TOURISTS
The moralist who loved a good hater has surely no right to complain of
not attracting affection; but I fear to shock many excellent persons
in professing that Dr. Johnson seems to me an overrated personality.
It is a commonplace that he shows much greater in Boswell than in his
own books; and to that infatuated worshipper we owe a rarely intimate
knowledge of one who appeals to John Bull as full of darling national
faults. No wonder that English writers should take a warm interest in
such a “character,” and that Cockneys should crown him as their king;
but when one finds Scotsmen of insight, like Macaulay and Carlyle,
joining the chorus of veneration, one hesitates to put forward one’s
own doubts to the contrary.
Still, at the risk of seeming to kick a dead lion, let me say what
an _advocatus diaboli_ might bring against the canonisation of Fleet
Street’s saint. For generations it has been dinned into our ears that
this man was wise, sturdy, manly, pious, and so forth, above his
fellows, while it is admitted that he was narrow-minded, ill-bred,
full of petty prejudices and credulities, much of a bully, as well as
on occasion a bit of a snob, as when he humbly deferred to the opinion
of a Hanoverian king, whose pension he had accepted after all he said
on that subject. He dealt much in moral maxims. So did Mr. Pecksniff.
He was generous and kindhearted to queer objects of charity: let that
stand to his credit. What was his vaunted sense of religion but an
erudite superstition, wide awake to the “folly and meanness of all
bigotry but his own,” and not saving him from craven dread of death? He
had such a lazy conscience that only when stung by Churchill’s satire
did he bring out the volumes on the subscription for which he had been
living for years. As to his love of truth, even Boswell confesses
the “robust sophistry” with which he would argue for the sake of
contradiction. As to his taste, let his criticisms on Shakespeare and
Milton speak. And why should we all be in a tale of reverence for the
wisdom whose deliverances have proved wrong on so many points, notably
in his opinion of Scotsmen. But for one Scot who was no great honour
to Scotland, this ponderous writer would surely have been long ago
“banished to that remote uncivil Pontus of the British poets,” instead
of being still welcome “within the cheery circle of the evening lamp
and fire.”
Even if one be moved to belittle this literary leviathan, one cannot
but respect the courage that took him as an inactive and infirm senior
into those ill-known isles, where indeed he shows to more advantage
than on some other scenes of his life, the Jacobite sentiments that
were his leaven of romance seeming to soften down such insolent
contempt of outlandish starvelings as counts with your stout John
Bull for virtue. He visited the Hebrides at an interesting time, when
their old life was undergoing a rapid transition under new conditions,
the commercial order, as R. L. Stevenson says, “succeeding at a bound
to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home.” Some
account of his venturesome journey, then, may not be without interest
for a generation that does not much read that classical _Journey to
the Western Isles_, nor even Boswell’s own account of his bear-show,
which in truth is more readable, none the less so for embalming some
of the oracle’s raciest impromptus before they were cooked up into
“Johnsonese.”
At Inverness the tourists took to horseback, with two Highlanders
running beside them to bring back the horses. They travelled down
the east side of Loch Ness to Fort-Augustus, beyond which they found
soldiers at work upon the new military road by which they struck across
the Rough Bounds into Glenmoriston, and thence by Glenshiel to Glenelg.
Neither Boswell nor Johnson has much to say of the picturesqueness
that moves their successors; the devout biographer is more concerned
to record their fear of dirt and vermin, and the great lexicographer
emits such recondite observations as—“Mountainous countries are not
passed but with difficulty, not merely from the labour of climbing,
for to climb is not always necessary; but because that which is not
mountain is commonly bog, through which the way must be picked with
caution.” After the ascent of one trying steep the sage was so cross
that his Highland attendant cried out to him, “See such pretty goats!”
as to a naughty child. This familiarity amazed Boswell, who found it
quite natural that his tired mentor should fly into a passion with him
for riding on ahead. When they reached the inn at Glenelg there was
some excuse for being sulky, since, a dirty fellow bouncing out of the
bed where they were to sleep, they chose to lie rather on hay, and
got nothing to eat or drink but a bottle of rum and some sugar, sent
in by a gentleman as tribute to the philosopher, who now behaved more
philosophically, while it was the turn of his famulus to be fretful.
Had the tourist of to-day seen those inns before they were turned
into hotels, he might well bless the road-makers of the Highlands.
But in Glenmoriston our travellers had had the luck to find an inn of
which one room possessed a chimney and another a small glass window. A
generation later the Rev. James Hall has to tell of one of the havens
on this route, that after a hungry journey he confined his refreshment
to bottled porter, on observing the hands of both mistress and maid.
[Illustration: CASTLE URQUHART, LOCH NESS]
The more luminous and voluminous Pennant, who had preceded that pair of
tourists in the Highlands by a couple of years, exclaims over the fact
that for two hundred miles along the west coast, from Campbeltown to
Thurso, there was nothing that could be called a town. In Skye there
were only one or two inns, and not one shop, according to Johnson, who
gives the population of the island at some 15,000. The strangers
had to depend on private hospitality; and their first experience was
not cheering, as Sir Alexander Macdonald, who had come to a small house
on the shore to receive them, was liberal only in bagpipe music. There
were not even sugar-tongs on the table, Johnson noted with disgust,
where knives and forks had made their appearance not long before; while
indeed this fastidious citizen himself was in the way of eating fish
with his fingers, so that his _convives_ might have felt some need
for sugar-tongs. But “Sir Sawney’s,” as he nicknames the parsimonious
chief, was the one house at which he complains of mean entertainment.
Usually he was treated like a lion, all the society of the district
being gathered to hear him roar; and for the nonce he proved so little
pock-puddingish as to enunciate “that which is not best may be yet
very far from bad, and he that shall complain of his fare in the
Hebrides has improved his delicacy more than his manhood.” Boswell
was satisfied with the respectful recognition given to his great man;
and it was only towards the end of their trip that one ignorant laird
asked if he belonged to the Johnsons (_i.e._ the MacIans) of Glencoe or
of Ardnamurchan. Both travellers were edified by the books possessed
by their hosts, who on the whole proved more cultured than they had
expected, though their expectations were not pitched quite so low as
that of an English tourist party stated, a generation later, to have
equipped themselves with beads, red cloth, and such gewgaws for traffic
with the naked islanders.
[Illustration: SPINNING IN SKYE]
Skye was then mainly divided among three clans, Macdonald, Macleod,
and Mackinnon, whose hereditary feuds, at last kept down by the arm
of the law, began to be confused by the intrusion of strangers. The
clansmen, unplaided and disarmed, had turned their claymores into
such crooked spades as served them to dig up their rough soil; and
Boswell observed how their targets came in useful to cover buttermilk
barrels. The chiefs no longer went in semi-barbarous state with a
“tail” of swashbuckling henchmen, and had ceased to keep a petty court
of bards and sennachies, though a piper or two would not be wanting.
Deprived of their hereditary jurisdiction, as some of them were ready
to forget where the nearest magistrate might not be easily appealed
to, they still had such dignity and influence that it would be their
own fault if they did not attract the affectionate loyalty of which
our travellers record some notable signs. But this sentiment was being
uprooted by a disposition to raise the rents of their poor land, now
commonly paid in money instead of kind and service. A new spirit of
calculation was abroad since the days when faithful tenants had taxed
themselves to pay double dues, to the power in possession, and to the
exiled lord. Johnson shrewdly observed how the pastoral state began “to
be a little variegated with commerce,” how this Arcadia had been “a
muddy mixture of pride and ignorance,” and how the chiefs were disposed
to take out in profit what they lost in power, then “as they
gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords,
they will divest themselves of the little that remains.” Pennant, who
takes more note of the misery and dejection of the people, puts their
numbers lower than Johnson, and states that the rental of the island,
£3500 in 1750, had in twenty years been doubled or trebled on some
farms.
The gentry of the island, lairds, “tacksmen,” _i.e._ the higher class
of tenants, and ministers, lived with more or less show of comfort in
decent houses of two storeys, where, indeed, the parlours had often to
do double duty as bedrooms, and the floors were not always clean or
dry. The gentlemen, Johnson asserts, were inclined to the Episcopal
Church; but could not afford any services beyond those of the parish
ministers, who might have to preach in a room, at intervals of two
or three weeks, beside the ruined chapels “which now stand faithful
witnesses of the triumph of the Reformation.” Of these pastors were
“found several with whom I could not converse, without wishing, as
my respect increased, that they had not been Presbyterians.” He
rather exaggerates in giving them the credit of having exterminated
the popular superstitions, that would still take a good deal of
extermination. He tells the story of Maclean caning the people of Rum
away from mass, a high-handed conversion that in the neighbouring
Catholic islands earned for Protestantism the nickname “religion of the
yellow stick.” He shows how schools were at work for enlightenment,
where a century would yet pass before the three R’s came within reach
of every bare-trotting Gael. In Skye he heard of two grammar schools,
at which boys boarded for three or four pounds a year, but only during
the summer months, “for in winter provision cannot be made for any
considerable number in one place.”
Even in the better-class houses wheaten bread was exceptional, oaten
and barley cakes being the staff of life, with meat, game, fish,
cheese, and preparations of milk. The cottars’ fare was chiefly some
kind of brose. Their poor crops went largely in making whisky, like
that “Talisker,” now renowned, which is said to owe its excellence to
the water coming over some dozens of falls; but an English distillery
has made in vain the expensive experiment of importing this charmed
water. Only in Iona did Johnson hear of beer being brewed. Though every
man took his “morning” as a matter of course, he did not see “much
intemperance,” convivial gentlemen being perhaps a little shy before
the philosopher, who tasted whisky only once out of curiosity (“Let
me know what it is that makes a Scotchman happy!”); but he cared not
to inquire as to the process of distilling, “nor do I wish to improve
the art of making poison pleasant.” He certainly saw one “drunken
dog” in the person of Boswell, who on a certain occasion sat up over
a punch-bowl till 5 A.M., to be satirically rebuked by his monitor:
“It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to
bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Boswell took special care to
have this teetotaler provided with water at dinner, who was also well
supplied with his beloved tea, and with the honey and preserves he
admired on a northern breakfast table, “polluted as it was with slices
of strong cheese.” The main deficiency was in fruit and vegetables,
chiefly represented by barley broth. Punch, made for dinner and supper,
which etymologically should have five ingredients, here wanted one,
for Sydney Smith was never so far from a lemon. “Under such skies
can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation,” indeed, and “few
vows are made to Flora in the Hebrides.” Some of the lairds were
trying to cultivate orchards about their houses. Others were zealously
introducing turnips and potatoes, that have made such a difference to
the Highlands but for years were banned by the stubborn conservatism of
their people, as in other parts of Europe. What late hay they gathered
“by most English farmers would be thrown away.”
Their stock consisted chiefly of the small cattle, in which a Highland
maiden’s dowry would formerly be paid, like the price of a Kaffir
bride. They had also ponies, an inferior breed of sheep, many goats,
with fowls and half-wild geese. The Highland prejudice against pigs
was still so strong that Johnson saw only one in the Hebrides;[4] and
a like _scunner_, older than their knowledge of the Bible, kept the
people from eating hares, eels, and scaleless fish such as turbot.
Hares and rabbits had no chance against the big foxes, on whose head
was set a guinea blood-money. Rats and mice were strangers to Skye, but
the Hanover rat now began to invade some of the islands. The place of
these vermin was taken by weasels, which infested even the houses.
[4] It is a question whether the Celtic aversion to pork had not its
origin in some such reverence as the cow bears among the Hindoos. The
Gaelic for pig, which to Saxon ears sounds so fitting, _Muck_, has
honour in place-names, as that of the great Ben Muich Dhu himself, not
to speak of the “Boar” of Badenoch, the “Sow” of Athole, and frequent
names of lochs and islands. In older days the Highlanders appear to
have abstained from eating all fish; so at least some antiquaries
assert.
In this land of “little sun and no shade,” so deeply fretted by
inlets that no part of it lies more than a few miles from the sea,
where “every step is on rock or mire,” Johnson missed villages and
enclosures. “The traveller,” he laments to Mrs. Thrale, “wanders
through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight
of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a
cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which
education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines,
is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain.” These “its”
were often half starved, so could not but excite a mixture of contempt
and pity in the well-fed English visitor. Pennant, with his practical
eye, speaks of the people as torpid from idleness, only bestirring
themselves at the pinch of famine; but he does not want sympathy
for them in the almost chronic famines due to improvidence under a
miserable climate, where hundreds “annually drag through the season a
wretched life; and numbers unknown, in all parts of the western isles,
fall beneath the pressure, some of hunger and some of the putrid fever,
the epidemic of the coasts, originating from unwholesome food.”
Leaving the comparatively green promontory of Sleat, Johnson’s party
rode over moors and bogs to Corriechatachin, near Broadford, where bad
weather kept them a couple of days till Macleod of Raasay sent his
“carriage” for them, and as conductor a gentleman of the clan who had
done the same service to Prince Charlie in his wanderings. The carriage
turned out to be an open boat, in which four half-naked men, chorusing
Gaelic songs, rowed them through the Sound of Scalpa, and across a
rough open sea to the island of Raasay, Dr. Johnson sitting high on
the stern “like a magnificent Triton.” In the new mansion-house, to
which the Laird had removed from his tumbledown castle, they found a
whole troop of Macleods, who every night danced and sang in honour of
their guests; but where they all slept was not so evident, some forty
persons in eleven rooms. Among the rest was the Macleod of Dunvegan, a
young man fresh from Oxford, who invited the strangers to his castle,
for which they set out, not without scruple, on a fine Sunday. Landed
at the harbour of Portree, then not even a village, where an emigrant
ship was lying as hint of new times for the Highlands, they went round
by Kingsburgh, that Johnson might have the satisfaction of making Flora
Macdonald’s acquaintance and of occupying the very bed in which the
Wanderer had slept; but the royal sheets had been devoted as shroud for
the hostess. “These are not Whigs.”
So little had they prospered on princely gratitude that Flora and her
husband were on the point of emigrating to America, from which she
eventually returned to be buried at Kilmuir in a grave left for our
time to honour. From the heroine’s own mouth, with ekings-out of
other information, Boswell compiled an account of Charles Edward’s
escape, which could now be safely published: even when she had been
brought a prisoner to London, the authorities seemed not very eager to
convict a fair traitor whose case excited much sympathy; and perhaps
the prince owed not more to her courage than to other half-loyal Macs
who, in command of the local militia, winked hard at the tricks of
their kinsfolk, and did not very keenly play the bloodhound upon the
fugitive’s doublings. Macdonalds, Macleods, and Mackinnons all were
willing to help him away, though not many of them had turned out to
take risks in his rash enterprise; and the poorest cottar despised that
price set on his head, while one of the men who would not earn £30,000
by betraying him came afterwards to be hanged for stealing a cow. The
most zealous agents of the Government in this matter seem to have been
Presbyterian ministers, Lord Macaulay’s grandfather for one: this might
be quoted as a case of ascending heredity.
[Illustration: GLEN SLIGACHAN, SKYE]
Dunvegan, to Boswell’s delight, was a real old castle, romantically
placed on a rock, and his companion rejoiced to find that its
_châtelaine_, having lived in London, “knew all the arts of southern
elegance and all the modes of English economy.” Pennant gives the
prosaic detail that there was a post-office here, in something like a
village, whence a packet sailed once a fortnight for the Long Island.
“We came in at the wrong end of the island!” Johnson exclaimed, in no
hurry to leave such good quarters. The old gentleman was suffering
from a cold, having “very strangely slept without a nightcap,” but
one of the ladies of this hospitable family made him a large flannel
one. As to that “strange” habit of sleeping bare-headed but for a
handkerchief, Boswell very ingenuously owns that if his oracle had
always worn a nightcap, and found the Highlanders not doing so, “he
would have wondered at their barbarity.” We may remember how in 1746
it was one of the royal fugitive’s hardships to part with his wig. Now
the well-nightcapped Doctor settled down in clover, dropping pearls of
gruff wisdom eagerly picked up by Boswell, who for his part chuckled to
be the keeper of such a treasure, comparing himself to “a dog who has
got hold of a large piece of meat, and runs away with it to a corner,
where he may devour it in peace.” But if he had no longer to share
Johnson’s talk with the members of the Club, he had a rival satellite
in the Rev. Donald Macqueen, minister of Snizort, who “adhered to”
them on most of their journeys in Skye, and so well pleased the great
man as only now and then to get a taste of his rough tongue, while his
book duly compliments this gentleman on account “of our intelligence
facilitated and our conversation enlarged.”
At Dunvegan they stayed a week, hearing the traditions of the castle,
and seeing its relics, for one that horn of Rorie More, to hold two
or three bottles of wine, which every Laird of Macleod must drink at
a draught in proof of his manhood; in our degenerate age, it appears,
this ceremony has to be performed by help of a false bottom. No doubt
they also saw, though neither of them mentions it, another more lordly
drinking-cup bearing the date 993, which seems to have been a chalice;
also the “fairy flag” of Dunvegan, a faded silk banner from the East,
probably a relic of crusading, which may be displayed thrice and thrice
only to save the house of Macleod from ruin—as it has done twice, and
may do once more. Though the young chief was deep in debt, he let wine
flow generously,—there being, indeed, no custom-house in Skye,—“and
venison came to the table every day in its various forms.”
Boswell could hardly get his unwieldy companion moved from this Capua;
but on September 21 they set out on their way back, travelling from the
west coast by Ullinish and Talisker, put up by one Macleod or other
as best he could; and it made part of Highland hospitality to convoy
the guests on to their next shelter. At Talisker, where their host
was a colonel in the Dutch service, they met young Maclean of Coll,
who henceforth became their cicerone for the southern isles. This
promising laird Johnson compared to Peter the Great. He had apprenticed
himself to practical farming in England as a school of improvement for
the barren islands, on which he was the first to plant turnips, an
innovation pronounced by Highland wise-acres “the idle project of an
idle head, heated by English fancies.” His father lived at Aberdeen for
education of the family, leaving such full power in the hands of the
son that he commonly bore the family title of “Coll,” like the young
Lochiel and Glengarry of ’45. To the veriest cit it is hardly needful
to explain that a northern laird was known by the name of his property,
or a farmer by that of his holding, where indeed certain surnames may
be so little distinguishing that in a hive of Campbells, Macleans, or
what not, one gets to speak of children as “Johnny Loch so-and-so” or
“Jessie Glen this-or-that.”
With young Coll they now travelled back to Sleat, looking out for a
chance of leaving Skye, which would not present itself every day in
any lull of the equinoctial gales. By this time the townsmen, who
had expected to slip from island to island as easily as ordering a
postchaise, found it was more a question of going where and when they
could. Boswell began to fidget about getting back to Edinburgh in time
for the legal session, while Johnson in his whimsical moods now talked
gaily of fresh adventures, then again grumbled at not being safe and
comfortable on the mainland. At Armadale they were entertained more
hospitably by his factor than they had been on landing by the now
absent Macdonald chieftain, and the people appeared in no haste to get
rid of that “honest man” who had done them the honour of coming so
far to lecture them. But the wind suddenly changing, on the morning
of Sunday, October 3, they were hurried on board a vessel bound for
Mull. Soon a storm came on; both the unseasoned voyagers were sea-sick;
Boswell was frightened to his prayers; neither of them had anything to
eat; and after being tossed about all day, even the skipper was glad
to run before the wind for Coll, where they cast anchor.
Safely landed, young Coll took them over the island to his own house, a
new one which was the best they had seen in the Hebrides, but Johnson’s
humour was to belittle it as “a tradesman’s box.” Not being occupied
by the old laird, it was hardly in a state to entertain distinguished
guests, for whose entertainment Coll collected from his kinsfolk such
books as Lucas _On Happiness_, More’s _Dialogues_, and Gregory’s
_Geometry_, that might pass for light reading beside the pocket volume
Johnson had laid in at Inverness—Cocker’s _Arithmetic_!—Boswell
having then equipped himself with Ovid’s _Epistles_ to “solace many a
weary hour.” Johnson took interest in the traditions of the family,
while his host was forward to show him signs of nascent civilisation,
about huts with gardens gathered into a clachan. Coll had a shop and
actually a mile of road, not to speak of a school kept in summer by
a young man who walked all the way to Aberdeen for the university
session. Here the visitors remained imprisoned for a week, then moved
down to the harbour to be ready for the sailing of a Campbeltown
kelp-ship on which they had engaged passage for Mull. On the morning of
the 14th the chance came by a fair breeze, and with Coll in attendance
they reached Tobermory at mid-day, just in time to escape the daily
gale that kept some dozen ships bound in this harbour.
At Tobermory they found rest in a “tolerable inn,” from which Boswell
hints how it was not easy to start his companion, while Johnson
admits that the eagerness to see Iona, as _bouquet_ of their tour, was
mainly on Boswell’s side. Taking horse, they rode through thick and
thin over the northern part of Mull, “a most dolorous country,” where
Johnson lost the oak stick which he declared to be a valuable piece
of timber in such a wilderness. “Your country consists of two things,
stone and water. There is indeed a little earth above the stone in
some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It
is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.” Such were
the complimentary jests by which Boswell reports him earning from the
open-mouthed natives so admiring epithets as “a hogshead of sense”
and a “dungeon of wit,” where indeed any kind of stranger would be
as welcome as a peepshow, and two learned gentlemen from London and
Edinburgh made a whole circus.
At night the boat of an Irish vessel obligingly ferried them across
to put up with M’Quarrie, “chief of Ulva’s isle,” about to sell his
possessions for debt and to enter the army at the age of sixty-two,
with forty years of life still before him. A Campbell, of course, was
the purchaser. Next day they went on by boat to Inch Kenneth, where
in dwindled state lived Sir Allan Maclean, head of another clan whose
star paled before the risen sun of the Campbells. On this island
Johnson’s heart was cheered by the sight of a cart road, and Boswell’s
by a parcel of the _Caledonian Mercury_, the first newspaper he had
seen for many a day. A little later, on the mainland, they found in a
Glasgow paper a report that Dr. Johnson was still kept in Skye by bad
weather, on which the paragrapher of the period smartly remarked—“Such
a philosopher detained on an almost barren island resembles a whale
left upon the strand.” Could he have heard Goldsmith’s happy hit at the
stylist who “would make little fishes talk like whales”?
After a day’s rest, parting with Coll, they put themselves in charge
of his chief, who took them along the coast in an open boat to Iona,
till lately his own property, but now sold to the Duke of Argyll. None
the less was Maclean welcomed with humble affection by his transferred
clansmen, to one of whom, that had offended him by not sending some
rum, his bitterest reproach was, “I believe you are a Campbell!” These
men belonged to the generation over which their chief had once power of
life and death; and to Boswell the culprit protested, “Had he sent his
dog for the rum, I would have given it; I would cut my bones for him!”
The pilgrims from Fleet Street, who embraced each other on touching
this sacred shore, were in too exalted mood to grumble at having to
sleep in a barn. In the morning they examined the ruins that stirred
Johnson’s famous paragraph—“Far be from me and from my friends such
frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any
ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.” At the
time Boswell showed himself the more deeply affected, who left his
breakfast to return to the cathedral for solitary meditation. “I hoped
that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an
exemplary conduct.” Johnson mischievously writes to Mrs. Thrale how at
Inch Kenneth his disciple had stolen into the ruins there to pray, but
was soon scared out by fear of spectres.
Landed again in Mull, they travelled round its south shore by Loch Buy,
and on October 22 were ferried across to Oban. Next day they rode on
to Inveraray, in bad weather, which almost for the first time moved
Johnson to what our generation finds a becoming sentiment. “The wind
was low, the rain was heavy, and the whistling of the blast, the fall
of the shower, the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the torrent,
made a nobler chorus of the rough music of nature than it had ever
been my chance to hear before.” In ten miles they crossed fifty-five
streams. He was better pleased to come upon a good road that led them
to an inn “not only commodious but magnificent,” at Inveraray, where
“the difficulties of peregrination were now at an end.”
The distinguished chiels who had been taking such notes spent nearly
two months on a trip done by the live transatlantic tourist in as many
days. They had passed through and near some of the scenic wonders of
the kingdom, with as little notice as if these had been Primrose Hill
or Turnham Green. Wherever they stopped they made a point of civilly
visiting what ruins, antiquities, and such like were on show, but
it does not appear that they asked for beauty or sublimity, nor did
their guides suggest going out of the way for any prospect beyond that
of a bed and a dinner. Boswell was the less Cockneyish of the two,
who could cry out at sight of an “immense mountain” which Johnson
scornfully put in its place as an “immense protuberance”; and we know
how he thought one green field as like another as two straws. They
did turn aside to see the Falls of Foyers, as to Boswell seems not
worth mentioning, while the rough scramble made Johnson wish “that our
curiosity might have been gratified with less trouble and danger.”
All travellers of that century, till Gray, were much of the same
mind. Pennant has small space to waste on Highland scenery, though he
so far comes under the _genius loci_ as to put his very wide-awake
view of the people in the form of a fictitious dream. Burt frankly
found the mountains ugly, “most disagreeable when the heather is in
bloom”—prodigious! On Raasay Boswell was so frisky as to walk over
the island and dance at the top of Duncan, but he has not a word to
say about the view. For all their interest in Prince Charlie, nobody
took the Fleet Street gentlemen to see his cave near Portree; and
but for passing by Kingsburgh they left untouched the north-eastern
peninsula of Trotternish, tipped by the Macdonald castle of Duntulm
and edged by the long line of precipitous faces showing the giant’s
teeth of the Storr and such a “nightmare of nature” as the Quiraing.
The north-western headland, Vaternish, they skirted to gain the Macleod
castle, where Johnson “tasted lotus” at the young chief’s board, but
was less concerned about the mighty moor-mounds called “Macleod’s
Tables,” and never heard of “Macleod’s Maidens,” those graceful spires
rising sheer out of the sea, nor of that dizzy Waterstein cliff that
faces the Atlantic near Dunvegan, and is continued by precipitous walls
down to Talisker. He could not help hearing Rorie More’s cascade, to
which he one day took a toddle between the showers; but neither the
bear nor his monkey put himself much about unless to look owlishly
at some “Temple of Anaitis,” or some cave recalling that of Virgil’s
Sibyl. Boswell just mentions the Coolins, as reminding him of Corsica,
but nobody drew their attention to that wild sierra conspicuous from
nearly every part of Skye, an eerie chaos of wrinkled, rusted, ruined
tops that “resemble the other hills on the earth’s surface as Hindoo
deities resemble human beings”; nobody told them of the black lochs
and gloomy corries hidden in those storm-breeding recesses; nobody
advised them to make the rough tramp up Glen Sligachan or the perilous
ascent of Blaaven, or even to look at that highest point whose name
titles it Inachievable, as it is not to practised mountaineers of
our own time. Two well-to-do gentlemen had not come all the way from
London and Edinburgh to distress themselves by going near that “most
savage scene of desolation in Britain” —hardly accessible still
unless through Loch Scavaig’s brighter anteroom, and then shunned by
the Skyemen as goblin-haunted—the naked hollow of Loch Coruisk, whose
uncanny solitude a child then in the nursery would bring to fame as a
Highland Acheron:
Seems that primeval earthquake’s sway
Hath rent a strange and shatter’d way
Through the rude bosom of the hill,
And that each naked precipice,
Sable ravine, and dark abyss,
Tells of the outrage still.
The wildest glen, but this, can show
Some touch of Nature’s genial glow;
On high Benmore green mosses grow,
And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe,
And copse on Cruchan-Ben;
But here,—above, around, below,
On mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,
Nor ought of vegetative power,
The weary eye may ken.
For all is rocks at random thrown,
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone,
As if were here denied
The summer sun, the spring’s sweet dew,
That clothe with many a varied hue
The bleakest mountain-side.
[Illustration: LOCH CORUISK, SKYE]
In coasting Skye, not indeed along the finest stretch, all our
ponderous Rambler observed was how the crags made landing difficult,
especially for an enemy; while Boswell cast a glance at “hills and
mountains in gradations of wildness.” The latter, even when not
perturbed by a rough sea-passage, owns that he finds “a difficulty in
describing visible objects,” such as those revealing themselves thus to
a ready writer of our time:
Here we beheld a sight which seemed the glorious fabric of a
vision:—a range of small heights sloping from the deep green sea,
every height crowned with a columnar cliff of basalt, and each rising
over each, higher and higher, till they ended in a cluster of towering
columns, minarets, and spires, over which hovered wreaths of
delicate mist, suffused with the pink light from the east. We were
looking on the spiral pillars of the Quiraing. In a few minutes
the vision had faded; for the yacht was flying faster and faster,
assisted a little too much by a savage puff from off the Quiraing’s
great cliffs; but other forms of beauty arose before us as we went.
The whole coast from Aird Point to Portree forms a panorama of
cliff scenery quite unmatched in Scotland. Layers of limestone dip
into the sea, which washes them into horizontal forms, resembling
gigantic slabs of white and grey masonry, rising sometimes stair
above stair, water-stained, and hung with many-coloured weed; and on
these slabs stand the dark cliffs and spiral columns: towering into
the air like the fretwork of some Gothic temple, roofless to the
sky; clustered sometimes together in black masses of eternal shadow;
torn open here and there to show glimpses of shining lawns sown in
the heart of the stone, or flashes of torrents rushing in silver
veins through the darkness; crowned in some places by a green patch,
on which the goats feed small as mice; and twisting frequently into
towers of most fantastical device, that lie dark and spectral against
the grey background of the air. To our left we could now behold the
island of Rona, and the northern end of Raasay. All our faculties,
however, were soon engaged in contemplating the Storr, the highest
part of the northern ridge of Skye, terminating in a mighty insulated
rock or monolith which points solitary to heaven, two thousand three
hundred feet above the sea, while at its base rock and crag have been
torn into the wildest forms by the teeth of earthquake, and a great
torrent leaps foaming into the Sound. As we shot past, a dense white
vapour enveloped the lower part of the Storr, and towers, pyramids,
turrets, monoliths were shooting out above it like a supernatural city
in the clouds.
From writers like Robert Buchanan one might quote dozens of such
enthusiastic descriptions, showing how a later generation has gone
back closer to the bosom of Mother Nature than lay that age of wigs
and nightcaps. Yet it is those whose play rather than their work takes
them into the wilds who are most prone to such new enthusiasm. Now
that Skye is somewhat thinly dotted with birch and larch clumps and
gardens, and belted with a high-road winding round her deep inlets
between groups of houses where church, schoolhouse, and hotel have
sprung up beneath cairns and ruins, her inhabitants are rather apt to
wonder why strangers give themselves so much trouble in seeking out the
most forbidding wilds of their island, that excite their own feelings
no more than Cobbett admired Hindhead when he found the roads rough
and the soil not suitable for turnips. Those weird scenes which the
well-fed Sassenach seeks, as Buchanan says, to “galvanise” his soul
with holiday emotion, overshadow the cottar’s daily life with poverty,
hunger, and dread. Some parts of Skye have now been made comparatively
trim and tame, beside others left hopelessly barren and dismal, with
peat and rushes for their best crop; but nowhere perhaps in Britain can
one better learn how “nature is not always gracious; that not always
does she outstretch herself in low-lying bounteous lands, over which
sober sunsets redden and heavy-uddered cattle low; but that she has
fierce hysterical moods in which she congeals into granite precipice
and peak, and draws around herself and her companions the winds that
moan and bluster, veils of livid rain.” This poor “island of cloud” is
indeed most rich in “frozen terror and superstition” for those who
have eyes to see.
[Illustration: SKYE CROFTER]
Between contemporary pilgrims of the picturesque and the dull observers
of older days, came to Skye an invasion of geologists and such like,
who did much towards proclaiming its grand points. One of the pioneers
of scientific invasion was the Frenchman Faujas de St. Fond, who does
not shine in the orthography of Scottish names. But of these explorers
one need not speak here, unless to distinguish that humorous and
hard-headed savant MacCulloch, whose hammer was brought to bear on
many time-weathered sentiments. His _Western Islands_ is more strictly
geological, but his _Highlands and Western Isles_ is full of rollicking
pages, though stuffed rather too much with learned facetiousness,
which would have tickled Mr. Shandy, while it may prove hard reading
“when, in after ages, the youths of Polynesia shall be flogged into
English and Gaelic as we have been into Greek and Latin” —a sentence
that appears rough sketch for a more celebrated Mac’s New Zealander.
Macaulay may also have lifted the formula, “every schoolboy knows,”
from this author, who varies that phrase by “the merest schoolboy”
or “the minutest Grecian,” and in more boldly laying down “all the
world knows what Callimachus says,” will not recommend himself to a
generation better acquainted with Macaulay’s dicta and dogmata than
with what song the Sirens sang, or what tartan Achilles wore when he
seems to have disguised himself in a kilt. Another famous saying, that
has become a _cliché_ in our day, as to the South Sea islanders’ trade
of taking in one another’s washing, seems adumbrated by MacCulloch’s
wonder how Highland shop-keepers contrive to keep open, “unless they
have agreed to live on gingerbread kings and carraway comfits, and to
buy all their pins and tape from each other.” And for a final sample of
this author’s shrewd wit, let us hear that “never have books been so
black, so thick, so large and so long, as when they have been written
about nothings.” This warning spurs me on from digressions that might
be extended to a folio—
Heavy and thick as a wall of brick,
But not so heavy and not so thick
As—
some volumes of travel one could mention.
One need not waste many words on the Cockney tourists who get the
length of Skye to stare at the children’s bare legs and to sniff at
the peat fires, such admiration as they are capable of being directed
by tourist tickets and guide-books. By Cockneyism I do not mean
citizenship of the world’s greatest city; indeed it is not for me to
file the international nest that has grown so big round the sound of
Bow Bells. To be a right Cockney is to be impotent of any outlook but
from our own Charing Cross or other restricted observatory, in which
moral sense we are all by nature Cockneys, some more, some less. There
are Cockneys of time as well as of place. The eighteenth was very much
of a Cockney century, hoodwinked by its own wigs, nightcaps, pews,
quartos, and other indispensable institutions. The nineteenth century
has taken pains to foster a more catholic spirit; but some of its sons
are slow to learn how poor is their little duck puddle or brackish
lochan beside the ocean that goes round the earth, itself a drop in
that inconceivable immensity of forces and phenomena against which the
brightest human life flies out to die like the tiniest peat spark.
To my mind some of the most offensive Cockneys are those who never
drop the _h_ of “Hail Columbia!” I am not specially dotting the _i_’s
of this remark for a certain couple that some years ago undertook to
make Johnson’s tour on foot, then, finding the weather chill and wet,
came back to publish an ill-humoured and well-illustrated book that
got them into critical hot water. Still less need one have anything
but a thousand welcomes for the American travellers who are travellers
indeed, who look through glasses of knowledge and sympathy rather
than through prejudiced goggles dulling every prospect, seen as from
the rush of a motor-car. But there is a kind of U.S.A. bookmaker,
who very much “fancies” his acuteness, bounded on one side by the
spelling-book and on the other by the sensational newspaper; and such a
smart descendant of ours has no shame in exposing his narrow-mindedness
while exulting over the nakedness of his grandfatherland. Boswell did
not write himself down an ass more plainly than some note-takers I
could quote, whose standard of measurement seems always the Capitol at
Washington, the water tower of Chicago, the Nob Hill of ’Frisco, or
some other universal hub of their self-satisfaction. What they always
cry out upon is the poverty, the shiftlessness, the backwardness of
Highland homes, for which they go on to blame the landlords as tyrants
unscrupulous as Tammany bosses, or Western evictors of Nez Percés
Indians. Their pity for the poor does them credit; but much of it is
wasted by complacent philanthropists unable to conceive how life may
be worth living without ice-cream, elevators, political “machines,”
hourly newspaper editions, endless Stock Exchange tapes, and the like
necessaries of high-toned civilisation. To this kind of transatlantic
tripper who comes hurriedly poking into lordly hall and smoky hovel,
peeping with such an uppish air on our manners and customs as if we
were Sandwich Islanders, one would say _Procul este profani_! but of
course one might as well try to scare a yellow-press reporter with a
notice to trespassers. And when the like of him has published his hasty
impressions, these may make wholesome study for us as showing how our
ancient idols strike a stranger from some exceedingly “up to date”
standpoint.
To find the western islands described with insight and sympathy one
can go to the writers above quoted, and to Miss Gordon Cumming’s
_Hebrides_, which I have not quoted on Skye, for fear of being tempted
to deck my grey page unduly in borrowed plumes as from some bird of
paradise. She was doubly a Highlander by blood, who could also inform
her survey with comparisons wide-drawn from other lands. Buchanan, I
fear, was born south of the Border, yet his forebears must have heard
the slogan of the wild Macfarlanes on Loch Lomond. As for Alexander
Smith, unless descended from some Highland Gow, such as that Hal
who fought on the Inch of Perth, he may frankly be set down for a
Sassenach, a Kilmarnock body “at that”; but this poet’s prose is thick
set with Highlands of fancy; and no book of the kind makes better
reading than his _Summer in Skye_. All these writers, by the way, have
a good word for Dr. Johnson, who so roughly abused their country; and
when I consider how that worthy did penance at Uttoxeter for a sin of
his youth, I am half-minded to humble myself on the cutty-stool as else
unable to look up to one whom so many better men have judged great and
wise.