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.
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