Posted by Andy Morley on April 24, 1999 at 10:40:33:
In Reply to: Ambassador Ransome posted by Edwin M. Kiser on April 23, 1999 at 20:09:31:
Ed - thank you for that.
I don't think you need to apologise for any lack of authenticity in your home town's 'Scottish' traditions. The whole point about living traditions is that they are a continually evolving hotch-potch of new ideas and influences. Like language, once they stop changing, they become dead. You may not be aware that the Scottish regalia of skirt-like kilts (the Philabeg I think they're called) was an upper-class Victorian English invention brought about by the coming of the railways and the final laying to rest of the Jacobite bogeyman. Nonetheless, the Scots embraced this new tradition enthusiastically, a symbol of the much happier relationship between these two nations than some others that are just as close to home.
This went a bit wrong with the English traditions because of the mania for 'collecting' them. Jemmerling presumably had some kind of love for birds, or he would not have been so passionate about collecting their eggs. But anything that you collect risks extinction if your persist in stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. Mania for collecting English culture arguably went too far in this direction and to some extent had such an effect. This may have been brought about by Mal de Siècle at the end of the 19th C coupled with reaction to the increasing pace of change and technological innovation. People often blame everything you could think of in this area on the 1st World War (end of an era etc.) but I see the War as not cause but effect. You ended with a poem; I'm going to do likewise. This one is so evocative of that time and so questioning in its overstated certainties:
In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
(Thomas Hardy)