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 thedisjecta membraof 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 Provençalin 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 stickingto 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’sAugustan Poetsthat critical revaluation of Burns is overdue—orhas, 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 hopelessanachronism 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 inthe 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 utilizingit 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 harmonywith 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 abovethe 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 onCaledonia: or the Future of the Scotsin 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 NationalConvention, 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 toThe 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 ofThe Northern Review, which showed not only Scotland but England as far down as Hull and Liverpool. Thecountry 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” complementaryto 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 hisDictionary 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.