What is Wrong with Scotland ?
EDINBURGH is not, perhaps, the hub of the universe. But her inhabitants console themselves that it is more distinguished to live in a city with a past than in a town with a future. We are proud of our background and, on the whole, we are pleased with ourselves. Bashful when patted on the back for our good qualities, we delight, with an inverted egoism, in being told about our faults. So it was with a certain complacency that I adjusted the headphones to listen to the first of the B.B.C. talks, broadcast recently from Scottish stations, on " What is wrong with Scotland ? "
Alas for my complacency, not one of the speakers- in this series of talks quoted Dr. Johnson's well-known jibe about oatmeal and Boswell's famous reply ! Only one mentioned the badness of our climate, and its ennobling effect on the character. For the rest, they were disconcerting. There were no ready-made parries to their thrusts.
Mr. Tom Johnston and Mr. Robert Boothby, from opposite angles, got down to stern industrial and economic realities. Mr. Johnston favoured the development of our waste places and our seaside resorts, Mr. Boothby the rationalization of our industries. I hope some way out of our economic difficulties may be found without making the Highlands alluring to tourists, and turning the villages on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts into so many Margates and Blackpools, Deauvilles and Lidos. (The climate, fortunately, is against this.) But I agree with Major Elliot that what is wrong with Scotland economically is the same as what is wrong with a dozen other States. More particularly, it is a part of the social problem of the United Kingdom.
No, it wasn't Messrs. Johnston and Boothby who depressed me. And it wasn't 'Mr. Rosslyn Mitchell- and Dr. James Devon, who set my thoughts wandering by striking, and sustaining, the note of panegyric. Neither was it Dr. Forgan, who confined himself to medical advice. Nor yet Mr. W. Y. Darling, who spoke non- commitally about a Stay-in-Scotland Movement and a National Development Trust.
That left four. I was getting hot. I was tracking that depressed feeling to its source. Ah, I had it ! The remaining speakers had laid their fingers on our cultural deficiencies. Here was the rub.
Mr. Compton Mackenzie said that a profound melancholy brooded over the country. The reason of this melancholy, he said, was that every Scotsman suspected, in the depths of his being, that he had developed along the wrong spiritual lines. Mr. Donald Carswell pointed out that we lacked direction ; that we had no national theatre ; that we failed to get the maximum of comeliness and humanity out of our circumstances. Major Elliot said, amongst other things, that we must cast back as far as the poet Dunbar for the secrets of tradition. Mr. Malcolm Thomson said—but why go on ? It emerged that we are, in a word, provincial. The same fate has overtaken Edinburgh which has overtaken every other town in the United Kingdom, except London. Easier communications have made the world a smaller place. There is room for only one capital, one intellectual centre, in the island. The fact of being provincial is not in itself depressing. The disturbance to one's peace of mind lay in the implication- that something could and ought to be done about it. "A measure of responsibility fell upon me, upon every individual Scot. These thoughtful people who told us what was wrong with Scotland, whether Home Rulers or Unionists, believed in the revival of Scottish culture on national lines. They were in sympathy with the post-War movement which has been dignified (and not by a compatriot) with the name of the Scottish Renaissance.
This new school of Scottish writers would have us go back to the days before the Industrial Revolution, and the Union, and the Reformation, back to the days of the fifteenth century Makars and the ancient Gaelic literature, to pick up the threads of our national culture. Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter, they believe. The sincerity of the movement cannot be doubted. It has its appeal. The trouble with these writers who express themselves in Gaelic and " synthetic Scots " is that they have few readers and cannot secure publication through the ordinary channels. Now, whatever the initiators of the movement may think, it takes readers as well as writers to make a literary renaissance.
No wonder, as a reader, I felt that a difficult task lay before me if I were to answer this new summons to the Fiery Cross. If I were logical and conscientious (and, being a true Scot, I am both these things) I must forget all that I, and my forbears before me for more than two centuries, had learned from an older and mellower civilization. Until I was sufficiently steeped in ancient Gaelic, fifteenth century vernacular, and modern synthetic Scottish literature, to be able to regard English literature objectively as a foreign culture, I must put all English books, so to speak, on the Index. All the English poets from Chaucer to Keats, all the masters of prose from Sterne to Charles Lamb, to say nothing of writers now living, must be closed books to me.
I got hold of Dunbar and his contemporaries (I had yet to learn Gaelic), and the modern synthetics, and a dictionary, and a glossary. I discovered that Dunbar and some of the others are very well worth reading. But the thought kept recurring—Can one wipe out the intervening centuries like this ? I recalled something Osbert Sitwell had said in his last book :
". . An English writer should never be self-consciously national. He must draw his inspiration from every quarter, need never bother to be English since what he borrows from other sources is converted by his very blood. . . . You cannot, even if you want to, deny your inheritance. The birthmark will show itself."
Whether you are pro- or anti- Sitwell is neither here nor there. The passage I have quoted is pertinent because it applies to Scots as well as English, and to readers as well as writers.
I have put away Dunbar, and the moderns, and the glossary, and the dictionary. I have succumbed to temptation. I have taken the most English of English plays—Henry ./V—from its place on the bookshelf, and deliberately opened it. And I am not afraid of forfeiting my inheritance. The birthmark will show itself.
IDA FINLAY.
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