Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland—by Atholl, by Breadalbane, by Strathearn—we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire clans on to its stage.
VI
THE MACGREGORS
What perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron
—in the shape of a pen! And surely the rash adventurer lays himself open to special risks when he undertakes to touch such a thistly subject as Scottish history, not to mention theology. It seems that I have given offence to certain partisans, who find their sympathies ruffled by what had to be said in my former volumes. I am accused of want of reverence for the Sabbath—an idol that, even in the cold North, is wearing away to a stump like snow wreaths in thaw. By an organ of that persuasion I am rebuked, more in sorrow than in anger, for enmity to the Free Church, my only expression of such enmity being a statement that the said worshipful body has set its face against dancing and piping in the Highlands, and a hint that it must be heartily ashamed of the way it treated one of its worthiest sons in our generation. But the hottest of my ecclesiastical assailants is a “Priest of the Church of England,” who writes to me from a Midland county, characterising my book on the Highlands as “nauseating,” “ungenerous,” “brutal,” and so forth. I will not give his name, for I guess this priest not so far out of deaconship as to be beyond a chance of learning better language in a less perfervid country. He appears to be a Highlander of Catholic loyalty, since he takes alike ill any aspersion on the fair fame of Glengarry or of Argyll; but amid much abusing at large, he waxes specially indignant that I have not been silent on the “later failings” of the poor young Pretender. Did I not say in advance that there are three subjects on which the hardest-headed Scot listens willingly to sentiment rather than reason? One of them, of course, is gallant Prince Charlie; then I may be thankful to have passed over all scandal about Queen Mary, as to have touched lightly on the later, and earlier, “failings” of Robert Burns.
If there were as many revilers in the Midlands as there are slates on Auld Reekie, I can do no other. I was apprenticed to fiction, which is a school of truth in dealing with human nature. Let my critics write books of their own, setting forth the facts as they would have them. Let them declare that Charles Edward ended his days as a worthy citizen of Rome, a model husband, a diligent student of Anglican divinity, and an office-bearer of its Diocesan Temperance Society. Let them assert that Free Church pastors have exhorted youths and maidens to skip upon the Highland hills like young rams. Let them maintain that the Jewish Sabbath has semper et ubique been a characteristic observance of the Christian Church, and that this doctrine flourishes as much as ever in its last sanctuary. I, for one, do not love Scotland, or its idols, better than the truth; and in such a cause can play the advocate without suppressing or glossing over the evidence. There is a quotation with which a Priest of the Church of England must be familiar, as much aired at clerical Congresses—Haud tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis!
Of all the charges made against me, the one by which I am most concerned is a reproach that I have spoken lightly of serious matters concerning the Clan Macgregor. Miss Murray Macgregor, the historian of her race, writes courteously but firmly to remonstrate with me on apparent libels against it in The Highlands and Islands. My most crying offence here, it seems, is one that would offend only a Highlander. In my haste I spoke of the modern Macgregors as “new-made,” when the law finally allowed them to wear their own patronymic, and I called their chief “Murray,” whereas I ought to have precisely defined him as for certain reasons bearing the name of Murray. Miss Murray Macgregor must accept my apologies for having heedlessly omitted to style her grandfather Sir John Macgregor Murray. In this contention, she seems to be unwittingly reviving old Nominalist and Realist controversies, for her part holding Macgregorism to be a principle with a real existence apart from its phenomena, whereas I use the name merely as a notion that casually labels certain sons of Adam. But hereby I recant, disavow, and seek absolution for any words of mine seeming to imply that a Murray and a Macgregor be not distinct entities in rerum natura, and in saecula saeculorum.
Another offence against the Macgregors laid to my charge is one in which I have many fellow-sinners. In
a slight account of the Glenfruin battle, I have repeated the tale—there expressly qualified as “tradition”—of the scholars of Dumbarton slaughtered by a bloodthirsty Macgregor—as to whom I mentioned another tradition that this crime made him an outlaw from the clan. Its historian would have me understand how no Macgregor was ever capable of such villainy, and more particularly points out that the evidence for it is in this case by no means convincing. I can only reply that if in any account of the Highlands, one were to give no stories but those that go without contradiction, and none that touch on deeds of violence, the result would make a volume that might well be advertised as suitable for the waistcoat pocket.