Scotland Yet ?
THERE is not, it may be safely wagered, one Scot out of every ten you may casually meet who could construe correctly Burns' " Auld Farmer's Address to his Mare." There are very few Scots to-day who do not believe (as they sing " Auld Lang Syne ") that willie-waught is really a genuine Scots word ; even Mr. Eyre-Todd in his Scotch Poetry of the Eighteenth Century prints this monstrosity, as if willie was a part of the word !Naught, or draught. There is in the mouth of most Scots a fervent outpouring of love for their native land, but theirs is a romantic nationalism which is divorced from any consideration of politics and the realities. The cult of Burns, some of whose work in English verse- writing is of the flattest and most conventional kind, gives rise to a distressing crop of sugary sentimentality, while " the Scots are incapable of considering their literary geniuses purely as writers and artists. They must be either an excuse for the glass or a text for a sermon." Real Scottish nationalistic feeling, except as a distorted fiction of the London stage, is more or less dead, for the Reformation, the Union and the Industrial Revolution have killed it.
It was not ever thus, and there are signs in Scotland of a renaissance of nationalism, even as the originally purely literary movement of Sinn Fein and the Abbey Theatre brought it about in Ireland, 'Various leagues, associations and conventions are working to this end ; there are still Scots who object to be classed under the broad generalization of English ; and the proposed New Scottish Dictionary is slowly working towards the conservation- of the language. Further to free the Scot from the fungoid growth of Angliciza- tion and to rouse him from his stagnant apathy come two books from the "To-day arid IV4ii'Orrew" Sags':
--the author of the first,. is .uncompromising in his attack and
cares not at all for the danger of bringing_ an Indictment against a nation. Half Scotland is slum-poisoned ; it possesses no literature nor any national newspaper ; it never thinks of expressing its life through the mediums of art or intellect ; it has suffered its land to be taken from it ; and it is rapidly losing all control of its own economic life. At all this the canny Scot (as he is known in England) looks on with cynical indifference, and it will he his fate (in Mr. Thomson's opinion) to be replaced by Catholic Irish immigrants. Mr. Grieve, on the other hand, while accepting the gist of Mr. Thomson's indictment, rather welcomes the alien immigration, and believes that " the line of hope lies partially in re-Catholicization, partially in the exhaustion of Protestantism." There is, however, he thinks, " 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. Calamity, however, is imminent."
Both of these books contain stuff for thought, as is characteristic of the series to which they belong. As a piece of incisive writing and powerful, though restrained, invective, Caledonia is specially notable. But of the style of Allyn the less said, the better. Seldom have we met an uglier heap of words than that which begins the third line of p. 11 : it is not a sentence, for it contains no predicate and so no sense. To read it aloud is a nightmare.
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