. BEHOLD TILE HEBRIDES"
By JAN STRUTHER !THAT the Scots run England is a time-hallowed --mtwie-hall. joke, and, like most music-hall jokes, largely true. Nobody, at any rate, attempts tO, deny it.. The Scots do not deny it because they have far too great a respect for tradition. And the English do not deny it because they find it such a convenient belief : - for if anything goes wrong with the -running of England they can always blame it on the Scots. • It is not surprising, really. The Scots as a race combine an almost terrifying talent for organisation with a marked distaste for being organised : the English, on the other hand, have no great passion for organising themselves. but are too good-humoured and too orderly- minded to object to somebody else doing it for them. The arrangement works admirably.
But what is surprising, at first sight, is that the natives- of such a beautiful country as Scotland can so readily exile themselves from it. All over the world lusty Scottish voices (for our musical tastes incline more towards the sing-song than the concert-hall) can be heard uplifted in praise of- their homeland's natural beauties, from the Banks of Loch Lomond to the Braes of Bonnie Doon, from the Birks of Aberfeldy to the Bush aboon Traquair. But the owners of the voices do not seem to go back there, even - when they can ;- or at any -rate they go only for a brief holiday—a Hog- manay reunion, perhaps, or a family funeral. Their feet are no sooner set npon their -native heath than they are itching restlessly once -more for .the pavements of London or the engine-room floors of remote tramp- steamers. " My heart's in the highlands," the exiled Scot declares : but the rest of his body (which is perhaFs why he is sometimes accused of heartlessness) reniains firmly ensconced in London, Montreal or Buenos Aires. " Oh, gin I were where Gadie .rins ! " he trolls over a stiff sundowner with a perfectly genuine lump in the throat : but he takes mighty good care that the river which runs past his windows or his port-holes shall he the Thames, the Hudson, the Ganges, the Amazon or the Yangtse-Kiang.
The truth is that the Scots are born exiles, and Scotland the perfect country to be exiled from. Do not imagine that I am running down Scotland. Far from it. When I go back there myself I never want to come away again : but then, I am half English. No : what I mean is that Scotland's beauties, though undeniable, are obvious ones, easy to carry in the heart, easy even to describe to the benighted members of less fortunate races. Lakes,• islands and mountains, heather and rowan, broad straths and narrow glens—these are jewels easily worn in the memory. easily captured in verse or prose even by the most inarticulate people in the world. It would require far more technique to be an exile from, say. the Essex marshes, where atmosphere counts for more than outline,- where mutable clouds must do duty for mountains and where • transient effects of light, and shade are the incidents which capture the heart. These beauties are difficult to take about with one : all that sticks in the mind is the memory of many lovely moments, and the •sense of something lost —a mood more than a picture. Nor can they be passed on to anybody who has never known them, either by words or by the dexterous whipping-out of snapshots.
The midlands, too, would present a difficult problem to exiles. Their comfortable, cultivated charm could so easily be made to sound merely smug and prosperous. Perhaps that is why they possess little or no nostalgic literature : or perhaps the real reason is that so few people are fools enough to leave them.
The southern counties, though scarcely more spectacular in appearance, have (partly owing to a greater density of population) been the home of more poets than the midlands, and they are therefore far better equipped with those memorable rhythmic tags which are both the fruit and the food of nostalgia. Sussex-by-the-sea, fbr instance, is now a most satisfactory place to be exiled from, so persistently have the poets of the Georgian school over-dramatised her homely beauties and woven fireile jingles out of her place-names ; while Devon, of course, has stolen a march on the whole lot by means of a mere accident of rhyme. I do not deny that it is a very lovely county : but it is interesting to speculate how the poets and song-writers would behave if Devon and Norfolk, say, were to exchange names. I suspect that they would all tumble over each other to catch the 3.40 from Liverpool Street, and that Mousehold Heath would soon become as famous as Dartmoor.
The exile from London—and perhaps this applies to any large city—has neither romantic or literary status.
Music-hall songs are his only living folk-music. He may long as passionately as the rest, but those who do not share his longing seem to think that there is something slightly comic and more than a little immoral about London nostalgia. Leicester Square, Piccadilly, the Old Kent Road : a bit of fun,. or stewed eels—they all know that's what he's after. He yearns, and they read a wink into his gaze. He has no means of explaining to them the complex charm of what he is missing, for like a subtle and expensive scent it is compounded of many ingredients which, taken by themselves, would seem to repel. Fogs, slums, dirt, pneumatic . drills-- there is more than a touch of civet in the spiritual exhalation of London : but occasionally, to one who is banished from it, there comes anache no less intolerable than that which assails the mountain-dweller in the plains. And what he longs for is not a sight or a sound or a touch or a scent but a bit of all four and something more besides—hot asphalt, shouting paper-boys, fluttering plane-leaves, the comfortable contact of unknown but friendly humanity ; or street-lamps shining on wet pavements and a barrel organ playing in the rain ; or something more indefinite still—a mere memory of a ghost of a mood that he once had while walking down a quiet side-street at dusk.
Beside these vague regrets, these shapeless rags and tags of homesickness, the sentimental equipmeat of the exile from Scotland seems as neat and manageable as a well-packed suitcase. There is a place for everything and everything in its place. In his mind's eye are the snowy crags and cool corries of the Grampians, in his cars the skirl of the pipes or the lapping of loch-water against heathery headlands ; whether he comes from Alamore or the Mearns, from Cape Wrath or the banks of Yarrow, his lips need never lack a poignant ballad, nor his throat a beautiful sad air, in which to convey, and thereby assuage, his melancholy. Nostalgia suits him : it suits the timbre of his voice, the stern set of his jaw, the far-away look in his blue, 'blue eyes. It is fortunate, and not to be wondered at, that the Scotsman so seldom goes home : for he is never so attractive as when, live hundred or five thousand miles away from them, he is agreeably engaged in beholding the Hebrides.
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