The Old Irish World

								

mind is bare.
The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under
authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland
now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave,
rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope
that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in
the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last
catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of
free knowledge and candid thinking. In Ireland, as in England, history
has been made compulsory in a sense--a sense, we might irreverently
say, of the “United Kingdom.” It has been made a department of English
Grammar, and has further been portioned out to Irishmen as a fragment
of English history, strictly confined within dates fixed for that
history in the schools of England. The Irish story is thus shut up as
it were like criminals of old in the Tower prison of Little Ease--a
narrow place where no man could stand or lie at length. And Irishmen
are still driven to discuss in belated fashion the question that all
Europe settled long ago--Why should we make the History of our country
our serious study?
The reason of Nature for this study is indeed as profound as the being
of man. There is no other creature on this planet that can create
a history of its kind. To man alone belongs the faculty of looking
“before and after,” and considering the story of his race from the
first human being that walked the earth. Our first forefather brought
with him something new--the power to store up and to celebrate memories
of the great dead. His elemental pieties have become part of the whole
tradition of our humanity; and that history which he began, and to
which we add day by day, is our witness to the separateness of man from
the other creatures of this world. When we cherish this study we are
proclaiming our pre-eminence among all the living beings that we know.
When we let this history fall from us we are sinking to the level of
the dumb beasts. As living men, therefore, “let us enjoy, whenever we
have an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties
of reverence.”
There is a practical reason, too, for the knowledge of history. The
individual man left to himself is helpless to stand against the powers
of the world. Alone he can do nothing. His strength lies in the
generations and associations of man behind him, linked by an endless
tradition, who have made for him his art, religion, science, politics,
social laws. It is only in communion with that company of workers that
he can take a step forward. The soul of a country is bound up with the
heroes who still


“... people the steep rocks and river banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul,
Of independence and stern liberty.”
Rulers and commanders have known this well. When they have wanted to
exalt peoples or armies under them, they have opened out to them the