THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 59

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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hundred years than polishing their metres, or dipping their language in the Pactolian stream of the great classical revival. Strip English literature of nine-tenths of the poetry, of the plays, of the histories and philosophies, accumulated since the days of Piers Plowman, and confide the care of the English language for all those centuries to a band of hunted peasants in the wilds of Cornwall, and you will only have applied to English letters the conditions upon which any Gaelic literature at all has come down to us. On the other hand, reverse the fate of the Gaelic Muse, which in centuries when the darkness of a brutish night overspread the intellect of Europe had already imagined the graceful scenery of the Land of Youth and the exquisite chivalry of the fight between Cuchullin and Ferdiad—suppose that the courts of Irish kings could have continued to shower their favours upon the masters of song and learning—suppose the Italian models from which the Elizabethan dramatists borrowed, or the mighty French masters who coloured the literature of Queen Anne, had presented themselves on the Irish poet's bower in place of statutes rewarding the slaying of Irish harpers on a more liberal scale than Irish wolves—suppose that a long dynasty of Goldsmiths, Swifts, Berkeleys, Burkes, Sheridans, Currans, and Moores had given to Gaelic letters the wealth of philosophy, imagination, and eloquence they have squandered upon a stepmother English tongue—who can measure to what a degree of expansion the language of Oisin might have attained in the nineteenth century? A couple of centuries of the Goths and Huns were enough to debase the proud literature of Rome. There are only three centuries accounted the Dark Ages. Yet, when they were over, civilisation had to begin all over again, as after Noah's flood. Ten centuries of confusion, … continue reading »

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