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
With increasing frequency there is a paragraph in the Scottish papers—more particularly the local papers, not the “national” organs—telling how a debate on the question of Home Rule for Scotland has been held here or there, and, almost invariably, the paragraph ends with the statement that, on a vote being taken, there was a large majority in favour of it. That is to say a majority of that small minority who attend meetings. No one who is in the habit of going up and down the country and coming into varied contact with the public can fail to observe that more and more are inclined to the movement with a sympathy which has greatly intensified within the past few years. These are they, in my opinion, who “feel in their bones” the larger issues of which I have been speaking, but have not yet developed more than a political reaction to them. Observers of very different shades of political opinion agree that the time is ripening for a new political nationalism, as part and parcel of a general national awakening. There is little agreement, however, as to how this widespread latent feeling may be crystallized, in the best interests of Scotland and the wider interests inevitably involved. Partial views, and partial solutions, abound; but none of these proffered precipitants are powerful enough to act on more than a small proportion of the flux of opinion that is obviously awaiting effective re-direction. What is it that intervenes in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, to prevent the sympathetic Scotsman from giving any practical effect to his feelings on such a matter?
Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sentiment strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs—a failure inconsistent alike with our traditional love of country and reputation for practicality. The reason probably lies in the fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complexity of our national life. For it must be recognized that the absence of Scottish nationalism is, paradoxically enough, a form of Scottish self-determination. If that self-determination, which, in the opinion of many of us, has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass, is to be induced to take a different form and express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading programme must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long ensured the opposite process. Scottish opinion is anachronism-proof in matters of this kind. The tendency inherent in the Union, to assimilate Scotland to England, and ultimately to provincialize the former—the stage which has been so unexpectedly but unmistakably arrested at the eleventh hour—has, as a matter of fact, not yet been effectively countered by the emergence of any principle demanding a reversed tendency. That is why, despite the persistence in Scotland of an entirely different psychology, the desire to retain and develop distinctive traditions in arts and affairs, and the fairly general recognition that the political, economic and social consequences of the Union have never been by any means wholly favourable to Scottish interests and have latterly, in many ways, become decreasingly so to a very alarming degree, there has nevertheless been at most little more than a passive resistance to complete assimilation masked by an external acquiescence. This is because Home Rule has been conceived for the most part, even by its advocates, merely as a measure of devolution—a continuance of substantially the same thing as prevails at Westminster; not something fundamentally different and answering to the unexpressed needs of the Scottish spirit. It is this passive resistance which accounts, for example, for the comparative paucity and poverty of distinctively Scottish literature since the Union. Only that fringe of the Scottish genius amenable to Anglicization has continued to find expression; the rest has, practically, “held its tongue,” and, to a large extent, its powers of expression have atrophied. A similar phenomenon manifests itself in our schools. Many teachers tell me that the children’s abilities to express themselves, and, behind that, to think, are largely suppressed by official insistence upon the use of “correct English.” They actually think, and could express themselves a great deal more readily and effectively, in dialect. This tenacity of Scots in the life of our people is extraordinary. Observe the way even “educated people” lapse into it on convenient occasions, or when they are genuinely moved. To ban it from our schools is, therefore, a psychological outrage. A distinctive speech cannot be so retained in the intimate social life, in the thinking of a people without an accompanying subterranean continuance of all manner of distinctive mental states and potentialities. The inhibition of these is all the worse when, as in Scotland to-day, they are denied their natural pabulum—when, for example, as so often happens, an appeal to Scottish sentiment is applauded by those who, owing to the way in which our educational system has been organized, have little or no knowledge of our separate history and culture, and have been taught to take it for granted that Scotland’s future is wholly identified with England’s, and that economic and social expediency are best served by discarding the shibboleths of “a distinction without a difference.” It is upon these camouflaged or hidden forces, however—many of them unconscious—that the ultimate direction, if it has any, of “Scotland—a Nation,” must depend. Only so can Scotland, as such, re-enter the mainstream of European arts and affairs. This reservoir of “difference” has not yet been tapped by any of our Scottish nationalist movements; few, indeed, have realized its existence or made it their objective. That is why they have been so ineffective. But latterly there has been a significant change. Its promise lies in the fact that it is not limited to Scotland, but, as Dr J. M. Bulloch has said, is a world-movement, naturally becoming specially well-defined in Scotland, to “set up a resistance to the efforts, many of them due to mechanisms and not a few to political theories, to make us all of one mind.” It is manifesting itself in many diverse ways—not yet co-ordinated into a comprehensive reversal of the general tendency it is arresting.