Highlander's calmness and self-command in the presence of new and
wonderful objects is pride. To express astonishment at the sight of
an object implies previous ignorance of that object; and no
Highlander worthy of the name will admit that he is ignorant of
anything under the sun. To come back, however, to what we were
speaking about a little while ago,--the differences between the
Highlanders and the Irish--the light-hearted Irishman delights to
'chaff' and to be 'chaffed;' the intenser and more serious-hearted
Highlander can neither do the one nor endure the other. The bit of
badinage which an Irishman will laugh at and brush carelessly aside,
stings the Highlander like a gadfly. When the Highlander is fencing,
the button is always coming off his foil, and the point is in your
arm before you know where you are. If you enter into a gay
wit-combat with a Highlander, it is almost certain to have a serious
ending--just as the old Highland wedding-feasts, beginning with
pledged healths and universal three-times-three, ended in a brawl and
half-a-dozen men dirked."
"Chaff, in common with shoddy, the adulteration of food, and the
tailor-sweating system, is the product of an over-ripe civilisation.
It is the glimmer on the head of the dead cod-fish--putridity become
phosphorescent. It can only thrive in large cities. It is the
offspring of impudence and loquacity. I am not astonished that the
Highlander cannot endure it; it is out of his way altogether. He no
more can use it as a weapon of offence or defence than David could
wear the armour of Saul. Chaff grows in the crowded street, not in
the wilderness. It is the one thing we have brought into perfection
in these later days. It is a weed that grows lustily, because it is
manured with our vices and our decomposed faiths. I don't think the
worse of the Highlander because he cannot chaff or endure being
chaffed. A London cabman would slang Socrates into silence in a
quarter of an hour."
"I suppose," said the Landlord, "when the Skye railway is finished we
poor Highlanders will get our jokes from the South, as we get our tea
and sugar. It's a pity the Board of Directors did not mention that
special import in their prospectus. The shares might have gone off
more rapidly, Pen!"
[Sidenote: Distrust of nature.]
"By the by," said Fellowes, turning to me, "you were speaking the
other day of the curious distrust of Nature, which you consider the
soul of all Celtic poetry and Celtic superstition, and you were
inclined to attribute that distrust and fear to the austerities of
climate and physical conformation, to the rain-cloud, and the
precipice, the sea-foam, and the rock. I agree with you so far; but
I think you lay too much stress on climatic influences and the
haggardness of landscape. That quick sense of two powers--of Nature
and Humanity, of man and a world outside of man--is the root of all
poetry."
"Of course it is. To the Celt, Nature is malign, evil-disposed,
cruel; and his poetry is dreary as the strain of the night wind. To
a Wordsworth, on the other hand, Nature is merciful and tranquil,
deep-thoughted and calm; and as a consequence his poetry is temperate
and humane, cool as a summer evening after the sun has set, and--with
all reverence be it spoken--sometimes tiresomely hortatory."
"Preaching is generally dull work, I fear; and Nature's sermons, even
when reported by Wordsworth, are as dull as some other sermons which
I have heard and read."
"But what I was going to say was, that the sense of malevolence in
Nature which you claim as the central fact of Celtic song and
superstition, is not so much the result of harsh climates and wild
environments as it is a stage in the mental progress of a race. At
one stage of progress, all races fear Nature alike. The South-Sea
Islander, whose bread-fruit falls into his mouth, fears Nature just
as much as the Greenlander, who hunts the white bear on the iceberg
and spears the walrus in the foam. When once man has got the upper
hand of Nature, when he has made her his slave, when her winds sit in
his sails and propel his ships, when she yields him iron whereby she
is more firmly bound to his service, when she gives him coal
wherewith to cook food and to mitigate the rigours of her
winters--when man has got that length, the aboriginal fear dies out
of his heart, the weird Celtic bard goes, and Wordsworth comes. Even
in the Lowlands, scraps of verses still exist--relics of long past
time, and shuddering yet with an obsolete terror--which are as full
of a sense of the malevolence of Nature as any Highland song or tune
you could produce."
"Let me hear one or two."
"Well, here is one which has been occasionally quoted, and which you
have in all likelihood come across in your reading:--
'Says Tweed to Till,
What gars ye rin sae still?
Says Till to Tweed,
Though ye rin wi' speed,
An' I rin slaw,
For ae man that ye droon,
I droon twa.'"
"Yes, it is very striking, and hits the nail on the head exactly.
Sir Walter quotes it somewhere, I think. I have little doubt that
these rhymes suggested to Scott his Voices of the River in the 'Lay,'
which is not that of the kelpie, a creature _in_ the river, but of
the river itself, in spiritual personation."
[Sidenote: "The dowie Dean."]
"That may be, or it may not. But nowhere, that I know of, does that
sense of an evil will, and an alienation from man in nature, find a
profounder and more tragic, if withal a playful, half-humorous
expression than in this curious little Border fragment, unless,
indeed, it be beaten by this from Forfarshire. Of the Dean stream,
wherein, while it was yet golden time with me, I slew many a fine
trout, there existed then a local rhyme of much less artistic and
literary completion than that relating the colloquy between Till and
Tweed, but, as I think, in its rudeness if anything even more
gruesome and grim--
'The dowie Dean,
It rins it lean,
An' every seven year it gets ean.'"
"What a hideous _patois_," quoth the Landlord, "your Forfarshire
people must talk! I can't say I understand a word of your rhymes.
Perhaps you will be good enough to translate."
Fellowes laughed. "I'll do my best,--
'The dowie (quietly dismal) Dean,
It rins it lean, (its lane, lone, solitary,)
An' every seven year it gets ean, (ane, one.)'
There it is now, in Scotch and English, for you. What specially
strikes me in this rhyme is its quiet power of awe, its reflex of the
passionless calm, which, in scorn of contrast with the 'fever and
fret' and flux of human feeling, is the specially frightful thing in
Nature. No need for the Dean to trouble itself to employ kelpies: it
runs quietly, gloomily on, feeding its fine red trout, and sure that
by the serene law of the case when the hour comes the man will, and
will drop to his moist doom, with no trouble given. 'It gets ean'
when the said 'ean' is due; and never having been disappointed, it
runs on 'dowie,' and not disturbing itself, as certain of its food in
season. This it plainly reckons on, somewhat as year after year we
look for strawberries and new potatoes. Then, the 'It rins it lean'
by itself, solitary, sullen, morose, as it were, and in the deeps of
its moody pools, meditating periodical unsocial mischiefs, past and
to come. For haggard, imaginative suggestion, unless it be in the
'Twa Corbies,' I don't know where we can quite equal this. Beside
this primal poetry of man's spiritual instinct of terror our later
verse-developments are the merest nothings."
While I kept repeating over to myself the rude triplet which was new
to me, and creeping as best I could into its fell significance, Pen
said--
"And I suppose, in point of fact, that your gloomy hermit and
murderer of a stream did get 'ean' every seven years. Don't you
think only 'ean' in seven years a somewhat scant allowance? Most
streams are as well supplied, I rather think."
"This septennial victim was in my boyhood considered by the natives
as the toll exacted by, and fated due of the river; and I have heard
the old people reckon back, over 'Jock Tamson that was drowned i' the
year ----, coming hame fou frae the fair;' 'Wull Smith,' fou of
course, also, who, fresh from 'the spring roup of grass parks at the
Hatton in the year ----,' was unexpectedly treated to more water than
he needed for his purposes of grog; and so on. The old inhabitant
would then conclude with a grave--'It's weel kent the burn's nae
canny;' and a confident prediction, with half a shudder in his voice,
that 'ye'll see it winna be lang noo till it maun get anither.' Any
sceptic was at once silenced with--'Weel-a-weel--say yer say o't the
noo, and jist bide till ye see. But dinna ye be daunerin' doon 't
yersel', neist nicht ye're fou, or maybe, my braw man, _ye'll no
see_. I'm no saying but ye'll mak' a bonny corp, giff ye downa swall
wi' the burn-water, yer stamack nae bein' used to't.'"
"Your theory is correct," said the Landlord, turning to Fellowes,
"that the fear of Nature is common to all races, and that as each
race advances in civilisation the terror dies out. The kelpie, for
instance, always lives near a ford--bridge the stream, and the kelpie
dies. Build a road across a haunted hill, and you banish the fairies
of the hill for ever. The kelpie and the fairy are simply spiritual
personations of very rude and common dangers--of being carried away
by the current when you are attempting to cross a river--of being
lost when you are taking a short cut across hills on which there is
no track. Abolish the dangers, and you at the same time abolish
those creatures, Fear and Fancy."
"Rhymes like these are the truest antiques, the most precious
articles of _virtu_. What is the brooch or ring that the fair woman
wore, the brogues in which the shepherd travelled, the sword or
shield with which the warrior fought, compared with a triplet like
that, which is really an authentic bit of the terror that agitated
human hearts long ago?"
[Sidenote: The Skye railway.]
But while we were discussing the Dean flowing on solitarily, every
gurgle silenced with expectation as the hour drew near when its seven
years' hunger would be appeased, Pen and the Landlord had drifted
away to the subject of the Skye railway--this summer and the last a
favourite subject of discussion in the Island.
"You are a great friend of the railway?"
"Of course I am," said the Landlord. "I consider the locomotive the
good wizard of our modern day. Its whistle scares away filth,
mendicancy, and unthrift; ignorance and laziness perish in the glare
of its red eyes. I have seen what it has done for the Hindoo, and I
know what it will do for the Islesman. We hold India by our railways
to-day rather than by our laws or our armies. The swart face of the
stoker is the first sign of the golden age that has become visible in
my time."
"What benefits do you expect the railway will bring with it to Skye?"
"It will bring us in closer contact with the South. By the aid of
the railway we shall be enabled to send our stock to the southern
markets more rapidly, more cheaply, and in better condition, and as a
consequence we will obtain better prices. By aid of the railway the
Islands will be opened up, our mineral treasures will be laid bare,
our marbles will find a market, the Skye apple and the Skye
strawberry will be known in Covent Garden, our fisheries will
flourish as they have never flourished before. The railway will
bring southern capital to us, and humane southern influences. The
railway will send an electric shock through the entire Island.
Everybody's pulse will be quickened; the turf-hut will disappear; and
the Skyeman will no longer be considered a lazy creature: which he is
not--he only seems so because he has never found a proper field for
the display of his activities. There are ten chances to one that
your Skye lad, if left in Skye, will remain a fisherman or a
shepherd; but transplant him to Glasgow, Liverpool, or London, and he
not unfrequently blossoms into a merchant prince. There were quick
and nimble brains under the shock heads of the lads you saw at my
school the other day, and to each of these lads the railway will open
a career great or small, or, at all events, the chance of one."
[Sidenote: The emigrants.]
When the Landlord had ceased speaking, a boy brought the post-bag and
laid it down on the gravel. It was opened, and we got our
letters--the Landlord a number of Indian ones. These he put into his
coat pocket. One he tore open and read. "Hillo, Pen!" he cried,
when he got to the end, "my emigrants are to be at Skeabost on
Thursday; we must go over to see them." Then he marched into the
house, and in a little time thereafter our smoking parliament
dissolved.
_THE EMIGRANTS._
[Sidenote: Emigration.]
The English emigrant is prosaic; Highland and Irish emigrants are
poetical. How is this? The wild-rose lanes of England, one would
think, are as bitter to part from, and as worthy to be remembered at
the antipodes, as the wild coasts of Skye or the green hills of
Ireland. Oddly enough, poet and painter turn a cold shoulder on the
English emigrant, while they expend infinite pathos on the emigrants
from Erin or the Highlands. The Highlander has his Lochaber-no-more,
and the Irishman has the Countess of Gifford's pretty song. The ship
in the offing, and the parting of Highland emigrants on the
sea-shore, has been made the subject of innumerable paintings; and
yet there is a sufficient reason for it all. Young man and maid are
continually parting; but unless the young man and maid are lovers,
the farewell-taking has no attraction for the singer or the artist.
Without the laceration of love, without some tumult of sorrowful
emotion, a parting is the most prosaic thing in the world; with these
it is perhaps the most affecting. "Good-bye" serves for the one; the
most sorrowful words of the poet are hardly sufficient for the other.
Rightly or wrongly, it is popularly understood that the English
emigrant is not mightily moved by regret when he beholds the shores
that gave him birth withdrawing themselves into the dimness of the
far horizon,--although, if true, why it should be so? and if false,
how it has crept into the common belief? are questions not easy to
answer. If the Englishman is obtuse and indifferent in this respect,
the Highlander is not. He has a cat-like love for locality. He
finds it as difficult to part from the faces of the familiar hills as
from the faces of his neighbours. In the land of his adoption he
cherishes the language, the games, and the songs of his childhood;
and he thinks with a continual sadness of the gray-green slopes of
Lochaber, and the thousand leagues of dim, heart-breaking sea tossing
between them and him.
The Celt clings to his birthplace, as the ivy nestles lovingly to its
wall; the Saxon is like the arrowy seeds of the dandelion, that
travel on the wind and strike root afar. This simply means that the
one race has a larger imagination than the other, and an intenser
feeling of association. Emigration is more painful to the Highlander
than it is to the Englishman--this poet and painter have
instinctively felt--and in wandering up and down Skye you come in
contact with this pain, either fresh or in reminiscence, not
unfrequently. Although the member of his family be years removed,
the Skyeman lives in him imaginatively--just as the man who has
endured an operation is for ever conscious of the removed limb. And
this horror of emigration--common to the entire Highlands--has been
increased by the fact that it has not unfrequently been a forceful
matter, that potent landlords have torn down houses and turned out
the inhabitants, have authorised evictions, have deported the
dwellers of entire glens. That the landlords so acting have not been
without grounds of justification may in all probability be true. The
deported villagers may have been cumberers of the ground, they may
have been unable to pay rent, they may have been slowly but surely
sinking into pauperism, their prospect of securing a comfortable
subsistence in the colonies may be considerable, while in their own
glens it maybe nil,--all this may be true; but to have your house
unroofed before your eyes, and made to go on board a ship bound for
Canada, even although the passage-money be paid for you, is not
pleasant. An obscure sense of wrong is kindled in heart and brain.
It is just possible that what is for the landlord's interest may be
for yours also in the long run; but you feel that the landlord has
looked after his own interest in the first place. He wished you
away, and he has got you away; whether you will succeed in Canada is
matter of dubiety. The human gorge rises at this kind of forceful
banishment--more particularly the gorge of the banished!
When Thursday came, the Landlord drove us over to Skeabost, at which
place, at noon, the emigrants were to assemble. He told me on the
way that some of the more sterile portions of his property were
over-populated, and that the people there could no more prosper than
trees that have been too closely planted. He was consequently a
great advocate of emigration. He maintained that force should never
be used, but advice and persuasion only; that when consent was
obtained, there should be held out a helping hand. It was his idea
that if a man went all the way to Canada to oblige you, it was but
fair that you should make his journey as pleasant as possible, and
provide him employment, or, at all events, put him in the way of
obtaining it when he got there. In Canada, consequently, he
purchased lands, made these lands over to a resident relative, and to
the charge of that relative, who had erected houses, and who had
trees to fell, and fields to plough, and cattle to look after, he
consigned his emigrants. He took care that they were safely placed
on shipboard at Glasgow or Liverpool, and his relative was in waiting
when they arrived. When the friendly face died on this side of the
Atlantic, a new friendly face dawned on them on the other. With only
one class of tenant was he inclined to be peremptory. He had no wish
to disturb in their turf hut the old man and woman who had brought up
a family; but when the grown-up son brought home a wife to the same
hut, he was down upon them, like a severing knife, at once. The
young people could not remain there; they might go where they
pleased; he would rather they would go to Canada than anywhere, but
out of the old dwelling they must march. And the young people
frequently jumped at the Landlord's offer--labour and good wages
calling sweetly to them from across the sea. The Landlord had
already sent out a troop of emigrants, of whose condition and
prospects he had the most encouraging accounts, both from themselves
and others, and the second troop were that day to meet him at
Skeabost.
[Sidenote: The emigrants.]
When we got to Skeabost there were the emigrants, to the number
perhaps of fifty or sixty, seated on the lawn. They were dressed as
was their wont on Sundays, when prepared for church. The men wore
suits of blue or gray kelt, the women were wrapped for the most part
in tartan plaids. They were decent, orderly, intelligent, and on the
faces of most was a certain resolved look, as if they had carefully
considered the matter, and had made up their minds to go through with
it. They were of every variety of age too; the greater proportion
young men who had long years of vigorous work in them, who would fell
many a tree, and reap many a field before their joints stiffened:
women, fresh, comely, and strong, not yet mothers, but who would be
grandmothers before their term of activity was past. In the party,
too, was a sprinkling of middle-aged people, with whom the world had
gone hardly, and who were hoping that Canada would prove kinder than
Skye. They all rose and saluted the Landlord respectfully as we
drove down toward the house. The porch was immediately made a hall
of audience. The Landlord sat in a chair, Pen took his seat at the
table, and opened a large scroll-book in which the names of the
emigrants were inscribed. One by one the people came from the lawn
to the porch and made known their requirements:--a man had not yet
made up his passage-money, and required an advance; a woman desired a
pair of blankets; an old man wished the Landlord to buy his cow,
which was about to calve, and warranted an excellent milker. With
each of these the Landlord talked sometimes in Gaelic, more
frequently in English; entered into the circumstances of each, and
commended, rebuked, expostulated, as occasion required. When an
emigrant had finished his story, and made his bargain with the
Landlord, Pen wrote the conditions thereof against his or her name in
the large scroll-book. The giving of audience began about noon, and
it was evening before it was concluded. By that time every emigrant
had been seen, talked with, and disposed of. For each the way to
Canada was smoothed, and the terms set down by Pen in his
scroll-book; and each, as he went away was instructed to hold himself
in readiness on the 15th of the following month, for on that day they
were to depart.
When the emigrants were gone we smoked on the lawn, with the moon
rising behind us. Next morning our party broke up. Fellowes and the
Landlord went off in the mail to Inverness; the one to resume his
legal reading there, the other to catch the train for London. Pen
went to Bracadale, where he had some business to transact preparatory
to going to Ireland, and I drove in to Portree to meet the
southward-going steamer, for vacation was over, and my Summer in Skye
had come to an end.
_HOMEWARDS._
Life is pleasant, but unfortunately one has got to die; vacation is
delightful, but unhappily vacations come to an end. Mine had come to
an end; and sitting in the inn at Portree waiting for the
southward-going steamer, I began to count up my practical and ideal
gains, just as in dirty shillings and half-crowns a cobbler counts up
his of a Saturday night.
[Sidenote: Practical and ideal gains.]