Fritz Hart and the `Celtic Twilight' In Australia

Literary Review, Fall, 2001 by Peter Tregear

The impetus that saw him turn decisively towards the literature of the Celtic revival, however, came with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The war had a dramatic effect not just on Hart, but similarly upon many native-born Australians who had earlier taken the increasing social and economic successes of their young Federation as an affirmation of modernism itself. A `glad, confident morning,' as the historian Beverley Kingston characterised the years before the war, became now gloomy and angst-ridden. The ease in which the invasion of Gallipoli, a bungled defeat, became an icon for the nation is symptomatic. The author Martin Boyd, wrote: `It's not that we have lost hope. It's that before the war we hoped that things would happen, whereas now we hope they won't.' (3) Graham McInnes, in his autobiographical novel Goodbye Melbourne Town, was similarly struck by the regressive state of mind in the older generation and remarked that many `not only hated the aftermath but were quite unable to adjust to a new life.' McInnes's mother, the celebrated middle-brow novelist and close friend of Hart, Angela Thirkell, `longed for a tranquil, ordered world, and ... she used her literary knowledge and writing skill to create it for herself (and for her readers) through the imagination.' (4) Of course, Celtic literature was suddenly attractive in part because it could be construed as British literature, and this allied to the cause of British nationalism. But it would nevertheless be unwarranted to suggest that the turn towards Celticism in Hart, and many other Australian composers, writers and artists, is reducible to mere opportunism. Hart's comment in a letter to fellow composer Alfred Hill in 1914 concerning his setting of Yeats's Land of Heart's Desire that he did not `care a damn whether it [would] attract the public or not' is not disingenuous. With the outbreak of war his creative life had become, and was to remain, something removed from the disappointing realm of modern life.

After the war, many Australian writers also realised that Celtic literature might provide a suitably adaptable iconography for use in depicting the otherwise baffling forms of the Australian landscape. For instance, when the art-critic Sydney Jephcott, writing in 1921, came to describe his response to the Australian environment he

   ... wondered no longer at the old world's overply of legends of
   Earth-spirits, Gnomes and Trolls--in that mooding starlessness [sic] the
   very planet muttered with their immemorial voices. (5)

And Victor Kennedy and Nettie Palmer saw in the poetry of fellow Australian Bernard O'Dowd the hope that

   [a]t some distant date the `magic prisms of a myriad years' will have
   changed the commonplace figures we tire of now into heroic shapes. The swag
   will have become a wallet of Sigurd, the drover's tale of love taken on the
   passion of Tristan's or Lancelot's; brumbies turned into centaurs, and the
   lyrebird on his dancing mound into a mystagogue from some Bacchantic vale.
   In a series of humours and fantastic images O'Dowd lets his fancy play on
   the way our humdrum present will have become translated into a romantic
   past. (6)