Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to / actions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had / understood that a country which has no national institutions must show / its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams / of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier, / the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the / Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, / possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchell / said 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though / she could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way / unabashed. But ideas and images which have to be understood and loved / by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, / no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some / 'Memory of the Dead' can take its strength from one; at all other / moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, / sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life / perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning / pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour.

After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, / abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who / never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till / minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the / scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds / unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation's / future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but / only as these things are understood by a child in a national school, / while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence / makes them bitter and restless. They are like some state which has only / paper money, and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold can / buy. They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a / generation is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured / accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical / deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her / mind to stone.