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Until quite recent years
the Scottish Gael has not been much in evidence in English letters. No
doubt the language accounts for this. Of all races, perhaps, the
Highlander is the most deeply emotional and the most poetic; and enough
poetry, traditional and written, is extant in the Highlands to astonish
any inquirer. It exists, however, in Gaelic. Towards the end of last
century, it is true, James Macpherson rendered a quantity of it, more or
less authentic, into English, with most striking effect. But to the
present hour the Gaelic genius has continued to express itself almost
exclusively in the Gaelic tongue, and English has remained for the
Highlander, so far as the production of literature is concerned, a foreign
language.
It has been different with the Irish Gael. Goldsmith and Swift and Moore
stand to represent the race of the sister island in the foremost rank of
English letters. But Ireland, so far as the educated classes are
concerned, has been for centuries an English-speaking country, and its
people have long enjoyed literary opportunities denied to the glensmen of
Argyllshire and the Hebrides.
Still more striking appears the contrast with the record of the other
Celtic race within the kingdom, the British or Cymric stock. Of late years
Wales has assumed the sole representation of that ancient race, and has,
with Cornwall, appropriated the entire mass of history, legend, and
literature of the race of Arthur and Boadicea. But Wales originally formed
a very- small part of the Cymric possessions. When the Romans left Britain
the entire country south of the Forth and Clyde was peopled by the
civilised Cymri. A hundred and fifty years later they still held absolute
sway in the west country from Loch Lomond to the Derwent. And so late as
the twelfth century the race and the territory remained distinct, and
David, heir of Scotland, was entitled Prince of Cumbria, just as the heir
to the throne is Prince of Wales at the present day. Though these ancient
inhabitants of the land were driven westwards by the invading Angles and
Saxons, they were by no means effaced. Owing to the Roman rule they were
more civilised than their opponents; intellectually, they remained more
active. So late as the daps of the Anglo-Norman kings their romances were
the chief, almost the only, imaginative literature of the country, and
down to this end of the nineteenth century their literary production has
continued in a stream of unbroken brilliance. It would be an interesting
task to take the names that have been great in English literature, and
trace their racial origin. The result might prove somewhat astonishing ;
the inquirer, at any rate, would be surprised to discover what a large
proportion of our best literature is not Saxon at all, nor vet Norman in
origin, but is owed to Cymric brains. Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson were
both descended from clansmen of the Scottish Border, the very heart of the
ancient Cymric kingdom, and, in later days, the same is to be said of Sir
Walter Scott and of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Mr. George Meredith, if the
most conspicuous, is by no means the only writer of to-day whose genius
carries on the traditions of a race brilliant in English letters for so
many hundred years.
Compared with this Cymric element in our literature, the Gaelic record
appears meagre indeed. A scattered name or two, like that of Thomas
Campbell, was all that was to be found representing the Highlands until
quite recent years, when the works of Dr. George MacDonald and Mr. Robert
Buchanan have given proof that the Gaelic genius had found its voice in
English letters. More recently, however, symptoms have appeared which
point to the literary genius of the race making a new departure.
The Evergreen, published in Edinburgh by Professor Patrick Geddes and his
colleagues in 1896, was hardly understood. Critics smiled at the quaint
allegorical bindings, and drew attention to a certain lack of practical
point in the contents; but their eyes were blind to the fact that the
kernel of the four volumes was a new thing in English literature. If The
Evergreen did nothing else, it gave an opportunity for the Gaelic genius
to express itself in its native manner to the English reader. The volumes
had for their most typical contributors Professor Patrick Geddes himself
and the new Highland writer, Miss Fiona Macleod. Miss Macleod in
particular, both in her writings in The Evergreen and in her independent
books, has furnished the public with an element unknown in literature
since the appearance of the Ossianic translations a hundred and forty
years ago.
In the translations there was a certain air of bombast, due obviously to
Macpherson, but the spirit of the Ossianic fragments and the spirit of
Fiona Macleod's work resemble each other closely in many ways. In both are
to be found the same mysticism, melancholy, and wistfulness, the
suppressed passion, like the fire in the white ashes of the peat, and the
brooding fatalism, born of life among silent glens and by lonely shores,
which are typical of the Gaelic race. Notwithstanding her sex, Miss
Macleod reflects no less the fierce element, the capacity for hatred and
revenge, which is also characteristic of the Gaelic spirit as revealed in
history. Her stories read for the most part like renderings in English of
old memories and traditions current among the people of the glens and
isles. Some of them are avowedly versions of ancient folk-lore tales that
have been the possession of the race for a thousand years; while others,
told perhaps the other day by fishermen in a boat off Mull, are narratives
embodying the superstitions still so powerful for good and evil in the
mind of the Highlander. The scene of the stories is laid mostly in the
neighbourhood of Iona, Isle of Saints, where so many pagan traditions
still live side by side with early Christian memories; and some of the
most telling and successful sketches are presentations of Highland myths,
touching and beautiful, which have gathered round the story of the Virgin
Mary and the infant Christ. Tales of the second sight are not wanting in
her pages; her heroes swear "by the Black Stone on Icolmkill and by the
Sun and by the Moon, and by Himself"; and a story like that of the
Sin-eater, the outcast who for a bribe takes upon himself the sins of a
dead man, could belong only to a people who in their secret heart still
cherish many strange, occult, and mystic beliefs.
Yet it is not altogether by the tales she tells, it is by the spirit
father in which she writes, that Miss Macleod represents in a native and
novel manner the genius of the Gael. Other writers without number have
depicted the Highlander, and some even of the stories told by the new
author have been told in English before. But here for the first time in
English it is a sennachy herself that writes; and the tales live, and the
Gael is pictured, not as he appears to the outsider, but as he is known
only to himself, and to himself only perhaps at inspired times.
Less of a mystic, and as much of a realist probably as it is permitted a
Gael to be, is the other writer whose work represents the new departure.
As Miss Macleod has gathered her inspiration and materials from Iona, with
its half-pagan, half-Christian memories, Mr. Neil Munro has gathered his
from Inveraray, and the traditions surviving there of old clan feuds, race
jealousies, and blood avengings. Both writers depict the Gaelic spirit,
both alike tell the old stories of the countryside, and both write English
coloured a good deal by the idiom of the Gaelic tongue. But the stories
from Loch Fyneside have a more modern twang; they are of the human nature
of to-day or yesterday, and they deal with just such-folk--sensitive,
proud, and hot-hearted --as are to be found at this hour in any Highland
town.
The actual period of the stories told in Mr. Munro's first book, "The Lost
Pibroch," appeared to be the earlier half of last century. The latest of
them, perhaps, was that of Rob Doun's wife awaiting her husband's return
from Culloden. They were of the period of dirk and claymore, and more than
one duel as fought out in their pages. As the Saxon reader turns these
leaves he begins to understand the more passionate spirit of the
Highlander. He feels his heart rise at the playing of pibrochs; the brown
floods pouring through woody glens bring him strange exultation; and he
sniffs the keen wind off Cruachan with the pride of the Gael himself.
Thesame strong stimulus and suggestive power live in the writer's later
books, "John Splendid" and "Gilian the Dreamer."
While Neil Munro's tales are of a time gone by, the spirit of their
telling is most modern. Indeed, for this quality, and the force and fire
with which they are told, their closest parallel is to be found in Mr.
Stanley Weyman's stories of Old France. The tales are of human nature,
strong and pure-bred, and each one, whether it be of the Lost Pibroch
itself, or the Secret of -the Heather Ale, or the tragedy of Black Murdo,
not only hinges on some typical trait of Gaelic character, but compels the
understanding and sympathy of the most obtuse Sassenach. Best of all, the
stories are in every page fresh, forceful, and exhilarating as the breezes
from their native glens above Loch Fyne.
It is often said that all feasible plots and human motives have long ago
been exploited and used up by romancers, but upon the appearance of each
new writer of genius the statement is proved a fallacy. Mr. Neil Munro and
Miss Fiona Macleod between them have fallen upon a variety of racial
motives and possibilities hitherto all but untouched. They have discovered
at the same time a fresh atmosphere and local colour. And there can be no
question of the worth and promise of the work that has already come from
their pens. It remains to be seen whether the-,- are the prophets of a new
departure. A hundred and forty years ago the appearance of Macpherson's
Ossian gave a mighty impulse to the great romantic movement which
culminated in the works of Scott and Goethe. In the works of the new West
Highland writers of to-day it is just possible that we have the first sign
of another such spiritual conquest by the Gael. |
