was there a scottish war literature? His notion of the identity and the tradition to which he elects to belong is
perhapsmost clearly articulated in ‘The Remembered Gods’, a four-act Highland
verse drama written during Mackintosh’s two years at Oxford. This story, dealing
with the contention between Christianity and the old, wilder gods of Morven, is,
technically and lyrically, a very assured piece of work. Ostensibly, the play celebrates
the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice, in thecharacter of Mairi, over the dark
temptations of pagan belief, manifested in her lover, Alastair. Its more powerful
and memorable elements, however, are the vivid evocations of folk belief, heard in
the alluring songs of Angus, Alastair, and Ian:
The bitter gods, the beautiful white gods,
That will be walking on the darkened cliffs,
Lior the haunter of the roaring tides,
Whose emerald eyes the drowning sailors see
For one sweet instant, and are swallowed up.
And Balor panoplied in shining rain,
And armoured with the lightnings of the hills
That fire our hearts to war. And chief of all,
Angus the white-foot conqueror of men,
The mist that would destroy the moon with love
If she could hold him, the eternal mist
That wanders still within our quiet hearts,
Stirring the bitter love we may not sate
Save with his own white beauty. These are they
That were your father’s gods in the old days.^42The Gaelic world that the play evokes is one of savage passionate grandeur and
romantic loneliness sprinkled with liberal amounts of Yeatsian faery dust. It is, in
other words, a conveniently timeless and generically evocative landscape into which
Mackintosh can meld a range of personal fantasies—a suitable objective correlative
for the passionate confusions of late adolescence. As in much of his other poetry,
the world of the Gael functions not only as a kind of land of heart’s ease into
which the troubled individual retreats from the pressures of the urban, workaday
world, but also as an Ossianic world of heroic, turbulent endeavour. The evolution
of this idea in Mackintosh’s poetry can be seen by looking at two poems. In the
first, ‘Return’, written while Mackintosh was at school in London, the restorative
landscape is the Sussex Downs. In the poem the retreat described is—as might be
expected from a Brighton lad at large in the metropolis—to a nurturing downland
countryside associated with childhood:
So when our hearts are bitter,
And smirched with blot and stain,
And fruit has turned to ashes,(^42) Mackintosh, ‘The Remembered Gods’, ibid. 57–8.