Contemporary Scottish Literature

fly ERIC

LLNICLATER.

THE recent growth of national consciousness in Scotland ha produced an interesting dichotomy on the one hand are literary Wee Frees, on the other Pan-Scotlanders. The latter are united by diversity—they will entertain as brother- nationals all whose patronymics reveal the ancestral strain of Scottish blood, and discover some' feature of the Scottish ethos in Isadore Duncan or Hermann Melville; but the former,- moved by schismatic fury, have divided to split the purely Caledonian atom into its Gael and Lowland com- ponents. There are those who favour a Celtic culture with an Ossianic background and a Clarsach Society on the side ; and - there are those who " believe that the Scottish spirit can express itself only in the roaring gutturals of Buchana ver- nacular broad as the backs of its own black cattle—or in the more domesticated dialect of Ayrshire.

Because of these divergent opinions it is difficult to say anything neither outrageously inclusive nor excessively exclusive, but decently conclusive about contemporary Scottish writing : assuming the Pan-Scotlarulers' connotation of Scottish one would require a telescope to survey the field, and to satisfy the Wee Frees a microscope would be more suitable. Let me say at once that I know nothing about recent contributions to Gaelic literature. Very few people do. For this general ignorance there may be a good reason. On the contrary, there may not. I think one may safely state, however, that expressions of the Celtic temper in English have recently declined both in number and popularity : as dramatic currency Ochone has sensibly depreciated, and one may suspect that an increased gold reserve of ideas will be required before it regains its original value, The Lowland vernaculars are extensively cultivated, but produce little more than occasional lyrical felicities. In the proper hands, of course, they possess a peculiar aptitude for the interpretation of certain states of feeling, and this has once more been demonstrated by Alexander Gray's admirable translations of German poetry. The vernaculars are incapable of bearing a serious intellectual burden, and are scarcely flexible enough for argument : there is, in consequence, no vernacular prose of any distinction, and no poetry of long- sustained interest. A novel called Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was an interesting experiment in suggesting the common speech by a rhythmical arrangement of words rather than by the use of dialect forms, but Mr. Gibbon's method requires further demonstration before it can expect whole-hearted approval. The poetry of Mr. Hugh MacDiarmid, who employs dialect words drawn from every county and the still more distant pages of Henryson and Dunbar, is suf. generic.

Mr. MaeDiannid is the most important poet Scotland has produced for many years. His language is extremely artificial, and his experiments have been always bold and frequently, happy. His adoption of a synthetic Scots was due largely to his conviction that standard English had become exhausted and incapable of further inventive effort : a conclusion invidi- ous to contemporary practitioners rather than to the tongue. itself. Mr. MacDiarmid's lyrical gift is remarkable and his earlier songs carried their uncouth ornament of archaisms like jewels indeed. That his later exercises in philosophical poetry have been less happy—To Cireurnjack. Cenerastus and the Hymns to Lenin, for example—is a demonstration, not of failing talent, but of the inaptitude of his medium. With his lyrical genius, his satirical intelligence, and his power of invective,: he might have been the Villon de nos jours ; and. that he should elect the laudation of Leninism rather than a

mellifluous scarification either of Lenin or his enemies is surely a matter for regret.

Novels dealing with the Scottish scene in more or less orthodOx English have achieved considerable success in the last few years, but there is, as yet, no specifically Scottish

novelist. who has both made and sustained a reputation. Neil Gunn, A. J. Cronin, Agnes Mure Mackenzie, Nan Shepherd

and Willa Muir are well-known names, and of these Miss Mackenzie is the most securely settled in her art, but she is limited by a delicacy of feeling, as Miss Shepherd is by a certain circumscription of interest. Neither Mr. Gunn nor Mr. Cronin have yet fully substantiated the promise of their best-known novels. All of them, when writing of Scotland, are handicapped by the lack of elements congenial to art in their background. The heather hills have been so often used that they have grown somewhat threadbare ; the industrial life of Scotland is so ugly that it cannot be faithfully dealt with in writing—it would require the triune reincarnation of Hogarth, Daumier and Goya in a mood of their most abomin- able inspiration to reveal it truly ; and in the more fortunate

classes of Society there is nothing nearer to cultural interests than-a bourgeois-dilettantish concern with the easier and more

obvious forms of art. It is this poverty of background that drives the specifically Scottish novelist so often to depend for his plot on the life-story of a sensitive boy who grows to man-

hood in the shadows of a romantically tinted mountain-and

an oppressive father, suecumbs to a few humdrum tempta- tions and rebels against the Old Man of the Tribe, and ulti- thately achieves the consummation of a last chapter that faces the future on very unsteady legs. If Scotland wants a truly national art, whether literary, pictorial, or musical, then Scotland should make itself fit for the artist to live in. In drama Mr.' James Bridie stands, not yet upon an Czninence, but almost alone ; and in criticism, Mr. Edwin Muir is a still more solitary figure, isolated especially by his ' knowledge of continental thought and its literary expression.

The Pan-Scoilanders, who believe that a novel may be called Scottish though its scene be Guatemala and its author live in Bloomsbury, arc not without arguments to support their faith. - NO English author is compelled to live in England and for ever write of England to assert his title to wear the national adjective. Greeks and Arabians may be his quarry, Italy his domicile, yet his work will be accounted English. Why, then,

should the Scot be required to prove his race by staying at home? There are three novels of the last decade or so, outside the Wee Frees' definition of literary nationalism, that nevertheless seem to me peculiarly Scottish in temper : SOuth Wind, :Pedal Fires and Extraordinary Women. It is true that neither Mr. Norman Douglas nor Mr. Compton Mackenzie have planted a

kailyard in Capri, nor have they built there a house with green Shutters. But their work, as well as yielding to a true national habit of disquisition—Keith is fully as Scottish as Bailie Nicol Jarvie or Mr. Oldbuck----reveals an amoral delight in the

vagaries of human conduct that may well claim kinship with the peculiar ebullience of Christ's Kirk on the Green and The Twa Merrit Wemen and the Ifedo; and an aesthetic rather than a social appreciation of the curiosities of human inter-

course that one is tempted , to compare with the calmly aesthetic mood—despite the considerable difference in content —of the NeraeSagas. Pre-Reformation Scotland was a vigorous

creature, and that its ghost should walk is not improbable, and certainly_ not undesirable. It would be a curious de- velopment if Extraordinary Women- were to find a place on the family bookshelf beside The Cottar's Saturday-Night I