IRELAND AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES

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BY PROF. W. F. P. STOCKLEY

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N education commission has lately recommended for Ireland, that modern languages other than English and Irish, shall not cease to be studied amongst us. They say we are in a transition state in Ireland. (One may hope that the present state of things is transitory. Wherever we are going, we cannot help a wish to be there, and not to be here. One echoes a recent Church of Ireland Gazette, on its being hindered in the post: 'Butler's thesis that this world is peculiarly fitted to be a place of probation, is being considerably reinforced by the conditions of life under which we are now living.') However, at present, we have come to this, that we are losing hold of French and German, not gaining hold of Italian, and weakening in our grasp of Spanish. We are left with English, and more or less with Irish. This, says the education commission, very wisely, is a bad look out for Ireland, intellectually, artistically, economically.'

Ireland is in a peculiar position. In this matter bi

1 Professor Tierney wrote, some four years since, in his Education in a Free Ireland :

To restore to the people the capacity for enlightened appreciation of music, painting, and sculpture, as well as of good literature, must be one of the great functions of our educational system; and the process cannot begin too soon. It must be based upon whatever art we possess, and must aim at the restoration of a national tradition in all branches of culture. For this purpose the study of foreign literature, history, and art must be introduced early into our schools, in order that we may have standards which the restorers of our civilization may strive to equal' (p. 46).

'There is great room in Dublin for an Institute of Nationality, on the model of the Imperial Institute in London, which will not only train men and women in purely Irish studies, but will devote its attention to nationality in general and to the various lesser nations of Europe. Such an institute would act as a tremendously useful connecting link with foreign nations' (p. 97).

lingual, one thinks, by comparison, of Wales, of Belgium, of Switzerland, of Poland, and perhaps of Hungary. But then one thinks, by contrast, that the second language for Flemish-Belgium is French; for Poland, German; German and French are Switzerland's dominant languages. Flemish, too, is Dutch, the tongue of a people with a place in great times of the world's history at home and abroad. Polish was a tongue used by a nation's rulers, not much more than a century before Poland's renewed independence. There is no analogy between those countries and Ireland, in its peculiar position of being left with a language, Irish, cut off, for so long, from main movements of thought and action, without a modern literature, even like Dutch or Polish, not to say Hungarian. (Though, of course, as to Irish in Ireland, it is possibly, unnecessary, now, to recall Davis, that national language, history, tradition, and song, are worth more than armies, fleets, and revenues.' One assumes, here, that Irish is to be Ireland's language; and one thinks of its extraordinary renewal in the last forty years, since Dr. Hyde led his forlorn hope.) And the other language that present-day Ireland is left with, is the language, English; the language of what has represented a mind, an action, hostile to, or contemptuous of, indifferent to, ignorant of, or ignoring, the subject people of Ireland, persecuted or tolerated, used or bribed, admired or tamed or absorbed, but never really recognized for what they were, themselves, bad or good, to live their life, express their thoughts, do their deeds, worship their heroes; with the same duty to love their own, and feel their own admiration for altar, home, and State, in Ireland, as might a big France or a little Switzerland. And this irritating contempt, this alternate bullying and wheedling, this dull indifference, or this embittering hate, is not good for anyone ; it engenders a life not normal; producing shame under violence, a self-distrust at heart, hidden by brave words, indecision, lack of perseverance, unseemly submission, and a disposition to live on hate of one's neighbour, rather than of love of one's own bit of the world. It is not a

normal life (to repeat), that Ireland has had to live; it is not a healthy life; it is not a life to be hoped for the future. But the past has been. And England's relations with Ireland have been what they have been. Things are as they are; and their consequences. No one in his senses in Ireland wants to be troubling himself too much about that past, and all its woe; not even with what it hid from Ireland, and what it deprived her of, in that most woeful might-have-been. Let the dead bury their dead,' must be used by the living; even by those who know that a nation lives by its dead; just as we, individually, by those who were our forebears. Nevertheless, nos ancêtres sont nos ancêtres, et nous sommes les gens de maintenant.' What are we going to do about it-that is, about our inheritance from the English-Irish past? This nation is what it is, with vices perhaps, with virtues perchance, which we should not have had, if that English-Irish past had never been. England has its attitude towards us; when it has to bother at all about us. The late Lord Salisbury spoke for a widespread nature in England, doubtless, when he declared, that the natural instinct of an Englishman on seeing an Irishman is to get rid of him. If the Irishman is at all

a real man; perhaps that English Prime Minister might have added.'

As for the Irish, half a century ago, their modest English visitor, Dr. Newman, felt-perhaps, indeed, too absolutely-that there was not an Anglophile in the whole of this land of Ireland; even though to an individual English man he found overflowing kindliness. These may not be whole truths. But there is much truth suggested by these allusions; this much truth, anyway-which is what one wishes to enforce-that one must live in the present as

1 Or the instinct of an Anglo-Scot, Carlyle: 'Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it-by heaven-squelch it.' But that is a trumpeter-elephant; and what his voice will say, is, that the strong beast must pick up the weak, and give it foster-care. For-as once more, in the language of her London Church Times, in January, 1923-England has been specially raised up to be the protector of weak nations.'

inheritor of the past. To England, therefore, the Ireland that has been is a something. To Ireland, the England that has been. It is not for Ireland's honour or her good, to receive too much, through the England that has been, the England dominating, and creating subserviency or else bitterness; unreality in the Irish, or else violence; blindness on their part to a better England, it may be, and anger with a worse England, and with themselves, for what they have to do with her. English literature, doubtless, is not much occupied with Ireland. And that literature, speaking generally, may surely be read for itself, for its great worth. But it is English. And there is pedantry in suggesting that what is English comes to Ireland with no special note -no louder (not to say deafening and dulling) than what comes from elsewhere-be it prestige, or aggressiveness, be it insinuation or domination. English literature being English, and England being England, and Ireland being Ireland, this literature cannot come to Irish youth as just one foreign literature. The language in itself forbids it being foreign, to our present generation anyway. And yet it is from England. And Ireland has a rising instinct to look beyond England. She feels herself cabin'd, cribb'd, confined'; by England, shut out from European trade, as from European ideas. Now, all this has to be, and will be, in an Ireland having too much to do with England, with the mind of England, with England's men of letters, if not with her men of action. Insularity may be a blessing or a curse, or both. England is an island off from the continent. Ireland is an island off from an island. As in her commerce, which she thinks of reviving with France and Spain, so in her mind and soul, it cannot be good-seeing that it is second-hand wisdom and culture -to pretend, or to be dazzled, to be confused and shortened in vision, to read history through only English historians, Ireland's bitter scorners or her naturally shamed soothers; to read only a literature so deeply grounded in the new religion and its modern results, which Ireland as such rejected; to lose all sense of proportion in judging

who are the great men of the world; to be unable to read French writers on the Church and society-Ozanam, the founder, from the University, of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul; Montalembert, the son of the Crusaders; Lacordaire, who would make the soul live of any young man of mind or Italian on philosophy, as well as for their world-poet Dante-or German historians and poets, above all, the author of Faust; not to speak of reading no books from the continent on medicine and engineering, or no up-to-date publications thereon, nor no good books of the hour, in foreign languages-on whatever be the subjects of our likingwhich may make live, for us, another world than the English or English-American. The dreadful insularity of the English has been a matter for their John Stuart Mill's lament, for their Matthew Arnold's exposures,' for their

1 'It is only of late,' said Mill, as Rector of St. Andrew's University, in 1867, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion. The very words "Fine Arts" called up a notion of frivolity, of great pains expended on a rather trifling object-on something which differed from the cheaper and commoner arts of producing petty things, mainly by being more difficult, and by giving fops an opportunity of pluming themselves on caring for it and by being able to talk about it. . . . On these subjects, the mode of thinking and feeling of other countries was, not only not intelligible, but not credible, to an average Englishman. To find Art ranking on a complete equality, in theory at least, with Philosophy, Learning, and Science, as holding an equally important place among the agents of civilization and among the elements of the worth of humanity; to find even painting and sculpture treated as great social powers, and the art of a country as a feature in its character and condition, little inferior in importance to either its religion or its government; all this only did not amaze and puzzle Englishmen, because it was too strange for them to be able to realize it, or, in truth, to believe it possible; and the radical difference of feeling on this matter between the British people and those of France, Germany, and the continent generally, is one among the causes of that extraordinary inability to understand one another, which exists between England and the rest of Europe, while it does not exist to anything like the same degree between one nation of continental Europe and another. It may be traced,' concludes Mill, 'to the two influences which have chiefly shaped the British character since the days of the Stuarts: commercial moneygetting business, and religious Puritanism.' Poor Ireland !

Matthew Arnold, several years later, notes how the Puritan Parliament treated the famous collection of pictures made by the Stuart king, Charles, who had the just idea that art and letters are great civilizers.' Ordered,'

said the triumphant Parliament, that all such pictures and statues . . . as are without any superstition shall be forthwith sold '; 'Ordered, that all such pictures as have the representation of the second person in Trinity upon them