"We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style? What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography." Signed H Stuart and Cecil Salkend in the second and final issue of the modernist journal To-morrow in August 1924, but attributed variously to W.B. Yeats, Liam O'Flaherty and Francis Stuart.
"There is an emptiness within the human breast, a hunger for we hardly know what, that is the deepest and wildest of all desires. It is the falling in love with life, the dark deep flow below the surface. Subtle, crude, beautiful, terrible. A few have dared to open their arms to it, to plunge into it, and always they are wounded and humiliated; but they have been touched, have been caressed by those fiery fingers that curved the universe, and there remains about them a breadth, a spaciousness, a warmth of genius." Francis Stuart. Notes for an Autobiography 1934
‘I walk through those streets that I once fought to defend, feeling a little like a stranger. And it was this spirit of smugness and deadness that we fought against and were defeated by. The spirit of liberal democracy. We fought to stop Ireland falling into the hands of publicans and shopkeepers, and she has fallen into their hands.’ Ibid.
Francis Stuart is unique. Wonderfully imaginative, and daring. Far more so than so many of the sacred cows of Irish literature.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard his name until I saw a priest quote part of the first paragraph yesterday on Twitter in respect of the language to be expected from the current Synod. I just found from Wikipedia that Stuart spent much of the war in Germany and between March 1942 and January 1944 broadcasting to Ireland. He spoke with admiration of Hitler and expressed the hope that Germany would help unite Ireland.
DeleteYes, his masterpiece "Black List Section H" deals with that period. I've read the war broadcasts.
ReplyDeleteHe was a fascist like many modernists?
DeleteI wouldn't say a Fascist. Like many intelligent and restless people, he found normal life boring - as he says in the quotation at the end of the post - and was desperate for something more exciting, which was the word he later used to describe his time in Germany, amidst some dubious "apologies".
DeleteI've seen you say it, but I think it's a bigger point not discussed enough that peace = boredom: business, commerce, family life. But many dissidents/contrarians/reactionaries etc find that stifling and so cause/join trouble.