Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.

There is only one footnote in this book. It has anchor [1], and the footnote itself has been left at the bottom of its paragraph.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

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.