Will Ye No Come Back Again?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 14

Will Ye No Come Back Again?

JACOBITS laments are fairly sure to make up a considerable portion of any programme of Scottish music, not because of the especial merit of this sort of music-is it really better?-but because of its well-known romantic connotations, Yet what is it that the Scot mourns in this myth of a _ hopeless loyalty? It cannot be the passing of the old life of clansman and chieftain; for that was a. Highland and exclusively Celtic defeat, and the Lowlander, by whom and in whose idiom every Jacobite song from "Loch Lomond" to "Over the Sea to Skye" was written, habitually and ancestrally regarded the Hielandman as a dangerous and half-witted savage. Yet Jacobitism as a memory unites all breeds of Scot as it never did when a historical force. The reason is, I suppose, that, faced with Union to a Whiggish, mercantile, and expanding England, the Scot felt the urgent need to preserve his national identity and so set up an entirely ghostly standard on the braes o’ Mar, a myth of defiance and loyalty to keep the ideas and customs of independence alive. At the same time he insists on the mutual nature of the Union and becomes violent when the United Kingdom is referred to as "England." Yet his struggle must at times seem hopeless; when, for instance, an American magazine of credit and renown refers to the 45 of hallowed memory as "Scotland’s Struggle Against the British."