But it goes far deeper than language, this “Caledonian antisyzygy,” and music in the long run may utilize it more fully and finely than literature. It is here that I join issue again with my essential theme—to find what I have said concerning the persistence of this queer Scots strain extraordinarily exemplified in modern music in the work of Erik Satie. Satie’s middle name was Leslie; his mother was a Scotswoman. Satie was a “musical joker.” His most distinctive and important work was a species of fantastic experimental clowning, hardening later into satire. His work and his methods should have the special consideration of every Scottish artist—every musician in particular—who is puzzled as to how he may profitably exploit the peculiarities of Scottish psychology of which he is conscious. Paul Landormy calls him “a freakish musician, more inventor than creator, the composer of ‘Pieces in the Form of a Pear,’ of the ‘Bureaucratic Sonata,’ and other fantastic products of a whimsical yet quite elegantly witty imagination,” but—and this is the vital thing—he admits that “he furnished certain elements of that new language which the composer of _Pelleas_ used for loftier ends.” This is no little understatement of Satie’s significance. Dr Eaglefield Hull says: “This kind of musical irony is the most individual and personal of all types of art. The composer writes for a few detached individual people, who would scoff at the rest of humanity. Only very ‘superior’ people can appreciate such irony, which passes from an elegant wit to a brutal sarcasm.” But he goes on to say: “Historically Satie was of immense importance. The music on Satie’s twelve pages (of his first work, _Sarabandes_, 1887) is even a greater landmark than either Debussy’s or Chabrier’s work. The ‘diaphony’ of his sevenths and ninths was to become part and parcel of the harmonic decoration of Debussy and the Impressionists.... He was the father of atonality in music. Side by side with all his strangeness and boldness are passages of the most amazing commonplaces, which are difficult to explain except as satirical allusions.” Exactly! What is this but the “Caledonian Antisyzygy” precisely as Professor Gregory Smith describes it, but manifesting itself in modern music to ultimately triumphant effect. There is no need, then, for Dr Hull to say “His father was French and his mother Scottish. We wonder to which source his outstanding characteristic of humour is due.” Surely it is along similar lines in Scotland itself that our difficult national characteristics may yet be turned to musical account and make the basis of a new technique, at once completely modern yet intimately related to the whole history of Scots psychology and conjoining in the closest fashion the artists we are about to become, if the Scottish Renaissance realizes its objectives, with the Auld Makars and the ballad makers whose achievements we have yet to parallel and continue.