Scotsmanship
By WILFRED TAYLOR TO be a competent Scot has always been rather a formidable undertaking. As a career Scotsmanship is continuously fraught with terrible responsibilities and carries serious occupational risks. A true. Scot can never relax from the cradle to the grave. He must be vigilant from morning till night, and he must never let weariness undermine wariness. He is rather like a painter keeping a careful eye on a perpetual one-man show. As an occupation or profession Scotsmanship calls for continuous artistry superimposed on a basis of solid, hard work.
All good Scots, of course, are born and not made, although the Scottish Ancestry Research Council in Edinburgh has been doing a roaring trade in the manufacture of ad hoc Scots. Despite its exacting demands on the constitution, a real born-and-bred Scot enjoys his work and wouldn't change it for anything else. He takes a craftsman's delight in technique, and is never so happy as when comparing notes on the aptitudes of his fellow-artists. When a Scot begins to lose his touch or to fall under the influence of an alien school, he can count on being exposed to a barrage of blunt home- truths from his colleagues. If, however, he incurs the censure of benighted outsiders, he can rest assured that his comrades will not ret him down. Scotland is one of the most firmly closed of all the shops in the world.
Although essentially a conservative institution, Scotsmanship is not unreceptive to progress. It has its static periods and its moments of brisk ferment as new ideas fertilise the soil and germinate in crevices in the granite. These periodic eruptions are known collectively as the Scottish Renaissance, which has now run through many editions. Rebirth in Scotland is a commonplace occurrence, and gives a livelihood to many maieutic experts. When renais- sance is taking place it always imposes heavier strains on the career Scot and adds to the burden on his back. Almost any other nation would collapse under the weight of chronic rebirth and suffer a nation-wide nervous break-down. But the Scot takes this kind of thing in his stride and seldom, if ever, develops schizophrenia. He is a remarkably wiry and resilient creature and chary of neurosis. He has been brought up to cope with the business of being born over and over again.
Scotsmanship is at present going through a tough and testing phase. Since the Covenant passed into circulation, we have been almost continuously on the stage. A constant stream of critical pilgrims has been pouring in from the south to try and get the hang of us. Some of their letters have made curious reading, and have obviously been composed by writers to whom Scotsmanship is a new and strange phenomenon. But we don't mind. It takes a lifetime of hard study to get more than an inkling of Scotsman- ship, and we can forgive the errors and blunders due to inexperience.
One of the personal problems which any serious practitioner of Scotsmanship has to solve is how far he ought to go to satisfy preconceived ideas. There is a widely prevalent notion, especially in outlying parts of the globe, that a Scotsman is intrinsically a dour, canny denizen, much given to ancestor-worship, passionately preoccupied by tartan, whisky, heather, bagpipes and porridge, and congenitally void of humour. Since, obviously, there is a large consumer-demand for the Scottish primitive, and since this demand is, to a certain extent, the stock-in-trade of the Scottish Tourist Board, most of us feel that we must go part of the way at least to meet it. We are prepared to spend some of our time in being dour and canny and in mastering, with the help of the poets, the vernacular. With some practice we can train ourselves to miss the point of jokes and to go through the motions of thrift. Some of us even think that, in order to put sporran policy on a sure footing, the Tourist Board ought to set up a school for the training of synthetic, authentic Scottish characters who, on being supplied with a tam o'shanter, a kilt, bagpipes and a subsistence allowance, would be stationed at strategic tourist-points throughout the season.
Since most of us possess reasonably broad accents, the language factor presents no great difficulties. We have no objection, for instance, to gratifying the English sense of humour by opening our mouths and speaking, or by shutting our mouths and being taciturn. Our real problem is how to convince the Englishman that civilisa- tion has straggled north of the Border without upsetting his ingrained belief that there is nothing to distinguish between an Englishman and a Scot except a cluster of peculiar habits. That takes real Scotsmanship. No conscientious Scot wants to hurt an English- man's pride, and the English are very proud of what they imagine to be their close kinship with the Scots. No Scot has ever been heard to boast that he has a drop of English blood on his mother's side. Yet Englishmen are constantly harping on the Caledonian tincture in their blood-stream. The fact that the Scots are the greatest race of blood-donors on earth is no reason for them to recognise the propriety of miscegenation. We may not have a Mason and Dixon line, but we know, instinctively where to draw the line.
Scotsmanship calls, and always will call, for great moral energy and fixity of purpose. We have to be barbaric and civilised at the same time. - We have to be incurably sentimental and as hard as nails. We have to be fissiparous and united. We must be perpetually filled with consuming convictions, and yet not quite agree among ourselves what we are convinced about. We must be tenaciously exclusive and pursue the policy of the ever-open door. We must shout, "Nemo Me Impune Lacessit !" and yet honestly complain that someone is doing it all the time. We have to be the most logical people under the sun and also live on a diet of disputable syllogisms. Scotsmanship is a wonderful pursuit. One never grows tired of it. We are the enigma of the world and never grow weary of concocting riddles.
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