Not always reassuring. A month or so later it arrived, Connections. It wove a theme, I suppose: the power of poets, playwrights, literary polemicists in the creation of the concept of nationality. Not exactly bestseller material. There was an essay that quoted Pearse’s Christmas Day letter from St. Enda’s College 1915, which was destined to be his last Christmas:Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed to us living men. Ghosts are troublesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.Of the shade of the Norwegian dramatist I beg forgiveness for a plagiaristic, but inevitable title.Pearse could write. No doubt about that. Then an entire essay on Ibsen—the “smallness” of his characters as Yeats saw it. Well, Cathleen Ní Houlihan is a presence that takes some beating on the stage, or in life.
