National Being
National Being
Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
Book Excerpt
ties 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
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