The Cockney Renaissance
By ANSELM CHILWORTH THE South owes much to the Scots. They founded the Empire and administered it. Without them the engines of the merchant marine would putter out into a long silence. They are the brains' of Whitehall and Fleet Street, the sinews of commerce, the driving power of industry. It was only in literature that, until recently, they seemed to the southerner to be living in the cold if splendid sunset of an illustrious past.
But that is an old story. The present literary scene in Scotland is illuminated by no mere sunset. The new ' makars ' of the Scottish renaissance have not only created a literature: they have re-created a language. In the words of one of them, Mr. Aloysius Wodehouse: ' The Quislings of Scottish literature denied the living qualities of the Auld Scots tongue, but we cast their aspersions in their teeth and forged out of the inchoate elements of the folk-tongue a towering Hie Kirk of the proud and earthy genius of our people: The shilpit bairn o Scottis sang In puirtith his remayned ower lang But noo it rises stark an strang Nae mair tae trummle.'
There were those who opposed the movement on the false grounds that so-called standard English had too far superseded local modes of speech, but the makars have stripped the last vestige of quasi-commonsense from the snobbish hypocrisy of the anglicising journalists, so-called ' scholars,' and contemp- tible dollar-mongering poetasters, who tried to stem the flood with cheapjack talk about ' antiquarianism," pastiche,' and ' artificiality' and what they sneeringly described as the ' impossibility' of creating a living literature out of language which for centuries had been dying.
The significance of this new movement, this Scottish Renaigsance, extends far beyond the boundaries of Scotland. The makars offer a great example which has shown us all how literature may be rejuvenated. Why should the local cultures of Yorkshire and Rutland and Devon and Middlesex be denied their proper expression because of a purely snobbish regard for that artificial monstrosity 'standard English '—an historic absurdity of a language whose users seldom achieve more than polite banality ? Would not Tennyson have been an infinitely greater poet if he had developed his practice of his native Lincolnshire dialect ? Would not Wordsworth have towered even higher if the true Cumbrian tongue had been the vehicle of his rich imagination ? And—to come nearer home—who shall say what the great Odes of Keats might have been like if he had allowed free play in them to the pungent speech of Hampstead ?
As it is these three potentially talented poets, and many others like them, fell back upon the ' standard English' and only in such lovely lines as Barnes's Since I noo mwore do zee your felice did the true genius of English poetry stand revealed.
But now, at last, the glorious example of the makars has been taken up, and has opened a door of hope for English poetry. Little. as .yet, may have been heard of the movement which its protagonists call—modestly, yet with a calm unflinch- ing pride—the Cockney Renaissance. But this is partly because it has had its origins in the sequestered calm of the universities (chiefly Durham and Aberystwyth). Now, however, it is spreading, and, even as we write, that profound study which lies ineluctably at the roots of great movements is being undertaken in Camberwell and Colindale, Stepney and Soho. Unfortunately there is not space here to write of the achiev,ements of David Davies or Mercy Musselwhite. It is fitting therefore that we should concentrate upon the work of the only leader of the Cockney Renaissance who is so fortunate as actually to live in London, and who was indeed born, if not literally within the sound of Bow Bells, at least not very far from Amos Grove tube station. I speak of Mr. Llwchwr O'Flannel—or Helfrid Uggins, by which pen-name he prefers to be known—a poet who brings new life into the effete literary scene of London, who is the first writer since Dickens to give full literary embodiment to the vigorous common speech of the metropolis. The primordial poetical ancestry of Uggins n is mob, to give the group its official dialectal title._can with some certainty be traced back even beyond Dickens to one of the most sensitive nodes in the history of English poetry, to that crocus-flowering of the spirit of Cockaigne, the movement associated with the names of Leigh Hunt, Cornelius Webb and the early Keats. It is to these early adventurers—attacked in their day with as much spite, and as little justification, as the Lallans poets in ours—that the works of Uggins n is mob owes its incomparable freshness and purity.
Stylistically, of course, the younger Weller is the model— or rather the starting-point, for the mob is no caucus of hide- bound academicians, bent on condemning the living spirit of poetry to dependence on a sterile, undeveloping vocabulary. Their concern has rather been to graft upon the superbly pregnant laconicism of Weller a diction and tone as closely related to the racy idioms of the Walworth Road as any ' standard English ' verse to the mincing inanities of Oxford or Chelsea. The result is a flexible and tangy, but rich and dignified, mode of utterance which can be harnessed to any task.
As the enemies of the Scottish Renaissance sneer at Lallans as an artificial creation unfit to express man's nobler emotions 'and perceptions, so will the envious enemies of the Cockney Renaissance try to attack Mr. Uggins's use of the vernacular. But when he says that a full canon of Cockney can be employed for all literary purposes he is not talking idly. And 1 am honoured by his permission to prove this by quoting his magnificent translation of Baudelaire's Albatross,' which should silence the cynics and strengthen the faith of all those who follow the streaming banners of Uggins n is mob.
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