IT has been a cherished fancy of the
dreamer and storyteller in all ages that, on this side of the horizon, by
magic or fairy influence, there might possibly be found, above the flood
of time and change, some little island where remnants of an ancient folk
survived with all the customs of the early world, untouched by modern
history and proof against the assault of years. Even unprofessional
dreamers have indulged this fantasy in regard to Pict or Celt in Britain.
They have sometimes thought that in the remoter Highlands there might
possibly still be seen survivals of the old life and thought which
Culloden is usually considered to have for ever dispelled—not a purely
mechanic survival, as the lingering quern, the cas-chrom, or the
cruisie; the shieling ballad, the tradition or the tartan; but a relic
subtle in essence, the genuine Celtic soul. The men who came out of the
mist one hundred and sixty-six years ago and marched between English
meadows, wearing moccasins and bearing shields, more like creatures of
mythology than actual beings in the eyes of their English observers, have
not all, surely, been swallowed up in the mist whereto the adventurous
clans returned. Some glen, we like to fancy, yet retains a remnant, or at
least one phantom who cannot forget. When the train hoots across Rannoch
or along Locheil, or the "Clansman" slips at sunset between the Western
Isles, there must be, somewhere on the hill or on the shore, a figure
silent, listening and wistful, his plaid drawn to his chin, his bonnet to
his eye-brows, his arms upon his breast, the type of a race as isolate in
sentiment and experience from that new world whose shapes he sees as was
the pelt-clad aboriginal looking from the breckan at the Roman legionary
pacing his earthen wall.
But the searcher for more than a
material Gael, for something profounder than tartan, language, and
ethnological signs, will go to many Highland markets now before he comes
on that which he desires. It is possible to find this phantom type at long
intervals in the Outer Isles where so many people have never seen a tree,
and even in rare mainland hamlets, but never in sufficient numbers to
populate a Clachan. The password that was whispered before Harlaw is
forgotten, and we must be half-lowland to be able to batter ourselves into
an emotional acceptance of summer kilts, clan societies, and "Gatherings"
as satisfactory evidence of the persistence of the Gaol
per se. It is
possible, however, for the curious to reconstitute in the imagination that
byegone state by seeing its still-surviving domestic features represented
at an Exhibition and by reading of those other features—tribal, feudal,
predatory, or martial—which, for some centuries, more manifestly
distinguished the Gael from the Lowlander. The Clachan is obviously and
inevitably incomplete, since it represents only the domestic and pacific
side of a people who are most notable in history for other arts and ideals
than the domestic or pacific. For complete realism, the Clachan should
have pikes and fire-arms in the thatch, and should ring occasionally with
slogans. But frays are out of fashion, and the inquirer into this side of
the Home Life of the old Highlanders must be content to learn of it from
the writers of the following pages.
