The Belgian Revival and Japonisme in Scotland

Fin-de-Siècle Scotland is frequently associated with the ‘kailyard’ movement and, by extension, with small towns, insularity and sentimentality. Using Scottish writers and artists’ thorough engagement with Belgian and Japanese culture as case studies, this chapter reveals how deeply international and cross-cultural Scottish writing and art was in the late-Victorian period. I argue that Scottish cultural revivalists looked to these two nations to help them build counter-hegemonic connections that allowed them to defend the value of smaller nations and traditional cultures. Part of the reason some cultural revivalists looked to Japan and Belgium specifically was that these nations’ artists offered examples of how cultural revivalist work could fuse with modernity, rather than simply reject it. I focus on examining William Sharp’s self-conscious attempts to bring the decadent energy of La Jeune Belgique into Scotland to help resist metro-centric thinking, before illustrating the marked impact of Maurice Maeterlinck on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. The Glasgow School played a key role nourishing Scotland’s Japanese connection, and we often find japonisme fusing with Scottish forms in their work.

Introduction

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.

Neo-Pagan Scotland: Fashioning Origins

In their attempts to advance Scottish cultural revivalism, many writers and artists looked to mythical origins to help bind the national community and define its international connections. This chapter illustrates that it was not just Celtic mythical heroes that appealed to cultural revivalists but also Mediterranean paganisms, and that Celtic and Greek gods and mythologies often interacted in Scottish literature and art. The chapter uses John Duncan’s Ramsay Garden murals as a case study, before going on to assess William Sharp/Fiona Macleod’s concern with paganism. Fiona Macleod’s neo-pagan writings reveal the complicated gender dynamics of cultural revivalism in Scotland. The chapter then discusses the significant presence of Pan in fin-de-siècle Scottish culture, before exploring John Davidson’s resistance to both neo-paganism and Scottish cultural revivalism.

The Pageant Revival: Popularising Renascence

This chapter argues that several Scottish cultural revivalists, including Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Jessie M. King, enthusiastically embraced Edwardian historical pageantry. What pageantry offered these writers and artists was an opportunity to further disseminate the Celtic myths and ‘lines of descent’ they had built in heir writings and artworks. By focussing on two key pageants: The Scottish National Pageant of Allegory History and Myth (1908) and Patrick Geddes’s The Masque of Learning (1912), I reveal the importance of Celtic mythology to Scottish pageantry, as well as the ways that these pageants interrogated stadialist notions of historical progress. A sub-chapter is dedicated to Arthurianism in Scotland, where I highlight the ways in which the Scottish claim to King Arthur helped advance Scottish cultural revivalism. The chapter also complicates wider critical understandings of Edwardian British pageantry, and reveals a distinct tradition in Scotland.

The Scottish Romance Revival

This chapter considers a range of Scottish writers associated with the late-Victorian romance revival – Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Lang, Barrie, Jacob and Buchan– and examines the ways in which each writer’s work contributed to cultural revivalism in Scotland. After identifying a key context that many revivalists felt was inhibiting the health of Scottish nationality – the Highland-Lowland cultural divide – the chapter goes on to scrutinise the various ways that Stevenson’s writings interrogated that divide and attempted to demonstrate greater national connection between the different geographies and cultures of Scotland. While his correspondent, Arthur Conan Doyle, was less directly aligned to Scottish cultural revivalism, we witness his concerns with Anglocentrism in The Mystery of Cloomber and The Lost World, the latter of which reflects his changing views around the question of Home Rule. The latter sections of the chapter consider some of the ways in which we can link the work of Lang, Barrie, Jacob and Buchan to fin-de-siècle Scottish cultural revivalism.

Envoy

This conclusion builds on the previous chapters of the book and highlights some key lines of continuity between the Scottish cultural revivalists of the fin de siècle and the writers of the Scottish Renaissance. By focussing on Hugh MacDiarmid, the conclusion reveals that – despite MacDiarmid’s dismissive portraits of late-Victorian Scotland – he acknowledged various debts to (and expressed admiration for) several figures discussed in this book, including William Sharp/Fiona Macleod and Patrick Geddes. The lines of continuity presented here are only indicative, but they reveal a more complex relationship between late-Victorian and Modernist cultural nationalism than some of MacDiarmid’s quotations suggest.

The Occult Revival

This chapter argues that fin-de-siècle occultism was a key component of Scottish cultural revivalism in the late-Victorian period. Discussing a range of figures – including Patrick Geddes, S. L. Macgregor Mathers and John Duncan, I demonstrate that occultism supported and defined cultural nationalism in Scotland in numerous ways, as it did in Ireland. A sub-chapter focuses on Egyptomania in Scotland and I argue here that the international craze for Egypt had particular resonance in Scotland due to Scotland’s ‘Scota Pharoah’ foundation myth. I then assess key occult societies and their intersections with neo-Jacobitism, a movement that spoke well to cultural revivalists’ nostalgia for the House of Stuart. The chapter also uncovers Geddes’s plan to create a Celtic occult society, not dissimilar to W. B. Yeats’s Order of Celtic Mysteries, in Edinburgh.