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 andthe 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 andYork, “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 literaturewhich 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 greatmission, 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 translatorof 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, whosediablerie, 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,’ andturns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings. For Scottish literature ismore mediæval inhabit 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.”
“Nae bombast swell,Nae snap conceits.”
“Nae bombast swell,
Nae snap conceits.”
The language of the Greeks is simple and concrete, withoutclichésor 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, ofTam 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]SeehisPomona: or the Future of English, in this series.
[1]SeehisPomona: or the Future of English, in this series.
[1]SeehisPomona: or the Future of English, in this series.
In days when mankind were but callansAt grammar, logic, and sic talents,They took nae pains their speech to balanceOr rules to gie,But spak’ their thoughts in plain braid lallansLike you or me.
In days when mankind were but callansAt grammar, logic, and sic talents,They took nae pains their speech to balanceOr rules to gie,But spak’ their thoughts in plain braid lallansLike you or me.
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.
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 isconscious. 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 ofPelleasused 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 theImpressionists.... 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 withdrama 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 Scotshave 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 theShorter Catechism(withwhich 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 aimand 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 “Scottishhistory” 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 hisDownfall of the Western World. “The Caledonian Antisyzygy,” instead of beinga 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 theirCanntaireachd, 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 morespace 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.