THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 58

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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records such as those which are packed away unregarded in the chests of Trinity College and the Royal Irish Academy—all this may surely excuse the outcries of Gaelic enthusiasts against the fashion of dismissing the venerable Gaelic learning in its own land as a peasant's jargon or a pack of gibberish about Finn McCool. But it will be said: 'This is an argument addressed to learned bodies, not to the common people. Doubtless Irish Universities and academies ought to give us a little more original Irish science— sociological, philological, and archaeological—even if they had to fill their Books of Transactions with a little less general science at secondhand. You cannot expect a general public to rummage old manuscripts of the twelfth century or puzzle over obsolete legal dialects to which no more than half-a-dozen scholars in a generation can find the key. The mass of men, after all, want to be amused, not to be set tasks. Is there aught in your vaunted Gaelic literature as full of vivid human interest as a play of Ben Jonson, or even that would enable the average reader in a public library to pass as enjoyable a leisure hour as a novel of Fielding or Thackeray?' To this I venture to return a confident affirmative. Those who decry Gaelic literature are those who are ignorant of it. I have yet to meet a man once practically acquainted with the language who dropped it for want of literary material to feed upon. It is quite true that there is no modern Gaelic literature to compare with that which sprang up in Italy in the courts of the Medici or the d'Este, or in England in the splendid times of Elizabeth and Anne, or in France under the smiles of the Grand Monarch. The men who might have been the Petrarchs or the Molieres or the Ben Jonsons of the Gael had darker cares to occupy them during the last seven … continue reading »

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