THE LAND OF LORNE
Among all the clans, the most numerous and the most powerful, in
modern times, have been the Campbells, who rose on the wreck of the
once predominant Macdonalds, ousting and absorbing men of other less
auspicious names till the new lords were firmly seated over Argyll and
a large part of Perthshire. This prosperity they owed to a knack of
choosing the stronger side, whereas Highlanders have been more apt to
figure as champions of falling causes. While less practically-minded
stocks stood “agin the government,” the Campbells usually proved
ready to recognise _de facto_ authority, to catch the flowing tide of
fortune, and to turn even godliness to gain in a manner supposed to
be more characteristic of the Lowland Scot. But the canniest of clans
had better success in earning fear than love from their neighbours.
The wilder chiefs looked on Argyll as an obnoxious good boy who pulled
out plums for himself from their seething confusion. Their Jacobite
sentiments came in part from an ancient respect for hereditary right,
in part from preference for a sovereign in no position to enforce
obedience; but often it was as much hatred of the Macallum More as love
of the Stuarts that drove Lochiels and Clanranalds into unprofitable
rebellion. “Fair and false as a Campbell!” is the reproach of sufferers
from that pushful race that, to threats and curses, gave back their
chuckling byword, “It’s a far cry to Loch Awe!” Jacobite poets are
of course very bitter against the line “of him who sold his king for
gold”; and when the cottar goodman had “waled a portion” enumerating
Job’s sheep and camels, his wife might well opine, “Maybe no the
same Cam’ells as at Inveraray, or I doobt there’d no be mony o’ the
sheep left.” But in the teeth of all ill-will, “the Campbells are
coming!” was the word for centuries, during which they went on serving
themselves heirs to the domains of the shadowy Prince Lorne, and
supplanting the sons of Somerled, more authentic Lords of the Isles.
They were, in short, one of the first clans to be civilised.
[Illustration: INVERARAY CROSS AND CASTLE]
I was at school with sons of this house, who were fair but not false;
and if its present head robbed me of an expected prize, that was
through the Campbell virtue of taking the likeliest means to attain
an end. The then Duke himself once attended our prize-day Exhibition,
when at the last moment it was well remembered to substitute “Wolsey, I
did not think to shed a tear!” or some such stock piece of inoffensive
declamation, for Aytoun’s “Burial March of Dundee,” in which a budding
Demosthenes had else reviled to their faces “the brood of false
Argyle.” So the name was commonly spelt in my days of spelling;
but the fashion now changes it to Argyll.
My own great-grandfather was born at Craignish, and it is not for me
to speak ill of his mother’s roof-tree. But if truth must be told,
antipathy to the modern lords of Lorne has not been confined to alien
clans. At school with us was another crew of Campbells, that prided
themselves on having kept their independence of the ducal chief, their
shrunken lands islanded amid his domain. They had some story which I
half forget, of ancestral charters hid away safe in a tree, when their
grasping overlord got into his possession those of other Campbells.
What I remember noting on a holiday visit was how these boys had been
taught not to pass the duke’s march without throwing a stone in sign
of undying enmity to the house of Argyll, a pious duty that would come
easy to boys in all times, but in our degenerate age was performed with
careless good-humour, none of these young mountain-cats being conscious
of any personal animosity. Old and new ways of life are mingled in
another story of stones which I vaguely recall from a western glen.
A Campbell had killed a Cameron—or it may have been the other way
on—to whose memorial cairn every passing Cameron added a stone of
remembrance, religiously pulled down by every Campbell. Thus the cairn
stood waxing and waning by a lonely moorside track, till a Campbell was
appointed postman on the beat, and his daily passage gave the monument
no fair chance.
The cradle of this race, so far as it is known to history, seems to
have been the Loch Awe valley below Ben Cruachan and the eastward
ridges about Loch Long, where the “Cobbler” had once for more poetic
name “Arthur’s Seat,” and a rocky peninsula became playfully styled
“Argyll’s Bowling-Green.” This country is as rich in romantic
associations as in natural beauty, famed by pen and pencil, chiefly
perhaps through P. G. Hamerton’s _Painter’s Camp in the Highlands_,
when with his faithful “Thursday” he took up Crusoe quarters on one
of the Loch Awe islands, before the solitude of its tombs was invaded
by steamboats and hotels. His readers will remember how he revels in
the colouring of these “changeful landscapes,” the greens and golds
against a background of rich heather, the velvet purples richer than
any king’s mantle, the rocks “plated” with thin snow, the patches of
blood-red fern in autumn, the masses of sun-lit snow in winter, the
stretches of calm lake reflecting green mountain slopes and tufted
islets, “the delicate half calms just dulled over with faint breathings
of the evening air,” the threads of fire which sunset shoots between
masses variously rippled that give the water a tartan pattern of
crimson, grey, and violet; the kaleidoscopic effects of sun and wind;
the azure blue of the distances, the pearly grey of rising clouds, the
Titianesque masses of evening gloom, the invisible vapours that even in
bright sunshine soften the outlines of crest and ridge.
The type of the most enjoyable Highland weather (says our connoisseur
in land and water scenery) is this:—The mountains in their own local
colour, not much altered by the effect; green for the most part, and
scarred with reddish, or purplish, or grey rocks, all outlines soft
and tender and vague, still perfectly well defined even in their
softness. The sky, a very pale lovely blue, delicately graduated;
the water, if under a pleasant sailing-breeze, as intensely blue as
ultramarine can get it, yet a very deep colour, not to be got out of
ultramarine alone, because there are purplish browns in it produced
by the play of the dark brown water with the azure sky-reflections.
Lastly, if the wind freshens, all this dark blue will be flecked with
snowy crests of breakers. Highland scenery is never so _lovely_ as
under this aspect.
Too often, indeed, these enchanting hues are buried in mists through
which it takes a painter’s eye to detect glimpses of grandeur or
beauty. Mrs. Hamerton, for her part, fresh from the sunny skies of
France, admits that the health of both suffered in the depressing
winter, “when the wind howls so piteously in the twisted branches
of the Scotch firs, and when the rain imprisons one for weeks
within liquid walls of unrelieved greyness.” But her husband can
tell how sometimes this valley may be baked by sunshine for weeks
and months together, till relief comes in a cloud-burst like that
of the Indian monsoon, such as he once beheld from the top of Ben
Cruachan, overwhelming what Christopher North held dearest of Scottish
lakes—“mountain-crowned, cliff-guarded, isle-zoned, grove-girdled,
wide-winding and far-stretching, with the many-bayed banks and braes
of brushwood, fern, broom, and heather, ... thou glory of Argyleshire,
rill-and-river fed, sea-armlike, floating in thy majesty, magnificent
Loch Awe!”
Hamerton was a poet as well as a painter, who in his _Isles of Loch
Awe_ has pictured the legends that take shape in such scenes. The most
striking of these is that of Inis Fraoch, a Celtic version of the
Hesperides story, with a modern love interest and a tragic ending. The
Hercules task imposed upon the young hero Fraoch, according to one
variant by his lady-love, but a more dramatic form gives this part to
a jealous rival, is to fetch from the island golden apples growing
there under charge of a dragon whose poisonous fangs do him to death,
and the fair-seeming fruit proves no less fatal to the maid, or else
she is made to die of grief. Another world-wide fancy ascribes the
origin of the lake to the heedlessness of a virgin who, overcome by
sleep, neglected her nightly task of sealing up a mystic fountain on
Ben Cruachan. A romantic tale, echoing from classical story and from
the banks of the Rhine, brings us into the Campbell traditions at
Kilchurn Castle. Seven years had its crusading knight been absent,
when in beggar’s rags, like Ulysses, he came home to find his wife
on the point of being forced into a hateful re-marriage. The strange
wedding guest begs a cup of wine at her hands, and when he gives it
back empty, the lady sees at the bottom a ring which she recognises
sooner than she does her husband, who then has no difficulty in
disposing of the insolent suitor. A truly practical feature is that
this Scottish Penelope’s task, through those long seven years, had been
no futile weaving and unweaving, but the building of that sturdy pile
that inspired Wordsworth’s muse as well as Hamerton’s, and gave a
hint for eerie fiction in Mrs. Oliphant’s novel _The Wizard’s Son_, as
previously it seems to have sat to Scott in his _Legend of Montrose_.
The descendants of that crusader spread northwards, displacing the
Macgregors of Glenorchy, and founding the lordship of Breadalbane
in Perthshire. Another cadet branch moved still farther north, long
after Macbeth’s time, to become Earls of Cawdor through one of those
profitable marriages that have been a Campbell custom. But the main
stock is the house of Argyll, which from obscure petty chieftainship
rose to command five thousand claymores in 1745. Not that all the
Campbells always stood shoulder to shoulder, as in 1715 Breadalbane’s
men fought for the Pretender, while Argyll led the bulk of his clan for
King George.
One might as well undertake the census of a hornets’ nest as
dogmatise on the descent of a Highland clan. The Argyll house, backed
by antiquaries like Skene, now repudiate the legend of a Norman
adventurer, “De Campo Bello” or Beauchamp, as having wed an heiress
of Loch Awe, though this origin would be quite in keeping with the
family traditions. A much more ancient source is claimed for them as
descendants of King Arthur, or of Diarmid, hero of Fingalian epics,
a descent that might make them akin to the Irish Dermotts. The name
Campbell is said to mean “Wry-mouth,” as Cameron “Crooked-nose,” from
the same root as appears in our winding Cam rivers. About the time of
the last Norwegian invasion under Haco, the clan comes to dim light in
two branches, the elder Macarthurs, the younger the sons of Colin or
Calain, a name perverted into MacCallum. The elder branch went under,
their tombs still to be seen on an island of Loch Awe. The younger
rose through marriage with a sister of Robert Bruce, and through
fighting for him against the Macdougalls of Lorne. The confirmation of
his sovereignty advanced this chief over confiscated estates of their
common foes. For generations a run of luck or policy kept increasing
the Campbells’ domain till they were lords of all Argyll and part of
the Islands, the conquered clans, if not exterminated or driven away,
being forced to take their name, as a Red Indian tribe has often
recruited itself by adoption of its prisoners or subjects. When the
elder Macarthurs were condemned as traitors under James I., the sons of
Colin basked in royal favour, and in the next reign the usurping chief
accepted a feudal lordship, which before long grew into the Earldom of
Argyll. Thenceforth they went on rising in the world, by cunning and
unscrupulousness, as their enemies put it, by prudence and enterprise,
as their friends say.
The Campbells generally stood on the side of law and progress, the
winning side in the long run; and it must not be forgotten how they
gave their quota of martyrs to the new religious spirit that has done
so much to tame the Highlands. It does not appear that they were more
ruthless than their neighbours, but more considerate and more lucky.
It may be that the dark hue of their tartans, blending with the green
hills and grey skies of Lorne, gave some help to their survival as
fittest in the Highland struggle for existence; while at court their
lords practised an art of mimicry that did not go the length of
neglecting the interests of Scotland when these came to be threatened
by English statesmen.
The worst thing that has been said about this clan is that they played
police for the throne with a clear eye to profit, and were too ready
to root out their own turbulent enemies in the name of law, their
chiefs even accused of instigating rebellions which they themselves
would be called on to suppress for a consideration. As far off as the
“bonnie house of Airlie” the Campbells pushed their fire-and-sword
process. Many an execution carried by them among the king’s rebels
is well forgotten; but one is still remembered that brought the
atrocities of romantic times almost down to newspaper days. From
Ballachulish and the slate quarries of Loch Leven all the tourists
take coach up Glencoe, catching a glimpse of austere wilds rightly
known only to those who wander on foot under the shadow of its stern
“Sisters” and the “Shepherds” of Loch Etive. For Ossian there could
be no fitter birthplace than this darkly famed glen. Its serrated and
bristling walls “have a barren strength and steepness which remind
one continually of the stone buttresses of Sinai”; yet the sunlight
shows weird Arabesque colourings of purple, green, and pink, often
dulled beneath a pall that seems nature’s mourning for the tragedy here
commemorated by a cross, and its scene still traced out by patches of
green round the site of ruined huts. “Even with sunshine,” Macaulay
found this “the very valley of the shadow of death.”
[Illustration: GLENCOE]
The story of the Glencoe massacre is renowned among many such deeds of
cruelty which have stained the heather; but it is not always recognised
how far this was a slaughter of Macdonalds by their hereditary enemies
the Campbells, acting under legal authority. Historians variously
apportion the guilt between the Earl of Breadalbane and the Master of
Stair, a minister who had the art to make King William accomplice in
the vindictive design. The innocence of the victims has been unduly
heightened for the sake of dramatic effect; and patriotic rage has
blindly charged the bloodshed upon English soldiers. The MacIan
Macdonalds of Glencoe were a band of sturdy cattle-thieves who, like
other Highland heroes of old, naturally lived in bad blood with
their neighbours; and an attempt to harry their fastness might have
passed as a fair exploit if not carried out with so base treachery.
Heavy winter snows having delayed the chieftain from bringing in his
submission to the Government by a fixed date, he was yet given to
believe it accepted. A detachment of Argyll’s regiment entered the
glen under pretence of friendship, and were received with Highland
hospitality, their commander, Campbell of Glenlyon, being connected
with the Macdonalds by marriage. This worthy is said to have played at
cards with the sons of the chieftain whom he had orders to murder next
morning, at which time every way of escape from the glen should be
closed by several companies marching up under his superior officer.
Before dawn of a winter morning the slaughter began with shooting down
the old chieftain at his bedside, his wife being so brutally ill-used
that she died next day. Similar scenes took place in the other homes
that had unsuspiciously received such guests. The story goes that the
soldiers had been loth to do their part in the butchery, but, once it
was on foot, they appear to have worked themselves up into a fury of
bloodshed, going even beyond their commission in killing children and
infirm elders. The Macdonalds, having hidden away their arms after the
submission, doubtless in hope to fight another day, found themselves in
no state to offer resistance. Scattered and surprised, they were shot
down like sheep, wherever the alarm did not warn them to escape. After
all, the plan of extirpation failed. Nearly forty men were slain; but a
larger number got away, with women and children, some of them to perish
in a snowstorm, which also saved many hardy Highlanders, as veiling
their flight and hindering the march of the force that should have
closed the passes on that woeful morning. Their homes were burned, and
from the glen were driven away five hundred horses, three times as many
cows, and large flocks of sheep and goats, cattle which the Macdonalds
may have come by in much the same violent manner.
Glencoe has now passed into the hands of a Canadian peer, a chief
of the great British clan Smith. Till lately its sheep-walks still
belonged to Macdonalds whom I knew in my youth. When news came from
India that one of this line had got into trouble through killing a
native, a neighbour of ours sapiently remarked, “The old massacre blood
coming out!” which seemed a confusion of active and passive. A most
efficient curse was that laid on the leader of the slaughterers, whose
descendants are understood to be conscious of it to this day. There is
a famous story, told in various forms, of one Campbell of Glenlyon,
on whom fell the duty of producing at the last moment a reprieve
for a condemned soldier. But in taking the paper from his pocket he
unwittingly pulled out the white handkerchief that was to be signal to
the firing party. Next moment the criminal lay dead, and the unhappy
officer covered his eyes with a cry—“The curse of God and of Glencoe!”
The brightest tradition relating to Glencoe is that noted by Scott,
how when Prince Charlie’s army marched by the house of Lord Stair it
was thought well to place a guard over it against the vengeance of the
Macdonalds, then the Glencoe chieftain proudly demanded for his own
clansmen to prove their military honour by fulfilling this duty.
Glencoe, Ben Cruachan, and other outskirts of the Land of Lorne rank
among the wildest scenes in Scotland. Loch Awe and Loch Etive are
hardly surpassed in fame; and Loch Creran has been called “one of
the loveliest and least known of Highland waters,” as comes to be
said of so many scenes beheld under congenial conditions. The general
aspect of this region, however, seems a blending of true Highland and
semi-Lowland, like the character and career of its lords. Robert
Buchanan tells us how it is “fair and gentle, a green pastoral land,
where the sheep bleat from a thousand hills, and the grey homestead
stands in the midst of its own green fields, and the snug macadamised
roads ramify in all directions from the tiny capital on the seaside,
with the country carts bearing produce, the drouthy farmer trotting
home at all hours on his sure-footed nag, and the stage coach, swift
and gay, wakening up the echoes in summer time with the guard’s cheery
horn.” Even its wilder nooks, as one can see from coach, railway, or
steamer, have been much broken up as sites for mansions and villas,
hotels and shooting-lodges; and in summer months farms and cottages in
a hundred glens are packed tight with holiday-making families from the
cities, whose seaside retreats threaten to turn the arms of the Clyde
into a gigantic Venice.
Inveraray, of course, is the county capital, a big village
picturesquely situated on a sea loch under the shade of lordly woods
about the duke’s castle, which in this century has for the first time
undergone the indignity of being let to a Southron. An old schoolfellow
of mine was once sheriff here, who, to save himself from “eating his
head off,” used to walk across the country to hold his court at Dunoon,
its biggest gathering of houses, best filled in summer. Campbeltown is
the most thriving burgh of business. But to the world the most familiar
name in Argyll is Oban, that international rendezvous showing as many
hotels as there are clans in the Highlands, and steamboats more than
might tow all the “lymphad” galleys of Argyll, overlooked from the
heights above by two modern towers of Babel.
[Illustration: OBAN BAY AT NIGHT]
At Oban the _genius loci_ seems too much exorcised by steam whistles,
and by the mob of knickerbockered and waterproofed tourists comparing
notes about their _tables d’hôte_. Few of these easy travellers find
their way into Knapdale, that long parish forming the upper part of the
Mull of Cantyre, which makes a characteristic stretch of this green
Land of Lorne. Happy days have I spent in youth among its low hills,
ten miles from the nearest steamboat pier or village. The name of the
place I cannot trust myself to spell, nor could most of my readers
pronounce it; but to me it meant paradise. It made the rough Tusculum
of a great Lancashire cotton-spinner, his son a schoolfellow of mine. A
moor rather than a mountain of the soft west, its strong point was as a
fishing quarter, having two trout streams opening into a long winding
estuary that looked out on the Paps of Jura and beyond across the wide
Atlantic. How we lads splashed through water fresh and salt, in those
“days by distance enchanted,” when no mist could cloud “the sunshine of
the breast,” when wet jackets and kilts seemed nothing but a joke, and
one hardly cared to keep a shod foot in that damp wilderness! We did
not enough appreciate our piscatorial blessings, where we might catch
dozens of troutlings any idle afternoon, with the chance of a grilse or
a yellow trout in the rivulet mouths, and deep-sea fishing in the
loch, down to the butchery of lythe, which, trailing bright feathers on
the coarsest tackle in the wake of the sunset, one hooked up as fast as
they could be drawn into the boat, each as long as one’s arm. How would
Piscators of this generation prize such opportunities, now probably let
at a pork-king’s ransom!
One holiday visit stands out in memory, when my schoolfellow and I
were lent the empty lodge, on condition of playing Robinson Crusoe
for ourselves. What could be more inviting to youngsters than such
a picnic! We took down by steamer from Glasgow an enormous round of
salt beef; we laid in a stock of bread at the nearest shop, ten miles
from our hermitage; and on this plain fare, with what fish we could
catch, we were prepared to live greatly independent. But the people of
the hill farm close at hand would not indulge our Spartanhood. Daily
they poured in upon us mutton, broth, bannocks, eggs, jam, honey, and
what not, so that we were fed up like turkey-cocks; and not a penny
would the goodman take for his friendly entertainment. _En Écosse,
l’hospitalité se donne_ has often been quoted sneeringly; but I can
answer for its truth in Knapdale.
It was for the sake of my friend’s father that we were so well treated,
and those who knew him best will understand why; but he did not command
the approval of all that countryside. For one thing, he was a hardened
“Erastian,” if my readers know what that means. When the Free Church
proposed to set up a tabernacle and applied to him for a subscription,
he growled out, “As soon as the parish church is full, I will build
you a new one out of my own pocket—not a penny till then!” For Free
Church students sent on awakening missions to those wilds, it was a
daring adventure to tackle the profane Englishman who would stroll
out on the Sabbath with a cigar in his mouth, though he did not miss
attending the English service held in the parish church mainly for his
benefit. One of these missioners received the crown of martyrdom at his
hands, or rather at his feet, for the poor fellow had no sooner begun
his remonstrance, “Sir, do you know this is the Lord’s Day?” than he
found himself vigorously kicked along the road. This was an arbitrary
as well as an open-handed gentleman, who, as a sound Tory and master of
a thousand workers, was disposed to look down on the Whig duke, so much
looked up to by the natives. He little knew how his only daughter would
marry a son of that duke, whose heir made a more brilliant match with a
princess, as to which _Punch_ hardly exaggerated the simple judgment of
Argyll: “Wasna’ the Queen a proud woman!”
_The_ duke has been a Campbell for time out of mind; but the silent
ruins round Oban are older than the intrusion of this name. Dunollie
Castle, close to the town, was lair of the Macdougalls, ancient lords
of Lorne, who still hold here a remnant of their shrunken domain,
and in their modest home behind the ruin have treasured that brooch
their forebear won from Robert Bruce. The larger Dunstaffnage, another
Macdougall stronghold, is believed to have been at one time seat of
the ancient Scottish kings, shrine of that mysterious “Stone of
Destiny,” fabled as Jacob’s Pillow, and St. Columba’s, which, after
many adventures by land and sea, was removed to Scone, and thence
to Westminster Abbey. Gylen Castle, on the island of Kerrera, was a
Macdougall eyry; Aros and Ardtornish guarded the Sound of Mull for the
Lords of the Isles. Across the Firth of Lorne the island shores are
haunted by Maclean legends. To the south, the castles and chapels of
Cantyre are Macdonald and Macmillan monuments; and Isla, now the most
prosaically prosperous of the Hebrides, shows traces of days when it
was chief seat of Somerled’s house. But most of those ruins, before
they fell into picturesque decay, had passed to Campbells, often by
deeds of fire and blood, often again by the marriages that have done
so much for this family, of whom it might be said, as of another clan,
that they put wedding rings on the fingers of the daughters, and dirks
in the hearts of the sons. In our day, indeed, the most thriving house
in Argyll seems to be that of Malcolm, whose head, it is said, can
walk forty miles on his own land. The name would show his ancestor
as “servant of Columba,” while the misnamed “Macallum” was at one
time “Gillespic,” the gillie of some bishop who would be pioneer of
civilisation before barons or dukes got grants from court.
Cantyre, with the adjacent Isla, appears to-day the most tamed part of
the West Highlands. This peninsula was almost depopulated by the great
plague of Charles II.’s reign; and to some extent became restocked
by Covenanting clients of Argyll from the Lowlands. There was a time
when it might be called the heart of Scotland, for here seems to have
been the first foothold of the Dalriad Scots, who, passing over from
Ireland, its cliffs only some dozen miles off the Mull of Cantyre,
spread their power far among the wild Picts, and their name before long
over the whole kingdom. Campbeltown boasts of having been their first
capital, now the largest burgh of Argyll, noted for its distilleries
and its fishing fleet, as for the adjacent coal-mine, which is the only
one in the Highlands, and for the grand golf-links on Machrihanish Bay,
another feature more frequent on the eastern side of Scotland.
But if Scotland take shame to have been colonised from Ireland, its
patriotic and poetic antiquaries point back to dimmer days, when an
Ossianic Conar sailed from Lorne to found a kingdom in the Emerald
Isle, long before its most thriving part was authentically overrun by
Scottish names. National pride has indeed little but mist from which to
weave theories of romantic early history, either for Albin or Erin. The
one thing certain is, that the people or peoples of these projecting
shores were in close connection of peace and war with each other. If
Columba carried the cross from Ireland into Scotland, Patrick had been
a Scotsman who devoted himself to the conversion of Ireland. And the
Isle of Man, which is said to have made part of his mission-field, long
stood in near relation with the Hebrides. The whole string of western
islands was formerly divided into Nordereys and Sudereys, the latter
being at one time under that bishop whose mysterious title Sodor and
Man is thus explained.
All these once belonged to the crown of “Norroway over the foam,” even
Cantyre, which, by the forced title of dragging a boat across its
narrow neck, shifty King Magnus brought into his island domain. As we
go farther north and out into the open sea, in place-names and other
marks we shall see clearer signs of that Norse conquest, which cannot
but have modified the stock of natives or previous invaders. For one
point, the philo-Celt can protest that if Highlanders be no strict
teetotalers, such a failing came not from the pious and sober Gael, but
through ungodly Goths, notoriously addicted to wassail as to bloodshed.
Then in Ireland, too, these thirsty Vikings have left some trace of
their customs.
Tamed and trimmed as much of Lorne has been, no Highland region shows
more variously those aspects of earth and sky, sublime, stern, sad, and
anon tender, that seem reflected in the character of the people. Sir
Archibald Geikie, who pushes scientific candour to the point of hinting
that Bannockburn would have gone otherwise had the ground been drained,
finds the Highlander’s nature moulded by his rugged hills and streaming
glens. The contrast between the Scottish and the Irish Gael, which some
would explain by the former’s stronger strain of Norse blood, this
author accounts for rather by the fact of the latter enjoying a milder
climate, a better soil, and more level fields, that give fairer play
to the natural buoyancy, good-humour, and quick wit of the Celt.
In the Highlander, on the other hand, these characteristics have been
replaced by a reserved, self-restrained, even somewhat sullen and
morose disposition. He is neither merry nor witty, like his cousin
across the Irish Channel. Yet he is courteous, dutiful, persevering;
a courageous foe, an unwavering ally, whether serving in the ranks
or leading his comrades where dangers are thickest. I am disposed to
regard this difference in temperament as traceable in great measure to
the peculiar condition of the Highlander’s environment. Placed in a
glen, often narrow and rocky, and separated from his neighbours in the
next glens by high ranges of rugged hills, he has had to contend with
a scant and stony soil, and a wet, cold, and uncertain climate. He has
to wage with the elements a never-ending battle, wherein he is often
the loser. The dark mountains, that frown above him, gather around
their summits the cloudy screen which keeps the sun from ripening his
miserable patch of corn, or rots it with perpetual rain as it lies
week after week on the sodden field. He stands among the mountains
face to face with nature in her wilder moods. Storm and tempest,
mist-wreath and whirlwind, the roar of waterfalls, the rush of swollen
streams, the crash of loosened landslips, which he may seem hardly to
notice, do not pass without bringing, unconsciously perhaps, to his
imagination their ministry of terror. Hence the playful mirthfulness
and light-hearted ease of the Celtic temperament have, in his case,
been curdled into a stubbornness which may be stolid obstinacy or
undaunted perseverance, according to the circumstances which develop
it. Like his own granitic hills, he has grown hard and enduring, not
without a tinge of melancholy, suggestive of the sadness that lingers
among his wind-swept glens, and that hangs about the birken slopes
around his lonely lakes.
There is little need to point the stronger contrast between this
dweller beside hungry mountains or cruel seas, and the otherwise
mingled race that has grown stout, ruddy, and jovial on Lowland or
Midland plains, among green pastures and still waters, where the
cattle, hardly raising a head to look beyond their own hedgerows,
may well be content with their lot, and the very dogs, familiar and
placable, will not always trouble to wag a tail at the wayfarer.
Generations of ancient peace have here tamed men’s spirits, quieted
their fears, and worn down their reverence to a sober respect for
honesty, good-fellowship, good-nature, prudence, prosperity, all the
qualities which make neighbours pleasant company and keep them from
coming on the parish. They think for the most part little enough of the
awful horizons of life, as they saunter through it from the christening
cake to the coffin, with an eye more often on the fruitful ground than
on the sky, unless for signs of the weather. A charm of homeliness
rests upon churches, halls, farms, and hamlets, scattered roomily in
secure confidence, where man may well nestle in the kindly lap of earth
and rejoice in nature’s gifts to a generation for which rough edges
of peril have been blunted by use and wont. Yet when she fondles not,
but scrimps their daily bread with frowns, her hardy sons love their
motherland the more dearly for her rare smiles, even though the poverty
of their home makes it easier for them to believe that elsewhere must
be their abiding city.
Lorne would be no Highland country if it had not as many relics of
devotion as of romance, some of them from days of chiefs and priests
who prayed and fought long before its Christian saints and its
half-Christian princes. Not any part of Scotland is more thickly set
with ruined chapels, broken graveyards, caves of Columba, and _Kils_
common as the _Llans_ of Wales, which mark the stations of Culdee
preachers. But also it abounds in cairns, barrows, and other nameless
memorials; and there is reason to suppose that many of its Christian
tombs have been adapted from pagan monuments far older than the cross
that consecrated them. Near Oban there is a remarkable serpent-shaped
mound, headed by a circle of stones, which appears to have been a high
place of superstition, kindred to that which raised similar mounds in
the Mississippi basin. This is but one of many Highland examples how
our shifting divisions of creed, name, and nation are now divergent,
now confluent, phases of the same human nature, that out of stocks and
stones, funeral piles and grave heaps, has developed its countless
temples, the barn-like Presbyterian kirks of Cantyre, as well as such
elaborately sculptured walls as long stood silent on Iona. But how slow
is the clan of Macadam to learn from their purest faith that Christian
and pagan, Scots and Irish, Celt and Saxon, Campbells and Macdonalds,
have nobler duties than cutting each other’s throats in the way of war
or trade!