Part 9

_Ossian_ fascinated some of the greatest men of the time. These Celtic poems, in the words of Matthew Arnold, passed 'like a flood of lava through Europe.' In the deliberate judgement of this acute critic, they revealed 'the very soul of the Celtic genius, and have the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.'[44] There can at least be no doubt that they gave a new and powerful impulse to the appreciation of the wilder aspects of nature, and did much to prepare the way for that love of mountain-scenery which has been one of the characteristic developments of the nineteenth century. It is not that in Ossian Highland landscape was deliberately described, but it formed a continually visible and changing background. The prevalent character of the whole range of scenery in the region, and the general impression made by it on the eye and mind, were so vividly conveyed that no one familiar with the country can fail to recognise how faithfully the innermost soul of the West Highlands is rendered.

Never before or since have the endless changes of sky and atmosphere been more powerfully portrayed. In the tempestuous climate of the west of Scotland these changes succeed each other with a rapidity and energy such as the dweller on the southern lowlands can hardly realise. They are faithfully, if somewhat monotonously, reflected in _Ossian_. All through the poems the air seems ever astir around us. Sometimes it is only a gently-breathing zephyr which

'Chases round and round The hoary beard of thistle old, Dark-moving over grassy mounds.'[45]

We mark the graves of dead heroes by

'Their long grass waving in the wind,'

and we move onwards 'in the robe of the misty glen' past

'Branches and brown tufts of grass Which tremble and whistle in the breeze.'

But when the full Atlantic gale sweeps over the land, and the rain-clouds rush in swift procession across the half-hidden hills, the moaning and shrieking of the storm come like sounds from another world. We seem to hear the tread, and almost to see the forms, of the ghosts of the Ossianic heroes,

'Chasing spectre-boars of mist On wings of great winds on the cairn. When bursts the cloud in Cona of the glens, A thousand spirits wildly shriek On the waste wind that sweeps around the cairn.'

Nor is the turmoil of the tempest on the sea less vividly depicted. We are shown the

'Waves surging onward in mist, When their crests are seen in foam Over smoke and haze widespread.'

In the midst of the gloom we descry a shore-stack against which the ocean

'Dashes the force of billows cold; White spray is high around its throat, And cairns resound on the heathery steep.'

With these pictures of tumult on land and sea, there come glimpses of those cherished interludes of bright sunshine, when the western hills and firths are seen at their loveliest. But whether radiant or gloomy the landscape is in unison with the human emotion described--

'Pleasing the tale of the time which has gone; Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild, On the brake and knoll of roes, When slowly rises the sun On the silent flank of hoary Bens-- The loch, unruffled, far away, Calm and blue on the floor of the glens.'[46]

As a final sample of the Ossianic landscape, with its kaleidoscopic play of atmospheric effect, answering to the changes of human feeling, let me cite some lines from _Fingal_:--

'Morna, most lovely among women, Why by thyself in the circle of stones, In hollow of the rock on the hill alone? Rivers are sounding around thee; The aged tree is moaning in the wind; Turmoil is on yonder loch; Clouds darken round the tops of Cairns [mountains]; Thyself art like snow on the hill-- Thy waving hair like mist of Cromla, Curling upward on the Ben, 'Neath gleaming of the sun from the west; Thy soft bosom like the white rock On bank of Brano of white streams.'[47]

Though Macpherson roused the interest of the world in the rugged scenery and boisterous climates of the west, it was some time before any other writer followed his lead among the highlands of this country. It is singular to reflect that though the mountain-world, more than any other part of the land, appeals to the imagination, by revealing all that is most impressive in form and colour, and all that is most vigorous in the elemental warfare of nature, it was the last part of the terrestrial surface to meet with due appreciation. Little more than a century has passed since men began to visit the Scottish Highlands for the pleasure of admiring their scenery. Previous to the suppression of the Jacobite rising, that mountainous region was regarded as the abode of a half-savage race, into whose wilds few lowlanders would venture without the most urgent reasons. Even after military roads had been made across it, the accommodation for travellers was still generally of the most wretched kind. Those who had occasion to traverse it gave such an account of their experiences as one would hardly now expect to receive from the heart of Africa.[48] The poet Gray during his visit to Scotland in the year 1765, made a brief excursion into the Perthshire Highlands, and, in spite of the discomforts of travel at that time, came away with a vivid impression of the grandeur and beauty of the scenery. But the only record that remains of this impression is to be found in a few sentences in his letters.[49]

Eight years after Gray's visit, Samuel Johnson in 1773 made his more adventurous journey to the Hebrides. When we consider what were the discomforts, and sometimes the actual dangers which he had to undergo, we cannot but admire the quiet courage with which he endured them, and the reticence with which he refers to them in his narrative. But Johnson could see no charm in the Highland mountains. In his poem on London he had asked many years before:

'For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?'

Yet when at last he set foot in Scotland, he showed no disposition to prefer its rocks to his haunts in London. Travelling through some of the finest scenery in Western Inverness-shire, this is the language he uses regarding it: 'The hills exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only by one sullen power of useless vegetation.'[50]

While such was the attitude of the man of letters in this country, influences were at work on the Continent which powerfully affected the relations of literature to the whole realm of outer nature, and more especially to mountain-scenery. Rousseau's descriptions, followed by the more detailed and scientific narrative of De Saussure, drew the attention of society to the fascinations of Switzerland and the Alps. But these influences had hardly had time to exert much sway in their application to the scenery of our own country when the genius of Scott suddenly brought the features of the Scottish Highlands into the most popular literature of his day. In his youth the future poet and novelist had paid some visits to the glens and lakes of Perthshire, where he found many a primitive custom still remaining, which has since vanished before roads, railways, and tourists. In the year 1810 his _Lady of the Lake_ appeared. Thenceforward the stream of summer visitors set in, which has poured in an ever-increasing flood into the Highlands of Scotland. The general interest thus awakened in the glens and mountains of the north was still further intensified by the advent of the _Lord of the Isles_, and of _Waverley_, _Rob Roy_, and the other novels that depict scenes in the Highlands. Certainly no man ever did so much as Walter Scott to make the natural features of his native country familiar to the whole world. The literary charm which he threw over the hills and glens of Perthshire kindled a wide-spread enthusiasm for the more rugged aspects of nature, and gave a powerful stimulus to the slowly-growing appreciation of the beauty and grandeur of mountain-scenery.

Nevertheless it must be admitted that Scott's highland landscapes, though more prominent and detailed than those in his descriptions of the lowlands and uplands, were also more laboured and less spontaneous. His pictures are no doubt faithful and graphic, and each of them leaves on the mind a clear impression of the scene depicted. But their effect is produced rather by a multiplicity of touches than by a few masterstrokes of poetic insight and graphic delineation. Moreover they are all in one tone of colour, and lack that changeful diversity so characteristic of mountains. They are chiefly fine-weather portraits, as if the poet loved only summer sunshine among the hills, and had either never seen or cared not to portray their gloom, cloud, and storm. We are bound of course to remember that, after all, he was only an occasional visitor to the Highlands. He had not been born among them, and never lived long enough in their solitudes to become intimately versed in all their alternations of mood under changes of sky and season. He writes of them as an admiring and even enthusiastic spectator, but not as one into whose very soul the power of the mountains had entered. He never warms among them into that fervent glow of affectionate appreciation which kindles within him in sight of the landscapes of his native Border.

One other mountainous district in Britain--that of the English Lakes--claims our attention for its influence on the progress of the national literature. Of all the isolated tracts of higher ground in these islands, that of the Lake District is the most eminently highland in character. It is divisible into two entirely distinct portions by a line drawn in a north-easterly direction from Duddon Sands to Shap Fells. South of that line the hills are comparatively low and featureless, though they enclose the largest of the lakes. They are there built up of ancient sedimentary strata, like those that form so much of the similar scenery in the uplands of Wales and the South of Scotland. But to the north of the line, most of the rocks are of a different nature, and have given rise to a totally distinct character of landscape. They consist of various volcanic materials which in early Palaeozoic time were piled up around submarine vents, and accumulated over the sea-floor to a thickness of many thousand feet. They were subsequently buried under the sediments that lie to the south, but, in after ages uplifted into land, their now diversified topography has been carved out of them by the meteoric agents of denudation. Thus pike and fell, crag and scar, mere and dale, owe their several forms to the varied degrees of resistance to the general waste offered by the ancient lavas and ashes. The upheaval of the district seems to have produced a dome-shaped elevation, culminating in a summit that lay somewhere between Helvellyn and Grasmere. At least from that centre the several dales diverge, like the ribs from the top of a half-opened umbrella.

The mountainous tract of the Lakes, though it measures only some thirty-two miles from west to east by twenty-three from north to south, rises to heights of more than 3,000 feet, and as it springs almost directly from the margin of the Irish Sea, it loses none of the full effect of its elevation. Its fells present a thoroughly highland type of scenery, and have much of the dignity of far loftier mountains. Their sky-line often displays notched crests and rocky peaks, while their craggy sides have been carved into dark cliff-girt recesses, often filled with tarns, and into precipitous scars, which send long trails of purple scree down the grassy slopes.

Moreover, a mild climate and copious rainfall have tempered this natural asperity of surface by spreading over the lower parts of the fells and the bottoms of the dales a greener mantle than is to be seen among the mountains further north. Though the naked rock abundantly shows itself, it has been so widely draped with herbage and woodland as to combine the luxuriance of the lowlands with the near neighbourhood of bare cliff and craggy scar.

Such was the scenery amidst which William Wordsworth was born and spent most of his long life. Thence he drew the inspiration which did so much to quicken the English poetry of the nineteenth century, and which has given to his dales and hills so cherished a place in our literature. The scenes familiar to him from infancy were loved by him to the end with an ardent and grateful affection which he never wearied of publishing to the world. No mountain-landscapes had ever before been drawn so fully, so accurately, and in such felicitous language. Every lineament of his hills and dales is depicted as luminously and faithfully in his verse as it is reflected on the placid surface of his beloved meres, but suffused by him with an ethereal glow of human sympathy. He drew from his mountain-landscape everything that

'Can give an inward help, can purify And elevate, and harmonize and soothe.'

It brought to him 'authentic tidings of invisible things'; and filled him with

'The sense Of majesty and beauty and repose, A blended holiness of earth and sky.'

For his obligations to that native scenery he found continual expression.

'Ye mountains and ye lakes, And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds That dwell among the hills where I was born, If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires-- The gift is yours.'

Not only did his observant eye catch each variety of form, each passing tint of colour on his hills and valleys, he felt, as no poet before his time had done, the might and majesty of the forces by which, in the mountain-world, we are shown how the surface of the world is continually modified.

'To him was given Full many a glimpse of Nature's processes Upon the exalted hills.'

The thought of these glimpses led to one of the noblest outbursts in the whole range of his poetry, where he gives way to the exuberance of his delight in feeling himself, to use Byron's expression, 'a portion of the tempest'--

'To roam at large among unpeopled glens And mountainous retirements, only trod By devious footsteps; regions consecrate To oldest time; and reckless of the storm, ... while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, ... and while the streams Descending from the region of the clouds, And starting from the hollows of the earth, More multitudinous every moment, rend Their way before them--what a joy to roam An equal among mightiest energies!'

In this passage Wordsworth seems to have had what he would have called 'a foretaste, a dim earnest' of that marvellous enlargement of the charm and interest of scenery due to the progress of modern science. When he speaks of 'regions consecrate to oldest time,' he has a vague feeling that somehow his glens and mountains belonged to a hoary antiquity, such as could be claimed by none of the verdant plains around. Had he written half a century later he would have enjoyed a clearer perception of the vastness of that antiquity and of the long succession of events with which it was crowded.[51]

It is curious to remember that three of the poets whom I have singled out as illustrations of the influence of our lowland, upland, and highland scenery upon our literature have held up the geologist to ridicule. Cowper put that votary of science into the pillory among the irreligious crowd, about whose ears the poet loved to 'crack the satiric thong.'[52] Wordsworth treated the geological enthusiast with withering scorn.[53] Scott, with characteristic good humour, only poked fun at him.[54] It was reserved for a poet of our own day to look below the technical jargon of the schools, and to descry something of this wealth of new interest which the landscape derives from a knowledge of the history of its several parts. But Tennyson only entered a little way into this enlarged conception of nature. There remains a boundless field for some future poetic seer, who letting his vision pierce into the past, will set before the eyes of men the inner meaning of mountain and glen.

And thus, while we recognise the potent influence which the scenery of the country has exerted on the progress of our literature, we can look forward to a fresh extension of this influence as the outcome of geological investigation. Already the result of this widening of the outlook has made itself felt alike in prose and verse. The terrestrial revolutions of which each hill and dale is a witness; the contrasts presented between the present aspect and past history of every crag and peak; the slow, silent sculpturing that has carved out all this marvellous array of mountain-forms--appeal vividly to the imagination, and furnish themes that well deserve poetic treatment. That they will be seized upon by some Wordsworth of the future, I cannot doubt. The bond between landscape and literature will thus be drawn closer than ever. Men will be taught that beneath and behind all the outward beauty of our lowlands, our uplands, and our highlands there lies an inner history which, when revealed, will give to that beauty a fuller significance and an added charm.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] _Types of Scenery and Their Influence on Literature_, the Romanes Lecture, delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, June 1, 1898.

[21] See the preceding essay for a fuller discussion of this part of the subject.

[22] See p. 24.

[23] _The Task_, bk. i. 154-176.

[24] _Ibid._, i. 177.

[25] _The Task_, iii. 357.

[26] _Ibid._, iv. 246.

[27] _Ibid._, vi. 112.

[28] _Winter_, 8.

[29] _Summer_, 192.

[30] _Ibid._, 89.

[31] _Autumn_, 476.

[32] _Spring_, 381, 400, 402; _Summer_, 13.

[33] _Autumn_, 337.

[34] _To William Simpson_, stanza 15.

[35] _Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson._

[36] _Poem on Pastoral Poetry._

[37] _Winter, a Dirge._

[38] _A Winter Night._

[39] _The gloomy night is gathering fast._

[40] _To Mary in Heaven._

[41] This was remarked by Wordsworth in the prefatory note to his lines on Mossgiel.

[42] _The Vision._

[43] Scott was familiar with this natural trait. '"That's the Forth," said the Bailie, with an air of reverence, which I have observed the Scotch usually pay to their distinguished rivers. The Clyde, the Tweed, the Forth, the Spey, are usually named by those who dwell on their banks with a sort of respect and pride, and I have known duels occasioned by any word of disparagement.'--_Rob Roy_, vol. ii., chap. xi.

[44] Arnold, _On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 1867, p. 152.

[45] The quotations here given are from Dr. Clerk's translation of Macpherson's Gaelic version of the Poems. The question has been much disputed whether his English or Gaelic is the original. There can be no doubt that, on the whole, the Gaelic shows greater vividness and accuracy in the description of landscape than the more vague and bombastic English of Macpherson. Dr. Clerk, who has given a literal rendering of the Gaelic line for line, remarks: 'I believe that a careful analysis would resolve very much of Ossian's most weird imagery into idealised representations of the ever-varying and truly wonderful aspects of cloud and mist, of sea and mountain, which may be seen by every observant eye in the Highlands, and it is no fancy to say that the perusal of these poems, as we have them, may be well illustrated by travelling a range of the Highland mountains.'--_Poems of Ossian_, Dissertation, vol. i. p. lxv.

[46] _Fingal_, iii. 3.

[47] _Fingal_, i. 211.

[48] In Burt's _Letters_, which give so graphic a picture of the condition of the Highlands of Scotland between the two risings of 1715 and 1745, the general impression made at that time on the mind of an intelligent stranger by the scenery of the region may be gathered from the following quotations: 'I shall soon conclude this description of the outward appearance of the mountains, which I am already tired of, as a disagreeable subject.... There is not much variety, but gloomy spaces, different rocks, heath, and high and low, ... the whole of a dismal gloomy brown drawing upon a dirty purple; and most of all disagreeable when the heath is in bloom. But of all the views, I think the most horrid is, to look at the hills from east to west, or _vice versa_; for then the eye penetrates far among them, and sees more particularly their stupendous bulk, frightful irregularity, and horrid gloom, made yet more sombrous by the shades and faint reflections they communicate one to another.'--_Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London._ Fifth edit., vol. i. p. 285.

[49] In writing to Mason he says: 'I am returned from Scotland charmed with my expedition: it is of the Highlands I speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen, that have not been among them, their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails. Then I had so beautiful an autumn; Italy could hardly produce a nobler scene, and this so sweetly contrasted with that perfection of nastiness and total want of accommodation, that Scotland only can supply.'--Gray's _Works_, edit. E. Gosse, vol. iii. p. 223.

[50] _Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland_, 1775, p. 84.

[51] Sedgwick did his best to enlighten the poet by his famous _Four Letters on the Geology of the Lake District_; but these came too late. They were published at Kendal in 1846, and Wordsworth died in 1850.

[52] Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn, That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

--_The Task_, bk. iii. 150.

[53]

You may trace him oft By scars which his activity has left Beside our roads and pathways, though, thank Heaven, This covert nook reports not of his hand-- He who with pocket-hammer smites the edge Of luckless rock or prominent stone, disguised In weather-stains or crusted o'er by Nature With her first growths, detaching by the stroke A chip or splinter--to resolve his doubts: And, with that ready answer satisfied, The substance classes by some barbarous name, And hurries on; or from the fragments picks His specimen, if but haply interveined With sparkling mineral, or should crystal cube Lurk in its cells--and thinks himself enriched, Wealthier, and doubtless wiser, than before!

_The Excursion_, bk. iii.

[54] _St. Ronan's Well_, chap. ii. The passage is quoted postea p. 166.

IV

The Origin of the Scenery of the British Islands[55]