Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to
actions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had
understood that a country which has no national institutions must show
its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams
of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier,
the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the
Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories,
possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell
said 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though
she could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way
unabashed. But ideas and images which have to be understood and loved
by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience,
no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some
'Memory of the Dead' can take its strength from one; at all other
moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional,
sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life
perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning
pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour.
After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much,
abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who
never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till
minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the
scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds
unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation's
future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but
only as these things are understood by a child in a national school,
while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence
makes them bitter and restless. They are like some state which has only
paper money, and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold can
buy. They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a
generation is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured
accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical
deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her
mind to stone.