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CONTENTS CONTENTS ADAM DRINAN The Men of the Rocks 294 BERNARD PERGUSSON Across the Chindwin 237 JAMES PERGUSSON Portrait of a Gentleman 3" G S FRASER The Black Cherub 82 SIR ALEXANDER GRAY A Father of SociaUsm loi Scotland 3i9 NEIL M GUNN Up from the Sea 114 The Little Red Cow 122 GEORGE CAMPBELL HAY Ardlamont 280 To a Loch Fyne Fisherman 280 The Smoky Smirr o Rain 281 MAURICE LINDSAY The Man-in-the-Mune 148 Willie Wabster 148 Bum Music 149 ERIC LINKLATER Rumbelow 132 Sealskin Trousers 261 HUGH MACDIARMID Wheesht, Wheesht 64 Blind Man's Luck 64 Somersault 5^ vi CONTENTS Sabine 65 O Wha's been Here 197 Bonnie Broukit Baim 198 COLIN MACDONALD Lord Leverhulme and the Men of Lewis 189 COMPTON MACKENZIE The North Wind 199 MORAY MCLAREN The Commercial Traveller 297 DONALD G MACRAE The Pterodactyl and Powhatan's Daughter 309 BRUCE MARSHALL A Day with Mr Migou 38 GEORGE MILLAR Stone Walls . 170 NAOMI MITCHISON Samund's Daughter 85 EDWIN MUIR In Orkney 151 In Glasgow 158 In Prague 161 The Good Town 166 WILL OGILVIE The Blades of Harden 259 ALEXANDER SCOTT The Gowk in Lear 112 GEORGE SCOTT-MONCRIEFF Lowland Portraits 282 vii CONTENTS SYDNEY GOODSIR SMITH ; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are due, and are hereby tendered, to the following authors and publishers for permission to use copyright poems and extracts from the volumes named hereunder : John Allan and Messrs Methuen & Co Ltd for Farmer's Boy ; George Blake and William CoUins, Sons and Co Ltd for The Ship- builders ; Jonathan Cape Ltd for three poems from Collected Poems by Lilian Bowes Lyon ; James Bridie and Messrs Constable & Co Ltd for Mr Bolfry (Playsfor Plain People) ; Ivor Brown and Jonathan Cape Ltd for Say the Word, Just Another Word, A Word in Your Ear, I Give You my Word ; Kenneth Buthlay and The Ettrick Press ' for The Salmon ' from Scottish Student Verse 1937-47 ; F Fraser Darling and William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd for Natural History in the Highlands and Islands ; Norman Douglas and Messrs Chatto & Windus for Looking Back, Paneros and Together ; Norman Douglas and Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd for Old Calabria and South Wind ; Adam Drinan for a passage from The Men of the Rocks, published by The Fortune Press ; Bernard Fergusson and Blackwood's Magazine ' for Across the Chindwin ' ; James Fergusson and Messrs OUver & Boyd Ltd for Scotland igjS ; G S Fraser and The HarviU Press ' Ltd for The Black Cherub ' from The Traveller has Regrets ; Sir Alexander Gray and Messrs Longmans, Green & Co Ltd for The ' Socialist Tradition ; Sir Alexander Gray for Scodand ' from Gossip, published by The Porpoise Press ; Neil M Gunn and Messrs Faber & Faber Ltd for Morning Tide and Young Art and Old Hector ; George Campbell Hay and Messrs Ohver & Boyd Ltd for three poems from Wind on Loch Fyne ; Maurice Lindsay and The Serif Books Ltd for diree poems from At the Wood's Edge ; Eric Linklater and Jonathan ' ' Cape Ltd for Rumbelow from A Dragon Laughed ; Eric Linklater and Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd for Seabkin Trousers and Other Stories Hugh MacDiarmid and William Blackwood & Sons Ltd for four poems from Penny Wheep, ' O Wha's been Here ' from A Drunk Man ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ' ' Looks at the Tkistk, and Bonnie Broukit Bairn from Sangschaw ; Colin MacDonald and The Moray Press for Highland Journey ; Compton Mackenzie and Messrs Chatto & Windus for The North Ltd Wind of Love ; Moray McLaren and Gerald Duckworth & Co for Return to Scotland ; Donald G Macrae and William Maclellan ' for The Pterodactyl and Powhatan's Daughter ' from Poetry Scot- Ltd for land No 3 ; Bruce Marshall and Messrs Constable & Co Yellow Tapers for Paris ; George Millar and WilHam Heinemann Ltd for Horned Pigeon ; Naomi Mitchison and Jonathan Cape Ltd for the Bough Breaks Muir and George G Harrap When ; Edwin & Co Ltd for The Story and the Fable ; Edwin Muir and Messrs ' Faber & Faber Ltd for The Good Town ' from The Labyrinth ; ' ' Will Ogilvie for The Blades of Harden from Whaup o' the Rede ; ' Alexander Scott for The Gowk in Lear ' from The Latest in Elegies ; George Scott-Moncrieff and B T Batsford Ltd for Lowlands of Scot- land ; Sydney Goodsir Smith and WiUiam Maclellan for two poems from The Deevil's Waltz ; Andrew Young and Jonathan Cape Ltd ' for Hard Frost ' from The Green Man and two poems from The White Blackbird ; Douglas Young and William Maclellan for three poems from A Braird o Thristles. INTRODUCTION This collection of prose and poetry by living Scottish authors is designed neither as an omnibus nor as a dairy. It does not offer a place to everyone, and it is not a de- liberate skimming of the cream. In making the selection I felt nb desire to be fair and inclusive ; and I have not been dominated by a critical anxiety to show my chosen authors at the tallest and most immaculate flowering of their several talents. My purpose was rather to make an attractive and, I hope, expository array of contemporary writing, and mj method has been to rely on the arbitrary taste of an indifferent memory. I began, that, is, with the reflection on my mind ofa landscape, sufficiently coloured and showing the proper variety of scene to make a Uterary portrait of Scotland, and then cast about in my memory for passages in the work of the authors whose prose and poetry had, in the ordinary course of my reading, helped to create that landscape. I filled my imagined map with what I thought would suit it. Some very respectable features of the landscape have been deUberately omitted. I decided to exclude books and authors whose primary intention was informative or critical, though the decision to do so deprived the anthol- ogy of much that would have enhanced its value, and in the few instances where I have broken this rule I have done so for a specific but arbitrary reason. Fraser Darling, for example, is a scientific and therefore informative writer, but I have included his description of the Atlantic Seal because seals are a relevant detail in the Scottish landscape, and I have always regarded them with interest and affection. A Father of Socialism, again, is critical and instructive writing, but I remembered it for the sheer xi INTRODUCTION Gray's pleasure it had given me ; it is Sir Alexander unusual gift to write of political and economic matters with such grace and wit as few authors command whose only purpose is entertainment. But though I have avoided instructional works, and restricted my choice—or nearly so—to writers who are primarily imaginative, my plan required that I should take from their books what would illustrate the Scottish scene and temperament ; or to be modest, my view of them. There are rural pictures by John Allan and Edwin Muir to set beside the urban scenes by Edwin Muir and George Blake ; and there is a chapter from Compton Mackenzie's immense novel. The Four Winds of Love, that I chose dehberately in preference to many passages of a more purely Uterary interest because it tells a good deal about the ideas implicit in Scottish Nationalism and about the sort of people one may hear discussing it. In Upjrom the Sea there is something of Highland Scotland, unspoiled by the vulgar world and Hghted by the translucent sky of Neil Gunn's cosmography ; and in Stone Walls and Across the Chindwin there are other provinces, very turbulently full of the world, where Scots revive their long history of war. I have not, it will be observed, confined my choice of scenery to native heath nor borrowed only from authors who stiU pay taxes on their own soil. To have done that would have been to show an imperfect and most mis- leading view ; for the tale of Scotland is no more to be told between Carter Bar and the Pentland Firth than the history ofJewry between Dan and Beersheba. The true parties to the Caledonian antisyzygy—Mr MacDiarmid's impressive word—may be, indeed, not Highlanders and Lowlanders, not Jacobitish romantics and hard-headed Whigs, but forth-faring Scots and home-keeping Scots. A remarkable sentiment for their own country dominates xii INTRODUCTION the latter, a vigorous preference for far places appears to inspire the former—but blood is thicker than the estrang- ing seas, and on two noisy nights of the year in a hundred towns from Auckland to Seattle there are many thousands of otherwise orthodox and disciplined citizens who, in a vast emotional confession, proclaim the breeding that environment, often happily, occludes. I cannot think it likely, I admit, that Norman Douglas makes a habit of attending Burns Suppers, but even against a Mediter- ranean background the ancestral bone shows clearly in his countenance and work. Even the English climate, in some ways a more subtle menace than Capri, does not often quite obscure a Scottish origin, at least not for a generation or two ; and if in his sentimental consciousness a Scot may continue so in the pervasive airs of Hampstead and Nottingham and Bournemouth, then the confmes of Scotland are assuredly not Umited by geography. The aggressive out-and-out Scottishness of the poets in this anthology who, as the disciples of Hugh MacDiarmid, write in the Lallans dialect, is a recent development in our history ; for though there has been much physical combat between Scots and English, Scottish writers have not, until lately, shown hostility to the English language. Such redoubtable figures, indeed, as John Kiiox and David Hume assiduously cultivated its style and idiom, and neither Smollett nor Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle nor Stevenson, doubted their Hberty to use Enghsh as their own.

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