[Footnote 1: "The Story of a Success." By P. H. Pearse. Being a Record of St. Erda's College, September, 1908, to Easter, 1916. Edited by Desmond Ryan, B.A. Maunsel & Co.]
Yet in Miss Somerville's appreciation there is often--not always--a sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so felt is Ireland perceived from the outside--seen as a picturesque ruin. You cannot so see Pearse; he is too strong for even compassionate laughter. What he embodies is the central strength of Irish nationalism--its disregard of the immediate event.
Wise men have told me that I ought never to set my foot on a path unless I can see clearly whither it will lead me. But that philosophy would condemn most of us to stand still till we rot. Surely one can do no more than assure one's self that each step one takes is right; and as to the rightness of a step one is fortunately answerable only to one's conscience and not to the wise men of the counting house. The street will pass judgment on our enterprises according as they have "succeeded" or "failed." But if one can feel that one has striven faithfully to do a right thing, does not one stand ultimately justified, no matter what the issue of one's attempt, no matter what the sentence of the street?
By such teaching he commended to his scholars, and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday--in all the yesterdays--and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such idealists have been regarded as criminal by the class for which Miss Somerville and her cousin speak--criminal and menacing to those who, holding the power, arrogated to themselves a monopoly of loyalty. They have always conceived of Pearse and his like as thirsting for their blood. Miss Edgeworth, in a letter printed for the first time in _Irish Memories_, writes:--"I fear our throats will be cut by order of O'Connell and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about O'Connell to realise how far this estimate lay from the truth of things; yet Miss Somerville herself talks about "Parnell and his wolf-pack." Justin McCarthy, John Redmond, Willie Redmond--these were some of the wolves who presumably wanted to tear Miss Somerville's kindred to pieces. That is where the change must come; there must be among the gentry some generous understanding of Nationalist leaders before the grave has closed over them. Anyone can see what is bad in Sinn Féin, but no one can fight that evil effectively, no one can convert to better uses the ill-guided force which Sinn Féin represents, until he understands what is best in it. Sinn Féin has largely replaced a movement which, in its later phases, dwelt perhaps too much on the material advantages which it offered as the reward of support. Sinn Féin's strength has lain not in what it has offered, but in what it has asked; it has asked for devotion, and Pearse certainly both gave that and received it. Such was his teaching, and I do not know a better saying for the Irish gentry to ponder over than the last sentence in these essays of his: "The highest thing anyone can do is to serve."