Hugh MacDiarmid

“ Scotland has ceased to hold any distinctive place in the political or cultural map of Europe. The centralization of book-publishing and journalism in London—the London monopoly of the means of publicity—has reduced Scottish arts and letters to shadows of their former or potential selves, qualitatively beneath contempt in comparison with the distinctive arts and letters of any other country in Europe. There is no Scottish writer to-day of the slightest international standing. ”

“ The thistle in the wund dissolves
In lichtnin’s as shook foil gi’es way
In sudden splendours, or the flesh
At Daith lets slip the infinite soul;
And syne it’s like a sunrise tint
In grey o’ day, or love and life,
That in a cloody blash o’ sperm
Undae the warld to big’t again,
Or like a pickled foetus that
Nae man feels ocht in common wi’
—But micht as easily ha’ been! ”

“ Under this heading the Scottish people are revealed as a leaderless mob in whom national pride has been strangled. They regard, unmoved, the spectacle of their monstrous slum-evil, the decay of their industries, the devastation of their countryside. This is the most compact and mordant indictment of Scottish policy that has yet been written. ”

“ Whoever can answer that question can explain the whole position of Scotland to-day. It is not enough that a measure should be clamantly called for by the needs of the Scottish situation; it is not enough that the mere mention of it should be sufficient to jog the most apathetic body of Scottish electors into enthusiasm; it is not enough that it should have the support of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish M.P.s of all parties. ”

“ Lowse me frae licht or eke frae darkness free.
Bite into me forever mair and lift
Me clear o’ chaos in a great relief
Till, like this thistle in the munelicht growin’,
I brak in roses owre a hedge o’ grief....
I am like Burns, and ony wench
Can ser’ me for a time.
Licht’s in them a’—in some a sun,
In some the merest skime. [35]
I’m no’ like Burns, and weel I ken,
Tho’ ony wench can ser’,
It’s no’ through mony but through yin
That ony man wuns fer....
I weddit thee frae fause love, lass,
To free thee and to free mysel’;
But man and wumman tied for life
True can be and truth can tell. ”

“ The outlook for the Scottish race is exceedingly grave. If ever there was a call to the Church of Scotland to stand fast for what men rightly contend dearest—their nationality and their traditions—that call is surely [73] sounding now, when our race and our culture are faced with a peril which, though silent and unostentatious, is the gravest with which the Scottish people has ever been confronted. ”

“ Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sentiment strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs—a failure inconsistent alike with our traditional love of country and reputation for practicality. The reason probably lies in the fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complexity of our national life. For it must be recognized that the absence of Scottish nationalism is, paradoxically enough, a form of Scottish self-determination. ”

“ And, fegs, I think the joke is rich
—Pairt soul, pairt skeleton’s come up;
They kentna which was which!...
Thou Daith in which my life
Sae vain a thing can seem,
Frae whatna source d’ye borrow
Your devastatin’ gleam?
Nae doot that hidden sun
’Ud look fu’ wae ana’,
Gin I could see it in the licht
That frae the Earth you draw!...
Shudderin’ thistle, gi’e owre, gi’e owre!
A’body’s gi’en in to the facts o’ life;
The impossible truth’ll triumph at last,
And mock your strife. ”

“ It takes some people more time than they can spare to see the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint.” And Professor Gregory Smith goes on to express the opinion that this incalculable Scottish spirit will continue to survive in English arts and letters pretty much as a dancing mouse may manifest itself in a family of orthodox rodents—as something disparate, an ornament, or an excrescence, but irreconciliable to any major tradition and incapable of affording a basis for any higher synthesis of the Scottish genius. ”

“ Gin he grows up, his way wi’ her!... [36]
A’thing wi’ which a man
Can intromit’s a wumman,
And can, and s’ud, become
As intimate and human.
And Jean’s nae mair my wife
Than whisky is at times,
Or munelicht or a thistle
Or kittle thochts or rhymes.
He’s no’ a man ava’,
And lacks a proper pride,
Gin less than a’ the warld
Can ser’ him for a bride!... ”

“ Scottish genius is being liberated from its Genevan prison-house. But the centralization of British arts and affairs in London is still restricting it in ways that can only be redressed by that re-orientation of facilities which would follow the re-establishment of an independent Scottish Parliament, or, in the event of a return to the system of Provinces, a federation of assemblies. The movement cannot manifest its full stature and move freely, save within that framework of a Scotland become once again a nation in every sense of the term for which it has been designed. ”

“ It is noteworthy that banking and national interests in Scotland are far more conspicuously divorced from each other than in most countries. There is less “cover” here than at the centre. Leading Scottish bankers do not discourse, like their English brethren, on current topics; they confine themselves to the business in hand. Mr McKenna and the like may create a diversion by pretending to let, not the cat, but one or two of its meows out of the bag occasionally, but in Scotland the public is too docile even to need “circuses.” ”

“ The idea that Scottish Home Rule is at variance with Imperial tendencies and requirements is, in fact, an erroneous and short-sighted one, while the contrary opinion is supported by the recollection of the great part Scotland has played in Imperial affairs in the past—and cannot, assuredly, continue to play if its [64] population is to be decimated, its industries ruined, and its countryside depopulated and thrown out of cultivation. Yet the latter is the effect of the neglect of Scottish affairs which is the settled—and natural—policy of the overwhelmingly English House of Commons. ”

“ Surely it is along similar lines in Scotland itself that our difficult national characteristics may yet be turned to musical account and make the basis of a new technique, at once completely modern yet intimately related to the whole history of Scots psychology and conjoining in the closest fashion the artists we are about to become, if the Scottish Renaissance realizes its objectives, with the Auld Makars and the ballad makers whose achievements we have yet to parallel and continue. ”

“ It would be truer to say that it is Braid Scots—not Scots—with which they are concerned. Their method is that of exact dialectical demarcation—they do not believe in mixing dialects—they contemplate no synthesis. What alienates the young creative writers, conscious of the inadequacy of their purpose alike of English and of what has still any currency as Scots, from the Vernacular Circle people is precisely that the latter have anything but a literary purpose. ”

“ I believe that the concept of the “canny Scot” is the myth (as M. Delaisi puts it) which has made Scotland governable by England and has prevented the development since the Union of any realistic nationalism worth speaking about. True, it has been so insidiously and incessantly imposed that the great majority of Scots [30] have long been unable for all practical purposes to do other than believe it themselves. Yet there are notable exceptions; the traditions of Highland soldiering, for example—the “ladies from Hell.” Even the “canniest” Scot does not repudiate these as un-Scottish. ”

“ The Glasgow Herald, in a recent leader, observed that there was no need for street-corner oratory in these days of a great free Press whose columns are open for the expression of all manner of opinion, and its editor, Sir Robert Bruce, is frequently to be heard dilating on the high status and professional integrity of the journalist to-day. Yet it is simple fact that there is no free Press and that journalists hold their jobs by opportunism and cannot afford to “own their own souls.” ”

“ Will it not serve the Empire best in the future, as it has done in the past, if Scotland can once again become the home of a vigorous and multiplying people from which the Colonies overseas can continue to draw robust settlers? ”

“ Whether “dreamers of dreams” can still prove themselves “movers and shakers of the world” or not, the protagonists of a Scottish Renaissance are dreaming the dream outlined in these pages, and have already earned at least the right to say to their countrymen in the words of Jaurès: “It is we who are the true heirs of the ancestral hearth: we have taken its flame while you have kept but the cinders.” ”

“ That is why, despite the persistence in Scotland of an entirely different psychology, the desire to retain and develop distinctive traditions in arts and affairs, and the fairly general recognition that the political, economic and social consequences of the Union have never been by any means wholly favourable to Scottish interests and have latterly, in many ways, become decreasingly so to a very alarming degree, there has nevertheless been at most little more than a passive resistance to complete assimilation masked by an external acquiescence. ”

“ Somehow or other the situation must be changed, so that measures corresponding to the actual requirements of our nation can be carried into the field of practical politics—and not allowed to “fail to carry” in this way. The whole impression of Scottish politics is like that of a man dominated by a sort of a nightmare he cannot shake off. ”

“ A man with “ideas of his own” is of no use in a modern newspaper office. The vigilance of the Press censorship—the ubiquitous range and insidiousness of the policy behind it—is such that even The Glasgow Herald does not, and cannot, permit signed correspondence on such subjects as Scottish music or drama, for example (let alone politics) , if these go [84] against the ideas of the vested interests concerned with these departments, not to speak of the veiled interests behind these vested interests which “hold all the strings in their hands.” ”

“ Association of ideas leads me to think how the distinctively Scottish genius has manifested itself in alien fields, however inhibited it may have been at home. My main purpose here is not to discuss the lets and hindrances which have prevented the development of modern arts in Scotland, nor will my space permit me to analyse the complexities of Scottish character and circumstances responsible for our comparative failure to find expression on the higher levels of culture. ”

“ It intensified the anglicization that the introduction of an English Bible and the Shorter Catechism (with [31] which England itself so promptly dispensed) had initiated. It progressively severed the Scottish people from their past. The extent to which this has gone is almost incredible—especially if taken in conjunction with the general attribution of an uncommon love-of-country to the Scots. English has practically vanquished Scots (which is not a dialect but a sister language to English, with different but not inferior, and, in some ways, complementary, potentialities) and Gaelic. ”

“ There is very little Scottish Education in Scotland to-day. The type of international education which is everywhere gaining ground to-day is that which seeks to perfect, and even to intensify, different cultures already existent among different peoples, and sets for its ideal that each people has, first, the right to its own interpretation of life ”

“ If that self-determination, which, in the opinion of many of us, has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass, is to be induced to take a different form and express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading programme [49] must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long ensured the opposite process. ”

“ Politics have led to an extraordinary distortion; but there can be little doubt that economic realities will yet redress the balance as between London, on the one hand, and that area on the other, and in effect endorse the Southward policy of the old Scots Kings. In any case there is still an ample Scottish population in Scotland to redevelop the essential nationalism—if they can be aroused to a recognition of the necessity of it and, with the support of the international tendencies to which I have referred (which in turn they would strengthen) , avert the calamity he indicates. ”

“ All that is happening is that a certain proportion of Scottish people is being replaced there annually by an equivalent of un-Scottish people. While this is happening in the towns, which, despite all the emigration, continue to show 50 per cent. more unemployment than in England, our rural areas are being steadily depopulated of their irreplaceable native peasantry—and nobody is taking their place. The seriousness of the matter on either count cannot be exaggerated. But the vital thing is not the influx of [70] Irish and other aliens, but the exodus of Scots. ”

“ How powerless is indicated by the fact that the Scottish Press (whose columns are shut to all discussion of national realities) gives prominence to such ridiculous statements as that of Mr Ridge Beedle, prospective Unionist candidate for the Camlachie Division of Glasgow, who says that “it is owing to the Scottish Home Rule Movement that new industries are not settling in Scotland; industrialists are preferring locations in England where continuity and settled conditions are assured.” ”