25 MAY 1934, Page 27

Scottish Books

Literature in Scotland

IT is now about ten years since the Scottish Renaissance began to be talked about. There was no sign of a renaissance at the time except in the work of " Hugh McDiarmid," the writer who talked and wrote most indefatigably about it. He started several reviews, some weekly and some monthly, which never lasted for very long but produced work by young writers which otherwise might never have been produced. Most of that work was bad, but some of it was good : for in- stance, Mr. Neil M. Gunn's first stories, so far as I can remem- ber, appeared in one of those short-lived magazines. After the last of them had stopped came The Modern Scot, a quar- terly edited by Mr. James H. Whyte, which is the best literary review that has appeared in Scotland for many decades, and has now maintained for several years a critical level which is unique there. At the same time there has been a far more intensive literary production than the first twenty years of the century could show, as well as a considerable public interest in it. No doubt the growth of nationalist feeling in Scotland has helped greatly to canalize that interest. There is now, at any rate, an increasing public prepared to give a. special welcome to Scottish work, and that is quite a new state of things, and provides for the first time for a century the possible conditions of a literary revival. But this is probably the most that can be said : there is a great deal of literary activity in Scotland ; there is no Scottish literary movement to compare with the Irish movement whose chief figure was Mr. W. B. Yeats.

The main reason for this, I think, apart from the absence of genius in any great abundance, is that the Scottish Renais- sance is a renaissance without a centre, either social or intel- lectual. It has no convenient meeting point like Dublin where writers can discuss their aims, and no common literary purpose which would give directions to their production. The result is that Scottish writers receive no effectual criticism, and consequently no real help in their work. It is well known that the general level of book-reviewing in the English Press is very low ; but in Scotland it is considerably lower. Again, there are in England several reviews in which intelligent criticism can be had if one wants it ; while in Scotland there is only one, and it a quarterly. In a country where criticism is indiscriminating or almost absent the work of its creative writers may be remarkable, but it is likely to be uneven. Scotland has three or four writers of original talent, but their work is far more uneven than it has any right to be, or than it would have been had they written for a country which pos- sessed an acknowledged standard of serious criticism as well as the, popular one represented by the Press. This lack of criticism is probably the chief danger to the- present revival of literature in Scotland. With a little more enthusiastic complaisance it may end in a complete uncritical morass.

But though the present literary production in Scotland has no definite direction, there is one thing which clearly dis- tinguishes it from that of Stevenson, Barrie, Crockett and Ian Maclaren at the end of last century. The Scottish characters in which these writers dealt were intended primarily, like Sir Harry Lauder's humour, for foreign consumption. They were designed for the popular English taste; they were exports. This was not true to the same degree of Neil Munro's High: landers, who came later, and it cannot be said at all, I think, of Mr. Neil M. Gunn's or Mr. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's or " Fionna MacColla's " Scottish characters. These writers address themselves first of all to a Scottish audience, and not incidentally, as their predecessors did. Certainly Stevenson should not be blamed too •much for his literary strategy, for such an audience did not exist in his time. And the fact that it does exist now is a clear proof of an immense increase in national self-consciousness.

In Scottish poetry there has been a change of a different kind. The most gifted poet writing in Scots at the beginning of the century was Charles Murray. He was a poet in the peasant tradition ; he played skilful variations on immemorial simple folk themes which had been used hundreds of times, by Burns and his many predecessors and successors. The real originality of " Hugh McDiarmid " is that he employs Scots as any other poet might employ English or French: that is, to express anything which a modern writer may have to say. This had not been done in Scotland since she ceased to be a nation, since about two centuries, that is to say, before Burns. Hugh McDiarmid " is an extremely erratic and uneven writer ; but he is probably the most gifted poet who has written in Scots since Burns, and the innovation he has made (if it should turn out to be a true innovation, that is, if it is carried on and consolidated after him by other writers) is clearly of major importance. But here again Scottish criticism has failed. " Hugh McDiarmid's " use of Scots has been much praised and much blamed ; but the . question whether he has succeeded in reinstating Scots as a language capable of expressing the whole world of contemporary experience and thought just as satisfactorily as English or French has never been seriously considered. He has very successfully expressed his own individual talent, with all its excellences and defects ; and as the result is original, that is sufficient to justify his means. But that Scots will ever be used again as an independent language capable of fulfilling all the purposes of poetry and prose is, I should think, very doubtful. It is not impossible, for Scots was once an autonomous language, and inherently there is no reason why it could not be an autonomous language again. But there is against that an overwhelming balance of probability. And if a language cannot be used for all the normal literary purposes of a language, no serious argument can be advanced for using it for poetry. " Hugh McDiarmid' is a poet of great originality, but if Scots does not become an independent language he will probably be known as a. writer who fashioned a speech of his own, which has to be specially learned before he can be appreciated.

The question of language in contemporary Scottish literature is a very difficult one. Apart from " Hugh McDiarmid," the names most commonly connected with the Scottish. Renaissance are those of Neil M. Gunn, Eric Linklater and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Mr. Gunn's sensitive style is more obviously influenced by D. H. Lawrence than by Neil Munro ; Mr. Linklater writes vigorous Elizabethan prose ; Mr. Gibbon has struck out a style which does succeed in giving the rhythm of the Scottish vernacular. But all use English as their natural utterance ; their literary inspiration is the great English writers, not Dunbar. or Burns. On the other hand, they write about Scottish life for a Scottish audience, and not for an English one, like Stevenson. They write for this audience in English, it is true, but there they have little choice ; for the Scottish people are a people who talk in Scots but think in English. These writers are, in any case, more intimately Scottish than Stevenson was, and that justifies one in calling the literary revival to which they belong a Scottish one. It is obviously only at its beginning yet ; the promise for its future lies in the fact that for some time Scotland has been becoming more and more conscious of itself as a separate unity, and that this tendency seems bound to