Scotland Today
Scottish Journey. By Edwin Muir. (Heinemann & 7s. ed.) ON the dust cover of Scottish Journey the _publishers warn the readers of Mr. Muir's book that here is something that will probably be a shock to the ordinary tourist of Scotland, the man who expects the usual amiable sentinientalities of a travel book. They imply that other people besides the tourist will be shocked, and make reference to Crosland's Unspeakable Scot in saying that the import of Scottish JoUrney . is far more serious. This warning is, I think, a pity. There . have been so. many books in the last few years that have set out. to 'shack the Scottish bourgeois out of hiS complacency ' and the English bourgeois tourist out of his sentimentality that one has grown to 'look with a little weariness upon the oft-repeated claim that here at last is the, cornplete " debunk- ing " of traditional and sentimental Scotland.
'Anyone who imagined from this advertisement that Scottish Journey Was another of these laboured shocks would be doing it.-urn,injtistice. It is as honest, acute and, in many ways, as moving a book on Scotland as has been written since the War. If some of Mr. Muir's remarks and observations wound our compatriots they may' have the consolation that their observations probably wounded the author just as much. 'ht.. Muir may, so it seems to me,'quite honestly say " It hurts rile more than it hurts you." Yet there would be in such a 'claim none of the odious hypocrisy of the schoolmaster. There is nothing shrill about Mr. Muir's sad reflection as he wanders throUgh the industrial wreckage of the West of Scotland, the ,respectability of Edinburgh, the exhausted Highland. 'When he. says, at the beginning of his book, that it is his main iMpression that " Scotland is gradually being emptied of its Population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellectual and innate' character," it is with no sense of superiority nor with atw purnalistie desire to be sensationally .shocking. It is Pieeisely what because Mr. Muir is honest about he has seen, and feels 'what he says that his book is a moving if saddening one to read. There is something very personal about it all.
There is, of course, something personal about it in another, a More. obvious sense. The book is a record of a zig-zag' journey through Scotland, starting at Edinburgh, thence south through the borders and theSieWartry, north to Glasgow, to Angus, the West HighlandS, the North and then Orkney. X'. Muir performed this journey recently in a small ear by himself, and he tells us not so much all about it as all about his thoughts on this journey, his recollections Of the plaoe" s as he yiaw them la t, and his judgainent on them today. We all know the traditional travel-boOk with its self-conscious digressions deliberately outside the "story story " 'as are the arias of an operatic' tenor who leaVes his lovemaking In the plot of the opera, advances to the footlights and, With' hiXback to his beloved, throws his line voice to the gallery. There is nothing of this in Scottish Journey. The whole boOk might be described as a huge • digression with minor digressions contained in it. Mr. Muir is intensely conscious of the fact of Scotland—the fact Of its past and the diminishing fact of its' present and future. This fact is the theme of all his digressions, major or minor.- Perhaps one of the best qualities of the book is its fairness. It is so easy when writing about Secitland (especially if one is a'Scot) to be partisan, to take the extreme vieW of everything. Edinburgh is nearly always ridiculously praised for her beauty or scurrilously abused for her mock gentility. Mr. Muir does neither of these two things. He is as appreciative of Edin- burgh's beauty as she deserves, and (though he' dOes not say lunch that is new about it) he sees and remarks all itsinfuriating qualities. Nevertheless for a man who is not an Edinburgh Man he has noticed many other things. Few people Who do not know the town realise that Edinburgh is one of the most convivial places in the United Kingdom. Mr, Muir remarks the excessive stiffness combined with the excessive Convivi- ality of Edinburgh society." He payS a charming tribute to the informal parties and ceilidhs which are such .a feature of .Edinburgli social life and which are the inevitable end of all big Edinburgh functions whenever there are a few of the more .ecarvivial spirits present at them. Similarly he is acute and I!tir about the Borders and the South-West. I had often ,Wondered what exactly was the difference between the Border ;country and Din n friesihire. 'Mr. Muir, 'with his 'description (f the (,00ls fertility, the " SoOtchness" Of the Burns' country and coniparison of it with the remoteness, the pas"sion of the true borderland seems to me to hit the nail beautifUlly on the head. • It is in the chapter on Glasgow that the author is at once most stimulating and most saddening. He spent a portion of his youth (before the crash) in Glasgow, to which he came front his native Orkney. He can remember what war Glasgow more intensely than any other part of Scotland, and his con- trast of the hideous prosperity of the past with the hideous decline of the present formS the longest chapter in the book. It is here that he allows his thoughts to wander most freely in retrospect, observation and imagination. In one long divaga- tion he compares the utterly unrelated drifting life of the unemployed with the unrelated unreal life of the knights in Spenser's Faerie Queene. A world of impossible dreaming, in which each individual is concerned with nothing but his own thoughts and himself. • Unlikely though it sounds, this odd and lengthy musing is one of the most striking things in the book. What is to be done with the wreck of Glasgow ? Mr. Muir puts this huge question at the end of his long chapter but leaves it unanswered.
Mr. Muir's general and sad impression of Scotland is one of emptiness growing more and more empty. The loss of nation- hood is to him only part of this emptiness, which he claims is economic, not political, and would have occurred as inevitably .under capitalism had there been no politioal union between Scotland and England. He does not accept, however, what was inevitable in the past as still so. If Scotland is to he saved from complete extinction it can only be by a communal will of the people (a people who, alas I have in the past shown a unique capacity for internecine and uneommunal bicker- ings). In other words, according to Mr. Muir, Scotland can only be saved by Socialism, whose object would be the saving of the life of the people of Scotland. Mr. Muir gives us no indication whether he thinks Scotland will be saved. He leaves us with what he believes to be the true solution for the Nationalists. And then, fearful of being too enthusiastic or too prophetic, leaves the choice to us.
The one element in the book which occasionally disturbs the reader• who knows his Scotland with its violent contrasts 'and colouring is the high twilight atmosphere which seems to have surrounded Mr. Muir's wanderings. Whether it is that the author is frightened of emotion on a subject which it is too easy to be emotional about,•or whether it is that he has deliber- ately chosen a twilight atmosphere for a twilight subject (the dying of a country) I do not know. But there it is, envelop- ing all he sees and muses on. Despite this atmosphere i onsplileyrethsios mysteriously engendered in at least one reader's book, there is one thing certain. The writing is admirable. Again and again Mr. Muir finds just the right phrase, analogy, description for many. of the most puzzling or obscure things in Scotland. His power of expression (whether he be vague or clear in his musing) is crystal clear with the quality of first-class prose.
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