stupefied the child until he was forced to give false testimony against his own royal mother. Irish … continue reading »
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