Stands Scotland where it did? If Ross were asked the same question by Macduff in a modern-day Macbeth, he'd give a very different reply. Whatever his answer, he certainly wouldn't say "Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself". In 1999, Scotland can't wait to know itself all the better. On May 6th, voters will elect MPs to the first Scottish parliament in 300 years. It's a sign of the times that the only credible threat anywhere in the UK to Tony Blair's ruling Labour Party comes not from the Conservatives, not from the Liberals, but from the Scottish National Party, currently running neck and neck with Labour in the Scottish opinion polls.
Scottish culture, from Trainspotting to Braveheart, has become a major international export. This nation of five million has rarely been in such bullish spirits. It remains to be seen whether the Scottish parliament paves the way to full independence, as the SNP would like, or simply improves the mechanics of local democracy, as Labour intends. Its impact, however, is already being felt. The parliament will not be formally opened until July 1st, and Enrico Morales's new parliament building, round the corner from Holyrood Palace, will not be ready until 2001, but already Edinburgh property prices have soared, the capital is filling up with civil servants, and the Scottish Media Group has added The Sunday Herald to its six-day run of The Herald. Expectations are high.
When the Edinburgh-based critic and commentator, Joyce McMillan, spoke recently at an international discussion, she was quizzed by her fellow participants about how the forthcoming parliament would affect the arts in Scotland. Would it produce more money? Would it inspire greater cultural confidence? Would it allow artists to flourish?
Yes to all of the above, she hoped, but the question could be better put the other way around: how much have the arts in Scotland affected the establishment of a Scottish parliament? For without a groundswell of cultural activity, it would be impossible for Scotland to conceive of itself as a modern, outward-looking nation worthy of its own legislature.
There's a line that sums it up in Alasdair Gray's 1981 novel, Lanark, a fantasy of doubles and doppelgangers set in a futuristic place called Unthank and a decaying Glasgow of the 1950s. When one 1950s character observes that nobody ever notices how magnificent Glasgow is, his companion says it's because nobody ever imagines living there: "If a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively . . . Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves."
This is clearly not the Glasgow that was European City of Culture in 1990 and is UK City of Architecture this year. Not the place that produced the wave of painters known as the "Glasgow Boys", among them Ken Currie, Stephen Conroy, and the Bosnian war artist Peter Howson, a favourite of Madonna. Not the home of novelists including Gray himself (also an accomplished painter and illustrator), the Booker-winning James Kelman, and multi-award winning Janice Galloway. Not where you'll find many of Scotland's key playwrights such as Liz Lochhead, David Greig and David Harrower. Not the city of comedians - Phil Kay, Bruce Morton, Fred MacAulay - and pop groups from Wet Wet Wet to Belle and Sebastian. Not the home of classical composer James MacMillan, one of several musicians who have rejected the pull of London in favour of Scotland.
The Glasgow and Scotland of today are places people do imagine living in. It didn't take Hollywood's vision of Braveheart (filmed, ironically enough, in Ireland) to do that for the country. Artists such as Alasdair Gray had been doing it for long enough already. Today, the 63-year-old Gray recoils at my suggestion that he is part of anything as grandsounding as a Scottish renaissance, but he accepts he and his post-War generation flourished in a way a previous generation had not.
"Up to the 1914-18 war, industrial Scotland was vigorous and confident," he says. "It had a school of painting and architecture that had closer links with Paris and Vienna than it had with London. After that war, you had a period of economic depression, and Glasgow's main vitality was in political radicalism.
"Most of the writers like myself, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, and Liz Lochhead were products of a welfare state. Britain's socialist phase gave a bit of material confidence - it's very hard to operate in total poverty. Today there's more confidence and more evidence of achievement."
Seona Reid, the out-going director of the Scottish Arts Council, recalls a Glasgow childhood in which her family would shun anything Scottish, and in which accent-flattening elocution lessons were de rigueur for middle-class girls like herself. Even as recently as 1979, the country was not sufficiently certain of itself to back devolution in a referendum. Twenty years later, nearly three-quarters of voters said "yes" to a Scottish parliament. In the meantime, as Reid sees it, contemporary artists have built on their cultural heritage, shaping a modern identity people are now comfortable with.
"There has been a slow build-up of pride in things Scottish," she says. "Not the kitsch aspects, which for young people are quite cringe-making, but things young people feel they can associate with. They have become part of people's lives and the way they express themselves. John Byrne's Tutti Frutti (1987), for example, must have been the first major television drama series based in Glasgow, using Scottish accents, and networked. You then had the rise of rock bands who were unashamedly Scottish, such as Runrig, Deacon Blue, The Proclaimers. You had traditional music being influenced by rock music. "In literature, we got James Kelman using the Glaswegian vernacular and being acknowledged as a great writer. Add all these little points together, and they mean that we've got a movement over the last 20 or 30 years that has given Scots pride in being Scottish." It should be said there is no overtly nationalistic movement among Scottish artists. Scottishness is implicit - a location, an accent, a field of reference - and rarely a subject matter in itself. The younger generation of playwrights, for example, is fascinated by questions of identity, but they are questions, not assertions, the spirit outward-looking, not self-obsessed.
In recent years, 7:84 Theatre Company, which came to prominence in 1973 with John McGrath's seminal rallying cry, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, has produced two state-of-the-nation snapshots in the form of David Greig's Caledonia Dreaming (1997) and Stephen Greenhorn's Dissent (1998). These plays were unusual, not to say invigorating, in their topicality, but they had nothing to do with flag-waving.
`There's a lot of national expression, but not in the form of nationalism," says 7:84's artistic director, Iain Reekie. "There's a cultural confidence which has developed not just since the general election, but long before that. The cultural lobby has been arguing for change for a long, long time, and it won out in the end."
It's the same with Edinburgh's new Museum of Scotland, thrillingly designed by architects Benson and Forsyth, all odd angles, curves and spy holes, which exists to tell "the history of Scotland - its land, its people and its achievements". It's a welcome addition to Edinburgh's stock of galleries and museums, but is the kind of resource you'd expect a capital city to have and hardly a major challenge to the Union. It was opened by the Queen at the end of last year.
So how will this parliament built out of cultural assertiveness repay the culture from which it sprang? It's early to say, but Seona Reid says the omens are good, even if the detail is vague: "The conversations we've been having with the political parties indicate a recognition that culture is important, and that it will be more important under a Scottish parliament. I don't think there will be wealth and riches unimagined for the arts, but the status of the arts, and their importance to the way the country promotes itself, and the way it responds to people's needs, will begin to shift considerably."
