ALAN Riach has done it again with his insight into Scots literature, a neglected subject of academia in Scotland. His “Windows on a changing world” (February 18) shows the neglected genius of many of Robert Louis Stevenson's contemporaries, Scottish and Irish.

The advice and criticism given by William Archer to the young meticulous James Joyce must have been invaluable, considering Joyce wrote at the pace of one sentence a day for the Land of Saints and Scholars, which one enthusiast cried from the Dublin audience, “Plaster Saints”. Riach included George Bernard Shaw and the Scoto Irish Arthur Conan Doyle of literary Edinburgh in his list of RSL’s contemporaries and sphere of influence.

Riach’s mention of MacKenzie’s Highland Clearances in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Celtic Connections was and still is also very symptomatic of expunging Celticism from the Scots duality. MacKenzie and Anderson’s very detailed Highland Clearances had to be copied in whole tracts and certainly far from plagiarism in Prebble’s attempts to make them better known and to rise from obscurity. When John Prebble listed almost whole tracts of this factual sorry story he was criticised by Unionist academia for being a mere journalist. His Buffalo Soldier also told of barely suppressed racism in society.

Prebble happened to be English, born in a Highland community in Canada, and ended his days in the Highlands supporting a Scottish Socialist Republic, as did George Orwell, who changed his name from Blair because it was too Scottish. Such conversion would hardly be forgiven by the North British Unionist literati and history critics, then and now, in vociferous denial of our Scots or Irish Celtic existence. The Highlanders, who did not call themselves Highlanders, but Gaels, were still called “Yirish” till the middle of the 18th century. Self-policing still goes on in the “Celtic Fringe” for fear of the Gaelic language holding them back. Parents still try to stop passing the beautiful tongue onto their children. What can be more self-denying and repressive? Whole sections of our community are still self-loathing, self-hating and self-racist. What a perfect colony.

The Scots academic Gifford brothers were at pains to point out all this in their neglected theory of the Scots duality, especially in their references to Robert Louis Stevenson. His Master of Ballantrae centred on the “dour” Presbyterian brother who was forced to stayed behind, by his faither, while his dashing gay cavalier brother, Jamie Durrisdeer, dashed off to support the Jacobite Rebellion along with his Irish Jacobite compatriot, Burke, sharing many swashbuckling adventures around the globe, epitomised on screen by the dashing Errol Flynn.

Perhaps the most famous example of this Celtic and Angliced inner struggle was best exemplified by the adventures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The dark inner Celt emerging from the thin veneer of Anglicisation sweeping Edinburgh still frightens the establishment today. Ironically, at the time of the so-called Union, Many Scots aspiring classes hired an Irishman from London, Sheridan, to teach them English lessons. They say that Dublin and Inverness were the prime examples of English as learned from their masters. Sheridan’s teaching explains the peculiar madam Morningside and Kelvinside accents, where Madam Coogate and Madam Coocaddens often seeps through from the Celtic herts tae their Saxon tongues.

More power and merr windaes tae break from the Alan Riach’s breaking through from Unionist academia and overt politicisation and subversion of our past, present and very fragile future.

Donald Anderson
Glasgow

I MUST disagree with Alan Riach’s judgment on Andrew Lang that “his prose style is often pedantic and laborious”, and wonder how much of Lang – widely regarded as one of the most scintillating stylists of his generation – Riach has actually read. As a tit-bit consider Lang’s spoof Socratic dialogue:

The scene, a Links near Ancient Athens:

"Critias was now building a small altar of sea sand, on which he placed a white ball, and addressed himself to it in a pious manner and becomingly.

'It is a singularly fine forming,' I remarked; on hearing which he smote his ball, not rightly, not according to the law, but on the top, so that it ran into the road, and there lay in a rut.

'Tell me Critias,' I said, 'do you think it becoming a philosopher, and one who studies the sacred writings even of the extreme Barbarians, to be incapable of self-command, and that in a trifling matter such as whether a ball is hit fairly, or not fairly?' But he seized an iron club and glared upon me so fiercely that I turned to Charmides, who was now about to hit his ball for the second time.

He observing that it was a 'beautiful lie' I asked him, 'Charmides can we say that any lie is really beautiful or noble, or are not nobility and beauty rather the attributes of the True?' He thereupon struck his ball, but not skilfully, so that it fell into the Ilissus, which did not seem to be his intention but otherwise...

'Critias,' I said, 'of three things, one. Either a wise man will not go into bunkers, or, being in, he will endure such things as befall him with patience...'"

And one could find innumerable examples of similar elegance, humour and lightness of touch throughout Andrew Lang’s extensive writings.

William Donaldson
Aberdeen