We may owe Tobias Smollett for the phrase, “facts are stubborn things”, but Bartlett’s likes John Adams as coiner better (in context with the Boston Massacre, 1770). Contrary to that eminent authority, The Yale Book of Quotations attributes the phrase to Bernard Mandeville, used a handful of decades earlier. Whatever the actual fact may be, —and my guess is that like many such things it comes ultimately from one latin writer or another— the phrase is Janus-faced. Facts are stubborn things and so cannot be ignored, which is the way many here like to think of it, but they are also stubborn things because once declared “fact” they can be hard to dislodge when shown to be “not fact”, actually.

In History writing we have an excellent example of this. The image of the Crusades that many educated people have in their minds is one derived from a good Historian and an even better writer, Steven Runciman. However, Johathan Riley-Smith, an even better historian but perhaps not as talented a writer, wrote the definitive correction to Runciman. Riley-Smith marshaled facts better than Runciman did, as stubborn as they are; but for all his pains Runciman’s image of the Crusades goes on being the popular one in our culture.


It’s March 17th. We’ll see a lot of the same kind of thing today about the Celtic Harp.

In “A History of Irish Music”, 1905, one William H. Grattan Flood wrote:

“January 28th, 1603, a proclamation was issued by the Lord President of Munster, by the terms of which the Marshal of the Province was strictly charged “to exterminate by marshal law all manner of Bards, Harpers,” etc. Within ten days after said proclamation, Queen Elizabeth herself ordered Lord Barrymore “to hang the harpers wherever found, and destroy their instruments.”

Have you seen this idea around today? Of half Irish heritage as I am (the other half Scotch), I’ve long nourished this idea in my soul, hating the English persecution of the Irish as much as the _______ persecution of the Palestinians. It’s visceral. But is Flood's statement a fact?

The image of the English burning Irish harps and hanging Irish harpers is a stubborn image, but it isn’t quite a fact:

https://www.wirestrungharp.com/harps/harpers/dictates_against_harpers.html

But for all that, it doesn’t matter. Like Runciman’s image of the Crusades, it’s the emotive image that proves more stubborn than the facts.





For myself, I like opinion more than fact. I know where I stand with an opinion. An opinion is a very humble claim, whereas assertions of fact are meant to be Universal, which is something none of us, in fact, has access to. Does that mean that all facts are ultimately opinions? Rather than twist around in that, let me end by quoting an opinion of the Irish from the 12th Century:

“[The Irish are] a barbarous people, literally barbarous. Judged according to modern ideas, they are uncultivated, not only in the external appearance of their dress, but also in their flowing hair and beards. All their habits are the habits of barbarians. Since conventions are formed from living together in society, and since they are so removed in these distant parts from the ordinary world of men, as if they were in another world altogether and consequently cut off from well-behaved and law-abiding people, they know only of the barbarous habits in which they were born and brought up, and embrace them as another nature. Their natural qualities are excellent. But almost everything acquired is deplorable.”

—Gerald Of Wales—
—The History and Topography of Ireland—

Gerald can go f**k himself. However, he did find one redeeming quality in the Irish:

“IT IS ONLY in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen.

“The movement is not, as in the British instrument to which we are accustomed, slow and easy, but rather quick and lively, while at the same time the melody is sweet and pleasant. It is remarkable how, in spite of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained. The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything – through quivering measures and the involved use of several instruments – with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied, and a concord achieved through elements discordant. They harmonize at intervals of the octave and the fifth, but they always begin with B flat and with B flat end, so that everything may be rounded with the sweetness of charming sonority. They glide so subtly from one mode to another, and the grace notes so freely sport with such abandon and bewitching charm around the steady tone of the heavier sound, that the perfection of their art seems to lie in their concealing it, as if ‘it were better for being hidden. An art revealed brings shame.”

—As above—

Notice the latin tag on the end? Anyway:

Erin go bragh

Human

Generally speaking, facts are facts until they aren't. Most have a limited lifetime, after which they become myths and old wives' tales.

Fortunately, there is a corpus of facts that don't change. These are piles driven into sand, upon which the boardwalk of civilization is built.

Then there is Mormon doctrine, built upon piles of something else. But even that has had a surprisingly long run. You really can fool some of the people all of the time.

In one sense it doesn't matter if the harps were destroyed. So many other aspects of Irish culture were destroyed like the language which is barely spoken in most of the country except by government pen pushers and hobbyists.

By the way, you're probably unaware of this, but there is a similar story of Calvinists burning the fiddles in Scotland. (The harp used to be the national instrument of Scotland too. Now only a handful of women play it.)

Wales has preserved its Celtic language better than either Scotland or Ireland.