“We could understand nothing on this side of what the people said, any more than if we had been in Morocco.” So wrote Daniel Defoe, in “Letter 13: Containing a description of the North of Scotland” in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. This was sometime in 1706, the year before the Act of Union. Defoe was in Wester Ross by now, in and around the town of Tain. Not only did he find the common people there woefully ignorant of “the customs of Christians”, he also found it “much for our convenience” to make them believe “we were French”. This is telling stuff. But no less telling, on another historical trajectory, is Defoe’s take on landscape, on “all that mountainous barren and frightful country” through which he passed. No grandeur for him, and no sublime. All he can say of the Isle of Skye is that it is “something like the Isle of Wight” in its relationship to the mainland.

But by the end of the eighteenth century, we are in quite another country. Much water has flowed under the picturesque bridge and many tides have swept round the Hebrides. Landscape has begun to be invented, or reinvented, by the visual arts, and appropriated for the aesthetic and literary. Place finds its place and all those aspects that might be said to constitute “a place” become a local habitation and a name, as well as the merely commodified picturesque, en route to “The Monarch of the Glen” and other culprits, some of them tartan. It’s not that Defoe is altogether too early to think differently. After all, his tour had several precedents, at least one of them in verse: Michael Drayton’s “Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests and other Parts of this Renowned Isle of Great Britain”, the Poly-Olbion (1622). Not that Drayton covered more than the southern part of the “kingdom”; nor that there are Romantic poetics at work in his verse, but a species of localist he was, as was his admirer north of the border, William Drummond, who sought on Drayton’s death “those fragmentes . . . of his Worke which concerne Scotland . . . to put them in this country to the presse . . . with the best remembrances his love to this country did deserve”.

Both Drayton and Defoe served ideas of Britain: Drayton with a rearguard and nostalgic view, Defoe as an active imperialist, committed to material progress. Between them stood the English Civil War. Drayton is closer to us in answering Ciaran Carson's definition of landscape as “a sourcebook”, as given in the introduction to his recent translation of The Tain, while Defoe is on another track, one that many Scots would follow in the creation of the British Empire. There is an opposition here, between modernity and the human, and it arises within Scotland as well as being imposed from without. The depressingly familiar back-story is of repression, internecine struggle, clearance, industrialization and consequent rural desolation.

“Reculer pour mieux sauter”, as the good folk of Wester Ross and Morocco say. Nothing begins or ends at once. Pull at a thread in the word “landscape” and it will take you the rest of your life to find your way home; for example “scape” meaning “a view of scenery”, “escape”, and also, pace Defoe, “a transgression due to thoughtlessness” (1681). “Land” is even more prolific. Then the two together . . . . Enough to say that all three senses of “scape” given here form significant strands in this spirited project. But not the most telling, which concerns dwelling and Dùthchas, what in Welsh is cynefin, and for which the English language has no word.

Beautifully produced by Luath Press (with over a hundred colour plates), Arts of Resistance is a set of dialogues, derived from public performances, by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach, steered by Linda MacDonald-Lewis. By “resistance” the authors mean “(1) standing firm, refusing to submit; (2) a covert organization fighting for national liberty in a country under enemy occupation”. Their story will doubtless antagonize all natural heirs to Defoe, both plain Scotophobe and unionist. To many others it will surely prove an inspiration, a revelation and education, as to the extraordinary richness and organic cohesion of twentieth-century Scottish culture, full of intellectual adventure and openness to the wider world, an aspect perhaps best illustrated here by Moffat’s “extended” portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid, subtitled “Hymn to Lenin”.

Moffat emerges from these pages not just as a great painter and extraordinary technician, but as a superb historian and critic of art – both in his time and earlier, in Scotland and elsewhere, from China to Cuba. He delivers from relative obscurity William Gillies, for one, a painter much admired by MacDiarmid, and from all but total obscurity, David Forrester Wilson, of whom we need to know much more. William McTaggart and especially Jack B. Yeats, two painters with much in common as to technique and vision, are retrieved and revitalized under Moffat and Riach’s gaze. Riach, a poet and professor of literature, knows painting astutely, as might be said of Moffat in respect of poetry. They complement each other and also on occasion deftly put each other right. They are full of passion and intelligence.

Starting out as a student in Edinburgh in the 1960s, Moffat found himself preoccupied, as were others, like his friend John Bellany, with “which visual language to use”. The choice was between abstraction and figuration, the USA and Europe. After experimenting with abstraction, he and Bellany opted for the “European” path. They wanted to forge “a figurative language which would not only be a synthesis of the old and the new, but would contain subject matter particular to modern Scotland. We closely allied ourselves to what we regarded as a specific Northern tradition of European Art. There was Breughel, Bosch, Grünewald and Rembrandt”. Goya was also included.

In 1962 Hugh MacDiarmid’s Collected Poems appeared, heralding a re-emergence for the now seventy-year-old poet. This event proved a catalyst and it became Moffat’s great inspiration to look to MacDiarmid’s example – his prolific ten years in poverty on Whalsay not least – and to that of other Scottish poets, including Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown and Norman MacCaig, and in the city, Edwin Morgan, to find a language in paint to express what being and belonging in a landscape or “place”, ravaged and depleted by history, has meant and means. This involved political commitment and “resistance”, but not at the price of art.

Some would speak differently of much late MacDiarmid on this point. Alan Riach is the general editor of the ongoing edition of MacDiarmid’s complete works. No one knows his man better, or with greater passion, and few have such a vigorous and persuasive vision of what Scottish literature has been about, in the past 200 years or so, but above all in the modernist era. Scotland is his agenda. But no less heartening, or important, is his case for the resistant value in art, universally, in poetry, painting and music (which figures much in the account), regardless of who we are and where we come from. This is something, Riach and Moffat protest, that our present age of distraction (and we might add, irresponsibility) neglects at its peril. In all the coverage afforded here, I regret only that almost none, except in passing, is given to George Campbell Hay. But neglect of Hay notwithstanding, this is a landmark book, both engaged and open to the widest currents of creative thought.

Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach with Linda MacDonald-Lewis
ARTS OF RESISTANCE
Poets, portraits and landscapes of modern Scotland
172pp. Edinburgh: Luath Press. £29.99.
978 1 906307 63 6

Andrew McNeillie’s collections of poetry include Nevermore, 2000, Now, Then, 2002, and Slower, which appeared in 2006. He is the founder of the Clutag Press.

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