THE BEARNA BAOGHAIL--CONCLUSION
I
But when principles have been proved and objections answered, there are
still some last words to say for some who stand apart--the men who held
the breach. For, they do stand apart, not in error but in constancy; not
in doubt of the truth but its incarnation; not average men of the
multitude for whom human laws are made, who must have moral certainty of
success, who must have the immediate allegiance of the people. For it is
the distinguishing glory of our prophets and our soldiers of the forlorn
hope, that the defeats of common men were for them but incentives to
further battle; and when they held out against the prejudices of their
time, they were not standing in some new conceit, but most often by
prophetic insight fighting for a forgotten truth of yesterday, catching
in their souls to light them forward, the hidden glory of to-morrow.
They knew to be theirs by anticipation the general allegiance without
which lesser men cannot proceed. They knew they stood for the Truth,
against which nothing can prevail, and if they had to endure struggle,
suffering and pain, they had the finer knowledge born of these things, a
knowledge to which the best of men ever win--that if it is a good thing
to live, it is a good thing also to die. Not that they despised life or
lightly threw it away; for none better than they knew its grandeur, none
more than they gloried in its beauty, none were so happily full as they
of its music; but they knew, too, the value of this deep truth, with the
final loss of which Earth must perish: the man who is afraid to die is
not fit to live. And the knowledge for them stamped out Earth's oldest
fear, winning for life its highest ecstasy. Yes, and when one or more of
them had to stand in the darkest generation and endure all penalties to
the extreme penalty, they knew for all that they had had the best of
life and did not count it a terrible thing if called by a little to
anticipate death. They had still the finest appreciation of the finer
attributes of comradeship and love; but it is part of the mystery of
their happiness and success, that they were ready to go on to the end,
not looking for the suffrage of the living nor the monuments of the
dead. Yes, and when finally the re-awakened people by their better
instincts, their discipline, patriotism and fervour, will have massed
into armies, and marched to freedom, they will know in the greatest hour
of triumph that the success of their conquering arms was made possible
by those who held the breach.
II
When, happily, we can fall back on the eloquence of the world's greatest
orator, we turn with gratitude to the greatest tribute ever spoken to
the memory of those men to whom the world owes most. Demosthenes, in the
finest height of his finest oration, vindicates the men of every age and
nation who fight the forlorn hope. He was arraigned by his rival,
Æschines, for having counselled the Athenians to pursue a course that
ended in defeat, and he replies thus: "If, then, the results had been
foreknown to all--not even then should the Commonwealth have abandoned
her design, if she had any regard for glory, or ancestry, or futurity.
As it is, she appears to have failed in her enterprise, a thing to which
all mankind are liable, if the Deity so wills it." And he asks the
Athenians: "Why, had we resigned without a struggle that which our
ancestors encountered every danger to win, who would not have spit upon
you?" And he asks them further to consider strangers, visiting their
City, sunk in such degradation, "especially when in former times our
country had never preferred an ignominious security to the battle for
honour." And he rises from the thought to this proud boast: "None could
at any period of time persuade the Commonwealth to attach herself in
secure subjection to the powerful and unjust; through every age has she
persevered in a perilous struggle for precedency and honour and glory."
And he tells them, appealing to the memory of Themistocles, how they
honoured most their ancestors who acted in such a spirit: "Yes; the
Athenians of that day looked not for an orator or a general, who might
help them to a pleasant servitude: they scorned to live if it could not
be with freedom." And he pays them, his listeners, a tribute: "What I
declare is, that such principles are your own; I show that before my
time such was the spirit of the Commonwealth." From one eloquent height
to another he proceeds, till, challenging Æschines for arraigning him,
thus counselling the people, he rises to this great level: "But, never,
never can you have done wrong, O Athenians, in undertaking the battle
for the freedom and safety of all: I swear it by your forefathers--those
that met the peril at Marathon, those that took the field at Platæa,
those in the sea-fight at Salamis, and those at Artimesium, and many
other brave men who repose in the public monuments, all of whom alike,
as being worthy of the same honour, the country buried, Æschines, not
only the successful and victorious." We did not need this fine eloquence
to assure us of the greatness of our O'Neills and our Tones, our
O'Donnells and our Mitchels, but it so quickens the spirit and warms the
blood to read it, it so touches--by the admiration won from ancient and
modern times--an enduring principle of the human heart--the capacity to
appreciate a great deed and rise over every physical defeat--that we
know in the persistence of the spirit we shall come to a veritable
triumph. Yes; and in such light we turn to read what Ruskin called the
greatest inscription ever written, that which Herodotus tells us was
raised over the Spartans, who fell at Thermopylæ, and which Mitchel's
biographer quotes as most fitting to epitomise Mitchel's life:
"Stranger, tell thou the Lacedemonians that we are lying here, having
obeyed their words." And the biographer of Mitchel is right in holding
that he who reads into the significance of these brave lines, reads a
message not of defeat but of victory.
III
Yes; and in paying a fitting tribute to those great men who are our
exemplars, it would be fitting also, in conclusion, to remember
ourselves as the inheritors of a great tradition; and it would well
become us not only to show the splendour of the banner that is handed on
to us, but to show that this banner _we_, too, are worthy to bear. For,
how often it shall be victorious and how high it shall be planted, will
depend on the conception we have of its supreme greatness, the
knowledge that it can be fought for in all times and places, the
conviction that we may, when least we expect, be challenged to deny it;
and that by our bearing we may bring it new credit and glory or drag it
low in repute. We do well, I say, to remember these things. For in our
time it has grown the fashion to praise the men of former times but to
deny their ideal of Independence; and we who live in that ideal, and in
it breathe the old spirit, and preach it and fight for it and prophesy
for it an ultimate and complete victory--we are young men, foolish and
unpractical. And what should be our reply? A reply in keeping with the
flag, its history and its destiny. Let them, who deride or pity us, see
we despise or pity their standards, and let them know by our works--lest
by our election they misunderstand--that we are not without ability in a
freer time to contest with them the highest places--avoiding the boast,
not for an affected sense of modesty but for a saving sense of humour.
For in all the vanities of this time that make Life and Literature choke
with absurdities, pretensions and humbug, let us have no new folly. Let
us with the old high confidence blend the old high courtesy of the
Gaedheal. Let us grow big with our cause. Shall we honour the flag we
bear by a mean, apologetic front? No! Wherever it is down, lift it;
wherever it is challenged, wave it; wherever it is high, salute it;
wherever it is victorious, glorify and exult in it. At all times and
forever be for it proud, passionate, persistent, jubilant, defiant;
stirring hidden memories, kindling old fires, wakening the finer
instincts of men, till all are one in the old spirit, the spirit that
will not admit defeat, that has been voiced by thousands, that is
noblest in Emmet's one line, setting the time for his epitaph: "_When_
my country"--not _if_--but "_when_ my country takes her place among the
nations of the earth." It is no hypothesis; it is a certainty. There
have been in every generation, and are in our own, men dull of
apprehension and cold of heart, who could not believe this, but we
believe it, we live in it: _we know it_. Yes, we know it, as Emmet knew
it, and as it shall be seen to-morrow; and when the historian of
to-morrow, seeing it accomplished, will write its history, he will not
note the end with surprise. Rather will he marvel at the soul in
constancy, rivalling the best traditions of undegenerate Greece and
Rome, holding through disasters, persecutions, suffering, and not less
through the seductions of milder but meaner times, seeing through all
shining clearly the goal: he will record it all, and, still marvelling,
come to the issue that dauntless spirit has reached, proud and happy;
but he will write of that issue--_Liberty; Inevitable_: in two words to
epitomise the history of a people that is without a parallel in the
Annals of the World.