THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 63
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
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ailments of body or mind. For this poison of moral and intellectual despair which is creeping through a sad world's veins, what cheerier antidote is within reach than the living tide of health, and hope, and simplicity, and hilarity, the breezy objectiveness and stoutness of muscle, and ardour of emotion, which flows full and warm through the heroic myths of the men of Erin? If the world is content to go as far as Norway for a new proof of how wicked and unhappy human nature can make itself, why not also go to Ireland to hunt the wild woods of Ben Gulban with Finn's mighty men, to see the golden towers of the Tir Tairngire glittering on the western wave, to participate in the glorious carouse of the Fair of Carman, or to live again the charmed life of the post-Christian days, when the vesper bells of saints sang the quiet valleys to their rest, and the welcome of kings laughed merrily out upon the stranger in the night?
The Celtic spirit is the saving salt of a materialistic age. Celtic hearts in our own days have carried the fire of divine faith into the depths of the New World as bright as the night it was kindled by Patrick on the Hill of Slane. As with the supernatural, so with the intellectual ideals, sympathies, blemishes, and virtues of the race. They retain their pristine sincerity and their incommunicable glow. Now, if there is anything clearer than that Celtic ideals do not find satisfaction in the English tongue—that they, so to say, feel an alien chill and discomfort in their English garb—it is that they, on the contrary, experience a feeling of kinship in the Irish language and in the old Irish lore, such as a man might experience at sight of the turf smoke curling out of his native cabin by some fairy-haunted Irish rath after wandering among the splendours of foreign cities. If there … continue reading »
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