I.

In the year nineteen hundred and fourteen Anno Domini, amid a world

conflict, the birth of the infant State of Ireland was announced. Almost

unnoticed this birth, which in other times had been cried over the

earth with rejoicings or anger. Mars, the red planet of war, was in the

ascendant when it was born. Like other births famous in history, the

child had to be hidden away for a time, and could not with pride be

shown to the people as royal children were wont to be shown. Its enemies

were unforgiving, and its friends were distracted with mighty happenings

in the world. Hardly did they know whether it would not be deformed if

it survived: whether this was the Promised, or another child yet to

be conceived in the womb of the Mother of Parliaments. Battles were

threatened between two hosts, secular champions of two spiritual

traditions, to decide its fate. That such a conflict threatened showed

indeed that there was something of iron fibre in the infant, without

which in their make-up individuals or nations do nothing worthy of

remembrance. Hercules wrestled with twin serpents in his cradle, and

there were twin serpents of sectarianism ready to strangle this infant

State of ours if its guardians were not watchful, or if the infant was

not itself strong enough to destroy them.

It is about the State of Ireland, its character and future, I have here

written some kind of imaginative meditation. The State is a physical

body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race. The body of the

national soul may be spiritual or secular, aristocratic or democratic,

civil or militarist predominantly. One or other will be most powerful,

and the body of the race will by reflex action affect its soul, even

as through heredity the inherited tendencies and passions of the flesh

affect the indwelling spirit. Our brooding over the infant State must

be dual, concerned not only with the body but the soul. When we essay

self-government in Ireland our first ideas will, in all probability, be

borrowed from the Mother of Parliaments, just as children before they

grow to have a character of their own repeat the sentiments of their

parents. After a time, if there is anything in the theory of Irish

nationality, we will apply original principles as they are from time

to time discovered to be fundamental in Irish character. A child in the

same way makes discoveries about itself. The mood evoked by picture or

poem reveals a love of beauty; the harsh treatment of an animal provokes

an outburst of pity; some curiosity of nature draws forth the spirit of

scientific inquiry, and so, as the incidents of life reveal the innate

affinities of a child to itself, do the adventures of a nation gradually

reveal to it its own character and the will which is in it.

For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have

had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the

civilization we wished to create for ourselves. Nations rarely, if ever,

start with a complete ideal. Certainly we have no national ideals, no

principles of progress peculiar to ourselves in Ireland, which are a

common possession of our people. National ideals are the possession of a

few people only. Yet we must spread them in wide commonalty over Ireland

if we are to create a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of

struggle and sacrifice to attain the power to build. We must spread them

in wide commonalty because it is certain that democracy will prevail

in Ireland. The aristocratic classes with traditions of government, the

manufacturing classes with economic experience, will alike be secondary

in Ireland to the small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. We

must rely on the ideas common among our people, and on their power

to discern among their countrymen the aristocracy of character and

intellect.

Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of

races. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty,

imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That

great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by

enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in

Europe simply by militarism. That military power depended on and was

fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused

education and science existing perhaps in the world. The national being

had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A great

subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective

manifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire which

has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerful

soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That necessity

is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external life

correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beauty

will never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid of

taste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.

We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are

a measure of their inner life. Our mean and disordered little country

towns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanliness

or beauty, accord with the character of the civilians who inhabit them.

Whenever we develop an intellectual life these things will be altered,

but not in priority to the spiritual mood. House by house, village by

village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the

individuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within the

national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respect

in its externals. That building up of the inner world we have neglected.

Our excited political controversies, our playing at militarism, have

tended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to surfaces. Life

is drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base, and behind the

surfaces we have little to fall back on. Few of our notorieties could

be trusted to think out any economic or social problem thoroughly

and efficiently. They have been engaged in passionate attempts at the

readjustment of the superficies of things. What we require more than

men of action at present are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers,

educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depths

of national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into a

fullness. We have few reserves of intellectual life to draw upon when

we come to the mighty labor of nation-building. It will be indignantly

denied, but I think it is true to say that the vast majority of people

in Ireland do not know the difference between good and bad thinking,

between the essential depths and the shallows in humanity. How could

people, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuine

knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anything

beautiful in the heavens?

What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. It

is enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or

passions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they have

given utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversies

provoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics.

Passion truly is a power in humanity, but it should never enter into

national policy. It is a dangerous element in human life, though it is

an essential part of our strangely compounded nature. But in national

life it is the most dangerous of all guides. There are springs of power

in ourselves which in passion we draw on and are amazed at their depth

and intensity, yet we do not make these the master light of our being,

but rather those divine laws which we have apprehended and brooded upon,

and which shine with clear and steady light in our souls. As creatures

rise in the scale of being the dominant factor in life changes. In

vegetation it may be appetite; instinct in bird and beast for man a life

at once passionate and intellectual; but the greater beings, the stars

and planets, must wheel in the heavens under the guidance of inexorable

and inflexible law. Now the State is higher in the scale of being

than the individual, and it should be dominated solely by moral and

intellectual principles. These are not the outcome of passion or

prejudice, but of arduous thought. National ideals must be built up

with the same conscious deliberation of purpose as the architect of the

Parthenon conceived its lofty harmony of shining marble lines, or as the

architect of Rheims Cathedral designed its intricate magnificence and

mystery. Nations which form their ideals and marry them in the hurry of

passion are likely to repent without leisure, and they will not be able

to divorce those ideals without prolonged domestic squabbles and public

cleansing of dirty linen. If we are to build a body for the soul

of Ireland it ought not to be a matter of reckless estimates or

jerry-building. We have been told, during my lifetime at least, not

to criticize leaders, to trust leaders, and so intellectual discussion

ceased and the high principles on which national action should be based

became less and less understood, less and less common possessions. The

nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws

but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and

issuing orders. No doubt our political chieftains loved their country,

but love has many degrees of expression from the basest to the highest.

The basest love will wreck everything, even the life of the beloved, to

gratify ignoble desires. The highest love conspires with the imaginative

reason to bring about every beautiful circumstance around the beloved

which will permit of the highest development of its life. There is no

real love apart from this intellectual brooding. Men who love Ireland

ignobly brawl about her in their cups, quarrel about her with their

neighbor, allow no freedom of thought of her or service of her other

than their own, take to the cudgel and the rifle, and join sectarian

orders or lodges to ensure that Ireland will be made in their own

ignoble image. Those who love Ireland nobly desire for her the highest

of human destinies. They would ransack the ages and accumulate wisdom to

make Irish life seem as noble in men's eyes as any the world has known.

The better minds in every race, eliminating passion and prejudice, by

the exercise of the imaginative reason have revealed to their countrymen

ideals which they recognized were implicit in national character. It

is such discoveries we have yet to make about ourselves to unite us to

fulfill our destiny. We have to discover what is fundamental in Irish

character, the affections, leanings, tendencies towards one or more of

the eternal principles which have governed and inspired all great human

effort, all great civilizations from the dawn of history. A nation is

but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of liberty

or dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until that

master idea is manifested to us there is no shining star to guide the

ship of our destinies.

Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered in

the national being. We have to do for Ireland--though we hope with

less arrogance--what the long and illustrious line of German thinkers,

scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians did for Germany, or what

the poets and artists of Greece did for the Athenians: and that is, to

create national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen,

the actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, the

administration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban and

rural life. Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or any

of the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continually

disturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and external

brawlings, and we shall only have achieved the mechanism of nationality,

but 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.