The Fin-de-Si?cle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity, by Michael Shaw

Reviewed by: The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity by Michael Shaw Cairns Craig (bio) The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity, by Michael Shaw; pp. xi + 300. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, $29.95 paper. Scottish literary history has long been perplexed about how to deal with the late nineteenth century. Its major figures, such as J. M. Barrie, made their careers in London, often with works that seemed to condescend to their Scottish origins; or, like Robert Louis Stevenson, they recalled Scottish scenes nostalgically from half a world away. Scots may have been at the forefront of the nineteenth century's new disciplines, such as psychology (Alexander Bain) and anthropology (J. G. Frazer), but in the arts, so the argument goes, Scotland, one of the most industrialized and urbanized countries in the world, "twisted its head back to front—its poetry always looking to [Robert] Burns and a dead language, in prose to [Walter] Scott and a past society" (T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 [Collins, 1970], 469). In The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity, a study of late-nineteenth-century Scottish art, Michael Shaw aims to challenge such judgments by showing how responsive Scottish artists were to recent international developments. Thus "romance" in the work of Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle is not escapism but rather part of the European revolt against realism. Equally, awareness of Decadence and degeneration are not mere imitations of Parisian fashions but symptoms of the decay of an industrial civilization that needed to be challenged by a spiritual art of the kind pioneered by Maurice Maeterlinck and the "Young Belgium" movement (6). According to Shaw, the arts in Scotland in the 1890s owe more to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt—the mythic origin of the first inhabitants of Scotland—or to styles deriving from Japan, with which many Scots were trading, than to Burns or Scott. And when the influences were Scottish, they came primarily from older sources in Celtic myth and legend, whether the heroes of Ossianic poetry or legendary figures, like St. Bride, associated with the early Celtic Church. Scottish artists could also lay claim to Arthurian legend, on the basis that the tales of King Arthur had been produced in Scotland when Welsh was the language of its southern counties. All of this amounted to an effective re-Celticizing of Scotland in defiance of those Victorians, like Thomas Carlyle and Robert Knox, who had presented Scottish culture as fatally split between the racial characteristics of Celts and of Anglo-Saxons. This renewed Celticism allowed Scottish writers, such as "Fiona Macleod" (William Sharp), and Scottish artists and designers, such as John Duncan, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Phoebe Anna Traquair, to develop their art as contributions to a distinctively national project aimed at resisting what they viewed as the failed culture of British utilitarian industrialism. The central figure in Shaw's account, however, is neither a novelist nor an artist, but rather the biologist, sociologist, town planner, and publisher Patrick Geddes. Geddes's Evergreen journal of 1895–6 not only published work by many of the leading writers and artists of this renewed Celticism, but gave it a name, the "Scots Renascence," and an ideology (qtd. in Shaw 17). The notion of something dormant springing back to life was no metaphor to Geddes. He had come to maturity in the early years of the theory of evolution, and the various forms of the transmission of life had been the focus of his first book, coauthored with John Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex (1889). Geddes and Thomson believed that Charles Darwin was mistaken in his account of evolution, because he had emphasized struggle and competition over care and cooperation. As biological structures became more complex, they argued, survival depended on sustained care, and [End Page 159] as social structures became more complex, they could maintain themselves only through cooperative mutuality. Geddes saw in the communal forms of traditional Celtic culture not a residue of the past but a model for the future, and in its adaptation to its...

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