Albyn; or, Scotland and the futureMacDiarmid, Hugh
History
Albyn; or, Scotland and the future
MacDiarmid, Hugh
Scotland
“We should be the last to assert that there are no aspects of the
smaller nationalism worth conserving,” says another opponent; “there
are many, but the best of them are alive and effective in Scotland
to-day, and they have no necessary connection with the structure of
Government. But Scotland, without losing her sense of herself as a
Scottish nationality, has attained to a full and complete sense
of a larger nationality, and she is not going to throw off that
sense of partnership in larger nationality under the leadership of
archaic and thrown-back minds, all of them belonging to the largely
denationalized region of Clydeside.” Now the fact of the matter is
that no valuable aspect of “the smaller nationalism” is permitted to
function, except under extraordinary handicaps, by the conditions of
progressive Anglicization (in violation of even such safeguarding
clauses as the Treaty of Union contained), which have increasingly
dominated Scotland during the past hundred years. Scotland has
ceased to hold any distinctive place in the political or cultural
map of Europe. The centralization of book-publishing and journalism
in London—the London monopoly of the means of publicity—has reduced
Scottish arts and letters to shadows of their former or potential
selves, qualitatively beneath contempt in comparison with the
distinctive arts and letters of any other country in Europe.
There is no Scottish writer to-day of the slightest international
standing. Scotland connotes to the world “religious” bigotry, a
genius for materialism, “thrift,” and, on the social and cultural
side, Harry Lauderism and an exaggerated sentimental nationalism,
which is obviously a form of compensation for the lack of a
realistic nationalism. No race of men protest their love of country
so perfervidly as the Scots—no country in its actual conditions
justifies any such protestations less. Every recent reference book in
any department of human activity shows the position to which Scotland
has degenerated. “Europa, 1926” (although it is presumably designed
for British readers) lists contemporary Czech and Bulgarian poets,
litterateurs, musicians, etc. (the bare names—which convey nothing!)
but it excludes Scotland completely. Ireland, on the contrary, has a
section to itself, and a special article on the boundary question.
Professor Pittard’s “Race and History,” doing justice to every other
people under the sun, deals only very slightly and imperfectly with
Scotland, and fails to take account of any of the newer material,
_e.g._, the works of Tocher. Like examples can be multiplied in every
direction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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