The Problem of Scotland
By EDWIN MUIR
A FACULTY of the Scottish mind which never seems to be dealt with in books about Scotland is its legend-creating power. This can be seen clearly if one compares English and Scottish history. King Alfred is the only great English legendary historical figure ; while all the main characters in Scottish history, except its moralists and reformers, were quickly turned into mythical figures by the communal imagination, so that they came to resemble the heroes and heroines of an unwritten ballad. Wallace, Bruce, Mary Stuart, Montrose and Prince Charlie are more like inventions of fiction than historical names ; it was the imagination of a people that effected this transmutation, and the implications of that imagination are not all flattering to Scotland. It was purely romantic, and it no longer exists actively : the Industrial Revolution cut across it and killed it. But it can still be seen in the disposition of Scotsmen to sentimentalize the past and shut their eyes to the present. Scotland's past is a romantic legend, its present a sordid reality. Between these two things there is no organic relation : the one is fiction, the other real life. The past does not enter into the present as it does in England ; for Scotland's development ever since the Reformation has consisted in giving away its past piecemeal, until it squandered almost all its old heritage. While England was growing out of itself, Scotland renounced in turn its existence as an independent nation and as a separate com- munity, and the ravages of the Industrial Revolution during the last century robbed it wholesale even of its racial characteris- tics. Glasgow is like a town where gold was discovered fifty or sixty years ago, not like the largest city of an old and civilized country. And Glasgow is an epitome of modern Scotland, possessing also its legend of a past when it was a pretty, trim little city as unlike its present self as possible.
These two books deal respectively with the real and the legendary Scotland. Mr. Blake confines himself to the present; Mr. Power ranges freely over the past and the future. He points to the glories of Scotland's Celtic tradition, and concludes with a vision of a regenerated nation with spacious towns and flourishing arts. Mr. Blake looks at Glasgow, the industrial region of Lanarkshire and the commercialized Highlands, and, honestly trying to answer the question whether the Sccittish people will eventually lose their " cultural identity," comes to the following conclusion : " The forces often appear to have been too much for them. Largely huddled into drab industrial towns, they found it sufficient satisfaction to delight in the loveliness of the country round about them, blind to the economic ugliness that its empty and deliberately unculti- vated condition represents. Notably slaves of jazz and the cinema, they will defend their unique Scottishness in terms of events and grandeurs long past and sadly soiled. For the most part they sit, curiously complacent, amid the ruins of their own civilization, such as it is." That is the opinion of a man who has a sincere affection and admiration for Scotland, and it seems to me far more pertinent than anything that Mr. Power says, fascinating as his speculations are.
The present state of Scotland is mainly due to the Industrial Revolution. That revolution began by destroying the tradi- tional life of the towns, and from the towns successive waves have been sent out into the countryside for the last fifty years,
The Heart of Scotland. By George Blake. With a Foreword by Eric Linklater. (Batsford. 7 s. ad.) Scotland and the Scots. By William Power. (The Moray Press. les. 6d.)
until now the acquired characteristics of Industrialism can be recognized as easily in a remote Highland village as in the spreading suburbs of Glasgow. Scotland became so radically industrialized because, having destroyed its past, it had no reserves to draw upon. " It is perfectly fair," Mr. Blake remarks, " to say that the Reformation, as it shaped in Scotland, wiped out tradition and produced Motherwell as a substitute for Culross." Scotland's industrial expansion was Lased on iron and coal. The iron, Mr. Blake says, is almost worked out, and the coal coming to an end. Glasgow, a city of over a million inhabitants, depends on these things. "What is to become of it when they disappear ? Or, rather, what is to become of the people who live in it ? Actually a vast clearance is taking place in Scotland at present, compared with which the clearances in the Highlands last century were mere local incidents. It is a clearance not of actual human beings, like the Sutherland ones, but simply of the resources on which human beings depend for life. The workers of Airdrie and Motherwell are allowed to stay in their houses : the dole secures them that : but any reason for their staying there— and nobody in his senses would stay there by choice—is rapidly vanishing. The squalor of Industrialism remains, but industry itself is fading like a dream.
It is this industrial country in decline that Mr. Blake describes. He describes it faithfully, and this makes his book a valuable one, which everyone interested in Scotland or involved in its lot should read. He seems to have little faith in Scottish Nationalism ; and it may be that the problem is too vast for nationalism to solve, except by introducing an economic revolution of some kind ; for if an independent authority were to take over Scotland today it would take over a bankrupt concern. Nevertheless, the Scottish Nationalists seem to be the only people who are aware of this problem. Mr. Blake says many just things on Scotland's two chief surviving institutions, the Kirk and the school, showing that both, and the latter particularly, have degenerated greatly in the last fifty years. He paints a picture of Scottish home life which is, I think, highly flattering, and even praises high tea, which is surely going too far. But, apart from such idiosyn- crasies, his description of Scotland's state is so uncompromising and so badly needed that it deserves general gratitude.
In Scotland and the Scots Mr. Power sets out to trace the influence of the Scottish landscape on Scottish history, religion, poetry, music, and the plastic arts. It is an endlessly interesting and subtle question. Mr. Power throws off many suggestive observations during the course of his enquiry, and his reading is wide and miscellaneous. But his method is needlessly discursive ; he rarely produces any proof in support of his opinions ; and he finds evidences of the Scottish landscape and the Celtic culture everywhere, which is as bad as finding them nowhere. His conviction that all Scotland is Celtic makes him deny what history, literature and common observation alike demonstrate : that is, the profound difference between the people who live in the Highlands and the Low- lands. But the book is suggestive, as he claims, and anyone interested in the present state of Scottish literature will find a good deal in it that is worth reading. Both volumes are excellently illustrated, Mr. Blake's with fine photographs of Scottish scenery, town and country, and Mr. Power's with reproductions of well-known Scottish landscape paintings.
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