Matthew Arnold and the Celts [pp. 884-890]

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS.
are a part of ourselves;... and yet in the great and rich
universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of
Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic mattersg those
who want them must go abroad for them. It is neither right
nor reasonable that this should be so. Ireland has had, in the
last half century, a band of Celtic students-a band with
which death, alas! has of late been busy —from whence Oxford
or Cambridge might have taken an admirable professor of Celtic; and with the authority of a university chair, a great Celtic
scholar, on a subject little known, and where all would have
readily deferred to him, might have by this time doubled our
facilities for knowing the Celt, by procuring for this country
Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and preventing
the dispersion of others which were accessible. It is not much
that the English government does for science or literature; but
if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of Celtic at Oxford, had appealed to the government to get him copies or the originals of
the Celtic treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or
in the library of St. Isidore's College at Rome, even the English government could not well have refused him... At
this moment, when the narrow Philistinism, which has long had
things its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits, and
we are beginning to feel ashamed and uneasy and alarmed at
it; now, when we are becoming aware that we have sacrificed
to Philistinism culture and insight and dignity;... at
such a moment, it needs some moderation not to be attacking
Philistinism by storm, but to mine it through such gradual
means as the slow approaches of culture, and the introduction
of chairs of Celtic. But the hard unintelligence, which is just
now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm.... Let us
reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world
through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on
the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors
of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to
send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of
peace to Ireland."
890
[Mar.