THE HEART HAS REASONS

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. So with Mr. Hendrick and his “heart whose reason is
unknown to reason.” 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.” 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 rains of tradition.” Well, as Pascal did not say, “what a
piece of work is man!”

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 they 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 perfecty natural storm,
without the storm having attained its “purpose,” the only course open
to us is to begin the storm all over again. 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 the
desire, although I believe that with him feeling has outrun
understanding. His incursions into mediaevalism, like the incursions
of Professor Stockley into mediaevalism, 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 the 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?” 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 did not accept this man and
his work, whatever his beliefs, whatever his tradition, his people did
not prove themselves worthy of him, and if they be poor as a result,
they have gotten only what they have deserved. A nation, sir, is only
a nation while it is absorbing life into itself, while it is absorbing
individuals into itself.

I am not so foolish as to imagine that we can have a nation without
the national tradition, that is to say, without the sum of what we
have learned, but neither am I foolish enough to think that without
our national tradition we cannot have a bus service. To think so would
be to think falsely and to pervert every standard of judgment.

The truth is that we need our national tradition in the making of our
national philosophy. It is not that tradition is itself a philosophy,
for what is it but the sum of certain experiences? It is the reaction
of intellect to these experiences which counts.

A last word for Mr. Hendrick. After the storm comes the calm; after
the hysteria of the idealsit comes the low and heartbreaking sobs of
Mr. O’Casey. Intellect comes between, and art, and industry.
Mr. Hendrick is a relic of the storm, high and dry, with little
learning. Mr. O’Casey, it would seem, is also by now a relic, and
when we have left him, too, behind us ...

‒Yours faithfully,

Frank O’Connor


The Irish Tribune, 1926-06-25