ALBYN
OR
SCOTLAND AND THE FUTURE
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 willundoubtedly 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 theexisting 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 theRenaissance 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 greatdeal 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 anddepends 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,viaa 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 sincethe 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 usingthe 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 laggingbehind in comparison with Braid Scots, and it is questionable whether Gaelic has any similar alignment with the “becoming tendencies” inWelt-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 createdistinctively 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.