J.B. Pick > Quotes

“A son of the Free Church Manse brought up to Calvinism, he adopted at Oxford first rationalist philosophy, and then the social asumptions of the English establishment, and often writes as if he were in fact descended from a long line of Cotswold squires. His last work of fiction, Sick Heart River gives a lucid account of his own development, and seems to me to be a deliberate effort to reconcile himself with life and death throught the charcter of Edward Leithen, of whom he says, 'it is possible to keep your birth-right and live in a new world - many have done it.' But not, I think, without acquiring a permanent inner loneliness and sense of exile.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“In Confessions of a Justified Sinner James Hogg is neither identified with, nor overwhelmed by, the darkness of the universe, nor does he suffer from hatred or despair. He sees the cause of Wringhim's disintegration as an inner weakness which chooses to identify with false doctrine. Since Wringhim lives in illusion, he is easy meat for a master practitioner of it. Hogg himself, on the other hand, is confident of his personal wholeness. He repudiates extreme doctrine from a basis of robust common sense, and his recognition of the power of the diabolical sublime does not endanger his own sense of solid worth. He retains a forthright good-will which shows itself in cheerful endorsement of those characters in the book who accept life and enjoy themselves.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Folk-tales and ballads conceive of Elfland with a different notion of time to our own. Its people mirror the activities of our world as if to mock or distort them, and to our eyes seem immortal. They affect our world, bringing benefit or harm, but these results are not consonant with our rules, and may resemble the arbitrary operation of luck or chance. Although men may interact with these folk, they can neither understand nor trust them.

The Border Ballads in general are ready to accommodate similtaneously a theology of expiation, reward and punishment, and an Elfland which has no moral imperatives, and interpenetrates our own in unpredictable ways, even inserting off-spring among us by means of the changeling.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“George MacDonald is central to a Scottish tradition tormented by theology and with its roots in two worlds. He has been described as a link between John Galt and the kailyard, and his social novels, of which he wrote a good many, are certainly that. To my mind his deeper life is not in these solid, moralistic books, but in the stories usually described as fantasies. The most formidable of these is Lilith, one of the most ambitious books in Scottish literature. It aims to project a total metaphysical vision of the universe, in which evil gives way at last to good through repentance; even the Devil will finally repent.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“In Confessions of a Justified Sinner James Hogg is neither identified with, nor overwhelmed by, the darkness in the universe, nor does he suffer from hatred or despair. He sees the cause of Wringhim's disintegration as an inner weakness which chooses to identify with false doctrine. Since Wringhim lives in illusion, he is easy meat for a master practitioner of it. Hogg himself, on the other hand, is confident of his personal wholeness. He repudiates extreme doctrine from a basis of robust common sense, and his recognition of the power of the diabolical sublime does not endanger his own sense of solid worth. He retains a forth-right good-will which shows itself in cheerful endorsement of those characters in the book who accept life and enjoy themselves.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Since the success of the kailyard writers was comparatively short-lived, and their ambitions limited, it seems peculiar to non-Scottish readers that the persistence of the reaction to them was so intense that 'sentimentality' remains to this day a term of literary abuse to which no defence may be offered, and counter-kailyarders go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate from their work the least trace of theological light or metaphysical hope.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Of course freedom for Hyde proves another form of bondage for Jekyll, just as in Hogg's book Wringham's 'Election' results not in liberation, as he imagines, but slavery to Gil-martin. For Jekyll as for Wringham there is a continual development and deterioration, so that in the end he finds himself going to sleep as Jekyll and waking as Hyde, with no control over events. He is mortally afraid that 'the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Beneath his perception of the instability of the everyday self, Hogg retained a firm confidence in the capacity of the natural man to see what is in fact the case, and to distinguish right from wrong. He did not accept that any single mind or any single system of thought could encompass all the complexities of life, and was content to carry a variety of incompatible parcels in his luggage, and to accept the burden cheerfully.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Fiona MacLeod provided a particular and peculiar atmosphere of twilit gloom, grim despair, and beauty laden with defeat. Despite the theatrical props and pretences, he was not making it all up, but articulating a genuine psychic affliction. The manner is both excessive and limiting - poetry which continually recreates a single mood by means of a litany of repeated words such as 'sorrow', 'beauty', 'grey', 'old', 'dream', 'pale' and 'sighing'. In one essay Fiona describes the Celtic spirit as a 'rapt pleasure in what is ancient and in the contemplation of what holds an indwelling melancholy; a visionary passion for beauty, which is of the immortal things beyond the temporary beauty of what is mutable and mortal...' Apart from the prose itself, which seems blown up with a bicycle pump, I'm nor sure if he knows what he means. What are these 'immortal things'? One sharp definition would destroy the misty fabric altogether.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction