AUTHOR’S NOTE.
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.
H. M’D.