• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws: An Historico-Economical Enquiry by John Stuart Blackie, F.R.S.E. Emeritus Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh London: Chapman and Hall Limited 1885 CHAPTER I. The Scottish Highlanders. “The Highlands of Scotland,” said that grand specimen of the Celto-Scandinavian race, the late Dr. Norman Macleod, “ like many greater things in the world, may be said to be well known, and yet unknown.”1 The Highlands indeed is a peculiar country, and the Highlanders, like the ancient Jews, a peculiar people; and like the Jews also in certain quarters a despised people, though we owe our religion to the Hebrews, and not the least part of our national glory arid European prestige to the Celts of the Scottish Highlands. This ignorance and misprision arose from several causes; primarily, and at first principally, from the remoteness of the situation in days when distances were not counted by steam, and when the country, now perhaps the most accessible of any mountainous district in Europe, was, like most parts of modern Greece, traversed only by rough pony-paths over the protruding bare bones of the mountain. In Dr. Johnson’s day, to have penetrated the Argyllshire Highlands as far west as the sacred settlement of St. Columba was accounted a notable adventure scarcely less worthy of record than the perilous passage of our great Scottish traveller Bruce from the Red Sea through the great Nubian Desert to the Nile; and the account of his visit to those unknown regions remains to this day a monument of his sturdy Saxon energy, likely to be read with increasing interest by a great army of summer perambulators long after his famous dictionary shall have been forgotten, or relegated as a curiosity to the back shelves of a philological library. The opening up of the sublimities and beauties of this most picturesque region we owe in the first place to the greatest of Scottish literary men. Sir Walter Scott, and in the second place to David Hutchison, and the enterprise with which he opened up the most remote lochs of the inner Highlands to the mercurial traffic of the steam-boats. But, though Scott has done much and steam more to make the Bens and glens of Caledonia familiar and fashionable to thousands to whom Skye and Harris would otherwise have remained as unknown as the frontiers of the Black and the Blue Nile, they could not prevail to make these flitting troops of summer pleasure-hunters do John Stuart Blackie, The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws, 4 more than take a hasty note of the most salient features of the physical landscape. The people and the soul of the people remained as formerly, either altogether unknown, or known only from the unfavourable or the ridiculous side. Of the host of “plodding antiquaries, crazy sentimentalists, silly view-hunters, and impudent stone doctors,”2 who from time to time favoured the public with stray notices of Highland life and manners, not one had the sense to understand that to know anything of a people beyond a scratch on the skin, you must take the trouble to study their language, and to identify yourself sympathetically with the fervid current of popular song and patriotic tradition, which, as the Laureate says of poets’ thoughts generally, makes rich the blood of the people. Jean Paul Richter, after Goethe perhaps the greatest of the great Germans of the last century, says somewhere in his usual striking style that the key to a mother’s heart is in her children, the key to a people’s heart in their language. In neglect of this great truth, the lords of uncounted leagues of Highland glens were brought up in systematic ignorance of the language of the people from the sweat of whose brow they drew their rents; nay, even the daughters of thoroughly Celtic clergymen, instead of cultivating the native Muse, so strongly marked with significant characteristics, allowed themselves to be seduced into a servile imitation of what was foreign and fashionable, rather than to grow up in the loving exercise of what was native and natural. A pseudo-gentility and a shallow affectation of Anglicism usurped the throne of the unstudied grace and the unsophisticated manhood that belonged to the soil; and, with eyes foolishly wandering over the earth, people bought gorgeous show flowers at an immense expense, while they cast scarcely a passing glance on the lovely blooms that were springing at their feet. And, if those who ought to have guided public taste in the social centres of our Highland glens shared so frequently this lamentable want of self-esteem, we shall be less disposed to wonder when we find even grave historians like John Burton blotting his fair page with shallow sneers and sharp sarcasms at a people whose noble character he either could not or would not comprehend. Add to all this the natural insolence which characterizes the judgment of dominant majorities — an insolence which leads them to ignore, to under-rate, and to over ride the minorities, whom on principles of Christian love and of social policy they ought rather to cherish, to encourage, and to elevate. Thus the Englishman is apt generally John Stuart Blackie, The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws, 5 to ignore and to depreciate the Scot, and the Scot in the same way is fond to look down upon the Celt. This flows from a fault of human nature, which it were in vain to quarrel with here; we only refer to it in passing as one among other obvious explanations of the fact that the Highlanders of Scotland are so often unkindly thought of and unworthily talked of by persons who derive much pleasure and no little profit from the interesting country in which they dwell. In discussing the subject of this chapter I will arrange what I have to say under two sections. First I will endeavour shortly to put before the reader the leading characteristics of this people, so long as they were allowed to grow up freely out of their own roots, and to wave their branches in the breezy atmosphere of the clan life in the glens, forming for many centuries a world of their own, full of natural self-formative forces, and unaffected by uncongenial influences intruded from without. Then I will endeavour to unfold the steps of the process by which this people, during the course of the last century and a half, chiefly since the date of the Stuart rising in 1745, have been submitted to the operation of powerful external forces tending to weaken their stamina, lower their tone, smooth away their most distinctive features, and render them less and less distinguishable from the foreign masses by which they are overborne or into which they have been absorbed. As a race the Scottish Highlanders are historically identical with the Irish, whose language they speak, and closely connected with the Cymric Celts of Wales, Cornwall, and Bretagne, and with the Gauls, who, though at an early period receiving laws and language from Rome, and a dynasty of kings from Germany, still retained the blood and the nerve and the temperament which gives its peculiar type to all the branches of the Celtic race. Of this type, as contrasted with the solid weight and stout endurance of the Saxon, great vivacity and excitability, with that emotional fervour which assumes the form of eloquence in the forum and of dash in the field, have always been the most prominent features; elements of character which, under bad treatment, as in Ireland, may readily assume a fierceness and ferocity of aspect degrading to humanity, but which, when wisely controlled and sweetly seasoned, have produced examples of loyal fidelity, of self-denying devotion to a great cause, and of self-disregarding courage in the hour of danger, unsurpassed in the annals of Greek or Roman fame. John Stuart Blackie, The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws, 6 So far also as a race may be improved by a liberal admixture of foreign blood, history shows plainly enough how the Scottish Highlanders have had the benefit of this powerful inoculation; for not only did Norman blood, Norman vigour, and Norman culture assert their influence sporadically in far north districts of the Highlands, but the strong arm of the Norse kings, commanding the Western seas from Orkney to the Isle of Man during four centuries, left a Scandinavian stamp on the population of which the virtue yet remains visible in the manly stature, kingly aspect, and effective brawn of some of our best-conditioned Highland volunteers. For though, no doubt, after the defeat of Haco at the battle of Largs, the superimposed Scandinavian element yielded in the matter of language to the revived vitality of the Celt, exactly in the same way that the Slavonic invaders of Greece in the middle ages after a few centuries became transmuted into Greeks, speaking a language inherited from Homer and Demosthenes, the foreign forces which had been acting on the social system of the Celt continuously for four hundred years could not be obliterated by a single naval disaster; as indeed even at the present day the names of places in Skye and the Western Hebrides bear large testimony to the strength of the Scandinavian population that must have had a permanent settlement in those parts. But be this as it may, of this there can be no doubt, that of all the great branches of the Celtic race that drifted westward from the original seat of the Aryan race in the high Persian table-land, the Scottish Highlanders, whether from admixture of Scandinavian blood, or from the inherent virtue of the race, grown strong by the stimulus of a healthy air and the exercise of a hardy life, presented a type of physical manhood equalled only by Roman senators and Venetian doges in their best days.

Load more

  191

Copy Link