ory of a Success_.[1] It
is the spiritual history of Pearse's career as a schoolmaster, edited
and completed by his pupil, Desmond Ryan; and it is a book by which no
one can be justly offended--a book instinct with nobility, chivalry and
high courtesy, free from all touch of bitterness; a book, too, shot
through and slashed with that tragic irony which the Greeks knew to be
the finest thrill in literature--the word spoken, to which the foreknown
event gives an echo of double meaning. Pearse was concerned with
Ireland's yesterday; he desired to bring the present and the future into
organic rotation with the past. But his yesterday was not Miss
Somerville's nor mine. The son of an English mechanic and a Galway
woman, he was brought up in Connemara after the landlord power had
ceased to exist. Ireland's past for him and Irish tradition were seen
through the medium of an imagination in touch only with the peasant
life, but inspired by books and literature, written and spoken. His
yesterday was of no definite past, for he had been born in a revolution
when the immediate past was obliterated. In his vision a thousand years
were no more than the watch of some spellbound chivalry, waiting for the
voice that should say, "It is the time." Cuchulain and Robert Emmet were
his inspirations, but the champion of the legendary Red Branch cycle and
the young revolutionary of Napoleon's days were near to him one as the
other, in equally accessible communion. Going back easily to the heroic
legends, on which, though blurred in their outline, his boyhood had been
fostered by tellers of long-transmitted tales at a Connemara hearthside,
he found the essential beauty and significance where more learned though
less cultured readers have been bewildered by what seemed to them wild
extravagances of barbarism. What he gathered from them did not lie
inert, but quickened in him and in others, for he was the revolutionary
as schoolmaster--the most drastic revolutionary of all. In the school
review which was the first vehicle for these writings of his, he hoped
to found "the rallying point for the thought and aspirations of all
those who would bring back again in Ireland that Heroic Age which
reserved its highest honour for the hero who had the most childlike
heart, for the king who had the largest pity, and for the poet who
visioned the truest image of beauty." All his theory of education was
based on the old Irish institution of fosterage, which was