ABSTRACT
The lack was fully supplied by Andrew Lang. In Carlyle one had the Calvinist peasant-genius as cosmopolitan philosopher, scholar, and historian. The right corrective supplement to Fiona Macleod was supplied by Neil Munro, a born Gael, a master of the old language, and in English a consummate artist. As a novelist he was largely a follower of Stevenson, but he got nearer the heart of his subjects, portraying life from the inside and not externally. Something corresponding to the Church’s defection took place in renascent Scots literature when Scots fiction, instead of broadening out from the Steven-sonian basis, took sudden refuge in the Kailyard. Barrie, even in his Kailyard days, displayed the unique witchery of fancy and humour that, conjoined with theatrical and general experience, was to make him a dramatist of a kind previously unknown. The vein of cynical humanism that runs through them all is as different as possible from the cosily insular sentiment of the Kailyarders.
