New Scottish Art Galleries BURNS excluded

 

Burns and other poets) wrote with Scots voices and language - why is Robert Burns not included here?

At a time when mainly English Tory unionist voices were being heard late 1700s. No other writer has done more than burns. I was taken back, at the new Scottish galleries that there is only one mention of DB, with regard his The Hunt poem and an Edinburgh tea room painting. 

Its wonderful to see the new galleries. I realise Scott lived in Edinburgh, but Burns was there for quite a few months over the late 1786 and into 1787, and he was greatly influenced by his time there – he visited the men’s clubs – the Crochallan Fencibles Anchor close; William Creech’s bookshop and publishing house, at the Luckenbooths near St Giles, where each day the great and the good met; and the literary parties that Burns was invited to, where he met the renowned scholars of the Scottish enlightenment. He also met the great love of his life late 1786, Agnes McLahose: (his Clarinda) who he wrote many love letters to and his famous song of parting Ae Fond Kiss.

 

Scott may have been read widely in 1800s – but to my mind (and most other Scots) Burns is our national hero and bard. We was painted by his good friend, the artist Alexander Nasmyth – on their walks to Rosslyn.

As i walked around the Scottish art I thought  - which Scotland are we emboldening and remembering here? After the first section covering the romantic period – we enter the brighter more modern period, with the windows open to the east Princes st garden views. 

I felt that the Burns creative legacy was a deliberately forgetting – Question? does his writing influence Scottish art. Burns was himself influenced by art – the symbolism and spiritual connection between the natural world, the creative fires and the established church teachings from his father – where dance was frowned upon. These strong interconnections.

He was influenced by the Ossian poems –by James MacPherson as the first Scot’s bard and also by other great poets. Burns was writing and collecting song before Scott – in fact he met the young 16 year old Scott at an Edinburgh literary party and Scott wrote about Burns after this great meeting. 

 

Burns was influenced by art and the close ties between our emotional life and nature – when he wrote one of the best love songs ever written - "Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear/ And the rocks melt wi’ the sun/ I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run."

It is hard to believe that Burns didn’t influence Scottish art with all the myths, memorabilia, statues and more that surround the great poet. Even so, his songs and poems were not enough to prevent the forgetting that occurred across Scotland over the 1800s. Today, as Lesley Riddoch writes in her 2023 book Thrive, ‘Scots know of William Wallace and Robert Bruce but nothing in-between up to modern times. Only in the past few decades have Scots recognised other great Scots from the 1980s onwards – with statues to James Clerk Maxwell and Adam Smith.

 

*      *      *      *       *

novelist Walter Scott

Scots bard Robert Burns

II   The galleries hold 60,000 works of Scottish art – from David Willkie, Alexander Nasmyth, Andrew Geddes, The Glasgow boys impress, particularly James Guthrie, and grand displays of William McTaggarts work.  

BUT Which Scotland – the empty Scotland or militarised? The proud Scotland or the shot stag. Romance or reality; mountain or flood;Ttory or Jacobin?

 

At the start of the exhibition there is an emphasis on the influence of Walter Scott’s historical fiction – Waverly and Heart of Midlothian. Scott was the inventor of historical novel. There is the claim “Nobody did more to popularise Scotland than Scott.’ There are photos of the construction of the imposing Scott monument nearby. David Octavious Hill’s pioneering photography, (a photography department at RSA 1857). On display is the painter John Drummond, and David Allan’s’ paintings of everyday life, the Porteous Riots.

*But I was surprised and saddened no mention of our great bard Robert Burns.

Moving on into the bright lit galleries with windows looking out onto east Princes st gardens displaying more modern art – the Glasgow boys, William McTaggert – The Sailing of the Emigrant ship, who was influenced by Constable 1776 – 1837 and Turner (1775- 1857). The Impressionist and Japanese print influences – of James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, Edward Arthur Waltour.

James Guthrie

Symbolism and Celtic revival 1890s - the alternative world of dreams, myths and visions. With John Peploe, George Leslie Hunter. And good to see several wmen artists – Frances Campbell Cadell, Anne Redpath. Margaret Macdonald, 

There is so much to be impressed with here and both the particular Scottish influence of Scotland soft ever changing light. The weather beaten and mountainous landscapes – the Celtic Ossian, Gaelic poetry, alongside other great Scots scholars and poets 1700s - Dunbar, Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns - who kept Scot’s voices alive. 

And of course Walter Scott’’s historical novels, which were popular worldwide. Political philosopher Tom Nairn criticised Scott - that he told of a ‘romanticised Scotland’ that was gone and lost forever’. This led to Scotland’s literacy voice being lost over the 1800s.

 

  

Romanticism in Scotland

 

Nigel Leask rites Burns has been tragically over-looked in academic studies and the need to consider Burns in a de-centralized four nation approach to British culture and of the marginalisation of Burns as a major Romantic poet.

 

The book is entitled 'Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burn and British Romanticism' Leask

sets out to recover a major Romantic poet in a Scottish, British, and colonial context. Burns's fame as Scotland's national bard, and his influence on Scottish writers like Hogg, Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lockhart, Wilson and Carlyle, has achieved local recognition. The goal of this book is to reassess the global significance of Scottish and British Romanticism in the light of Burns's achievement and influence. ' And a more historically contextualised notion of the Scottish Enlightenment. And to situate Burns and 18th century Scottish poetry in relation to Enlightenment theories.

 

But much light remains to be cast on his literary and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as his far-reaching influence on English and Irish Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Roscoe, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Clare, Hazlitt, De Quincey Tom Moore and J.C.Mangan. 

 

MUSIC  - Burns is best known as a songwriter and song collector

Burns's poetry is now largely excluded from a revised canon of Romantic literature as it is taught in UK and US English departments, despite the fact that the canon has broadened to include women and minority writers. In fact the decline of his reputation as a major Romantic poet has continued measurably even since 1945. Astonishingly, there is to date no dedicated study of Burns's influence on British Romanticism.

 

Contemporary Burns scholarship is still largely concerned with studying the poet in a national literary framework, despite important recent work by Carol McGuirk, Liam McIllvanney, Robert Crawford and Gerry Carruthers, opening up Burns to broader contexts. 

 

Robert Burns was part of an attempt to produce a canon of Scottish song, which resulted in a cross fertilisation of Scottish and continental classical music, with romantic music becoming dominant in Scotland into the 20^th century. 

Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian poems. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and Scots Wha Hae served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Burns A Mans a Man as sung by Sheena Wellington at the opening of the Scottish parliament.

 

Novelist Walter Scott popularised Scottish cultural identity 19th century.  He played a major part in defining Scottish and British politics, helping to create a romanticised view of Scotland and the Highlands that changed Scottish national identity. Tom Nairn argues to a false mythical Scotland gone forever. Scott has a highly successful career, with other historical novels - Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820) 

 

Burns was greatly influenced by Scots poets Allan Ramsay, James Macpherson, and Robert Fergusson – who wrote poems in scots about Edinburgh. And English poets such as Alexander Pope. Allan Ramsay(1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, developed the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. 

 

James Macpherson(1736–96) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that were internationally popular, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics. Fingal, written in 1762, was translated into European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and in German literature (Johann Herder and Johann Goethe). Also popular in France –read by Napoleon^.

 

Other major Scottish literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839). One of the most significant figures of the Romantic movement, Lord Bryon, was brought up in Scotland until he acquired his English title. 

 

**Romanticism in Scotland  II

was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement late 1700s and early 1800s. 

Part of the wider European romantic movement, which was partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, emphasizing individual, national and emotional responses, moving beyond Renaissance and Classical models. In the arts, Romanticism manifested itself in literature with the mythical bard Ossian, the exploration of national poetry in the work of Robert Burns and in the historical novels of Walter Scott. Scott also had a major impact on the development of a national Scottish drama. Art was heavily influenced by Ossian and of the Highlands as the location of a wild and dramatic landscape. 

In music, 

 

In art there was a stress on imagination, landscape and a spiritual correspondence with nature. It has been described by Margaret Drabble as "an unending revolt against classical form, conservative morality, authoritarian government, personal insincerity, and human moderation" Although after union 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and cultural norms, its literature developed a distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation.

 

The editors of the recent essay collection Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism argue, from the 19th century Scottish literature came to stand for an 'inauthentic Romanticism, defined by a mystified commitment to history and folklore', in marginal relationship to an 'organic' English Romanticism. 

 

Scotland was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review, (1802) and Blackwood Magazine(1817)which significantly influenced the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. 

 

Romanticism declined in the 1830s, but it continued to affect music and art. It had a lasting impact on the nature of Scottish identity and outside perceptions of Scotland. It is often thought to incorporate an emotional assertion of the self and of individual experience along with a sense of the infinite, transcendental and sublime. 

 

James MacPherson

Robert Burns and Pastoral is a full-scale reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759-1796), arguably the most original poet writing in the British Isles between Pope and Blake, and the creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. Although still celebrated as Scotland's national poet, Burns has long been marginalised in English literary studies worldwide, due to a mistaken view that his poetry is linguistically incomprehensible and of interest to Scottish readers only. 

 

Nigel Leask challenges this view by interpreting Burns's poetry as an innovative and critical engagement with the experience of rural modernity, namely to the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thereby resituating it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. Detailed study of the literary, social, and historical contexts of Burns's poetry explodes the myth of the 'Heaven-taught ploughman', revealing his poetic artfulness and critical acumen as a social observer, as well as his significance as a Romantic precursor. Leask discusses Burns's radical decision to write 'Scots pastoral' (rather than English georgic) poetry in the tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, focusing on themes of Scottish and British identity, agricultural improvement, poetic self-fashioning, language, politics, religion, patronage, poverty, antiquarianism, and the animal world. The book offers fresh interpretations of all Burns's major poems and some of the songs, the first to do so since Thomas Crawford's landmark study of 1960. It concludes with a new assessment of his importance for British Romanticism and to a 'Four Nations' understanding of Scottish literature and culture.

 

New National Scottish Gallery at the National gallery

 

Margaret MacDonald

Brand new galleries have been built behind the Mound art galleries Edinburgh to be a new and open home to display Scottish art From 1800s to 1845 – from the Glasgow Colourists: Francis Cadell, Leslie hunter, Samuel Peploe and JD Fergusson (1890 – 1914)

William McTaggart

The galleries hold over 60K works of Scottish art and 140 will be on display. Including – William McTaggart, Anne Redpath, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Margaret Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Boys.

Director john Leighton, Before retiring was ambitious to fulfil his desire for a proud spacious showcase for Scottish art at the national galleries. Before this Scottish art was displayed down some steep steps to  a confined, dark gallery space. 

 

On display is the controversial *Monarch of the Glen by English artist Edwin Landseer, 1661 - “thousands of real local people were cleared from surrounding glens to make way for aesthetically pleasing emptiness, deer and sportsmen.”

 

In 1830s, English reform campaigner William Corbett, was outraged that Edinburgh – which he regarded as the worlds finest city – was not surrounded by thriving agricultural villages, because aristocrats preferred their estates empty, rural and unspoiled. 

Allan Ramsay

 

SONGS make a Nation

The Proclaimers

And the poetry and art. Since the 60s Scots have been singing in their own Scots and Gaelic voices – first with Flower of Scotland on the football terraces, the resurgence of Scots folk protest songs such as Hamish Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye and then with the Proclaimers songs. 

We might ask who is writing new songs for the union?

 

“Now everyone sings Scottish songs and if I were a unionist politician of whatever party, but especially the Labour party, I would be counting the songs, have a habit of making the laws also.” Ian Hamilton wrote. 

 

Since the 60s and 70s, the resurgence of Scots voices, culture and arts have had more impact on our hearts and minds - than the often hollow and ignorant political chat. Early in 1970s Edinburgh, traditional folk songs were flourishing around the folk clubs, bars and folk festivals – Girvan, Ayr, Arran, Sandy Bells and many more. 

Before this I had mainly listened to music on recorded albums, so the live local music scene was a revelation for me, with its foot-stomping fiddles, the strumming banjos, guitar and bohran, the perfect unaccompanied singers, and the traditional Scots ballads. 

 

The impact of the Proclaimers first tv appearance on channel Four’s music program the Tube – when they performed Letter to American in strong Scottish accent was immediate. They combined folk and punk music. Then we also have dougie macLleans powerful Caledonia and David Steele's Scotland Yet.

 

As attitudes towards the British empire changed after the war, in the mid 1960s at the men’s football game they started to boo and agitate and to sing their own songs as the band played the national anthem, God Save the Queen. In 1966-67 fans started to sing Flower of Scotland – and eventually authorities recognised this and dropped the UK National Anthem for Scotland.

 

The Corries

Ian Hamilton, who along with other student stole the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey, wrote -

“Nobody sang in Scotland in the ­middle part of the century. To be more correct, those who sang did not derive their songs from Scotland. Their sources were ­foreign and what they sang was only an alien copy of other people’s ways of life.”    He saw a very different Scotland in the early 1990s compared to the past: “Now everyone sings Scottish songs, and if I were a Unionist politician of whatever party, but especially of the Labour ­Party, I would be counting the songs, rather than the votes. The people who make the songs of a country have a habit of making the laws also.”

Perhaps that is a little too romantic for some but it contains a kernel of truth. What we sing and who sings says something about who we see ourselves as ­being and how we stake our claim in the world. Maybe in his heart, Ally McCoist knows this too.

Extracted The Songs We Sing, Gerry Hassan, The Sunday National 17^th September 202 - 

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23794397.gerry-hassan-god-save-king-flower-scotland-unites-us/

 

 

A Canon of Scottish literature

 

Scottish literature over long eras has been neglected or deliberately obscured,  so securing its place in the firmament is a kind of redress, a reclamation. “ Alan Riach

Language expresses who we are, 

A canon is a form of cultural empowerment, “any canon of Scottish literature is a form of cultural reclamation, a resistance to the canonical weight of English, or Anglo-American, or Anglophile literatures in English, what used to be called commonwealth literature.”

Lewis Grassic Gibbons

RL Stevenson

Galt, Gibbon, Mackay Brown, Oliphant, Spark, Janice Galloway, AL Kennedy, Jackie Kay, Ali Smith, Scott, RL Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Irvine Welsh, JM Barrie,…..Celtic folklore, ghost stories, landscapes of Highlands, western isles, rich histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Over the 1700s many poets worked to reclaim and keep alive Scots voices and ballads, - Allan Ramsey, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson.  

**In 1800s, Privy Council in Westminster, created the Scottish Education Department, to teach English (to replace the Church of Scotland, who taught Scots and Gaelic). The plan was cultural change. At that time Scots spoke Scots or Gaelic or both.  

In 1911, the Scottish Education Department moved to Edinburgh. English was then used to deliberately destroy Scots culture and to eradicate “Scottishness.” In 1950s Gaelic teaching was stopped, - and only English was taught. In some counties of Scotland today most English teachers are non-Scots. 

 

Scots should be taught in schools as a second language – to protect our history and culture. In the EU children are taught their own language and English as the language of western international business. 

 

The importance of Scottish literature

WHY has Scottish literature not been explored as confidently as other literatures. 

“The subject needs to be more widely known and discussed with more confidence and curiosity.... There has been work since 1980s, and more needs to be done." Alan Riach 

 

At college down Edinburgh Royal mile, I studied French author Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and American poet Sylvia Plath, when I specialized in English, at school I studied Chaucer, Shakespeare, and novels Catch 22, English novelist Jane Austen. The union 1707 was basically an elite project begun under James VI – to incorporate Scottish history, literature and religion into the English system. Many rebelled – poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns), Covenanters, academics. Holyrood must protect Scots literature and Scots language, so its taught in schools alongside English.  

 

All this began with the elite project under James VI, at a meeting of clan chiefs on Iona, when it was agreed that every eldest son would be educated in England. 

 

Robert Fergusson

**BOOKS

Why Scottish literature matters? Professor Carla Sussi

 

SCOTTISH LITERATURE – from poets

And scholars such as George Buchannan, who wrote of democracy for all. 

American founding father – John Witherspoon, 

Our great Bard Robert Burns, Scots authors - 

And todays many acclaimed Scots academics, authors, artists, musicians and innovators. Scots literature and Scots voices do matter and have unique contributions to make.  Alongside scientific discoveries and one of the world\s first surgeons and medical schools. 

 

Douglas Stuart

**SCOTS Booker Prize winners

 

Disgracefully as usual in a Time article there is no mention of Scotland’s recent Booker prize winners. The Scottish literary scene boasts several Booker prize winners – 2020 Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, 1994 James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late. 

Plus Booker shortlisted authors – Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, AL Kennedy, Graham McCrea Burnett, Muriel Spark. World famous Scots novelists of modern times include –Iain Banks, Val McDermid, Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin, Louise Welsh, Liz Lochhead, Alan Bisset, Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Alexander McColl Smith, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, William McIlcanney, Maggie O’Farrell, 

 

Famous Scots writers of the past – Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Boswell, John Barbour, Adam Smith. 

 

Hackett quotes Irish writer Magee, “The English may be too comfortable to write great novels.”  

At least six times in her article she labels ‘Britain/ England’ as one and the same, the England label can never include Scots or the Welsh and we’ll never regard Britain as England as our cultural or historic home, even though so many Scots remain in ignorance of Scotland’s rich histories of which we might be proud. Its time Londoners woke up to this reality. 

Our creative stories, arts and music are intrinsic to our shared voices and view of self.

 

Perhaps creative thinkers either can’t afford or don’t want to be in London. In ‘Britain/ England’ mind-set little exists outside of London. In the 80s London boasted a thriving literary scene around Soho. But today’s London is dominated in its skyline by foreign oligarchs empty high-rises, populist musicals, global chain outlets and over priced art. 

 

 

**BOOKS

Anthology of Scottish stories – Gerard Caruthers

Scottish literature, an introduction – Alan Riach.

The Fair Botanist – Sara Sheridan

 

Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burns and British Romanticism – 

Scottish Nationalism for a Progressive modern state

It’s a strange thing, I’ve been reading Tom Nairn ‘s excellent book the Break up of Britain (1977) and he makes many profound insights into the archaic nature of the British state – one being that unionists view all the supposed benefits of the state of Britain, and that some view Scottish nationalism as a backward-looking project. I’ve been told too that I should move beyond the Battle of Bannockburn (1314).

He writes, ’Nationalism is not a question of simple identity, but rather of something more – a catalyst.

 

What’s strange really is in my view the British state is the total opposite of unionist’s world view. I see Scottish nationalism and Scottish independence as a progressive, modern project to bring a more authentic democracy for progressive socialism and fair opportunities alongside a healthy capitalism, that encourages and protects small businesses, we need both. 

 

And I have longed viewed the British state as archaic and as a pre-democracy – as does Nairn and many other commentators. The British state as established 1688, of the Crown in Parliament, well before universal suffrage, Nairn writes, is a political cul-de-sac, unable to reform itself under its two party system and its first past the post voting system. 

 

Because of this Britain “is stuck in the past and not a modern state. Crucially FPTP voting means Bills at Westminster don’t get proper scrutiny. (New book, How Westminster Works and How it Doesn’t by Ian Dunt  how Westminster is not effective at governing). 

 

Nairn writes, “Although not of course an absolutist state, the Anglo-British system remains a product of the general transition from an absolutism to modern constitutionalism: it led the way out of the former, but never genuinely arrived at the latter,…..it is basically an indefensible and inadaptable relic, not a modern state form.” 

 

Perhaps it’s now time we stop hiding behind nationalism, but view it as the positive, progressive project it is. Nairn views nationalism as both good and bad, and as a process that happened across Europe in the 1800s. Scotland is only now trying to catch up. 

 

He also writes Scotland became bereft of a literary voice due to the false romantic myths of Walter Scott – of a Scotland gone forever – and due to emigration and the Kailyard school. Nationalism is also viewed as anti-globalization.

 

Nationalism, Nairn argues is always both good and bad. ’ And originated from and derived in – the impossibility of escape from the uneven development of capitalism.

The reason is that when the nation states in Europe were transitioning in the 1800s, due according to Nairn, to the uneven nature of capitalism, Scotland was the only nation state to have previously jumped across during the enlightenment and the Edinburgh new town. 

 

But now today Scotland has been left behind, in the 20^th century, There has been no revolution, and the absence of change. 

By contrast in Europe 1800s, nationalism took hold with the demise of empires, and the rise of nation states.  As a nation Scotland jumped, ahead in the 1700s, with increased trade, the enlightened thought,  when Scotland moved very fast from a place of superstition and tribal warfare.

“Only one country stepped over before the Europe of 1800s – Scotland politics and culture was decisively and permanently altered by the great awaking of nationalist consciousness – Scotland or north Britain …due to the uneven development of capitalism. “

 “After the black the unspeakable 17^th century was 1688 which marked the real dawn of Scotland, after the dark bloodshed years of religious conflicts across Europe. – William Robertson, in his book History of Scotland. When the Scottish bourgeoisie exploited the results of the English revolution. Scotland progressed from fortified castles and witch burning, to Edinburgh new town and Adam Smith in only a generation:”

 

***Tom Nairn’s book The Break Up of Britain

“The most influential book on British politics to be published in the last half century,”  writes Anthony Burnett

 

 

Walter Scott’s fake nationalism and false myths of Scotland

“pervasive, second-rate sentimentalist, associated with tartan nostalgia.”

 For Walter Scott - “the past is gone, beyond recall.” ….it evokes a national past never to revive it.”

.... no part of political or social mobilization of present by a mythical emphasis on

 

Walter Scott’s novels were read across the world, and his contribution to the rising tide of national romanticism, was a great one.  – “however it was great everywhere but in his own nation of Scotland.” Scott wrote of a  “romantic national culture and the rise of a kitsch Scotland.”

 

Tom Nairn, leading political theorist, denounces Scots novelist Walter Scott- ..”the destruction of Celtic Scotland was to haunt Lowlanders or the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott. He showed us “how not to be nationalist during an ascendant political nationalism. Its the language of Tory unionism and of progress”/ 

 

“From Ossian to Walter Scott played a large part in generating and defining romantic consciousness for the rest of Europe while degrading his own nation. Which led to rootlessness, a void, which cultural and literary historians deplore.  The continuity between (heroic) past and present.”…....  The heart may regret but never the head.”

 

Nairn writes of the failures of Scottish Nationalism, during the 1800s under the false romantic myths such as the writing of Walter Scott and of a bereft Scottish literature at this time.  Two examples – cultural emigration and the Kailyard school of vulgar tartanry.”,,, 

 

Scotland reverted to being a province 1800s, while prosperous and imperial. Why? Scotland became void and rootless. 1. Absence of political nationalism 2. Absence of a mature cultural romanticism. The poor Highland's world and comparatively prosperous Lowland world, and the total repression of Highland culture and social structure. The highland were once half of the population of Scotland.

Scott monument Edinburgh

By contrast the real purpose of romantic history was different – cultural nationalism was the mythical resuscitation of the past, to serve the present and the future. 

 

Scott caused disintegration of a great national culture. Elsewhere in Europe, “the middle classes felt the development for people was impossible without rapid mobilization of their own resources and rejection of alien rule.”

 

Nairn claims Scotland is unique in Europe, where nationalism struggled with its national identity and along with the rise of nationalism 1800s and the rise of nation states across Europe, as the "result of the uneven development of capitalism."

 

That the Scottish Enlightenment was very much a Tory project. While Scotland prospered during the 1800s with manufacturing, its literary voice became bereft. He sees Walter Scott’s work of a mythical Scotland and Scots heroes, as very much glorifying a past that was gone and to be forgotten. Scotland became north Britain. While Scott’s romantic and mythical novels were highly successful across the world. 

 

The real interests of Scotland diverge from the auld sang