That passage is taken from Louis Le Roux's biography of Pearse, first published in English in 1932, and to date the only full-length biography.  It illustrates the virtual impossibility of writing, even today, an objective study of a man whose death elevated him into the most sacred realms of national mythology.  Behind the Pearse of legend - the orator, the Gael, the child Pearse, allegedly swearing on his knees to free Ireland or die fighting the English, the man Pearse, writing a promised poem to his mother in the condemned cell - it is not merely difficult but almost blasphemous to discern a human being of flesh and blood.  It is the historian's obligation to make the attempt, but in the circumstances, and at fifty years' remove, it can only be an interim one. 
Patrick Henry Pearse was born on November 1879 at 27 Great Brunswick Street, now Pearse Street, Dublin, where his father, James Pearse, carried on business as a monumental sculptor.  James Pearse was born, according to his obituaries, in London in December 1839 and seems to have been thoroughly English and probably Protestant stock, although he was a Roman Catholic at least as early as the birth of his first child in 1864.  He came to Dublin, reputedly from Birmingham, as a very young man, being one of a group of ecclesiastical crafts-men brought to Ireland as the influence of the Gothic revival swept over post-Emancipation church-building.  He worked for various monumental firms before finally setting up in indepen-dent business in i 8 78.  By the time of his death he had attained a considerable eminence as a sculptor; his most acclaimed work was the heroic group of figures crowning the façade of the National Bank in College Green, but examples of his style are to be found in many of the churches built in Ireland in the second half of the century, and the Freeman's Journal described him as 'the pioneer of modern Gothic art, as applied to Church work, in this country.' 
He married twice: firstly, Emily Fox, who bore him two children before dying in 1876 at the age of thirty, and secondly, in October 1877, when he was thirty-seven, Margaret Brady, a twenty-year-old Irish girl whose family came from Meath.  She bore him four children, two of them sons, Patrick, born in 1879, and William James, born in 1881. 
In politics James Pearse was a convinced Home Ruler, but of a mentality unmistakably that of an English radical.  His one literary work was a pamphlet entitled England's duty to Ireland as it appears to an Englishman, published in 1886 in reply to an anti-Home Rule and anti-clerical tract of a Catholic Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Thomas Maguire.  Pearse's pamphlet shows remarkably wide reading for a man who must have had relatively little formal education, triumphantly quoting Caius Gracchus, Tiberius Sempronius, Polybius, Addison and Thomas D'Arcy Magee, to sustain the thesis that 'you ought not to force a mode of government upon an unwilling people.  And you cannot for ever do so, whether you ought to or not . . .' 'I am Englishman enough to say,' he declared, 'that were I an Irishman my duty and my patriotism would force me into the ranks of Mr. Parnell.' 
James Pearse maintained his English connections throughout his life; members of the Pearse family stood sponsor at Patrick's baptism, and it was on a visit to his brother's home in Birming-ham that he suddenly collapsed and died in 1900.  His body was brought back to Dublin and buried in Glasnevin.  His business was carried on for some years by his younger son, among whose work is a Mater Dolorosa which still stands in Westland Row church.  James Pearse, English radical, mature and opinionated, must have been an interesting father for a boy in his teens.  James Pearse may well have suffered neglect in a nationalist tradition to which the source of filial inspiration must almost always be seen as maternal.  At the very least he provided the mixed background not unusual to Irish patriots: Parnell's mother was an American, Thomas Mac-Donagh's mother English, Tom Clarke's father a Presbyterian and a soldier in the British Army, Éamon de Valera's father Spanish. 
Patrick was educated at the Christian Brothers' School, Westland Row, and through the old Royal University.  He took his BA in 1901 and was soon after called to the bar.  In I905 he made one of his few appearances as a barrister, pleading, with Tim Healy, before the King's Bench division, the case of a Donegal farmer who had been fined one shilling at Dunfanaghy for putting his name on his cart in 'illegible', that is to say, Irish, letters.  Pearse's defense was described by one of the judges as very ingenious, interesting, and from a literary point of view, instructive,' but he lost his case.  He never apparently practiced again, and in later years described the lawyer's craft as 'the most ignoble of all professions'.  His career was instead to lie in education. 
In September igo8 he founded St Enda's College as an experimental bilingual secondary school for boys in Cullens-wood House, Rathmines.  In 1910 he decided that the house was too small and too close to the city to give full scope to his ideas.  Cullenswood House was converted into St Ita's, a sister--school for girls, while the main school was moved to The Hermitage at Rathfarnham, the lease of which Pearse managed to secure with the financial backing of some friends.  St Enda's now became wholly a boarding-school, and assumed the form described so affectionately in Pearse's own Story of a Success and in Desmond Ryan's writings. 
Pearse's educational ideas were in advance of their time.  The school language and games were Irish, and all other subjects except languages and the scientific subjects were taught bilingually.  Nature study was encouraged, and Irish plays were regularly performed.  The disciplinary emphasis was upon trust and self-reliance.  Opinions naturally vary as to how wholly successful these methods proved, but such an issue falls outside the scope of this study.  Two points are relevant.  Firstly, the role of educationalist always remained central to Pearse's character and was to be the theme of many of his writings, of which the best-known in this context is the collection of essays between 1912 and 1914, later published in pamphlet form in The Murder Machine.  This work combines liberal teaching methods with unyielding nationalism.  'What the teacher should bring to his pupils is not a set of ready-made opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence but rather so infectious an enthu-siasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm.' To an anxious parent who asked what he should do with a son who was good at nothing but playing the tin whistle, Pearse replied: 'Buy a tin whistle for him.' 
With these thoroughly modern ideas went, however, a view of the place of nationalism in education with which some might quarrel.  'If the true work of the teacher be ... to help the child to realize himself at his best and worthiest, the factor of nation-ality is of prime importance.' The child was to be taught that the Irish separatist tradition began in 1169 and embraced the supporters of Edward Bruce, Art MacMurrough, Shane O'Neill, and just about everyone else who had ever taken up arms in Ireland.  This is scarcely the view of modern historical scholar-ship, but it was logically the view of a man who saw no incompatibility between the roles of educationalist and propa-gandist to his pupils of Gaelic and, at least from 1910 onwards, physical force nationalism.  As MacDara, the hero of Pearse's most famous play The Singer, published in 1915, declares: 'The true teacher must suffer and do.  He must break bread to the people, he must go into Gethsemane and toil up the steep of Golgotha. . . . Sometimes I think that to be a woman and to serve and suffer as women do is the highest thing.  Perhaps that is why I felt it proud and wondrous to be a teacher, for a teacher does that.' 
However successful St Enda's may have been educationally it did not pay its way.  Pearse had no head for money matters, he was sometimes unable to pay his teachers' salaries, and was recurrently saved from the school's creditors by loyal friends.  Yet even this was to play a circumstantial part in the inevitable process by which Pearse's educational work gained the active support of the I.R.B. 
Pearse, like so many of the young men of his time, came to nationalism through the Gaelic League.  His love of Irish was apparently first stimulated around the age of eleven or twelve by a female relative of his mother's who was well versed in Gaelic history and legend.  The youthful Pearse studied Irish through the grammar and texts of the Society for the Preserva-tion of the Irish Language, and later at the classes held by Canon O'Leary in Dame Street.  As an adult he widened his knowledge by regular visits to the Connacht Gaeltacht, where he acquired a cottage at Rosmuc.  Pearse's Irish was largely self-taught, and although many of his works were to be written in that medium, expert opinion can always detect that he was not a native speaker.  But his writings were suffused by a tremendous love of the language and of the Gaeltacht folk to whom it was the medium of story-telling and reminiscence.  This quality of folk sympathy is seen most clearly in the simpler and less rhetorical of Pearse's writings such as the stories Iosagán and Brigid of the Songs. 
Pearse's advocacy of the Gaelic revival was remarkably precocious.  At the age of seventeen he founded the New Ireland Literary Society with the object of popularizing Irish poetry and folklore to 'the barbarian'.  His three presidential addresses, subsequently published in 1898, in his nineteenth year, show him an ardent Gaelic Nationalist of a mystical rather than a revolutionary kind.  'The Gael is not like other men,' he declared in 1897, just before his eighteenth birthday, 'the spade, and the loom, and the sword are not for him.  But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain, awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life . . .' 
Naturally Pearse was quickly attracted to the Gaelic League which, it must be recalled, was from its foundation in 1893 up to the Dundalk convention Of 1915 an essentially non-political body.  'My service to Douglas Hyde,' Pearse wrote in 1913, 'began when I was only sixteen.' In 1903 he became editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the organ of the League, a post which he retained until 1909.  Four years later Pearse was to describe the Gaelic League as 'a spent force', the first stage of a revolution which was now to be brought about.  But by that time Pearse was a member of the Volunteers and on the fringes of the I.R.B.; in 1909 his resignation from An Claidheamh Soluis seems to have been chiefly the result of the growing demands made upon his time by St Enda's. 
Pearse in 1909 was therefore known principally as a dominant figure in the Gaelic revival movement, a writer and speaker of great force and fluency.  Physically he had developed a com-manding presence.  He was about average height, of stocky build, with a clear and impressive profile, although according to contemporaries his facial appearance was marred by a distinct cast in the left eye.  By dint of application he had become a fine orator, overcoming in the process a slight natural stammer.  His oratory was of the set piece rather than the impromptu kind, his speeches carefully memorized and rehearsed before a mirror in St Enda's.  He was not as yet a consistent physical-force revolutionary; as late as April 1912 he spoke from a Home Rule platform in Sackville Street, though making the reservation that Home Rule was a stepping-stone to complete independence.  As late as igi2 Pearse was also, according to Desmond Ryan, still critical of the Irish Republican Brotherhood as an associa-tion of 'talkers and old Fenians, past all capacity for action'.  These might seem incongruous sentiments for the future Commander-in-Chief of a revolution largely organized by the Brotherhood.  But three factors determined Pearse's rapid pro-gression to the centre of the republican stage.  Firstly, he was a militant Gael, prepared to follow to the bitter end the prompt-ings of his nationalist conscience.  Secondly, he was a man who could move and inspire other men.  And thirdly, the I.R.B. was in the same period undergoing a rejuvenation which could cause it to appreciate the potential utility of a man with these qualities. 
In the period before the outbreak of the First World War the I.R.B. came increasingly under the control of a generation of young, vigorous men.  The key figure in this process seems to have been Tom Clarke.  To no single figure, Clarke, Pearse, or MacDermott can the inspiration of 1916 be ascribed.  But un-doubtedly the fact that Clarke, the symbolic fellow-martyr of an older generation, was prepared to throw the weight of his name behind the young men and their policy of action was a major influence in its ' success.  These younger men, determined upon a fight, were ready to make use of congenial material.  Clarke had already been enormously impressed by a speech which Pearse had made at an Emmet commemoration concert in 1911, and in June 1913 the I.R.B. chose Pearse to deliver the Bodenstown oration at the grave of Wolfe Tone.  Pearse, in the first of a set of orations which have passed into Irish history, fully identified himself with the tradition of Tone.  'We have come to the holiest place in Ireland,' he began, 'holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down.  Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us.' In the same month Pearse began to contribute a series of articles 'From a Hermitage' to Irish Freedom, the I.R.B. newspaper, which also show a steady progression towards physical force.  'There are only two ways of righting wrongs; reform and revolution', he wrote in October 19I3- 'Reform is possible when those who inflict the wrong can be got to see things from the point of view of those who suffer the wrong.' 
Pearse was not yet, apparently, a member of the I.R.B. He was still disliked in some I.R.B. circles for his spasmodic con-stitutionalism.  Many of his senior and university students resi-dent at St Enda's, including Desmond Ryan, were sworn members of the I.R.B. at least eighteen months before their headmaster.  Late in 1913 Pearse approached Bulmer Hobson with the project of a fund-raising American lecture tour to rescue St Enda's from a financial crisis.  Hobson wrote to John Devoy with the approval of Clarke and MacDermott recom-mending Pearse as 'all right and in line with us here' and St Enda's as 'the only college preparing boys for the Universities that is really and intensely national in tone'. 
The precise occasion when Pearse was actually sworn into the I.R.B. has been and probably always will be the subject of controversy, but the most probable date is shortly after the foundation of the Volunteers in November 1913 and before Pearse went to America.  Of the founding group of the Volun-teers, which first met on 11 November 1913, Pearse is listed by Bulmer Hobson amongst those members who were not in the I.R.B. But the Volunteers were from the outset effectively infiltrated by a cadre of I.R.B. men.  Elections to officer rank were used to place them in key positions, and particularly after the split with Redmond in September 1914 the revolutionary nucleus of the Volunteers was supplied by the secret organiza-tion.  The overt purpose of the Volunteers was firstly defensive against conscription and partition, but at least from September 1914 the covert purpose of the I.R.B. was to mount a rising before the war ended. 
Pearse rapidly rose to a position of prominence in both organizations.  He was one of the principal speakers at the Rotunda Rink meeting which launched the Volunteers on 25 November I 9 I 3, and from then on became the principal orator of the movement, his work culminating in his electrifying oration at the O'Donovan Rossa funeral in August 1915- On 6 Decem-ber I914, at the first meeting of the General Council of the Volunteers after the split with Redmond, he was appointed Director of Organization, and as such issued orders on behalf of MacNeill, the Chief of Staff.  Equally, in May 1915, he was appointed, with Joseph Plunkett and Eamonn Ceannt, a mem-ber of a three-man military committee set up by the Supreme Council of the I.R.B. to draft a plan for a military insurrection.  This committee later became the Military Council and was widened in I9I5 to include Clarke and MacDermott, ex officio, as Secretary and Treasurer of the Supreme Council and its key figures, and in 1916 Connolly and MacDonagh.  In September 1915 Pearse figures as a co-opted member of the Supreme Council of the I.R.B. In January 1916 the Supreme Council decided upon revolution at 'the earliest date possible', leaving the timing and details to the Military Council.  What followed is history, and will be discussed in its place by other contributors to this series. 
Two fundamental questions do, however, arise concerning Pearse's position.  Firstly, why was Pearse, after only two and a half years in the I.R.B., and with no military experience, elected by the Military Council to the position of Commander--in-Chief?  Secondly, why was Pearse prepared to place himself at the head of a rising which had little initial chance of success and which, after the failure of the arms ship to arrive, he knew could only conclude in his own death? 
The first question is only partially answered by Pearse's oratorical powers.  More fundamental was the position which he held as a member of the Supreme Council of the I.R.B. and of its Military Council, and at the same time Director of Organiza-tion of the Volunteers.  Plunkett and Ceannt were also com-mandants in the Volunteers, but no other I.R.B. man held such prominent dual rank as Pearse.  Clarke, for example, a dedicated revolutionary continually under detective observation, had held back from the prominent role in the Volunteers which Pearse naturally assumed, and Clarke's role and that of MacDermott in the planning of the rising was necessarily little known outside the I.R.B. 
Pearse therefore was indispensable in the link between the I.R.B. and the Volunteers.  When he issued orders for military maneuvers, culminating in the decisive order of Easter 1916, he did so in a dual capacity.  To the rank and file non-I.R.B. Volunteer he was the spokesman of the Volunteer leadership.  To the I.R.B. man in the know he was the spokesman of the Brotherhood.  The I.R.B. was the agent and mainspring of the rising, but with probably not much more than two thousand members, of whom perhaps about a quarter were militarily active, it needed the umbrella of the Volunteers.  Hence the protracted deception of MacNeill; hence also the key role of Pearse, whom several of the I.R.B. leaders still regarded as a political amateur. 
The seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic, the seven members of the Provisional Government, were the seven members of the Military Council of the I.R.B. But the ordinary Volunteer, living in 1916 when communications were so much slower than today, confused by orders and counter-manding orders, about to embark upon a desperate gamble against the mightiest empire in the world, knew little of the actual planning of the rising which had been perhaps the best -kept secret in Irish revolutionary history.  To such a Volunteer, Pearse of the I.R.B. seven was the most familiar figure, the name which had appeared on so many Volunteer orders since December 1914- So the duality of the secret and open organiza-tions, and the reluctance of MacNeill, the technical head of the Volunteers, to strike, propelled Pearse inexorably to the titular leadership. 
Why, in turn, was Pearse prepared to assume a role which virtually guaranteed his execution?  The answer to this question most probably lies in his writings between igi2 and igi6.  In this period Pearse developed the idealism of his I897 essay to the point where he concluded that his own generation had lost the right to freedom by its decadence and servility, and could only be rejuvenated by a blood-sacrifice.  This idea was broadly shared by Connolly, Plunkett, MacDonagh and MacDermott.  But Pearse, in both his controversial and his dramatic writings, developed it most fully and single-mindedly.  He once wrote to himself, in his short-lived journal An Barr Buadh, 'Pearse, you are too dark in yourself... Is it your English blood that is the cause of that, I wonder?' He went on later: 'However, you have the gift of speech.  You can make your audience laugh or cry as you please.  I suppose there are two Pearses, the sombre and taciturn Pearse and the gay and sunny Pearse.' As the Abbey actress, Máire nic Shiubhlaigh, a sympathetic observer, re-called, inside St Enda's he was 'a quiet young man, full of nothing but the business of the school.  But outside, some might have said Pearse was vain - a bit of a poseur'. 
He was indeed a gentle and considerate if rather humourless man in his school and in his private life, and he was deeply con-scious of the responsibilities of military leadership: 'It is a terrible responsibility to be cast upon a man, that of bidding the cannon speak and the grapeshot pour,' he wrote in January 1914.  But a month earlier he had written: 'May it not be said with entire truth that the reason why Ireland is not free is that Ireland has not deserved to be free?' The right to freedom, he became convinced, could only be won in arms: 'We must accus-tom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms.  We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as a final horror has lost its manhood.' Of the European war he wrote in December 1915: 'The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe.  Heroism has come back to the earth.... The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields.  Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.' 
With this concept of the cleansing effect of bloodshed there developed in Pearse's mind a vision of the overthrow of injustice by the sacrificial death of virtue.  If Pearse's nationalism stemmed principally from Tone, Emmet, and Mitchel, this sacrificial concept had a strongly religious, even Messianic quality.  The hero of his play The King, first produced in l912, is a young child whose innocent readiness to give his life for his people frees them where the efforts of the adult king have failed.  'I do homage to thee, 0 dead King, 0 victorious child!' says the king at the end, 'I kiss thee, 0 white body, since it is thy purity that hath redeemed my people.' And The Singer, his last play, which is often seen as expressive of his own sense of mission, ends in the same way with the hero going out to certain death crying, 'One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world.' The same expectancy of death is seen in several of Pearse's poems such as The Mother, with its famous lines: 

I do not grudge them; Lord, I do not grudge 
My two strong sons that I have seen go out 
To break themselves and die, they and a few, 
In bloody protest for a glorious thing. 

And still more clearly in Renunciation: 

I have turned my face 
To this road before me, 
To the deed that I see 
And the death I shall die. 

And so, on 3 May 1916, Pearse died, as he had foretold.  As soldiers, he and his colleagues were failures.  The military plan was foredoomed once the arms failed to arrive, and arguably was ill conceived from the beginning.  There were already those who questioned the logic of sitting within a tightening ring in Dublin waiting to be overwhelmed.  Such men were to come back from English prison camps to apply the lessons of igi6 in a more ruthless and ultimately more successful kind of war. 
But whether they could have done that without 1916 is another question.  Maxwell's firing squad made Pearse, even more than his colleagues, the inspiration of a national myth.  His was in many ways a strange, divided nature.  His elevation of death to the status of a first principle is uncongenial to an age less familiar with the grand gesture.  In his own time he was an unrepresentative figure, regarded as an unpractical visionary by many not merely in the Parliamentary Party but in the I.R.B. In the secret groundwork which preceded the rising others, specifi-cally Clarke and MacDermott, appear to have played a greater part.  But it is difficult not to feel that by the standards of his own teachings, posterity vindicated Pearse.  He had become con-vinced that the risings of the past had been bedeviled by a last- minute reluctance to strike.  In common with the rest of the I.R.B. Military Council he was determined not to repeat that fatal hesitancy.  To him to strike was in a sense to win.  'We seem to have lost.' he said at his court martial: 'we have not lost.' And on Wednesday of Easter week in the GPO he is reported as remarking: 'When we are wiped out, people will blame us for everything, condemn us.... After a few years they will see the meaning of what we tried to do.' And indeed, as the released prisoners came back to Dublin in the following year they were accorded a heroes' welcome.  If Pearse's course was sacrificial and irrational, it had the unanswerable self-justification of success.  As he wrote in his poem The Fool, some six months before he was executed: 

The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces, 
And said, ‘This man is a fool’, and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth’; 
And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life 
 In the world of time and space among the bulk of actual things 
 To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold. 
O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true? 
What if the dream come true? And if millions unborn shall dwell 
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of thought? 
Lord, I have staked my soul, I have asked the lives of my kin 
On the truth of thy dreadful word, do not remember my failures, 
But remember my faith.     -Pádraig H. Pearse 1915