National Being | Page 4

the
spirit will have eluded us.
What I have written hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on an
Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than a
few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought and
discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish
civilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appears
primitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are at
the beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settle
fundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with
disdain on the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing
nationality, or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of
an infant State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character
of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in
developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth
together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished.
This book only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler
imaginations and finer intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help
to raise the soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher to its
soul.

II.

The building up of a civilization is at once the noblest and the most
practical of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to their
highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as they
are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highest
civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made
part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters
into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a
character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-
citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for unity
and magnificence of effect. So ancient Egypt, with its temples,
sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decorations, seems to us as if it had
been created by one grandiose imagination; for even the lesser
craftsmen, working on the mummy case for the tomb, had much of the
mystery and solemnity in their work which is manifest in temple and
pyramid. So the city States in ancient Greece in their day were united
by ideals to a harmony of art and architecture and literature. Among the
Athenians at their highest the ideal of the State so wrought upon the
individual that its service became the overmastering passion of life, and
in that great oration of Pericles, where he told how the Athenian ideal
inspired the citizens so that they gave their bodies for the
commonwealth, it seems to have been conceived of as a kind of
oversoul, a being made up of immortal deeds and heroic spirits,
influencing the living, a life within their life, molding their spirits to its
likeness. It appears almost as if in some of these ancient famous
communities the national ideal became a kind of tribal deity, that began
first with some great hero who died and was immortalized by the poets,
and whose character, continually glorified by them, grew at last so
great in song that he could not be regarded as less than a demi- god. We
can see in ancient Ireland that Cuchulain, the dark sad man of the
earlier tales, was rapidly becoming a divinity, a being who summed up
in himself all that the bards thought noblest in the spirit of their race;
and if Ireland had a happier history no doubt one generation of bardic
chroniclers after another would have molded that half-mythical figure
into the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic, and

magnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought
of it a staff to the very noblest. Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford held
it against a host, so the ideal would have upheld the national soul in its
darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart. The
national soul in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic age it
assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes a
multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real
social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together
by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood
too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of
peace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, panic, and delirium.
None of our modern States create in us such an impression of being
spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient
world. The leaders