Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 1:32:27 GMT 1
Christopher Harvie examines Scottish cultural identity since the Act of Union, and argues that writers and intellectuals have been the real keepers of the national flame.
At the beginning of the 1997 general election campaign in Scotland, the Scottish National Party’s delegates were told to ‘play down the kilted image’. This surprised no one. The same advice was given seventy years earlier to the infant National Party of Scotland by its president, ‘Don Roberto’ Cunninghame-Graham. This was odd counsel coming from perhaps the most flamboyant MP ever -- laird, essayist, gaucho cowboy, and socialist veteran of the Bloody Sunday riots in Trafalgar Square in 1887. But Don Roberto’s career and views emphasised the gulf between the popular image of the country and the ideas and ambitions of Scottish political activists.
‘Streitbar [quarrelsome]und intellektuell’ was how a German commentator, Reiner Luyken of the newspaper Die Zeit in 1992, described the writers, thinkers and artists who kept Scottish national identity alive through the three hundred years of union. It is perhaps apt that the world’s first purpose-built poetry library preceded the parliament building at Edinburgh’s Holyrood. The intellectuals’ collective shift from cultural to political nationalism in the twentieth century underlies the success of Europe’s most legalistic autonomy movement, with a ‘civic’ ethos far removed from the simplicities of ethnic nationalism.
But what about Braveheart --- the kilted image pur sang? Not a few observers have actually attributed SNP success to ‘the Braveheart factor’ put in play by Mel Gibson’s Hollywood version of the medieval wars of independence. All Scottish parties clambered onto the William Wallace bandwaggon, as they had done in the Unionist 1860s when a spiky monument was raised above the site of his greatest victory at Stirling. In 1996 it was the Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, who undid Edward I’s work by repatriating the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey to Edinburgh Castle. His MPs were wiped out in Scotland a few months later.
The intellectual and middle-class Nationalists who helped eradicate the Scottish Tories in 1997 kept Braveheart at a distance. In fact, the gains of the SNP in the May 1997 general election were slight and in the referenda of that September the Scots swing to home rule was outdone in Wales. But ideas of Britishness were also waning fast, not least because of the commitment of a Scots intelligentsia traditionally stretched between local loyalties and global ideals, which proved peculiarly resistant to traditional analyses of nationalism.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci -- whose work influenced such Scots writers as Hamish Henderson and Tom Nairn -- suggested the useful categories of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals. The first are the actors in industrial transformation -- managers, technicians or economists -- while the ‘traditional’ intellectuals include lawyers, clergy, and the military.
Gramsci and later the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter were fascinated with the way British capitalism favoured the ‘traditional’ intelligentsia. But did they know how intellectuals differed in each of the nations of the British Isles, while being open to offers from the English elite? Gramsci took an agreed ‘nation’ for granted, and also a consciousness of the various roles that intellectuals might take, but in Scotland both have been problematic. The notorious ‘perfervid ingenuity of the Scots’ had a cosmopolitan dimension long before the Act of Union in 1707, and Scots intellectuals of all stripes have taken a distinctive role in the ‘civic’ nation which has provoked both remarkable cultural achievement and debilitating political conflict.
Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), philosopher-statesman and defender of the old Scots parliament, said he would rather write the ballads of a nation than its laws. If small nations, as the Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams has noted, ‘grow in the interstices of other nations’ histories’, such an exercise of imagination is necessary to enable that growth. History was important to the medieval Scots in creating an ideology of nationhood. What we know of the Celtic Christian period suggests that the mobile and talented clergy who survived the devastating raids of the Vikings helped the Scots unify against this threat by creating a national memory through myths of their origins and legends of their ancient kings.
When, later, the nation had to come to terms with the Normans to the south, the nation again called on this proto-intelligentsia.
The wars of independence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were less about ‘Bravehearts’ than a movement in the complex dance of the nations of the British islands. The Scots’ essentially parliamentary idea of the community of the realm might have been compatible with an Anglo-Scottish dual monarchy -- even that grand statement of Scottish freedom, the Declaration of Arbroath, (1320) has Anglo-Norman roots in the thought of John of Salisbury (d. 1180), the associate of Thomas Becket. However, Edward I’s policies of absolute centralisation -- dramatised by his massive, state-of-the-art Welsh castles – provoked national resistance, and England was not powerful enough to exert its will against the Scots and their European allies, the Papacy, the Hanseatic League or France. The need to maintain these links stimulated expatriate canon and civil lawyers from the first European universities to defend the Scots cause in Paris or Rome. To do this they needed backing from powerful Scottish institutions -- burghs, Kirk and law - which thereby developed their own European interests.
This late-medieval cosmopolitanism may explain Scotland’s overproduction and export of a traditional intelligentsia: the military, clerical or trading expatriates who related their national spirit to a European canon, through scholastic philosophy, the lyrics of the Makars (court poets) and the Renaissance Latinity of George Buchanan (1506-82), the greatest classicist of his age. The Scots kept an anxious eye on English, European and later global issues -- political and cultural -- and another, more acquisitive, on opportunities for their commercial exploitation. Though Scotland’s ‘community of the realm’ was an early example of ‘popular’ nationalism, the country was riven with complex divisions between Lowland and Highland, Gaelic and Scots, urban and rural, seaboard and landward.
This, perhaps as much as the ramifying trading links with the ‘Auld Ally’ France, Calvinist-commercial Holland, Scandinavia and the Baltic, meant that by the eighteenth century there were consistent appeals to Scottish intellectuals to play more than one role: to be Jacobite and Jacobin; cavalier and Calvinist; Pole or Russian or Finn and Scot. The philosopher Immanuel Kant of Königsberg was proud of his Angus family roots; Norway’s great dramatist Henrik Ibsen always insisted he was of Scots descent. Scots intellectuals were also ‘stretched’ between their European political allies and ideologies and their articulacy in English. Between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Scotland was arguably the home of English literature -- with Dunbar, Montgomerie and Henryson. The Scottish Reformation was led by intellectuals ultra-radical by European standards, but it faced Erasmus’s collaborator John Mair (1470-1550) with the problem of ‘placing’ Scotland in a divided Europe. Faced with Catholic France as an occupying power, the Scots had, after 1560, to settle for Mair’s idea of an English alliance (though had the Calvinist French Huguenots won the French wars of religion it might have been another matter).
The result was another lengthy power-struggle within the archipelago, marked by a salutary spell of direct rule under Cromwell. The 1707 Union produced a rough-and-ready coexistence between the national cultures, through the regularisation of law and Kirk, banking and education as semi-independent Scots institutions. Debate continued about the future of the nation and the means of maintaining its identity.
The result was that, crucially, it was the intelligentsia, rather than land or capital, that determined the country’s distinctiveness. The ‘traditional’ intellectuals transformed themselves into the ‘organic’ intelligentsia of capitalism, chiefly through the operations of groups of teachers, ‘improvers’, and journalists. Men like Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson worried about backwardness -- and indeed played down much of Scottish history on this score -- but also about the ‘luxury and corruption’ of the new commercial order (merchants rigging the market, workers turning into machines). Culture was their elixir, buttressed by industrial success and political patronage through access to rich imperial pickings.
The North, still populous, Gaelic- speaking and inclined to Catholicism or Episcopalianism, was a danger until 1746 saw Jacobitism blown to pieces on Culloden Moor. The Highlands thereafter were turned from a political menace into merely a manpower resource and cultural artefact. Providing colonists and soldiers, they were also ‘symbolically appropriated’ by a Scotland run by lawyers, clergymen and landowners. Paradoxically James MacPherson’s Ossian (1761), a mixture of the oral tradition and pseudo-epic, convinced European Romantics of the unity of folk, speech and land, just as the Scots themselves deserted this triad for history-less ‘improvement’: the model village, the ‘muckle ferm’, the squares and quadrants of Edinburgh’s New Town.
Linda Colley’s influential book Britons (1992) sees the Union cemented by Protestantism, empire and war. But this underestimates national continuities, the growing power of economics, and ‘print capitalism’. The Scottish literati’s closeness to industry and trade enabled it to incubate capitalist institutions while marketing an artful Scots romanticism. Walter Scott put the transition ‘from status to contract’ into the canny wordplay of the Glasgow Bailie Nicoll Jarvie in Rob Roy (1818):
But I maun hear naethin about honour - we ken naething here but aboot credit. Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street. But Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play.
Yet Rob Roy’s country, ‘old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago’, could be visited via the Macadam road, the steamboat and above all the printing press. Burns and Scott became precursors of a model European nationalism that came to be expressed through the ballads and the ‘ideal types’ of the historical novels of Balzac, Hauff and Manzoni.
But ‘symbolic appropriation’ had its price: Burns, a thoughtful, well-informed man with a university-level education, was marketed as ‘the heaven-taught ploughman’. Walter Scott’s literary entrepreneurship made him a victim of cyclical economic depression. It wasn’t just that the Scots novel fell out of favour, but industrialisation and the Reform Act of 1832 -- the first destabilising, the second sweeping away the old political order -- menaced the ‘semi-independence’ that had survived since the Union.
Between 1832 and 1843 the intelligentsia lost its role in civil society. Though the late Scots Enlightenment flared up brilliantly in the work of Thomas Carlyle, the real distinctiveness of the country was maimed by the collapse of its major institution, the Kirk. The religious reformer Thomas Chalmers’s ‘popular party’ had seemed poised to take over what was a semi-independent legislature controlling education and poor relief. Instead, in 1843, it quit to form the Free Church, and the Kirk simply stopped working as a political unit. ‘Controversial divinity’ became a battleground for sectarian brawling, which by 1900 bored the Scots as much as it baffled everyone else.
The result of this religious-political setback, coupled with effective economic union through railways and steamers, was a sort of anarchic global-marketism. The character of Scotland became indistinct. The assault of industry on the nation was summed up in the phrase ‘noise and smoky breath’ used of Glasgow. This ‘shock city’ was dynamic but also a sort of internal island: its magnates were almost obsessively ‘organic’ in Gramsci’s sense. They collected, travelled, translated and built eclectically, experimented with collective social reform --- yet allowed two-thirds of the population to live in the worst housing in Europe.
Meanwhile a parallel ‘national’ culture emerged: what Tom Nairn has called ‘the Great Tartan Monster’. In discovering the Highlands in the 1840s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert exploited the power-vacuum in Scotland. ‘Balmorality’ began only months after the railway had reached Aberdeen. Royalty and the threatened Scots nobility allied with the Toryism of Blackwood’s Magazine and scores of terrible architects to usher in a commercialised romanticism: legends of thin red lines and kilted bagpipe-playing heroes of the British Empire came with the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Old Calvinist and new democratic nationalism were alike sidelined. So all those nineteenth-century investments -- courts, schools, barracks, railways -- which marked other European nations were in Scotland financed from imperial, municipal or private funds, and not from the nation’s coffers. One consequence was cosmopolitanism: Scots took their art and social science from France and their philosophy from Germany; they translated Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. Britain’s first performances of Chekhov were in Glasgow; the Scots medical tradition produced Britain’s first psychoanalysts. Outside Europe, Scots who had come to feel awkward as colonial democrats now began to build up governing elites.
There was a brief nationalist eruption in the early 1850s, enough to sanction a sort of imperial civil society with a distinctively Scottish character. The elite now dressed in kilts and lived as draughtily in ‘Scots baronial’ castles, shooting or hooking whatever moved. There was legally-distilled whisky, golf for the bourgeoisie and football for the multitude. Energetic weekly papers, Chartist-Calvinist in origin, carried local news and dialect fiction, and worshipped Gladstone, who was not just Scots but of a useful Lowland-Highland breed. The Burns cult invoked by Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor as prime minister, boomed after the centenary of the Kilmarnock edition of the national poet’s works in 1886. But this cultural nationalism was apolitical and, despite Gladstone’s high-mindedness, hard-nosed commercial above all.
‘The Scots care nothing for things like national flags’, says a character in a nineteenth-century Charles Lever novel; ‘They want only what pays’. But, in imitation of Lever’s Ireland, home rule began to be agitated for, often by Scots who had returned from overseas. By the 1900s the sociologist Patrick Geddes was proclaiming a Scottish Renaissance in Edinburgh, citing the ethical socialism of Ramsay MacDonald and Tom Johnston’s journal Forward, feminism and town planning. He had in mind the painting of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ group, the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and novels such as George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters. In 1911 Glasgow’s third huge exhibition resulted in the founding of a chair in Scottish history at the university.
The phrase ‘Liberal-imperial’ would have captured the ethos of Scots culture in 1914. But a war that saw Scots -- Haig, Bonar Law, the Geddes brothers -- in key positions slaughtered a disproportionate number of their compatriots and distorted their industry: after 1920 ‘the workshop of the world’ soon became ‘that distressed area’. ‘Organic’ cosmopolitanism was sidelined as the new literati turned to nationalism and science while industry crumbled. Responses varied from unionist collectivism to the intellectual nationalism of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ revived by the poet Christopher Grieve: alias ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’. He had several streams running through him, one of them Ireland and the Easter Rising of 1916, where poets had apparently changed a nation. One of the Rising’s executed leaders, the socialist trade unionist James Connolly, was born in Edinburgh and had been the Irish correspondent of Forward, which was baffled by his self-sacrifice; but to younger Scottish socialists like MacDiarmid, politicised by the war and the industrial struggles of the ‘Red Clyde’, Connolly became a hero. An ethnic nation, of the sort which proliferated after Versailles in 1919, was the new goal.
The Renaissance literati, however, were rurally-based, mainly Protestant (or at least ex-Protestant) and aware of a London market. It was John Buchan -- that enigmatic combination of thriller-writer, historian, cultural nationalist and political Conservative -- who launched the movement in his anthology The Northern Muse in 1924, and also helped to publish MacDiarmid’s first verse collection Sangschaw a year later. By the time that MacDiarmid’s epic poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle came out in 1926, however, MacDiarmid was in charge. The pivot of the poem was The Ballad of the General Strike, in which the Scots workers are seen as the scrawny, all-negating thistle, struggling to change into the ‘rose’ of socialist man:
And still it grew till a’ the buss
Was hidden in its flame.
I never saw sae braw a floo’er
As yon thrawn stock became.
And still it grew until it seemed
The haill braid earth had turned
A reid, reid rose that in the lift
Like a ball of fire burned.
MacDiarmid’s political movement came with the ambition of a ‘Lallans’(Lowland Scots dialect) revival, but the Scottish workers failed to match MacDiarmid’s ambitions for them. The General Strike, after all, had rapidly failed. Claiming ‘Anglophobia’ as his hobby, MacDiarmid helped set up the National Party (later the SNP) in 1928 only to see it taken over by a moderate (and deeply unliterary) group under John MacCormick. MacDiarmid used Marxism as a catalyst to release his remarkable poetry, believing also in the then fashionable Social Credit theory as an authentically Scottish economic remedy. Not everyone agreed. His literary ally Lewis Grassic Gibbon dismissed it as ‘childbirth without pain, and, equally intriguingly, without a child’, damned nationalism as reactionary, and small nationalism as worse.
Grassic Gibbon was to produce, in A Scots Quair (1934), writing arguably as powerful as that of Burns and Scott, though his indelible picture of the Mearns, its crofts and peewit-haunted parks and their destruction by war and slump, was written in Welwyn Garden City. The poet Edwin Muir came north in 1935 and declared that fighting fascism was more important than home rule or reviving the Lallans tongue. MacDiarmid never forgave him.
The Renaissance, however, was grit in the Scottish oyster. In 1928 MacDiarmid wrote to Roland Muirhead, the Nationalists’ dour but generous patron, that his ideas would need twenty-five years to work their leaven: for him, an unusually shrewd forecast. But when Muirhead’s faction ousted MacCormick from the leadership of the SNP in 1942 the result --- lengthy committees, pugnacious manifestoes -- was near-paralysis.
Progress came from another angle. As Secretary of State during the Second World War, the Labour party socialist Tom Johnston managed to justify increased administrative devolution to Scotland, using the argument of ‘a Sinn Fein movement coming up’ to get concessions from Churchill. There was, indeed, a Berlin-based radio transmitter, Radio Caledonia, broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Scottish nationalist guise, which lasted from 1940 to 1942, but, more importantly, Scotland had become the reception area for Second Front munitions and a transfer point for Russian supplies, and had to be kept sweet. Nationalism was effectively appeased by the promise of socialist reconstruction, exemplified by Johnston’s creation in 1943 of Scotland’s equivalent of Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hydro Board, to bring electricity to the Highlands.
The SNP won a seat, Motherwell, in the war’s closing weeks, but the nationalist challenge faded in the face of Labour’s crusading zeal and swelling membership. The arts were radical, as Tyrone Guthrie’s revival of Sir David Lindsay’s political morality play The Three Estates (1540) at the Edinburgh Festival of 1948 showed. It was the ex-imperial middle class which now promoted home rule, with MacCormick capitalising on their worries about ‘London centralisation’ with his Scottish Covenant Movement, which gained over two million signatures for a home rule declaration by 1950. He then overshadowed this with the snatching of the Stone of Scone, ancient symbol of Scots kingship, from Westminster on Christmas morning, 1950. The Stone was subsequently found at the Abbey of Arbroath, but not before nationalists such as the folksinger John MacEvoy claimed several replicas had been carved:
So if ever ye come on a Stane wi’ a ring/ Jist sit yirsel’ doon an’ proclaim yirsel’ King.
For there’s nane wud be able to challenge yir claim/ That ye’d croon’t yirsel’ King on the Destiny Stane.
Subsequently, Special Branch agents-provocateurs sought to discredit the nationalists, but the government need not have bothered. The post-war rebuilding of Germany and Japan meant that the heavy industries were enjoying an Indian summer, making the 1950s the most Unionist of decades. The Conservative literary magus T.S. Eliot had even co-opted Scots nationalism, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), as a useful service-motor for British culture: enriching but not threatening. The Scottish literati sulked.
Steel, coal, shipyards and railways declined after the Suez crisis in 1956 but there was still the Labour Party’s option of central planning. However, when this unravelled in the later 1960s the national movement, broader than the SNP and now strengthened by anti-nuclear groups, converts from the declining Communist Party, clergy and environmentalists and both ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals -- started to make the running. In November 1967 the SNP made their first significant electoral breakthrough with a by-election win at Hamilton against an unpopular Labour government -- a feat repeated on a grander scale in 1974 when the party captured eleven seats, and hopes of self-government burned bright. The 1970s were rich in nationalist agitation, but meagre in cultural results -- save for John McGrath’s Marxian pantomime The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil of 1973, provoked by the discovery of huge oil and gas fields in the North Sea. In its Highland circuit it had a vivid propagandist effect, while it also implied that the Left would have to live with nationalism or face the multinationals alone. The decade ended, however, with the tragi-comedy of the 1979 referendum -- in which Scots failed to muster the necessary majority for the Assembly, thereby delaying its advent by twenty years. The same year saw the arrival of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister, her long rule proving increasingly unpopular north of the Border.
‘Then, gentlemen, the cause is lost forever!’ Some commentators echoed Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s ally in Scott’s Redgauntlet. Yet political defeat produced a counter-movement: sober effort was piled into literary and social histories, cross-party campaigns and sustained agitation which produced in 1989 the Scottish Constitutional Convention and an agreed plan for a parliament. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1982), a fantastic vision of a post-industrial, self-destructive Scotland, doomed and cannibalistic, soared into the best-seller lists. Gray’s motto, borrowed from poet Dennis Lee from Canada (a Scots-influenced nation similarly overshadowed by a large neighbour), served as an epigraph for his contemporaries: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation.’
Self-rule became fact between 1997 and 1999. Labour’s general election triumph, which saw a Scotland cleared of all Conservative representation at Westminster for the first time, was followed by a decisive referendum for self rule. But a Lib-Lab victory in the first Scottish parliamentary elections in May 1999 stands in the way of the eventual nationalist goal of outright independence. Today the Scots literati can celebrate -- and warn. One twentieth-century Scots poet, Robert Garioch, nailed the arrogance of all politicians, monarchs or MSPs:
Aince there was a king, wha sat
Scrievin’ this edict in his palace haa’
Til all his folk: ‘Vassals, I tell ye flat
That I am I, and ye are bugger-aa’.
Against this, Walter Scott recorded the Edinburgh folk mourning their parliament: ‘We could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they waur na gude bairns.’ If the MSPs aren’t ‘gude bairns’, the ballad-makers of the nation will be next door in their library, and ready.
For Further Reading:
Michael Lynch, Scotland : A New History (Century, 1991); Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism (Routledge, 1998); William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: an Historic Quest (Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Richard Finlay, Independent and Free (John Donald, 1994); Tom Nairn, The Modern Janus (Verso, 1996).
• Christopher Harvie is Professor of Scottish History at Tubingen University. His most recent book is Travelling Scot (Argyll,1999).
At the beginning of the 1997 general election campaign in Scotland, the Scottish National Party’s delegates were told to ‘play down the kilted image’. This surprised no one. The same advice was given seventy years earlier to the infant National Party of Scotland by its president, ‘Don Roberto’ Cunninghame-Graham. This was odd counsel coming from perhaps the most flamboyant MP ever -- laird, essayist, gaucho cowboy, and socialist veteran of the Bloody Sunday riots in Trafalgar Square in 1887. But Don Roberto’s career and views emphasised the gulf between the popular image of the country and the ideas and ambitions of Scottish political activists.
‘Streitbar [quarrelsome]und intellektuell’ was how a German commentator, Reiner Luyken of the newspaper Die Zeit in 1992, described the writers, thinkers and artists who kept Scottish national identity alive through the three hundred years of union. It is perhaps apt that the world’s first purpose-built poetry library preceded the parliament building at Edinburgh’s Holyrood. The intellectuals’ collective shift from cultural to political nationalism in the twentieth century underlies the success of Europe’s most legalistic autonomy movement, with a ‘civic’ ethos far removed from the simplicities of ethnic nationalism.
But what about Braveheart --- the kilted image pur sang? Not a few observers have actually attributed SNP success to ‘the Braveheart factor’ put in play by Mel Gibson’s Hollywood version of the medieval wars of independence. All Scottish parties clambered onto the William Wallace bandwaggon, as they had done in the Unionist 1860s when a spiky monument was raised above the site of his greatest victory at Stirling. In 1996 it was the Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, who undid Edward I’s work by repatriating the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey to Edinburgh Castle. His MPs were wiped out in Scotland a few months later.
The intellectual and middle-class Nationalists who helped eradicate the Scottish Tories in 1997 kept Braveheart at a distance. In fact, the gains of the SNP in the May 1997 general election were slight and in the referenda of that September the Scots swing to home rule was outdone in Wales. But ideas of Britishness were also waning fast, not least because of the commitment of a Scots intelligentsia traditionally stretched between local loyalties and global ideals, which proved peculiarly resistant to traditional analyses of nationalism.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci -- whose work influenced such Scots writers as Hamish Henderson and Tom Nairn -- suggested the useful categories of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals. The first are the actors in industrial transformation -- managers, technicians or economists -- while the ‘traditional’ intellectuals include lawyers, clergy, and the military.
Gramsci and later the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter were fascinated with the way British capitalism favoured the ‘traditional’ intelligentsia. But did they know how intellectuals differed in each of the nations of the British Isles, while being open to offers from the English elite? Gramsci took an agreed ‘nation’ for granted, and also a consciousness of the various roles that intellectuals might take, but in Scotland both have been problematic. The notorious ‘perfervid ingenuity of the Scots’ had a cosmopolitan dimension long before the Act of Union in 1707, and Scots intellectuals of all stripes have taken a distinctive role in the ‘civic’ nation which has provoked both remarkable cultural achievement and debilitating political conflict.
Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), philosopher-statesman and defender of the old Scots parliament, said he would rather write the ballads of a nation than its laws. If small nations, as the Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams has noted, ‘grow in the interstices of other nations’ histories’, such an exercise of imagination is necessary to enable that growth. History was important to the medieval Scots in creating an ideology of nationhood. What we know of the Celtic Christian period suggests that the mobile and talented clergy who survived the devastating raids of the Vikings helped the Scots unify against this threat by creating a national memory through myths of their origins and legends of their ancient kings.
When, later, the nation had to come to terms with the Normans to the south, the nation again called on this proto-intelligentsia.
The wars of independence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were less about ‘Bravehearts’ than a movement in the complex dance of the nations of the British islands. The Scots’ essentially parliamentary idea of the community of the realm might have been compatible with an Anglo-Scottish dual monarchy -- even that grand statement of Scottish freedom, the Declaration of Arbroath, (1320) has Anglo-Norman roots in the thought of John of Salisbury (d. 1180), the associate of Thomas Becket. However, Edward I’s policies of absolute centralisation -- dramatised by his massive, state-of-the-art Welsh castles – provoked national resistance, and England was not powerful enough to exert its will against the Scots and their European allies, the Papacy, the Hanseatic League or France. The need to maintain these links stimulated expatriate canon and civil lawyers from the first European universities to defend the Scots cause in Paris or Rome. To do this they needed backing from powerful Scottish institutions -- burghs, Kirk and law - which thereby developed their own European interests.
This late-medieval cosmopolitanism may explain Scotland’s overproduction and export of a traditional intelligentsia: the military, clerical or trading expatriates who related their national spirit to a European canon, through scholastic philosophy, the lyrics of the Makars (court poets) and the Renaissance Latinity of George Buchanan (1506-82), the greatest classicist of his age. The Scots kept an anxious eye on English, European and later global issues -- political and cultural -- and another, more acquisitive, on opportunities for their commercial exploitation. Though Scotland’s ‘community of the realm’ was an early example of ‘popular’ nationalism, the country was riven with complex divisions between Lowland and Highland, Gaelic and Scots, urban and rural, seaboard and landward.
This, perhaps as much as the ramifying trading links with the ‘Auld Ally’ France, Calvinist-commercial Holland, Scandinavia and the Baltic, meant that by the eighteenth century there were consistent appeals to Scottish intellectuals to play more than one role: to be Jacobite and Jacobin; cavalier and Calvinist; Pole or Russian or Finn and Scot. The philosopher Immanuel Kant of Königsberg was proud of his Angus family roots; Norway’s great dramatist Henrik Ibsen always insisted he was of Scots descent. Scots intellectuals were also ‘stretched’ between their European political allies and ideologies and their articulacy in English. Between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Scotland was arguably the home of English literature -- with Dunbar, Montgomerie and Henryson. The Scottish Reformation was led by intellectuals ultra-radical by European standards, but it faced Erasmus’s collaborator John Mair (1470-1550) with the problem of ‘placing’ Scotland in a divided Europe. Faced with Catholic France as an occupying power, the Scots had, after 1560, to settle for Mair’s idea of an English alliance (though had the Calvinist French Huguenots won the French wars of religion it might have been another matter).
The result was another lengthy power-struggle within the archipelago, marked by a salutary spell of direct rule under Cromwell. The 1707 Union produced a rough-and-ready coexistence between the national cultures, through the regularisation of law and Kirk, banking and education as semi-independent Scots institutions. Debate continued about the future of the nation and the means of maintaining its identity.
The result was that, crucially, it was the intelligentsia, rather than land or capital, that determined the country’s distinctiveness. The ‘traditional’ intellectuals transformed themselves into the ‘organic’ intelligentsia of capitalism, chiefly through the operations of groups of teachers, ‘improvers’, and journalists. Men like Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson worried about backwardness -- and indeed played down much of Scottish history on this score -- but also about the ‘luxury and corruption’ of the new commercial order (merchants rigging the market, workers turning into machines). Culture was their elixir, buttressed by industrial success and political patronage through access to rich imperial pickings.
The North, still populous, Gaelic- speaking and inclined to Catholicism or Episcopalianism, was a danger until 1746 saw Jacobitism blown to pieces on Culloden Moor. The Highlands thereafter were turned from a political menace into merely a manpower resource and cultural artefact. Providing colonists and soldiers, they were also ‘symbolically appropriated’ by a Scotland run by lawyers, clergymen and landowners. Paradoxically James MacPherson’s Ossian (1761), a mixture of the oral tradition and pseudo-epic, convinced European Romantics of the unity of folk, speech and land, just as the Scots themselves deserted this triad for history-less ‘improvement’: the model village, the ‘muckle ferm’, the squares and quadrants of Edinburgh’s New Town.
Linda Colley’s influential book Britons (1992) sees the Union cemented by Protestantism, empire and war. But this underestimates national continuities, the growing power of economics, and ‘print capitalism’. The Scottish literati’s closeness to industry and trade enabled it to incubate capitalist institutions while marketing an artful Scots romanticism. Walter Scott put the transition ‘from status to contract’ into the canny wordplay of the Glasgow Bailie Nicoll Jarvie in Rob Roy (1818):
But I maun hear naethin about honour - we ken naething here but aboot credit. Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street. But Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play.
Yet Rob Roy’s country, ‘old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago’, could be visited via the Macadam road, the steamboat and above all the printing press. Burns and Scott became precursors of a model European nationalism that came to be expressed through the ballads and the ‘ideal types’ of the historical novels of Balzac, Hauff and Manzoni.
But ‘symbolic appropriation’ had its price: Burns, a thoughtful, well-informed man with a university-level education, was marketed as ‘the heaven-taught ploughman’. Walter Scott’s literary entrepreneurship made him a victim of cyclical economic depression. It wasn’t just that the Scots novel fell out of favour, but industrialisation and the Reform Act of 1832 -- the first destabilising, the second sweeping away the old political order -- menaced the ‘semi-independence’ that had survived since the Union.
Between 1832 and 1843 the intelligentsia lost its role in civil society. Though the late Scots Enlightenment flared up brilliantly in the work of Thomas Carlyle, the real distinctiveness of the country was maimed by the collapse of its major institution, the Kirk. The religious reformer Thomas Chalmers’s ‘popular party’ had seemed poised to take over what was a semi-independent legislature controlling education and poor relief. Instead, in 1843, it quit to form the Free Church, and the Kirk simply stopped working as a political unit. ‘Controversial divinity’ became a battleground for sectarian brawling, which by 1900 bored the Scots as much as it baffled everyone else.
The result of this religious-political setback, coupled with effective economic union through railways and steamers, was a sort of anarchic global-marketism. The character of Scotland became indistinct. The assault of industry on the nation was summed up in the phrase ‘noise and smoky breath’ used of Glasgow. This ‘shock city’ was dynamic but also a sort of internal island: its magnates were almost obsessively ‘organic’ in Gramsci’s sense. They collected, travelled, translated and built eclectically, experimented with collective social reform --- yet allowed two-thirds of the population to live in the worst housing in Europe.
Meanwhile a parallel ‘national’ culture emerged: what Tom Nairn has called ‘the Great Tartan Monster’. In discovering the Highlands in the 1840s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert exploited the power-vacuum in Scotland. ‘Balmorality’ began only months after the railway had reached Aberdeen. Royalty and the threatened Scots nobility allied with the Toryism of Blackwood’s Magazine and scores of terrible architects to usher in a commercialised romanticism: legends of thin red lines and kilted bagpipe-playing heroes of the British Empire came with the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Old Calvinist and new democratic nationalism were alike sidelined. So all those nineteenth-century investments -- courts, schools, barracks, railways -- which marked other European nations were in Scotland financed from imperial, municipal or private funds, and not from the nation’s coffers. One consequence was cosmopolitanism: Scots took their art and social science from France and their philosophy from Germany; they translated Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. Britain’s first performances of Chekhov were in Glasgow; the Scots medical tradition produced Britain’s first psychoanalysts. Outside Europe, Scots who had come to feel awkward as colonial democrats now began to build up governing elites.
There was a brief nationalist eruption in the early 1850s, enough to sanction a sort of imperial civil society with a distinctively Scottish character. The elite now dressed in kilts and lived as draughtily in ‘Scots baronial’ castles, shooting or hooking whatever moved. There was legally-distilled whisky, golf for the bourgeoisie and football for the multitude. Energetic weekly papers, Chartist-Calvinist in origin, carried local news and dialect fiction, and worshipped Gladstone, who was not just Scots but of a useful Lowland-Highland breed. The Burns cult invoked by Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s successor as prime minister, boomed after the centenary of the Kilmarnock edition of the national poet’s works in 1886. But this cultural nationalism was apolitical and, despite Gladstone’s high-mindedness, hard-nosed commercial above all.
‘The Scots care nothing for things like national flags’, says a character in a nineteenth-century Charles Lever novel; ‘They want only what pays’. But, in imitation of Lever’s Ireland, home rule began to be agitated for, often by Scots who had returned from overseas. By the 1900s the sociologist Patrick Geddes was proclaiming a Scottish Renaissance in Edinburgh, citing the ethical socialism of Ramsay MacDonald and Tom Johnston’s journal Forward, feminism and town planning. He had in mind the painting of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ group, the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and novels such as George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters. In 1911 Glasgow’s third huge exhibition resulted in the founding of a chair in Scottish history at the university.
The phrase ‘Liberal-imperial’ would have captured the ethos of Scots culture in 1914. But a war that saw Scots -- Haig, Bonar Law, the Geddes brothers -- in key positions slaughtered a disproportionate number of their compatriots and distorted their industry: after 1920 ‘the workshop of the world’ soon became ‘that distressed area’. ‘Organic’ cosmopolitanism was sidelined as the new literati turned to nationalism and science while industry crumbled. Responses varied from unionist collectivism to the intellectual nationalism of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ revived by the poet Christopher Grieve: alias ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’. He had several streams running through him, one of them Ireland and the Easter Rising of 1916, where poets had apparently changed a nation. One of the Rising’s executed leaders, the socialist trade unionist James Connolly, was born in Edinburgh and had been the Irish correspondent of Forward, which was baffled by his self-sacrifice; but to younger Scottish socialists like MacDiarmid, politicised by the war and the industrial struggles of the ‘Red Clyde’, Connolly became a hero. An ethnic nation, of the sort which proliferated after Versailles in 1919, was the new goal.
The Renaissance literati, however, were rurally-based, mainly Protestant (or at least ex-Protestant) and aware of a London market. It was John Buchan -- that enigmatic combination of thriller-writer, historian, cultural nationalist and political Conservative -- who launched the movement in his anthology The Northern Muse in 1924, and also helped to publish MacDiarmid’s first verse collection Sangschaw a year later. By the time that MacDiarmid’s epic poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle came out in 1926, however, MacDiarmid was in charge. The pivot of the poem was The Ballad of the General Strike, in which the Scots workers are seen as the scrawny, all-negating thistle, struggling to change into the ‘rose’ of socialist man:
And still it grew till a’ the buss
Was hidden in its flame.
I never saw sae braw a floo’er
As yon thrawn stock became.
And still it grew until it seemed
The haill braid earth had turned
A reid, reid rose that in the lift
Like a ball of fire burned.
MacDiarmid’s political movement came with the ambition of a ‘Lallans’(Lowland Scots dialect) revival, but the Scottish workers failed to match MacDiarmid’s ambitions for them. The General Strike, after all, had rapidly failed. Claiming ‘Anglophobia’ as his hobby, MacDiarmid helped set up the National Party (later the SNP) in 1928 only to see it taken over by a moderate (and deeply unliterary) group under John MacCormick. MacDiarmid used Marxism as a catalyst to release his remarkable poetry, believing also in the then fashionable Social Credit theory as an authentically Scottish economic remedy. Not everyone agreed. His literary ally Lewis Grassic Gibbon dismissed it as ‘childbirth without pain, and, equally intriguingly, without a child’, damned nationalism as reactionary, and small nationalism as worse.
Grassic Gibbon was to produce, in A Scots Quair (1934), writing arguably as powerful as that of Burns and Scott, though his indelible picture of the Mearns, its crofts and peewit-haunted parks and their destruction by war and slump, was written in Welwyn Garden City. The poet Edwin Muir came north in 1935 and declared that fighting fascism was more important than home rule or reviving the Lallans tongue. MacDiarmid never forgave him.
The Renaissance, however, was grit in the Scottish oyster. In 1928 MacDiarmid wrote to Roland Muirhead, the Nationalists’ dour but generous patron, that his ideas would need twenty-five years to work their leaven: for him, an unusually shrewd forecast. But when Muirhead’s faction ousted MacCormick from the leadership of the SNP in 1942 the result --- lengthy committees, pugnacious manifestoes -- was near-paralysis.
Progress came from another angle. As Secretary of State during the Second World War, the Labour party socialist Tom Johnston managed to justify increased administrative devolution to Scotland, using the argument of ‘a Sinn Fein movement coming up’ to get concessions from Churchill. There was, indeed, a Berlin-based radio transmitter, Radio Caledonia, broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Scottish nationalist guise, which lasted from 1940 to 1942, but, more importantly, Scotland had become the reception area for Second Front munitions and a transfer point for Russian supplies, and had to be kept sweet. Nationalism was effectively appeased by the promise of socialist reconstruction, exemplified by Johnston’s creation in 1943 of Scotland’s equivalent of Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hydro Board, to bring electricity to the Highlands.
The SNP won a seat, Motherwell, in the war’s closing weeks, but the nationalist challenge faded in the face of Labour’s crusading zeal and swelling membership. The arts were radical, as Tyrone Guthrie’s revival of Sir David Lindsay’s political morality play The Three Estates (1540) at the Edinburgh Festival of 1948 showed. It was the ex-imperial middle class which now promoted home rule, with MacCormick capitalising on their worries about ‘London centralisation’ with his Scottish Covenant Movement, which gained over two million signatures for a home rule declaration by 1950. He then overshadowed this with the snatching of the Stone of Scone, ancient symbol of Scots kingship, from Westminster on Christmas morning, 1950. The Stone was subsequently found at the Abbey of Arbroath, but not before nationalists such as the folksinger John MacEvoy claimed several replicas had been carved:
So if ever ye come on a Stane wi’ a ring/ Jist sit yirsel’ doon an’ proclaim yirsel’ King.
For there’s nane wud be able to challenge yir claim/ That ye’d croon’t yirsel’ King on the Destiny Stane.
Subsequently, Special Branch agents-provocateurs sought to discredit the nationalists, but the government need not have bothered. The post-war rebuilding of Germany and Japan meant that the heavy industries were enjoying an Indian summer, making the 1950s the most Unionist of decades. The Conservative literary magus T.S. Eliot had even co-opted Scots nationalism, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), as a useful service-motor for British culture: enriching but not threatening. The Scottish literati sulked.
Steel, coal, shipyards and railways declined after the Suez crisis in 1956 but there was still the Labour Party’s option of central planning. However, when this unravelled in the later 1960s the national movement, broader than the SNP and now strengthened by anti-nuclear groups, converts from the declining Communist Party, clergy and environmentalists and both ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals -- started to make the running. In November 1967 the SNP made their first significant electoral breakthrough with a by-election win at Hamilton against an unpopular Labour government -- a feat repeated on a grander scale in 1974 when the party captured eleven seats, and hopes of self-government burned bright. The 1970s were rich in nationalist agitation, but meagre in cultural results -- save for John McGrath’s Marxian pantomime The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil of 1973, provoked by the discovery of huge oil and gas fields in the North Sea. In its Highland circuit it had a vivid propagandist effect, while it also implied that the Left would have to live with nationalism or face the multinationals alone. The decade ended, however, with the tragi-comedy of the 1979 referendum -- in which Scots failed to muster the necessary majority for the Assembly, thereby delaying its advent by twenty years. The same year saw the arrival of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister, her long rule proving increasingly unpopular north of the Border.
‘Then, gentlemen, the cause is lost forever!’ Some commentators echoed Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s ally in Scott’s Redgauntlet. Yet political defeat produced a counter-movement: sober effort was piled into literary and social histories, cross-party campaigns and sustained agitation which produced in 1989 the Scottish Constitutional Convention and an agreed plan for a parliament. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1982), a fantastic vision of a post-industrial, self-destructive Scotland, doomed and cannibalistic, soared into the best-seller lists. Gray’s motto, borrowed from poet Dennis Lee from Canada (a Scots-influenced nation similarly overshadowed by a large neighbour), served as an epigraph for his contemporaries: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation.’
Self-rule became fact between 1997 and 1999. Labour’s general election triumph, which saw a Scotland cleared of all Conservative representation at Westminster for the first time, was followed by a decisive referendum for self rule. But a Lib-Lab victory in the first Scottish parliamentary elections in May 1999 stands in the way of the eventual nationalist goal of outright independence. Today the Scots literati can celebrate -- and warn. One twentieth-century Scots poet, Robert Garioch, nailed the arrogance of all politicians, monarchs or MSPs:
Aince there was a king, wha sat
Scrievin’ this edict in his palace haa’
Til all his folk: ‘Vassals, I tell ye flat
That I am I, and ye are bugger-aa’.
Against this, Walter Scott recorded the Edinburgh folk mourning their parliament: ‘We could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they waur na gude bairns.’ If the MSPs aren’t ‘gude bairns’, the ballad-makers of the nation will be next door in their library, and ready.
For Further Reading:
Michael Lynch, Scotland : A New History (Century, 1991); Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism (Routledge, 1998); William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: an Historic Quest (Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Richard Finlay, Independent and Free (John Donald, 1994); Tom Nairn, The Modern Janus (Verso, 1996).
• Christopher Harvie is Professor of Scottish History at Tubingen University. His most recent book is Travelling Scot (Argyll,1999).
