land, there would be no doubt at all that Unionists are justified in holding themselves aloof. There should be no false security of mind in England on this subject. The danger of Home Rule is by no means over. Of course it has always been the unqualified demand of the United Irish League; but I am not referring to professional agitators, nor to a flaccid Cabinet which seems never to be able to refuse; I am thinking of the Irish people. The quiet state of the country as a whole, coinpared with not very distant years, is no proof of the contrary. The greatest of all causes of disquiet, the land question, is almost settled in law, and is being very slowly settled in fact, and the country consequently has rest, to a large degree; but this material improvement has not as yet changed the aspirations of the people.

It is reason

ably argued that a contented farming population owning its land will not trouble itself much about National politics, but will keep its eyes fixed on the balance at the bank. That remains to be seen, but as yet there is little evidence, there has been no time for evidence, of any such political change. At any rate, among the townspeople, shopkeepers, and the more alert and intelligence classes generally, Home Rule is not dead. It is in the forefront of every movement, and since the Irish language is taken up most enthusiastically by these very same intelligent classes, it is only reasonable to infer that those who are studying Gaelic with so much zeal are quite likely to be equally zealous for Home Rule. There is no getting out of this position, and no use in blinking it. If the majority of the intelligent Irish, excluding a large proportion of the north and also a great number of the professional and upper classes in other parts, desire Home Rule, and the same majority desire the teaching of Gaelic as their national language, then the learning of

Gaelic may consistently, though not necessarily be regarded as a "plank" in the Home Rule platform.

Are people then to be denied what is in itself "good"-assuming it to be so for the sake of the argument-merely because they hold political opinions which we do not approve? Should I, as a Tory, be justified in refusing education to Radicals, from the fear that such education might make them more capable opponents? Granting, for the argument's sake, that the study of Gaelic is an instrument of intellectual development, are we to denounce and oppose it and keep the people back because we are afraid of their development? It seems a cowardly and shortsighted policy. One might almost as well argue that it would be right to underfeed Nationalists for fear they should give us a thrashing. If the Irish language be useful, as an educational asset, the true Unionist policy is to acquire it. If it tend to develop the national character, the Unionists, who are every whit as Irish as the Nationalists, and have just as little liking for English ways or English government-save only the link of Unionought to take advantage of it just as much as their opponents. It is the old story of why do not the Roman Catholics capture Trinity College? Why do not the Unionists leaven the Gaelic League?

But we have left out the very important fact that although the great majority of its members are probably Home Rulers, the Gaelic League is essentially and avowedly non-polititcal. I do not belong to it, but I know there is no political test, and I or any one else who cares about the study of Irish could be admitted as a member to-morrow. It is a mere confusion of thought to argue that because the members of a society are largely of one political color, therefore the society itself is organized on a political basis. The Athenæum Club

is widely associated in the popular mind with bishops. Many years ago I was elected a member; was I therefore obliged to become a bishop, or even to take Orders, or belong to the Church of England at all? Oxford used to be always regarded as a hot-bed of "Puseyism." Am I, therefore, as an Oxford man who even had the dangerous honor of being acquainted with Dr. Pusey, necessarily a "Tractarian"? If the Gaelic League is preponderantly Nationalist, it is not by reason of its constitution. It is because the majority of Irishmen happen to be Nationalists, and because the Unionists, for the most part, stand aloof. I do not in the least believe in the political terrors of the League, but I do believe in its educational value.

This brings us to the question, which has been only assumed so far, whether Irish is an educational asset. Whether it be or not does not affect its vitality, for, useless or valuable, it has "come to stay," in the vulgar phrase, and nothing now will stop its progress. A little time ago one might have thought it merely a passing fashion; there is no room for such a thought now. Still, while accepting the fact as indisputable and inevitable, it would be satisfactory to feel assured that it is not downright folly or madness. If the Irish people insist upon having a toy, they must have it, provided that it will not cut their fingers; but one would prefer that it were not merely a toy that they set their hearts on. Now there are two ways in which a language may be a desirable study. (We may leave out its commercial use, for no one has ever predicted any considerable commercial benefits from the acquisition of Gaelic; indeed, the leaders of the movement would indignantly repudiate so unworthy a motive for cultivating Irish.) There is the educational value of studying a language merely as a linguistic exercise, and VOL. XXXVI.

LIVING AGE.

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there is the wider educational value of gaining access to a national literature. The advocates of Gaelic have hardly laid enough stress on the advantages of bilingual education. If you take two boys of equal mental capacity (if such could be found), one of whom knows only English, whilst the other knows both English and French, or English and Latin, there will be no doubt whatever as to which of the two has the better trained intellect. That is, of course, one reason why Latin has continued so long to be the groundwork of all educational methods in Europe; and it should be noted that the present tendency to dislodge Latin from its old pre-eminence is not an attack on the bilingual idea, but really an effort to substitute another language, the language of mathematics and exact science, which has a similar and (as its supporters maintain) a superior influence in training the mind in exact methods. That is what Latin is meant to do. English, with its deficiency in inflections and syntax, can never furnish the exact training that an inflectional and highly syntactical language can give. Most boys were not made to learn Latin so much for the contents of its literature, of which they usually touched only the bare outskirts, as for the sake of the grammatical training; it is perfectly easy in a brief conversation on any literary subject to discover the presence or absence of what is called a classical education. What Latin has done for Europe, Gaelic may do, as a training instrument, for Ireland. Setting aside the contents of the two literatures, Gaelic provides ample exercise for mental training in its elaborate accidence, its beautiful phonetic system, its exquisite flexibility, and its copious vocabulary. This is not the place for a disquisition on Irish philology, even were I competent to give it, but I may be allowed to remark, as a student and professor of lan

A great deal of nonsense has been written about the absurdities of Gaelic spelling, the superfluity of vowels, and the complexities of "aspiration," and so forth. There are valid reasons for these apparent complexities which become obvious to any one who has even an elementary knowledge of the language; and once the delightful phonetic principle of caol le caol is grasped, the vowel system is seen in its real beauty. It is an extremely difficult language, I rejoice to add, for this quality of difficulty is one of the chief justifications for its employment as an educational instrument. The boy who has really mastered Irish has learned how to use the brain. No other language will seem unconquerable to him; he will have the grammatical apparatus which he needs for the easier languages, such as German, and unless fate compels him to attack Russian, or Arabic, or Chinese, he may consider his linguistic preparation equal to most emergencies. He has gained the key which will pick a good many locks. It is true that the form of the language as now taught in the elementary schools is shorn of some of the refinements of the accidence. There is a lamentable preference for the socalled "analytic verb," in place of the true synthetic conjugation. But this is incidental to the early stage of a linguistic revival, and already there are hopes of improvement. Just as the Athenians have almost in one's own memory restored classical forms and got rid of much that defaced modern Greek, so the Irish may soon begin to appreciate the fact that crude forms are unworthy of an exquisitely flexible synthetic language.

The educational value of such a lan

guage cannot be disputed; but apart from this, has Gaelic any "use"? If by "use" be meant money-value, I have already said that no one expects Irish to be of much use to correspondence clerks and merchants, in the way that French or German would be of use. For "getting on" in the world, in a commercial house, or outside Ireland, French or German would be infinitely more useful. But the fact remains that Irish boys and girls, and their teachers as a rule, do not care a fig for French or German, but they do care a great deal for Irish. They want to learn Irish, as they want no other language on earth. The passion may have been artificially stimulated at first, for whatever reason you please to impute, but it is a genuine passion now in a large part of Ireland, and there is no such passion for any other study. We have to take facts as they are, and this being a fact, we must leave aside altogether the question whether some other language would not be more profitable. They do not want some other language, and they do want Irish. But they do not want it merely as a linguistic exercise. They want it because it contains their national literature. The value of this literature has been the subject of very conflicting statements. Enthusiastic Gaelic scholars like Dr. Douglas Hyde set a perhaps extravagant value upon it. Others, especially those who do not know any Irish, say that there is no Irish literature worth the trouble of reading. pends upon what one understands by "literature." If any one hopes to find a Dante, or a Virgil, or an Eschylus among Gaelic poets, he will doubtless suffer disappointment; but if a wide and varied collection of sagas, and chronicles, and hagiographies, and a rich and peculiarly sensitive lyrical vein will content him, there is plenty of material in Gaelic literature. If there were not, it would be difficult to

It rather de

account for the extraordinary attraction it is exerting, not only on Irish students, but on English, French, German, Italian, and American scholars, who can have no national sentiment to inspire their zeal. The enthusiasm for Irish abroad has been compared to the eagerness which was excited by Sanskrit a century ago, or even to the passion for Greek at the "Revival of Learning." Is it conceivable that without a rich and important literature such scholars as Zimmer, Whitley Stokes, Standish Hayes O'Grady, Kuno Meyer, and many more, would have devoted themselves to the study of Irish? deed, though the treasures of Irish literature are as yet but partly explored, still less printed, there are enough translations already by competent scholars to convince the most sceptical on this point.

In

But the whole question is really beside the point. Only real students learn languages for the sake of the literature. For one person who learns French in order to read Corneille there are a thousand who learn it in order to check the addition at a Paris restaurant or to read a modern novel. The bulk of the people never read "literature." Even in English, the popularity of the sixpenny detective story, with its excruciating verbiage-even "the poverty of the English language" shall not com. pel me to call it "style"-and its hackneyed phraseology irretrievably damns our nation as lovers of literature. doubt whether the Irish will fall so low. They have a love of literature, especially if it be national, and I can see many signs that, if the old literature does not content them, or if they cannot read it-for to ask them to read Middle Irish is like setting an English elementary schoolboy to read Chaucerthere are plenty of cultivated minds eager to furnish them with a new literature by living Irishmen. The plays that in recent years have been produced

I

and performed in Gaelic in Dublin and elsewhere stand in refreshing contrast to the conventional society drama of London and the provinces. There is no lack of talent or inspiration among living Gaelic writers, and the demand which is daily swelling will not fail of its supply.

Yet, apart from the actual literary value of what has come down from the Middle Ages, and what is now being put forth by modern Irishmen, there is another incentive to the study of Irish which no one can gainsay. It is the most powerful incentive that can exist. The Irish people want to learn Irish because it is Irish-just that. It is enough. I am not going into the questions: Is "Ireland a Nation"? Is there such a thing as a genuine Celtic people in Ireland? Are not the Irish as mixed and as English a race as the English themselves? We have heard all this dinned into our ears till we are sick. Race is not the only factor in nationality; sentiment cuts far deeper, and if any one who has lived in Ireland and knows the people ventures to say that they are not a distinct people with national characteristics and an intense national sentiment-not by any means confined to any class, religion, region, or political section-he must be blind and deaf and without understanding.

Does any one deny the individuality of the Scottish character, or the strongly marked distinction between the Highlander and the Lowlander? The Battle of the Books is being fought in Scotland too, and Mr. Morston Macdonald of Largie has defended the teaching of Gaelic in the Highland schools on much the same lines that I had adopted before I read his vigorous letter in the Times of last August 24th.

We look forward (he says) with apprehension to the time when the whole Empire shall have been levelled to a

single standard of cockney dulness, when local feeling, costume, customs, and speech shall have perished, and all that we have in exchange for our soul is . . . commercial efficiency We believe that it is possible, by the preservation of our ancient tongue, and the individuality which we Highlanders have inherited from our forefathers, to contribute something to the good of the Empire which is in no sense incompatible with commercial efficiency, but which, once lost, no amount of commercial efficiency could ever restore. We believe that the Gaelic Highlander has certain gifts of character which can be of special service to the Empire, and we believe that to crush these in the insane desire for homogeneity is a false and short-sighted policy. true statesmanship is rather to foster and encourage all that goes to build up character and preserve individuality.

The

It is this intense national feeling, this distinct nationality, that craves for its own language and literature, no matter what its contents; and it is in order to foster this national feeling and maintain these national characteristics that the leaders of the language movement devote themselves to the spread of Gaelic studies. It may be mixed up with current politics, but it is not a political movement; it may tend towards the possible realization of Home Rule, but political separation is not its object. That object is the preservation of the essential character and life of the Irish people, and the prevention of the deadly process of grinding all people to the same uninteresting commercial level. The apostles of Gaelic do not dispute the greatness of much that is in the English character, though they sometimes speak unadvisedly with their tongue on the subject. But they do not want to be turned into English any more than we want to be turned into Germans. They will use any means, The Fortnightly Review.

and the language is the most potent of all, to escape the curse of cosmopolitanism, or, as they put it, with a more limited outlook, Anglicization. And who is to throw the first stone at them? Do any of us, outside the elect of the philosophers, wish to have our national character and temperament tampered with? Should we like England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to be turned into exactly the same shape, like the four legs of a table? "Highlanders," writes the Rev. J. C. Maclellan, “in the sound philosophy of the Apostle, believe that nationalities, like individuals, have diversities of gifts, and that they each have a distinctive and healthy contribution to make to the body politic." And why not Irishmen-as national as you please? There is no need to descant upon the virtues and charm of the Irishman, nor yet on his defects; still less on the Irishwoman, in whom I admit no defects. It is enough that they are distinctively Irish, and they intend to remain so. For my part, in spite of all the trouble they give us, and their unique capacity for disquieting our pet theories and convictions. I would not change the Irish character if I had Aladdin's lamp to work the miracle. Suum cuique. Let each nationality possess at least its own character unmolested; let us not attempt to make a Finland or a Caucasus of Eire. Let her develop her own nature in her own way, without the imposition of profane hands. There is a pietas of nations, as well as of families, erga patriam aut parentes, as Cicero tells us, the more Ireland loves her past, the more she will respect herself in the present, and with a fuller life and wider knowledge we may perhaps hope that in time she may even come to respect -I do not say like-her nearest neigh

bor.

Stanley Lane-Poole.