Part 4

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]

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]

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]

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]