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