ON 5 June 1819 an event was held in the Freemason’s Tavern in London, chaired by the Duke of Sussex, to commemorate Robert Burns and raise funds for the establishment of a ‘National Monument to his Memory’. The opening speaker, Sir James Mackintosh, declared that ‘this was the first instance in the history of the world, of an assembly of Gentlemen called together, and over which a Prince of the Blood presided, for the purpose of erecting a Monument, in the Capital of his Country, to a Peasant of that country’.1 The monument proposed was no modest statue but a Greek temple on Calton Hill, designed to acknowledge Burns’s equality with classical authors and to establish what would become ‘the Acropolis of the Northern Athens’. The proposal aimed to put Burns at the spiritual centre of the nation and create an enduring shrine that would be enhanced by works of commemoration by each generation of Scottish artists. Only twenty-three years after his death in 1796, Scotland and Burns were intimately identified one with the other: Burns’s works, according to the duke, ‘were calculated to keep alive a spirit of independence, not individual but national, because they brought home to the bosoms of his countrymen in every climate of the globe, recollections of their national language, national dress, and national manners’, while the very possibility of a peasant-poet being acclaimed the equal of classical authors was testimony, according to Mackintosh, to ‘the benefits resulting from a system of national instruction’ that, if imitated elsewhere, would ‘incalculably augment the common riches of the intellectual world—would open unnumbered mines of mental treasure, which would otherwise lie unwrought and unvalued’.2 Burns’s works were not the product of individual genius but of the national genius, and, as another speaker predicted, when ‘we honour the Memory of our immortal Poet’ at the same time ‘[we] preserve the ardent patriotism and daring spirit, which has distinguished our Countrymen in every land’.3
The monument proposed was not built—it metamorphosed into the National Monument to victory in the Napoleonic Wars, which was left unfinished in 1829—but wherever migrant Scots went across the globe, statues to Burns were erected (today, there are estimated to be around 200 full-size memorials and all 3,400 libraries in North America funded by Andrew Carnegie have a bust of Burns) and Burns’s birthday is treated as a day of national celebration. This unique identification of poet and nation was made possible by Burns’s use, in his most famous poems, of Scots, a language with a literary history that goes back at least to the fourteenth century—and is, therefore, as old as English as a literary vehicle—and which had been the ordinary language of educated Scots until after the Union with England in 1707, when English steadily displaced it as the medium of written culture and public life. As a language, Scots therefore had a double existence. On the one hand, it was the language of the nation’s early literary traditions, traditions that became increasingly well known in the eighteenth century through the publication of works by the so-called ‘makars’ of the fifteenth century—William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lindsay—which had been preserved in the Bannatyne and Maitland manuscripts. These traditions went back to the Wars of Independence with England and some of the most popular poems were ones which, like The Bruce by John Barbour and Wallace by Blind Harry, celebrated the heroic deeds of the leaders who, in the fourteenth century, had maintained Scotland’s independent nationality. It was a version of Wallace produced in 1722 by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield that Burns said had ‘poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest’.4 On the other hand, the gradual anglicization of Scottish speech among the educated classes meant that Scots was increasingly the language of the lower classes, but one that maintained an oral culture rich in folksong and ballad. Burns, both the son of a peasant and an ardent reader of earlier Scottish poetry, united these two cultural traditions and in doing so made Scots vernacular a key and continuing element in the nation’s literary and national identity, even while the nation’s eighteenth-century literati were training themselves to avoid ‘Scotticisms’ and to produce polished English.
The role of Scots gave Scottish literature its defining difference from the English literature that the Scots so assiduously studied in their courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, courses which, as they were imitated in North America, in the empire, and in England itself, were to be the foundation of the modern discipline of English Literature. The vigour of dialect speech and the prominence accorded to lower-class and to peasant characters were to form distinctive features of Scottish writing, ranging from Allan Ramsay’s pastoral play The Gentle Shepherd in the 1720s through Burns’s celebration of the peasantry in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and of beggars and outcasts in ‘Love and Liberty’, to the prominent place accorded to lower-class Scots speakers in Walter Scott’s early novels. Scott’s use both of vernacular and of highly specified regional identities made a significant contribution to the development of the novel as a genre—George Eliot and Thomas Hardy would follow in his footsteps—and set a pattern for Scottish novel-writing that was to stretch from John Galt’s studies in the local culture of the west of Scotland—such as Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Entail (1822)—to what many have regarded as Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896). It was an influence that continued into the twentieth century in the works of distinctively regional novelists such as Nan Shepherd (The Quarry Wood, 1928; The Weatherhouse, 1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (A Scots Quair, 1932–4). It is symptomatic of the centrality of Scots vernacular to Scottish literary identity that when the young Christopher Murray Grieve set out to renew Scottish poetry in the 1920s, he invented as his alter ego one ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, an archetypal Scottish poet steeped in and reusing the language of early Scottish writing.5 That the oldest continuing literary language in Scotland was not Scots, but Gaelic, did not have the same defining impact on Scottish literature and Scottish identity. Gaelic remained separate, almost self-contained, while Scots, through the influence of Burns and the huge popularity of Scottish magazines such as Blackwood’s—founded in 1814 to compete with the international success of the Edinburgh Review, which, from its inception in 1802, set the model for magazine publication for the nineteenth century—became the second literary language of the British Empire.
Rather than being an alternative to English, Scots was, according to Allan Ramsay, an extension of it: English, ‘of which we are Masters, by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it’, was supplemented by ‘all our own native Words, of eminent Significancy’, these Scots expressions making ‘our Tongue by far the completest’.6 The potential ‘completeness’ of Scots-English meant that no matter how much English came to dominate the public life of Scotland, Scottish writers continually returned to it as the resource that established the distinctiveness of their work. From the 1930s to the 1970s poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch, and Alexander Scott were following Hugh MacDiarmid down the path of a highly literary Scots; and dramatists such as Robert McLellan (Jamie the Saxt, 1937) and Donald Campbell (The Jesuit, 1976) were exploiting Scots through plays set in historical periods when Scots was still the normal speech of both upper and lower classes in Lowland Scotland. If the King James Bible, inspired by the first Scottish King of England, made a certain kind of English the language of religion in Scotland, and the foundation of the nation’s linguistic anglicization, the publication in 1983 of Professor W. L. Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots—which became an unexpected best-seller—was testimony to the ongoing desire of many Scottish readers for a version of the Bible in what remained, despite two hundred and fifty years of anglicization, their own language.
In the 1850s David Masson, soon to be Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and one of the first professional literary critics, pondered ‘The Scottish Influence in British Literature’ and, listing how many influential Scottish writers overlapped with the life of Burns, declared that ‘in reading the writings of such men, one is perpetually reminded, in the most direct manner, that these writings are to be regarded as belonging to a strictly national literature’.7 And considering the achievement of Scottish writers, Masson reflected on how the rise of Scottish literature since Burns’s Kilmarnock edition of 1786 was as remarkable as the rise of Scottish philosophy in the sixty years before that publication:
Considering the amount of influence exerted by such men [Scott, Jeffrey, Campbell, Chalmers, Wilson, Carlyle] upon the whole spirit and substance of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of Great Britain in the nineteenth century has come either from them or from other Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish literature is as notable a historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of Scottish philosophy.8
Much has been made in the last half-century of the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, who have come to be regarded as the glory of Scottish culture, while Burns and Scott have been steadily written out of the history of international literature in English. But Alexander Broadie’s A History of Scottish Philosophy (2009) concludes in the 1960s, with little evidence of a powerful continuing influence, whereas Scottish literature remains as a flourishing element in contemporary Scottish life. Indeed, it is arguable that the thirty years from 1979 were among the most distinguished in the whole history of Scottish culture. The celebration of Burns may now have been reduced to a ritual in which literary value plays little part, but the sense of the significance of Scotland’s writers to the nation’s identity remains intense—as is manifest by the inscriptions chosen to decorate the new Scottish Parliament when it was opened in 2004.
For sixty years from the 1630s, Scotland was a country riven by civil and religious strife. By the 1690s, two courts claimed royal authority over Scotland. In London was the Williamite court, whose authority had been accepted in Scotland when William III agreed to the abolition of prelacy in the Church of Scotland—a running sore that had provoked conflict from the time of Charles I’s accession to the throne in 1625; and at Versailles in Paris there was the exiled Jacobite court, where James VII and, after 1701, James VIII were supported by Louis XIV in their claim to be the rightful kings both of Scotland and England. The cost of these seventy years of strife was enormous: many of the leading Scottish families were ruined by debt, towns such as Aberdeen and Dundee had been sacked, uncountable thousands had been killed (including hundreds accused of witchcraft), and many had died of the return of the plague in 1645. As power shifted, different religious groups were driven into exile. Scotland was a nation in ruins: many of its greatest buildings destroyed, its most powerful families impoverished, and the national coffers emptied by the disaster of the attempt in 1696 to set up a Scottish colony in Darien on the isthmus of Panama. (For a more optimistic appraisal see Chapter 15.)
The rebuilding of Scotland in the eighteenth century was to be given spectacular embodiment in the classicism of Edinburgh’s New Town in the 1780s, which was designed to celebrate the peaceful Union of 1707 and, quite literally, to turn its back on Scotland’s earlier history, as embodied in Edinburgh’s Old Town. But even before the Union treaty was concluded, some were endeavouring to recover the remnants of an older Scotland from the ruins of the seventeenth century. In 1706 the Edinburgh printer James Watson, a man of Jacobite sympathies, published the first volume of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems Both Ancient and Modern in order to make available the poetry of our ‘own native Scots Dialect’, poetry that had either been printed ‘most uncorrectly’ or ‘never before printed’.9 Watson’s Choice Collection, containing some poems dating back to pre-Reformation Scotland, such as ‘Christ’s Kirk on the Green’, attributed to King James V, was to inspire two collections by Allan Ramsay, both published in 1724. His Tea Table Miscellany was a collection of lyrics, mostly in Scots, intended for domestic performance: it went through more than twenty editions in the following three-quarters of a century, as well as through many imitations by other editors, and contributed to the fashion for ‘national’ songs that became part of the emerging ‘British’ culture of the eighteenth century. It was Ramsay’s Ever Green of 1724, however, that seriously attempted to reconstitute the national past, through ‘a collection of Scots Poems, wrote by the Ingenious before 1600’. The Ever Green made available for the first time a substantial number of poems by Dunbar, Henryson, and Montgomerie preserved in the Bannatyne manuscript.
Ramsay’s effort to reconstitute the Scottish literary past and to collect Scottish popular song was in turn to be the inspiration for generations of Scottish writers and scholars: Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) had much of its impact because of the twenty Scottish ballads and songs supplied by his Scottish correspondent, Lord Hailes, who himself re-edited material from the Bannatyne manuscript in Ancient Scottish Songs (1770); David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769) claimed that the fragments of the past had at last been gathered into ‘one body’—but the dismembered past was to continue to give up new fragments to each succeeding generation: Burns at the end of his career in the songs he collected for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and Walter Scott at the beginning of his, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), both confirmed the richness of the oral tradition of Scots, riches that were to be further excavated by William Motherwell in his Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827) and by William Aytoun’s Ballads of Scotland (1858). The lore of Gaelic Scotland was collected in Carmena Gadelica (1900) by Alexander Carmichael, and the Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection, gathered in the north-east of Scotland in the decade before the First World War, required eight volumes for its publication in the 1970s and 1980s.
Recurrently, collecting the past was the founding basis of new Scottish writing. When Christopher Grieve set out to ‘modernize’ Scottish poetry after the First World War, it was under the banner of ‘Back to Dunbar’, and by means of the resources of John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), which combined both medieval literary examples and folk materials to provide an account of the history of Scots words. After the Second World War, poet-scholars like Hamish Henderson would return to the collection of folk literature as the basis for a new revival of national culture. This drive to collect and reconstitute the fragments of the nation would be repeated in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to working-class writing, for example by the efforts of William Donaldson to recover Scots prose published in local newspapers in the nineteenth century and by Tom Leonard’s edition of the working-class poets of Renfrew.10 And women’s writing would undergo a similar recuperation in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing back into the canon a host of forgotten writers from even relatively recent times. These included playwright Ena Lamonst Stewart, whose dramatization of working-class life in Men Should Weep (1948) was revived to great effect by the 7:84 Theatre Company in the 1980s, and Helen Adam, who combined writing Scottish ballads with participating in the Beat poetry movement in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lurking in Ramsay’s Evergreen, however, was a poem entitled ‘The Vision’, which he claimed to have been ‘compylit in Latin be a most lernit Clerk in Tyme of our Hairship and Oppression, anno 1300, and translatit in 1524’, and which is attributed to ‘Ar. Scot.’ This name might have implied the sixteenth-century Scottish poet Alexander Scott, but it in fact concealed ‘Allan Ramsay Scotus’, recalling the events of Scotland’s suffering under the oppression of Edward I as an allegory of its suffering under the Hanoverians. Ramsay’s creation of an ‘original’ ancient poem revealed how easily the editorial effort of reconstituting the body of the nation’s literature could turn into the creative replenishment of the nation’s past with modern productions. The editor as gatekeeper between the past and the present was also an aspirant poet recreating the past in his own image: Burns infused old songs with his own lyrical grace, while James Hogg’s mother famously complained that Walter Scott had ruined her songs when he had them printed. The ‘fakesong’ that imitated folksong for an audience of readers rather than listeners—as in the work of Lady Nairne—underlined how different was the finality of print from the fluidity of oral culture.
Such tensions underlay the most influential literary event of eighteenth-century Scotland—the publication, in 1760, of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Macpherson, a young schoolteacher with literary ambitions, was encouraged by the Edinburgh literati to extend the collecting activities of Lowland Scots by engaging in a similar venture in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. He returned with translations into English of what were claimed to be fragments of Gaelic epics produced by the blind bard Ossian in the third century AD, epics that had been maintained by oral transmission for over a thousand years. The impact of Macpherson’s work was sensational: it provided Britain with an alternative to classical mythology, one imbued with a wild nobility and heroic passion that was to shape much subsequent Romantic literature. The transition from classical to native mythology was to be dramatized through quotations from the Fragments in Goethe’s influential The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which helped Macpherson’s poetry to inspire the search for equivalent ancient epics in the upsurge of national self-expression that swept Europe from Finland to Galicia. In nineteenth-century Ireland the effort to reclaim Macpherson’s Celtic heroes as Irish rather than Scots was to be the inspiration of W. B. Yeats’s Irish Revival.
In Britain, doubts about the authenticity of Macpherson’s collection were not assuaged when Macpherson rapidly published two complete epic poems—Tamora and Fingal—in 1762–3 while refusing to provide the Gaelic originals on which they were based. In Britain, Ossian’s reputation shifted from celebrated literary revolution to despised literary fraud but it continued to exert an international influence throughout the nineteenth century, and the transformation it had made in the international perception of Scotland would reshape Scottish identity forever. At the very moment when the traditional life of the Highlands of Scotland was being destroyed in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, Macpherson’s translations transformed the Scottish Highlands from a place of social and economic backwardness into the homeland of a noble spirituality that retained values long lost to Western urban culture. ‘There we find the fire and enthusiasm of the most early times,’ Hugh Blair declared in his ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, ‘combined with an amazing degree of regularity and art’.11 Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), gave an account of what is lost in the transition to modernity: that loss was symbolically reversed in Macpherson’s collection and re-presentation of the Gaelic past, which became, suddenly, the exemplar of modern national identity. The Highlands were transformed into the place where poetry and mythology had survived, a place where the imagination had retained a vigour that had been lost to more advanced societies, making what had been a barbarous and uncultivated—and unvisited—place into one of noble sublimity, lure to Johnson and Boswell on their tour of the Highlands in 1773, and thereafter to poet, musician, and artistic tourists from Wordsworth to Mendelssohn and Landseer.
Macpherson’s Ossianic poems are doubly poems of memory: the poems call back into the contemporary world a lost Gaelic past but do so through a poetic persona who is himself calling up the memory of the dead:
Thou askest, fair daughter of the isles! whose memory is preserved in these tombs? The memory of Ronnan the bold, and Connan the chief of men; and of her, the fairest of maids, Rivine the lovely and the good. Why seek we our grief from afar? Or give our tears to those of other times? But thou commandest, and I obey …12
Macpherson’s poetry commands a haunted world. As his eighteenth-century English is haunted by a Gaelic almost none of his readers could speak, so his landscape teems with ghosts to whom the living call out: ‘Speak to me, hear my voice, sons of my love! But alas! They are silent…’.13 This structure of double memory—a return to an ancient world in which a character recalls a world still more ancient—was to be regularly rehearsed by Scottish writers. James Beattie’s The Minstrel, of 1774, intended as its subtitle declares to be a study of ‘The Progress of Genius’, is set in a primitive pastoral world:
There lived in Gothic days, as legends tell,
A shepherd-swain, a man of low degree;
Whose sires, perchance, in Fairyland might dwell,
But he, I ween, was of the north countrie:
A nation famed for song, and beauty’s charms;14
The protagonist, Edwin, has to learn his art from his ‘Beldam’, who can ‘chant the old heroic ditty o’er’ and tell tales of ‘knights, and feats of arms’ and the ‘moonlight-revel of the fairy glade’.15 And Walter Scott’s first poetic success, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1802), has the same double structure, focusing on an old minstrel in the seventeenth century who sings a bardic tale of border conflict in the Middle Ages:
His legendary song could tell –
Of ancient deeds, so long forgot;
Of feuds, whose memory was not;
Of forests, now laid waste and bare;
Of towers, which harbour now the hare;
Of manners, long since chang’d and gone;
Of chiefs, who under the grey stone
So long had slept, that fickle Fame
Had blotted from her rolls their name …16
The need to collect the remnants of an almost forgotten past made Scotland peculiarly a place of memory, a place whose literature gained its power by evoking the past to which those scattered remnants pointed. So John Home’s Douglas (1756) is set in the early Middle Ages, during the Viking invasions of Scotland, and has as its central character a woman—Lady Randolph—who is obsessed by the losses of the past:
O Douglas! Douglas! If departed ghosts
Are e’er permitted to review this world,
Within the circle of that wood thou art,
And with the passion of immortals hear’st
My lamentation.17
Similarly, Joanna Baillie’s drama, The Family Legend, which was staged in Edinburgh by Sir Walter Scott in 1812, is built around family memories of sixteenth-century Scotland. Such works invoke an almost forgotten historical era by focusing on a character who is, like the author, obsessed with reaffirming a connection with the past. Scotland becomes in these works, as Scott was to express it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a land where poetry ‘still reflects to Memory’s eye’:18
O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e’er untie that filial band,
That knits me to thy rugged strand!19
Poetry is the offspring of wildness and wilderness, and Scotland’s wildernesses make it a natural home to the imagination. Even Jane Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs (1805), written in celebration of the ‘liberty’ for which Britain was fighting against Napoleonic France, is an account of the struggle of William Wallace for national liberty in the fourteenth century.
This recollective dimension of Scottish writing encouraged the use of genres that were naturally suited to remembrance. Elegies are the distinctive mode of both Allan Ramsay’s and Robert Fergusson’s earliest poems in Scots, as though the poems elegize the passing of the language in which they are written as well as the Scots characters they celebrate, and Ramsay’s most successful work was the pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd (1728), a play that transforms the era of the Restoration, some sixty years earlier, into an idyll in which sundered parents and children can be reunited and love fulfilled. Enacted in vernacular Scots and including songs which Ramsay had published in his anthologies, The Gentle Shepherd suggests not only that the fragments of the past can be recomposed by art but that a rediscovered past can provide a critical perspective on a degraded present. Hugh Blair believed that Ramsay’s play was a perfect modern version of pastoral but that its use of Scots would make the play unreadable to succeeding generations; in fact, however, it had a long history of successful stage production till the late nineteenth century, and its celebration of Scotland as a place of pastoral virtue would inspire identification of Scotland’s social virtues with its rurality—as in Robert Fergusson’s ‘The Farmer’s Ingle’:
Peace to the husbandman and a’ his tribe,
Whase care fells a’ our wants frae year to year!
Lang may his sock and cou’ter turn the glybe,
And bauks o’ corn bend down wi’ laded ear!
May Scotia’s simmers ay look gay and green;
Her yellow har’sts frae scowry blasts decreed!
May a’ her tenants sit fu’ snug and bien,
Frae the hard grip o’ ails, and poortith freed;
And a lang lasting train o’ peacefu’ hours succeed!20
It is a theme taken up by Burns in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, in which rural virtue becomes the spiritual essence of Scottish identity:
The chearfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace,
The big ha’-Bible, ance his Father’s pride.
His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,
His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare;
Those strains that once did sweet in ZION glide,
He wales a portion with judicious care,
‘And let us worship GOD!’ he says, with solemn air.21
If, for Fergusson and Burns, it was ‘from scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs’, their identification of Scotland with an agricultural world would rapidly turn into nostalgia for a lost world as Scotland’s peasantry were cleared from the land—a nostalgia that would not only dominate the writings of the late nineteenth-century ‘Kailyard’ school, which took its inspiration from J. M. Barrie’s collection of stories ‘Auld Licht Idylls’ (1888) and became a byword for sentimental recollection, but would continue to shape Scottish writing into the twentieth century. In Sunset Song, the first volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–4), for instance, the central character, Chris, lives through the destruction of the old agricultural world during the First World War. Despite its presentation of the raw and repressive nature of the agricultural community, and despite the trilogy’s overall celebration of technological progress, Sunset Song is nonetheless a pastoral elegy:
So, hurt and dazed, she turned to the land, close to it and the smell of it, kind and kind it was, it didn’t rise up and torment your heart, you could keep at peace with the land if you gave it your heart and hands, tended it and slaved for it, it was wild and a tyrant, but it was not cruel.22
Chris is the embodiment of Scotland as memorial, each section of the novel made up of her recollections as she sits by ancient standing stones on top of the hill close to her farm, standing stones that represent the ancient memory of the folk and which will become at the novel’s end a War Memorial, with her husband’s name inscribed on it.
This centrality of memory to the Scottish muse is underlined by the development of a theory of aesthetics—of ‘taste’ as it was known in the eighteenth century—founded principally on memory. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), David Hume had argued that all our mental experience was shaped by the ‘association of ideas’, in which things were linked together by the recollection of their proximity to one another in space or time, or by their perceived similarities. From this, Hume developed a theory of art in which the effect of any work of art lay in the associations that it was able to inspire in the perceiving mind, associations which constituted the ‘beauty’ attributed to the artwork—the more powerful the associations, the more beautiful the work. It was an explanation taken up by Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste in 1759 and in Archibald Alison’s Essays on Taste of 1793, which formed the basis of the critical theory of the Edinburgh Review under the editorship of Francis Jeffrey from 1802. The associationist conception of beauty as dependent entirely on memory linked literature and landscape in a mutual interdependence. A landscape could only be experienced as beautiful if it aroused associations, and those associations would be more powerful if they derived not from merely personal memories but from the common associations of shared literary experience; works of literature, equally, gained power by inspiring the recollection of particular places.
The effect can be seen in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), in which a Welsh family, touring Britain, arrive in the Highlands:
We have had princely sport in hunting the stag on these mountains—These are the lonely hills of Morven, where Fingal and his heroes enjoyed the same pastime; I feel an enthusiastic pleasure when I survey the brown heath that Ossian wont to tread; and hear the wind whistle through the bending grass—When I enter our landlord’s hall, I look for the suspended harp of that divine bard, and listen in hopes of hearing the aerial sound of his respected spirit.23
The landscape is experienced as a recollection of literature in a process that later writers would adapt by making the evocation of landscape and its associations central to their works: Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810), for instance, invokes in its very title Arthurian mythology that will turn Loch Katrine, the setting of much of the poem, into a place of ‘enchantment’, where a disguised King can both encounter the alien Celtic culture with which he shares his kingdom and re-enact the earlier achievements of the heroes of romance:
And thus an airy point he won,
Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One burnish’d sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him roll’d,
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,
And mountains, that like giants stand,
To sentinel enchanted land.24
Loch Katrine is the central character of Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810) because it is a place where nature echoes with minstrel songs and folk songs in imitation of Scott’s own art, an art which, in its recall of the past, continues to people the landscape with story and enrich it with memory. The mutual empowerment of landscape and literature is also, however, a threatening dependence—the art of memory is enacted on the brink of its extinction, threatened always by a loss of memory that would be the loss not only of the landscape but of the nation it symbolizes. Scott’s art, like that of many of his contemporaries, aimed to retain the memory of the nation against the forces that, he believed, were ‘gradually destroying what remains of nationality and making the country tabula rasa’.25
In 1730 the London-based Scot James Thomson published a long poem entitled The Seasons, which was to be extended and embroidered until its final edition in 1746. Its celebration of the natural world introduced into anglophone poetry something that would later be identified as ‘Romanticism’, a term to whose implications Thomson’s poem contributed:
… And here a while the muse
High hovering o’er the broad cerulean scene,
Sees Caledonia in romantic view –
Her airy mountains, from the waving main
Invested with a keen diffusive sky,
Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge,
Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature’s hand
Planted of old; her azure lakes between,
Poured out extensive, and of watery wealth
Full; winding deep, and green, her fertile vales,26
Where later Romantic poets saw in nature redemption from the evils of society, Thomson saw the spirit of progress at work transforming the world: the life of the savage is:
A waste of time! till Industry approached
And roused him from his miserable sloth;
His faculties unfolded; pointed out
Where lavish Nature the directing hand
Of Art demanded; showed him how to raise
His feeble force by the mechanic powers,
To dig the mineral from the vaulted earth
…
Nor stopped at barren bare necessity;
But, still advancing bolder, led him on
To pomp, to pleasure, elegance, and grace:
And, breathing high ambition through his soul,
Set science, wisdom, glory in his view.27
The structure of The Seasons would seem to imply a cyclic conception of human experience, such as Thomson would have learned in his training for the ministry at Edinburgh University. The poem, however, celebrates not only nature but the city as the place where:
… every form of cultivated life
In order set, protected, and inspired,
Into perfection wrought …
and celebrates the ‘Commerce’ of ‘the busy merchant’ whose trading fills the country ‘with foreign plenty’. ‘All’, Thomson concludes, ‘is the gift of Industry’.28 It is a vision of progress that would come to dominate Scottish thinking about society in the course of the eighteenth century and which would inspire Scottish writers to explore the forces that produced such progress. The arrival of the Jacobite army in Edinburgh in 1745—described by Walter Scott in Waverley (1814) as an event that ‘conveyed to the South-Country Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African Negroes or Esquimaux Indians had issued forth from the northern mountains of their own native country’29—posed the question of what forces had shaped lowland society that made it so different from highland society, of what made ‘progress’ possible. It was a question which led Scottish writers into an investigation of history so intense that, in a now famous letter of 1770, David Hume claimed Scotland as ‘the historical nation’—not for its national deeds but because of its fame in the writing of history.
Hume’s History of England (1754–62), in particular, was acclaimed throughout Europe both for the quality of its research and standard of its writing, and Hume himself regarded it as his contribution to ‘literature’. Scotland’s foremost eighteenth-century novelist, Tobias Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker had been preceded by Roderick Random (published in 1748 and therefore among the earliest of novels in English), wrote a competing Complete History of England and also a continuation of Hume’s history, covering the period after 1688 at which Hume had stopped. The ‘continuation’ of historian by novelist appropriately acknowledged how much the novel owed to the techniques of the historians in the construction of narrative and the description of character. Hume’s history continually pauses to analyse the nature of the actors in his history and the underlying causes of their actions:
Cromwell, by whose sagacity and insinuation Fairfax was entirely governed, is one of the most eminent and most singular personages, which occurs in history. The strokes of his character are as open and strongly marked, as the schemes of his conduct were, during the time, dark and impenetrable. His extensive capacity enabled him to form the most enlarged projects: his enterprising genius was not dismayed with the boldest and most dangerous. Carried by his natural temper, to magnanimity, to grandeur, and to an imperious and domineering policy; he yet knew, when necessary, to employ the most profound dissimulation, the most oblique and refined artifice, the semblance of the greatest moderation and simplicity.30
It is by such character drawing that Jane Porter introduces us to William Wallace in her The Scottish Chiefs:
Checked at the opening of life in the career of glory that was his passion, secluded in the bloom of manhood from the social haunts of men, he repressed the eager aspiration of his mind; and strove to acquire that resignation to inevitable evils which could alone reconcile him to forego the promises of his youth; and enable him to view with patience that humiliation of Scotland which blighted her honour, menaced her existence, and consigned her sons to degradation or obscurity.31
But behind Hume’s history was more than just techniques that would come to be identified with fiction: the Scottish historians of the Enlightenment subscribed to what Dugald Stewart described as ‘conjectural history’—the assumption that, since human nature was everywhere the same, the historian could conjecturally interpolate what the actual records of history had lost. This allowed them to envisage how primitive societies might have been organized and allowed them, in turn, to propose that human beings had passed through several—usually four—different stages of development that led from primitive pastoralism to modern commercial society, and that in each of these stages only certain kinds of social organization were possible. History, therefore, was fundamentally the account of human beings’ progress from one stage of society to another. In each of these stages only certain kinds of roles were available, with the result that each stage was also a kind of theatrical stage on which the historical actors could only adapt themselves to a limited number of roles. For David Hume ‘the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away’,32 and for Adam Smith morality operates by virtue of the sympathy that links the individual to an ‘impartial spectator’ who regards life as a kind of theatre in which can be balanced the appropriate flows of emotion: if ‘We weep even at the feigned representation of a tragedy’,33 then how much more will our sympathy go out to sufferers in real distress? History was theatre where ‘impartial spectators’ judged characters by the sympathy they provoked.
When Walter Scott, stung by the impact of Byron’s Childe Harold (1812–18) and fearing the decline of his literary fortunes, turned secretly from writing verse romances to writing novels, what he produced was not a prose version of the historical romances that had been such a feature of previous Scottish writing, including his own, but something entirely new—a historical novel that dramatized the turning point of the stages of history. In Waverley (1814), Scott used the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6 to present the conflict between a pastoral society based on family and clan loyalties and a modern commercial society based on property. The tragedy of the destruction of the earlier stage of society—a society endowed with the noble heroism celebrated by Macpherson—was balanced against the comedy of a progressive history that produces a new and more liberal social order. The protagonist, Edward Waverley, is an Englishman accidentally caught up in the rebellion and captivated by its glamour: he is on the stage of history at a decisive moment in history’s progress between stages, and discovers himself to be an actor on the wrong side of the transition:
It was at that instant, that looking around him, he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible and unnatural.34
Waverley’s realization that he is a man dressed for a part he does not want to play but from which he cannot escape is indicative of the inherent theatricality of Scott’s novels, a theatricality which allowed them to be transferred easily to the stage. Consequently, dramatizations of Scott novels were the staple of Scottish theatre throughout the nineteenth century,35 and some of the novels—most famously The Bride of Lammermoor, which was adapted by Donizetti—rapidly became part of the repertoire of European opera.36
The tension between Scott’s dramatization of the real forces of history and his construction of theatrical narratives has dogged criticism of his works, which has been torn between praising the realism of his presentation of the historical past and bewailing the romantic theatricality of his plots. But Scott, concealed as the ‘Author of Waverley’, was intensely aware of the artifice of novel-writing: in the ‘Introduction’ to Ivanhoe he compares the author to ‘an actor’ who ‘by possessing in a pre-eminent degree the external qualities necessary to give effect to comedy, may be deprived of the right to aspire to tragic excellence’. The novelist, like such an actor, must escape the expectations ‘which confine him to a single course of subjects’,37 by switching not only from the Scottish history and manners with which Scott first made his reputation to the history of other countries and cultures, but between different generic constructions of the historical past—the tragedy of The Bride of Lammermoor of 1819 balanced by the ‘romance’ of Ivanhoe published in the same year.
Scott’s experiments with the genres possible within the frame of the historical novel, and with the role of the narrator as intermediary between past and present, were to inspire a host of experimental Scottish novel-writing in the twenty years after 1814. Some, like James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1817) and John Galt’s Ringan Gilhaize (1823), were direct responses to Scott—in both cases challenges to Scott’s presentation of Covenanting Scotland in Old Mortality (1816); others, like Christian Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (1815), Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), or John Gibson Lockhart’s Adam Blair (1822) use the Highlands as the location for supernatural events, for escape from moral strictures, or as a touchstone of sensibility. The possibilities of the historical novel opened up by Scott were to continue to shape Scottish fiction for over a hundred years: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896) set their action in Scotland’s dramatic history; John Buchan’s first novel in the 1890s, John Burnet of Barns (1898), was a historical romance of the seventeenth century and his most successful novel, Witch Wood (1927), returned there to analyse the hypocrisies of Calvinism in the period of Scotland’s witch-hunts; and, in 1948, Naomi Mitchison’s The Bull Calves used the Scottish Highlands after Culloden (1746) as a parallel to the post-Second World War era of reconstruction.
But the issue with which Scott’s fiction had confronted Scottish writers was the role of the historian-author himself or herself. Scott’s concealment of his identity as author and his attribution of his narrative to various intermediaries foregrounded the issue of the text’s relationship to the past which it reconstructed, and of the author’s role in that reconstruction. In Annals of the Parish (1823), John Galt ironically explored the gap between individual memory and historical record through the accidental reminiscences of the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, whose tenure in the manse in the parish of Dalmailing exactly matches the period of George III’s monarchy and makes him a local equivalent of the king who has lost control of his kingdom. Unlike the conjectural historian, Balwhidder has no organizing narrative structure for his history but relates it in a simple chronology, listing events for each of his fifty years as parish minister. He is surrounded by the technological and social transformation of Scottish society in the period of the American and French Revolutions, but when the great developments of the time force themselves on his awareness, his natural reaction is evasion: confronted with a mass of working people made unemployed, he hides in his closet; discovering the growth of Glasgow and the poverty of its working people, he returns to his parish to tell his wife that if ‘we live within the narrow circle of ignorance, we are spared from the pain of knowing many an evil; and, surely, in much knowledge there is sadness of heart’.38 Galt’s text thus develops a double structure in which, through his central character’s very evasion of history, the history of Scotland’s transformation by industry and empire is made to appear. Even more radical is Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which presents us with a narrative from the early eighteenth century that has been discovered and reinterpreted by an ‘Editor’ who gives us his version of events before we read the text itself, thus encouraging us to prejudge its contents. For Hogg, the Editor represents the blinkered understanding by which those of a later time attempt to understand their predecessors, and the double text sets the world views of two historical epochs in conflict with one another. The same ironic structure is repeated by Thomas Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus (1833), in which an editor struggles to make sense of the works of a German philosopher, works that he nonetheless claims will have a transforming effect on his British public. Since the life of the German philosopher is clearly a fiction based on novellas such as Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, we are caught in a dialectical interplay of competing fictions that at once mocks the possibility of uncovering the real while providing the context for Carlyle to put forward his own challenging interpretation of German idealism.
The radical uncertainty of such texts reveals the extent to which the historical novel actually put in doubt both the possibility of historical knowledge and a narrative realism that could truthfully represent the past. Their challenge to history and to realism were to be little appreciated by later nineteenth-century critics for whom realism was the norm for both historical narrative and novelistic representation, but in the latter part of the twentieth century, when the self-consciousness of fiction and the textuality of history came to dominate critical debate, these texts were seen as prescient of the era that came to be known as ‘postmodernism’. What they reveal, however, is a complex literary culture of competing modes of writing, each struggling to maintain its own authority and, in the process, undermining the authority of other forms of discourse. Byron—who acknowledged himself ‘half a Scot by birth, and bred/A whole one’39—satirized Edinburgh’s literary culture in ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, as run by ‘young tyrants …/Combined usurpers on the throne of taste’, and Edinburgh’s publishing world as one in which the machinery of text has run mad:
No dearth of bards can be complain’d of now,
The loaded press beneath her labour groans,
And printers’ devils shake their weary bones
…
Behold! In various throngs the scribbling crew,
For notice eager, pass in long review;
Each spurs his jaded Pegasus apace,
And rhyme and blank maintain an equal race;
Sonnets on sonnets crowd, and ode on ode;
And tales of terror jostle on the road;40
But Byron was himself a part of the destabilizing environment he criticized. When the London-based Scottish publisher John Murray published the first two Cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, the poem combined medieval romance, contemporary travelogue, confessional autobiography, and political satire in a disorienting—but exhilarating—combination that made the work, and its author, an overnight sensation. To Byron’s sceptical eye, however, neither political nor literary power can make a significant mark on history:
Ah! such alas! the hero’s amplest fate!
When granite moulders and when records fail,
A peasant’s plaint prolongs his dubious date.
Pride! bend thine eye from heaven to thine estate,
See how the Mighty shrink into a song!
Can Volume, Pillar, Pile preserve thee great?
Or must thou trust Tradition’s simple tongue,
When Flattery sleeps with thee, and History does thee wrong.41
The claims of History are as illusory as the enchantments of theatre.
Scotland’s major eighteenth-century historians had presented England’s history as the paradigmatic version of the narrative of progress, a narrative into which, after the Union, Scotland would be harmoniously incorporated. It is an expectation dramatized in Scott’s Waverley with the marriage of Edward Waverley, accidental English Jacobite, to Rose Bradwardine, daughter of a Scottish antiquarian. Each is allowed to escape the clutches of the past into a future no longer distorted by the nation’s former conflicts. Ironically for a nation that had just created the historical novel, this made the Scottish past irrelevant to its national future (see also Chapter 1). As early as 1816, in Old Mortality, Scott presents a Scotland in which none of the competing factions can be the foundation for a modern nation, so that instead of benefiting from a happy marriage of past and present, the protagonist is forced into exile to await a change in the tenor of the national life. By 1818, in The Heart of Midlothian, Scott was creating a narrative structure in which the wild and savage are not tamed by civilization but, like the illegitimate son of Jeanie Deans’s sister Effie, continually escape its claims: having unknowingly killed his own father before fleeing as an indentured servant to Virginia, the boy there kills his master and joins himself ‘to the next tribe of wild Indians’.42 The savage is not harmoniously integrated into progressive history but continually re-establishes itself outside of history’s control. The historical novel becomes the medium not for the exploration of the turning points within the stages of history, but of the boundary between a world governed by history and another governed by forces over which history has no sway. Hogg’s Confessions dramatizes these as a Devil who cannot be set aside by history, even though the ‘Editor’ believes that ‘in this day, and with the present generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow-creature’. To the generation that rediscovered Hogg’s novel after the Second World War, the reality of diabolic evil in the semblance of a fellow creature had become, again, only too painfully real. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889) similarly exposes the frailties of progressive history: Stevenson sets up his tale as though it were a traditional historical novel, with two brothers representing the Jacobite and Hanoverian sides in the Rebellion of 1745–6, but instead of a narrative about the orderly extension of civilization and progress across Britain’s imperial territory, what we are given is a narrative in which characters from opposite extremities of the British Empire end up in a North American wilderness. The brothers cannot stand for successful and unsuccessful historical forces, for both are driven backwards from modernity towards its origins—one into infantile subjection, the other into primitive barbarism. The failure of history is underlined by the episodic structure of The Master, with its several narrators who disrupt the orderly progress of the narration, and by the role of the principal narrator, MacKellar, who is himself deeply engaged in undermining the very tale he claims to tell.
Such novels subvert the structure of progressive history to question the ultimacy of the values by which it is guided. It was a questioning intensified by the unfolding discoveries of Scottish geologists, such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell, which revealed how insignificant was the timescale of recorded history, and, in 1844, by Robert Chambers’s early account of evolution in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which prefigured much of what Charles Darwin was to argue fifteen years later. In the same period Scottish scientists such as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Peter Guthrie Tait, and James Clerk Maxwell were revolutionizing the understanding of the universe through their studies of thermodynamics, electricity, and magnetism. The new consciousness that this produced was described in 1865 by David Masson, appointed that year as Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, as one that required ‘the notion of Interplanetary, or even Interstellar, Reciprocity. Imperceptibly, by the action of many suggestions from different quarters, men have of late contracted or recovered a habit of interplanetary recollectiveness in their thoughts about things—a habit of consciously extending their regards to the other bodies of our solar systems, and feeling as if somehow they were not to go for nothing in the calculation of the Earth’s interests and fortunes …’.43 A world of such enormities of space and time, and which, through the workings of entropy, was bound to end in dissolution, was a world that made human history insignificant; a universe that consisted only of energy, continually in transformation, was a universe which could not be portrayed within the conventions of representational realism, whether historical or novelistic. To Masson, the romance genre of Shakespeare’s late plays was far superior to modern realism precisely because it conveyed how illusory was the world portrayed by realism.
In order to chart what was beyond history, Scottish writers took to exploring alternatives to realism. Amongst the earliest is George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1856), which, through fantasy, creates an image of the world as revealed by thermodynamics, a world of energy, constantly changing shape:
Looking out of bed, I saw that a large green marble basin, in which I was wont to wash, and which stood on a low pedestal of the same material in a corner of my room, was overflowing like a spring; and that a stream of clear water was running over the carpet, all the length of the room, finding its outlet I knew not where. And, stranger still, where this carpet, which I had myself designed to imitate a field of grass and daisies, bordered the course of the little stream, the grass-blades and daisies seemed to wave in a tiny breeze that followed the water’s flow; while under the rivulet they bent and swayed with every motion of the changeful current, as if they were about to dissolve with it, and, forsaking their fixed form, become fluent as the waters.44
While MacDonald discovers in this world of shape-changing the possibilities of redemption, its dark alternative in relentless determinism was to be the focus of James ‘B. V.’ Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874):
All substance lives and struggles evermore
Through countless shapes continually at war,
By countless interactions interknit:
If one is born a certain day on earth,
All times and forces tended to that birth,
Not all the world could change or hinder it.45
This is a world to which ‘realism’ is utterly inadequate, and which adopts the tenor of biblical prophecy to deny the Bible’s authority:
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: On the left
The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft:
There stopped and burned out black, except a rim
A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim.46
In this ‘hell’ Thomson’s speaker finds that ‘I was twain,/Two selves distinct that cannot join again’,47 a theme that was to be taken up by Robert Louis Stevenson in another ‘fantasy’ driven by the new energy physics of shape-changing, The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886). Jekyll’s discovery of his other self in the demonic Hyde seems to have allowed him to defeat the laws of thermodynamics, as well as those of morality, since he can expend energy on committing crimes as Hyde, while being able to return to an undiminished version of himself as Jekyll. But Hyde’s dissipation of energy gradually turns Jekyll into ‘a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak in both body and mind’.48 The complex sequence of narrators in Stevenson’s tale, ending with Jekyll’s own first-hand account of his destruction, dramatically underlines the overwhelming of enlightened modernity by an irresistible darkness: ‘The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been rekindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in nightmare.’49
Stevenson theorized the significance of this anti-realist dimension of his art in his ‘Humble Remonstrance’, an essay that took issue with Henry James’s conception of the novel in ‘The Art of Fiction’. Stevenson wrote:
Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.50
This resistance to realism is as evident in the ‘supernatural tales’ of a writer such as Margaret Oliphant, much of whose massive output held itself within the limits of nineteenth-century realism, as in the self-conscious fictions of J. M. Barrie, such as Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900). It was with Peter Pan (1906), however, that Barrie invented a style that could both mock the conventions of realism and reveal truths unimaginable within those conventions. Peter, as eternal as an atom and as forgetful of the history of its transformations, is a primitive force of energy that continually disrupts and undermines the order on which modern civilization believes itself to be based. The very fact that Peter Pan is a children’s story represents a refusal of the teleologies of adulthood, as well as of the historical purposes of the imperial world mocked by the pirates and Indians of the Never Land.
Pan’s name suggests, of course, that he belongs, at least in part, to the world of the primitive, a world that was being charted during the course of Barrie’s career in J. G. Frazer’s immense study of primitive mythology, The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890 and, by 1915, extending to twelve. Now that its anthropology has been discounted, Frazer’s work stands as a great imaginative construction—a vast detective novel tracking down the key to humanity’s most primitive instincts. And what it attests to is the power of forces that continually undermine progressive history: there is, Frazer insists:
a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society … unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture…. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.51
The forces of savagery are massive, indeed almost geological, the forces of progressive history feeble, a fragile surface that will not sustain us. It is a juxtaposition that was to find literary form in the first major Scottish work of the twentieth century, George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1900), for it juxtaposes a ‘realistic’ narrative—indeed, a narrative designed to oppose the ‘myths’ of Kailyard fiction by the intensity of its realistic portrayal of the downfall of the Gourlay family—with a structure based on Greek tragedy, as though the earliest form through which humanity emerged from savagery continues to shape the lives of those who live within the modern savagery of capitalism. Frazer’s juxtaposition of the ahistorical primitive with a feeble modern history become, in House with the Green Shutters, the juxtaposition of the ahistorical truth of primitive tragedy with the ‘progressive’ history of modern economic development in a small Scottish village. Scotland is a place where the forces from beyond the boundaries of history insistently reveal themselves to be more powerful than the history that people assume is the ultimate force reshaping their society: progressive history turns ineluctably into ancient tragedy. Frazer’s vision of a modernity undermined by the primitive would continue to shape Scottish novelists’ account of the world throughout the twentieth century—as late as 1991, Allan Massie was to invoke it in The Sins of the Father, his novel of Nazi survivors in Argentina in the 1960s.
In Neil Gunn’s The Serpent (1943), the central character, Tom, is sent to an apprenticeship in Glasgow, where he is introduced to the evolutionary theories that he had only ever heard mocked in his highland home. At a public meeting to which he goes with his room-mate Dougal, he listens to a speaker who extols the virtues of Robert Owen’s socialism:
The speaker had touched on ‘what is called progress, the progress of the machine age, of capital, of world-wide expansion. When we come down to human essentials, what does this progress amount to?’
‘Progress and poverty,’ responded Dougal …52
Scotland in 1914 was one of the most industrialized countries in the world and if, as Marxism and socialism proclaimed, the world of the future was to belong to the working classes, then Scotland ought to have been in the vanguard of progress towards that goal. Many of its leading writers of the 1920s and 1930s certainly believed so, and adapted their art to communist and socialist purposes. ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ moved from the literary Scots of his early poetry to a celebration of the demotic of factory workers:
The haill shop’s dumfoonderin’
To a stranger like me.
Second nature to you: you’re perfectly able
To think, speak and see
Apairt frae the looms, tho’ to some
That doesna sae easily come.
Lenin was like that wi’ workin’ class life,
At hame wi’t a’.
His fause movements couldna been fewer,
The best weaver Earth ever saw.
A’ he’d to dae wi’ moved intact
Clean, clear, and exact.53
Lewis Grassic Gibbon Leslie Mitchell, too, reshaped his Scots to an urban vernacular that celebrated the revolutionary potential of the working classes:
… what was wrong up there, why had they stopped? Chaps cried Get on with it, Jim, what’s wrong? Syne the news came down […] the police were turning the procession back down into Paldy by way of the wynds. It wasn’t to be let near the Town Hall at all, the Provost had refused to see them or Trease.
And then you heard something rising about you that hadn’t words, the queerest-like sound, you stared at your mates, a thing like a growl, low and savage, the same in your throat. And then you were thrusting forward like others—Never mind the Bulgars, they can’t stop our march!54
And a working-class dramatist like Joe Corrie presented, in plays such as In Time o’ Strife (1927), the conflicts of strike-torn working-class communities.
As the political impulse promised by socialism stalled, however, under the impact of the Depression of the 1930s, and the gradual ebbing away of Britain’s imperial power, urban Scotland became a place seemingly abandoned by historical progress. In the imagination of its writers, Glasgow, once the workshop of the world and exemplar of municipal socialism, became a city without purpose. The transformation is traced by Edwin Muir in his Autobiography (1940; 1954): at the age of twenty-one, recovered from the illness that had first accompanied his family’s transfer from Orkney to Glasgow, he is converted to socialism in an ‘emotional transmutation’ that was ‘a recapitulation of my first conversion at fourteen’;55 after the First World War, however, Glasgow has become the antithesis of such spiritual transmutation:
I was returning in a tramcar from my work; the tramcar was full and very hot; the sun burned through the glass on the backs of necks, shoulders, faces, trousers, skirts, hands, all stacked there impartially. Opposite me was sitting a man with a face like a pig’s, and as I looked at him in the oppressive heat the words came into my mind, ‘That is an animal.’ I looked round me at the other people in the tramcar; I was conscious that something had fallen from them and from me; and with a sense of desolation I saw that they were all animals … my mind saw countless other tramcars where animals sat or got on or off with mechanical dexterity … and I realized that in all Glasgow, in all Scotland, in all the world, there was nothing but millions of such creatures living an animal life and moving towards an animal death as towards a great slaughter-house.56
Despite works that present the life of middle-class Glasgow, such as Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! (1920), and novels such as Dot Allan’s Hunger March (1934) and George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1936), which juxtapose working-class life with the lives of middle-class Glaswegians, the slums of Glasgow come to be the intransigent image of the nation’s decay. In The Changeling (1958) by Robin Jenkins, the world of the slums is one where:
Newly-born babies in their prams, if washed, looked pathetically alien there; but in a short time, in two years or less, they had begun to acquire the characteristics which would enable them to survive amidst that dirt and savagery, but which naturally detracted a great deal from their original beauty. By manhood or womanhood they were as irretrievably adapted to their environment as the tiger to his.57
In Jenkins’s Fergus Lamont (1979), the nation’s delusions about its romantic identity are shown both to be born in the slums and to founder in them. Glasgow becomes an unchanging hell, the ironic endpoint of a nation that had believed itself possessed of a religion of the elect. It is the world in which Alasdair Gray was to enmesh Duncan Thaw in Lanark in 1981, with the revelation that ‘Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others’ and ‘history was an infinitely diseased worm without head or tail, beginning or end’.58
To escape the dehumanization to which history had brought its cities, Scottish writers returned regularly to Scotland’s countryside and to places where a sense of community could be rebuilt. In Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse (1930), Garry Forbes, back wounded from the hell of the Western Front, and considering returning there, looks out over the Aberdeenshire farmland where his aunt lives:
Mrs Hunter sailed across the stackyard in a stream of hens. And on his steep, thin field Francie Ferguson walked, casting the seed. It was his moment of dignity. Clumsy, ridiculous, sport of a woman’s caprice and a byword in men’s jesting, as he cast the seed with the free ample movement of the sower Francie had a grandeur more than natural. The dead reached through him to the future. Continuity was in his gait. His thin upland soil, ending in stony crests of whin and heather, was transfigured by the faith that used it, he himself by the sower’s poise that symbolised his faith.59
In Magnus Merriman (1934), Eric Linklater mocked the politics of the 1930s and the literary nationalism of his contemporaries before having his protagonist retreat to Orkney where he discovers ‘that his life was kin to all the life around him, even to the beasts that grazed in the fields, and to the very fields themselves’.60 The same act of return is undertaken by several of Neil Gunn’s protagonists, most notably by Kenn in Highland River (1937), for whom the journey home is also the recovery of the memory of the folk that modernity had tried to erase:
In the last few moments before he had risen he had seen himself walking towards the mountain, much as, in the last year or two, he had seen the little figure of the boy Kenn adventuring into the strath. What older mind, in this curious regress, was now the observer might be difficult to say, for its apprehension seemed profounder than individual thought. Pict, and Viking too, and Gael; the folk through immense eras of time…61
Since modernity has, seemingly, no future, recovery can only be by way of the past, and that return to the past as the beginning of recuperation from a failed present is typical of much Scottish writing from the 1920s to the 1950s. Edwin Muir himself began to overcome his Glasgow experiences by recollecting his childhood in Orkney and infusing its landscape with symbols made significant by his experience of psychoanalysis; Sorley Maclean’s poetry in Gaelic, by its use of a language being steadily eroded by modernity, represented a recuperation of the past that parallels the content of poems such as ‘Hallaig’:62
Tha iad fhathast ann a Hallaig. |
They are still in Hallaig |
chunnacas na mairbh beò. |
the dead have been seen alive. |
Na fir nan laighe air an lianaig |
The men lying on the green |
Similarly, the novels, stories, and poems of Iain Crichton Smith turn insistently on the recovery from the destructive impact of Calvinisim on both Gaelic culture and modern life, as do the works of George Mackay Brown, set on an Orkney whose traditional culture stands still in defiant opposition to modernity. Even as urbane a poet as Norman MacCaig discovers that poetry is insistently a return to rural, Gaelic-speaking Scotland: ‘… no need to invoke/That troublemaker, Memory, she’s everywhere’.63
This profound distrust of the course taken by Scottish history had implications for the genres that Scottish writers could use: a ‘realism’ which could document Scotland’s hell would also be submissive to it, so that those who wished to resist modernity required a style that could challenge accepted reality. J. M. Barrie’s exploitation of the supernatural in plays such as Mary Rose (1920), in which the eponymous heroine disappears on a Scottish island to return twenty-five years later unchanged, and in his novella, Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1931), in which a nineteenth-century minister meets and falls in love with an eighteenth-century Jacobite woman, drew on a long tradition of Scottish writings about encounters with the supernatural, not to mention with the Devil—as in Burns’s ‘Tam O’ Shanter’—and these were traditions that were to be regularly revisited by Scottish writers. James Bridie (Osborne Henry Mavor) drew on this tradition in Mr Bolfry (1943), a play in which the Devil (Mr Bolfry) is conjured up in the house of a minister of the Church (Mr McCrimmon); McCrimmon, tall and grey, and Bolfry, elfin, small, and dark, are distorted mirror images of one another:
BOLFRY: |
I have told you, Sir. My name is Bolfry. In the days of sanity and belief, it was a name not unknown to men of your cloth. |
McCRIMMON: |
You are dressed like a minister. Where is your Kirk? |
BOLFRY: |
In Hell. |
McCRIMMON: |
Are there Kirks in Hell? |
BOLFRY: |
Why not? Would you deny us the consolations of religion?64 |
Hell is no longer the ‘other place’ but this place in the present. It is a theme taken up in Muriel Spark’s Hothouse by the East River (1973), in which the ghosts of people killed in the Second World War continue to live on in New York in the 1960s, a hell of secular culture where ‘there isn’t any war and peace any more, no good and evil, no communism, no capitalism, no fascism’,65 but where everyone ‘missed out the mortality problem’.66 Characters in Spark’s novels are regularly visited by the supernatural—Mrs Hogg in The Comforters (1957), who disappears out of existence; the voice on the telephone informing the characters of Momento Mori (1959) ‘remember you must die’; Margaret Mutchie in Symposium (1990), who is always close to suspicious deaths and whose Uncle Magnus is like a character out of an old ballad, suffering a ‘divine affliction’ that enables him to ‘prognosticate and foreshadow’.67
Such supernatural intrusions into plots are echoed by characters who gain access to alternative dimensions of existence—like Art and Old Hector in Neil Gunn’s The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944), in which, having fallen in a river and nearly drowned, the two main characters arrive in a parallel universe dominated by a local version of the totalitarianism then threatening the world. Fantasy mirror images of, or alternatives to, Scotland’s failed present allowed Scottish writers to create significant narratives from a history from which narrative seemed to have been evacuated: in Alasdair’s Gray’s Lanark (1981), Duncan Thaw’s life in Glasgow in the 1950s is continued in fantasy form by the life of ‘Lanark’, who inhabits, first, a Glasgow full of creatures turning into dragons and then a Scotland being literally consumed and turned into energy for others’ use by an international conspiracy of the supposedly enlightened; while in Poor Things (1992) nineteenth-century Glasgow becomes the scene of a double reworking of the Frankenstein myth, when a humanly engineered doctor revivifies a suicide by grafting into her body the brain of her own unborn child. These fantasy versions of the real reveal what realism itself cannot capture: the structure of a worldwide capitalism that deprives people of their humanity. As Scotland was overwhelmed in the 1980s by the effects of ‘Thatcherite’ policies that destroyed its traditional industries, such fantasies became the medium through which Scotland’s incapacity to control its history could be envisaged: Iain Banks’s The Bridge (1986) takes place in a city inhabiting a structure like the Forth Bridge, whose ends are so distant they have never been seen; and in A. L. Kennedy’s So I am Glad (1995) an unemployed drifter turns out to be Cyrano de Bergerac, returned to reinhabit the world and still carrying with him the consciousness of an earlier century. Alasdair Gray’s A History Maker (1994) ironizes the whole tradition of the historical novel by envisaging a future society in which men are restricted to playing war games instead of making real war, and in which history has, effectively, been brought to an end, returning us to the cyclic world of oral culture from which the eighteenth-century literati had sought to escape.
In 1961 Ian Hamilton Finlay published a small collection of poems written in phonetic representation of Glasgow dialect, Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, haw, an Inseks, an aw, a Fush (1961). The adoption of Glasgow dialect was a direct challenge to the principles of MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance movement, and to those who continued to develop its commitment to a highly literary Scots, such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, whose Carotid Cornucopious (1947) and Under the Eildon Tree (1948) represent the major achievements of the ‘second generation’ of the Scottish Renaissance. Despite the fact that there was no agreed standard for the representation of Scots in written form—efforts at agreement in the 1940s came to nothing—it was nonetheless accepted that Scots as a literary language was quite different from Scots as a spoken vernacular. Hamilton Finlay, however, chose to emphasize the phonetics of contemporary Glasgow speech, an example that was to be taken up decisively in the work of Tom Leonard:
right inuff
ma language is disgraceful
ma maw tellt mi
ma teacher tellt mi
thi doactir tellt mi
thi priest tellt mi
…
jist aboot ivry book ah oapnd tellt mi
even thi introduction tay the Scottish National Dictionary tellt mi68
The refusal to conform to the style of the Scottish National Dictionary and instead to put trust in the value of contemporary Scots went against the whole tradition of modern writing in Scots. Leonard’s poem concludes:
ach well
all livin language is sacred
fuck thi lohta thim
The language we ‘live in’ (livin) is a living language: it is sacred even if it includes vocabulary (‘fuck’) that is unacceptable in ‘educated’ society. For Leonard this was a poetry that emphasized ‘sound’—the cover of his Intimate Voices (1984) collection offers a poem which transforms ‘in the beginning was the word’ in ten lines into ‘nthibiginninwuzthiwurd’, before declaring ‘in the beginning was the sound’—but its impact on the eye was just as crucial. Words became a physical presence sculpted onto the page, defying the ease with which the eye normally scans them and forcing the reader to explore their physical as well as their aural structure. It was a recognition that was to lead Hamilton Finlay towards concrete poetry—in which language was exploited for its visual potential—and then into the placement of language in a physical environment with which it would interact. At Stonypath, in the Pentlands, Finlay created a garden that celebrated the intersection of sculpted language and planned nature and which became one of the major achievements of Scottish culture in the last half of the twentieth century.
The interaction of vernacular language with its physical representation, however, was a key element in the innovations of Scottish writing in this period, exemplified in the huge variety of Edwin Morgan’s experimental work, such as ‘Canedolia’:
oa! hoy! awe! ba! mey!
who saw?
rhu saw rum. garve saw smoo. nigg saw tain. lairg saw lagg.
rigg saw eigg. largs saw haggs. tongue saw luss. mull saw yell.69
The poem foregrounds Scotland as a soundscape rather than a landscape, one where sounds turn into perceptions (‘tongue saw luss’) and perceptions into sounds (‘mull saw yell’). Scotland becomes in Morgan’s poetry, as in Finlay’s garden, a crossing place: a crossing place of languages, of cultures, of discourses, of real and unreal(ized) encounters.
The defamiliarization of an apparently banal world that these crossings produced was to inspire a generation of Scottish writers to experiment both with the physical representation of language and with the complexities produced by the interaction of a local culture with a globalized world. In James Kelman’s novels, for instance, each of his central characters appears to create a unique linguistic world, operating by its own rules and in defiance of those of ‘standard English’:
But it couldnay get worse than this. He was really fuckt now. This was the dregs; he was at it. He had fucking reached it now man the fucking dregs man the pits, the fucking black fucking limboland, purgatory; that’s what it was like, purgatory, where all ye can do is think. Think. That’s all ye can do. Ye just fucking think about what ye’ve done and what ye’ve no fucking done; ye cannay look at nothing ye cannay see nothing it’s just a total fucking disaster area, yer mind, yer fucking memories, a disaster area.70
This demotic declaration of independence was to unleash a torrent of writing in Scots, and an acceptance of the Scottish voice, the contemporary Scottish voice, as the appropriate literary medium for Scottish writers. Liz Lochhead’s translations of Molière into Scots, together with plays such as Mary Queen of Scots Got her Head Chopped Off (1989), translate historical events and works into a contemporary idiom, while John Byrne’s television dramas Tutti Frutti (1987) and Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990) play similar games between the Scots of contemporary urban Scotland and the American culture which saturates its media, so that the American ‘Gene’ can be misheard as Scottish ‘Jean’:
DORWOOD: |
(loudly) There’s my redundancy money off the rigs inside the Gene Autry wireless, tell her. |
TAMARA: |
(to engineer) Something about Jean, is that what you got? |
ENGINEER: |
He’s just after tellin’ us the wife’s name was Cissie, what one we supposed to bring back, the wife or the fancy wumman? |
DORWOOD: |
(loudly) I was savin’ up to take her an’ … I was savin’ up to take us to Nashville, if she asks you.71 |
Scotland has become a place where translation between cultures and languages is not an afterthought—it is fundamental to every linguistic act: Scotland is a place where language is so profuse that it continually mistakes its object, producing endless confusion but, at the same time, a chaotic creative vitality. The ‘livin language’ of the immediacy of the voice and the apparently permanent structures of type intersect to produce a unique linguistic environment, both contemporary and yet rooted in a long tradition of literary independence. No one would have predicted, in 1980, that a novel written in a series of Edinburgh dialects could have been a literary let alone a popular success, but Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), rendered in the language of Edinburgh’s working-class drug culture, was to be, like the film based on it, an international best-seller.
In the 1970s and 1980s the possibility that Scottish culture was facing a ‘doomsday’ annihilation seemed to some all too imminent.72 An increasingly strident assertion of specifically English cultural values by influential magazines such as P N Review, and by English politicians who regarded the ‘failure’ of the devolution referendum of 1979 as an end to the issue of a separate Scottish Parliament, suggested that an identifiably Scottish culture was no longer one of the possibilities of the modern world. In 1984, however, in his Sonnets from Scotland, Edwin Morgan began to envisage a series of alternative Scotlands, both past and future, that symbolized the persistence and vitality of the culture. One of them brings together Scotland’s greatest geologist, James Hutton, and greatest poet, Robert Burns, by way of Burns’s evocative folk lyric, ‘A Red, Red Rose’, with its strange temporal perspective: ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,/And the rocks melt wi’ the sun’:
James Hutton that true son of fire who said
to Burns ‘Aye, man, the rocks melt wi the sun’
was sure the age of reason’s time was done:
what but imagination could have read
granite boulders back to their molten roots?
And how far back was back, and how far on
would basalt still be basalt, iron iron?
would second seas re-drown the fossil brutes?
‘We find no vestige of a beginning,
no prospect of an end.’73
The final lines quote Hutton’s conclusion to his account of the earth’s geological processes in Theory of the Earth (1785), but in the context of the political failures of the 1970s and 1980s, their assertion became a reaffirmation of the value of the nation’s literary history, a literary history to which Burns continued to be central and that refused to acknowledge the ‘prospect of an end’.
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Craig, Cairns, The Modern Scottish Novel (Edinburgh, 1999).
—— ed., The History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1987–9).
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