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PART I.
"They went forth to the
war, but they always fell."
"EVERYTHING," wrote
Macculloch, in his critical volumes on the Highlands, "whisky, courage,
ghosts, virtue or Beltain, is alike peculiar to the Highlands among
those who know no country but the Highlands"; and the essayist who takes
the Scottish Highlands as his subject must justify his choice by
avoiding the ignorant flattery and weakly acquiescence which makes so
much of the occasional literature on the subject worthless. Yet
Macculloch himself found in the North material sufficient to fill four
stout volumes; and the century which has intervened since he wrote has
been rich in new collections of Highland folklore and ancient customs.
And now there is a peculiar fitness in suggesting Highland life as a
subject for careful study; for a century of depopulation has culminated
in the melancholy figures of the latest census. A generation ago it was
the decay of Highland: manners which distressed the patriot; to-day it
is the actual disappearance of the Highland stock from Scotland. A few
years hence the historian of the North and West may take as his most
appropriate motto:
"I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him."
Without undue pessimism,
it must be confessed that, in the Scottish Highlander, as the
representative of a coherent people, dwelling in a fixed abode, we are
dealing with a survival, the term of whose existence along the old lines
cannot be prolonged far into the twentieth century. With relentless
precision, modern civilisation has chosen other centres on which to mass
her forces; and nothing marks the old positions now but ruined cots and
the decay of ancient modes of life. I shall deal, theii, in my lecture,
with the psychology of a lost cause, a nation based on principles, and
living under physical conditions which seem to have contradicted the
laws of modern national evolution; and my problem is to represent the
virtues and picturesque qualities which have made the Highland name
famous, and at the same time to trace, even in the very virtues, the
elements of dissolution. It must be an essay on the decline and fall of
the Highland people.
To find these virtues
faithfully and sympathetically portrayed, the modern reader may safely
place himself in the hands of three men of the last generation, Norman
Macleod, J. F. Campbell, and Alexander Carmichael, all of them
Highlanders of the Highlanders, all of them with a touch of Celtic
genius, and two of them among the most notable collectors of folklore
whom Britain has produced. Norman Macleod's Reminiscences of a Highland
Parish, Carmichael's Carnzina Gadelica, and J. F. Campbell's four
volumes of Highland tales furnish admirable material for a panegyric on
the last days of the Highland community. It is a rude, but sound, Utopia
to which Norman Macleod introduces us in his parish of Morven. Hill,
stream, and' sea furnish a fitting background for a race, if not of
heroes, at least of men. Society has not completely hardened and'
formal- ised its relationships, and the chief or laird presides over
something even, yet recognisable as a clan. He still takes a paternal
care of the education of his young men, and still receives payment in
commodities not recognised in modern political economy. Religion in the
parish, following the apostolic precept of poverty, attains apostolic
purity and something more than apostolic peace. Schism has not yet set
Presbyterianism against Presbyterianism; and the primitive soundness
which in the parish minister has combined the farmer with the cleric,
saves religion alike from the mawkishness of modern town evangelicism,
and the effeminancy of modern ritualism. In simple farm and humble cot
there is bred such a race of men and women as have no superiors in the
world; and' the sneer at "Scottish manners, Scottish religion, and
Scottish drink," which the grossness of Burns and his world enabled
Arnold to justify, falls harmlessly to the ground where men have, in
Campbell's words, "the bearing of Nature's own gentlemen," and' the
religious imagination of the folk stands out in high contrast from the
stolid flatness of the English peasant world. Nor can any doubt as to
the virility of the race be entertained in face of these astonishing
facts: ' It is not a little remarkable" (I quote from Norman Macleod)
"that the one island: of Skye should have. sent forth from her wild
shores, since the beginning of the last wars of the French Revolution,
21 lieutenant-generals and major-generals, 48 lieutenant-colonels, 4
governors of colonies, 1 governor-general, 1 adjutant-general, 1 chief
baron of England, and 1 judge of the Supreme Court of Scotland." Crime
there is for human nature is errant, but astonishingly little; and
tragedies and sorrows, when they come, have something of the simplicity
and directness of the little world which they assail, and affect the
reader with something of the awe, religious quiet, and purification with
which a Greek tragedy cleanses the imagination.
It is given to few books
so to quieten and elevate their readers as does this little
half-forgotten tribute of a great Highlander to his own people.
Something there may be in it over- idealised; rude facts veiled or
softened by a gentle haze of West Highland romance; for even the most
austere of patriots softens as he tells of the land he loves. But how
little real exaggeration there is the casual notes and prefatory
references in the great collections of Highland story and custom prove
beyond reasonable doubt. "I have wandered among the peasantry of many.
countries," says J. F. Campbell in his most admirable introduction,
"there are few peasants that I think so highly of; none that I love so
well.. . . The poorest is ever the readiest to share the best he has
with the stranger; a kind word kindly meant is never thrown away, and
whatever may he the faults of this people, I have never found a boor or
a churl in, a Highland bothy." In similar fashion, Alexander Carmichael,
in an introductory essay, which is a miracle of simple, poetic
description: "The people of the Outer Isles, like the people of the
Highlands and' Islands generally, are simple and law-abiding, common
crime being rare, and serious crime unknown amongst them.... During all
the years that I lived and travelled among them, night and day, I never
met with incivility, never with rudeness, never with vulgarity, never
with aught but courtesy. I never entered a house without the inmates
offering me food or apologising for their want of it." My evidence may
have proved nothing more / than that Highlanders are enthusiastic in
praise of themselves. " But when men praise valour and courtesy as the
chief virtues, 6-he judges that valour and courtesy have made their way
into the heart of the national life; and we know enough to know the
right of the Highlander to claim these as his own.
Yet the Highland
eulogists have failed to explain the fact that, in spite of virtue,
valour, and courtesy, the Highland world is vanishing; that the Utopia,
in which they have forced us to believe, is now a fallen empire. It is
perhaps an invidious enquiry, but the real interest of the subject seems
to me to lie in the connection between the very best in Highland culture
and this decline and fall, so that, if we can only form a true
conception of the Highlander, we shall have arrived at an understanding
of the weakness of the social fabric of which he was the centre.
Abundant sources of
information offer themselves for an impartial account of the Highlander
in modern history; whether they be in the form of folk-collections, or
of description by interested if generally biassed explorers, from
Martin, in the seventeenth century, down to Macculloch, Walter Scott,
and Alexander Smith in the nineteenth. Using these as guides to the
secret of the fate of the Highlands, the reader is first affected by an
impression of defect, incapacity, even of the repulsiveness which
incapacity usually involves. Apparently the old Highland world knew
little of the leverage of skilled instruments, and scientific modes of
action. Partly, it may be, through poverty, but also, I think, because
their culture assumed that hands and feet, and the ordinary modes of
nature were sufficient, Highland society possessed none of the
artificial conveniences of life. Even in sea-girt St. Kilda, if Martin
is to be believed, there was, at the time when he wrote, only one boat.
In many parts of the Highlands implements were made entirely of wood;
and the scarcity of supplies was intensified by the absence of mills and
the smaller necessities of agriculture. "I saw a woman," says Burt,
"cutting green barley in a little plot before her hut; this induced me
to turn aside, and ask her what use she intended it for, and she told me
it was to make bread for her family." Mention of Burt suggests the most
amusing volume in evidence of this failure in the instruments of
civilisation. Burt, who was one of Wade's officers, and engaged on the
construction of Scottish roads, wrote a series of very racy letters
somewhere about 1725-6; and if he found exaggeration a very convenient
literary instrument, his exaggerations do not conceal the real facts
which interested him. Prejudice, frankly acknowledged, is by no means
the greatest foe to truth. The Highland country, as Burt saw it, was
essentially a land, the inhabitants of which had not yet appreciated the
value of modern inventions. Inverness, if Burt's Inverness be not a
parody, owed its filthy housing conditions, its unwashed inhabitants, to
simple lack of modern skill; and what was true of city life was still
truer of the country. Our author records one humorous episode when, as
he travelled, he found the stable door of the inn too low to receive his
horses—"so the frame was taken out, and a small part of the roof pulled
down for their admittance; for which damage I had a shilling to pay the
next morning." Difficulty, and remedy, and compensation, all of them
proclaim a people wedded to the most primitive ways; and such attempts
at style or show as were made, merely emphasised the aloofness of the
Highlander from civilised methods. Everyone remembers Johnson's "elegant
bed of Indian cotton" which he approached on a floor of soft mud. It was
life according to nature, lived in days when the future lay with those
who could improve on nature. They sang their reaping songs, using
instruments unchanged from those which Ossian's Celts and Homer's Greeks
had employed in the old days; they sought not doctors, but incantations
; the very music which accompanied their weaving, their milling, and the
routine actions of their domestic life, bears unconscious witness to
their ignorance of more rapid and efficient methods of work. Happy
ignorance, the dreamer may exclaim; but foolishly, for nations fall or
rise according as they learn to be wise in trifles. Man is a tool-using
animal and progresses only when he realises the fact.
Rooted far deeper in the
Highland character than this incapacity in externals, was the failure to
comprehend the rules of civilised society. With the central fact
here—the clan system—I shall deal below. But their attitude towards law
and justice is illuminating. Nothing in English history is so impressive
as the process whereby primitive justice hardened into law, and law grew
into institutions. Out of rude revenge and compensation came the laws of
Athelberht and Alfred; and Cnut followed Alfred; and Norman and
Plantagenet deepened, strengthened, made practical the earlier codes,
until at last law evolved into a living power in the existence of a
legislature. But in the Highlands there was never any promise of this
development. Scott was well within the truth when he made Evan, in
Waverley, contradict the ordinary usages of the courts, and offer with
princely but barbaric generosity that, if the court would let \Tich Ian
Vohr go free just this once, . . . ony six o' the very best of the clan
will be willing to be justified. in his stead.." It was common to talk
of honest men who died for the law, that is, who were hanged for theft.
As for the Highland capacity for misusing the modern organisation of
justice, I do not know that a more splendid, or a less conscious,
confession of sin exists, than in Argyle's address in the famous Appin
murder case: "If you had been successful in that rebellion. .
he said to the man whose
death he was securing for reasons of state, and to placate clan feeling,
"you might have been giving the law where you now have received the
judgment of it,-and we, who are this day your judges, might have been
tried before one of your mock courts of judicature, and then you might
have been satiated with the blood of any name or clan to which you had
an aversion." But in this land, where law remained custom, and courts
depended on an individual's whim, and no legislature outside that
individual's will threatened to add to the complexity of life, there is
no confession of aloofness from the legal point of view so picturesque
as the incantation given by Carmichael, whereby the litigant sought to
interpose a buffer of magic, which he understood, between him and and
the law which was assailing him with its mysterious terrors. "The
litigant went at morning dawn to a place where three streams met. And as
the rising sun gilded the mountain crests, the man placed his two palms
edgeways together, and filled them with water from the junction of the
streams. Dipping his face into this improvised basin, he fervently
repeated the prayer..
I will wash my face
In the nine rays of the sun,
As Mary washed her Son
In the rich fermented milk.
Love be in my countenance,
Benevolence in my mind,
Dew of honey in my tongue,
My breath as the incense.
Black is yonder town,
Black are those therein,
I am the white swan,
Queen above them.
I will travel in the name
of God,
In likeness of deer, in likeness of horse,
In likeness of serpent, in likeness of King,
Stronger will it be with me than with all persons."
I do not know that, even
in stories, magic and witchcraft ever carried their privileged
possessors into real prosperity.
But the central fact in
Highland society and ethics was the clan, and' the influence of the clan
system, more than any other single phenomenon, reveals how deeply
intertwined with Highland virtues were the roots of destruction. It
would be foolish to deny the obvious splendours and barbaric virtues of
the old clan organisation. Readers of the Waverley novels are not likely
to forget the Highland chapters in Waverley, where the splendid
ostentation of Scott's scenes marks the clan at its highest. In many
cases chiefs exercised the patriarchal authority with a grave sense of
responsibility and with admirable effect; and where this was the case,
the combined humanity and romance of the personal relationship raised
Highland society to a plane far more elevated than that of Lowland
commercialism. "Government," said Macleod to Boswell, "has deprived us
of our ancient power, but it cannot deprive us of our domestic
satisfactions. I would rather drink punch in one of their houses
(meaning the houses of his people) than he enabled by their hardships to
have claret in my own." By ennobling the office of lordship, the clan
organisation also idealised the office of service. Filial piety is too
weak a phrase in which to describe the relation of the true clansman to
his chief. Even in the time of Johnson's tour, when degeneration had set
in, that critical observer found, in Col and; many others, Highland
chieftains not unworthy of the ancient traditions. " Wherever we roved,"
he wrote of Col, "we were pleased' to see the reverence with which his
subjects regarded him. He did not endeavour to dazzle them by any
magnificence of dress; his only distinction was a feather in his bonnet;
but as soon as he appeared, they forsook their work, and clustered about
him: he took them by the hand, and they seemed mutually delighted." But
in the heroic days, no old Germanic tribesman ever flung away his life
with so enthusiastic an abandon as did' the clansman to save his chief,
or to avenge him. Culloden is no happy memory, nor did the Macdonalds on
that stricken field sustain their traditional prestige, yet it was one
of Keppoch's clansmen there, who bade his son "put him down, as he was
gone anyway," and help to save the body of the chief. Highland courage,
at its highest, was the courage of clan devotion. And in the same way
Highland courtesy was also clan courtesy. Even to this day, it is
impossible tc hesitate between the certain, kindly, picturesque manners
of the Highlands, and the dour, ill-trained, if sincere, independence of
the Lowlander. It may be that the connection with France had had its due
effect, but a more obvious reason is simply that where society is so
planned that men of all classes are thrown into the most intimate
contact, the meanest gain some slight social air, and, even if caste is
stereotyped, the whole character of society is raised nearer the tone of
the highest.
Whatever, then, may be
said in criticism, here, in the paternal care of the chief, and the
unflinching loyalty of the man, Highland society may fairly claim
something rare and distinguished; and the author of the Reminiscences
was justly proud when he could speak of his clan leaders in these terms:
"They were looked up to and respected by the people. Their names were
mingled with all the traditions of the country; they were as old as its
history, practically as old, indeed, as the hills themselves. They
mingled freely with the peasantry, spoke their language, shared their
feelings, treated them with sympathy, kindness, and, except in outward
circumstances, were in all respects one of themselves."
But gracious as the old
world seemed, its grace and distinction could no more save it from
wreck, than the courtesies and honour of feudal France could prevent the
great Revolution. In both societies, the most distinguished virtues
presupposed the absence of the spirit of progress. Not every castle was
so romantically perfect as the home of Flora and Fergus M'Ivor. Burt,
who may act as our advocatus diaboli, visited some minor chieftain at
his castle, and found it all "inelegant and ostentatious plenty." with
the future mortgaged to meet present extravagances. " I make little
doubt,' he says, "that his family must starve for a month to retrieve
the profusion." The criticism might be ignored as unimportant, were it
not that the whole fabric of Highland show and courtliness was based on
similar uneconomic uses of men and material. The chieftain's following
was possible only where labour was unreasonably cheap, or altogether
neglected; and there were many occasions on which the glory of the
chief, and the material good of the clansman came into direct
opposition. Burt, who in this matter at least knew his subject, gives an
instance of clansmen called from sixteenpence a day to sixpence, to suit
the needs of the chief. "They said he injured: them in calling them from
sixteenpence a day to sixpence; and I very well remember he then told
me, that if any of those people had formerly said as much to their
chief, they would have been carried to the next rock, and precipitated."
Laudatores tern ftoris acti may proclaim, if they like, the blessing of
such primitive poverty and obedience; but poverty is a national evil,
the more so when it is the natural consequences of uneconomic, that is,
unnatural conditions. It was no question of preserving primitive
innocence and simplicity. Change had to come, and the clan system
complicated the disasters of change. must be remembered, too, that the
clan chiefs were among the first to surrender to the profitable
temptations of the modern world, and, while the minds and customs of
their followers very slowly readapted themselves to meet the change, the
highest Highland aristocracy signed a sur- render which spelt disaster
to their men. The personal bond was exchanged for territorial feudalism;
feudalism made way for sheep-farming, and sheep-farming for
deer-forests, and the end of the process came in the ruin of the people.
Even the romantic glamour
of the Highland gift for rebellion, and the prestige of the hot courage
of the Highland band tends to dissipate under cool observation. Twenty
years before the '45, Burt noticed that, "were it not for their fond:
attachment to their chiefs, and the advantages these gentlemen take... I
verily believe there are but few among them that would engage in an
enterprise so dangerous to them as rebellion." More than half the
gallant failures, on which the Highland name for desperate fighting
powers is based, were schemes of the Highland leaders supported by the
natural obedience of their liegemen. That the clansmen loved war is
true; that their gallantry has found no superior, the history of
Highland war- fare from 1745, through Wellington's campaigns, down to
the Crimea and the Mutiny, is the steadfast witness. Yet it has been too
little noticed' that when the former sanctions of the clan authority
were removed, Highlanders showed little eagerness to join either the
army or the navy. Macculloch was often perversely disillusionising in
his comments, but on this point he is assuredly correct, and he is
equally convincing in his refusal to be swept away by effusive eulogiums
of clan warfare. "The military organisation appears to be very
imperfect, because deficient in what is the basis of everything,
obedience... It is well known that the ancient Highlanders could seldom
be rallied in the field, and that it was impossible to detain them from
home, when disgust, the acquisition of plunder, or other causes, induced
them to disband."
The natural inference
from all these facts is that the Highland character, moulded by clan
loyalty and responsibility, fair in its antique quixotisrns and
ostentations, was actually contradictory to the ways of what we call the
world; and that world, being always right, has a warning word for its
opponents—Vac victis.
This stiffness in the
face of change became something more than disaster to the Highlands in
the hands of what men call Chance; for the Highlanders throughout their
history were, like the dynasty they defended so loyally, peculiarly
subject to the strokes of fortune, and peculiarly badly fortified
against them. It is a curious, romantic, and unfortunate fact, that the
place of Fate -that is, something independent of, and' overruling, the
human will - is abnormally great in Highland history. The most direct
illustration may be found in the large share which nature has had in
moulding the Highland character. By natural conditions the Highlander
has been kept remote from the European world, has had his communities
broken up into clans, has dwelt on the loose and sliding slopes of the
world, beaten on and conquered by sun, wind, and' rain. Nature has
dictated to him his remoteness from modern civilisation, and' given him
but a slender hold on the operations of his life; and' the very
indolence and fitful energy, which are his characteristic in the world
of affairs, are the fruit of the inevitable laws of a tyrannous Nature.
Unlike the Stoic or the English Puritan, he has accepted religion, not
from the revelations of God to his will and conscience, but from the
fancies and fears imposed on his imagination from without. His poetry
and' songs are not merely artistic descriptions of the minor pleasures
on which men's senses dwell in ease and at leisure. They arose at the
dictation of "mightier movements"; and while the Englishman has written
his dramas to please a crowd, and taught even love to flow gently along
sonnet channels, the Highlander has sung and composed to meet the
exigencies of life and death, and found charms and magic spells more
suitable expressions of feeling, than less potent, if more literary,
modes of poetry. As with nature, so with events. When we associate a
people with lost causes, we mean that the balance between human
initiative and the force of circumstances has been upset, and that its
folk are no longer masters of their fate. It was instinct (which is
nature), not policy, which drove the Highlands into Jacobitism, and when
once that cardinal error had been made, nothing remained but to submit
to all the consequences. It is pitiful to see the ancient fabric of the
clans prostrate after CulIoden, so that a circumstance so trivial as the
making of roads, was sufficient to threaten fundamental change. Then
when political failure had reachedi its natural culmination, great
economic changes smote the land, andi again there was nothing for it but
endurance. As I have hinted above, chiefs became landlords, and rents
had to rise. Then landlords found sheep better tenants than men, and the
men had to go. And later still the comparative humanity of sheep-farming
had to vanish before men's selfish pleasures, in the form of sport.
Stroke after stroke beat on this ancient people, loosened the old ties,
and finally broke it. "There seems now," says Johnson, in 1773, "to be,
through a great part of the Highlands, a general discontent. That
adherence which was lately professed by every man to the chief of his
name has now little prevalence"; and he speaks of "this epidemic desire
of wandering, which spreads its contagion from valley to valley." So the
Gael, fighting the new world with old weapons, found his discomfiture
completed when nature and chance attacked him on flank and rear; with
the end—destruction, not indeed of the individuals, but of the organised
nation. It is seldom that any national type has so completely changed
his moods, as the Scottish Highlander seems to have done; still seldomer
that one may watch the changes come under the operation of historic and
calculable causes -Reformation, and Calvinistic revival; misplaced
loyalty, and war, and the sickening hardships of defeat and exile. The
real Highlander, with whose nobler traits the sentimental Philistine has
made such melancholy sport, the mail with his hopes and longings, and
his unquenchable ambition to remain Highlander, is the creature of the
Fates. Torn from his land, lie attempts to preserve something of the old
reality by creating a curious little fatherland within his imagination—a
place, memorial, coloured with traditions, and preserved' through a
racial home-sickness. But even in this last retreat; fortune must still
pursue him, and the Highlander, citizen of the land within his heart,
watches the natural forces of separation and exile change his children,
until the Highland name becomes the memory of a memory.
In the historic and
external world then, the old Highland community stands out as the
creature, rather of circumstances than of its own will; of virtues
distinguished chiefly for their lack of contact with present utilities;
of defects, the regular and inevitable concomitants of failure. There is
a struggle for existence among peoples as among individuals, and this is
one of the failures.
PART II.
"Will no one tell me what
she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again."
THE intellectual and
aesthetic record of the old Highland community the external observer is
perhaps less competent to criticise than its history. There are the
obstacles of a strange language, and new rules of art; and the
involutions and eccentricities of the Highland brain demand an expert in
national psychology. It is easy, and useless, to indulge in such
sweeping judgments as that of the prince of dogmatists on the "Erse"
language: "The rude speech of a barbarous people, who have few thoughts
to express, and were content as they conceived grossly, to he grossly
understood." But it seems not unfair to trace, in these esoteric
matters, a line of argument parallel to that outlined above:—that the
true Highland genius is something primitive, traditional, which it is
almost impossible either to continue or to reproduce; that the onsets of
the modern and alien world must, in the long run, conquer and destroy
old things; and that the contribution of the Highlands to the modern
world, apart from the individual genius of her sons, which is always
valid and modern, must be sought in indirect influences, quaint
eccentric eddies of the spirit, reversions to conservative, or even
prirnaeval, thoughts and imaginations.
To begin with, the
Highland mind strikes the alien critic as instinctive rather than
rational; poetic, not scientific. As is the case with other primitive
folk who boast an intellectual inheritance. Highland imagination has
been developed at the expense of prose and reason. I do not mean that
Highland powers of mind are in any sense despicable. Dr. Johnson, not
once, but many times, paid sincere tributes to the culture of the
Highland gentlemen and the ministers whom he met: "I never was in any
house," he witnessed of the islanders, "where I did not find books in
more languages than one, if I stayed' long enough to want them." And if
Norman Macleod's enthusiasm for Highland love of learning might suggest
doubts in Lowland minds, the history of that distinguished family, to
which he belonged, must quickly put them to flight. If one excepts the
regions round Aberdeen (where light springs more readily than
sweetness), I doubt if self-improvement proceeds anywhere so easily, and
so rapidly, as in the Highlands and Islands. That the Highland mind is
apt in learning the mental habits of other peoples, is a proposition
easily demonstrated. Yet this is only another proof that the road to
fortune for the Highlander lay, and lies, away from the Gaelic world. It
is hardly too much to say that the logical thinker or scientific
observer, who would be true to Celtic tradition, will find himself in an
impossible dilemma, for Highland culture has produced no philosophic
treatise of importance, has helped to further no great scientific
discovery, indeed has composed no single volume of real weight in prose.
In the Bodleian copy of Martin's Description of the Western Islands,
there are some quaint criticisms, inscribed by bland, the eighteenth
century Deist (I wonder if anything fades so fast as self-appreciative
Illuminism?). In one place he is constrained to exclaim, "The author
wanted almost every quality requisite in an historian . . . except
simplicity, if even this may be allowed him." Martin was a Highlander.
From first to last, his fellows in literary thought have found it
difficult to think coolly, and one of the latest of them—he follows the
novelist's art—has lately discovered, in what is really Lowland humour,
a convenient way of escape from the antique domination of his own world.
One and all, they are children crying for the light, and with no
language but a cry.
Without a rational
philosophy, or a systematic theology. for Highland Protestant orthodoxy
is a frenzy, not a system, the Highland race has made its weightiest
contribution to thought in the great mss of its traditional beliefs,
and' primitive religious imaginations. Macculloch may brush it all aside
with a contemptuous gesture: " Fashion, ignorance, idleness, credulity,
superstition, falsehood, dreaming, starvation, hypochondriasm,
imposture, will explain all"; and Johnson, inquiring earnestly but
sceptically, concerning second sight, may depart with, at best, a will
to believe, but the fact remains that this Highland supernaturalism is
the richest possession of the Highlander. and his most potent means of
influencing the outside world. Thanks to the fidelity of Highland
records, the salient facts are known to all, and I shall simply give
them in brief outline, for the purposes of my argument, grouping them
under three headings—Celtic belief in a spirit-world; Celtic use of
charms, magic, and witchcraft; and the Celtic pantheon of little gods
and uncanny monsters.
What impressed early
observers, and what still astonishes those who know "the Highlander, in
literature and out of it, is in the first instance his obsession by a
spirit-world, where space and time seem to have lost their limits, and
the dead ignore the bonds of the grave. It was a natural habit in old
writers to devote a section to Second Sight, and phenomena related to
Second Sight, among the Islanders; for nothing seemed to them so
conspicuous and unique in the islands they were visiting. Even the
sceptical Macculloch contributed a scornful chapter on the subject, and
if lie attributed the miraculous facts to "the condition of the
Highlanders: unoccupied, subject to hypochondriacal disorders, dozing
away their time in tending their cattle, nationally and habitually
superstitious, and believing that which it was the fashion to believe,"
at any rate he thought the phantasy worth refuting. The Gaelic
difficulty, apparently, was, not belief in dreams and visions, but means
of escaping happily from seeing them. Martin tells us of a certain John
Morison of Bernera of Harris, who "wears the plant called fuga
dacnionunz sewed in the neck of his coat, to prevent his seeing of
visions." The cure, we are told, was effectual. But Second Sight, no
matter how eery, was humane and comfortable compared with the uneasy
energy of the Highland dead. For them the grave was no prison house, and
they haunted fords and houses, and obtruded themselves on quiet sleep
with their messages of doom. The Maclain-es had their " Hugh of the
Little Head," drecing his weird by riding his black steed with the white
spot on its forehead, to give warning when any of his race was about to
die; and every great family had some similar grisly spiritual companion.
[Nothing could be found
contrasting more amusingly the Highland way with Scott's shrewd Lowland
common--sense than the novelist's account of his sleep in the haunted
chamber at Dunvegan. "An autumnal blast, sometimes clear, sometimes
driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake
which it occasionally concealed, and in fits disclosed. The waves rushed
in wild disorder on the shore and covered with foam the steep pile of
rock. . . The voice of an angry cascade was heard from time to time
mingling its notes with those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted
room at Dunvegan; and, as such, it well deserved a less sleepy
inhabitant. . . . In- a word, it is necessary to confess that, of all I
heard or saw, the most engaging spectacle was the comfortable bed in
which I hoped to make amends for some rough nights on shipboard, and
where I slept accordingly, without thinking of ghost or goblin, till I
was called by my servant in the morning."—Lockhart's Life of Scott, Vol.
IV, p. 206.]
In an atmosphere so
overcharged with spirit, it was natural to believe in witchcraft and
magic, and to rely on charms, and an elaborate ritual of primitive
paganism, to effect what more orthodox means seemed impotent to d.
Highland witch-tales are too familiar to require restatement, but it is
not often enough realised that Christianity itself finds self-expression
in the Hebrides in most unorthodox practices. There are baptisms and
sacraments, unknown to the strict authorities of the faith, and the
charms in Carnzina Cadel-ica prove how recently the western islanders
still offered tribute to the unknown god's. "Three days before being
sown, the seed is sprinkled with clear cold water, in the name of
Father, and of Son, and of Spirit, the person sprinkling the seed
walking sunwise the while"; and in harvest, "the father of the family
took up his sickle, and, facing the sun., cut a handful of corn. Putting
the handful three tunes round his head, the man raised the ' lollach
Buana,T or reaping salutation." It is still possible, in the Highlands,
to serve two masters, and nowhere are all forgotten far-off things so
intimately connected with our modern mysteries of faith. What, for
example, could be at once more genuinely Christian, and at the same time
Pagan, than this charm, with which they guarded their cattle from harm:
"The prosperity of Mary
Mother be yours;
Active and full may you return.
From rocks, from drifts, from streams,
From crooked passes, from destructive pits,
From the straight arrows of the slender ban-shee,
From the heart of envy, from the eye of evil."
There is, lastly, what I
have called the pantheon of the Celtic minor gods and horrid monsters,
who beset mankind beings not only of the spirit, but apparently endowed
with natural substance. Hobgoblins and fairies have played much the same
part in the northern story that tyrant kings and unruly barons have done
in England. So concrete is it all that one is half surprised to find no
branch of Scottish law dealing with the conveyancing of fairy territory,
and no constitutional practice evolved from their domination over men.
But we are less concerned here with the mere details than with their
meaning in the Highland character and their influence, through the
Highlands, on the outside world.
It is a repetition of the
wayward, incalculable power of Highland caprice and enthusiasm, relating
itself to the more utilitarian civilisation of the South through curious
reactions and indirect influences. Yet, as in the world of history and
politics, even the influence actually exerted by the North has meant
loss of vitality—virtue has gone out with it—and to trace the
modifications introduced by Highland superstition is also to trace the
disappearance of Highland beliefs.
In one sense, these
Celtic and pre-Celtic relics have a modern value, which must continue to
increase. Cool as modern science is, its anthropologists find the fossil
remains they are investigating, curiously ready to come to life once
more, and no field in anthropology has so infected the explorers with
sympathy and romance as the North and West of Scotland. The Highlander,
indeed, has himself undertaken to investigate his own mysteries, and no
names in folklore are more honourably distinguished than those of J. F.
Campbell of Tiree, and half-a-dozen others of the same stock. Not only
have the Scottish collectors done more in detailed collection than those
of Wales or Ireland—I set the Arthurian legend aside for the present for
obvious reasons—but the tales, myths, and songs have been wooed from
their owners with a courtesy and gentleness in keeping with old Highland
manners. The sentence with which Carmichael closes the introduction to
his great collection, Car- mina Gadelica, is both an unconscious tribute
to the writer and a revelation of the secret of his success as a
discoverer. "These notes and poems," he writes, "have been an education
to me. And so have the men and women reciters, from whose dictation I
wrote them down. They are almost all dead now, leaving no successors.
With reverent hand and grateful heart I place this stone upon the cairn
of those who composed and of those who transmitted the work." Such
piety, indeed, is one of the virtues assured of a blessing, not only
hereafter, but even here and now.
But outside the great
collections Highland supernaturalism has left its traces upon the
society which is securing its disappearance. It is, of course, easy to
exaggerate the influence of the North on southern imagination, and there
are, even within the British isles, several rivals to its predominance
in literature. Border ballads and legends have had their sway; the
Arthurian cycle must always claim an obvious and explicit supremacy; and
the Irish mythology would find even more scope for its influence than it
does were its modern proselytes more genuinely and simply Irish. Indeed,
the external signs of Highland influence through myth and story are
almost meagre. There are Highland renderings Of the supernatural mood in
Highland poetry. One English poet at least—I mean Collins—surrendered to
the claims of "the popular superstitions of the Highlands," even if he
went astray in his description of the "gifted wizard seer's abode" in
"the depth of Uist's dark forest." Macpherson gave it vogue in a form
the corruptions of which had, curiously enough, as much influence as the
pure reality. It appears, artificially but not insincerely, in Scott's
poetry and novels, although I do not know that Scott really sympathised
with Highland superstition as he did with Border legend. And Stevenson,
with the artist's knowledge of a treasure, used' it as a fascinating but
subordinate part of his artist's stock in trade. But explicit literary
influence is a deceptive guide. The Gaelic power has proved its strength
by undercurrents and modifications, not the less genuine because they
have done their work silently. The virility of the modern understanding
and imagination depends on the element of primitive irrationalism in it;
and Highland superstition, working not so much through books as through
personal contact—through the whims of Highland gentlemen, the home-sick
traditions of Highland emigrants, and the curious educative faculty of
Highland nurses, has done much to hamper the enfeebling progress of the
clear civilised intellect. The passivity of England may have let
primitive ideas die out, and the arid efficiency of American materialism
may dispense with actual myths; but through the Highlander it is still
possible to draw from these deep living waters' of fear and wonder, and
to prolong for a little the childhood of the world. Here is a last
refuge against the monotonous onsets of common sense.
I have chosen to dwell on
this element in the Highland life, for it is not possible to judge
Highland literature accurately without a critical equipment, drawn from
these barbaric religious fancies. It is, perhaps, absurd' for one who
knows Gaelic poetry only in translation, to venture on criticism. Yet I
do not know that stricter knowledge of local detail is necessary to
substantiate the proposition that the true literature of the High- lands
is to be found, not in the individual efforts of the bards and poets,
but in the songs owned by the nation itself, inspired in the nation by
the old vanishing world, and doomed' to end, except as a record of the
past, with the culture that produced it. The earliest poetic promise of
the race, when Erse was the literary dialect of both Ireland and the
Scottish Highlands, was singularly splendid. This is no place in which
to describe the heroic legends of the Irish Celt; or the schools of the
Irish bards; or the rich literature of early Celtic Christianity. It
will be sufficient to indicate from such early lyrics as Dr. Kuno Meyer
has translated, the distinctive qualities of early Celtic poetry. Dr.
Meyer has very rightly indicated the secret of their charm—an "avoidance
of the obvious and the commonplace. The half-said thing to them is
dearest." It would be hard: to find in the literature, late or early, of
any European people a more perfect treatment of nature. The early Celtic
poet finds subtle enjoyment of her through all his senses. Sight is the
obvious hand-maiden of descriptive verse, andi the old poet's eyes are
aided in their work by a loving care for detail—he sees not merely the
autumn hillside, but the bracken reddening on its slopes, the pleasant
ruin of the summer's growth, and the wild-geese winging their way to
sunnier skies. He hears with acuter ear the small sounds, and subtle
quiet music of nature, and like the greatest of later lyric poets,
Keats, he knows the poetry of taste. Be associates the nature he loves
with all the occupations of his life, and earns his bread more willingly
in the sweat of his brow, because he does it in a fair setting. Even the
scribe finds new attractions in his scroll and pen and ink, because he
writes under trees and with the sky above him :-
"A hedge of trees
surrounds me,
A blackbird's lay singe to me;
Above my lined booklet
The trilling birds chant to me.
Well do I write under the greensward."
The religious penitent
rejoices because the operations of the Holy Spirit have as their fitting
symbol the clear pool in which he washes away his sins. The life ascetic
has still the subtle luxury of natural beauty to satisfy earthly
cravings, and a warrior saint like Columba tempers the rigours of his
religious exile with memories of the oak-groves of Derry. Matthew
Arnold, misleading the world with a phrase, as was his wont, has spoken
of melancholy, and a kind of brooding art-magic, as the notes of the
Celtic imagination. He speaks of "the sheer inimitable note" (Celtic, of
course) in passages like these:
"Met we on hill, in dale,
forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea."
And
"In such a night as this
Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage."
But half the charm of
this early Celtic poetry lies in its frankness and health. It has
lightness and spirit; and real melancholy, reflective gloom, in fact all
derivative emotions are less evident than in Anglo-Saxon verse. Laments
there are, but objective and direct laments.
Passing from this fair
early phase of Celtic imagination, we have an acute sense of
disappointment at the later achievements of Gaelic genius, when that
genius has learned to express itself in a Highland dialect. It is,
perhaps, well to remind ourselves at how late a date this happened.
According to Skene, it was only when the fall of the almost independent
kingdom of the Isles, and the Reformation again separated the country
from Ireland that a reaction towards the vernacular and spoken Scotch
Gaelic took place. Among the earliest examples of Gaelic literature are
the poems in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Even there "some are in
pure Irish,. . . others in a mixed dialect, in some of which the Irish
idiom, in others the Scotch predominates." The old lyrical graces have
not entirely disappeared. The affectionate details of natural beauty in
Deirdre's lament show the old quality still present.
"Glendaruadh! O
Glendaruadh!
My love each man of its inheritance.
Sweet the voice of the cuckoo on bending bough,
On the bill above Glendaruadhi.
Beloved is Naighen and its
sounding shore;
Beloved the water o'er pure sand.
O that I might not depart from the cast,
But that I might go with my beloved."
There is an
extraordinarily frank and simple pleasure in human graces—ruddy faces,
pearl-white teeth, raven-black hair, as in this verse in praise of
Diarmaid:
"Whiter his body than the
sun's bright light,
Redder his lips than blossoms tinged with red,
Long yellow locks did rest upon his head."
The heroic note,
too—battle, andl legendary splendour, and the virtues of champions—still
sounds clearly. But despite one little despairful love song by a
Countess of Argyll, the collection creates the impression that writing
and the self-conscious literary life are obstacles intervening to
pervert the true character of Gaelic poetry. There are wonderfully few
memorable things in the Ossianic fragments in the Dean's book; only vain
repetitions, and hints of things which the Irish had done more skilfully
centuries earlier. Much of the rest of the volume is composed of
aphorisms and trite sayings—the refuge, in all ages, of third-rate
minds. There are the usual satires of the half-educated imagination,
many of them wearisome tirades against women in general, suggesting that
woman in particular has been a little disdainful of the bardic advances.
Eulogies and laments commemorate great heroes, not without a
professional unction, as though sorrow and praise rose and fell in
strict accordance with a recognised tariff. It may be the effect of
imperfect translation, but the novice in Gaelic finds himself conscious
of a literary dilemma—the one alternative, that there is little in the
substance of the poetry to justify aesthetic enthusiasm, the other, that
somewhere, concealed behind' imperfect art, lies a world of true poetry
and natural magic. Nor does the critic's difficulty grow less as he
passes on to the age of more celebrated Gaelic poets, when the graces
and complicated art of the Gael had reached perfection. It is obvious
that the affection of Duncan Ban Macintyre for his hills and' deer has
produced some charming open-air poetry, and that Alastair Macdonald's "Birlinn
Ghlann-Raonuill " has Celtic fire and movement, even in a late
translation; yet, when enthusiastic advocates of Highland Celticism
boast of poetic triumph's in Gaelic, the Saxon critic remains sceptical.
Alexander Carmichael may claim for Gaelic oral literature that it has
passages "unsurpassed by anything similar in the ancient classics of
Greece or Rome," but there is surely little in the artificial literature
of his people which counts in European courts of literary criticism, and
it is no kindness to Highland folk-poetry to compare it with anything in
the classics more modern than Homer. Apart from the eighteenth-century
Wardour Street Celtic of Macpherson, which has its own virtues, and:
which certainly had its influence, no work of any Gaelic poet has yet
contrived to convince the world of western criticism that the obstacle
of the Gaelic language is worth surmounting, as men learn Italian to
know Dante, for the treasures beyond.
Nevertheless, somehow or
other, the Gaelic temperament has always received: recognition as
poetic; indeed if there were nothing more, the power which Macpherson's
translations so indubitably exercised, in spite of Dr. Johnson's
triumphant and ignorant contempt, demands some further explanation than
that of Macpherson's very questionable genius. It was on a voyage of
adventure, to discover some solution to this dilemma, that I found
Alexander Carmichael's Carnzina Gadelica, and so came upon the greatest
author produced' by Highland culture, and its finest expression,—the
Highland folk themselves, and their natural songs and poetry. In the
remoter regions of the Western Highlands, and more especially in "The
Long Island," that ardent Gael and true gentleman, Alexander Carmichael,
discovered a literature in folk-song, unquestionably superior, not
merely to formal and artificial Gaelic poetry, but to any similar
folk-song in the British Isles. It is a literature dependent on a life
simple and primitive, where natural wants are satisfied by the simplest
natural processes, and literature, if that may be called literature
which is never written, is nothing but the rhythms or melodies which
serve as a kindly accompaniment to domestic routine and the labours of
the field. Sowing and reaping, churning and weaving, pasturing cattle
and catching fish, these things with shining intervals of Sundays and
saints'-days, dominate life, and leave no intervals for modern artifice.
There, even Christianity has done little to repress the worship of
former days, and Protestantism could secure her dogmatic victory only by
creating waste places in the old traditionary life. "There were many sad
things done then," said a housewife to Carmichael, "for those were the
days of foolish doings, and of foolish people. . . . The good ministers
and the good elders preached against them, and went among the people,
and besought them to forsake their follies and' to return to wisdom.
They made the people break and burn their pipes and fiddles. If there
was a foolish man here and there who demurred, the ministers and elders
themselves broke and burnt their instruments, saying:
"Is fearr an teine beag a
gharas la beag na sithe
Na'n teine mor a loisgeas la mor na feirge.
[Better is the small fire that warms on the little day of peace,
Than the big fire that burns on the great day of wrath.]"
Even in the Protestant
islands something remained after this drastic Puritan invasion; but, in
the Catholic islands, a wiser toleration compromised with earlier
paganism, and so, thanks to the editor of Carmina Cadelica, we have
to-day record' of a spontaneous literature of charms, invocations,
blessings, as real as the life they commemorate, as beautiful as the old
Celtic poetry, the very soul of the Highland people. It has at least one
proud distinction, of which the lewder and more sensual lowland genius
cannot boast—an amazing purity, which Campbell of Islay found paralleled
in the Highland Tales to which he listened: " I have never heard a story
whose point was obscenity, publicly told in a Highland cottage; and I
believe such are rare." It tells the story of the simple crises of a
simple life. There are routine chants which the women sang as they
milked, or worked the quern, or rocked the cradle; verses appropriate to
joy and sorrow, the natural poetry of birth, love, and death. They are
pieces of an extraordinary religious mosaic, in which the Celtic
imagination has set together old mythology, and mediaeval hagiology, and
evangelic truth. For the islanders have written quaint magical verses in
honour of a pagan Christ, and his mother, and his angels. Christ is the
'white Lamb'; Mary, some fair heathen goddess; and the angels are demi-gods.
"Come, Brendan, from the
ocean,"
sang the herdsman,
'Come, Ternan, most potent
of men,
Come, Michael, valiant, down
And propitiate the cow of my joy.
Ho, my heifer, the heifer of my love,
My beloved heifer, choice cow of every sheiling,
For the sake of the High King, take to thy calf."
They sang their
appropriate invocations, when February brought round the day of Bride,
the "aid-woman" of Mary in travail. They created out of St. Michael a
new god of the sea, and held his day, the 29th of September, as "the
most popular demonstration of the Celtic year." I cannot find elsewhere
in Gaelic verse anything to match in delicate fancy the invocation that
the people made on the maiden before her marriage, wishing her the skill
and virtue, faith and beauty, of the saints, the ancient heroines, and
the fairies; and the simplicity of the true lyric surely reaches its
perfection, in these verses sung by lovers, of the lovers' gifts
bestowed on the day of St. Micahel:
"My lover gave to me a
knife
That would cut the sapling withe,
That would cut the soft and hard,
Long live the hand that gave.
My lover promised me a
snood,
Ay, and a brooch and comb,
And I promised, by the wood,
To meet him at rise of sun.
My lover promised me a
mirror,
That my beauty I might see,
Yes, and a coif and ring,
And a dulcet harp of chords.
He vowed me those and a
fold of kine,
And a palfrey of the steeds,
And a barge, pinnacled white,
That would safely cross the perilous seas.
A thousand blessings, a
thousand victories
To my lover who left me yestreen,
He gave to me the promise lasting,
Be his Shepherd God's own Son."
Or, once again, here is
surely the true and perfect lyric of Highland hospitality; true and'
perfect because it reflects, not an individual fancy, but the ideas of
the folk:
"I saw a stranger yestreen,
I put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place;
In the sacred name of the Triune
He blessed myself, and my house,
My cattle and my dear ones;
And the lark said in her song,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger's guise.
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger's guise."
It is with heart-felt
sorrow that one realises how quickly this natural literature has already
faded. What Carmichael says of the feast of St. Michael is true of the
whole world of which he is the affectionate historian: " The Michael
lamb is sometimes slain, the Michael struan is sometimes baked, and the
carrots are occasionally gathered, but the people can give no account of
their significance." Here and nowhere else is the true inspired
literature of the Gael, and yet the days of its life are numbered. Old
things are passing, and must pass, and' these songs can live, only in
the modifications they may have made in minds imperfectly in sympathy
with the Highlander, or in the affection and faithful memory of Gaels,
still determined to fight time and fate to the last.
Alike in history and
literature, the modern student of the Highland community finds the
elegiac note predominant. Like another elect people, the clansmen have
been and must continue to be pilgrims and strangers. Their gallantry has
been the central strength of the British army through a century; their
love of culture has done much to give to the Scottish Universities their
prestige; their virility and resourcefulness are building Novae Scotiae
for Britain beyond: the seas. But the days of the proud old Highland
realm in Scotland are almost over, and Britain is the poorer for it. |
