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“To know ourselves” is best
achieved by a study of the life and poetry of our people. One must, however,
be extremely careful of the entanglements caused by hasty conclusions, the
frantic guess-work of ethnology, and confusing views of history; from which
you find perpetuated to-day such statements as that such and such districts
are Celtic because the people of them speak Gaelic, or Saxon because Gaelic
if not understood there, usually, of course, at the date of the writer
himself; whereas language has often little to do with race at all, after
long lapse of time subsequent upon settlement. For example, you find in
America thousands of negroes, English-speaking and following European habits
of thought and living whose boast of being Anglo-Saxon is a broad joke
indeed. At the time of the siege of Alafeking, Baden-Powell was taken as the
representative of Anglo-Saxon resolute dogged-ness, while his names mark him
out distinctly as Cymric, and his race had learned that dogged pulse of
frontier warfare, standing dourly in the mists, fighting in De-Wet-like
campaign against the English Edward. The fact is tha we are so mixed as a
people that perhaps no greater historic fallacy has been perpetuated than
the designation of us as the Anglo-Saxon race. Anglo-Celtic would be nearer
the marl of truth, and, if we would be fully described as Anglo-Cymri-Dano-Celtic
would most truly cover the Scot at any rate.
Dr Samuel Johnson said, “Languages are the pedigree of nations.” Like many
other aphoristio utterances, this is not true universally and in Scotland it
does not hold at all. “For not only is English spoken throughout the
Highlands by people to whose ancestors it was an alien tongue, but the
Gaelic language itself is the mother tongue of many whose physical
characteristic, plainly show that they come of widely different stocks”
(Mackenzie’s “Short History of the Highlands”). We have ourselves seen whole
parishes undergo the change from one language to the other, and in places
where only a few years since, the children were playing in the one tongue
the present generation are playing in the other. In 1830 Gaelic was the
absolute vernacular of Braemar, while in 1876 it was preached in four parish
churches in Caithness, and in seven congregations of the Free Church in that
county. It does not follow that a race changes its history or it pedigree
according to the uniform it dons.
The natives of the outer Hebrides an regularly spoken of and thought of as
the purest Celts “because Gaelic is their language”; whereas the Highlander
himself calls those islands “Innso Gall.” “the island of the strangers,”
from the fact that they were largely peopled by. the Norsemen, and held bv
Norway till after 1226. Recently an account of the life of George Ross, who
founded a little kingdom of his own in the Cocos Islands, in the Indian
Ocean, appeared in a newspaper. He was born in Orkney, so to the writer of
the article he must be “the Viking,” “the child of the Norseman,” and the
like; a thing which no Ross could ever be, for his race could not be
anything other than that of the Celtic clan of his name, and he must have
been sprung from some settler in the islands, a thing easily explained,
Orkney and Shetland having been in historic times the happy hunting grounds
of Scots adventurers, as the melancholy traditions of the native people
still can testify, and the lingering dislike of the “Scotchman” a name the
older generation proves. So, also, a friend of mine, writing about a
district from which Gaelic had died out about two generations ago, the
people now speaking a broad strong Doric, said— “Their speech proves them to
be of the old Teutonic stock,” which it might also have done in regard to
the children of the Italian ice-cream vendor in any Scottish village, or the
children of a Polish miner “with a name like a sneeze,” but a vocabulary and
accent picked up in the parish school.
The Scots are a mixed race, but the predominant trend of thought and
sympathy, is Celtic, in the main. The masterful Scandinavian seized, held,
and dominated districts of the land. Yet, though he changed much of the
local situation, he did not change the blood of the folk. He gave to the
kerns whom he conquered his own name as the tribal title, as did the
Macleods, the Macaulays, Sinclairs, and their set, but inside the clan thus
formed there were sept names and clanlets who kept and keep still their own
stories and their own designations. The great clans were most frequently
strong co-operative confederacies, rather than ia homogeneous unity sprung
from a common source.
Scottish Life and Poetry
by Lauchlan Maclean Watt (London, 1912). (pdf) |
