THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 64

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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is such a thing as 'the well of English undefiled' whence whatever is best in English literature is drawn, still more is there a holy well of uncontaminated Gaelic from which any distinctively national literature will have to derive its inspiration. Davis, and Mangan, and Ferguson are great in proportion as they caught the Gaelic glow, and Moore failed in so far as he was a stranger to it. Not in Russia, not in Norway, not in the outworn East, may the world find any permanent refreshment for its jaded spirit, but by the old Gaelic firesides, in the hunting booths of Diarmid and Oscar, in the cells of Colman and Brendan amidst the ocean's dirges, in the riches buried amidst the ruins of Gaelic civilisation, like a fairy crock of gold under some haunted castle; and whoso shall have the magic gift of discovering the treasure to the world's eyes will do so not by slavishly copying the old Gaelic forms of dead things, but by importing into the actual life of the world around us the blithesomeness, healthfulness, and simple-heartedness, the ardour in love, and the relish in war, the full-bodied enjoyment of this pleasant green world, the wild pathos of its night-side, and the thrilling faith in the mystic encompassing spirit-world beyond, which give to antique Gaelic literature its charm, and to the Gaelic race its indestructible vitality.

But it will be said, why wring our hands over the inevitable? The god Pan is dead. The speakers of the Irish language are dying off by tens of thousands every decade; not many more tens of thousands remain to die off. What rational hope can there be of retaining, as a living tongue at least, a language in such extremities? In the first place, the Irish language is not in the direful extremities which are sometimes taken for granted. Drawing a line from north to south through the centre of the island, roughly speaking, one half of the population … continue reading »

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