Part 2
Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries, useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers. Idly retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish rights and sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen got up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen. This apart, however, most of our grievances may be comfortably digested by chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull’s own spirit of easy good-nature.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, And power to him who power exerts: Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet. And all that Nature made thine own, Floating in air, or pent in stone, Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea, And like thy shadow follow thee.
The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has been like to merge in England’s greater one, to which smart a plaster must be applied in the revived title of Britain. No school-book would sell north of the Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of England. Yet we cannot play the censor on the speech of our Continental neighbours, who denounce as England the power that has ruled the waves to their loss; and it is England which so many sons and dependents, in so wide regions of the world, speak of as “home.” In the London Library some vague hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish History a separate department; but one notes with concern how works on the Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England, while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this slight to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the English poets!
It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should come to be best known by the name of the prominent partner. One never could be expected to style Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in full, unless by way of formal address; had it been no more than Dodson and Fogg, one might make shift at an Austria-Hungary bracketing. Lord Bute is accused of prompting George III. to pride in being born a _Briton_; but the grievance seems more philosophically handled in a story of two Sandy tars at Trafalgar, one of whom found fault with Nelson’s famous signal: “‘England expects’--aye, but nothing about poor old Scotland!” was his grumble. “Hoots!” answered his comrade, “don’t they know that every Scotsman is sure to do his duty?”
I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland has got quite her share of practical benefit from the “sad and sorrowful Union,” and need not grudge to England the nominal advantages of size and wealth, which the latter sometimes appears to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So long as Scottish enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play on both sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost titles and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time’s dustbin. When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow subjects with our best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our dark record of feuds and slaughter and bigotry falls into its place in the background of a grander scene, and that instead of cherishing thistly independence as a romantic Norway or an austere Portugal, we merge our national life into the greater kingdom’s, which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to stand so high in the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison would fit better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah.
True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate unenlightened patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process defined by Herbert Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind, while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with the substance of its old discords.
Where is this reactionary _Particularismus_ to stop? There are parts of Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were independent of each other, some that still are as different from one another in blood and speech, as most of Scotland is from England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan awake its overlaid individuality? May not Galloway and Strathclyde set up for recognition of their ex-independence? Then why not encourage Strathbogie, the Cumbraes, the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of Gandercleugh, to lament upon the fate that has made them members of one greater body? Nay, now that the clans are broken up, could they not contrive to respin their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of national patriotism? Such _reductio ad absurdum_ is worth thinking about, when at this moment there are signs of relapse in the long convalescence from that Jacobite fever that “carried” hard heads as well as soft hearts, and set old grudges against the Union flaunting in plaid and philibeg.
I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many and serious. Of old, _Fibh_ had kings of its own, of such immemorial antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The dialect of Fife, mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old Scottish Church was at St. Andrews, where arose the first northern university, the local Saint Regulus being supplanted by that apostle who, according to scoffers, was chosen as Scotland’s patron because of the keen eye he showed on earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant days, several of the religious leaders--Knox, the Melvilles, the Erskines, John Glas, Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers--were all either natives of or sojourners in Fife. This
many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce. The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:
Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea, Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Cralia crofta, Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis, Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant Per costam, et scopulis lobster monifootus in udis Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis, _etc._
Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I quote? _Je vous le donne en cent._ The most hackneyed citation, it seems, ought nowadays to be labelled, for when in _Bonnie Scotland_ I aired a verse beginning, “Fairshon had a son who married Noah’s daughter,” a certain Caledonian newspaper critic was moved to applaud by calling for the author. Such be the proficient patriots who scunner at King Edward’s title as Seventh across the Tweed, and at other bawbeeworths of offence to Scottish nationality!
After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot. It seems claimable for Fife, then, that its county council be glorified as a parliament sitting by turns at Cupar, Dunfermline, and Kirkcaldy; or, at least, that in a revived Scottish parliament its representatives shall assert their old privilege of voting first, before that presumptuous Perthshire. The sovereign’s title raises some difficulty. Edward VII., of course, is out of the question. But it has to be admitted that Edward I. of England received the homage of Fife at Dunfermline, so his present Majesty might justly be styled Edward II. _qua_ King of Fife. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far Edward Baliol made his reign a _fait accompli_ in Fife, some precisians propose to meet the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half Edward. In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future, one or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as Fifers. The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but as misconception might arise from vulgar misuse, _Fifeian_ may be coined as an untarnished adjective, the old one to be applied to the less admirable or more commonplace features of the county, its distilleries, railway junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and achievements that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest empire in the world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in local acts, The Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and the rest of the British dominions, etc., etc.
For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated dignity, only for having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus exhibiting some title to be taken as hub of the universe. But in rambling over its hills and glens, I hope to let it show for itself the truth of Scott’s estimate, justified by his reference to other writers, such as might be quoted by the hundred, all in the same tale of due admiration.
It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that the most interesting district of every country, and that which exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion, clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed, Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.
II
TAYSIDE
I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive, garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself airs of classical authority.
The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. Its head-streams rise upon the borders of Argyll, but only after issuing from Loch Tay does it assume a name apparently derived from a Celtic word for quiet-flowing water, in other parts of the kingdom taking such forms as _Taw_ and _Tavy_. The Tay has its course of 120 miles almost entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on either side, and thus draining a basin of some 2400 square miles. At Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of Forfar and Fife. For further details, see any geographical work.
There now! no Aristarchus can find fault with that paragraph, in which I have not broken into a single anecdote or metaphor, though tempted to say _en passant_ that the basin of the Tay only needs flattening out to over-measure that of the Thames. But this formal style sits on me as uneasily as Saul’s armour upon David, so I leave it to rust in the works of reference; and as a stone for my scrip, snatch up a well-worn quotation already slung by a mightier hand:
“Behold the Tiber!” the vain Roman cried, Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie’s side; But where’s the Scot that would the vaunt repay And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?
Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up, beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:
In scorching sun, the Italian cries in vain: O, happy, happy Caledonian swain! Whose groves are ever cool, and mild the skies, Where breezes from the ocean ever rise.
This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed, stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone, below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.
Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might all merge into each other. Perhaps as a branch of dyeing sprang Todd’s Perth Office Ink, which I note to be now glorified as Moncrieff’s Ink, and long may it flow under that auspicious name! Another industry of Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low tide in the Tay traffic.
While ships were growing larger, the Tay estuary had been silting up and narrowing as its flat shores were reclaimed into the fertile Carse of Gowrie. This dry ground was won by _inches_, a name often met along Tayside, where what were once islands have become welded on to the shore. The Inches, _par excellence_, are the public parks above and below Perth; _the_ Inch being its North Inch, in which the Romans are fondly believed to have hailed their Campus Martius--_Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis Pergama_.
Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears the suggestive name of “Bloody Inches”; and the Perth Inches too have been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch is as site of Cromwell’s citadel, in the construction of which were used the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be taught from _Tales of a Grandfather_ that they represented hostile confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be identified with the Mackays of the north. But the Kay and the Chattan names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a hint of Loch_iel_, others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by a _tour de force_ of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed into luckier kindreds.
A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given piously profound study to
the subject, concludes that those adversaries were the sons of an Adam and a Dougal, clans known to have fought against each other in the wars of Bruce, which as likely as not means an old tribal feud. Adam, it seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like _Gooil_, or _Hooil_, which Lowland writers might make a shot at as _Quhele_, _Quhevil_, _Queill_, _Chewill_, and other forms in which it appears. Their rivals in certain books are called _Clachinyha_, which Dr. R. C. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same family in the records of one generation. Not only at home, indeed, are Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much impressed himself on the natives as a _santon_ that his tomb stood mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.
In Wyntoun’s Chronicle, the leaders’ names are anglicised as “Christy Johnson” (Gilchrist MacIan) and “Sir Farquhar’s son,” the latter elsewhere called Little Schea or Shaw. The Shaws hold themselves a branch of the Mackintoshes, who claim the headship of Clan Chattan, also claimed by the MacPhersons, “sons of a parson,” or at least of some one boasted by a certain bard as a “superior person.” The matter seems to have begun with an encounter in which the Sheriff of Angus was killed--a long way from the Cameron country--in quelling such a disturbance as often vexed the Highland line. The king sent the Earls of Dunbar and Crawford to do what justice could be done upon this outrage; and they have the credit of suggesting the settlement of an obstinate feud by picked bloodshed in the royal presence. Some writers have wasted ink on the feebleness of Robert III. as to blame for what strikes them as a revolting scene; but such a show of gladiatorship was as much in keeping with the manners of the age as a football match with ours; and to the king’s advisers it no doubt seemed excellent policy to let those wild cats cripple or punish each other in a holiday spectacle. As a matter of fact it is recorded that the border had peace from the caterans for long after this signal blood-letting. “The forwardest of both parties being slain,” says George Buchanan, “the promiscuous multitude, left without leaders, gave over their trade of sedition for many years after, and betook themselves to their husbandry again.”