Albyn by Hugh MacDiarmid — Read

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.

At first blush there may seem little enough connection between such phenomena as the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement, the "Irish Invasion" of Scotland, and the campaign to resuscitate Braid Scots and Gaelic. But, adopting the Spenglerian philosophy, the Renaissance movement regards itself as an effort in every aspect of the national life to supplant the elements at present predominant by the other elements they have suppressed, and thus reverse the existing order. Or, in terms of psychology, the effort is to relieve the inhibitions imposed by English and Anglo-Scottish influences and to inhibit in turn those factors of Scottish psychology which have rendered it amenable to the post-Union state of affairs. In closer consideration, then, it will be seen that the four phenomena mentioned correspond to pre-Union conditions in Scotland. The first takes us back beyond the demoralizing concept of the Canny Scot, which has conduced so largely to Scottish denationalization, and re-establishes a psychology in keeping with the independent traditions of the country. The majority of the Scottish Labour members returned to the House of Commons went there as "internationalists."