ON THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH LITERATURE, VOLS I-IV,
GENERAL EDITOR CAIRNS CRAIG, ABERDEEN UNIV. PRESS, 1987-1988

My first five years were spent in Cessnock naming all the cars on Paisley Road. Then along to Crookston, reading Here We Go, Janet and John, Scottish Catechism of Christian Doctrine, To a Mouse, To a Louse, To a Mountain Daisy, 'Oor Wullie', the Hotspur, Bunty, People's Friend, at seven deciding it was time for books without pictures, starting at the left with Tom Brown's Schooldays, Little Women, and a hundred pages of some endless Dickensian thing before going back with some relief to Biggles and Enid Blyton until it was time for long trousers, Agatha Christie and Alasdair Maclean, commended for his large vocabulary by our English teacher, a Sydney Carton lookalike and bitter antagonist of Samuel Beckett who gave us Macaulay's Essays on Warren Hastings, for at least two years: it was one of the few books there were thirty-eight copies of, and that was because no one, no one would have wanted to pinch it.

That was why I did languages in the end: when you've learnt irregular verbs that's them out of the way; Warren Hastings just kept coming back. At any rate this is how I remember it - but although my copious diaries of the time record that on a given day I had meat round, chips and peas for tea and afterwards read a book, they don't lend to specify what the book was. Sydney Carton confiscated a friend's brother's copy of Six Glasgow Poems by Tom Leonard 'Thon big shite wiz dayniz nut' - which was from another planet in any case. That was about it: I was at Oxford before I saw The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil on the box and started going to the theatre. But it wasn't till I got round to reading A Drunk Man after failing to find my way north out of Inversnaid that I got curious about Scottish literature.What is it? Is it what Scottish people read? The only book mentioned in Barbour's Bruce is Ferambrace, a Charlemagne romance Bruce declaims to his men while waiting for the rest of his army to swim or be rowed across Loch Lomond. A later king, James I, knew his Boethius, Gower and Chaucer; Wyntoun knew about monopedes and other monsters from the Mediaeval Id (I've got three odd volumes of his chronicle: they're stamped Trinity College Church of Scotland and they smell like Glasgow Cathedral). And so on. While the Gaelic poets were drawing on Irish tradition, Dunbar was reading Chaucer. Much later, Ramsay is editing Dunbar and returning to Scots, and the gentle shepherd hero of his play reads Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Drummond of Hawthornden and Cowley. There's good verse in that play:

'Speak on, speak thus, an'still my grief
Haud up a heart that's sinking under
Thae fears ...'

Soon after that James Thomson sets out his pantheon in 'Summer' and there is not a Scottish poet or philosopher there; his sole attempt at emulating Ramsay shows he has difficulty in writing Scots - even though, as Mary Jane Scott shows, he was a good, Scottish Latinist (The History of Scottisb Literature, Vol. II, p. 85 [from here on a Roman numeral followed by an Arabic is a reference to HSL]). With Burns we are back to Ramsay's fusion of English and Scots (volume II is excellent on strategic use of English by Scottish poets), though here - for the first time? - is work sustained by Scottish tradition, from the recent past of Fergusson and Ramsay, through Montgomerie to Hary; Burns wrote, 'The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest' (The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns ed. by James Kinsley, p. 1078). M. P. McDiarmid makes big claims for The Wallace in volume I which I could hardly dispute: all I have here in Geneva is a version published in 1722 and subsequently purchased in a jumble sale by my mum. I quote at random:

And (Wallace) cleverly so laboured their buff,
Their armour did not signify a snuff.
The Scotsman there behav'd extremely well,
As the poor South'ron sensibly did feel:
Then all the English left the field and fled;
And Sir John Morton he was killed dead.

That, believe it or not, was the version that inspired Burns. I've been on the lookout for someone, anyone, whose chosen reading was Scottish Literature as we can infer it from the HSL - which never troubles to define it. Hugh Miller quotes casually from The Bruce, and visits Thomson's grave, but only because it is in Shenstone's garden. In the end there is only this: 'As for literature, he read the classic poets, to be sure, and the Epithalamium of Georgius Buchanan, and Arthur Johnston's Psalms, of a Sunday; and the Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum, and Sir David Lindsay's Works, and Barbour's Bruce, and Blind Harry's Wallace, and the Gentle Shepherd, and the Cherry and the Slae' - the Sunday reading of a pedantic old Jacobite in Waverley.

What the Scots write, then, is not what the Scots read. The country is small, and linguistically divided. The reading and the writing overlap, but not enough, not on a big enough scale, to get a more or less autonomous literature going - like English or French or Spanish at different times. Everything is dispersed; there is no ready-made tradition. Few Scottish writers hit the ground running and many just hit the ground. The winners make literature, the rest are history, leafmould for later growth. Each writer has to find his or her own traditions - in history, in oral tradition or elsewhere. For this reason cultural and historical background are especially important in study of our literature, and HSL is very strong in this respect. It is not quite so strong on 'elsewhere': in a small country, especially if it is culturally subdivided, individual genres tend to overshadow the national literature - it's a literary version of the economic situation in Switzerland, where three or four Swiss multinationals have turnovers larger than the national budget; do you describe the economy in national or corporate terms? Neither should be overlooked, but proper assessment of both requires more knowledge than an individual could manage. This is an interesting situation for the writer (the share dealer) and an impossible one for the critic (economist). HSL by definition concentrates on the national view of our literature. In so doing it raises questions of genre worth looking at.
The first is literary history itself. There is something disingenuous about literary histories, which examine other texts and contexts but do not in general subject themselves to the same scrutiny. An analogy may be Thames & Hudson's History of World Art paperbacks, that present paintings and suggest interpretations, but pass over in silence the composition of the books themselves, the pickling of images, subtraction of texture, addition of context, and removal of any autonomy the work might have had on the wall. I presume that in both cases the justification would be that the books are not designed as things in themselves but as guides for other things - Climbing in Scotland, handholds and techniques for difficult passages, or, if the subject is a text last published in Leyden in 1742, lush illustrations and first-hand accounts: it's the National Geographic experience. You can almost smell the dentist's waiting room. The objection to that justification, of course, is that literary histories are things in themselves as well, built for purposes that may or may not accord with the purposes of the authors they discuss, The Guggenheim art gallery in New York, I think, was built by Frank Lloyd Wright, who is said to have despised the decorative arts. The visitor begins at the top of the building and descends a helical ramp lined with paintings. Because the floor is sloping it is inconvenient to stop for any length of time in front of a painting. The viewer is kept moving by gravity, and the eye tends to follow the suave lines of the building - which is thus designed to display not paintings, but itself. There is no such grand subversion here, especially since the HSL is the work of many hands, but the genre of literary history arose, in one sense, as a justification of British imperialism, and it leaves no tome unturned.
I'll return to that, but first I would like to consider alternative openings. An odd one is Switzerland, which has roughly the same population as Scotland, four (or so) literary languages, one of them Romansh, spoken by about one per cent of the population, in the high valleys to the east, which makes it the demographic equivalent of Gaelic. Writers in each of these languages are consciously and definitely Swiss; as in Scotland, there is the phenomenon of promotion, whereby a good Genevan author writing in French becomes known as a French author (Phillipe Jacottet, for example), but they cope with that more or less as the Scots do. The curious thing, though, is that there seems to be no notion of a single Swiss literature: the Genevans are suspicious not only of cultural colonisation by the French, but also and equally of linguistic colonisation by the German-speaking Swiss. Imagine the Scottish Gaels looking only to Ireland, the Orcadians to Norway, English speakers to England and Scots speakers nowhere in a union that is political but not cultural; for Switzerland, in contrast to Scotland, is a state without a literature.
The most venerable type of literary history is that of the Rig Veda and the Bible, where a collection of texts is accumulated, pruned and approved. Commentaries are kept separate. In the HSL we have the commentaries, but too often the texts themselves are not available: a lot of important ones were last issued before the First World War, by the Scottish Texts Society, which caters only for specialists in any case. Try and find the poems of David Lindsay or Gavin Douglas in a bookshop. Try and find W.S. Graham or Hugh MacDiarmid, for that matter. Things must improve, though: if Cairns Craig can produce something on the scale of HSL in a short time, then old texts can surely be reproduced more quickly still. Then, in happy contradiction of what I have just written about Switzerland, l'Age d'Homme publishes, for the benefit of French speakers, cheap paperbacks of modern Swiss literature in French and in translation from German and Italian.

Another approach is exemplified by Vissarion Belinsky, who was the first to acclaim Gogol and Lermontoy, who wrote the earliest full-scale study of Pushkin's work, and who helped Dostoevsky and Tyutchev at the start of their careers. He lived by and for his work, prospecting poetry and prose for answers to his questions: is there a Russian literature? What is it for? What is the function of the writer/citizen? Of the intelligentsia? He lived in Petersburg when great things were being written, when a literature was being born, so the result is not prestigious assertion of culture but urgent questioning of it. George Davie argues that philosophy has been the lynchpin of Scottish culture, though in his notes on MacDiarmid he observes that the vital thinking is not always done by professional philosophers, and alludes to the work on artificial intelligence now being done by psychologists. But the vital questions are in natural intelligence and human responsibility. Over the last half-century, for the first time, all Scots have gained access to the heritage of the entire country - as HSL shows clearly. This may be like the close of One Hundred Years of Solitude, where someone discovers the aboriginal history of Macondo with its prediction of doom just as the place collapses about his ears; or it may be that something is beginning, in which case those vital questions have to be asked, by critics.
Literary history was an eighteenth-century invention. In 1744 James Thomson sings:

Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts,
Inspiring vigour, Liberty, abroad
Walks unconfined even to thy farthests cots,
And scatters plenty with unsparing hand ...
Full are thy cities with the sons of art;
And trade and joy, in every busy street,
Mingling are heard: even Drudgery himself,
As at the car he sweats, or, dusty, hews
The palace stone, looks gay.

In 'The Castle of Indolence' happy Drudgery has been dubbed Sir Industry:

Then towns he quickened by mechanic arts,
And bade the fervent city glow with toil;
Bade social commerce raise renowned marts,
Join land to land, and marry soil to soil,
Unite the poles, and without bloody spoil
Bring home of either Ind the gorgeous stores;
Or, should despotic rage the world embroil,
Bade tyrants tremble on remotest shores,
While o're the encircling deep Britannia's thunder roars.

Without bloody spoil. The shallowness of this view becomes even more apparent in comparison with, say, Adam Smith. (The Wealth Of Nations, end of Book 1,1). In 1751, as Robert Crawford tells us,

'Adam Smith became the first person to give an official course in English that dealt with the technique and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world's first professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith's work ... The enterprise of Smith and Blair was to enable the "provincial" Scots to engage with the culture of England on that culture's own ground.' ('Ecclefechan and the Stars', London Review of Books, 21 January 1988).

The seventeenth century made the literature and the Empire, the eighteenth rationalised them. Language, literature and life were put on file, and although Scots made these fields their own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is nothing about James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary or the Edinburgh-based and edited Encyclopaedia Britannica in HSL, and nothing about histories of literature.

The Encyclopaedia is the most transparent of the three new genres, but the dictionary is no more objective than history of literature, and at times no less consciously literary. The histories started to appear in book form towards the end of the eighteenth century (Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the eleventh to the eighteenth Century (1781); Dr Johnson, Lives of the Poets; Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818); Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864, trans. 1871); in Scotland A. Campbell, Introduction to the History of Poetry in Scotland (1799); J. Sibbald, Chronicle of Scottish Poetry (1802); D. Irving, The Lives of the Scottish Poets (1810), Lives of Scottish Writers (1839), and The History of Scottish Poetry (1861) - I thank Edwin Morgan for that information). Dissenting voices could not drown out Britannia. The Empire was a mammoth project, big enough for anyone to get lost in - and, not knowing whether they were the victors or the vanquished, the Scots got lostest. There's a nice illustration of this in 'Exile and Empire' (Ill. 416): A minor character [in Tom Cringle's Log], Don Ricardo, is revealed as being Scottish by birth and upbringing but Spanish in his identification with society in Cuba; yet, 'in his mountain retreat, sole master, his slaves in attendance on him, he was once more an Englishman, in externals, as he always was at heart, and Richie Cloche, from the Lang Toon of Kirkaldy, shone forth in all his glory as the kind-hearted landlord'. James Murray's autobiography is called Caught in the Web of Words. This paragraph has lost me, but as policemen learning points duty are told, if it all gets too much for you and you can't keep the traffic under control, just take off your gloves and walk away.
HSL has a fine chapter on the culture of science in the eighteenth century. On Hume and Smith, John R. R. Christie writes, 'Scientific theories were the provisional fictions through which human imagination is obliged to apprehend and control the world' (11. 301).
In considering the division of labour, Adam Ferguson

did not exempt the figure of the 'man of science' from complicity in the divisive process of interest and competition. In modern society, knowledge is commerce. 'The productions of ingenuity are brought to the market; and men are willing to pay for whatever has a tendency to inform or amuse'. By implication then, science itself is increasingly produced by occupational specialisation, and knowledge, as commodity, feeds into the ascending spiral of desire and gratification which is the psychological principle of marketbased society. (11. 301)

This, in spite of Thomas Reid's attempt to bring science back to realism, is still the state of play from particle physics to the professions, which are the locus if not the focus of any power in Scotland today; when society loses the place, cling to professional pride. When you don't want to talk about the morality of a situation, talk about technique. The work of the physicist is easily suborned by the market. The good physicist must be a metaphysician too, asking why he/she wants to know. Literature is perhaps of less use at the moment to expansionist politicians, but artists can be persuaded to perform or conform, or more insidiously, they can be used by literary history. As Walter Benjamin writes: 'Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy ... if he wins'.
It is good to see lan Hamilton Finlay strike a blow for the arts by turning frigates and tanks into works of art, but the reverse is much more often what happens, and the Oxford English Dictionary, the Britannica (now American) and the Oxford History of English Literature (launched with welders still on board) are flagships of civilization, hidebound cruisers in a world of pink maps. Matthew McDiarmid has been quoted as calling for a grand-scale, prestigeconferring history of Scottish literature. As John Maclnnes says of something else: 'There is a perverse, if not downright lunatic, expenditure of energy in the venture, but it is, of course, perfectly understandable'. (III. 393) Please no.

Having done with the history of history of literature, we should note that HSL discusses texts not all of which would usually be called literature. Volume I, edited by R. D. S. Jack, is the most traditional in this respect, and pre-Reformation Scots translations of legal texts is as far as it goes from the beaten track; volume II, edited by Andrew Hook, who goes out of his way to call it a (as opp. the) history of Scottish literature in his opening sentence, devotes almost half the chapters to social, historical, aesthetic and scientific work - and it works very well. Douglas Gifford in volume III allocates about a fifth of the chapters to extra-literary context, while Cairns Craig in volume IV gives two or three out of 23 chapters to context. This of course prompts the questions: what are you calling literature? And who cares?

Despondent and unable to rest because of the impending execution of some prisoners he had visited in Newgate, Boswell made his barber try to read him to sleep, with David Hume's History of England. (II.160)

Each literary text is located somewhere in a slow conversation that ranges across countries within languages and across languages within genres. Even the Cantos and other modern epics edited by the grim reaper can be seen to be trying to finish saying something. Blok speaks and MacDiarmid answers - too late for Blok; Olson gets wind of something and Morgan picks up on that. MacDiarmid writes Morgan a putdown of raji-rife beat poets, and Hamilton Finlay takes the French minister of culture to court.
Try again. In his introduction to volume II, Andrew Hook indicates 'that the gap between the practice of major historians such as Hume and Robertson, and that of a novelist such as Scott, was not in fact especially wide'. Unfortunately, he does not expand on that. I guess that the gap results from literature's principle of unity. We might regard histories as Hume and Smith regarded scientific theories: provisional fictions through which human imagination is obliged to apprehend and control the world' (II. 301). Like scientific theories, they should satisfy the tacit criteria of concision and elegance, which makes them user-friendly. Their worth is neither textual nor contextual, but practical. By inventing characters, historical novelists signal their intention that the work be judged in ultimately aesthetic terms - a combination of credibility and approbation.
For example, when in The Brownie of Bodsbeck farmer Laidlaw gets away with manhandling Clavers while minor characters have their ears cut off or are summarily shot for much less, we might think that Hogg just can't resist the opportunity of making Claverhouse look like a small-time bully (at the risk of ruining the plot), whereas the passages Hogg takes from Wodrow on Clavers's persecution of the Covenanters ring all too true: we never have far to look to see a psychopath take power when the law breaks down. But when we turn to Wodrow's work as history, or when we let HSL do that for us (though there is no general index to refer from Wodrow to Hogg),

In the work he reluctantly wrote for publication, his massive two volume History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, from the Restoration to the Revolution (1721), it was not sufficient to report, he had also to convince. Especially he aimed to convince English readers that the proceedings of the Royalists against the Presbyterians had involved religious persecution and denial of civil liberties and not been (as Sir George Mackenzie, for example,
alleged) a legitimate suppression of rebellion. So Wodrow's greatest strength as a historian, his commitment to tell a story which he knew to be true, brought him directly up against his dilemma - that those he aimed to convince were the least likely to listen. He discusses his problem in terms of prose style. - (Douglas Duncan, 'Scholarship and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth Century', II. 58).

Its justification is not aesthetic or textual, but practical: coming across.

It might seem futile to pursue questions of genre, especially now that the events are so far in the past that Wodrow's history might read like Caesar's or any other Black Penguin, but what the historical novel has done to history, to Scottish history at least, subjecting it to the pleasure principle of the market, restricts the sphere of moral judgement to the inside of the book - the author need no longer stand by his word and say this is true; it just has to ring true - as though the Never-Never Land of the Pretenders had turned half of historiography into historical romance. One can see the point of Thomas Reid's attempt to reground science (and history with it) in the realism of Common Sense (II. 301). Otherwise literature and history are two packs of lies, the one depending upon plausibility and the other on the author's skill as a used-car salesman.
So how do you establish a canon? MacDiarmid's method in the Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry was a kind of parody of the pun at the base of English literature: he claimed everything and everyone who wrote in Gaelic or Scots, who was born or lived in Scotland, who had a Scott sh name or who had anything to do with the Norse sagas, because they were really Celtic in origin, and so were the Scots. This is all good anarchy, but if you are looking for legitimacy, as The History of Scottish Literature clearly does, then where do you draw the line?

then round again to the placid hills of Fife beyond the grey-blue sliver of the Forth. And just below me a landmark which has always held for me a strange attraction, the blunt protuberance of Dalmahoy Hill whence, it was once said, Mynyddawg and Gwlyged led the ill-fated men of Gododdin, still drunk from their year-long feast of mead, on their last long march to Catraeth against the Saxon. (John Herdman, A Truth Lover)

Much fine story-telling must have been suppressed, lost, in the conflict of cultures, as is evidenced by the survival of the Gododdin, composed probably beside Dundee, by Neirin, about the year 600, the earliest extant of Europe's heroic poems in a vernacular tongue. (M. P. McDiarmid, I. 27)

Thirteen of the sixteen chapters of volume 1 are on writing in Scots. We have the heroic opening of Barbour and Hary after a chapter on Middle Scots as a literary language, then 'The Alliterative Revival', showing continuity from the mid fifteenth till the late sixteenth centuries, and a fine piece on 'Poetry - James I to Henryson' that focuses on numerology, so that, in the first four chapters, we have information on the language, subject matter, versification and architectonics of Scots Mediaeval verse. This is followed by a chapter each on religious and secular poetry, and a chapter by the editor on 'Poetry under King James VI'. There is little overlap, the sequence is well calculated to emphasise continuity, tradition. The second half shows the other side of the coin. In 'Poetry after the Union 1603-1660' there is little to boast about apart from Urquhart, although there are things that are worthy of attention.

'Vernacular Prose before the Reformation' shows the plain purposive style of the reformers displacing the Latinate prose of the papists. A crucial moment, this, and the problems of Scots in that period tend to distract our attention from Scotland's 'global languages': Latin and the European connection was at its final high point with Buchanan; English was being smuggled into the country in a Bible, like Latin before it. Yesterday Europe, tomorrow, the Empire! The chapter on prose after Knox is mainly on Drummond and Urquhart (so I'd have thought 'The Cypress Grove' would have merited more than two sentences). After that, we have 'Early Scottish Drama', 'Scottish Latin Poetry', 'Latin Prose Literature', 'Gaelic: The Classical Tradition', and'The Ballad and Popular Tradition to 1660' - all very good, and each left very much to its own devices. Hamish Henderson's chapter on popular tradition takes a line that others might usefully have followed: the work is Scottish, but the tradition knows no bounds and respects no boundaries. 'Latin Prose Literature' is expertly written, but begins with the craziest decision in the entire work: Michael Scot and Duns Scotus are left out of the reckoning because they 'belong primarily to the history of European thought'. Also, if readers are curious enough to read about the author of Historia Abbatum de Kynlos, is it likely they will need to be told that Mary I was 'the ill-fated Catholic queen of a predominantly Protestant Scotland'?
Anyway, the materials relating to Columba and to Kentigern and Merlin are discussed and situated with great clarity. Thomas Innes (discussed in volume II) is mentioned as one source of the story of St Andrew, but once again - no general index, no connection. Incidentally, C. S. Lewis and his 'sixteenth-century' volume of the Oxford History of Literature crop up quite often in volume I, but only three references are noted in the index. Drummond, a man of many parts, comes up again in 'Scottish Latin Poetry', which is dominated by George Buchanan. As James MacQueen says, if Buchanan's works now seem remote from the mainstream of Scottish creativity, the reason is to be found not in their failure as works of literature but rather in our failure to provide access to them in a changing cultural and educational system. It is to be hoped that a new edition of his poems will soon rectify this' (I.218)
This is the first time that Latin has been so strongly presented in a history of Scottish literature, and I was left feeling it might even have been pushed a bit further in order to bring the Celtic poems closer in. The classical Gaelic tradition came over from Ireland, and so did the Latin: Columba was a Latinist, but what language did he speak? If Kentigern christened Merlin, or if Mungo was Merlin (see Nikolal Tolstoy's The Quest for Merlin), what language did he talk to himself in? And good as it is to begin on the bright note of Barbour, could we not have had a little more on the Gododdin, and what went down with the dispossessed? I fill the blanks with creatures from Wyntoun's Chronicle.

As there was every appearance of a heavy tornado, the Dooty allowed us to sleep in his baloon, and gave us each a bullock's hide for a bed. (Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa)

In the last chapter of Waverley the old Baron Bradwardine, pardoned for having fought in the Jacobite army, has his home restored and returned to him by Talbot, the avuncular English soldier who had saved Waverley from going to the gallows for the same offence. The Hanoverian hit-man shows the old pedant round his house :

There was one addition to this fine old apartment, however, which drew tears into the Baron's eyes. It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young man of high genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist. Raeburn himself (whose Highland Chiefs do all but walk out of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject; and the ardent, fiery, and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this painting hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was beheld with admiration, and deeper feelings.
Men must, however, eat, in spite both of sentiment and virtue ... The dinner was excellent. Saunderson attended in full costume, with all the former domestics, who had been collected, excepting one or two, that had not been heard of since the affair of Culloden.

The frame of the picture is the frame of the novel. Fergus Mac-lvor, the chief of Glennaquoich in the story, was one of Charles Edward Stuart's generals in the '45. Scott portrays him as a man of great ambition born into a society that could no longer put ambition to good use: the clan is bankrupt (he gives away the last of the family silver in the traditional gift to the bard) and the insurrection presents the chance to march on London in a colossal cattle-raid. When the enterprise falls, he knows at once that his days are numbered. It is interesting that Scott who did, after all, support the Union, did not take the easy way out and have Mac-lvor killed in the retreat. Instead, he has him captured and taken to Carlisle, where he is finally hanged, drawn and quartered; his head is then impaled on the gates of Carlisle town. Scott thus points out, gently but emphatically, that for all its positive effects, the Union of parliaments opened Scotland to at least one utterly barbarous practice, which was not removed from the statute book until 1814, when Waverley was published (See Andrew Hook's note in the Penguin edition).
Bradwardine, the old Jacobite pedant whose reading so closely corresponds to a Scottish literature course, also fought in the '45. The Hanoverian authorities in the person of Talbot realise that he fought not for personal ambition but for history - his main concern throughout the campaign was that of reviving the family tradition of pulling off the king's boots after battle. Talbot realises that if he is left with his history - the family trappings and his Scottish literature - he will be perfectly happy and will present no threat to the British State. He is content to remain on his ancestral estate, where his butler is allowed to appear 'in full dress', like a figure in a painting. To paraphrase Douglas Young,

They libbit Glennaquoich,
He gart them bleed.
They dinna libb Bradwardine,
they dinna need.

Waverley, the hero, is a tourist. He stops at nothing in his lust for local colour: he joins the army, goes over to the other side in a fit of pique when his commanding officer asks him not to fraternise with the enemy, cuts a dash in tartan pantaloons and looks on while said commanding officer is cut to pieces. And while he is trying to decide which of the local lassies he really wants to take back home, the servants who enlisted with him are found guilty of treason, largely by association with him. Never have I been so infuriated when a character didn't get his just desserts - but like every resourceful tourist, all he has to do when the going gets rough is call the consulate or show his American Express card. A word in the right ear (the king's) from Talbot and he's back on the coach.

The author of Waverley is not to be blamed for letting this monster off scot-free: he just showed what was happening. As volume II of HSL demonstrates, sentimental jacobitism had been waxing throughout the eighteenth century: Penicuik, one of the engineers of the Union, James ('Rule Britannia') Thomson and James Boswell were all sufferers. It had no outlet in politics, so some kind of 'Disnaeland', to use W. N. Herbert's word, was required. Real people don't die in Disneyland. Tourists don't die on holiday - or even if they do it's just an awful exception that proves the rule. Scotland was now the realm of the tourist - Dr Johnson being the last traveller to have taken any sort of risk in going there. From then on the tourist would be no more threatened by reality than a reader by a novel. So what happened to real life in Scotland? We can consider the lower orders later, but it's interesting at this point to look at another man of ambition, Mungo Park. He undertook his first expedition to the Niger in his early twenties, put up with amazing hardship and returned to Scotland, where, between 1798 and 1804, he was a neighbour of Walter Scott's. Park told Scott a few hair-raising tales that Scott declined to relate to Park's biographer (I wonder where they were used), and said that he would rather brave Africa again and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over the hills of Scotland, for which the remuneration was hardly enough to keep body and soul together (Introduction to the Everyman edition of Park's Travels,
1932). Waverley stayed in Scott's drawer, as it happens, until after the news of Park's death reached Britain.
In the course of his travels Park discovers that his predecessor, Major Houghton, had been allowed to die of thirst by the Moors. Park himself is taken prisoner by Ali, the Moorish chief, and spends
months in captivity and in fear for his life. He makes his escape when his captor tires of him. It seems plausible that Ali knew exactly what he was doing in his treatment of Park: having killed one infidel, he finds a second coming in search of the first; if he kills this one too, a third will arrive. Better surely to maltreat the second and let him return home to tell his countrymen to steer clear of the area? It only delays the inevitable: first the explorers and missionaries, then the army, then the Paris-Dakar. Mungo Park becomes Waverley sooner later:

We found the monarch sitting upon a mat, and two attendants with him. I repeated what I had before told him concerning the object of my journey, and my reasons for passing through his country. He seemed, however, but half satisfied. The notion of travelling for curiosity was quite new to him. He thought it impossible, he said, that any man in his senses would undertake so dangerous a journey, merely to look at the country and its inhabitants. (Park, p. 40).

I related to Tiggity Segoe, in answer to his enquiries, the motives that induced me to explore the country. But he seemed to doubt the truth of what I asserted, thinking, I believe, that I secretly meditated some project which I was afraid to avow. (Park, pp. 55-56)

The Moors, indeed, subsist chiefly on the flesh of their cattle, and are always in the extreme of either gluttony or abstinence. In consequence of the frequent and severe fasts which their religion enjoins, and the toilsome journeys which they sometimes undertake across the Desert, they are able to bear both hunger and thirst with surprising fortitude; but whenever opportunities occur of satisfying their appetite, they generally devour more at one meal than would serve a European for three. (Park, p. 114)

Steaks, roasted on the coals, were supplied in liberal abundance and disappeared before Evan Dhu and their host with a promptitude that seemed like magic, and astonished Waverley, who was much puzzled to reconcile their voracity with what he had heard of the abstemiousness of the Highlanders. He was ignorant that this abstinence was with the lower ranks wholly compulsory and that, like some animals of prey, those who practice it were usually gifted with the power of indemnifying themselves to good purpose, when chance threw plenty in their way. (Scott, p. 142)

Donald asked Edward in a very significant manner, whether he had nothing particular to say to him, Waverley, surprised and somewhat startled at this question from such a character, answered he had no motive in visiting him but curiosity to see his extraordinary place of residence. Donald Bean Lean looked him steadily in the face for an instant, and then said, with a significant nod, 'You might as well have confided in me; I am as much worthy of trust as either the Baron of Bradwardine or Vich Ian Vohr: but you are equally welcome to my house'. (Scott, p. 143)

If eighteenth-century literature is factions and frictions, the nineteenth century is an explosion: in describing it you try to establish the causes and to say what shape it took. Douglas Gifford's introduction to volume III looks to the social and intellectual causes, while his overview of the novel, 1814-1914, traces the trajectories of various writing careers, managing a fantastic volume of information. The other contributions to volume Ill are caught in this perspective. In 'Scottish Poetry in the Nineteenth Century' (volume III) Edwin Morgan discusses a lot of fine work by internal and external exiles. He relates that 'Walter Scott, who helped to stage-manage the royal progress, produced a celebratory version of an old song, "Carle, now the King's come", and Roger promptly published his anti-celebratory "Sawney, now the King's come", advising ambitious Scots to "kneel and kiss his gracious bum"' (III. 341). But the rotten egg, unlike the bomber, never gets through. Even Byron's 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' ultimately flatters rather than shatters the Edinburgh junta by taking its criticism seriously. A chilling critique by Andrew Noble of 'John Wilson (Christopher North) and the Tory Hegemony' shows just how low Scotland had sunk by the mid nineteenth century: Wilson, 'the head of Scottish literature', saw the growing urban Scotland as a cesspool of sin and was quite unwilling to see its inhabitants as victims of brutal economic pressures (Ill. 147). The heroes and statesmen with their language that James VI called 'heich, pithie and learned' had gone south; the men of business with their 'commoun and passionate' were shameful philistines, and the 'corrupit and uplandis', had not the leisure to write.
Sentimentality. The problem is that while in the eighteenth century sentimentalism is a literary theory and practice that can be discussed with some precision - as John Mullan does in 'The Language of Sentiment: Hume, Smith and Henry Mackenzie' (II, 273-89), by the twentieth century it seems to have flitted from literary theory to psychopathology:

It could be argued further that the very strong streak of sentiment in Barrie, which on occasion topples over into sentimentality, is the most Scottish thing about him. Such sentimentality, whose origins must be sought in the emotional distortions produced by Scots Presbyterianism and other factors, fuelled the Kailyard School of novelists and continues to fuel an important strand of Scottish popular fiction (David Hutchison, 'Scottish Drama' IV. 169)

But sentimentality is not a Scottish prerogative. In fact, the Russians easily outdo us: Esenin, one of their most popular poets, can make Robert Burns sound like Wallace Stevens. Come to think of it, some of the Mexican soaps my mother-in-law watches would make People's Friend readers blush. If it is possible to forget about nationality for a moment when discussing sentimentality - and popular culture for that matter: another contributor writes of Scottish popular culture as though no other nation had any (IV. 245) - it might be better to consider it in class terms and stop bashing Presbyterianism.
In considering the nineteenth century I want to distinguish between (a) writers who have the technique to avoid it but want above all to be understood as sensitive creatures (by sensitive readers, of course), and (b) those who describe their feelings rather than evoke them, perhaps because life has not given them leisure to distance themselves from their subject, analyse it, select the facts that produce the feeling, and fire them back at the reader.
If so, then sentimentality is a symptom produced by two different ills - a refusal to contemplate prevalent injustice on the one side, and an inability to get clear of it on the other: John Wilson (Christopher North) versus the likes of William Thorn and Janet Hamilton.

The production of sentimental writing, though, is only half the problem: its reception is the reader's half. Let's take two extremes: a plangent account of an awful event distracts the audience from the facts, and gets them annoyed at the teller; yet if the teller were to display no emotion at all, the audience would begin to see this as sinister and once again would be distracted from the crux of the matter. The trick is to guess the expectations of the audience and play along with it to a degree. But without critical feedback this can't be done. Why did William Thorn, who was capable of expressing radical thoughts, write sentimental stuff for Whistle Binkie? Was he playing along with the editors? Or did he have a notion that the middle classes that produced it, that could let a child of his own starve and that was unmoved by extremes of poverty, had to be given sentimental descriptions of grief and joy, being unable to experience them? If we don't know, then that is partly Thorn's fault and partly ours. Automatic rejection in any case is not an escape from the sentimental into more astringent air, but part of the same dialogical problem: the patrician Nabokov's scunner at Dostoevsky's manipulation of sentiment.
So how can Scotland shake off Balmorality?
In the words of Neal Ascherson (1979 and 1989): 'Scotland needs democracy more than independence, social justice more than a flag on the ships. Any directly elected parliament is good, however limited its starting powers.'
On the one hand there won't be peace until the last national anthem chokes on its own flag - which is maybe just a way of saying that there won't be any peace. In a way it's not bad to belong to a country whose national anthem is uproarious booing and whistling on the terraces, and whose flag is scored out with a big red cross (wrang!). On the other hand, if power corrupts, impotence doesn't do a lot of good either. A wee gold star in the corner of the flag when I gain a say in how my life should be organised.
The double edge to Scottish literature is that each writer (and reader) has had to invent his or her own tradition. The advantage is work like MacDiarmid's; the disadvantage in the constant return to first principles is inability to agree over basic questions.
So it would have been good to see criticism of women's writing attempting an overview, but the divisions in Scottish society break up the study of women's writing in HSL: the chapter in volume III concentrates on middle-class women's writing in English, leaving working-class women writing in Scots to the 'local literature' heading, and Mary MacPherson to Gaelic literature. In volume IV Muriel Spark is seen as too big to fit in the women's writing corner, and Naomi Mitchison is put along with Linklater and Grassic Gibbon, which is fine, though she has been active for so long that she might have made the connection between the women novelists of volume III and the present.
In the 1920s it got fashionable to see Roman Catholicism - the auld kirk - as the real national religion: we have MacDiarmid's Alba replying to Thomson's Caledonia, MacColla's anti-Presbyterian works and Muir's scurrilous book on John Knox. As Andrew Noble remarks, 'The tragedy of MacDiarmid's generation was that it was almost wholly out of synchronisation with national consciousness and hence political possibility' (Glasgow Herald, 7 March 1989). After a long period of - indifference - it's Calvinism again. Consider Cairns Craig on the search of Scottish Renaissance writiers for a lost cultural continuity:

Calvinism also had clear claims, since it had represented the backbone of polit'cal and theological power in the society for 400 years. Most writers, however, rejected Calvinism and all its works both because it was identified with nineteenth-century Victorian values which, as good twentieth-century citizens, they were bent on overthrowing, and also because of Calvinism's apparent rejection of literature itself, as 'lies' concealing the true word of God ... Catholicism, too, had its proponents, many of whom looked to Scotland's pre-Reformation past as the real Scotland which was rural, Catholic and creative as compared with the dour, guilt-ridden, inhibited Scotland of the Reformation and after. But Catholicism was not only deeply antagonistic to many Scots because of the long and maintained traditions of Covenanting struggles for the national church; it was also feared by many because of the pressure of Catholic immigration from Ireland and the threat it posed to the local communities and traditions. (Introduction, IV.6).

A few words of clarification here: the fear and antagonism of Scots towards Irish Catholic immigrants (a quarter of whom were in fact Protestant) took the form of Paddy-bashing on the street and 'Catholics need not apply' in the job adverts. The word for it didn't exist then, but it does now: racism. It cannot be dignified with talk of long and continuing Covenanting struggles. I do not suggest that Catholics of whatever nationality are morally superior: both divisions have ruled in Scotland and both have performed miserably in terms of their beliefs.

Enough of tribal rivalry; on to religion, where some confusion remains. Of Muriel Spark, we are told that 'it would be wrong to see her Catholicism as merely opposing her Edinburgh background', because it seems that according to Cardinal Newman, Catholicism and Calvinism have points in common. The ensuing discussion of doctrinal niceties omits the staringly obvious point that both are Christian sects. Scottishness is associated with Calvinism, which Spark manages to evince in spite of her Catholicism. And her Jewish origins. And not having lived in Scotland since the 1940s. The 'Four Scottish Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s' chapter speaks of 'the "fallen world" and promised "heaven" of Calvinism' - ideas which are shared with other Christian churches. George Friel is described as being from a Catholic background, yet at the end he is one of four novelists with a Scottish cast of mind, i.e. Calvinist in origins. Alexander Trocchi, distinguished by his absence, couldn't have been squeezed into that framework anyway.
Fortunately, the chapter on 'Recent Scottish Thought' sees Calvinism as a tradition, not a touchstone, and in a recent article in Cencrastus on Alasdair MacIntyre, the same authors show a way forward, asking how MacIntyre's 'Augustinian Christianity' is to be related to Calvinist traditions. (It is also worth looking back beyond Geneva and Rome to Iona, since the Celtic church followed the tradition of the (non-Augustinian) desert fathers. I can't give a reference for that because a hermit from Roslyn ran off with the book.) Duns Scotus, in this connection also, should certainly have been discussed in HSL. As Britannica notes, 'His strong defence of the papacy against the divine right of kings made him unpopular with the English Reformers of the sixteenth century for whom the word "dunce" (a Dunsman) became a word of obloquy, yet his theory of intuitive cognition suggested to John Calvin, the Genevan Reformer, how God may be "experienced".' John Knox brought that idea home. Also, he was the great voluntarist of scholastic philosophy, arguing the primacy of will over intellect - and that goes well with Barbour (p. 77, against necromancy, and the character of Bruce in general), and surges out again in MacDiarmid's own work, and in his espousal of Shestov.
It was a mistake to break MacDiarmid's work in two. Its unity, though difficult, is valuable. In HSL we have a solid, conventional essay by Catherine Kerrigan on MacDiarmid's early poetry and an exciting piece on the later poetry by Alan Riach, who sets out like Mungo Park, not sure if he'll get word back:'... the millennial vision of MacDiarmid's later work has a material analogue only in culture, specifically in literature and most specifically in itself' (IV, 222). Is this like Von Neumann's rueful remark, on the subject of computer models of the brain, that it may transpire that the simplest possible model of the brain is the brain itself? Maybe, though it seems to me to the clearest analogue now to MacDiarmid's later poetry is the utterly incurable computer virus. In Memoriam James Joyce is a great poem, while Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics is no classic. The two are associated on the pretext that both are Marxist. Riach notes the following from Stalin's book:

Here we shall have not two languages, one of which is to suffer defeat, while the other is to emerge from the struggle victorious, but hundreds of national languages, out of which, as a result of a prolonged economic, political and cultural co-operation of nations, there will first appear most enriched unified zonal languages, and subsequently the zonal languages will merge into a single international language, which, of course, will be neither German, nor Russian, nor English, but a new language that has absorbed the best elements of the national and zonal languages.

Working as a translator in a number of UN agencies I have seen what happens to languages after prolonged economic, political and cultural cooperation of nations, NGOs and multinationals. The working languages (they are, of course, and by Stalin's consent, English, Russian and not German but French) are used largely by people who have learned them in adulthood. They converge and become more abstract because when a specific term has no equivalent in another language, it is either borrowed or translated with a generic term. They are sanitised to avoid giving unintended offence (e.g., one place insists on lexical equivalents of 'endogenous' because 'native' has colonial connotations for English speakers, 'autochthonous' has similar problems in Spanish, as 'Indigenous' has in French). Denotation is simplified and connotation, the communal aspect of language, is regarded as interference; no community - no epic. What results is not a world language, but an international chewing-gum, Desperanto, and if it is allowed to slash and burn its way through the linguistic rainforests of the world, a lot of people will lose their tongues. The fostering of Scots, and Gaelic, their literatures, and the minority languages of central Scotland, are vital, and not only to the people of Scotland.
HSL does help to reverse this bureaucratic whitening of language and culture - though it must be acknowledged that, with its two layers of delegation (general editor/editor/critic), and the maddening lack of communication between individual contributors, it has true bureaucratic deniability: no one is really responsible for the result, and the only indication the reader has of the relative merits of various works of literature is the number of pages each is allotted - and given that some important writers are not even mentioned, that will not do. HSL derives, ironically, from the great projects of empire, and it will affirm the values of Scottish literature at home and abroad; but it questions those values in the best contributions, contemplating the past with a view to the present.