Schottische

“ While Scotsmen are musing on what is deepest in man, the fires of devotion burn brightly and the soul utters itself in song, so that Scotland is not least among the nations in its repertoire of either poetry or music.
“Why are the Scotch so different from the English?” is a question often asked. In my view the roots of the difference are best discerned in a critical study of the Reformation. In Scotland this great movement of the human mind was far more consistent and radical than in England, and it therefore affected all classes more thoroughly. ”

“ I should understand every Scotch town having a statue of Burns, and another of Scott. These two geniuses personify Scotland; they remind the [Pg 165] Scotch that Scotland is a nation, with a literature of her own; they keep up patriotism in every heart. But what did Wellington do for Scotland? If, in 1840, for instance, the Scotch had asked the English to give them their national rights and their parliament, Wellington is probably the general who would have gone to reduce them to order. ”

“ In one of the most conspicuous points of Princes street stands that splendid triumph of architectural genius dedicated to the brightest mind in literature which Scotland claims.
A man dear to every lover of ancient song and story—one who has robed the mountains, valleys and streams of Scotland with immortal glory and universal renoun—Sir Walter Scott. We have spent many a pleasant hour studying the rugged and homely face of that figue which sits in the Centre with the Scottish plait thrown over his sholder and his favorite and famous stag-hound crouching at his feet. ”

“ Take the single kingdom of Scotland alone. Englishmen are carelessly wont to suppose there is such a thing as a Scotch temperament. Scotchmen know better. Even if we omit from the reckoning such remoter and more doubtful elements as Black Celts, and so forth, we may say, roughly speaking, that Scotland consists of six distinct nationalities—the English of the Lothians, the Welsh of Strathclyde, the Irish Scots of Argyllshire, the true Gaels of the Highlands, the Picts of the east coast, and the Scandinavians of Orkney, Caithness, and Sutherland. ”

“ Yet the foundation of Scotland’s prosperity was laid by John Knox and his successors. Hamerton,239 who wrote that charming book, “A Painter’s Camp in the Highlands,” said in one of his works that, in proportion to their small numbers, the Scots are the most distinguished little people since the days of the ancient Athenians, and the most educated of the modern races. “All the industrial arts are at home in Glasgow, all the fine arts in Edinburgh, and as for literature it is everywhere.” ”

“ But it is largely the shipping that goes and comes, fishing boats and coast pliers and the pleasure boats of the western isles.
You cannot come back from the far corners of the earth—to which Scotland has sent such majorities of her sons, since the old days when she squandered them in battle on the Border or on the Continent, to the new days when she squanders them in colonization so that half a dozen of her counties show decline in population—but you must come to Glasgow. The steamers are second-class compared with those which make port farther south. They are slower. ”

“ We must advert to a peculiarity of our Scottish countrymen, which can be set down only on the credit side of their character—their sympathy with each other when they meet as wanderers in foreign countries. Scotland is just a small enough country to cause a certain unity of feeling amongst the people. Wherever they are, they feel that Scotsmen should stand, as their proverb has it, shoulder to shoulder. ”

“ The great Scottish publishing firms have of late years shown a tendency to gravitate towards London; but more than one still keeps its headquarters here, beside some of the largest and best printing establishments in the kingdom. It must be confessed that what is spoken of as “the trade,” is whisky, too much consumed about the premises, as visitors are apt to note. The worst shame a Scotsman need take for Scotland is on account of what Englishmen specially distinguish as “Scotch.” ”

“ For I had only made one flying visit to Scotland before except as a sailor and then very briefly, seeing only the seamy sides of Glasgow and Dundee. But I had delightful remembrances of Scotsmen the world over, and especially in New Zealand; some of my most dearly loved shipmates had been Scotsmen and I flattered myself that I could pass as a Scotsman anywhere in any northern dialect except that of Glasgow, which I confess always bothered me. ”

“ But during the subsequent periods, though the connection between Scotland with her Celtic population and Lothian with her Anglic inhabitants was at first but slender, her monarchs identified themselves more and more with their Teutonic subjects, with whom the Celtic tribes maintained an ineffectual struggle, and gradually retreated before their increasing power and colonisation, till they became confined to the mountains and western islands. The name of Scot passed over to the English-speaking people, and their language became known as the Scotch ”

“ In the midst of his conversation he would every now and then throw in a Scottish word or phrase, as more tersely expressive of his meaning than anything he could find in English. He knew the West of Scotland better than most of his countrymen, for not only was he born and bred there, and passed most of his life in the midst of his ancestral possessions, but for many years he kept a yacht on which he peered into every bay and creek among the Western Isles. He had considerable artistic power, and was never happier than when sketching some scene that delighted him. ”

“ In education almost every classical school and colonial college in the South was established by these people. In character and abilities—trained and nourished by education, morals, and religion—the Scotch-Irish were excelled by no other people.
In our land—new birth of the ages—the names of the clans and of individuals who bear Caledonian names do not only call up scenes in Scotland’s history, but do forcibly emphasize our blessings of peace after long strife. One of the earliest Scottish stories I remember was of a Grant and a Macpherson, who met one day upon a log spanning a chasm. ”

“ The young lawyer was, indeed, unwittingly preparing for his mission to paint Scottish scenery so vividly, and Scottish character so charmingly, that he may almost be said to have created a new country which succeeding generations delight to visit. No man was ever a greater benefactor to Scotland, whose glories and beauties he was the first to reveal, showing how the most thrifty, practical, and parsimonious people may be at the same time the most poetic. ”

“ A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged in these days, to a variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. ”

“ Scotland sprang into being as a land of romance, filled with poetry, a country full of glorious scenery, a people descended from a line of kings. Even the narrow streets of Edinburgh and the old Canongate itself became historic ground under the Wizard's spell. The Wizard was Walter Scott, and now he found the whole world as eager to hear the stories and poems he had to tell about his country as his boy friends had been years before. ”

“ The epoch of expansion is pretty nearly past, but there remains before us a great work of development and consolidation. And that is a work which should appeal especially to Scotsmen. The Scottish people have borne a great part, great out of proportion to their numbers, in building up our common British heritage. They are taking a foremost part in it to-day. All over the world, as settlers in Canada, in Australia, or in South Africa, as administrators in India and elsewhere, they are among the sturdiest pillars on which the great Imperial fabric rests. ”

“ The Scotch climate compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily strength makes it easy; and Scotland, with her mountain-tours in summer, and her frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above all, that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and the hills where every breeze is health, affords facilities for healthy physical life unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur’s Seat towering above his London, no Western Islands sporting the ocean firths beside his Manchester. ”

“ Anyhow, the romantic quality of Scotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying to be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full (as its history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. The wageslavery we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. ”

“ Fond memory shall your strains repeat, Like distant echoes, doubly sweet, That on the wild the traveller hears.”
Scott went on to expatiate on the popular songs of Scotland. “They are a part of our national inheritance,” said he, “and something that we may truly call our own. They have no foreign taint; they have the pure breath of the heather and the mountain breeze. All genuine legitimate races that have descended from the ancient Britons; such as the Scotch, the Welsh, and the Irish, have national airs. ”

“ The wine is all imported; the horses are mostly small ambling nags, only a few being preserved entire for propagation; and neither curry-combs nor reins are used. From Scotland are imported into Flanders hides, wool, salt, fish, and pearls. Nothing gives the Scots more pleasure than to hear the English dispraised. The country is divided into two parts, the cultivated lowlands, and the region where agriculture is not used. The wild Scots have a different language, and sometimes eat the bark of trees. There are no wolves. ”

“ There is no mistaking the national attachment so strong in the Scottish character. Men return after long absence, in this respect, unchanged; whilst absent, Scotsmen never forget their Scottish home. In all varieties of lands and climates their hearts ever turn towards the "land o' cakes and brither Scots." Scottish festivals are kept with Scottish feeling on "Greenland's icy mountains" or "India's coral strand." I received an amusing account of an ebullition of this patriotic feeling from my late noble friend the Marquis of Lothian, who met with it when travelling in India. ”

“ Oh, Scotland! Scotland! if the best blood of thy bravest children could enrich thy barren soil, what land on earth would excel thee in fertility! When is it that a white hair is seen on the beard of a Scottishman, unless he be some wretch like thy sovereign, protected from murder by impotence, to witness the scenes of slaughter to which he cannot put a period? Let them come in, delay them not. They are in haste to kill, and, grudge each other each fresh breath of their Creator's blessed air. The demon of strife and slaughter hath possessed the whole land! ”

“ Indeed, during the civil wars in England, between the houses of York and Lancaster, when the manufactures and commerce of that country necessarily declined, the commerce of Scotland began to flourish, and was protected and encouraged by its monarchs. The herring fishery was encouraged; duties were laid on the exportation of wool, and a staple for Scotch commerce was fixed in the Netherlands, In the year 1420 Glasgow began to acquire wealth by the fisheries; but until the discovery of America and the West Indies, it had little or no foreign trade. ”

“ The Scots as a nation are proverbial for their travelling propensities; they are to be found not only in every part of the British Isles, but in almost every known and unknown part of the wide world. It was a jocular saying then in vogue that if ever the North Pole were discovered, a Scotsman would be found there sitting on the top! Sir Walter Scott was by no means behind his fellow countrymen in his love of travel, and like his famous Moss-troopers, whose raids carried them far beyond the Borders, even into foreign countries, he had not confined himself "to his own—his Native Land." ”

“ There were the tones of Scotch reels sounding—tones that brought Scotland vividly before the very eyes; and there were Canadian hunters and half-breed voyageurs, whose moccasins were more accustomed to the turf of the woods than the boards of a drawing-room, and whose speech and accents made Scotland vanish away altogether from the memory. There were old people and young folk ”

“ Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation," yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society. It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes. "The meaner sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;" ”