has been exactly the same with regard to speakers of Irish during my whole life.
On the other hand, I have been always disappointed with the sort of Irish prose which I have been reading or listening to. I mean, of course, the prose which has been produced in recent times. It is turgid and nonsensical. The writers of that Irish prose appear to have had in their minds the idea that they were bound to something entirely different from the sort of Irish they spoke to each other every day, something ‘classical,’ I dare say. The result of their ‘classical’ notions has been turgid nonsense. If they had had the common sense to write in the style in which they spoke to each other in their business transactions we would have as the result something worth reading and worth listening to instead of the turgid nonsense.
There is a strange thing to be seen in connection with this turgid nonsense. During the period which produced it we have had poets, and the poetry which they have left to us is splendid. It is all splendid, but some of it is more exquisitely beautiful than anything of the kind which I have ever met. Some of the little pastoral poems which have been produced in this country during the past couple of centuries are far superior to anything that Horace ever composed. Then here is something inexplicable. Some of those same poets wrote bits Of Irish prose as headings to their songs and those same bits of Irish prose are the very extreme of ugliness. How is it that they were able to produce the exquisitely beautiful song, and then that they could not produce One decent sentence of prose? I can see only one explanation of the matter. It is this. When the poet was writing, or
