Notes on the Failure of the Scottish Renaissance
One could be forgiven for thinking that Scottish Nationalism has always been as crude and parochial as it is today. In fact, at least in the realm of the arts, it began as a kind of necessary corrective. Ever since Burns and Scott, the literature of this country has been infected by a kind of lazy, sing-song nostalgia. The English get Wordsworth and Shelley, we get bogles and haggis and ‘my sweet Highland Mary’. Beginning in the 1920s, poets like Hugh MacDiarmid and William Soutar condemned this tradition and branded it 'kailyardism.'
The term 'kailyardism' came from a line in Ian Maclaren’s 1894 collection of short stories, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, and before that, from an old Jacobite song included in the 1797 'Scots Musical Museum', a collection of lyrics compiled by Burns and his associates.
A kailyard in Scots terminology is a sort of small cabbage patch or kitchen garden, usually adjacent to a cottage; appropriately, Maclaren’s book is full of sentimental, idyllic images of Scottish country life. To the Modernists like MacDiarmid, 'kailyardism' was the result of centuries of oppression and Anglicisation; Scots literature, which had produced in Scotland before the Reformation poets like Dunbar and Douglas, whose interests were wide ranging, international, and highly refined, had become under English hegemony nothing more than a curiosity. Quaint little verses like Burns's 'My Luve is like a red red rose,' were published to delight ladies in Edinburgh and London, who no doubt felt a delightful frisson at the thought of being carried away by a rugged, red-bearded Highlander.
The 'Scottish Renaissance' of the 1920s (so called by a French reviewer) aimed to overcome this parochialism by developing a Scots literature that was engaged with developments on the Continent and the work of giants like Eliot and Pound. The most famous poem to result from this effort was MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926. The poem is hard to read if you are Scottish, almost impossible if you are not, but its depth of thought and feeling is undeniable. No bonnie lassies or kirkyard jigs here. Instead, we get reflections on sexual, sociological, political, and theological problems, wherein the works of Dante, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are referenced, and scathing passages like the following:
‘But what’s the meanin’, what’s the sense?’
—‘Men shift but by experience.
’Twixt Scots there is nae difference.
They canna learn, sae canna move,
But stick for aye to their auld groove
—The only race in History who’ve
Bidden in the same category
Frae stert to present o’ their story,
And deem their ignorance their glory.
The mair they differ, mair the same.
The wheel can whummle a’ but them,
—They ca’ their obstinacy “Hame,”
What's more, well aware that the greats of Medieval Scotland wrote in a free Scots that borrowed words from different dialects, as well as from English, French and Latin, MacDiarmid created for himself a synthetic, de-regionalised Scots that could support the weight of his arguments. This was an important step in freeing Scottish literature from parochialism.
Although men like MacDiarmid were of dubious political leanings (he was variously a Fascist, a Communist and a Scottish Nationalist), their struggle for a confident, engaged Scotland freed of sentimental claptrap, was, I believe, a noble one. But it was doomed to fail, for the simple and tragic reason that the European culture they relied upon for their civilising and their opening up of Scotland, was itself dying. In the wake of the Second World War America became the cultural heavyweight, and Scotland fell back into exportable stereotypes of herself suitable for that market. Today, Scottish schoolboys are subjected to the works of Carol Anne Duffy, whose childish attempts at Scots make full use of heather and pine and neeps and tatties, and tourists swarm in their millions to Edinburgh and the Highlands, reciting the names of the parochial classics. Who among them knows the name Dunbar, or who can recite a line from Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid (a book that Pound praised in the highest possible terms)?
There seems little chance of fighting this return to the brier bush, owing to its assiduous exploitation by American businessmen and Europhile politicians. Which only leaves the question: what can a Scottish youth, who perceives this hollowness of tartan and bonnet, and scowls at the Kurd in the tartan gift shop, do to escape it? The answer is simple: like the Catholic Jacobites of old, he needs to get out, however he can, and make a life for himself somewhere warmer.