This gallimaufry is dedicated to my friend, Francis George Scott, the
composer, who suggested it, and to whom, during the course of writing it,
I have been further greatly indebted for co-operative suggestions and
for some of the most penetrating and comprehensive of modern European
criticism.
I would gratefully acknowledge, too, the assistance I have received from
my friend, Dr Pittendrigh Macgillivray, and from my wife, in the revision
of proofs.
To the Editor of ‘The Glasgow Herald’ I have to tender the customary
acknowledgements for his kindness in allowing me to republish here
certain portions of my poem which originally appeared in his columns.
Drunkenness has a logic of its own with which, even in these decadent
days, I believe a sufficient minority of my countrymen remain _au fait_.
I would, however, take the liberty of counselling the others, who have
no personal experience or sympathetic imagination to guide them, to be
chary of attaching any exaggerated importance, in relation to my book
as a whole, to such inadvertent reflections of their own sober minds
as they may from time to time—as in a distorting mirror—detect in these
pages, and of attempting, in, no doubt, a spirit of real helpfulness,
to confer, on the basis of these, a species of intelligibility foreign
to its nature, upon my poem. It would have been only further misleading
these good folks, therefore, if I had (as, arbitrarily enough at best, I
might have done) divided my poem into sections or in other ways supplied
any of those “hand-rails” which raise false hopes in the ingenuous minds
of readers whose rational intelligences are all too insusceptible of
realising the enormities of which “highbrows” of my type are capable—even
in Scotland.
I would suggest, on the other hand, if I may, that they should avoid
subtleties and simply persist in the pretence that my “synthetic Scots”
presents insuperable difficulties to understanding, while continuing to
espouse with all the impressiveness at their command the counter-claims
of “sensible poetry.”
The whole thing must, of course, be pronounced _more Boreali_.