A traveller who passed through the Hebrides in the year 1786 recorded
that in many houses he was given the room to sleep in which had been
occupied by Dr. Johnson.[1] Twenty-eight years later, when Sir Walter
Scott with some of his friends landed in Skye, it was found on inquiry
that the first thought which had come into each man’s mind was of
Johnson’s Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale.[2] The Highlanders at Dunvegan,
Scott goes on to say, saw that about Johnson there was something
worthy of respect, “they could not tell what, and long spoke of him
as the _Sassenach mohr_, or big Englishman.”[3] He still lives among
them, mainly, no doubt, by his own and Boswell’s books, but partly
also by tradition. Very few of the houses remain where he visited.
Nevertheless, in two of these in the Hebrides, and in one in the
Lowlands, I was shown his bedroom. Proud, indeed, would the old man
have been could he have foreseen that an Englishman who followed on
his steps one hundred and sixteen years later would be shown at New
Hailes, at Rasay, and at Dunvegan, “Dr. Johnson’s Chamber.” At Rasay is
preserved his walking-stick—not the famous “piece of timber” which was
destined for some museum, but was stolen or lost in Mull, but one which
he had occasionally used. In his bedroom an engraving of him hangs on
the wall. The china tea-set out of which he had drunk is preserved by
a descendant of the laird who was his host. At Dunvegan his portrait
is set up in a post of honour in the noble drawing-room of the famous
old castle, and his autograph letter to Macleod of Macleod rests among
the ancient memorials of that still more ancient family. That it is
endorsed “Dr. Johnston’s Letter” may be twisted into a compliment. So
popular was he that his very name was “Scottified.”
[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON’S BEDROOM, DUNVEGAN.]
[Sidenote: TRADITIONS OF JOHNSON.]
In many places I found traditions of him still remaining—some, no
doubt, true; others false. But whether false or true, by their vitality
they show the deep mark which the man made as he passed along. In
Glenmorison there are countryfolk who profess to know by the report
of their forefathers the “clear rivulet” in “the narrow valley, not
very flowery but sufficiently verdant,” where Johnson reposed on “a
bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign, and
first conceived the thought of the narration” of his tour.[4] In a
farmhouse on Loch Duich, just below the mountain which exhausted his
patience and good-humour, and nearly exhausted his strength, I was
told of the speech which he made as he reached the top of the pass.
“He turned as he was beginning the descent, and said to the mountain,
‘Good-bye, Ma’am Rattachan, I hope never to see your face again.’”[5]
From Rasay a friendly correspondent wrote to tell me how the great
man had climbed up Dun Can, the highest mountain in the island, and
had danced on the top. I have pointed out that it was Boswell and not
Johnson who performed this feat, but the tradition, doubtless, will
linger on. At Dunvegan Miss Macleod of Macleod, who remembers her
grandmother, Johnson’s hostess, and her aunts, “the four daughters, who
knew all the arts of southern elegance, and all the modes of English
economy,”[6] has preserved some traditions more worthy of trust. “One
day,” she said, “he had scolded the maid for not getting good peats,
and had gone out in the rain to the stack to fetch in some himself.[7]
He caught a bad cold. Lady Macleod went up to his room to see how he
was, and found him in bed, with his wig turned inside out, and the
wrong end foremost, serving the purpose of ‘a cap by night,’ like the
stocking of Goldsmith’s _Author_. On her return to the drawing-room,
she said, ‘I have often seen very plain people, but anything as ugly as
Dr. Johnson, with his wig thus stuck on, I never have seen.’[8] She was
(her granddaughter added) greatly pleased with his talk, for she had
seen enough of the world to enjoy it; but her daughters, who were still
quite girls, disliked him much, and called him a bear.”
[Illustration: MAM RATTACHAN.]
At the inn at Broadford, sitting in the entrance-hall, I fell into
talk with an elderly man, a retired exciseman, who lived close by.
He, too, had his traditions of the _Sassenach mohr_. His father had
known an old lady, blind of one eye, who was fond of telling how in
her childhood, at the time of Johnson’s visit, she had been watching
the dancing in that famous farmhouse of Corrichatachin, where Boswell
got so drunk one night over the punch, and so penitent the next morning
over a severe headache and the Epistle for the Twentieth Sunday after
Trinity.[9] A large brass button on the coat-tail of one of the dancers
had struck her in her eye as he whirled round and had so injured it
that she lost the sight. My informant had a story also to tell of the
learned minister, the Rev. Donald Macqueen, who accompanied Johnson
in part of his tour. “A crofter seeing the two men pass, asked the
minister who was his companion. Macqueen replied, ‘The man who made
the English language.’ ‘Then he had very little to do,’ rejoined the
crofter; meaning, according to the Gaelic idiom, that he might have
been much better employed.” My friendly exciseman had known also
an old lady who remembered Johnson coming to her father’s house in
Mull. According to a custom once very common in the Highlands, though
even in those days passing fast away, she had been sent for three or
four years to a shepherd’s hut to be fostered. It was shortly after
her return home that Johnson’s visit was paid. He did not hide his
displeasure at the roughness which still clung to her. She had not
forgotten, moreover, how he found fault with the large candles, rudely
made of pieces of old cloth twisted round and dipped in tallow.[10] My
acquaintance ended his talk by saying: “If Dr. Johnson had returned to
Scotland after publishing his book, he would have got a crack on his
skull.”
At Craignure, in the Isle of Mull, the landlord of the little inn
had his story to tell of the untimely death of young Maclean of
Col, that “amiable man,” who, while the pages of Johnson’s _Journey
to the Western Islands_ “were preparing to attest his virtues,
perished in the passage between Ulva and Inch-Kenneth.”[11] My host’s
great-grandmother, a Macquarrie of Ulva, on the night when the boat was
upset, had been watching the cattle near the fatal shore. An old woman
who was to have been her companion had failed her, so that she was
alone. She saw nothing, and heard no cries. “A half-witted person,” my
informant added, in a serious voice, “had warned one of the party not
to go; but his warning was not heeded, and the man lost his life.”
[Illustration: SOUND OF ULVA.]
At Lochbuie two traditions, I found, had been preserved in the family
of the laird, the great-grandson of that Maclean of Lochbuie whom
Boswell had heard described as “a great roaring braggadocio,” but
found only “a bluff, comely, noisy old gentleman. He bawled out to
Johnson (as Boswell tells us), ‘Are you of the Johnstons of Glencroe
or of Ardnamurchan?’ Dr. Johnson gave him a significant look, but made
no answer.”[12] The report has come down in the family that Johnson
replied that he was neither one nor the other. Whereupon Lochbuie cried
out, “Damn it, Sir, then you must be a bastard.” There can, I fear, be
no doubt that this rejoinder belongs to those _excellens impromptus à
loisir_ in which Rousseau excelled[13]—that _esprit de l’escalier_, as
the French describe it. If the laird, like Addison, could draw for a
thousand pounds, he had, I suspect, but nine pence in ready money.[14]
For had this repartee been made at the time, and not been merely an
after-invention, Boswell most certainly would not have let it pass
unrecorded. The second tradition is scarcely more trustworthy. Johnson
at the tea-table, I was told, helped himself to sugar with his fingers,
whereupon Lady Lochbuie at once had the basin emptied, and fresh sugar
brought in. He said nothing at the time, but when he had finished his
tea he flung down the cup, exclaiming that if he had polluted one he
had also polluted the other. A lady of the family of Lochbuie, whose
memory goes back ninety years, in recounting this story when I was
in Scotland, added, “But I do not know whether it was true.” That it
was not true I have little doubt. In the first place, we have again
Boswell’s silence; in the second place, to the minor decencies of life
Johnson was by no means inattentive. At Paris he was on the point of
refusing a cup of coffee because the footman had put in the sugar
with his fingers; and at Edinburgh, in a passion, he threw a glass of
lemonade out of the window because it had been sweetened in the same
manner by the waiter. In one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale he expressed
his displeasure in Skye at the very practice with which he is charged
a few weeks later in Mull. Describing his visit to the house of Sir
Alexander Macdonald, he wrote: “The lady had not the common decencies
of her tea-table: we picked up our sugar with our fingers.”[15]
It is strange that while in Mull, that “most dolorous country,” that
“gloom of desolation,” as Johnson described it, these stories of him
are preserved, the boatman who took me across the narrow passage
between it and Inch-Kenneth had no traditionary knowledge of his host,
Sir Allan Maclean, and of his retirement in that little island. To the
forefathers of the men of Mull the head of the Macleans would have been
an object of reverence and even of fear, and Johnson only a passing
wonder. “I would cut my bones for him,” said one of his clan, speaking
of Sir Allan in Boswell’s hearing.[16] But of the Highland chief who
lived among them no remembrance remains, while the _Sassenach mohr_,
who spent but a few days in the island-home of the Macleans, is still
almost “a household word.”
[Sidenote: SCOTTISH SENSITIVENESS.]
I was indeed surprised to find through the Highlands and the Hebrides
how much he still remained in men’s thoughts. On Loch Lomond, the
boatman who rowed me to the islands on which he had landed, a man
of reading and intelligence, said that though he had himself read
Johnson’s _Journey_, yet “Scotchmen still feel too sore to like reading
him.” Whatever soreness still lingers is, I have little doubt, much
more due to his sarcasms recorded by Boswell than to any passages in
his own narrative. But it is surprising that Scotchmen cannot more
generally join in a hearty laugh at his humorous sallies, though
they are at their own expense. That the Scotch of a hundred years
and more ago were over-sensitive is not astonishing. At that time
in most respects they were still far behind England. It was England
that they were striving to follow in their arts, their commerce, and
their agriculture. It was the English accent that they were striving
to catch, and the English style in which they laboured to write. It
was to the judgment of Englishmen that their authors, no small or
inglorious band, anxiously appealed. That they should be sensitive to
criticism beyond even the Americans of our day was not unnatural. For
in the poverty of their soil, and the rudiments of their manufactures
and trade, they found none of that boastful comfort which supports
the citizen of the United States, even when he is most solicitous of
English approbation. But at the present day, when they are in most
respects abreast of Englishmen, and in some even ahead, they should
disprove the charge that is brought against them of wanting humour
by showing that they can enjoy a hearty laugh, even though it goes
against them. Johnson’s ill-humour did not go deep, and, no doubt, was
often laughed away. Of that rancour which disgraced Hume his nature
was wholly incapable. He wished no ill to Scotland as Hume wished
ill to England.[17] “He returned from it,” writes Boswell, “in great
good-humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful
feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated.”[18]
Not all Scotch critics were hostile towards him. The _Scots Magazine_,
which last century was to Edinburgh what the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ was
to London, always spoke of him with great respect. Writing of him early
in the year in which he visited Scotland, it says:
“Dr. Johnson has long possessed a splendid reputation in the
republic of letters, and it was honestly acquired. He is
said to affect a singularity in his manners and to contemn
the social rules which are established in the intercourse of
civil life. If this extravagance is affected, it is a fault;
if it has been acquired by the habitudes of his temper and
his indolence, it scarcely merits censure. We allow to the man
who can soar so high above the multitude to descend sometimes
beneath them.”[19]
In the two reviews of his _Journey_ in the same magazine, there is
not one word of censure; neither when Boswell, eleven years later,
brought out his account of the tour, had they any fault to find. In the
character which they drew of Johnson on his death they leave unnoticed
his attacks on Scotland. They are even generous in their praise.
Speaking of his pension they say: “It would have been a national
disgrace if such talents, distinguished by such writings, had met with
no other recompense than the empty consciousness of fame.”[20] There
were also men of eminence in Scotland who at once acknowledged the
merits of the book. “I love the benevolence of the author,” said Lord
Hailes.[21] The “virtuous and candid Dempster,” the “patriotic Knox,”
Tytler, the historian, “a Scot, if ever a Scot there were,” had each
his word of high praise.[22] Sir Walter Scott, writing many years
later, said: “I am far from being of the number of those angry Scotsmen
who imputed to Johnson’s national prejudices all or a great part of the
report he has given of our country. I remember the Highlands ten or
twelve years later, and no one can conceive of how much that could have
been easily remedied travellers had to complain.”[23]
These men, nevertheless, formed a small minority. The outcry that was
raised against Johnson was at once loud and bitter. To attacks for many
a long year he had been used, but yet this time he was startled. “He
expressed his wonder at the extreme jealousy of the Scotch, and their
resentment at having their country described as it really was.”[24]
Boswell mentions “the brutal reflections thrown out against him,” and
“the rancour with which he was assailed by numbers of shallow irritable
North Britons.”[25] How quickly the storm gathered and burst is shown
in a letter written by an Englishman from Edinburgh a few days after
the book was published:
“Edinburgh, Jan. 24, 1775. Dr. Johnson’s _Tour_ has just made
its appearance here, and has put the country into a flame.
Everybody finds some reason to be affronted. A thousand people
who know not a single creature in the Western Isles interest
themselves in their cause, and are offended at the accounts
that are given of them. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, all
teem with abuse of the Doctor. He was received with the most
flattering marks of civility by everyone. He was looked upon as
a kind of miracle, and almost carried about for a show. Those
who were in his company were silent the moment he spoke, lest
they should interrupt him, and lose any of the good things he
was going to say. He repaid all their attention to him with
ill-breeding, and when in the company of the ablest men in this
country, who are certainly his superiors in point of abilities,
his whole design was to show them how contemptibly he thought
of them. Had the Scotch been more acquainted with Dr. Johnson’s
private character they would have expected nothing better.
A man of illiberal manners and surly disposition, who all
his life long had been at enmity with the Scotch, takes a
sudden resolution of travelling amongst them; not, according
to his own account, ‘to find a people of liberal and refined
education, but to see wild men and wild manners.’”[26]
[Sidenote: ATTACKS ON JOHNSON.]
The “patriotic Knox,” as Boswell calls him, the author of _A Tour
through the Highlands and Hebride Isles in 1786_, a man freer from
prejudices than the common run, and one who readily acknowledged the
merits of Johnson’s book, bears equal witness to the wrath of his
countrymen.
“Dr. Johnson (he writes) set out under incurable impressions
of a national prejudice, a religious prejudice, and a literary
jealousy. From a writer of such abilities and such prejudices
the natives of Scotland had reason to expect a shower of arrows
without mercy, and it was possibly from this prepossession that
they were ready to fall upon him as one man the moment that
his book appeared. Their minds were charged with sentiments
of indignity, resentment and revenge, which they did not
fail to discharge upon his head in whole platoons from every
quarter.”[27]
To us, who know Johnson better than we know any other author who has
ever lived, the charge of literary jealousy seems ridiculous. But
Knox lived before Boswell’s _Life_ was published. Scotland, in which
learning and even literature had slumbered for nearly a century, had
started up from her long sleep, and was bent on turning the Auld Reekie
into the Modern Athens. All her geese were swans, though of swans she
had at this season a fair flock. “Edinburgh is a hotbed of genius,”
wrote Smollett, shortly before Johnson’s visit, and as a proof of it
he instanced among “authors of the first distinction,” Wallace, Blair,
Wilkie, and Ferguson. Hume still earlier had proclaimed that at last
there was “a hope of seeing good tragedies in the English language,”
for Johnny Home had written his _Douglas_. Wilkie of the _Epigoniad_,
the great historian held, was to be the Homer, and Blacklock the
Pindar, of Scotland.[28] But it was in Ossian Macpherson that the
hopes of the country had at one time soared highest. By Dr. Blair, the
Edinburgh Professor of Rhetoric, he had been ranked with Homer and
Virgil.[29] The national pride, the honour of Scotland, was concerned,
and the meanest motive was attributed to the man who had ventured to
pronounce his poems an impudent forgery. Macpherson was a dangerous
enemy. Against “the menaces of a ruffian” a thick cudgel might avail;
but the secret arts of a literary forger were not so easily baffled.
His position was one of great power, for from the Court he received a
pension at first of £600 a year, and afterwards of £800, “to supervise
the newspapers. He inserted what lies he pleased, and prevented
whatever he disapproved of being printed.”[30] It was from this tainted
source that no doubt sprang many of “the miserable cavillings against
the _Journey_ in newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive pieces.”[31]
These, as Boswell tells us, “only furnished Johnson with sport.”
Nevertheless, though they did not trouble his mind, they marred the
fame of his book, and prejudiced not only the immediate, but even the
traditional judgment of Scotland. Enough dirt was thrown, and some of
it did stick and sticks still. Lies were sent wandering through the
land, and some of them have not even yet found their everlasting rest.
One disgusting story, not unworthy of the inventive genius of Ossian
himself, is still a solace to Scots of the baser sort. That it is a lie
can be plainly proved, for it rests on a supposed constant suspicion in
Johnson of the food provided for him. Now we know from his own writings
that only twice in his tour had he “found any reason to complain of a
Scottish table.”[32] Moreover, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale and in
Boswell’s _Journal_, we can follow his course with great accuracy and
minuteness. Had there been any foundation for this lie it must be found
on the road between Inverness and the seashore. Now we know what meals
he had at each station. Even in the miserable inn at Glenelg, where
his accommodation was at its worst, if he had chosen he could have had
mutton chops and freshly-killed poultry. Finding both too tough, he
supped on a lemon and a piece of bread.
[Sidenote: M’NICOL’S SCURRILOUS VOLUME.]
The attacks of the angry critics, published as they were in fugitive
pieces, might have been forgotten had they not been revived three
or four years later in “a scurrilous volume,” as Boswell justly
describes it, “larger than Johnson’s own, filled with malignant abuse
under a name real or fictitious of some low man in an obscure corner
of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman,
who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and
England.”[33] The “low man” was the Rev. Donald M’Nicol, and the
“obscure corner” that long and pleasant island of Lismore which
the steamers skirt every summer day as they pass with their load
of tourists between Oban and the entrance of the Caledonian Canal.
M’Nicol’s predecessor in the manse was the Rev. John Macaulay, whose
famous grandson, Lord Macaulay, was to rebuke those “foolish and
ignorant Scotchmen, who moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth
which was mingled with much eulogy in the _Journey to the Western
Islands_, assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of
their country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than
anything that he had ever said or written.”[34] When Johnson was shown
M’Nicol’s book he said: “This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t
know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book
against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me
with pamphlets.” The book, however, seems to have been widely read,
and in the year 1817 was reprinted at Glasgow in a fine large type. A
Scotch gentleman recently told me that he fears that to many of his
countrymen Johnson’s tour is only known through M’Nicol’s attack.
[Sidenote: OSSIAN MACPHERSON.]
It was Macpherson at whom Boswell aimed a blow when he wrote of the
“other Scotchman whose work it was supposed to be.” If Ossian had
no hand in it himself, it was certainly written by someone fired
with all his hatred of the man who had branded him as a forger.
Johnson is described as “a man of some reputation for letters, whose
master-passion was hatred of Scotland. When the _Poems of Ossian_ were
published, and became the delight and admiration of the learned over
all Europe, his cynical disposition instantly took the alarm.”[35] It
was from this time that “we may date the origin of his intended tour
to Scotland.” It was from malice that he started so late in the year—a
malice, by the way, which nearly brought him to a watery grave. “It
was not beauties he went to find out in Scotland, but defects; and for
the northern situation of the Hebrides the advanced time of the year
suited his purpose best.”[36] Johnson, with a discretion which other
travellers in like circumstances would do well to imitate, had passed
over Edinburgh with the remark that it is “a city too well known to
admit description.” This wise reticence is twisted into a proof of
malevolence. So, too, is the brevity with which he mentions Dundee.
“We stopped awhile at Dundee,” he recorded, “where I remember nothing
remarkable.”[37] Surely this is a very innocent sentence. Even Boswell,
whose record was generally far fuller, dismisses this place with three
words. “We saw Dundee,” he says.[38] But M’Nicol at once discovered the
miserable jealousy of the Englishman. “He passes very rapidly through
the town of Dundee, for fear, I suppose, of being obliged to take
notice of its increasing trade.”[39] How delicately Johnson treated
this town in his published narrative is shown by his description of it
in his private letter to Mrs. Thrale. To her he had written: “We came
to Dundee, a dirty despicable town.”[40] Much as M’Nicol belaboured
Johnson, he could not refrain from claiming him as of Scotch origin.
“We are much deceived by fame,” he wrote, “if a very near ancestor of
his, who was a native of that country, did not find to his cost that
a tree was not quite such a rarity in his days.”[41] This mysterious
hero of the gallows was no doubt no Johnson at all, but a Johnston—of
Ardnamurchan, probably, or of Glencroe.[42]
M’Nicol is ingenious in his treatment of the great Ossian controversy.
“The poems,” he says, “must be the production either of Ossian or Mr.
Macpherson. Dr. Johnson does not vouchsafe to tell us who else was the
author, and consequently the national claim remains perfectly entire.
The moment Mr. Macpherson ceases to be admitted as a translator, he
instantly acquires a title to the original.”[43] Granted that he was a
ruffian who had tried by menaces to hinder the detection of a cheat.
What of that? He was a great original ruffian, and his cheat was a work
of great original genius. So that Caledonia, if she had one forger
the more, had not one poet the less. She made up in genius what she
lost in character. But this Dr. Johnson failed to see, being, poor man,
“naturally pompous and vain, and ridiculously ambitious of an exclusive
reputation in letters.” It must have been this same pomposity, vanity,
and ambition which led him to say of these poems: “Sir, a man might
write such stuff for ever, if he would _abandon_ his mind to it.”[44]
[Illustration: GLENCROE.]
That Johnson’s narrative should have roused resentment is not
surprising. Even his friend Beattie, “much as he loved and revered
him,” yet found in it “some asperities that seem to be the effect of
national prejudice.”[45] That “this true-born Englishman,” as Boswell
delights to call him, should have given a wholly unprejudiced account
of any country not his own was an impossibility. As regards Scotland,
the position which he took certainly admitted of justification. “When I
find,” he said, “a Scotchman to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman,
that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me.”[46] Boswell, and
perhaps Boswell alone, exactly answered this requirement, and the
two men were fast friends. For many other Scotchmen, indeed, he had
strong feelings of regard, and even of friendship—for Andrew Millar
the bookseller, for William Strahan the printer, for Blair, Beattie,
John Campbell, Hailes, and Robertson, among authors, and for his poor
assistants in the great work of his Dictionary, who all came from
across the Tweed. There was no want of individual affection, no John
Bull disinclination that had to be overcome in the case of each fresh
acquaintance which he made. His “was a prejudice of the head and not
of the heart.”[47] He held that the Scotch, with that clannishness
which is found in almost equal strength in the outlying parts of the
whole island, in Cornwall and in Cumberland, achieved for themselves in
England “a success which rather exceeded the due proportion of their
real merit.”[48] Jesting with a friend from Ireland, who feared “he
might treat the people of that country more unfavourably than he had
done the Scotch,” he answered, “Sir, you have no reason to be afraid
of me. The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false
representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir: the Irish
are a _fair people_;—they never speak well of one another.”[49] To
Boswell he began a letter, not meant, of course, for the public eye, by
saying: “Knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to tell
lies in favour of each other.”[50] When he came to write his _Journey_,
he was led neither by timidity nor false delicacy to conceal what he
thought. He attacks that “national combination so invidious that their
friends cannot defend it,” which is one of the means whereby Scotchmen
“find, or make their way to employment, riches, and distinction.”[51]
He upbraids that “vigilance of jealousy which never goes to sleep,”[52]
which sometimes led them to cross the borders of boastfulness and pass
into falsehood, when Caledonia was their subject and Englishmen their
audience. “A Scotchman,” he writes, “must be a very sturdy moralist
who does not love Scotland better than truth; he will always love it
better than inquiry.”[53] Even in his talk when among Scotchmen he was
inclined “to expatiate rather too strongly upon the benefits derived to
their country from the Union.”[54] “‘We have taught you,’ said he, ‘and
we’ll do the same in time to all barbarous nations, to the Cherokees,
and at last to the Ouran-Outangs,’ laughing with as much glee as if
Monboddo had been present. BOSWELL. ‘We had wine before the Union.’
JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir; you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which
would not make you drunk.’ BOSWELL. ‘I assure you, Sir, there was a
great deal of drunkenness.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir; there were people who
died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get drunk.’”[55]
[Sidenote: ATTACKS ON THE HIGHLANDERS.]
Such pleasantry as this could hardly have given offence to anyone
into whose skull a jest could penetrate by any operation short of a
surgical one. But it was a very different matter when the spoken jest
passed into a serious expression of opinion in print. All the theoretic
philosophy of which Scotland justly boasts was hardly sufficient to
support with patience such a passage as the following: “Till the
Union made the Scots acquainted with English manners the culture of
their lands was unskilful, and their domestic life unformed; their
tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy
as the cottages of Hottentots.”[56] His attacks on the Highlanders
would have been read with patience, if not with pleasure, in Lowland
circles. “His account of the Isles,” wrote Beattie, “is, I dare say,
very just. I never was there.”[57] These were not the “asperities” of
which that amiable poet complained. Yet they were asperities which
might have provoked an incensed Highlander to give the author “a
crack on his skull,” had he looked not to the general tenour of the
narrative, but to a few rough passages scattered up and down. M’Nicol
would surely have roused the anger of his countrymen to a fiercer
heat had he forborne to falsify Johnson’s words, and strung together
instead a row of his sarcastic sayings. The offensive passages are
not indeed numerous, but out of such a collection as the following
irritation enough might have been provided: “the genuine improvidence
of savages;”[58] “a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance;”[59] “the
chiefs gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious
landlords;”[60] “the animating rabble”[61] by which of old a chief was
attended; “the rude speech of a barbarous people;”[62] “the laxity of
their conversation, by which the inquirer, by a kind of intellectual
retrogradation, knows less as he hears more;”[63] “the Caledonian
bigotry” which helps “an inaccurate auditor” to believe in the
genuineness of Ossian.[64]
To the sarcasms which had their foundation in Johnson’s dislike of
Presbyterianism Lowlanders and Highlanders were equally exposed. On
Knox and “the ruffians of reformation”[65] he has no mercy. It is true
that he maintains that “we read with as little emotion the violence of
Knox and his followers as the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths.”[66]
But how deeply he was moved Boswell shows, where he describes him among
the ruins of the once glorious magnificence of St. Andrews. “I happened
to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, ‘I hope in
the high-way. I have been looking at his reformations.’”[67] The sight
of the ruined houses of prayer in Skye drew from him the assertion that
“the malignant influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency
together.”[68] In another passage he describes the ancient “epidemical
enthusiasm compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity,
which, in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts, was
long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young.”[69]
Even for this inveterate ill a cure had at length been found. “By trade
and intercourse with England it is visibly abating.”
[Sidenote: THE TOUR TO THE WESTERN ISLES.]
By the passages in which he described the bareness of the eastern
coast the most irritation was caused. The very hedges were of stone,
and not a tree was to be seen that was not younger than himself. “A
tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice.”[70] For this
he was handled as roughly as Joseph’s brethren. He was little better
than a spy who had come to see the nakedness of the land. The Scotchmen
of that day could not know, as we know now, that “he treated Scotland
no worse than he did even his best friends, whose characters he used
to give as they appeared to him both in light and shade. ‘He was
fond of discrimination,’ said Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘which he could
not show without pointing out the bad as well as the good in every
character.’”[71] If in his narrative he has not spared the shade, every
fair-minded reader must allow that he has not been sparing of the
light. John Wesley, who had often travelled over the same ground as far
as Inverness, on May 18, 1776, recorded in his Journal at Aberdeen:
“I read over Dr. Johnson’s _Tour to the Western Isles_. It is a very
curious book, wrote with admirable sense, and, I think, great fidelity;
although in some respects he is thought to bear hard on the nation,
which I am satisfied he never intended.”[72]
[Sidenote: JOHNSON’S COMPLIMENTS TO THE SCOTCH.]
That Johnson was not careless of the good opinion of the Scotch is
shown by his eagerness to learn what Boswell had to tell him about
the book. “Let me know as fast as you read it how you like it; and
let me know if any mistake is committed, or anything important left
out.”[73] A week later he wrote: “I long to hear how you like the
book; it is, I think, much liked here.” The modesty of the closing
passage of his narrative should have done something towards disarming
criticism. “Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may
have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature that
are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation.
Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be
conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of
one who has seen but little.”[74] The compliment which he paid to the
society of the capital must surely have won some hearts. “I passed
some days in Edinburgh,” he wrote, “with men of learning whose names
want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance,
which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise.”[75] He never lets slip
an opportunity of gracefully acknowledging civilities and acts of
kindness, or of celebrating worth and learning. As he closed his
book, so he had opened it with a well-turned compliment. It was, he
said, Boswell’s “acuteness and gaiety of conversation and civility of
manners which induced him to undertake the journey.”[76] He praises
the kindness with which he was gratified by the professors of St.
Andrews, and “the elegance of lettered hospitality” with which he was
entertained.[77] At Aberdeen the same grateful heart is seen. Among
the professors he found one whom he had known twenty years earlier in
London. “Such unexpected renewals of acquaintance may be numbered among
the most pleasing incidents of life. The knowledge of one professor
soon procured me the notice of the rest, and I did not want any token
of regard.”[78] He had the freedom of the city conferred upon him. In
acknowledging the honour he compliments the town at the expense of
England, by mentioning a circumstance which, he says, “I am afraid I
should not have had to say of any city south of the Tweed; I found no
petty officer bowing for a fee.”[79] With Lord Monboddo he was never
on friendly terms. “I knew that they did not love each other,” writes
Boswell, with a studied softness of expression. Yet Johnson in his
narrative praises “the magnetism of his conversation.”[80] With Lord
Auchinleck he had that violent altercation which the unfortunate piety
of the son forbade the biographer to exhibit for the entertainment of
the public. Nevertheless, he only mentions his antagonist to compliment
him.[81] If he attacked Presbyterianism, yet to the Presbyterian
ministers in the Hebrides he was unsparing of his praise. He celebrates
their learning, which was the more admirable as they were men “who had
no motive to study but generous curiosity or desire of usefulness.”[82]
However much he differed from “the learned Mr. Macqueen” about Ossian,
yet he admits that “his knowledge and politeness give him a title
equally to kindness and respect.”[83] With the aged minister of Col he
had a wrangle over Bayle, and Clarke, and Leibnitz. “Had he been softer
with this venerable old man,” writes Boswell, “we might have had more
conversation.”[84] This rebuke Johnson read in Boswell’s manuscript.
The amends which he makes is surely ample. He describes the minister’s
“look of venerable dignity, excelling what I remember in any other man.
I lost some of his goodwill by treating a heretical writer with more
regard than in his opinion a heretic could deserve. I honoured his
orthodoxy, and did not much censure his asperity. A man who has settled
his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his conviction
disturbed; and at seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.”[85]
[Illustration: [A]]
[A] See Appendix. [Transcriber’s note: The illustration is of the
letter which is transcribed in Appendix A.]
[Sidenote: JOHNSON NO GRUMBLER.]
The people he praises no less than their ministers. “Civility,” he
says, “seems part of the national character of Highlanders. Every
chieftain is a monarch, and politeness, the natural product of royal
government, is diffused from the Laird through the whole clan.”[86]
He describes the daughter of the man who kept the hut in Glenmorison,
where he passed a night. “Her conversation like her appearance was
gentle and pleasing. We knew that the girls of the Highlanders are all
gentlewomen, and treated her with great respect, which she received
as customary and due.”[87] He praises the general hospitality.
“Wherever there is a house the stranger finds a welcome. If his good
fortune brings him to the residence of a gentleman he will be glad
of a storm to prolong his stay.”[88] How graceful is the compliment
which he pays to Macleod of Rasay! “Rasay has little that can detain
a traveller except the Laird and his family; but their power wants no
auxiliaries. Such a seat of hospitality amidst the winds and waters
fills the imagination with a delightful contrariety of images. Without
is the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the
howling storm; within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the
song and the dance. In Rasay if I could have found a Ulysses I had
fancied a Phæacia.”[89] To the other branch of the Macleods he is no
less complimentary. “At Dunvegan I had tasted lotus,” he wrote, “and
was in danger of forgetting that I was ever to depart.”[90] He met
Flora Macdonald, and does not let the occasion pass to pay her a high
compliment. “Hers is a name that will be mentioned in history, and,
if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.”[91] In
fact, he rarely introduces in his narrative any living person but in
way of compliment or acknowledgment. “He speaks ill of nobody but
Ossian,” said Lord Mansfield, Scotchman though he was.[92] “There
has been of late,” he once said, “a strange turn in travellers to be
displeased.”[93] There was no such turn in him. From the beginning to
the end of his narrative, there is not a single grumble. In Mull last
summer I had the pleasure of meeting an old general, a Highlander, who
had seen a great deal of rough service in the East Indies. Someone
in the company let drop an unfavourable remark on Johnson. “I lately
read his _Journey_,” the general replied, “and when I thought of his
age, his weak health, and the rudeness of the accommodation in those
old days, I was astonished at finding that he never complained.”
In his food he had a relish for what was nice and delicate. Yet
he records that “he only twice found any reason to complain of a
Scottish table. He that shall complain of his fare in the Hebrides has
improved his delicacy more than his manhood.”[94] “If an epicure,”
he says in another passage, “could remove by a wish in quest of
sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in
Scotland.”[95] Boswell, we read, “was made uneasy and almost fretful”
by their bad accommodation in the miserable inn at Glenelg. “Dr.
Johnson was calm. I said he was so from vanity. JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir,
it is from philosophy.’”[96] The same philosophy accompanied him not
only through his journey, but through his letters and his narrative.
Nearly five weeks after he had left Edinburgh he wrote to Mrs. Thrale:
“The hill Rattiken and the inn at Glenelg were the only things of
which we or travellers yet more delicate could find any pretensions to
complain.”[97] Yet he was by no means free from bodily troubles, as his
letters show. He was “miserably deaf,” he wrote at one time, and was
still suffering from the remains of inflammation in the eye, he wrote
at another time. His nerves seemed to be growing weaker. The climate,
he thought, “perhaps not within his degree of healthy latitude.”[98]
The climate, indeed, had been at its worst. In all September he had
only one day and a half of fair weather, and in October perhaps not
more.[99] Kept indoors as he was by the rain, he often suffered under
the additional discomfort of bad accommodation. Two nights he passed
in wretched huts; one in a barn; two in the miserable cabin of a small
trading-ship; one in a room where the floor was mire. Even in some of
the better houses he had not always a chamber to himself at night,
while in the daytime privacy and quiet were not to be enjoyed. At
Corrichatachin, where he twice made a stay, “we had,” writes Boswell,
“no rooms that we could command; for the good people had no notion that
a man could have any occasion but for a mere sleeping place; so, during
the day, the bed-chambers were common to all the house. Servants eat in
Dr. Johnson’s, and mine was a kind of general rendezvous of all under
the roof, children and dogs not excepted.”[100]
He not only passes over in silence the weariness and discomforts of
his tour, but he understates the risks which he ran. On that dark and
stormy October night, when the frail vessel in which he had embarked
was driven far out of its course to Col, he was in great danger.
“‘Thank God, we are safe!’ cried the young Laird, as at last they spied
the harbour of Lochiern.”[101] This scene of peril, of which Boswell
gives a spirited description, is dismissed by Johnson in his letter to
Mrs. Thrale in a few words: “A violent gust, which Bos. had a great
mind to call a tempest, forced us into Col, an obscure island.”[102] In
his narrative, if he makes a little more of it, he does so, it seems,
only for the sake of paying a compliment to the seamanship of Maclean
of Col.[103] It was this stormy night, especially, that was in Sir
Walter Scott’s mind when he described “the whole expedition as being
highly perilous, considering the season of the year, the precarious
chance of getting seaworthy boats, and the ignorance of the Hebrideans,
who are very careless and unskilful sailors.”[104]
If votive offerings have been made to the God of storms by those who
have escaped the perils of the deep, surely some tall column might well
be raised on the entrance to Lochiern by the gratitude of the readers
of the immortal _Life_. Had the ship been overwhelmed, not only the
hero, but his biographer, would have perished. One more great man would
have been added to the sad long list of those of whom the poet sang:
“Omnes illacrimabiles
Urguentur, ignotique longa
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.”
“In endless night they sleep unwept, unknown,
No bard had they to make all time their own.”[105]
By the men of Johnson’s time the journey was looked upon as one of
real adventure. When Boswell visited Voltaire at Ferney, and mentioned
their design of taking this tour, “he looked at him as if he had
talked of going to the North Pole, and said, ‘You do not insist on
my accompanying you?’ ‘No, Sir.’ ‘Then I am very willing you should
go.’”[106] Dr. Percy, of the _Reliques_, wrote from Alnwick Castle that
a gentleman who had lately returned from the Hebrides, had told him
that the two travellers were detained prisoners in Skye, their return
having been intercepted by the torrents. “Sir Alexander Macdonald and
his lady,” Percy adds, “at whose house our friend Johnson is a captive,
had made their escape before the floods cut off their retreat; so that
possibly we may not see our friend till next summer releases him.”[107]
A Glasgow newspaper gave much the same report, but attributed his delay
to the danger of crossing in the late autumn “such a stormy surge in a
small boat.”[108] On the Island of Col they were indeed storm-bound for
eleven days. “On the travellers’ return to Edinburgh,” writes Boswell,
“everybody had accosted us with some studied compliment. Dr. Johnson
said, ‘I am really ashamed of the congratulations which we receive. We
are addressed as if we had made a voyage to Nova Zembla, and suffered
five persecutions in Japan.’”[109] Dr. Robertson “had advanced to him
repeating a line of Virgil, which I forget,” Boswell adds. “I suppose
either,
_Post varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,_[110]
or
—_multum ille et terris jactatus et alto._[111]
Johnson afterwards remarked that to see a man come up with a formal
air and a Latin line, when we had no fatigue and no danger, was
provoking.” Of exaggeration he had always a strong hatred, and would
not allow it in his own case any more than in another’s. He had
undergone great fatigue, and he had been in real danger, but of both
he made light. [Sidenote: JOHNSON’S DELIGHT IN HIS TOUR.] It was in
high spirits that he returned home after his tour of a hundred days.
“I came home last night,” he wrote to Boswell, “and am ready to begin
a new journey.”[112] He had fulfilled his long-cherished wish, and no
wonder his spirits were high. His father, the old Lichfield bookseller,
had put into his hands when he was very young Martin’s _Description
of the Western Islands_, and had thus roused his youthful fancy.[113]
His longing to visit the wild scenes of which he had read in his
childhood would in all likelihood have remained ungratified, had it
not been for Boswell. He had known that lively young gentleman but a
very few weeks, when, over supper “in a private room at the Turk’s
Head Coffee-house in the Strand,” he promised to accompany him to the
Hebrides.[114] Ten years elapsed before the promise was fulfilled. “I
cannot but laugh,” he said at Armidale in Skye, “to think of myself
roving among the Hebrides at sixty.[115] I wonder where I shall rove
at four-score.”[116] To Mrs. Thrale soon after his birthday he wrote:
“You remember the Doge of Genoa, who being asked what struck him most
at the French Court, answered, ‘Myself.’ I cannot think many things
here more likely to affect the fancy, than to see Johnson ending his
sixty-fourth year in the wilderness of the Hebrides.”[117] “Little
did I once think,” he wrote another day, “of seeing this region of
obscurity, and little did you once expect a salutation from this
verge of European life. I have now the pleasure of going where nobody
goes, and seeing what nobody sees.”[118] So close to this verge did
Mrs. Thrale suppose he was, that she thought that he was in sight of
Iceland.[119] She and his friends of the Mitre or the Literary Club
would have been astonished could they have seen him that night in Col
when “he strutted about the room with a broad-sword and target,” and
that other night when Boswell “put a large blue bonnet on the top of
his bushy grey wig.”[120]
[Illustration: ARMIDALE.]
The motives which led him on his adventurous journey were not those
which every summer and autumn bring travellers in swarms, not only
from England, but from the mainland of Europe, from across the wide
Atlantic, from India, from Southern Africa, from Australia and New
Zealand to these Highlands of poetry and romance. “I got,” he said, “an
acquisition of more ideas by my tour than by anything that I remember.
I saw quite a different system of life.”[121] It was life, not scenery,
which he went to study. On his return to the south of Scotland he was
asked “how he liked the Highlands. The question seemed to irritate him,
for he answered, ‘How, Sir, can you ask me what obliges me to speak
unfavourably of a country where I have been hospitably entertained?
Who _can_ like the Highlands? I like the inhabitants very well.’”[122]
The love of wild scenery was in truth only beginning as his life was
drawing to its close. “It is but of late,” wrote Pennant in 1772, “that
the North Britons became sensible of the beauties of their country;
but their search is at present amply rewarded. Very lately a cataract
of uncommon height was discovered on the Bruar.”[123] Fifteen years
later Burns, in his _Humble Petition of Bruar Water_, shows that the
discovery had been followed up:
“Here haply too at vernal dawn
Some musing Bard may stray,
And eye the smoking dewy lawn
And misty mountain grey.”
[Sidenote: THE DISCOVERY OF STAFFA.]
But in the year 1773 Johnson could say without much, if indeed any
exaggeration, that “to the southern inhabitants of Scotland the state
of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of
Borneo and Sumatra; of both they have only heard a little and guess
the rest.”[124] Staffa had been just discovered by Sir Joseph Banks.
It seems almost passing belief, but yet it is strictly true, that
Staffa—Staffa, as one of the wonders of creation—was unknown till
the eve of Johnson’s visit to the Hebrides. The neighbouring islanders
of course had seen it, but had seen it without curiosity or emotion.
They were like the impassive Frenchman who lived in Paris throughout
the whole of the Reign of Terror, and did not notice that anything
remarkable went on. It was on August 12, 1772, a day which should for
ever be famous in the annals of discovery, that Banks coming to anchor
in the Sound of Mull, “was asked ashore” by Mr. Macleane of Drumnen.
At his house he met with one Mr. Leach, an English gentleman, who told
him that at the distance of about nine leagues lay an island, unvisited
even by the Highlanders, with pillars on it like those of the Giant’s
Causeway.[125]
[Illustration: STAFFA
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
No yachtsman as yet threaded his way through the almost countless
islets of our western seas; the only sails as yet reflected on the
unruffled surface of the land-locked firths were the fisher’s and
the trader’s. For the sea as yet love was neither felt nor affected.
There was no gladness in its dark-blue waters. Fifteen years were to
pass before Byron was born—the first of our poets, it has been said,
who sang the delights of sailing. A ship was still “a jail, with the
chance of being drowned.”[126] No Southerner went to the Highlands to
hunt, or shoot, or fish. No one sought there a purer air. It was after
Johnson’s tour that an English writer urged the citizens of Edinburgh
to plant trees in the neighbourhood of their town because “the increase
of vegetation would purify the air, and dispel those putrid and noxious
vapours which are frequently wafted from the Highlands.”[127] It was
on an early day of August, in a finer season than had been known
for years, that Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, complained that neither
temperance nor exercise could preserve him in any tolerable health
in the unfriendly climate of Loch Lomond.[128] Of all the changes
which have come over our country, perhaps none was more unforeseen
than the growth of this passion for the Highlands and the Hebrides.
Could Johnson have learnt from some one gifted with prophetic power
that there were passages in his narrative which would move the men
of the coming century to scoff, it was not his references to scenery
which would have roused his suspicion. I have heard a Scotchman laugh
uproariously over his description of a mountain as “a considerable
protuberance.” He did not know however where the passage came, and he
admitted that, absurd as it was, it was not quite so ridiculous when
taken with the context. “Another mountain,” said Boswell, “I called
immense. ‘No,’ replied Johnson, ‘it is no more than a considerable
protuberance.’”[129] It was his hatred of exaggeration and love of
accurate language which provoked the correction—the same hatred and
the same love which led him at college to check his comrades if they
called a thing “prodigious.”[130] But to us, nursed as we have been and
our fathers before us in a romantic school, the language of Johnson and
of his contemporaries about the wild scenes of nature never fails to
rouse our astonishment and our mirth. Were they to come back to earth,
I do not know but that at our extravagancies of admiration and style,
our affectations in the tawdry art of “word-painting,” and at our
preference of barren mountains to the meadow-lands, and corn-fields,
and woods, and orchards, and quiet streams of southern England, their
strong and manly common sense might not fairly raise a still heartier
laugh.
[Sidenote: MOUNTAIN SCENERY.]
The ordinary reader is apt to attribute to an insensibility to beauty
in Johnson what, to a great extent, was common to most of the men of
his time. It is true that for the beauties of nature, whether wild
or tame, his perception was by no means quick. Nevertheless, we find
his indifference to barren scenery largely shared in by men of poetic
temperament. Even Gray, who looked with a poet’s eye on the crags and
cliffs and torrents by which his path wound along as he went up to the
Grande Chartreuse, yet, early in September, when the heather would be
all in bloom, writes of crossing in Perthshire “a wide and dismal heath
fit for an assembly of witches.”[131] Wherever he wandered he loved to
find the traces of men. It was not desolation, but the earth as the
beautiful home of man that moved him and his fellows. _Mentem mortalia
tangunt._ He found the Apennines not so horrid as the Alps, because
not only the valleys but even the mountains themselves were many of
them cultivated within a little of their very tops.[132] The fifth
Earl of Carlisle, a poet though not a Gray, in August, 1768, hurried
faster even than the post across the Tyrol from Verona to Mannheim,
“because there was nothing but rest that was worth stopping one moment
for.” The sameness of the scenery was wearisome to his lordship, “large
rocky mountains, covered with fir-trees; a rapid river in the valley;
the road made like a shelf on the side of the hill.” He rejoiced
when he took his leave of the Alps, and came upon “fields very well
cultivated, valleys with rich verdure, and little woods which almost
persuaded him he was in England.”[133]
[Illustration: LOCH NESS, NEAR FOYERS.]
There is a passage in Camden’s description of Argyleshire in which we
find feelings expressed which for the next two centuries were very
generally entertained. “Along the shore,” he writes, “the country
is more unpleasant in sight, what with rocks and what with blackish
barren mountains.”[134] One hundred and fifty years after this was
written, an Englishman, describing in 1740 the beautiful road which
runs along the south-eastern shore of Loch Ness, calls the rugged
mountains “those hideous productions of nature.”[135] He pictures to
himself the terror which would come upon the Southerner who “should be
brought blindfold into some narrow rocky hollow, inclosed with these
horrid prospects, and there should have his bandage taken off. He would
be ready to die with fear, as thinking it impossible he should ever
get out to return to his native country.”[136] This account was very
likely read by Johnson, for it was published in London only nineteen
years before he made his tour. In the narrative of a Volunteer in the
Duke of Cumberland’s army, we find the same gloom cast by mountain
scenery on the spirits of Englishmen. The soldiers who were encamped
near Loch Ness fell sick daily in their minds as well as in their
bodies from nothing but the sadness produced by the sight of the black
barren mountains covered with snow, with streams of water rolling down
them. To divert their melancholy, which threatened to develop even into
hypochondriacal madness, races were held. It was with great joy that
the volunteer at last “turned his back upon these hideous mountains and
the noisy ding of the great falls of waters.”[137]
Even the dales of Cumberland struck strangers with awe. Six months
before Wordsworth was born, Gray wandered up Borrowdale to the point
where now the long train of tourist-laden coaches day after day in
summer turns to the right towards Honister Pass and Buttermere. “All
farther access,” he wrote, “is here barred to prying mortals, only
there is a little path winding over the Fells, and for some weeks in
the year passable to the Dale’s-men; but the mountains know well that
these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient
kingdom, the reign of Chaos and Old Night.”[138]
A few days after Johnson had arrived in Scotland, Mason, the poet,
visited Keswick. Many of the woods which had charmed his friend Gray
had been since cut down, and a dry season had reduced the cascade to
scanty rills. “With the frightful and surprising only,” he wrote, “I
cannot be pleased.”[139] He and his companion climbed to the summit
of Skiddaw, where, just as if they were on the top of the Matterhorn,
they found that “respiration seemed to be performed with a kind of
asthmatic oppression.”[140] To John Wesley, a traveller such as few men
have ever been, wild scenery was no more pleasing than to the man who
wandered for the first time. Those “horrid mountains” he twice calls
the fine ranges of hills in the North Riding of Yorkshire, whose waters
feed the Swale and the Tees, though it was in summer-time that he was
travelling.[141] To Pennant Glencroe was “the seat of melancholy.”[142]
Beattie, Burns’s “sweet harmonious Beattie,” finds the same sadness
in the mountains:
[Sidenote: THE MELANCHOLY HIGHLANDS.]
“The Highlands of Scotland” (he writes) “are a picturesque, but
in general a melancholy country. Long tracts of mountainous
desert, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by
misty weather; narrow valleys, thinly inhabited and bounded
by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents; a soil
so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to
admit neither the amusements of pasturage nor the labours of
agriculture; the mournful dashing of waves along the friths and
lakes that intersect the country; the portentous noises which
every change of the wind, and every increase and diminution of
the waters, is apt to raise in a lonely region full of echoes,
and rocks, and caverns; the grotesque and ghastly appearance
of such a landscape by the light of the moon—objects like
these diffuse a gloom over the fancy which may be compatible
enough with occasional and social merriment, but cannot fail to
tincture the thoughts of a native in the hour of silence and
solitude.”[143]
[Illustration: LOCH NESS
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
The French writer, Faujas de Saint Fond, who visited the Highlands
about the year 1780, was touched with the same unromantic gloom.
When on his way from the barren mountains of the north he reached
the fertile southern shore of Loch Tay, and caught the first glimpse
of the change to happier climes, his soul experienced as sweet a
joy as is given by the first breath of spring. He had escaped from
a land where winter seemed eternally to reign, where all was wild,
and barren, and sad.[144] Even Macleod of Macleod, the proprietor of
nine inhabited isles and of islands uninhabited almost beyond number,
who held four times as much land as the Duke of Bedford, even that
“mighty monarch,” as Johnson called him,[145] looked upon life in his
castle at Dunvegan as “confinement in a remote corner of the world,”
and upon the Western Islands as “dreary regions.”[146] Slight, then,
must have been the shock which Johnson gave even to the poets among
his fellows, when on “a delightful day” in April, he set Fleet Street
with its “cheerful scene” above Tempé, and far above Mull.[147] To the
men of his time rocks would have “towered in horrid nakedness,”[148]
and “wandering in Skye” would have seemed “a toilsome drudgery.”[149]
Nature there would have looked “naked,” and these poverty-stricken
regions “malignant.”[150] Few would have been “the allurements of
these islands,” for “desolation and penury” would have given as
“little pleasure” to them as it did to him.[151] In Glencroe they
would have found “a black and dreary region,”[152] and in Mull “a
gloomy desolation.”[153] Everywhere “they would have been repelled by
the wide extent of hopeless sterility,”[154] and everywhere fatigued
by the want of “variety in universal barrenness.”[155] In the midst
of such scenes, as the autumn day was darkening to its close, they
would have allowed that, “when there is a guide whose conduct may be
trusted, a mind not naturally too much disposed to fear, may preserve
some degree of cheerfulness; but what,” they would have asked, “must
be the solicitude of him who should be wandering among the crags
and hollows benighted, ignorant, and alone?”[156] Upon the islets
on Loch Lomond they would have longed “to employ all the arts of
embellishment,” so that these little spots should no longer “court the
gazer at a distance, but disgust him at his approach, when he finds
instead of soft lawns and shady thickets nothing more than uncultivated
ruggedness.”[157] Everywhere they would have regretted the want of the
arts and civilization and refinements of modern life.
[Sidenote: INDIFFERENCE TO SCENERY.]
Had Johnson been treated more kindly by the weather, doubtless the
gloom of the landscape would have been less reflected upon his pages.
Fifty-eight days of rain to three days of clear skies would have been
sufficient to depress even the wildest worshipper of rude nature. In
the eleven days in which he was kept prisoner by storms in Col, he had
“no succession of sunshine to rain, or of calms to tempests; wind and
rain were the only weather.”[158] When the sun did shine he lets us
catch a little of its cheerful light. His first day’s Highland journey
took him along the shore of Loch Ness in weather that was bright,
though not hot. “The way was very pleasant; on the left were high
and steep rocks, shaded with birch, and covered with fern or heath.
On the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating their bank,
and waving their surface by a gentle undulation.”[159] The morrow was
equally fine. How prettily he has described his rest in the valley on
the bank, where he first thought of writing the story of his tour,
“with a clear rivulet streaming at his feet. The day was calm, the
air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude.”[160] Very
different would have been the tale which he told had he travelled in
the days of fast and commodious steamboats, good roads and carriages,
comfortable inns, post-offices, telegraphs, and shops. He would not
have seen a different system of life, or got an acquisition of ideas,
but he might have found patience, and even promptings for descriptions
of the beauties of rugged nature. “In an age when every London
citizen makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben
Nevis,”[161] the old man may easily be mocked, for his indifference to
scenery. But the elderly traveller of our times, who whirled along “in
a well-appointed four-horse coach,” indicates the beauties of nature
to his companions, and utters exclamations of delight, as from time
to time he takes his cigar from his lips, might have felt as little
enthusiasm as Johnson, had he had, like him, to cross Skye and Mull on
horseback, by paths so narrow that each rider had to go singly, and so
craggy that constant care was required.
[Illustration: LOCH LOMOND.]
The scenery in which he took most delight was the park-lands of
southern and midland England.
“Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride,
And brighter streams than fam’d Hydaspes glide.
There all around the gentlest breezes stray,
There gentle music melts on every spray;
Creation’s mildest charms are there combin’d,
Extremes are only in the master’s mind.”[162]
“Sweet Auburn” would have been dearer to him than all the wilds of the
Highlands. But Auburn scenery he did not find even in the Lowlands. Had
Goldsmith passed his life in Ayrshire or even in “pleasant Teviotdale,”
the _Deserted Village_ would never have been written. Burns had never
seen an Auburn, nor even that simpler rural beauty which was so dear to
Wordsworth. No “lovely cottage in the guardian nook” had “stirred him
deeply.” He knew nothing of the sacredness of
“The roses to the porch which they entwine.”[163]
In Scotland was seen the reverse of the picture in which Goldsmith had
painted Italy.
“In florid beauty groves and fields appear,
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.”[164]
[Sidenote: POVERTY OF LANDSCAPE.]
In Scotland man was nourished to the most stubborn strength of
character, but beauty was the growth that dwindled. In the hard
struggle for bare living, and in the gloom of a religion which gave
strength but crushed loveliness, no man thought of adorning his home as
if it had been his bride. Wordsworth compared the manses in Scotland
with the parsonages, even the poor parsonages in England, and said that
neither they nor their gardens and grounds had the same “attractive
appearance.”[165] The English country-house, with its lawns, its
gardens, and its groves, which adds such a singular charm to our
landscape, had not its counterpart on the other side of the border.
Elderly men could still recall the day when the approach to the laird’s
dwelling led past the stable and the cow-house, when the dunghill
was heaped up close to the hall-door, and when, instead of lawns and
beds of flowers, all around grew a plentiful crop of nettles, docks,
and hemlocks.[166] Some improvement had been already made. A taste
had happily begun for “neat houses and ornamental fields,” and to the
hopeful patriot there was “the pleasing prospect that Scotland might in
a century or sooner compare with England, not indeed in magnificence of
country-seats, but in sweetness and variety of concordant parts.”[167]
Even at that time it supplied England with its best gardeners,[168] and
nevertheless it was a country singularly bare of gardens. “Pray, now,
are you ever able to bring the _sloe_ to perfection?” asked Johnson
of Boswell.[169] So far was nature from being adorned that she had
been everywhere stripped naked. Woods had been cut down, not even had
groups of trees been spared, no solitary oak or elm with its grateful
shade stood in the middle of the field or in the hedge-row; hedge-rows
there were none. The pleasantness of the prospect had been everywhere
sacrificed to the productiveness of the field. The beautiful English
landscape was gone. “The striking characteristic in the views of
Scotland,” said an observant traveller, “is a poverty of landscape from
a want of objects, particularly of wood. Park scenery is little known.
The lawn, the clump, and the winding walk are rarely found.”[170] As he
crossed the border he might have said with Johnson: “It is only seeing
a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the
naked stalk.”[171] “Every part of the country,” wrote Goldsmith from
Edinburgh in his student days, “presents the same dismal landscape. No
grove nor brook lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the
inhabitants forget their poverty.”[172] There was none of “the bloomy
flush of life.” The whole country was open, and resembled one vast
common with a few scattered improvements.[173] Along the western road
from Longworth to Dumfries it exhibited “a picture of dreary solitude,
of smoky hovels, naked, ill-cultivated fields, lean cattle and a
dejected people, without manufactures, trade or shipping.”[174]
The eastern coast, along which Johnson travelled, was singularly bare
of trees. He had not, he said, passed five on the road fit for the
carpenter.[175] The first forest trees of full growth which he saw
were in the north of Aberdeenshire.[176] “This is a day of novelties,”
he said on the morrow. “I have seen old trees in Scotland, and I have
heard the English clergy treated with disrespect.”[177] Topham, while
attacking his _Journey to the Western Isles_, yet admitted that it was
only in the parks of a few noblemen that oaks were found fifty years
old.[178] Lord Jeffrey maintained so late as 1833 that within a circle
of twenty miles from Watford there was more old timber than in all
Scotland.[179] Burns, in his _Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the
Duke of Athole_, testifies to the want of trees:—
“Would then my noble master please
To grant my highest wishes,
He’ll shade my banks wi’ tow’ring trees,
And bonnie spreading bushes.”
There were, of course, noble trees scattered throughout the country.
Gray describes “the four chestnuts of vast bulk and height in Lord
Breadalbane’s park,”[180] and Pennant, “the venerable oaks, the vast
chestnuts, the ash trees, and others of ancient growth, that gave
solemnity to the scene at Finlarig Castle.”[181] A love of planting,
which began about the time of the Union, was gradually extending. Defoe
noticed the young groves round the gentlemen’s houses in the Lothians,
and foretold, that in a few years Scotland would not need to send to
Norway for timber and deal.[182] The reviewer of Pennant’s _Tour_ in
the _Scots Magazine_ for January, 1772, rejoiced to find that the
spirit of planting was so generally diffused, and looked forward to the
advantages arising from it, which would be enjoyed by posterity.[183]
Sir Walter Scott defended Johnson against the abuse which had unjustly
been cast on him. The east coast, if the young plantations were
excepted, was as destitute of wood as he had described it.[184] Nay, to
his sarcasms he greatly ascribed that love of planting which had almost
become a passion.[185] It was not for nothing, then, that Johnson had
joked over the loss of his walking-stick in Mull, and had refused to
believe that any man in that island who had got it would part with it.
“Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber there.”[186]
[Sidenote: BACKWARDNESS OF FARMING.]
The modern traveller who, as he passes through the Lothians or
Aberdeenshire, looks with admiration on farming in its perfection,
would learn with astonishment how backward Scotch agriculture was
little more than one hundred years ago. While in England men of high
rank and strong minds were ambitious of shining in the characters
of farmers, in Scotland it was looked upon as a pursuit far beneath
the attention of a gentleman. Neither by the learned had it been
made a study.[187] There were those who attributed this general
backwardness to the soil and climate; but it was due, said Lord Kames,
“to the indolence of the landholders, the obstinate indocility of the
peasantry, and the stupid attachment of both classes to ancient habits
and practices.”[188] The liberal intercourse between the two countries,
which was an unexpected result of the Rebellion of 1745, greatly
quickened the rate of improvement.