The war against the past (1988).

The best women, like the best nations, have no history. The greatest sin a man can commit against his race is to bring the work of the dead to nothing … We all hope that Ireland's battle is drawing to an end, but we must live as though it were to go on endlessly. We must pass into the future the great moral qualities that give men the strength to fight … It may be that it depends upon writers and poets such as us to call into life the phantom armies of the future. Just after the triumphant production of the play Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1902, W. B. Yeats wrote the above words. Like so many nationalists before and since, Yeats there seemed to extol the notion of the fight as a self-sustaining tradition, rather than the more humane idea of the culture fought for. It is the mark of many conservative thinkers to see in sacrifice not the highest price a man may pay to assert his self, but an end in its own right. Even more sinister is Yeats's implied view of the Irish Revival not as a restoration of personal freedoms but as bleak revenger's tragedy, in the course of which this generation will get even with England on behalf of Ireland's patriot dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]