Quaint Highlanders and the Mythic North: the Representation Of

Quaint Highlanders Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth Scotland’s myths and the cultural formations which carried centuries, the period covered here, Scotland underwent them are complex. great social, economic and cultural change. It was a time and the Mythic North: when painting came to be accorded tremendous significance, THE MYTH OF SCOTLAND both as a record of humanity’s highest achievements and as The term myth, in this context, is taken to mean a widely The Representation of a vehicle for the expression of elemental truths. In Britain accepted interpretative traditional story embodying in the nineteenth century the middle classes assigned great fundamental beliefs. Every country has its myths. They arise Scotland in Nineteenth significance to the art they bought in increasing quantities; via judicious appropriations from the popular history of the indeed, painting became their preferred instrument for country and function as a contemporary force endorsing the promotion of their vision of a prosperous modern belief or conduct in the present. They explain and interpret Century Painting society. Art was valued insofar as it expressed their highest the world as it is found, and both assert values and extol aspirations and deepest convictions, and it was a crucial identity. Here, in addition, the concept embodies something instrument in the task of moulding a society of people of the overtones of the moral teaching of a parable. who shared these values regardless of their class, gender or John Morrison wealth. If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting A myth is a highly selective memory of the past used to functioned to corroborate the narratives people used to stimulate collective purpose in the present. With no collective help validate their lives; if further it was closely linked to purpose, there can be no national identity and therefore middle-class ideologies, then we are likely to find that the no nationalism. Myths are central to the very existence of social and political power of the middle classes made art nationalism. The word “myth” implies fabrication, but to a barometer of Scottish society as a whole.2 have evolved at all a myth must have some connection to reality. It must reflect aspects of the realities of life and be That society, for much of the nineteenth century, was seen to do so, or it simply will not survive. That is not to concerned either with what it meant to be Scottish, or imply that myths are at some basic level objectively true. with asserting that distinctive Scottishness. Throughout Rather they must be conceived by those to whom they relate the nineteenth century and arguably until after 1914, as expressing a broader allegorical truth about themselves expressions of Scottish national identity, Scottish and their identity. The objective truth or otherwise of a myth “nationalism,” concentrated on those aspects of life is irrelevant and myths are not subject to destruction by which gave the country its unity: the land, the people, the dispassionate proof that they are false. What people believe history, and most importantly the country’s “myths.”3 It is is real, is real in its consequences. Given that a myth exists, in representations of these subjects, which were repeatedly its perpetuation relies on it being continually reiterated. It painted in the period, that an expression of contemporary must become embedded in one or more cultural carriers. ideas of national identity can be found. The nature of To borrow Raymond Williams’s breakdown of the cultural Quaint Highlanders and the Mythic North: The Representation of Scotland The Idea of North: Myth-Making and Identities ISBN: 978-952-94-1658-5 48 in Nineteenth Century Painting, John Morrison Helsinki: The Birch and the Star, 2019 www.birchandstar.org process, “traditions,” endure through incorporation into bonds of kinship and of community, as being classless and the “institutions” and “formations” of a country.4 To fiercely loyal. These characteristics spawned numerous apply this to Scottish culture we must consider the myth of depictions of noble Highlanders operating to a different Scotland and its cultural carriers.5 In the nineteenth century, code from modern, evolving Lowland Scottish society. as Kate Flint has observed, painting in particular fulfilled Paintings depicting this “different” culture or depicting the role of carrier of myth. “Art,” she observes, “had the simply the Highland landscape as does My Heart’s in the function of confirming the narratives which (people) used Highlands (fig. 1), are prime carriers of the Scottish myth. to make sense of their lives.”6 This myth stressed that Scotland was an ancient land with The myth of the land was particularly powerful. A myth continuing traditions, that it still possessed a distinctive of nature “acts economically: it abolishes the complexity social system and that it had a unique and valuable of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essence, […] contribution to make to the constructed state of Great myth does not deny things, on the contrary its function is to Britain. This manufactured identity read the Highlands talk about them, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it as an unchanging society and, from a highly selective gives them natural and eternal justification.”7 The Romantic reading of the culture of the north and west of Scotland, landscapes of Horatio McCulloch (1805–1867) reflect purported to identify a medieval system of tribal affiliations, the dominant narrative in Scotland and it is a myth of the manrent and feudalism. This became Scotland’s defining North. As Peter Womack observed of Scotland’s defining national characteristic. Some liberal opinion objected but northern myth: this northern identity held sway for a century and still resonates today. Fig 1. 1. Horatio McCulloch, My Heart’s in the Highlands, 1860, oil on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm, Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery & Museum, We know that the Highlands of Scotland are Kelvingrove. Romantic. Bens and glens, the loan shieling in THE ROMANTIC HIGHLANDS the misty island, purple heather, kilted clansmen, Against this reading Horatio McCulloch is seen not only battles long ago, an ancient and beautiful language, as the creator of archetypal Scottish landscapes but as the claymores and bagpipes and Bonny Prince Charlie – producer of images embodying the essential qualities of the we know all that, and we also know that it is not real.8 nation itself. During his lifetime McCulloch was hailed as “strictly a national painter,” a master of the “bold bluff Though not by any means unchallenged, this visual of a craggy steep.”10 Allusions to the culture of the North expression of Scottish identity was very powerful in the and the supposed inherent emotional, war-like tendencies period under discussion. The Highlands of the north of of the people, are seen in the castle in the middle distance. Scotland were understood, from their representation by It is not simply the link between the human culture and Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century onwards, as the land that is important. The presence of the deer in the the home of a different type of culture and it was to that left foreground is not negligible. It deliberately alludes to culture, or rather to a very particular fantasy view of that the Highlands as a place of wilderness, “unspoiled” by culture, that Scotland pinned its identity.9 The Highlands human impact. A place where one might encounter nature as a landscape were understood as wild, empty, desolate in the raw. It offers up the region as a retreat from modern and with a terrible beauty. The people who inhabited the human society. region lived in a society presented as being founded on Quaint Highlanders and the Mythic North: The Representation of Scotland 49 in Nineteenth Century Painting, John Morrison Artists who supplied the huge demand for images of “the The painted image of the North which derived from Scott mountain and the flood” knew only this sentimental elegiac bore little relationship to reality. The iconographic content vision of the Highlands initially promoted by Walter Scott of the paintings was only superficially Highland and to and burgeoning throughout the nineteenth century.11 Scott’s residents of the region would often have appeared cruelly The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published in 1805. From mocking rather than celebratory. The paintings frequently then onwards his vision of the Highlands as a land out misinterpreted images, misrepresented people and places of time, a wild rugged landscape, home to an ancient and ignored awkward truths. Images of wild landscapes culture, was hugely popular. In 1822 King George IV with windswept sheep and deer became stock Scottish visited Scotland, the first reigning British monarch to do so scenery but only for those unaware of the reality. This in almost two centuries. Scott was placed in charge of the mythic Highlandism was a paradigm to serve the needs ceremonial aspects of the jaunt. His orchestration of George of a Scottish nationalism that was bound to the British IV’s sojourn in Edinburgh sealed the northern identity for the union. It was a construct, not a likeness. In depictions of country. After it, the majority of Scots embraced the notion the people, representations of noble, simple unsophisticated, of a dual identity. They were content to be both Scottish incorruptible warriors inhabiting a simple, unsophisticated, and British. To these sentiments Scott’s pageant grafted a untainted environment abound. John Pettie’s A Highland myth of Scotland as a unified, northern, Highland culture, Outpost (fig. 2) is standard fare in this regard. with a heroic past and a history of extravagant loyalty. While the visit was taking place, the fully fifteen percent In all its guises a country’s myth defines identity for those of the population that visited Edinburgh to participate or who live in it.

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