The cradle of this race, so far as it is known to history, seems to have been the Loch Awe valley below Ben Cruachan and the eastward ridges about Loch Long, where the “Cobbler” had once for more poetic name “Arthur’s Seat,” and a rocky peninsula became playfully styled “Argyll’s Bowling-Green.” This country is as rich in romantic associations as in natural beauty, famed by pen and pencil, chiefly perhaps through P. G. Hamerton’s Painter’s Camp in the Highlands, when with his faithful “Thursday” he took up Crusoe quarters on one of the Loch Awe islands, before the solitude of its tombs was invaded by steamboats and hotels. His readers will remember how he revels in the colouring of these “changeful landscapes,” the greens and golds against a background of rich heather, the velvet purples richer than any king’s mantle, the rocks “plated” with thin snow, the patches of blood-red fern in autumn, the masses of sun-lit snow in winter, the stretches of calm lake reflecting green mountain slopes and tufted islets, “the delicate half calms just dulled over with faint breathings of the evening air,” the threads of fire which sunset shoots between masses variously rippled that give the water a tartan pattern of crimson, grey, and violet; the kaleidoscopic effects of sun and wind; the azure blue of the distances, the pearly grey of rising clouds, the Titianesque masses of evening gloom, the invisible vapours that even in bright sunshine soften the outlines of crest and ridge.
The type of the most enjoyable Highland weather (says our connoisseur in land and water scenery) is this:—The mountains in their own local colour, not much altered by the effect; green for the most part, and scarred with reddish, or purplish, or grey rocks, all outlines soft and tender and vague, still perfectly well defined even in their softness. The sky, a very pale lovely blue, delicately graduated; the water, if under a pleasant sailing-breeze, as intensely blue as ultramarine can get it, yet a very deep colour, not to be got out of ultramarine alone, because there are purplish browns in it produced by the play of the dark brown water with the azure sky-reflections. Lastly, if the wind freshens, all this dark blue will be flecked with snowy crests of breakers. Highland scenery is never so lovely as under this aspect.
Too often, indeed, these enchanting hues are buried in mists through which it takes a painter’s eye to detect glimpses of grandeur or beauty. Mrs. Hamerton, for her part, fresh from the sunny skies of France, admits that the health of both suffered in the depressing winter, “when the wind howls so piteously in the twisted branches of the Scotch firs, and when the rain imprisons one for weeks within liquid walls of unrelieved greyness.” But her husband can tell how sometimes this valley may be baked by sunshine for weeks and months together, till relief comes in a cloud-burst like that of the Indian monsoon, such as he once beheld from the top of Ben Cruachan, overwhelming what Christopher North held dearest of Scottish lakes—“mountain-crowned, cliff-guarded, isle-zoned, grove-girdled, wide-winding and far-stretching, with the many-bayed banks and braes of brushwood, fern, broom, and heather, ... thou glory of Argyleshire, rill-and-river fed, sea-armlike, floating in thy majesty, magnificent Loch Awe!”
Hamerton was a poet as well as a painter, who in his Isles of Loch Awe has pictured the legends that take shape in such scenes. The most striking of these is that of Inis Fraoch, a Celtic version of the Hesperides story, with a modern love interest and a tragic ending. The Hercules task imposed upon the young hero Fraoch, according to one variant by his lady-love, but a more dramatic form gives this part to a jealous rival, is to fetch from the island golden apples growing there under charge of a dragon whose poisonous fangs do him to death, and the fair-seeming fruit proves no less fatal to the maid, or else she is made to die of grief. Another world-wide fancy ascribes the origin of the lake to the heedlessness of a virgin who, overcome by sleep, neglected her nightly task of sealing up a mystic fountain on Ben Cruachan. A romantic tale, echoing from classical story and from the banks of the Rhine, brings us into the Campbell traditions at Kilchurn Castle. Seven years had its crusading knight been absent, when in beggar’s rags, like Ulysses, he came home to find his wife on the point of being forced into a hateful re-marriage. The strange wedding guest begs a cup of wine at her hands, and when he gives it back empty, the lady sees at the bottom a ring which she recognises sooner than she does her husband, who then has no difficulty in disposing of the insolent suitor. A truly practical feature is that this Scottish Penelope’s task, through those long seven years, had been no futile weaving and unweaving, but the building of that sturdy pile that inspired Wordsworth’s muse as well as Hamerton’s, and gave a hint for eerie fiction in Mrs. Oliphant’s novel The Wizard’s Son, as previously it seems to have sat to Scott in his Legend of Montrose.
The descendants of that crusader spread northwards, displacing the Macgregors of Glenorchy, and founding the lordship of Breadalbane in Perthshire. Another cadet branch moved still farther north, long after Macbeth’s time, to become Earls of Cawdor through one of those profitable marriages that have been a Campbell custom. But the main stock is the house of Argyll, which from obscure petty chieftainship rose to command five thousand claymores in 1745. Not that all the Campbells always stood shoulder to shoulder, as in 1715 Breadalbane’s men fought for the Pretender, while Argyll led the bulk of his clan for King George.
One might as well undertake the census of a hornets’ nest as dogmatise on the descent of a Highland clan. The Argyll house, backed by antiquaries like Skene, now repudiate the legend of a Norman adventurer, “De Campo Bello” or Beauchamp, as having wed an heiress of Loch Awe, though this origin would be quite in keeping with the family traditions. A much more ancient source is claimed for them as descendants of King Arthur, or of Diarmid, hero of Fingalian epics, a descent that might make them akin to the Irish Dermotts. The name Campbell is said to mean “Wry-mouth,” as Cameron “Crooked-nose,” from the same root as appears in our winding Cam rivers. About the time of the last Norwegian invasion under Haco, the clan comes to dim light in two branches, the elder Macarthurs, the younger the sons of Colin or Calain, a name perverted into MacCallum. The elder branch went under, their tombs still to be seen on an island of Loch Awe. The younger rose through marriage with a sister of Robert Bruce, and through fighting for him against the Macdougalls of Lorne. The confirmation of his sovereignty advanced this chief over confiscated estates of their common foes. For generations a run of luck or policy kept increasing the Campbells’ domain till they were lords of all Argyll and part of the Islands, the conquered clans, if not exterminated or driven away, being forced to take their name, as a Red Indian tribe has often recruited itself by adoption of its prisoners or subjects. When the elder Macarthurs were condemned as traitors under James I., the sons of Colin basked in royal favour, and in the next reign the usurping chief accepted a feudal lordship, which before long grew into the Earldom of Argyll. Thenceforth they went on rising in the world, by cunning and unscrupulousness, as their enemies put it, by prudence and enterprise, as their friends say.
The Campbells generally stood on the side of law and progress, the winning side in the long run; and it must not be forgotten how they gave their quota of martyrs to the new religious spirit that has done so much to tame the Highlands. It does not appear that they were more ruthless than their neighbours, but more considerate and more lucky. It may be that the dark hue of their tartans, blending with the green hills and grey skies of Lorne, gave some help to their survival as fittest in the Highland struggle for existence; while at court their lords practised an art of mimicry that did not go the length of neglecting the interests of Scotland when these came to be threatened by English statesmen.
The worst thing that has been said about this clan is that they played police for the throne with a clear eye to profit, and were too ready to root out their own turbulent enemies in the name of law, their chiefs even accused of instigating rebellions which they themselves would be called on to suppress for a consideration. As far off as the “bonnie house of Airlie” the Campbells pushed their fire-and-sword process. Many an execution carried by them among the king’s rebels is well forgotten; but one is still remembered that brought the atrocities of romantic times almost down to newspaper days. From Ballachulish and the slate quarries of Loch Leven all the tourists take coach up Glencoe, catching a glimpse of austere wilds rightly known only to those who wander on foot under the shadow of its stern “Sisters” and the “Shepherds” of Loch Etive. For Ossian there could be no fitter birthplace than this darkly famed glen. Its serrated and bristling walls “have a barren strength and steepness which remind one continually of the stone buttresses of Sinai”; yet the sunlight shows weird Arabesque colourings of purple, green, and pink, often dulled beneath a pall that seems nature’s mourning for the tragedy here commemorated by a cross, and its scene still traced out by patches of green round the site of ruined huts. “Even with sunshine,” Macaulay found this “the very valley of the shadow of death.”
