The Glories Of Ireland Part 19

Truly the land of the Southern Cross is not the dimmest jewel in the coronet of Ireland's glories.

REFERENCES:

Hogan: The Irish in Australia (1888), The Gladstone Colony (1898); Mennell: Dictionary of Australian Biography (1892); Duffy: Life in Two Hemispheres (1903); Kenny: The Catholic Church in Australia to the Year 1840; Moran: History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (1898); Davitt: Life and Progress in Australasia (1898); Bonwick: The First Twenty Years of Australia (1883); Flanagan: History of New South Wales (1862); Byrne: Australian Writers (1896); Wilson: The Church in New Zealand (1910); Hocken: A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand (1909).

THE IRISH IN SOUTH AFRICA

By A. MILLIARD ATTERIDGE.

The tide of emigration from Ireland has set chiefly towards America and Australia. In South Africa, therefore, the Irish element among the colonists has never been a large one. But, despite its comparatively small numbers, it has been an important factor in the life of South Africa. Here, as in so many other countries, it has been the glory of the sons of Erin to be a missionary people. To their coming is due the very existence of the Catholic Church in these southern lands.

When Dr. Ullathorne touched at the Cape on his way to Australia in 1832, he found at Cape Town "a single priest for the whole of South Africa," an English Benedictine, who soon afterwards returned to Europe in broken health. Few Irish immigrants had by that time found their way to the Cape. They began to arrive in numbers only after the famine year.

The founder of the Catholic hierarchy in South Africa was the Irish Dominican, Patrick R. Griffith, who, in 1837, was sent to Cape Town by Gregory XVI. as the first Vicar Apostolic of Cape Colony. His successors at the Cape, Bishops Grimley, Leonard, and Rooney, have all been Irishmen, and nine in every ten of their flock have from the first been Irish by birth or descent. In the earlier years of Bishop Griffith's episcopate there was a large garrison in South Africa on account of the Kaffir wars. Many of these soldiers were Irishmen. At Grahamstown in 1844 the soldiers of an Irish regiment stationed there did most of the work of building St. Patrick's Church, one of the oldest Catholic churches in South Africa. They worked without wages or reward of any kind, purely out of their devotion to their Faith, giving up most of their leisure to this voluntary labor.

Ten years after Bishop Griffith's appointment, Pius IX. separated Natal and the eastern districts of Cape Colony from Cape Town, and erected the Eastern Vicariate Apostolic. Once more an Irish prelate was the first Bishop--Aidan Devereux, who was consecrated by Bishop Griffith at Cape Town in the Christmas week of 1847. The great emigration from Ireland had now begun, and a stream of immigrants was arriving at the Cape. Bishop Devereux fixed his residence at Port Elizabeth, and of his four successors up to the present day three have been Irish. Bishop Moran, who went out to Port Elizabeth in 1854, was consecrated at Carlow in Ireland by Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen. The third Vicar Apostolic was Bishop Ricards, and the present bishop is another Irishman, Dr. Hugh McSherry, who received his consecration from the hands of Cardinal Logue in St.

Patrick's Cathedral at Armagh.

Until the discovery of the diamond deposits in what is now the Kimberley district, some forty years ago, the Irish immigrants had chiefly settled in the ports and along the coast. But among the crowds who went to seek their fortunes at the diamond fields were large numbers of adventurous Irishmen. The mission church established at Kimberley became the centre of a new bishopric in 1886, when the Vicariate of Kimberley, which for some time included the Orange Free State, was established, and an Irish Oblate, Father Anthony Gaughran, was appointed its first bishop. He was succeeded in 1901 by his namesake and fellow countryman, the present Bishop Matthew Gaughran.

The gold discoveries on the Wit.w.a.tersrand about Johannesburg produced another rush into the interior in the days after the first Transvaal war. A great city of foreign immigrants--the "Uitlanders"--grew up rapidly on the upland, where a few months before there had been only a few scattered Boer farms. Irishmen from Cape Colony and Natal, from Ireland itself, and from the United States formed a large element in the local mining and trading community. They were mostly workers. Few of them found their way into the controlling financier cla.s.s, which was largely Jewish. The Irish were better out of this circle of international gamblers, whose intrigues finally produced the terrible two years' bloodshed of the great South African war. Many engineers of the mines were Irish-Americans. Huge consignments of mining machinery arrived from the United States, and many of the engineers who came to fit it up remained in the employ of the mining companies.

Until after the war, the Transvaal and Johannesburg had depended ecclesiastically on the Vicar Apostolic of Natal, but in 1904 a Transvaal Vicariate was erected, and once more the first bishop was an Irishman, Dr. William Miller, O.M.I.

We have seen how Irish the South African episcopate has been from the very outset. Most of the clergy belong to the same missionary race, as also do the nuns of the various convents, and the Christian Brothers, who are in charge of many of the schools. Of the white Catholic population of the various states of the South African Union, the greater part are Irish. There are about 25,000 Irish in Cape Colony in a total population of over two millions. There are some 7,000 in Natal, I,500 in Kimberley, and about 2,000 in the Orange River Colony. In the Transvaal, chiefly in and about Johannesburg, there are some 12,000 Irish. A few thousand more are to be found scattered in Griqualand and Rhodesia.

As has been already said, the total numbers are not large in proportion to that of the population generally, and they belong chiefly to the industrial and trading cla.s.ses. The most notable names among them are those of prelates, priests, and missionaries, who have founded and built up the organization of the Catholic Church in South Africa. But there are some names of note also in civil life. Sir Michael Gallwey was for many years Chief Justice of Natal; the Hon.

A. Wilmot, who has not only held high official posts, but has also done much to clear up the early history of South Africa, is Irish on the mother's side; Mr. Justice s.h.i.+el is a judge of the Cape Courts; Eyre and Woodbyrne are Irish names among the makers of Rhodesia; and amongst those who have done remarkable work in official life may also be named Sir Geoffrey Lagden, Sir William St. John Carr, and the Hon.

John Daverin. Lagden was for many years British Resident in Basutoland, the Switzerland of South Africa, where the native tribes are practically independent under a British protectorate. Griffith, the paramount chief of the Basuto nation, has been a Catholic since 1911. Sir Geoffrey's tactful policy and wise counsels did much to promote the prosperity of this native state, and during the trying days of the South African War, he was able to secure the neutrality of the tribesmen.

In the Boer wars, Irishmen fought with distinction on both sides.

General Colley, who fell at Majuba in the first Boer War, was a distinguished Irish soldier. Another great Irishman, General Sir William Butler, has written the story of Colley's life. Butler himself was in command of the troops at the Cape before the great war. If his wise counsels had been followed by the Government, the war would undoubtedly have been avoided. He refused to have any part in the war-provoking policy of Rhodes and Chamberlain, and warned the Home Government that an attack on the Dutch republics would be a serious and perilous enterprise. When the war came, England owed much to the enduring valor of Irish soldiers and to the leaders.h.i.+p of Irish generals. One need only name General Hart, of the Irish Brigade; General French, who relieved Kimberley, and who is now (1914) Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the British army in France; General Mahon, who raised the siege of Mafeking; Colonel Moore, of the famous Connaught Rangers, now (1914) commandant and chief military organizer of the Irish National Volunteers; and, finally, Lord Roberts, who took over the chief command and saved the situation after the early disasters. Lord Kitchener, who acted as Roberts's chief-of-staff, succeeded him in the command, and brought the war to an end by an honorable treaty with the Boer leaders, is a native of Ireland, but of English descent, and he pa.s.sed most of his boyhood in Ireland, in Co. Kerry, where his father had bought a small property. I used to know an Irish Franciscan lay brother who told me he had taught the future soldier "many games" when he was quite a little fellow.

Of the regiments which took part in the war none won a higher fame than the Munster and the Dublin Fusiliers and the Connaught Rangers.

It was in recognition of their splendid valor that the new regiment of Irish Guards was added to the British Army.

But the majority of Irishmen sympathized with the Boer republics, and many of them fought under the Boer flag, of these were legally British subjects, but many were naturalized burghers of the Transvaal, and many more were United States citizens, Irish-Americans from the Rand gold mines. There were two small Irish brigades under the Boer flag, those of McBride and Lynch (the latter now a member of the British House of Commons), and an engineer corps commanded by Colonel Blake, an American. At the first battle before Ladysmith it was one of the Irish brigades that kept the Boer guns in action, bringing up ammunition under a rain of sh.e.l.lfire. During the Boer retreat and Roberts's advance on Pretoria, Blake's engineers were always with the Boer rearguard and successfully destroyed every mile of the railway as they went back. Blake had served in the United States cavalry, had learned mining while on duty in Nevada, and had then gone to seek his fortune at Johannesburg. The great leader of the Boer armies, now the Prime Minister of the new South Africa which has happily arisen out of the storm of war, has Irish connections.

Louis Botha lived before the war in the southeast Transvaal, not far from Laings Nek, and near neighbors of his were a family of Irish settlers bearing the honored name of Emmet. The Emmets and the Bothas were united by ties of friends.h.i.+p and intermarriage, and one of the Emmets served with Louis Botha during the war.

The Irish colonists of South Africa keep their love for faith and fatherland, but, as in the United States, they have thoroughly and loyally thrown in their lot with the new country of which they have become citizens. Few in number though they are, they are an important factor in the new Dominion, for their national tradition inspires them with civic patriotism, and their religion gives them a high standard of conduct and puts before them, as guides in the work of life and the solution of the problems of the day, the Christian principles of justice and charity.

REFERENCES:

Government Census Returns, South Africa; Catholic Directory for British South Africa (Cape Town, since 1904); The Catholic Magazine, Cape Town; Wilmot and Chase: History of Cape Colony (London, 1896); Theal: History of South Africa (5 vols., London, 1888-1893); for the war period, the _Times_ History of the South African War, and the British Official History.

IRISH LANGUAGE AND LETTERS

By DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., M.R.I.A.

The Celtic languages consist of two divisions, (a) the Gaelic or Irish division, and (b) the Kymric or Welsh division. Between them they comprise (a) Irish, Scotch-Gaelic, and Manx, and (b) Welsh, Armorican, and Cornish. All these languages are still alive except Cornish, which died out about a hundred years ago.

Of all these languages Irish is the best preserved, and it is possible to follow its written literature back into the past for some thirteen hundred years; while much of the most interesting matter has come down to us from pagan times. It has left behind it the longest, the most luminous, and the most consecutive literary track of any of the vernacular languages of Europe, except Greek alone.

For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not recognized that they had any relations.h.i.+p with the Greeks or Romans, the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica"

(published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and inflections, and its whole verbal system.

The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that, although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain kins.h.i.+p with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin groups, especially to the Latin.

All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relations.h.i.+p, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic.

Thus we find the Irish _dia_ (G.o.d) in the Anglo-Saxon _tiw_, the G.o.d of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-dag, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish _dead_ in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,--as, for example, the _b_-future, the pa.s.sive in-_r_, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. _fer_, gen. _fir_, dat. _fiur_, acc. _fer n_--, plur.

nom. _fir_, gen. _fer n_--, is derived from the older forms _viros, viri, viro, viron_, nom. plur. _viri_, gen. plur. _viron_, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, _vir, viri, viro, virum_, nom. plur.

_viri_, etc.

So much for the language. When did this language begin to be used in literature? This question depends upon another--When did the Irish begin to have a knowledge of letters; when did they begin to commit their literature to writing; and whence did they borrow their knowledge of this art?

The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to have brought his Ogam writing with him.

The Irishman who first invented the Ogam character was probably a pagan who obtained a knowledge of Roman letters. He brought back to Ireland his invention, or, as is most likely, invented it on Irish soil. Indeed, the fact that no certain trace of Ogam writing has been found upon the European continent indicates that the alphabet was invented in Ireland itself. An inscription at Killeen Cormac, Co.

Kildare, survives which seems to show that the Roman alphabet was known in Ireland in pagan times. Ogam is an alphabet suitable enough for chiselling upon stones, but too c.u.mbrous for the purposes of literature. For this the Roman alphabet must have been used. The Ogam script consists of a number of short lines straight or slanting, and drawn either below, above, or through one long stem-line. This stem-line is generally the sharp angle between two faces or sides of a long upright rectangular stone. Thus four cuts to the right of the long line stand for S; to the left of it they mean C; pa.s.sing through it, half on one side and half on the other, they mean Z. The device was rude, but it was applied with considerable skill, and it was undoubtedly framed with much ingenuity. The vowels occurring most often are also the easiest to cut, being scarcely more than notches on the edge of the stone. The inscription generally contains the name of the dead warrior over whom the memorial was raised; it usually begins on the left corner of the stone facing the reader and is to be read upwards, and it is often continued down on the right hand angular line as well.

The language of the Ogam inscriptions is very ancient and nearly the same forms occur as in what we know of Old Gaulish. The language, in fact, seems to have been an antique survival even when it was first engraved, in the third or fourth century. The word-forms are probably far older than those used in the spoken language of the time. This is a very important conclusion, and it must have a far-reaching bearing upon the history of the earliest epic literature. Because if forms of language much more ancient than any that were then current were employed on pillar-stones in the third or fourth century, it follows that this obsolescent language must have survived either in a written or a regularly recited form. This immediately raises the probability that the substance of Irish epic literature (which was written down on parchment in the sixth or seventh century) really dates from a period much more remote, and that all that is purely pagan in it was preserved for us in the same antique language as the Ogam inscriptions before it was translated into what we now call "Old Irish."

The following is the Ogam alphabet as preserved on some 300 ancient pillars and stones, in the probably ninth-century treatise in the Book of Ballymote, and elsewhere:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ogam Alphabet]

There are a great many allusions to this Ogam writing in the ancient epics, especially in those that are purely pagan in form and conception, and there can be no doubt that the knowledge of letters must have reached Ireland before the island became Christianized.

With the introduction of Christianity and of Roman letters, the old Ogam inscriptions, which were no doubt looked upon as flavoring of paganism, quickly fell into disuse and disappeared, but some inscriptions at least are as late as the year 600 or even 800. In the thoroughly pagan poem, _The Voyage of Bran_, which such authorities as Zimmer and Kuno Meyer both consider to have been committed to parchment in the seventh century, we find it stated that Bran wrote the fifty or sixty quatrains of the poem in Ogam. Cuchulainn constantly used Ogam writing, which he cut upon wands and trees and standing stones for Queen Medb's army to read, and these were always brought to his friend Fergus to decipher. Cormac, king of Cashel, in his glossary tells us that the pagan Irish used to inscribe the wand they kept for measuring corpses and graves with Ogam characters, and that it was a source of horror to anyone even to take it in his hand.

St. Patrick in his Confession, the authenticity of which no one doubts, describes how he dreamt that a man from Ireland came to him with innumerable letters.

In Irish legend Ogma, one of the Tuatha De Danann who was skilled in dialects and poetry, seems to be credited with the invention of the Ogam alphabet, and he probably was the equivalent of the Gaulish G.o.d Ogmios, the G.o.d of eloquence, so interestingly described by Lucian.

We may take it then that the Irish pagans knew sufficient letters to hand down to Irish Christians the substance of their pagan epics, sagas, and poems. We may take it for granted also that the greater Irish epics (purely pagan in character, utterly untouched in substance by that Christianity which so early conquered the country) really represent the thoughts, manners, feelings, and customs of pagan Ireland.

The effect of this conclusion must be startling indeed to those who know the ancient world only through the medium of Greek and Roman literature. To the Greek and to his admiring master, the Roman, all outside races were simply barbarians, at once despised, misinterpreted, and misunderstood.

We have no possible means of reconstructing the ancient world as it was lived in by the ancestors of some of the leading races in Europe, the Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, and the people of all those countries which trace themselves back to a Celtic ancestry, because these races have left no literature or records behind them, and the Greeks and Romans, who tell us about them, saw everything through the false medium of their own prejudices. But now since the discovery and publication of the Irish sagas and epics, the descendants of these great races no longer find it necessary to view their own past through the colored and distorting gla.s.ses of the Greek or the Roman, since there has now opened for them, where they least expected to find it, a window through which they can look steadily at the life of their race, or of one of its leading offshoots, in one of its strongholds, and reconstruct for themselves with tolerable accuracy the life of their own ancestors. It is impossible to overrate the importance of this for the history of Europe, because neither Teutons nor Slavs have preserved pictures of their own heroic past, dating from pagan times. It is only the Celts, and of these the Irish, who have handed down such pictures drawn with all the fond intimacy of romance, and descriptions which exhibit the life of western Europeans at an even earlier culture-stage in the evolution of humanity than do the poems of Homer.

This conclusion, to which a study of the literature invites us, falls in exactly with that arrived at from purely archaeological sources.

Professor Ridgeway of Cambridge University, working on archaeological lines, expresses himself as follows: "From this survey of the material remains of the _la Tern_ period found actually in Ireland, and from the striking correspondence between this culture and that depicted in the _Tain Bo Cualnge_, and from the circ.u.mstance that the race who are represented in the epic as possessing this form of culture resemble in their physique the tall, fair-haired, grey-eyed Celts of Britain and the continent, we are justified in inferring (1) that there was an invasion (or invasions) of such peoples from Gaul in the centuries immediately before Christ, as is ascribed by the Irish traditions, and (2) that the poems themselves originally took shape when the _la Tene_ culture was still flouris.h.i.+ng in Ireland.

But as this could hardly have continued much later than A.D. 100, we may place the first shaping of the poems not much later than that date and possibly a century earlier."