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 of nations too have lost that divine air that many
leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them
as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute
this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame.
In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
man was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second time
in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector of
Troy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the
great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types.
How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an
epic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a
genuine lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern
world, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies,
and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have dropped
out of the divine procession, and sing a solitary song. They inspire
nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing
to true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from his
stall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and
the company promoter from the director's chair, and elect them as
representative men. We certainly do this in Ireland. It is--how many
hundred years since greatness guided us? In Ireland our history begins
with the most ancient of any in a mythical era when earth mingled with
heaven. The gods departed, the half-gods also, hero and saint after
that, and we have dwindled down to a petty peasant nationality, rural
and urban life alike mean in their externals. Yet the cavalcade, for all
its tattered habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity. There is still
some incorruptible spiritual atom in our people. We are still in some
relation to the divine order; and while that uncorrupted spiritual atom
still remains all things are possible if by some inspiration there could
be revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness, an Irish polity in
accord with national character.