Albyn; or, Scotland and the futureMacDiarmid, Hugh
History
Albyn; or, Scotland and the future
MacDiarmid, Hugh
Scotland
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.” They were very lukewarm Home Rulers. A short
experience of Westminster transformed them completely. They found
the vote of the majority of the Scottish electorate systematically
vetoed by an English majority, and saw how Scottish affairs were
treated in the House of Commons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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