One sees rise ultimately… in place of Religion—Nothing… one does not seek to replace a fever by an attack of jaundice. One seeks the fields and night and the sound of the sea, the warmth of good talk and human companionship, love, wonder in the minute life of a water-drop, exultation in the wheeling Galaxy.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘Religion’ in Scottish Scene; or The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934)
This article was published as ‘Profile of Lewis Grassic Gibbon: a Scottish Humanist’ by E. Rob, in The Humanist, July 1960
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s early death robbed us of ‘the greatest Scots novelist of the century’
SCOTLAND has a tradition of radical humanism stretching back to David Hume and given impetus by the ecclesiastical satires of Robert Burns. So it is not altogether surprising that the greatest Scots novelist of the twentieth century, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was a humanist. His masterpiece, the trilogy of novels, Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite, issued collectively under the title A Scots Quair, is still available (Jarrolds, 18s) with a percipient introduction by Ivor Brown.
This spring Scottish newspapers and the Scottish Home Service of the BBC commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gibbon’s death at the early age of thirty-four. Hugh MacDiarmid in a broadcast tribute considered that he was not, even yet, fully appreciated by the people of Scotland. One may hazard a guess that this is due in part to his attitude to religion as well as to his ruthless and sometimes harrowing realism.
Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) was the son of a crofter, James Mitchell, and his wife Lilias Grassic Gibbon, from whose name he adapted his pseudonym. Born on February 13, 1901, at the farm of Hill of Seggat, near Auchterless, in central Aberdeenshire, most of his childhood was spent at Bloomfield, Drumlithie, Kincardineshire, on the small farm which his father was to work until his death in 1936. After a year at Mackie Academy, Stonehaven, he became a junior reporter on the Aberdeen Journal before moving to the Scottish Farmer in Glasgow. After a breakdown in health, he came home to Kincardine before serving first in the Army and then in the RAF as a clerk. This enabled him to travel, taking him to the Middle East, an experience he put to good use in his books.
In 1928 his service career ended and he began to write. His early short stories were constantly rejected until in despair he sent one to H. G. Wells, who advised him to try the Cornhill magazine, at that time edited by Dr Leonard Huxley, father of Sir Julian. The first of his stories appeared in the Cornhill for January 1929, and more than a score of short pieces followed in subsequent issues during that year and the next. Some of these were collected under the title The Calends of Cairo (1931), with an introduction by H. G. Wells and Leonard Huxley, and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (1932), with a preface by J. D. Beresford.
A happy marriage to a childhood schoolmate spurred Mitchell on to a great burst of literary activity. In seven years he wrote seventeen books as well as working for a time as a publisher’s reader. All but five of these works appeared under his own name — J. Leslie Mitchell. With recognition and increasing popularity, he was able to move from London to Welwyn Garden City, where on February 7, 1935, he died after an operation.
Mitchell was passionately interested in human pre-history and this enthusiasm informs all the books he wrote. He believed in something very like a Golden Age of primitive virtue and he thought that he had found a scientific basis for this vision of history in the Diffusionist theory of culture propagated by Prof G. Elliot Smith, W. J. Perry, and H. J. Massingham, among others. But in essence this attitude was emotional and was a protest against the Scottish Calvinism which Burns had attacked before him. The Diffusionism which he espoused was a rationalization of the ‘proletarian’ sentiments of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ —
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast:
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.
It is noteworthy that in the eighteenth century Burns himself, also of ‘peasant rearing and peasant stock’ shared this conviction of the virtues of the ‘natural man’ which he derived no doubt from Rousseau and the French Enlightenment.
Sunset Song, written in the spring of 1932 and published in August of that year under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, combined this anarchistic humanism with a realistic presentation of the pre-1914 crofter community in Kincardineshire made possible by what has been described as a ‘total recall’ of childhood memories. It is written in a highly exotic rhythmic prose little removed from blank verse. In its author’s words the technique was ‘to mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires’.
The positive values which it acclaims are the values of the old Scottish crofter community, in which a rough and eccentric individualism is redeemed by occasional highlights of co-operative mutual aid when the community acts as one: harvests and threshings, a farm fire, and a rustic wedding. A belligerent humanism emerges in passages like this:
Her thoughts went back to the kirkyard. She asked would he like to come to the kirk next day, she hadn’t been there herself for a year.
He looked surprised and then laughed: You’re not getting religious are you? as though she had taken to drink… And she said No… I don’t believe they were ever religious, the Scots folk —not really religious like Irish or French or all the rest in the history books. They’ve never BELIEVED. It’s just been a place to collect and argue, the kirk, and criticize God.
And Will yawned; he said Maybe. He didn’t care one way or the other, himself. Mollie in the Argentine had taken up with the Catholics, and faith! she was welcome if she got any fun.
After the holocaust of the First World War, which shatters the mould of the old rural economy, the book ends with a magnificent retrospective threnody by the minister for the four young men of Kinraddie who were killed:
They went quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and lived and abided, their life and enduring love… And the land changes, their parks and their steadings are a desolation where the sheep are pastured… the crofter has gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer to his heart than the flesh of his body… For greed of place and possession and great estate these four had little heed: the kindness of friends and the warmth of toil and the peace of rest— they asked no more from God or man, and no less would they endure.
So, lest we shame them, let us believe that the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we seem to inherit. Beyond it and us there shines a greater hope and a newer world…
Sunset Song is not a novel for the squeamish. It depicts the ugliness as well as the beauty of the peasant life of the countryside. In some public libraries it was considered too coarse to appear on the open shelves. The ‘insane peasant malice’ it depicts has been criticized as a ‘laboured, boring, psychological trick’. But those who have praised it claim that it ‘made the Scottish earth vocal’.
Grassic Gibbon was a rebel not only against the status quo in agricultural drudgery but also against the status quo in politics, religion, morals, and social attitudes. His heroine, Chris Guthrie, does not believe in God, but this does not prevent her from marrying a minister, Robert Colquohoun. Cloud Howe, the second novel of the trilogy, is the story of their life together in the village of Segget. To begin with, Robert thinks he can change the ways of the people by preaching sermons relevant to their daily lives. But he finds that social reform cannot come, as he hoped, through the Church.
Gradually his sermons become more subdued until the painful incident of an evicted family taking refuge in a pigsty renews his anguish. In the final catastrophe he renounces his faith in a pulpit oration:
In the early days after the death of Christ His return was hourly awaited — His followers, scanty, assured, looked to His coming within a few months or years at the most, they were certain He would come again and redeem the evil of the world that had murdered HIM. And the years went by: and He tarried still. But that Hope and that Promise it was that bore the Cross to triumph at last in Rome, all over Europe; that uplifts it still. And still the Christ tarries and the world remains.
LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST INTO THY KINGDOM . . .
This year, when hunger and want filled the land, the counsellors of the nation told for our guidance that more hunger and poverty yet must come, an increase of stripes in the name of the Law, of Good Government, Order, in this Christian land, in this nineteenth century since the Christ died and came into that Kingdom of the Soul which the Churches proclaim that he came into —
. . . AND IT WAS ABOUT THE SIXTH HOUR, AND THERE WAS A DARKNESS OVER ALL THE EARTH UNTIL THE NINTH HOUR.
AND THE SUN WAS DARKENED, AND THE VEIL OF THE TEMPLE WAS RENT IN THE MIDST.
So we see, it seems, in the darkened sun, in the rending veils of the temples and kirks, the end of Mankind himself in the West, or the end of the strangest dream men have dreamt — of both the God and the Man Who was Christ, Who gave to the world a hope that passes, and goeth about like the wind, and like it returns and follows, fulfilling nothing. There is no hope for the world at all . . . except it forget the dream of Christ, forget the creeds they forged in His shadow . . .
The Passing of Religion
We have in this novel pity, terror, humour, and fidelity. Grey Granite (1934), the final book of the trilogy, dealing with life in a town, represents a falling-off in the opinion of many critics, although John Lehmann considered it ‘a fine proletarian novel’.
In the same year, also under the name Lewis Grassic Gibbon, appeared Niger: the Life of Mungo Park and Scottish Scene, or the Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (the latter in collaboration with Hugh MacDiarmid).
In Scottish Scene Gibbon shows that he saw how easily man can become less than man through trying to be more, how easily transcendental dreams can degenerate into authoritarian nightmares. He attacked religion as a dangerous ‘corpus of archaic science… Man is naturally irreligious. Religion is no more fundamental to the human character than cancer is fundamental to the human brain’. Because of this, as has been pointed out, he was apt to set up ministers and priests in his novels as Aunt Sallies at which he could aim missiles directed at their beliefs.
Nevertheless, he was not intolerant of the kinder, gentler, more harmless manifestations of religion. He paid a generous tribute to the democratic virtues of the Church of Scotland:
The humble and the poor have found the Kirk and kirk life not only a grinding and mean oppressiveness, they have found (and find) ministers who are cheerful and helpful beings.
Towards the end of this essay, he visualizes the passing of religion.
One sees rise ultimately (in that perfect state that is an ultimate necessity for human survival, for there is no sure half-way house between Utopia and extinction) in place of Religion — Nothing… one does not seek to replace a fever by an attack of jaundice. One seeks the fields and night and the sound of the sea, the warmth of good talk and human companionship, love, wonder in the minute life of a water-drop, exultation in the wheeling Galaxy. All these fine things remain and are made the more gracious and serene and unthreatened as Religion passes. Passing, it takes with it nothing of the good — pity and hope and benevolence. Benevolence is as natural to Natural Man as hunger. It is… a conditioned reflex of mental and physical health.
All Gibbon’s other books appeared under his own name, J. Leslie Mitchell. In 1932 came the archaeological romances, Three Go Back and The Lost Trumpet; in the following year Image and Superscription and Spartacus (a historical novel dealing with the slave revolt in Rome); in 1934 The Conquest of the Maya, with a foreword by G. Elliot Smith (a Diffusionist view of the Mayan civilization), Gay Hunter, a Wellsian romance, and Nine Against the Unknown: A Record of Geographical Exploration which includes the bitter story of the cruel treatment by the Spanish conquistadores of the gentle primitives of Central America.
But the books in the Mitchell canon which are of the greatest interest to humanists are his first two novels, Stained Radiance (1930) and The Thirteenth Disciple (1931). In the former, the hero’s visit to the Church of the Nativity provides an opportunity for a diatribe on priests (‘Plump, smooth men, they believed in the divinity of Christ, the efficacy of prayers to the saints and the remission of sins obtained by eating the body of the dead god and drinking his blood’) and speculation about Christ. Mitchell thinks of him as an agitator, a Judean Bernard Shaw, with an inferiority complex about his birth:
He left behind him a memory of angry simplicity and kindliness which took by storm the slave populations of the Roman world… He offered freedom and comfort and full stomachs in the next world in exchange for suffering and stripes in this. To an audience accustomed to suffering and stripes, but unaccustomed to the promise, his appeal was irresistible. He offered something for nothing. That is still mainly his appeal… the idea of Christ came to the Western world and wiped reason from the slate… And the twisted memory of this crucified muddle-minded agitator had ever since lain across the centuries like a black shadow.
Attitude to Sex
The Thirteenth Disciple is generally considered to be the best of the Mitchell novels. The first half, which is semi-autobiographical, is set in Scotland. We start with the five-year-old Malcom (sic) Maudslay contemplating suicide. Four years later he asks his mother a quite simple question about sex. ‘Her sallow face had flushed arid her usual composure deserted her. “You are a dirty little beast”.’ This response ‘killed in him the beginnings of an Oedipus complex if ever he had had one’, Maudslay is very bitter about the old-fashioned attitude to sex:
It was the natural lot of women to be perpetually bowed in the ungracious discomforts of pregnancy. They seemed to take this lot calmly, but I do not believe that any woman other than a half-wit has ever desired a large family. Child-bearing: it was a drearily exciting inevitability… If only half the epitaphed ideal wives and mothers who predeceased their husbands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had kept diaries of their inmost thoughts — what a history we might then possess of solemn marital lust disguised under the protective name of fatherhood! Especially among the clergy. If only we knew the private opinions of the wife of… John Donne. She bore twelve children in sixteen years, and died in child-bed. The Sunday following her death Donne preached a sermon on the text ‘Behold in me a man afflicted’.
The chapter on his boyhood is headed ‘Fourteen Thousand Miles’ — the distance Malcom estimates he had to walk altogether in pursuit of an elementary education, it being about three miles over the fields from his croft to school and nearer five miles if he had to go round by the road. He read voraciously so that his mother worried — quite seriously — lest his brain should soften under the strain. He hated the land and would never help with the farm work if he could help it:
A beastly life. With memory of it and reading those Catholic writers who, for some obscure reason, champion the peasant and his state as the ideal state, Malcom is moved… to a sardonic mirth… He is unprintably sceptical as to Mr Chesterton or his chelas ever having grubbed a livelihood from hungry acres of red clay, or regarding the land and its inhabitants with any other vision than an obese Victorian astigmatism… Sometimes, unkindly, he would vision Mr Chesterton sentenced to pass three years at Chapel o’ Seddel as hired man; picture of a large, distinguished presence staggering across the slimy floors of Chapel o’ Seddel byre behind a barrowload of reeking manure often cheered his dourer moments.
He is sent to Sunday school and occasionally to church to be like the neighbours, but ‘no one experienced any real, vital belief’!
After journalism, army life and hawking, Malcom finds a job in London as ‘secretary to the Hanno Society’ and conceives the idea of a politico-social society whose outlook should be based on organized knowledge. This secular control group agrees on eleven propaganda points: abolition of the legal status of marriage, State propaganda and enforcement of birth control (how precisely this is to be done is not suggested!), a general tax to be levied for the endowment of each woman’s first two children, complete secularization of education, disestablishment of Churches, repeal of the blasphemy laws and censorship, nationalization of banks, the State to acquire controlling shares of principal industries, compulsory periodical dissolution and reorganization of all chartered learned societies, the State to acquire all patents and establish a department for the endowment of bona fide individual research, international organization of associations pledged to both passive resistance and sabotage. The last point is, at a later stage, thrown out, causing Malcom to resign and go off on a fruitless journey of exploration to America. So the end of the story is somewhat disappointing!
In some ways the extravagances of Mitchell’s ardent anti-clericalism would be an embarrassment to more sober, rational humanists. He was not always judicious but, like Burns himself, he had the virtues of his defects. It is no accident that his first book (Hanno, 1928) and his last (Nine Against the Unknown, which in America has the title Earth Conquerors) were about explorers, for he was himself above all a quester and it is the vigour of his questing that gave what he wrote its power and quality. Had he lived, he might well have now been a pillar of scientific humanism.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon | National Library of Scotland
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