Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry | Page 2

time he had left College and was called to the Bar (1837) he had
disciplined himself by thought and study, and was a very different

being from the dreamy and backward youth described for us by the
candid friends of his schooldays. A dreamer, indeed, he always was,
but he had learned from Bishop Butler, whom he reverenced
profoundly and spoke of as "the Copernicus of ethics," that there is no
practice more fatal to moral strength than dreaming divorced from
action. Some concrete act, some definite thing to be done, was now
always in his mind, but always, it may be added, as the realisation of
some principle arrived at by serious and accurate thinking. He had
acquired clear convictions, his powers of application were enormous,
he had a boundless fertility of invention, and was manifestly marked
out as a leader of men. It is interesting to go through the pages of
Davis's Essays and to note how many of his practical suggestions for
work to be done in Ireland have been taken up with success, especially
in the direction of music and poetry, of the Gaelic language, and of the
study of Irish archaeology and the protection of its remains. But a new
Davis would mark with keener interest the many tasks which yet
remain to be taken in hand.
His connection with the Bar was little more than nominal; from the
beginning, the serious work of his life seemed destined to be journalism.
After some experiments in various directions, he, with Gavan Duffy
and John Blake Dillon, during a walk in the Phoenix Park in the spring
of 1842, decided to establish a new weekly journal, to be entitled, on
Davis's suggestion, _The Nation_. Its purpose, which it was afterwards
to fulfil so nobly, was admirably expressed in its motto, taken from a
saying of Stephen Woulfe: "To create and foster public opinion in
Ireland, and to make it racy of the soil." Davis's was the suggestion of
making national poems and ballads a prominent feature of the
journal--the feature by which it became best known and did, perhaps,
its most impressive, if not its most valuable, work. His "Lament for
Owen Roe," which appeared in the sixth number, worked in Ireland
like an electric shock, and woke a sleeping faculty to life and action.
Henceforth Davis's public life was bound up with the _Nation_. Into
this channel he threw all his powers. What kind of influence he exerted
from that post of vantage the pages of this book will tell.
Davis was naturally a member of O'Connell's Repeal Association, but

took no prominent part in its proceedings, except on one momentous
occasion on which we must dwell for a while. The debate was on the
subject of Peel's Bill for the establishment of a large scheme of
non-sectarian education in Ireland. Of this measure Sir Charles Duffy
writes:--
"A majority of the Catholic Bishops approved of the general design,
objecting to certain details. All the barristers and country gentlemen in
the Association, and the middle class generally, supported it. To Davis
it was like the unhoped-for realization of a dream. To educate the
young men of the middle class and of both races, and to educate them
together, that prejudice and bigotry might be killed in the bud, was one
of the projects nearest his heart. It would strengthen the soul of Ireland
with knowledge, he said, and knit the creeds in liberal and trusting
friendship."[3]
But O'Connell, though he had previously favoured the principle of
mixed education, now saw a chance of flinging down a challenge to the
"Young Irelanders" from a vantage-ground of immense tactical value.
He threw his whole weight against the proposal, taunted and
interrupted its supporters, and seemed determined at any cost to wreck
the measure on which such high hopes had been set. The emotion
which Davis felt, and which caused him to burst into tears in the midst
of the debate, seemed to some of his friends at the time over-strained.
But he was not the first strong man from whom public calamities have
drawn tears; and assuredly if ever there were cause for tears, Davis had
reason to shed them then. More, perhaps, than any man present, he
realised the fateful nature of the decision which was being made. He
knew that one of the governing facts about Irish public life is the
existence in the country of two races who remain life-long strangers to
each other. Catholic and Protestant present to each other a familiar
front, but behind the surface of each is a dark background which in
later life, when associations, and often prejudices, have been formed,
the other can rarely penetrate and rarely wishes to do so. It was Davis's
belief that if the young people of