Albyn

Albyn by Hugh MacDiarmid (1947)

Albyn argues that a Scottish Renaissance is underway, driven by forces that are simultaneously radical and conservative, literary and political, secular and religious. The movement began as a purely literary effort some seven or eight years before the time of writing, but rapidly acquired political and then religious dimensions, and is now manifesting across every sphere of Scottish national life. Its inception coincided with the end of the War and shares in the wider post-war resurgence of nationalism and Catholic revivalism across Europe. The text identifies four seemingly incompatible phenomena as expressions of this renewal: the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement, the Irish influx into Scotland, and the campaigns to revive Braid Scots and Gaelic. Viewed through a Spenglerian philosophy, all four represent attempts to supplant the post-Union order by recovering what it suppressed. The Scottish Labour members who entered Westminster as lukewarm internationalists were transformed by the experience of seeing Scottish votes perpetually overridden by an English majority, and their radicalism is interpreted as a reassertion of Scotland's pre-Union republican tradition. The Home Rule movement is meanwhile re-orienting itself toward fiscal autonomy and practical realism, and the Scots National League, which seeks complete independence, is growing more rapidly than the moderate Scottish Home Rule Association. The text dismisses Scottish journalism as almost wholly untrustworthy in its representation of Scottish opinion, noting that all daily papers are anti-Home Rule and anti-Socialist despite a third of the Scottish electorate voting Socialist. It argues that Scottish Nationalism and Scottish Socialism are naturally finding common cause, and that Liberal and Conservative politicians who oppose Home Rule out of fear of a Scottish Socialist government are signing their own death-warrant. On the Irish question, the text rejects the Protestant alarm over the Irish influx as motivated by emptying churches rather than genuine nationalism, pointing out that the Protestant churches themselves are about to achieve union through indifference rather than enthusiasm. From the Renaissance standpoint, the growth of Catholicism and the arrival of Irish immigrants are both welcome as undoing the blight the Reformation imposed on Scottish arts. The Shorter Catechism, like the myth of the Canny Scot, is identified as an English invention. Scottish Calvinism is held responsible for strangling Scottish arts, and a Catholic revival is seen as necessary for cultural renewal. The revival of Scots is presented as a central vehicle for the Renaissance. The Burns influence is judged entirely harmful, having produced only sentimental and platitudinous verse, and the movement looks instead to Dunbar and the Auld Makars, great Catholic poets who used the vernacular for the highest imaginative purposes. The younger Scottish poets are described as repossessing these noble traditions and reuniting themselves across five centuries with their predecessors. Similarly, the revival of Gaelic is championed, with proposals for a great Gaelic College having been taken up by the Clans Association in America. The text examines what Professor Gregory Smith calls the Caledonian antisyzygy, a baffling zig-zag of contradictions blending the real and the fantastic, which it finds running through Scottish literature and character across the centuries. This quality is traced in writers with Scottish blood such as Lermontov, Wergeland, Melville, and Walter de la Mare, and is identified in the work of the composer Erik Satie, whose mother was a Scotswoman. Satie's fantastic experimental clowning, his mixing of commonplace with bold innovation, and his historical importance as a precursor of Debussy and a father of atonality are all interpreted as expressions of the Caledonian antisyzygy in modern music. Scotland's cultural failure is attributed to three causes: the Reformation, which strangled the arts and elevated churl psychology to dominance; the Union with England, which confirmed and extended the Reformation's damage, severed Scots from their past, and subordinated Scottish law and finance to English control; and the Industrial Revolution, whose worst effects were magnified by the other two. The text condemns the anglicization of Scottish education, noting that children are taught some Burns and a few ballads but nothing of the Auld Makars, and that Scottish history is only now being rediscovered, with even relatively sympathetic Scottish histories found to be little more than English propaganda. Scottish journalism and the Scottish press are attacked at length for suppressing facts and figures about Scottish affairs, permitting only fragmentary and contradictory reporting on national questions, and maintaining a censorship that prevents any well-informed national policy from being articulated. The text connects this press censorship to banking and financial interests, noting the amalgamation of Scottish banks with English ones and the English control of Scottish newspapers as two sides of the same policy. Statistics of rural depopulation, overcrowding, high death rates, and fiscal inequality are marshalled to demonstrate Scotland's material plight: Scotland pays upwards of one hundred and twenty million pounds per annum to the Imperial Exchequer and receives back only some thirty million. The Credit Reform proposals of Major C. H. Douglas are cited as a significant contribution of re-oriented Scottish genius to world affairs. The text also invokes Sir Walter Scott's Letters of Malachi Malagrowther as the one real political triumph Scotland scored over England since the Union, when Scott's agitation successfully resisted the government's attempt to unify paper currency. The implication is that only similar determination, including the readiness to move beyond constitutional means, can achieve results. The text argues that Scotland's only real hope lies in the closer convergence of the Scottish Socialist and Nationalist movements around the financial question, and envisions a meeting ground for Scottish Nationalists, Catholics, and Socialists whose recognition of their interdependence could generate a Scottish Renaissance of international consequence. Professor Denis Saurat is quoted to the effect that the Scottish Renaissance, in achieving its immediate objectives, might do more and might save Europe.

By Hugh MacDiarmid · First published 1947 · Genre: Political Essay, Cultural Criticism, Literary Criticism · 8 chapters · 18,243 words

First lines

The forces that are moving towards a Scottish Renaissance are complex and at first sight incompatible. The movement began as a purely literary movement some seven or eight years ago, but of necessity speedily acquired political and then religious bearings. It is now manifesting itself in every sphere of national arts and affairs, and is at once radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary. Engaged in traversing the accepted conceptions of all things Scottish, it is in keeping that it should not have set the heather on fire. But it has made far greater headway than what has appeared about it in the English or Anglo-Scottish Press would indicate. For obvious reasons these are concerned to minimize or ignore its manifestations. The movement has had various more or less short-lived organs of its own; it will undoubtedly acquire others. But in the meantime it lacks any and its progress is correspondingly obscure but none the less real. Its inception synchronized with the end of the War, and in retrospect it will be seen to have had a genesis in kin with other post-war phenomena of recrudescent nationalism all over Europe, and to have shared to the full in the wave of Catholic revivalism which accompanied them. It took the full force of the War to jolt an adequate majority of the Scottish people out of their old mental, moral and material ruts; and the full force of post-war reaction is gradually bringing them to an effective realization of their changed conditions.

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Scottish literature · poetry · 20th century · Scots language · modernism · Scottish identity · cultural nationalism · Gaelic influences · political commentary · avant-garde · experimental form · European modernism

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