Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

Correspondence: The Heart Has Reasons

formalism which is neither Catholic nor Literature.38 The present book is written in the same mood. * * * Correspondence: The Heart Has reasons1 dear Sir, – a tag is occasionally a very useful thing, particularly when the tag carries with it the name of some great man, pascal, for instance.2 So with Mr. Hendrick and his ‘heart whose reason is unknown to reason.’3 if people whose hearts trouble them in this way would only ask themselves, as pascal certainly would have asked himself, whether the fault lay in their hearts or in reason, what a deluge of drivel we poor reason-led mortals would be spared! in the present instance Mr. Hendrick is troubled by symbols, and ‘such is the poverty of language that we can find no words to give expression to these hidden symbols.’4 a striking admission surely! Language, which followed dante into the life to come, cannot follow Mr. Hendrick into the labyrinth of his own reason. again, has it struck Mr. Hendrick that the fault may lie not in language but in his own reasoning faculties? two eminent examples of this muddy thinking – if it were not that an irishman is absolutely devoid of sentimentalism, i should have called it sentimentalism – occur in this last issue of The Tribune. first by long odds comes Mr. Hendrick’s article. after this comes Mr. Corkery’s ‘Landscape,’ otherwise an earnest and a beautiful bit of writing. They are alike only in this, that their authors are both wailing after something; Mr. Corkery after The Spirit of the Nation (the capitals are his), and Mr. Hendrick after those symbols which, inscrutable, so he tells us, to reason, and inexpressible to language, he first refers to as rains, then as winds, then again as storms, and finally as ‘spiritual symbols that have been nourished and strengthened by the winds and the rains of tradition.’5 Well, as pascal did not say, ‘what a piece of work is man!’6 But Mr. Hendrick’s ‘symbols,’ like a Victorian novel, are dignified with a purpose.Those wild people who wish to preserve our dominion status are gravely informed that they have mistook the ‘purpose’ of what he at last condescends to speak of as ‘a storm’ – at this point i failed to discover whether he was speaking of symbols or street-ambushes, but i know it must be one or the other. That a storm, being the work of natural forces, cannot have a purpose is beside the point; and, now that a perfectly natural calm has succeeded a perfectly natural storm, without the storm’s having attained its ‘purpose,’ the only course open to us is to begin the storm all over again. 210 Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism. Selected Writings That, briefly, is the logic of the thing, and an extraordinary bit of logic it is. indeed, of this reason reason knoweth nothing, and the less it knows of it, say i, the better. Then comes Mr. Corkery, a very oisin, weeping after The Spirit of the Nation. Were i in the mood to be merely satirical i need only requote that tag again and again in its original capitals to achieve my purpose. But i am not in the mood to be satirical, because to balance an intangible, invisible, inexpressible, rainy, windy symbol with a very noble sentiment would be to prove myself lacking in a sense of proportion. i understand what Mr. Corkery desires and i respect that desire, although i believe that with him feeling has outrun understanding. His incursions into mediævalism, like the incursions of professor Stockley7 into mediævalism, seem to me to be expressions of the mind left high and dry; no longer rowing, they would have the river stop that they may not be outdistanced. Mr. Corkery is speaking now of what he calls a ‘pervert Gael.’ ‘He would drain bottoms, pluck the rocks from the hillsides, set the plough where plough had never been, build house after house, shed after shed, scheme unceasingly – unceasingly! – yet only still to find that spirit speaking in his ear: is that all?’8 Mr. Corkery would have us believe that until the man makes his peace with The Spirit of the Nation that work will go for nothing. i do not believe it. i do not believe that the spirit of the nation, any more than the spirit of the Catholic religion, is a permanent and unchanging thing. i say that if his people...