How the Scots Invented the Modern World (18 page)

Ramsay understood, as other Scots soon would, that high culture could also be good business. To increase his customer base, he permitted patrons not only to buy the latest books but also to borrow them for a week or two, for a subscription fee. It was the first lending library in Britain, and soon people were following Ramsay’s example up and down Scotland. At first Ramsay ran afoul of the Kirk: clerics warned that he was allowing profane and sinful works to circulate in the city, and demanded that he be shut down. The day the town council sent inspectors to examine Ramsay’s bookshelves, however, they were amazed to discover them full of theological works and sermons. The city fathers decided to allow Ramsay to stay open.

He did go too far, however, when he tried to open a theater, almost within sight of the John Knox House. The Kirk attacked Ramsay’s “Hellbred Playhouse Comedians who debauch all the Faculties of the Souls of our Rising Generation,” and the place had to be closed. It would be several more years before plays could be performed publicly in Edinburgh; people instead went to what were called “presentations,” usually in someone’s private home. But a corner had been turned in the battle against the old prohibitions and taboos, and the Kirk’s warning about “the Souls of our Rising Generation” shows that it knew the old Presbyterianism was losing its grip.

Commercial Scotland had another significance in the 1740s. Glasgow and Edinburgh were where loyalty to the British union ran the deepest. They were “Whig” cities par excellence, meaning committed to ties to England and parliamentary rule from Westminster, as well as the new Hanoverian kings, a succession of German-born Georges with their English prime ministers. The first generation of Scottish Whigs, men such as Principal Carstares, had had to fight for union, and saw it primarily as a way to keep a Protestant on the throne. The next generation—men such as William Robertson, David Hume, Hugh Blair, John Home, and Alexander Carlyle—could take union for granted. Those self-professed disciples of Kames and Hutcheson saw their mission as securing Scotland’s rightful place as England’s equal in this United Kingdom. When Robertson composed his
History of Scotland
in 1759, he could boast that “the union having incorporated the two nations, and rendered them one people, the distinctions which had subsisted for many ages gradually wear away; peculiarities disappear; the same manners prevail in both parts of the island. . . .”

One such distinction had been political. John Erskine of Grange, a jurist and leading Scottish Whig, noticed this as early as 1735. The end of independent Scotland, with its own Parliament and Privy Council, had not brought despotism and tyranny, as so many had feared. Just the opposite. “There is a wide difference,” Erskine noted, “between constitutional and effectual liberty.” In Scotland, he explained, “we had the first; but actual liberty was a stranger here.” Even the greatest aristocrats were not really free men, “for they were lawless, and with lawlessness freedom is inconsistent.” Thinking of figures such as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, Erskine remarked, “the truth is our Scottish heroes of old savor a little of the Poles at present,” Poland being the eighteenth-century equivalent of constitutional anarchy. “They fought for liberty and independency, but not [for] the country, but [for] the Crown and the grandees.” Scots were beginning to realize that the passing of the old laws could be a matter of celebration rather than regret. In fact, that same year, 1735, saw the death penalty for witchcraft finally abolished.

The other distinction between England and Scotland, and just as important in the minds of Robertson and others, had been cultural and literary. Whereas seventeenth-century Scotland had little or no great literature to set beside the achievements of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, today, Robertson wrote, “the same standard of taste, and purity of language, is established” in both England and Scotland.

“Purity of language”—this touched on a thorny issue in the eighteenth century, namely whether educated Scotsmen should adopt English, instead of Scots, as their primary written and spoken tongue. The social and cultural pressures for taking up English were intense. Everyone knew that England was the dominant partner in this new united kingdom. A Scotsman with drive and ambition measured his success by his success in England, and particularly in the English equivalent of the Big Apple, London. Succeeding there required learning to be and act English: Dr. Johnson’s maxim about the high road to London turned out to be true in more ways than one. At the same time, one was expected to set aside the language and culture one had grown up with since childhood. But how far and how much? That was the question that the early Scottish Enlightenment confronted head-on, and with it something that has bedeviled the modern world ever since: the question of cultural identity.

In fact, Scottish Whigs such as Robertson, Adam Smith, and David Hume confronted much the same problem that Indian, Chinese, and other Third World intellectuals would encounter a century or two later: how to deal with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage, and oneself with it. At times they tried to act as if there were really only one culture, a British culture, just as there was only kingdom, Great Britain. They even took to calling themselves “North Britons,” implying that any remaining difference between the two people was merely geographic. However, no Englishman ever referred to himself as a “South Briton,” and Scots knew it. No amount of political wishful thinking could close the cultural gap.

One of the first to realize this was the poet James Thomson. Born in the Scottish border country, he was not only the first nature poet and forerunner of British Romanticism; he also composed the anthem of Scottish Whiggery, which would resound down through the next two centuries as rousing choruses of “Rule Britannia”:

When Britain first at Heaven’s Command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung the strain:
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons never shall be slaves.

Here was the Scottish Whig ideal: we are Britons, Scots and English all, belonging to one nation and enjoying the same privileges and liberties. All the same, although it was Thomson’s own home of Southdean in the Tweed river valley that inspired his poetic landscapes, and although he studied in Edinburgh and lived there for nine years, it was not until he went to London in 1726 and found a fellow Scot named Millan to publish the first part of his cycle of poems,
The Seasons,
that he found the literary success he craved.
¹¹
An English, not a Scottish, reading public made Thomson one of the most celebrated writers of the eighteenth century—and English, not his native Scots, served as the vehicle for his poetic muse.

So which to use, English or Scots (not, we note, Gaelic, which hardly any urban dweller spoke)? Despite their shared origin as dialects of old Anglo-Saxon, the two languages diverged widely in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Enlivened by borrowings from French and Scandinavian as well as Gaelic, broad Scots could be heard up and down the streets of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, as well as in the farms and valleys of the Clyde and Tweed. For centuries it had served as the language of law, government, commerce, and the Kirk. It had also spawned a rich literary heritage during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as even a dedicated Scottish Whig such as William Robertson readily admitted. But now, as the eighteenth century dawned, it seemed second-class. As the career of James Thomson demonstrated, any Scottish modern or “polite” culture would have to take root in the idiom from the south.

For most Scots, learning to converse and write in English was as difficult as learning a new language. Mistakes in grammar, as well as accent, would constantly give them away. David Hume conversed in broad Scots all his life, but he always regretted that he never learned to speak English as well as he wrote it. He confessed that he and his fellow Scots were “unhappy in our Accent and Pronunciation.” It was not easy to pronounce
night
as
nite
instead of
nicht,
or say
brite
instead of
bricht.
It was hard to remember to say
old
instead of
auld; above
instead of
aboon; talk
instead of
crack;
a
gathering
instead of a
rockin’;
to say “It made me very glad” instead of “It pat me fidgin’ fain” or “I am angry” instead of “I’m a’ in a pelter” and “I have drunk a great deal” instead of “I drang a muckle.” Hume confessed to an English correspondent, “Notwithstanding all the Pains, which I have taken in the Study of the English Language, I am still jealous of my Pen. As to my Tongue, you have seen, that I regard it as totally desperate and irreclaimable.”

However, the person who best and most famously represents the problems of being a Scot in Georgian Britain is James Boswell.

Boswell is one of those writers whose reputation has suffered from his own success. Generations have come to take him for granted. In his
Life of Johnson,
Boswell turned himself into a sensitive, self-effacing sounding board in order to reveal the character of someone he believed to be not only interesting and admirable, but a truly great man—much as he would have done if he had ever finished his biography of Lord Kames. His voluminous diaries suffer from the same virtues. Boswell made them an absolutely honest and candid record of his own thoughts, experiences, and emotions. They present us with “Bozzie” not as he appeared to others but as he appeared to himself: his fantasies, ambitions, missteps, anxieties, and weaknesses are all revealed in detail. They dominate our recollection of reading them—and of him. Taken together, they have created the image of James Boswell as a genial, bumbling mediocrity, who happened to compose a literary masterpiece almost by accident.

Now, finally, we are beginning to realize that Boswell was a truly gifted writer and an accomplished man, that rare combination of an intellectual with broad human sympathies as well as a deep personal honesty. He grew up in Edinburgh under the shadow of the impossibly high demands of his disapproving father, Lord Auchinleck of the Court of Session, and found an emotional and intellectual counterweight in his mentor, Lord Kames. It was Kames who encouraged Boswell’s intellectual and literary interests, and who probably enabled Boswell, against his own inclinations, to complete his studies to become a lawyer.

The idea of setting off for London was Boswell’s own, however. He was twenty years old when he first arrived in 1760, determined to succeed in the city that seemed the center of civilized life. He was, as he described himself, “a young fellow whose happiness had always centered in London, who had at last got there, and had begun to taste its delights.” He fantasized about “getting into the Guards, being about Court, enjoying the happiness of the
beau monde
and the company of men of Genius.”

One thing stood in the way of this fantasy: being Scottish. When he first met Dr. Johnson, his first stammered words were, “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” Johnson’s reply was devastating: “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” It was a bad season for being a Scot in London. The new king, George III, had selected an extremely unpopular prime minister of Scottish origin, Lord Bute, and political feelings ran high against “North Britons.” Boswell even attended a play at which the audience kept shouting over and over, “No Scots! No Scots!” The radical John Wilkes published daily diatribes against Scottish immigrants, attacking them as ignorant, grasping, and corrupt: “The principal part of the Scottish nobility are tyrants,” Wilkes sneered, “and the whole of the common people are slaves.”

In this hostile atmosphere, Boswell struggled with his giveaway Scottish diction, just as Hume did. When he introduced General Sir Alexander MacDonald to Dr. Johnson in March 1772, the distinguished soldier remarked, “I have been correcting several Scotch accents in my friend Boswell. I doubt, Sir, if any Scotchman ever attains to a perfect English pronunciation.” Johnson replied loftily, “Why, Sir, few of ’em do. . . . But, sir, there can be no doubt that a man who conquers nineteen parts of the Scottish accent may conquer the twentieth.” Later, Boswell met a Dr. Kenrick, who claimed “he taught a man from Aberdeen to speak good English in six weeks.” Kenrick explained to Boswell that his great difficulty was to get the Aberdonian to stop lilting his words as he spoke, as a Scotsman did and an Englishman did not. Kenrick finally told the man, “Sir, you don’t speak at all. You sing.”

Today we would naturally expect this sort of prejudice and “negative stereotyping” to breed a deep cultural resentment among educated Scots, or at least a backlash. Remarkably, and characteristically, it had just the opposite effect. Boswell not only read Wilkes’s anti-Scottish scandal sheet (he admired its “poignant acrimony,” as he put it), but when they met he found Wilkes to be funny and charming, and they struck up a lasting friendship. Intellectuals in Edinburgh were thrilled, not offended, when in the summer of 1761 the Irish actor and “orthoepist” (or pronunciation expert) Thomas Sheridan arrived in town to offer a series of lectures on English elocution. More than three hundred gentlemen, “the most eminent in this country for their rank and abilities,” attended Sheridan’s lectures (one of them, we note, was Boswell). They encouraged Sheridan to enlarge on those aspects of spoken English “with regard to which Scotsmen are most ignorant, and the dialect of the country most imperfect.” They even encouraged him to run a separate set of lectures for ladies. Sheridan, whose son Richard would become a celebrated playwright and author of
The School for
Scandal,
sold places at his lectures for a guinea each—in today’s money, almost a hundred dollars—as well as subscriptions for his forthcoming book for half a guinea. The Edinburgh town council even made him a honorary freeman of the city. All in all, it was a remarkable summer, not only for Sheridan but also for Edinburgh’s elite, whose cultural anxiety evidently ran so deep that they were eager to be lectured on good English from an Irish actor.