Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

The Hidden Ireland

where formerly, perhaps, there was none – a patina on the bronze. But the thing is to be prepared to lose something. If verse translates, then, surely, it ought to modernise. and old Irish verse translates not alone well, to judge by Kuno Meyer’s examples, but excellently well. The concision of old Irish verse that must hinder, in a way, modernisation , at the same time proves that modernisation is possible. So far as I know, old Irish verse did not depend on its metre for its beauty; neither did it depend on verbal graces nor on assonance; these graces were in it, contributing their quota towards the final result; but there was in it, as there is in Browning,4 to choose a modern parallel, a beauty that would still remain, and remain almost in its entirety, if all these were blotted away – the beauty of vision. and vision knows only one tongue – the concrete. Vision appeals always in concrete terms – fortunately, since it gives all peoples a chance of translating into their own parochial languages the greatest literature in all other languages. If the great outstanding excellence of ancient Irish verse consist in its keenness of vision, then I can see no reason why it should not be modernised, even if new verse forms, more modern verse-forms, had to be used for the purpose. every living literature modernises itself from day to day: is it not time to begin to do this with more modern Irish poems? no one, of course, would ask that it be done in the case of poems now published for the first time, like those in Thomas F. o’rahilly’s Dánta Grádha,5 but why not make an effort to do so in the case of Keating?6 perhaps I speak as a fool. perhaps also it is a question on which the professors, being professors, are admirably qualified to give a perfectly wrong decision: do we not see them hankering after quaint spellings in the case of even Milton,7 after the capital letters found in early Goldsmiths?8 * * * The Hidden Ireland1 I In the latter half of the eighteenth century, whether Catholics should be free to enlist in the British army was warmly debated by the ruling caste in Ireland. It was, of course, the penal Laws that stood in the way: according to these, no Catholic could do so, for it was not thought wise that Catholics should learn the use of firearms. However,townshend became Viceroy,2 and took a new view of the matter. 22 Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism. Selected Writings He argued that ‘as the trade and manufactures of Ireland are almost totally carried on by protestants, the number of whom is very small in proportion to the number of papists,’ it was of the utmost importance that protestants should not be taken away for foreign service, and he proposed that papists,and papists alone,should be enlisted.‘a considerable number of able men might be raised from amongst them in a short space of time in the provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connacht.’ rochford3 answered that the arguments of townshend had convinced the King of the impropriety of drawing off a number of protestants from those parts of the country where the chief manufactures were carried on; that he could not without a special act of parliament order the recruiting agents to restrict themselves to roman Catholics, but that in the present very pressing exigency he authorised them to make Leinster, Munster, and Connacht their recruiting grounds.* In this manner, adds Lecky, the Catholics were silently admitted into the British army (1771). a few years later, among the Catholics who took advantage of this hoodwinking at the Law was a poor Munster peasant, a labourer, a wild rake of a man, named eoghan Ó Súilleabháin. He had misbehaved himself whilst in the service of the nagle family,4 whose place was not far from Fermoy, and enlisting in the army was his way of escaping the consequences. From Fermoy he was sent to Cork, transferred to the navy, and straightway flung into england’s battle-line, thousands of miles away. If one dwells on the incident, a great deal of Irish history, Irish history in any century, may be realised.townshend, the Viceroy, the representative of Law, rough-rides over it when it suits him. The penalised Catholic, living from day to day, is callous whether his act is thought...