TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
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ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_A List of the Contents of
this Series will be found
at the end of this volume_
ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
BY
C. M. GRIEVE
_Author of ‘Contemporary Scottish Studies,’ ‘The Present
Position of Scottish Music,’ etc._
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & Co.
1927
_To what genius are addressed the disquietudes stirred in our
conscience by a setting so poor and so strong?_
MAURICE BARRÈS.
_All despair in politics is an absolute stupidity._
CHARLES MAURRAS.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM.
ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
I
The forces that are moving towards a Scottish Renaissance are complex
and at first sight incompatible. The movement began as a purely
literary movement some seven or eight years ago, but of necessity
speedily acquired political and then religious bearings. It is now
manifesting itself in every sphere of national arts and affairs, and
is at once radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary.
Engaged in traversing the accepted conceptions of all things
Scottish, it is in keeping that it should not have set the heather
on fire. But it has made far greater headway than what has appeared
about it in the English or Anglo-Scottish Press would indicate.
For obvious reasons these are concerned to minimize or ignore its
manifestations. The movement has had various more or less short-lived
organs of its own; it will undoubtedly acquire others. But in the
meantime it lacks any and its progress is correspondingly obscure
but none the less real. Its inception synchronized with the end of
the War, and in retrospect it will be seen to have had a genesis in
kin with other post-war phenomena of recrudescent nationalism all
over Europe, and to have shared to the full in the wave of Catholic
revivalism which accompanied them. It took the full force of the War
to jolt an adequate majority of the Scottish people out of their
old mental, moral and material ruts; and the full force of post-war
reaction is gradually bringing them to an effective realization of
their changed conditions.
At first blush there may seem little enough connection between such
phenomena as the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement,
the “Irish Invasion” of Scotland, and the campaign to resuscitate
Braid Scots and Gaelic. But, adopting the Spenglerian philosophy,
the Renaissance movement regards itself as an effort in every
aspect of the national life to supplant the elements at present
predominant by the other elements they have suppressed, and thus
reverse the existing order. Or, in terms of psychology, the effort
is to relieve the inhibitions imposed by English and Anglo-Scottish
influences and to inhibit in turn those factors of Scottish
psychology which have rendered it amenable to the post-Union state
of affairs. In closer consideration, then, it will be seen that
the four phenomena mentioned correspond to pre-Union conditions in
Scotland. The first takes us back beyond the demoralizing concept
of the Canny Scot, which has conduced so largely to Scottish
denationalization, and re-establishes a psychology in keeping with
the independent traditions of the country. The majority of the
Scottish Labour members returned to the House of Commons went there
as “internationalists.” They were very lukewarm Home Rulers. A short
experience of Westminster transformed them completely. They found
the vote of the majority of the Scottish electorate systematically
vetoed by an English majority, and saw how Scottish affairs were
treated in the House of Commons. This saltatory emergence of a
Socialist preponderance in the Scottish representation is a post-war
product, and is interpreted from the Renaissance point of view
as a significant reassertion of the old Scottish radicalism and
republicanism. Prior to the Union Scotland was always “a nest of
rebels” and “never noted for loyalty to Monarchy,” and the old
Scots’ Parliament, though far from being a democratic body, placed
on its statute book measures of social reform in many directions in
advance of any yet enacted by the Mother of Parliaments. An analysis
of the difference in psychology and “direction” between the English
and the Scottish Labour and Socialist movements shows that this
interpretation is by no means far-fetched. The English movement
is constitutional and monarchical; the Scottish revolutionary and
republican.
The Scottish Home Rule movement is re-orienting itself along realist
lines, and has ceased to be mainly sentimental. For the first time it
is looking before as well as after. It is concerning itself less with
the past and more and more with the present and the future, and its
membership is growing in direct ratio to its increased practicality.
Most significant of all is the fact that these developments are
marked by an ascending claim. It is now generally realized that no
form of devolution without fiscal autonomy will meet the case, and
that merely constitutional means may not suffice. Bill after Bill,
backed by four out of five of the Scottish representatives of all
parties, has been thrown out by the overwhelming majority of English
members. This is a state of affairs which will not be tolerated
indefinitely. A premium is being put upon militant effort; and
the fact that the Scots National League which is out for complete
independence is now growing very much more rapidly than the moderate
Scottish Home Rule Association is significant in this direction.
At present the nationalist Press consists of two small monthly
organs; and all the daily, and practically all the weekly, papers
are anti-Home Rule, just as they are all anti-Socialist, although
the Scottish Socialist vote represents a third of the electorate.
Scottish journalism is, therefore, almost wholly untrustworthy
in relation to Scottish opinion. Realistic nationalism and the
majority elements of the Labour movement solely, or at all events,
predominantly concerned with bread-and-butter politics, have
naturally a great deal in common in the existing state of affairs,
and it is not surprising that Scottish nationalism and Scottish
Socialism should be making joint cause. Nor is the attitude of those
Liberal and Conservative politicians who are opposing Scottish Home
Rule, or modifying their interest in the subject, because it would
probably mean a Scottish Socialist Government, failing to produce its
own effects. Constitutionalism that fears and evades the will of the
people signs its own death-warrant.
Lord Haldane recently commented on the stimulating and beneficial
effects of such an admixture of races as is at present taking place
in Scotland, and especially on Clydeside. There has been a tremendous
“pother” about the “Irish Invasion” in certain quarters. We are
told by some Protestant leaders that Scottish nationalism is in
danger. This is a new-found zeal for nationalism, however, obviously
dictated by emptying churches. These gentlemen represent the very
factors which have been mainly responsible for the desuetude of
Scottish nationalism. Their anti-Irish propaganda has been of the
most unscrupulous character and depends for its principal effects
on the use of the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” as synonymous. But,
large as the Irish influx has been, the recent rapid development
of which throws an adequate light on the real motives of the
protesters, representing as they do churches which are about to
achieve Union, really a prelude to the inevitable re-union of the
Protestant Churches and Rome, through the indifference instead of the
enthusiasm of their remaining members and without consultation of
the Scottish people, _via_ a Parliament systematically anti-Scottish
in its policies. From the Renaissance point of view the growth of
Catholicism, and the influx of the Irish, are alike welcome, as
undoing those accompaniments of the Reformation which have lain like
a blight on Scottish arts and affairs. In this connection it is
useful to remember that the Shorter Catechism, like the concept of
the Canny Scot, the myth which has facilitated the anglicization of
Scotland, was an English invention. The revival of Catholicism means
the restoration of the atmosphere in which Scottish arts and letters
flourished in a fashion they have far from paralleled at any time
since the Reformation. I am not contending that Protestantism is
essentially antagonistic to arts and letters. That would be absurd.
But Scottish Calvinism has been: and just as many of the great
figures in the Irish literary movement have been Protestants, so, on
the other hand, if there is to be cultural progress in Scotland, must
many of the emerging artists be Catholics.
As to Scots, here, again, its desuetude was largely due to the
Reformation and to the Union with England. Its “direction” is
completely at variance with the “direction” of English; and the
present state of English literature on the one hand, and the newer
tendencies in Europe to which London is most antipathetic on the
other, considered in conjunction with the special virtues of Scots,
suggests that the psychological moment for its revival has arrived
and that through it lies a way for the successful re-entry of
distinctively Scottish culture into the European stream. The Burns
influence has been wholly bad, producing little save puerile and
platitudinous doggerel. It is necessary to go back behind Burns to
Dunbar and the Old Makars—great Catholic poets using the Vernacular,
not for the pedestrian things to which it has latterly been confined,
but for all “the brave translunary things of great art.” The younger
Scottish poets are repossessing themselves of noble media and high
traditions; and a splendid mystical and imaginative spirit is
reuniting them over a period of five centuries with their mighty
predecessors. Even the Burns cult itself, which long confined itself
to an “annual guzzle” on the poet’s birthday, is now proclaiming
itself a Scottish literary and patriotic organization, and advocating
the teaching of Scots in the schools. And the Scottish Education
Department is reported to be favourably disposed. Can the headway
that has been made during the past few years be more impressively
illustrated?
The Scottish Renaissance Movement is even more concerned with
the revival of Gaelic than of Scots. It regards Scotland as
a diversity-in-unity to be stimulated at every point, and,
theoretically at any rate, it is prepared to develop along trilingual
lines. Actually the revival of the Gaelic—and the output of Gaelic
letters of quality, despite the efforts of the Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine
of Marr, is lagging behind in comparison with Braid Scots, and it
is questionable whether Gaelic has any similar alignment with the
“becoming tendencies” in _Welt-literatur_. Or it may be that the
present position calls in the first place for recognition, and modern
applications, of the Pictish rather than the Gaelic elements in
Scottish culture. On the other hand, proposals for the establishment
of a great Gaelic College have been taken up enthusiastically by
the Clans Association in America, and are already well advanced.
Far-reaching developments are imminent in this direction. Here again,
materialism is giving way to new spiritual ideals, and in Gaelic we
return closer then ever to the old Scotland.
All these movements then represent so many antitheses of the
tendencies which have dominated Scotland since the Union and have
conjointly driven it so far along the road to Anglicization.
They are asserting themselves and have arrested the tendency to
assimilate Scotland to English standards just when it seemed on the
point of complete success. Lost ground is being rapidly recovered;
efforts are being made once more to create distinctively Scottish
literature comparable in artistic quality and tendencious force to
the contemporary output of other European countries, and to regain
the independent cultural position of Scotland in Europe; efforts
are being made to create a Scottish national drama and Scottish
national music—both of which Scotland alone of European countries
entirely lacks, mainly because of Calvinistic repression—and all
these efforts are achieving a measure of success. Scottish genius is
being liberated from its Genevan prison-house. But the centralization
of British arts and affairs in London is still restricting it in
ways that can only be redressed by that re-orientation of facilities
which would follow the re-establishment of an independent Scottish
Parliament, or, in the event of a return to the system of Provinces,
a federation of assemblies. The movement cannot manifest its full
stature and move freely, save within that framework of a Scotland
become once again a nation in every sense of the term for which it
has been designed.
II
In the foregoing chapter I have given an account of the movement
upon which it seems to me the future of Scotland depends—or,
rather, a Scottish future of Scotland. Scotland, of course, may
have another future. It may become a Roman-Catholic country with a
predominantly Irish population. Or its progressive anglicization and
provincialization may continue until it becomes to all intents and
purposes a part of its English neighbour. The latter is still the
likeliest; the former has only within the past few years emerged as a
serious competitor. But the main point to seize upon in the meantime
is that, apart from the “Scottish Renaissance Group,” the rest of
the Scottish people in Scotland to-day are not Scottish in any real
sense of the term. They have no consciousness of difference except
in detail; “distinctions without difference.” They are all the less
Scottish in proportion to their ardour as Burns enthusiasts, members
of St Andrew’s and Caledonian Societies and the like. Just as the
majority of Socialists become conscious of the economic causes of
their plight but retain (often in an exacerbated form) the types
of ideas on other matters which spring from the same source, so
the vast majority of Scots to-day—even Scottish Home Rulers—regard
as typically Scottish the very sentiments and attitudes which
are the products of their progressive anglicization. Scotland is
suffering from a very widespread inferiority complex—the result
of the psychological violence suffered as a consequence of John
Knox’s anti-national policy in imposing an English Bible (and, as a
consequence, English as the basis of education) upon it, and of the
means by which the Union of the Parliaments was encompassed and by
which its inherent intention of completely assimilating Scotland to
England has since been pursued. Weaker minds find compensation in
a “romantic nationalism”—sedulously dissociated from politics and
practical realities of every kind. The others accept the situation
and transcend it; that accounts for such phenomena as Scottish
Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury and York, “heids of
departments” of all kinds, the ubiquitous Scotsman generally, most
of the Scottish aristocracy, and such writers of English as R. L.
Stevenson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Norman Douglas. But these—or
some of them—are only exceptions that prove the rule that the
Anglo-Scottish symbiosis leads to nullity. There is a third class who
are “more English than the English”—who become panicky immediately
any question arises as to the benefit to Scotland of its present
relationship to England, who regard everything “Scottish” as beneath
contempt, and, in short, manifest all the symptoms of a “specific
aboulia” in the presence of any challenge to their submerged
nationalism. They have been un-Scotched and made “damned mischievous
Englishmen.” The “nationalism” of the first of these three classes is
such that it has been unable to create any literature, music or drama
of more than a local value. It is hopelessly provincialized. The
history of Scottish Vernacular poetry, for example, since the days of
the Auld Makars, is a history of the progressive relinquishment of
magnificent potentialities for the creation of a literature which
might well have rivalled the English. The only challenge to the
decline was that of Allan Ramsay and Ferguson—which Burns, in the
last analysis, betrayed. The influence of Burns has reduced the whole
field of Scots letters to a “kailyaird.” So with music. Scottish
mediæval music was ahead of English. To-day, Scotland is the only
country in Western Europe which has failed to develop an art-music,
though it has as available basis perhaps the finest inheritance of
folk-song in the world. Scarcely any effort is being made even yet
to create a national school of composers in Scotland, although the
creation of such national schools in every other country in Europe—at
their third and fourth stage of development now in most of them—has
constituted during the past half century or so one of the greatest
revolutions in music. So far as Scottish music is concerned it
remains at best practically where it was in the sixteenth century.
Music in Scotland is another matter. An effort is presently being
made to found a Scottish Academy of Music in conjunction with a
Chair of Music in Glasgow University. But the title is a misnomer.
It will be merely an Academy of Music in Scotland—probably under a
Welshman. In his new book, _Music: Classical, Romantic, and Modern_,
Dr Eaglefield Hull deals very succinctly with the position of
Scottish music to-day. “Scotland,” he says, “the country with the
loveliest scenery, the most thrilling history, a rich inheritance
of literature, and hundreds of the finest love-songs in the world,
has no national school of musical composition. Mac. after Mac. goes
down into England and loses his musical soul for a mess of pottage!
It is useless to ask whether Scotland stands where she did in
music, for apart from folk-music she has no standing at all. It is
indeed high time that she set to work to put her house in order. In
Donald Tovey, David Stephen, Francis George Scott, Erik Chisholm,
and others, there is fine material which must be utilized. But the
cultivation of a School of Scottish composers can only be carried on
within its own borders.” But he goes on to throw out a suggestion
of no little significance. “Perhaps,” he says, “Scotland is waiting
for some awakener from outside to make her thrill to a sense of her
great mission, such as John Field in Russia, Glinka in Spain, and
Jean Aubry in England. The spark is undoubtedly there, and only needs
fanning.”
Association of ideas leads me to think how the distinctively Scottish
genius has manifested itself in alien fields, however inhibited
it may have been at home. My main purpose here is not to discuss
the lets and hindrances which have prevented the development of
modern arts in Scotland, nor will my space permit me to analyse the
complexities of Scottish character and circumstances responsible for
our comparative failure to find expression on the higher levels of
culture. But it is curious to find that in relation to the cultures
of other countries, or in association with foreign elements in the
constitution of the individuals concerned, Scotsmen, or half-Scotsmen
have, with a surprising consistency, continued to manifest elements
distinctively Scottish which clearly relate them to the Auld Makars,
to the ballad makers, to our mediæval Scots musicians, and to that
elusive but unmistakable thread of continuity which attaches the work
of Norman Douglas, for example, to that of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the
translator of Rabelais. Wergeland, the Norwegian poet, was conscious
of the idiosyncratic power of the Scottish blood in his veins. So was
a greater poet—the Russian Lermontov. So was Hermann Melville; so—to
take a living example—is Walter de la Mare, whose _diablerie_, the
finest element in his work, is probably attributable to his Scottish
blood, as, in his case, were some of Browning’s amusing tortuosities
and prepossession with dialectical excesses. This Scottish strain is
tremendously idiosyncratic, full of a wild humour which blends the
actual and the apocalyptic in an incalculable fashion. In his able
analysis of the complexities of the Scottish genius Professor Gregory
Smith has called it “the Caledonian antisyzygy”—a baffling zig-zag
of contradictions—and he traces it down the centuries in a most
interesting fashion, remarking that “There is more in this Scottish
antithesis of the real and fantastic than is to be explained by the
familiar rules of rhetoric. This mingling, even of the most eccentric
kind, is an indication to us that the Scot, in that mediæval fashion
which takes all things as granted, is at his ease in both ‘rooms of
life,’ and turns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings.
For Scottish literature is more mediæval in habit than criticism
has suspected, and owes some part of its picturesque strength to
this freedom in passing from one mood to another. It takes some
people more time than they can spare to see the absolute propriety
of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint.” And
Professor Gregory Smith goes on to express the opinion that this
incalculable Scottish spirit will continue to survive in English arts
and letters pretty much as a dancing mouse may manifest itself in a
family of orthodox rodents—as something disparate, an ornament, or an
excrescence, but irreconciliable to any major tradition and incapable
of affording a basis for any higher synthesis of the Scottish genius.
That may be; on the other hand, its expansion may await a conjunction
of conditions which have not yet arisen. It has affiliations to the
baroque and the rococo, and evidences are not lacking of a widespread
renewal of interest in these modes. But a more important fact is that
this complicated wildness of imagination is, in Scots literature,
associated with a peerless directness of utterance
“Nae bombast swell,
Nae snap conceits.”
The language of the Greeks is simple and concrete, without _clichés_
or rhetoric. English is, by contrast, loose and vague. But what Greek
epigram has a more magical simplicity than Burns’s
Ye are na Mary Morison,
or where shall a parallel be found for the terrific concision, the
vertiginous speed, of _Tam o’ Shanter_? The future of the Scots
spirit may depend upon the issue of the great struggle going on
in all the arts between the dying spirit of the Renaissance and
the rediscovered spirit of nationality. To-day there is a general
reaction against the Renaissance. Observe the huge extent to which
dialect is entering into the stuff of modern literature in every
country. Dialect is the language of the common people; in literature
it denotes an almost overweening attempt to express the here-and-now.
That, in its principle, is anti-Renaissance. Basil de Sélincourt[1]
and many others observe that modern English shows signs of fatigue
in comparison with Chaucer’s. Chaucer was a poet with this power
of plain speech. He never flinched from the life that was being
lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw,
its dung, its cocks and hens is not, some people have thought, a
poetic subject; Chaucer knew better. Dunbar with the aid of Scots
achieved effects beyond Chaucer’s compass with an utterance even more
simple and straightforward. It has been said that Dunbar had for his
highest quality a certain unique intensity of feeling, the power of
expressing that passionate and peculiar force which distinguishes and
differentiates us people of the North from our Southern neighbours.
What is this unique intensity of feeling, this power of direct
utterance, but the pre-Renaissance qualities of which I am writing?
Braid Scots is a great untapped repository of the pre-Renaissance
or anti-Renaissance potentialities which English has progressively
forgone.
[1] _See_ his _Pomona: or the Future of English_, in this series.
In days when mankind were but callans
At grammar, logic, and sic talents,
They took nae pains their speech to balance
Or rules to gie,
But spak’ their thoughts in plain braid lallans
Like you or me.
But it goes far deeper than language, this “Caledonian antisyzygy,”
and music in the long run may utilize it more fully and finely than
literature. It is here that I join issue again with my essential
theme—to find what I have said concerning the persistence of this
queer Scots strain extraordinarily exemplified in modern music in
the work of Erik Satie. Satie’s middle name was Leslie; his mother
was a Scotswoman. Satie was a “musical joker.” His most distinctive
and important work was a species of fantastic experimental clowning,
hardening later into satire. His work and his methods should have
the special consideration of every Scottish artist—every musician in
particular—who is puzzled as to how he may profitably exploit the
peculiarities of Scottish psychology of which he is conscious. Paul
Landormy calls him “a freakish musician, more inventor than creator,
the composer of ‘Pieces in the Form of a Pear,’ of the ‘Bureaucratic
Sonata,’ and other fantastic products of a whimsical yet quite
elegantly witty imagination,” but—and this is the vital thing—he
admits that “he furnished certain elements of that new language which
the composer of _Pelleas_ used for loftier ends.” This is no little
understatement of Satie’s significance. Dr Eaglefield Hull says:
“This kind of musical irony is the most individual and personal of
all types of art. The composer writes for a few detached individual
people, who would scoff at the rest of humanity. Only very ‘superior’
people can appreciate such irony, which passes from an elegant wit
to a brutal sarcasm.” But he goes on to say: “Historically Satie
was of immense importance. The music on Satie’s twelve pages (of
his first work, _Sarabandes_, 1887) is even a greater landmark than
either Debussy’s or Chabrier’s work. The ‘diaphony’ of his sevenths
and ninths was to become part and parcel of the harmonic decoration
of Debussy and the Impressionists.... He was the father of atonality
in music. Side by side with all his strangeness and boldness are
passages of the most amazing commonplaces, which are difficult to
explain except as satirical allusions.” Exactly! What is this but
the “Caledonian Antisyzygy” precisely as Professor Gregory Smith
describes it, but manifesting itself in modern music to ultimately
triumphant effect. There is no need, then, for Dr Hull to say “His
father was French and his mother Scottish. We wonder to which source
his outstanding characteristic of humour is due.” Surely it is
along similar lines in Scotland itself that our difficult national
characteristics may yet be turned to musical account and make the
basis of a new technique, at once completely modern yet intimately
related to the whole history of Scots psychology and conjoining
in the closest fashion the artists we are about to become, if the
Scottish Renaissance realizes its objectives, with the Auld Makars
and the ballad makers whose achievements we have yet to parallel and
continue.
As with literature and music so with drama and dancing this tale
might be continued. The explanations of Scotland’s leeway lie in the
Reformation, the Union with England and the Industrial Revolution.
If I isolate the second of these as the main cause, it is because it
was indispensable to the consummation and continuance of the first
and largely determined the effect upon Scotland of the third. There
are people who imagine that but for the Union with England Scotland
would still be destitute of all the blessings of modern civilization.
They find no difficulty in associating this belief with the idea
that Scotsmen are thrifty, hardworking, exceptionally well-educated,
law-abiding and home-loving. I am not one of them. I believe that
the Industrial Revolution would have spread to Scotland much less
injuriously if England had suddenly disappeared about 1700. I believe
that the concept of the “canny Scot” is the myth (as M. Delaisi puts
it) which has made Scotland governable by England and has prevented
the development since the Union of any realistic nationalism worth
speaking about. True, it has been so insidiously and incessantly
imposed that the great majority of Scots have long been unable for
all practical purposes to do other than believe it themselves. Yet
there are notable exceptions; the traditions of Highland soldiering,
for example—the “ladies from Hell.” Even the “canniest” Scot does
not repudiate these as un-Scottish. At all events the effect of all
these three causes was overwhelmingly repressive and anti-Scottish.
The Reformation, which strangled Scottish arts and letters, subverted
the whole national psychology and made the dominant characteristics
of the nation those which had previously been churl elements. The
comparative cultural sterility of the latter is undeniable. A premium
was put upon Philistinism. There has been no religious poetry—no
expression of “divine philosophy”—in Scotland since the Reformation.
As a consequence Scotland to-day is singularly destitute of æsthetic
consciousness. The line of hope lies partially in re-Catholicization,
partially in the exhaustion of Protestantism. The Union with England
confirmed and secured the effects of the Reformation. It intensified
the anglicization that the introduction of an English Bible and
the _Shorter Catechism_ (with which England itself so promptly
dispensed) had initiated. It progressively severed the Scottish
people from their past. The extent to which this has gone is almost
incredible—especially if taken in conjunction with the general
attribution of an uncommon love-of-country to the Scots. English has
practically vanquished Scots (which is not a dialect but a sister
language to English, with different but not inferior, and, in some
ways, complementary, potentialities) and Gaelic. There is very little
Scottish Education in Scotland to-day. The type of international
education which is everywhere gaining ground to-day is that which
seeks to perfect, and even to intensify, different cultures already
existent among different peoples, and sets for its ideal that each
people has, first, the right to its own interpretation of life;
and, second, the duty of understanding, and sympathizing with,
the different interpretations given by its neighbours as fully as
possible. Back of this type of international education lies the
belief that differentiation in matters of culture is more valuable
to life than a stereotyped homogeneity. This, so far as Scotland
is concerned, is the aim and object of the Scottish Renaissance
movement; and it is high time that the Scottish Educational System
was attempting to change-over to this type of education rather than
adhering partly to the imperialistic and partly to the eclectic
types, both of which, as Professor Zimmern says, “belong rather to
the past than to the present,” except, alas, in Scotland, which
once prided itself on leading the world in matters of education. A
recent Committee of Enquiry, set up by the Glasgow branch of the
Educational Institute of Scotland, reports that no school-book
dealing with Scottish history is of a satisfactory character. This,
although a remarkable advance in professional admission, is a
sheer understatement. Scottish history is only now in the process
of being rediscovered and, once the labours of the new school of
Scottish historical researchers come to be synthetized, it will be
found that even such comparatively “Scottish” Scottish Histories
as Hume Brown’s have to be thrown overboard, as little more than
a mass of English propaganda. It is only within recent years that
any attempt has been made to teach even such “Scottish history”
in Scottish schools, and then subsidiarily to English, and, as it
were, as a make-weight or after-thought—to the older children. Scots
literature is in even worse case, although here, too, there has
been a slight improvement during the past decade. The increasing—if
still insignificant—Scoticization of Scottish Education during
recent years is, of course, not a product of the propaganda of the
Scottish Renaissance Group. To what is it attributable? How can it be
accounted for if the policy of England and, even more determinedly,
of Anglo-Scotland, let alone the over-riding tendency of modern
industrialism, is towards the complete assimilation of Scotland
to England? In my opinion it is a product partly of the latent
criticism of the industrial order and partly of a realization of the
cultural exhaustion of English (_vide_ “_Pomona_”)—an instinctive
protective re-assembling of the forces suppressed by the existing
order of things which has made for the predominancy of English.
This explanation accords with the doctrine Spengler expounds in his
_Downfall of the Western World_. “The Caledonian Antisyzygy,” instead
of being a disparate thing destined to play a baroque, ornamental,
or disfiguring rôle—_chacun à son goût_—in English literature may be
awaiting the exhaustion of the whole civilization of which the latter
is a typical product in order to achieve its effective synthesis
in a succeeding and very different civilization. In the history of
civilization therefore the sudden suppression of Scots, with all its
unique expressive qualities may prove to have been a providential
postponement; it may have been driven underground to emerge more
triumphantly later. Its coming musicians and writers must address
themselves to it, as Mussorgsky, following Dargomisky’s dictum that
“the sound must express the word,” addressed himself to Russian—with
Mallarmé’s “adoration for the property of words”; just as they
must recollect that the “pure poetry” of some of the contemporary
Continental expressionists was anticipated and carried far further
long ago in their _Canntaireachd_, or mnemonic notation of the
MacCrimmons—a basis upon which they may profitably build. To detail
the arguments in support of this “theory of Scots letters” would take
up more space than I can afford; but I must interpolate a brief
outline of them here, for they bear in one way and another on all the
issues with which I am concerned.
III
Not Burns—Dunbar! That is the phrase which sums up the significant
tendency which is belatedly manifesting itself in Scots poetry
to-day. At first it may seem absurd to try to recover at this time
of day the literary potentialities of a language which has long ago
disintegrated into dialects. These dialects even at their richest
afford only a very restricted literary medium, capable of little
more than kailyard usages, but quite incapable of addressing the
full range of literary purpose. They are the _disjecta membra_ of
a language; the question is, whether they can be re-integrated and
re-vitalized. Can these dry bones live? Like feats have at all events
been accomplished elsewhere—in regard to Provençal in France,
Catalan in Spain, the Landsmaal in Norway, and so on. Those who would
try it in Scots must first of all recover for themselves the full
canon of Scots used by the Auld Makars and readapt it to the full
requirements of modern self-expression. This is no easy task. Why
should it be attempted? One answer is because English is incapable of
affording means of expression for certain of the chief elements of
Scottish psychology—just as English has no equivalents for many of
the most distinctive words in the Scots vocabulary. Another answer is
that there is a tendency in world-literature to-day which is driving
writers of all countries back to obsolete vocabularies and local
variants and specialized usages of language of all kinds. This is not
the place to more than indicate considerations such as these. Suffice
it to say that a little group of Scottish writers to-day are alive to
them and conscious of an overwhelming impulse to return more deeply
“into the pit whence we were digged” than any Scot has felt impelled
to go for several centuries. Burns, although he used a certain amount
of synthetic Scots of his own, not sticking to any one dialect
and recovering words that had ceased to be used, did not know the
works of his great fifteenth-century predecessors well enough to
make anything like full use of the linguistic material available.
This is what makes Carlyle say that if Burns had been “a first-class
intellectual workman he might have changed the whole course of
literature.” That opportunity still remains open, however, for anyone
who can revive the potentialities of the Scots language manifested
in Dunbar and since then almost wholly forgone in favour of the very
different potentialities of English.
The effect of Burns’ work on Scots poetry is well-known. It has
reduced it to a level that is beneath contempt. Little or no poetry
that has been produced in Scots since Burns’ day has been of a
quality to support comparison for a moment with the average of
contemporary poetry in any other European country. It is all of
the kailyard kind; sentimental, moralizing, flatfooted, and with
little or no relation to reality. I have suggested in the preface
to my selection of Burns’ work in Benn’s _Augustan Poets_ that
critical revaluation of Burns is overdue—or has, perhaps, been
tacitly accomplished—except by Burnsians and anthologists. Perhaps
poetry-lovers have carried the winnowing process too far. Reacting
from hackneyed favourites, and immune from the Burns cult, they have
not troubled to go over his work again—still less considered it
from the standpoint of what is best by Scottish, if not by English,
standards. Much of the best, and least known, of Burns depends for
appreciation on a thorough knowledge of Scots. This is its “growing
end.” His poetry in English is wholly negligible, and of his work as
a whole it may be said that it rises in poetic value the further away
from English it is, and the stronger the infusion of Scots he employs.
But it is not a question of language only but of content. A great
deal of Burns’ work is eighteenth-century conventionalism of a
deplorable kind. Most of his love-songs have a deadly sameness. The
task of Scottish poetry to-day is to rise out of the rut in which
it has so long been confined. It is here that the return to Dunbar
is of the utmost value. It means that Scots poetry may be rescued
at last from the atmosphere of hopeless anachronism which has long
kept it so “fushionless.” It has been said that if Burns is the
heart, Dunbar is the head, of Scottish poetry: and certainly at any
time during the past century Scots literature has had desperate need
to pray Meredith’s prayer for “More brains, O Lord, more brains.”
Dunbar is in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of
Scottish poets, whereas all but a fraction of Burns’ work (and that
fraction by no means confined to the most generally known portion of
it) is irrevocably dated and almost indistinguishable from the ruck
of imitations of it to which Scots poets have so largely confined
themselves during the subsequent century and a half. Even Professor
Gregory Smith admits that “there cannot be any quarrel about the
richness of the Scottish vocabulary, its frequent superiority to
English in both the spiritual and technical matters of poetic
diction, its musical movement and suggestion, and, generally, what
have been called the ‘grand accommodations’ in the craft of writing
as well.” Intelligent young Scots a few years ago might very well
have been excused for failing to detect any of these great qualities
in the very inferior types of Scots literature they came into
contact with. Scottish children are only taught a little Burns and a
few of the ballads. They are not taught anything of the Auld Makars.
For the most part their attention is confined to English literature.
It is not surprising, therefore, that they should regard Scottish
literature as a mere side-line, and that, in consequence, Scottish
literature should lose the greater part of those who should be
contributing to it rather than to a foreign literature, which, in any
case, prefers its own sons and daughters. But with the re-discovery
of Dunbar in particular by young Scottish poets during the past few
years new possibilities have opened up. They realize now upon what
grounds testimony is borne to the richness and resource of the Scots
language. In Dunbar they see them displayed in a way far beyond
anything accomplished since. They see Scots allied to noble ideas,
high imaginings, “divine philosophy,” and no longer confined to
the foothills of Parnassus, and when they resurvey the problem of
the revival of Scots from that angle, many of the difficulties of
readjusting and utilizing it to serious literary purpose which have
hitherto proved baffling are dispelled. Most of the people who are
trying to revive the Doric are, at the same time, trying to maintain
its “pawkiness,” its “canniness,” its kailyardism and so forth—in
a word, they are trying to revive Scots and yet remain within the
stream of tendency responsible for its progressive decay. It would
be truer to say that it is Braid Scots—not Scots—with which they are
concerned. Their method is that of exact dialectical demarcation—they
do not believe in mixing dialects—they contemplate no synthesis. What
alienates the young creative writers, conscious of the inadequacy of
their purpose alike of English and of what has still any currency as
Scots, from the Vernacular Circle people is precisely that the latter
have anything but a literary purpose. Not one of them is capable
or desirous of envisaging the creative potentialities of Scots or
sufficiently involved in questions of literary technique and tendency
to appreciate that so far as the literary outcome of what they are
professing to attempt goes it must depend, not only on intuitions in
profound harmony with the phonetic and expressive genius of Scots,
but also in effective relation with some major tendency in European
literary evolution. If there is to be further writing in Scots these
people want it to be as like what has gone before it from Burns’
time as possible: otherwise they will be the first to condemn it as
un-Scottish. But they are not caring much about further writing in
Scots at all; they want to maintain the Burns cult and the cult of
such lesser lights as Tannahill, and “_Johnny Gibb o’ Gushetneuk_.”
Any Scottish aspirant worth a bawbee is bound to recognize that
this is hopeless. The Vernacular Circle is a “vicious circle.” No
revival of Scots can be of consequence to a literary aspirant worthy
of his salt unless it is so aligned with contemporary tendencies in
European thought and expression that it has with it the possibility
of eventually carrying Scots work once more into the mainstream
of European literature. The re-discovery of Dunbar can solve the
difficulty for every would-be Scots writer who stands divided between
his reluctance to go over bag and baggage to English literature
and his inability to rise above the Kailyaird level through the
medium of Kailyaird Scots. Dunbar stands at the opposite pole of
the Scottish genius from Burns. The latter has ruled the roost far
longer than it is healthy for any literature to be dominated by a
single influence. It is time, and more than time, for a swing of the
pendulum which, if it carries us back over the centuries to Dunbar,
may also regain for Scots literature some measure, at all events, of
the future that was foregone at Flodden.
It is the possibility and increasing probability of such a swing of
the pendulum that Mr G. M. Thomson seems to me to have disregarded
in his cogent, but far too pessimistic, essay on _Caledonia: or the
Future of the Scots_ in this series. But I am at one with him in
regard to the desperate state of Scottish arts and affairs to-day
and in the absence of such developments as I indicate and their
timely expression in an effective form, my anticipations could not
materially differ from his. His melancholy outlook is due to his
failure to recognize that the Scottish Home Rule Association, the
Scots National League, the Scottish National Movement, the Scottish
National Convention, the Scotland’s Day Committee, the Scottish
Renaissance Group and other bodies fully realize the position he
describes, and have been making marked headway during the past two
or three years. Mr Thomson’s reference to the Porpoise Press (which
has done excellent work) does not excuse his failure to give credit
to _The Scottish Chapbook_, _The Scottish Nation_, _The Northern
Review_, _The Scots Independent_, _Scottish Home Rule_, _Guth na
Bliadna_, and other organs which, severally and jointly, have been
of far greater consequence in this redevelopment of cultural and
political nationalism. Nor—otherwise accurate as is his account of
Scotland’s industrial plight—can he be excused for failing to realize
the significance of the electrification policy. Scotland would never
have been selected for this purpose if it had been so destitute of
an industrial future as surface appearances suggest. The North of
England is suffering in many respects just as Scotland is doing,
but Mr Thomson should have realized the import of the map on the
cover of _The Northern Review_, which showed not only Scotland but
England as far down as Hull and Liverpool. The country between the
Humber-Mersey line and the Forth and Clyde line corresponds to the
old Brythonic kingdom. This is our real centre of gravity. Most of
our heavy industries are centred there—most of our mineral wealth—and
statistics show that an overwhelming percentage of Scottish and
English genius alike of all kinds has come from that area. Politics
have led to an extraordinary distortion; but there can be little
doubt that economic realities will yet redress the balance as between
London, on the one hand, and that area on the other, and in effect
endorse the Southward policy of the old Scots Kings. In any case
there is still an ample Scottish population in Scotland to redevelop
the essential nationalism—if they can be aroused to a recognition
of the necessity of it and, with the support of the international
tendencies to which I have referred (which in turn they would
strengthen), avert the calamity he indicates. The calamity, however,
is imminent; and all but a moiety of the people are unconscious of
its imminence or indifferent. The conscious minority has, perhaps
still a decade in which to develop a “Scottish Idea” complementary
to Dostoevsky’s “Russian Idea” (Dostoevsky’s mistake was to imagine
that Russia alone could prevent the robotization of Europe) and in
so doing to demonstrate that Professor Denis Saurat divined aright
the larger hope of the Scottish Renaissance Movement when he wrote
that in achieving its immediate objectives it might do more—it might
save Europe. It is significant that Spengler, and Laurie Magnus in
his _Dictionary of European Literature_, both look to “one of the
smaller countries” with a similar hope. But, as Saurat says, to “burn
what we have hitherto adored” is the pre-requisite of such a Scottish
Renaissance.
IV