Albyn by Hugh MacDiarmid — Read

In the foregoing chapter I have given an account of the movement upon which it seems to me the future of Scotland depends-or, rather, a Scottish future of Scotland. Scotland, of course, may have another future. It may become a Roman-Catholic country with a predominantly Irish population. Or its progressive anglicization and provincialization may continue until it becomes to all intents and purposes a part of its English neighbour. The latter is still the likeliest; the former has only within the past few years emerged as a serious competitor. But the main point to seize upon in the meantime is that, apart from the "Scottish Renaissance Group," the rest of the Scottish people in Scotland to-day are not Scottish in any real sense of the term. They have no consciousness of difference except in detail; "distinctions without difference. " They are all the less Scottish in proportion to their ardour as Burns enthusiasts, members of St Andrew's and Caledonian Societies and the like. Just as the majority of Socialists become conscious of the economic causes of their plight but retain (often in an exacerbated form) the types of ideas on other matters which spring from the same source, so the vast majority of Scots to-day-even Scottish Home Rulers-regard as typically Scottish the very sentiments and attitudes which are the products of their progressive anglicization. Scotland is suffering from a very widespread inferiority complex-the result of the psychological violence suffered as a consequence of John Knox's anti-national policy in imposing an English Bible (and, as a consequence, English as the basis of education) upon it, and of the means by which the Union of the Parliaments was encompassed and by which its inherent intention of completely assimilating Scotland to England has since been pursued.

Weaker minds find compensation in a "romantic nationalism"-sedulously dissociated from politics and practical realities of every kind. The others accept the situation and transcend it; that accounts for such phenomena as Scottish Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury and York, "heids of departments" of all kinds, the ubiquitous Scotsman generally, most of the Scottish aristocracy, and such writers of English as R. L. Stevenson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and Norman Douglas. But these-or some of them-are only exceptions that prove the rule that the Anglo-Scottish symbiosis leads to nullity. There is a third class who are "more English than the English"-who become panicky immediately any question arises as to the benefit to Scotland of its present relationship to England, who regard everything "Scottish" as beneath contempt, and, in short, manifest all the symptoms of a "specific aboulia" in the presence of any challenge to their submerged nationalism. They have been un-Scotched and made "damned mischievous Englishmen. " The "nationalism" of the first of these three classes is such that it has been unable to create any literature, music or drama of more than a local value. It is hopelessly provincialized. The history of Scottish Vernacular poetry, for example, since the days of the Auld Makars, is a history of the progressive relinquishment of magnificent potentialities for the creation of a literature which might well have rivalled the English. The only challenge to the decline was that of Allan Ramsay and Ferguson-which Burns, in the last analysis, betrayed.