SCOTLAND FOR THE ENGLISH
Modern Scotland. By Cicely Hamilton. (Dent. 7s. 6d.)
Miss HAMILTON disarms the Scots critic of her book at the outset by defining her purpose in a foreword. She is writing, she explains, for the uninformed English reader rather than for the Scots informed ; she has limited herself of set purpose " to certain aspects of national life and conditions ; those aspects, namely, which do not, as a rule, attract the attention of a visitor to the country and to which the author who writes descriptively of Scotland will devote but few of his pages." So we pick up her guide with great expectations.
It must be granted that Miss Hamilton will prove an intelli- gent and observant guide to the more thoughtful English visitor. She has listened to one or two shrewd observers of the Scottish scene, like Mr. William Power, she is a wide- awake traveller herself, and as a result she knows the ropes. Anyone surveying the situation with her introduction will be made aware of the main problems which agitate the minds of the thinking Scot, briefly and carefully presented : Irish immigration, Highland depopulation, the Gaelic Cult, the Nationalist case. Shc has grasped the surface significance of all these matters and presented it in a sympathetic and cultured way ; but she shows them to her reader rather as a shrewd, kindly professor might show specimens in an anatomical museum—knowing that his class, who are only students for one night, have not time to spend in listening at greater length to the intricacies of the case, and not having himself much interest in the human beings of whom the specimens are but sections detached for observation. There are no striking pieces pf prose in this survey of Scotland, there are no high spots, no regrettable lapses. It is perhaps unfair to wish that since she had the shrewdness to get into touch with so many of the vital problems in Scottish life Miss Hamilton might have gone one step further and probed deeper in the company of some of the younger observers. With her intelligence she could have profited by a little impassioned exposition of the various aspects of the " Scots Tragedy " from Ian Macpherson, Hector Maclver, George Scott Moncrieff and Robert Hurd, to supplement what some of the elders told her, to explain what she saw and felt herself. As it is, she touches on the Gaelic Cult without revealing any grasp of what is so sadly wrong with the Highland Association ; she talks of the Church without showing that she knows much of the " Catholic approach " within it, of the Protestant Action rowdies without proving any real realisation of their significance or numbers. As one intimate with theatrical affairs she could surely have inquired more deeply into the question of Scottish Drama, after going so far as to raise the subject. In so comprehensive a survey she might have found space for some consideration of the absence of Scottish periodicals and the influence of radio and the B.B.C.
The fact is that the book's very competence makes the reader querulous for more than its scope reasonably would allow. Early in these pages we realise that Miss Hamilton has become a very experienced observer of conditions in many countries, and that she has a gift orynpahy which will get her into close touch with a wide range of significant -types. If she succeeds in whetting the appetite of intelligent travellers to know more of the human background of their favourite summer playground, we must be grateful for the service she has rendered. This book has a better sense of proportion, a more sane historical background, and less senti- mentality than most of those written about Scotland in recent
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