TARTANS
Foreigners who expect to find all Scotland lit by a sunset of romance,
are disappointed in the paucity of kilts and plaids as touches of human
colour upon the Highland scenery. The tartan, indeed, has gone out
faster than some picturesque costumes of continental mountaineers. It
was when forbidden to wear it that the thrawn Highlander clung fondly
to his ancestral garb; now that he has his choice, though he may keep a
kilt and gay trappings to match for occasional display, he submits to
the hodden grey breeches of the Saxon for work-a-day wear. In our time,
indeed, aristocratic patronage has brought forth a holiday revival of
the Highland dress. Queen Victoria’s admiration set Braemar reblooming
with rainbow shows; and one Stuart peer of to-day is reported as
offering a kilt of his tartan gratis to any clansman who will oblige
him by displaying it. But these gauds are more visible on the edge of
the Highlands than in their recesses; least of all on the Islands,
where men rather affect seafaring blue, and it is chiefly old women who
cling to the tartan shawl as head-dress. There may be more philabegs
found in London than in Glasgow, or even in Inverness; and in Lochaber
or Badenoch you are less sure of encountering the tartan than on Surrey
heaths about Aldershot, or in the Hertfordshire meadows near Watford,
whither the Caledonian Asylum has now removed its company of young
Highlanders, that till a year or so back flaunted themselves in the
metropolis, exciting rude urchins to derisive cries of “Scotchie!” as
in lowland Scottish towns they might be greeted with “Kiltie, kiltie,
cauld legs!”
Those young Cockneys are as ignorant as some grown-up ladies and
gentlemen and not a few authors, who ought to know that the “garb of
old Gaul” is no more the “Scottish dress” than a tall hat and a red
cloak is the English national costume for women. The comic papers
caricaturing bank directors and church elders in tartans betray
themselves as published within sound of Bow Bells. A London illustrated
weekly lately put Lanarkshire miners into kilts, as a patch of local
colour. A few words, then, may not be wasted in enlightening popular
ignorance on a subject that has some real obscurities to invite learned
controversy among such pundits as concern themselves with “the cut of
Adam’s philabeg.”
And first let me remonstrate with Friend Ezra Q. Broadbrim of
Philadelphia and Miss Virginia M’Adam of Vermont, who profess to
be as much shocked at bare knees as at the Apollo Belvidere or the
Venus de Medici. A generation back England had a like squeamishness,
when even on the northern stage Rob Roy and the Dougal Cratur felt
it proper to wear tights; nay, a century ago certain prim ladies of
Edinburgh thought fit to publish in the _Courant_ how they must avert
their eyes from hairy-shanked cattle-drovers out of Highland glens.
The example of our athletic youth has gone to shame down such mock
modesty. As well be scandalised by the Scotch lasses who display their
comely limbs in washing-tubs, not so liberally, indeed, as did their
mothers, thanks to the leering of Cockney cads, who may be born at
Paisley as at Peckham! And let those who find the Highland dress too
Arcadian know to their confounding that the Celt, whether of Scotland
or Ireland, is a model for the Saxon in the morals that here seem open
to question. As to healthfulness, the experience of Highland soldiers
all over the world bears out Dr. Jaeger’s doctrine of a thick girdle
round the middle of the body being best for both hot and cold weather:
the seat of life protected, and the extremities left to take care of
themselves. There is a very Cockney novel of truly Cockney days, in
which “Sir Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” appears in the Fleet
Prison wearing a snuff-shop kilt, as represented by the artist; and a
visitor judges it as well he can’t go out, for fear of catching cold!
As to picturesqueness, ask any artist wrestling with his “Portrait of a
Gentleman”—heaven help him if Mars or Minerva cannot cast some cloud
over the lay figure draped by twentieth-century tailors!
The kilt is believed to be the oldest fashion of dress in the world,
the original material having been fig leaves, seaweeds, or such like.
In the days of Roman power a full skirt was the badge of civilisation,
distinguishing the _togati_ from _braccati_ barbarians. The whirligig
of time was to bring about an exchange of fashion as to form; but Pliny
and other writers describe the Celts of classic days as arrayed in a
kind of tartan. It may have been under some Epping Forest or Hampstead
Heath check that Boadicea hid her stripes, “bleeding from the Roman
rods.” There is question as to if, when, or how far the old Highlanders
gave up trews, tight-fitting hose all of a piece, for what seems to
have been a single piece of rough cloth wrapped about the upper and
belted about the lower part of the body. Bare legs was certainly the
feature that three centuries ago put the nickname “Redshanks” on both
Scottish and Irish kernes. A Norwegian king got at home the sobriquet
of Magnus Barefoot when he brought back from the Hebrides a fashion
of apparel he found there. On the other hand, there are parts of the
Highlands where the kilt appears never to have become popular, while in
some form or other the _breacan_, tartan, was everywhere worn by both
sexes, the first patterns of which may have been suggested by varied
hues of decay in Adam’s leafy garment: Eve, no doubt, had a new one at
frequent intervals from some Pandemoniac Paris.
The groundwork of ancient costume for Scottish and Irish Celts seems
to have been a linen shirt dyed with saffron or smeared with pitch;
and perhaps the poorer class habitually wore little more, while
the chieftains and their attendants learned from mailed foemen to
use defensive armour. But what has come, rightly or wrongly, to be
considered the characteristic dress of a Highlander was formerly the
belted plaid, the lower part of it plaited in the manner of the kilt,
the upper part capable of being folded round the body in various ways;
and hydropathists should be interested to know that to keep himself
warm when sleeping on the open ground, the hardy clansman used to dip
his loose wrapping in water. That story of the snowball pillow scouted
as effeminate luxury, is told of several clans; and Burt, early in
the seventeenth century, reports the scorn of Highland women for a
degenerate duinewassal who had donned a Lowland greatcoat. There could
have been no want of tough hardiness about the men who, under Montrose,
made marches of sixty miles a day by rough mountain paths.
By and by the idea would be hit on of separating body and skirt of an
encumbering costume that, serving both for dress and blanket, had to
be thrown off when it came to hot fighting or active business. Thus
was developed the _philabeg_ or little kilt which we know, in its
present form vainly said to be the invention of an Englishman, even
of an army-tailor, and, there is strange whisper, of some Quaker! J.
F. Campbell of Isla, Lord Archibald Campbell, and other writers make
out, however, by help of old pictures and older sculptures, a very good
case for antiquity both of the kilt and the diverse patterns of tartan.
John Major, teacher of Knox and Buchanan, speaks of the “wild Scots” as
dressed in “patchwork,” and going naked from mid-leg. A print in the
British Museum shows kilts among the Scottish auxiliaries of Gustavus
Adolphus. Sir R. M. Keith, in Frederick the Great’s time, wrote home
from Germany for “a plaid of my colours sewed and plaited on a waist
belt ... in which to show my nakedness to the best advantage”; but
he does not use the name _kilt_ for what in the army was at first an
undress uniform. “Till he got his plaid kilted on him” took some time;
and this phrase, used of one of the 1745 heroes, explains the name
which Burt spelt _quelt_.
There need be little doubt that the costume would be modified to
military exigencies on the raising of the Highland regiments between
the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The kilt of those days appears to have
been more “cutty,” giving greater freedom to the limbs than now, when
it ought to touch the knee-cap, and its wet edge may cause sore rubs on
unhardened skin, as poor John Brown found when, for once in a way, sent
out walking in his philabeg livery. The sporran, used as a pouch, may
originally have been an apron for decency’s sake, and took its present
showy form in military trappings. Rob Roy’s is said to have been armed
with a pistol that would go off in hands trying to open it without
knowing the trick. A “snuff-mill” is mentioned as one of the appendages
in Georgian days. The broad bonnet, apparently a Flemish importation,
belonged to Lowland as well as Highland Scotland; its ornamental border
of dice is said to come from the _fesse chequée_ in the Stuart arms,
and to have been introduced as a Cavalier distinction from the plain
blue bonnets of the Roundheads. All over Scotland, too, was worn the
plaid, now shrunk in military use to little more than an ornament of
the “garb of old Gaul,” but in its full size capable of mantling the
body from head to heels. The ostrich plumes of Highland regiments
are, of course, modern excrescences, yet developed from the feathers
that marked the rank of chief and duinewassal. The ribbons behind the
bonnet are vain survivals of appendages which had a practical use in
tightening or loosening it, and might be drawn down as ear-flaps. But
the clansmen of old time probably went bare-headed, as barefoot but
for thin brogues of hide, that made no pretence of being waterproof,
and soon wore out upon metalled roads. Your wild Highlandman was sure
to carry a dirk, like a butcher’s knife, with as many other lethal
weapons as he could come by; and if he had no buskins in which to stick
his _skene-dhu_, he might keep it handy in his sleeve or a fold of his
plaid. Silver buttons, Stewart of Garth says, were worn by those who
had them, with the purpose of providing means for a decent funeral in
very probable case of need. As to the gewgaws that now go with this
dress, they must have been very exceptional when Burt describes a
Highlander’s plaid as commonly fastened by something like a fork or a
skewer. The same writer dwells on bare limbs frequently disfigured by
itch as a most unromantically displeasing feature of a costume which
he, for his part, found “far from acceptable to the eye.”
After Culloden, the wearing of the Highland dress was strictly
prohibited, the clansmen stripped of their beloved tartans along with
their arms. But it proved as ill to take the kilt as the breeks off
a Highlander. This attempt against half-national sentiment only went
to endear to the Celt his airy chequered garb; and the courts had to
deal with knotty cases like that of a mountaineer who stitched up
his kilt in the middle and pleaded that such a divided skirt met the
requirements of the law. Likely young men caught in the kilt were
handed over to the regiments in which they could wear it unblamed.
There is one comic case of a negro lad taken up for displaying the
tartan livery of his master, in which he may have resembled that
battalion of Hindoo Highlanders whom the Guicowar of Baroda provided
with pink silk fleshings as groundwork for their exotic array. Perhaps
_Humphrey Clinker_ is not to be taken as a sober authority, on which
we learn that when condemned to breeches by Act of Parliament, “the
majority wear them, not in their proper places, but on poles, or
long staves, over their shoulders.” The law seems not to have been
thoroughly enforced over the Highlands, and it became a dead letter
before being repealed, when the Pretender took to swilling himself out
of any risk of heroism. Now it’s
Up wi’ the bonny blue bonnet,
The kilt and the feather and a’!
But at that time the philabeg was as the smock frock of an English
peasant. One would affectionately remonstrate with Mr. Neil Munro,
who, in the seventeenth century, makes a gently-born hero “put on his
kilt for town.” A chief or gentleman commonly wore trews of tartan, as
Prince Charlie did at Edinburgh, where on one occasion his “Highland
garb” is reported as including “red velvet breeches”; and Waverley
assumed the Highlander in trews to the approval of his mentor, the
Baron of Bradwardine. Much farther back, for an excursion into the
Highlands, “FitzJames” had equipped himself with three ells of Highland
tartan at 4s. 4d. the ell, “to be hose to the king’s grace”; and there
is reason to suppose that the wearing of the trews was common in his
day. In the same century we have a note of “breekis” supplied to
Argyll’s son, whose pedagogue seems to have gone gowned in a plaid,
as became humbler station. A kilt, indeed, does not lend itself to
horsemanship. The supporters of Highland coats of arms are sometimes
represented as wearing one the kilt (occasionally marked as the
“servile” dress), the other trews, which latter Mr. David MacRitchie
(_Scottish Historical Review_, July 1904) insists on as the true form
of Celtic garb, handed down from the most ancient times, and would have
proud Sassenachs know that they took the use as the name of trousers
from the race they despised as half naked. Quoting Defoe, who describes
trews-wearing Highland soldiery as “like a regiment of merry Andrews
ready for Bartholomew Fair,” he boldly suggests that Harlequin may
belong to the clan of Celtic jugglers. But this writer appears a true
Celt in his love for lost causes and costumes. When bayonets began to
prick tartans, at all events, a belted plaid was the common wear of
henchmen and gillies: in the Lowlander’s eyes, as Macaulay says, the
dress of a thief. And even a smart thief’s sweetheart could boast of
her Gilderoy—
He never wore a Hieland plaid,
But costly silken clothes!
Highlanders of rank living among their dependants would sometimes
affect the popular garment, as an English squire may show himself
in corduroys; and queer figures they would have cut to our eyes,
when arrayed in what Boswell took for the true style of a Highland
gentleman, “purple camlet kilt, a black waistcoat, a short green
cloth coat bound with gold cord, a yellowish bushy wig, a large blue
bonnet with a gold thread button.” Even the clergy in the far north
occasionally vested themselves in the philabeg; an Anglican bishop has
struck Highlanders with surprise as one who superfluously wore both
kilt and trews, though not in the blue and white pattern recognised as
the clerical tartan.
In our time the fashion has swung round; and it is the Scottish
aristocracy who now cherish a dress in which youngsters look so well,
while unwise strangers too are tempted to bedeck themselves in such
unfamiliar gauds. I shall never forget the figure an old friend of
mine used to cut, who died a bearded Uhlan before the walls of Paris,
but in youth was moved to assume grand-maternal tartans as setting
for the typical aspect of a German student, round smooth face, gold
spectacles, long straight hair, and all. I have seen an Italian prince,
too, in this disguise, but thus he made no model for Salvator Rosa. If
a foreigner take to the “garb of old Gaul,” it is seldom he can live
up to it. _Cucullus non facit monachum._ “The white-kneed Cockney,
conscious of his kilt” may indeed be suspected half a mile off. (“How
white your knees are!” a recent novelist makes one of his characters
say admiringly to the hero in Highland dress.) I was about to lay it
down that this “garment of terrible possibilities” cannot be worn
becomingly without youthful usage; but I refrain on consideration that
most of the soldiers who swing their tartans so bravely have been
fettered in breeks till they took the king’s shilling.
To its military renown we mainly owe the preservation of the Highland
dress; but our kilted campaigners in India and Africa are not, as a
rule, men of the same breeding as those whose martial virtues were
first enlisted on the side of loyalty and order. No common soldiers
were the privates, some of whom rode to drill attended by a gillie to
carry their arms and uniforms. All of them would be fellow-clansmen or
belonging to the same district, serving under their natural chiefs, and
forming a happy regimental family, easily disciplined by leaders who
understood their manners and would humour their sensibilities. They had
the name of being “lambs in the house as lions in the field”; welcomed
after experience by poor folk upon whom they came to be quartered, who
at first might have shrunk from them as half-naked Scythians. Stewart
of Garth, himself an officer in the Black Watch, is most emphatic as to
the good conduct of this regiment, among whom for many years the lash
was never used, as it was daily in other corps. At a general punishment
parade the Highlanders would be excused from attendance, such an
example being held needless for them. When one of them did at last
come under the cat, he was banned by his fellows as plague-stricken;
and the men, we are told, would sometimes subscribe to buy out a bad
character, lest he should bring disgrace upon his company. These stern
warriors feared above all a threat to tell of their misconduct at home.
Out of their sixpence a day they, in at least one case, joined to pay a
chaplain of their own, organising themselves into a church with elders
elected from the ranks. Not a few of them sent part of that poor pay
home to the old people; while others had sold their bodies to the king
on condition of a farm lease given by the laird to the father they
might never see again.
[Illustration: CAWDOR CASTLE]
The Highlanders in those days were as noted for sobriety as for valour,
declares General Stewart, in proof of which he asserts that when rum
was served out on a campaign, the Highland soldiers alone could be
trusted with three or four days’ allowance at once, like officers.
There is indeed reason to hold that the Highlands have not always
deserved a name for intemperance. The former drink of the people was
ale, if not water; whisky does not figure in their ancient songs and
proverbs, as does the Pictish “heather ale,” the secret of making
which is long lost. With Pitt’s excise laws, we are told, began the
smuggling and illicit distillation that did so much to demoralise
a race which, if all stories are true, has sadly fallen away from
primitive virtue. So Stewart protests as to the temperance of the early
Highland regiments; yet more critical observers in George I.’s reign
speak of whisky houses as already a curse to the country from which
those troops were raised; and indeed all travellers of that date who
got themselves into print are apt to touch on a habit of “correcting”
or “qualifying” the rawness of Highland air, where a funeral, as well
as a feast, was like to end in a drunken fray, when dirks served for
forks.
General Stewart, it must be confessed, looked back on the Highlands
through a haze of full-dress tartan, glittering with silver settings
and jewelled memories! One can excuse this Gael for a little idealising
the memory of his fathers in arms. He admits that the first Highland
soldiers had some military failings, especially from the martinet’s
point of view. They could be led, but not driven. Like Red Indian
warriors, they took the warpath eagerly, but thought no shame of
dropping off at their own whim or convenience. Like Swiss mercenaries,
they often suffered acutely from _Heimweh_, drawing them back to their
beloved mountains. Desertions were frequent in early days, till the
clansmen had learned what it was to be soldiers. The wonder is they
were not more frequent among soldiers often enlisted by pressgang
methods. The discontents which repeatedly drove them into open
mutinies were bred out of misunderstandings, either on the part of
men whose ignorance of English blinded them to the nature of their
engagement, or of officers who could not make allowance for their
susceptible character; and they had real grievances in the bad faith
of the Government when they found themselves ordered abroad or drafted
into other regiments, contrary to the terms of their enlistment.
The 42nd—originally the 43rd—Regiment was first formed out of the
companies of the Black Watch in 1739. Three years later they were
marched into England, to their surprise and suspicion, soothed by a
representation that the king wished to see the finest regiment in his
service. Over the border they found themselves regarded with such
curiosity as to-day would be excited by the sight of our Maori or Sikh
auxiliaries; then their good conduct and imposing array were worth a
friendly reception, that for a time lulled their distrust. But this
awoke again in London, where rumours ran that they had been decoyed so
far to be transported to the American plantations; and the Cockneys of
that day, as well as the clowns of southern counties, seem to have been
more inclined to coarse jests than the northern English, who had better
cause for respecting the wild Highlandmen. Traitors were also at work
among them, putting into their heads the idea that “after being used as
rods to scourge their countrymen, they were to be thrown into the fire.”
Having been reviewed on Finchley Common by Marshal Wade, the regiment
gave itself leave to start bodily homewards, under the leadership of
a Macpherson corporal, taking a line across country between the two
great north roads, and dodging from wood to wood, so that for two or
three days their march could not be traced by the amazed authorities.
In a wood a few miles from Oundle they were intercepted and surrounded
by a force from Northampton; then, no doubt half-starved and much
bewildered, after some parley they surrendered. Three men were shot as
an example in the Tower. The rest let themselves be shipped over to
Flanders for a baptism of foreign fire at Fontenoy, where their conduct
proved so excellent that they were trusted with the service of covering
the retreat. After 1746 they had a long term of exile, from which, out
of more than a thousand, not a hundred men came back to their native
heath. Ever since—
We have sailed owre many a sea, my lad,
We have fought ’neath many a sky;
And it’s where the fight has hottest raged
That the tartans thickest lie.
The Highland regiments grew used to getting more than their fair
share of foreign service; but for long their fiery spirits were apt
to flare up into mutiny against real or imaginary injustice. After
such risings, when it was thought necessary to make an example, men
would come forward to offer themselves for trial and punishment as
scapegoats. Stewart tells a story of one private, marched to Edinburgh
to be tried for his life, who got leave of his officer to turn aside
alone to Glasgow for the settlement of important business, and, true
to his word, made a dramatic appearance at the last moment among his
fellow-prisoners, having struggled with accidental delays like the hero
of Schiller’s _Bürgschaft_.
It was vulgar crime that appears to have been almost unknown among
these touchy braves, whose virtues and failings remind us of honourable
schoolboys. By tens of thousands such men laid their bones all over
the world to pave the British Empire. Till the end of the century
fresh regiments could be raised from the Highlands, as well as corps
of Fencible militia and volunteers. The drain of the long French war
first made the supply run short. The ranks of the Highland regiments
began to be recruited from outside, from the scum of London and Dublin,
as Stewart bitterly complains; and this alloy went far to debase their
early character. There are too few real Highlanders in the ranks
since the glens from which they were recruited have been stocked with
sheep and deer in place of men. The Celt seems to have much lost his
martial ardour, now that other careers are open to him. In our day
recruits have actually been rejected from the Black Watch because they
could speak nothing but Gaelic, or perhaps as showing too much of the
ancestral grudge against discipline.
Of late years more care has been taken to give Scotsmen only the
privilege of serving in regiments for which recruits would willingly
come forward from all parts of the kingdom. The majority of “Highland”
soldiers are at least Lowland Scots, and some battalions have a
considerable percentage of real Highlanders, which will be much larger
in the militia contingent. But, as General Stewart noticed, Sassenachs,
Irishmen, Cockneys, and other aliens soon catch the infection of
enthusiasm for tartans, bagpipes, and the proud traditions of regiments
that are the Zouaves or Bersaglieri of our service. They have lost,
indeed, the old bonds of caste and custom that held them closely
together, for good and evil, like the Brahmin sepoys who stirred mutiny
in our Indian army. But still _esprit de corps_ is strong enough in
regiments to make them jealously loyal to their own special uniform.
In the South African war they needed more than one order to make them
hide their showy tartan by a khaki apron worn in front: the other
side an enemy is not expected to see. And when prosaic War Office
authorities talked of smudging all the bright stripes and checks into
some such plain dull tint as a less striking mark for Boer rifles,
the _veldt_ “heather was on fire” with wrath of Seaforth and Gordon
Highlanders who could not tell you where Seaforth is, or how the Gay
Gordons came to have to do with the Highlands. To reconcile this
sentiment with practical exigencies, a Scottish artist has lately been
at work designing tartans that will preserve the distinctive check in a
low-toned scheme of colour. This would be but a development of the old
practice, which in several cases distinguished a showy design for full
dress from the less _voyant_ effect of the clan’s hunting tartan.
It must be remembered that only in recent days has the Highlander, like
the Red Indian, become an abstract personage. The sentiment of Highland
soldiery was originally a more concrete one. They had faint idea of
general patriotism, and their loyalty was not so much to their race as
to their own chiefs and kin. The first bodies raised in the reign of
King William were largely Campbells and other loyal clans; but after
the rising of 1715 they were disbanded as of doubtful trustworthiness.
On the representation of General Wade and other officers, however, the
experiment was again tried of keeping the peace of the Highlands by
independent companies, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
thief. Contemporary scandal-mongers even hinted that these watchmen
took turns of stealing and retrieving, so as to earn the old suspicion
against _custodes ipsos_. Each company would wear the tartan of its
captain, and be largely made up of his clansmen or dependants, who
conceived a new respect for law when it set them in arms against their
hereditary enemies. One captain was charged with stripping his tenants
of their best plaids for the soldiers to cut a gallant figure in on
parade occasions.
[Illustration: LOCH LINNHE]
When these companies came to be embodied as a regular regiment, the
question of uniform made a sore point among men of different clans. To
meet this difficulty the dark neutral Black Watch tartan is said to
have been devised, which forms the groundwork of several others; but it
is also claimed as one of the Campbell patterns, and half the original
captains belonged to that clan, foremost in furnishing soldiers
to guard Whig thrones. There were Highlanders of that day who would as
soon have worn a shirt of Nessus as Argyll’s trappings. Later corps,
raised by noblemen in their own country, naturally took the tartan
of their chiefs, whose names and colours are preserved in our modern
regiments, when Gordon and Cameron Highlanders are as like to be Smiths
and Robertsons. The grey kilting of the London Scottish corps seems
related to the fact that no clan tartan would be generally acceptable
to Highlanders of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hammersmith, few of whom
could pass a searching examination in tartanology.
Even ardent Celtic eyes, military or civilian, of our generation might
well be dazzled into confusing the brilliant array of Macdougalls
and Macdonalds, of Macleods and Macmillans; and it is not only
the Sassenach who needs the help of an illustrated dictionary for
distinguishing between some hundred recognised patterns, many of them
differing only by a shade, or a thin stripe of colour. Some clans, as
the Campbells and the Macdonalds, split into several branches, have
as many tartans, for the most part bearing a general resemblance, yet
to be recognised by an expert. Some give themselves the luxury of
different sets, one for full dress, another worn only by the chief and
his family. There is reason to understand that in old days a greater
variety of colours was displayed by the rich, while the poor had to
be content with simpler designs. Some patterns seem to be of no small
antiquity, handed down like the wampum records of a Red Indian tribe;
others may have been modified by circumstances or designed in rivalry
to those of neighbouring clans. Certain of the best-known clans, the
Gordons and the Grahams, for instance, came from the Lowlands, and
would have to equip themselves with a becoming tartan, as has been
done for Douglases and Dundases in quite modern times. Certain tartans
displayed in shop windows are undoubtedly of recent sartorial origin.
That now worn by the Cameron Highlanders was a blend designed for the
sake of harmony with King George’s red coat. The older patterns perhaps
depended on knowledge of or access to the natural dyes used in them,
got from heather, broom, roots, barks, seaweeds, or what not. Perhaps
they were coloured to some extent by defiance to hereditary enemies, as
in the case of the Campbell greens and the Cameron reds, contrasting
like the tints of Rembrandt and of Botticelli. The hue would often be
suggested by the need of slinking unseen upon sly game, over braes of
turf and heather; old writers indeed describe the general effect of
tartan as brown or heathery; and more glaring patterns could not have
been for everyday wear.
Highland as indeed Lowland kindreds also affected the wearing of some
plant in their caps, as the holly of Avenel, the thistle of Stewart,[1]
the broom of Forbes, the sprig of fir, box, or heath that is the
common badge of so many clans that it was only among near neighbours
it could make a mark of distrust or defiance. Another token was the
slogan or rallying-cry of the clan, often the name of some mountain or
conspicuous rock in its country, as “Cruachan” was for the Macintyres
and came to be for the conquering Campbells. There were further
peculiarities which the Gael could interpret as easily as a Mohawk read
the “sign” of Huron or of Delaware. But long before coming near enough
to excite the war-cry of his foes, the keen-eyed Highlander might make
out the hue of their tartans, warning him to be prepared for fight or
flight, as the case might be, when the strangers were not of a friendly
name. The Maclean reds and the Macleod yellows were like a danger
signal on each side. It was not so, indeed, with all neighbours, which
is almost as much as to say enemies. The Forbeses and the Gordons,
once living beside each other on cat-and-dog terms, have tartans ill
distinguished in general effect, by a thin line in the one case of
white, in the other of yellow, which it would take a very sharp-sighted
scout to pick out at musket range.
[1] One story of how this became the badge of Scotland suggests the
geese of the Roman Capitol: A Dane, moving stealthily to the attack of
some Scottish stronghold, trod in the dark upon a thistle, pricking out
of him a cry that alarmed the garrison.
One might suppose those old feuds quite forgotten in our days, but I
can quote a curious instance to the contrary. The tartan I have any
right to is that of Forbes, in which I went bedecked when I wore what
Wordsworth quite ultroneously belittles as—
The Roman kilt, degraded to a toy
Of quaint apparel for a half-spoilt boy.
“Half-spoilt” boy, quotha! I conceit myself, for one, brought up in more
decency and order than the poet who ran so wild on Cumberland fells,
wearing out his corduroys in nut-brakes, or unblushingly bare even of
“cast-off weeds” when he made “one long bathing of a summer’s day.” The
matter in hand is that at a more prudent stage of life, to save myself
from being “half-spoilt” by a cold journey “on an itinerant vehicle,”
I addressed myself to buy a plaid, Forbes tartan of course, but not
finding one thick enough in the shop, I humbled my ancestral pride
to put up with the Gordon pattern. This I did on two considerations:
first, that the objectionable yellow should in time bleach itself to
lamblikeness; second, that the ignorant natives of the country in which
I mainly live would not know the difference. But after exposure to wind
and rain for a generation, the hateful hue is as bright as ever; then
one day in an hotel ’bus, at Bournemouth of all places in the world, I
had as companions two elderly ladies who kept looking grimly askance at
that perverted tartan of mine.
“Sir,” said one of them abruptly, “I hope you’re not a
Gordon.”—“Certainly not,” replied I, somewhat taken aback; “but
why?”—“Because our people don’t like the Gordons!” quoth this frowning
dame; “we are Forbeses!” Shamedly I made confession of my fault,
declaring how, in spite of appearances, I too boasted that choicest
Highland descent; but my kinswomen heard me in the stony silence due to
a pretended Forbes in Gordon trappings.
Hereditary instincts awoke in me to lighten up their natural
resentment. I myself would think kindly of these unfortunate Gordons,
and speak of them with subdued reprobation, as becomes a son of the
nineteenth century. I feel no lust to lift from them a single head of
cattle, however come by, nor to strip them of any tatter of character
that may hang about their deplorable history. I strive to take a fair
view of them as fellow-men, and would fain disguise their badges of
infamy in the Perth dyeworks. Yet a candid spirit might well ask
whether no critical commentator have shown cause to suspect that the
enemy of mankind made his first _creagh_ against our happiness arrayed
in the Gordon tartan, its livid stripes on a green background readily
suggesting that allegory of a serpent form. The white lines of my
tartan are rather to be taken for traces of primitive innocence, as
even a Gordon must admit; and the dourest Forbes may agree that all
offence of the hostile colours has long been washed in brave blood.
The clannishness, which is the obverse of such inter-tribal grudges,
has not yet died out, albeit on the Stock Exchange a Macgregor makes no
better price for a Vich-Alpine than for a son of Somerled. In certain
secluded glens and islands is still rooted a minor patriotism which
does not wholly wither under the suns of the open world. “A’ Stewarts
are no sib to the king!” is the semi-Sassenach’s sneer at distant
calling of cousins between crofter and chieftain; yet his cherished
memories of descent go far to make the poorest Highlander something of
a gentleman. Nor is stretching out of the ties of kindred all upon
the inferior side. At least it will be only in recent times that the
Highland chief takes shame for his poor relations, who still may keep
some rags of the old loyalty. If you ask an English Brown whether he
be connected with a namesake, his first impulse is usually towards
emphatic denial, especially if he be in a condition to shun “brutes
that use the wrong kind of soap.” But the M’Brown is more apt to think
twice before repudiating any claim of far-off kinship, a fact cynically
explained by conditions, lasting longer in the north than in the
south, under which the greatest man’s life and property were safe in
proportion to the prevalence of his name and blood. It is not so long
ago since a Highlander had such a practical as well as a sentimental
interest in seeing about him none but his own tartan.