Nor have schoolbooks and newspapers yet banished the homely tales and traditions that linger about the smouldering light of peat fires. We have seen how these legends often recall those of other lands, all shaped as they may have been in some far-off nursery of the race. But here they take on sombre colours and congenial shadows, flickering and glooming in the alternation of long pale twilights and short dark days. One interest they lack, that hinted at in the phrase “smoking-room stories,” a spice better relished in Saxon palaces than in Gaelic shieling or bothy. The character of these tales is well expressed by Alexander Smith, who, if he did not know Gaelic, had a poet’s ear for the universal language of human nature, and moreover seems to have drawn at that fountain of Highland folk-lore, J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands:
As the northern nations have a common flora, so they have a common legendary literature. Supernaturalism belongs to their tales as the aurora borealis belongs to their skies. Those stories I have heard in Skye, and many others, springing from the same roots, I have had related to me in the Lowlands and in Ireland. They are full of witches and wizards; of great wild giants crying out, “Hiv! Haw Hoagraich! It is a drink of thy blood that quenches my thirst this night”; of wonderful castles with turrets and banqueting halls; of magic spells and the souls of men and women dolefully imprisoned in shapes of beast and bird. As tales few of them can be considered perfect; the supernatural element is strong in many, but frequently it breaks down under some prosaic or ludicrous circumstance: the spell exhales somehow, and you care not to read further. Now and then a spiritual and ghastly imagination passes into a revolting familiarity and destroys itself. In these stories all times and conditions of life are curiously mixed, and this mixture shows the passage of the story from tongue to tongue through generations. If you discover on the bleak Skye shore a log of wood with Indian carvings peeping through a crust of native barnacles, it needs no prophet to see that it has crossed the Atlantic.... Many of these stories, even when they are imperfect in themselves, or resemble those told elsewhere, are curiously coloured by Celtic scenery and pervaded by Celtic imagination. In listening to them, one is specially impressed by a bare, desolate, woodless country; and this impression is not produced by any formal statement of fact, it arises partly from the paucity of actors in the stories, and partly from the desert spaces over which the actors travel, and partly from the number of carrion crows, and ravens, and malign hill-foxes which they encounter in their journeyings. The “hoody,” as the crow is called, hops and flits and croaks through all the stories. His black wing is seen everywhere. And it is the frequent appearance of these beasts and birds, never familiar, never domesticated, always outside the dwelling, and of evil omen when they fly or steal across the path, which gives to the stories much of their weird and direful character. The Celt has not yet subdued nature. He trembles before the unknown powers. He cannot be sportive for the fear that is in his heart. In his legends there is no merry Puck, no Ariel, no Robin Goodfellow, no half-benevolent, half-malignant Brownie even. These creatures live in imaginations more emancipated from fear. The mists blind the Celt on his perilous mountain-side, the sea is smitten white on his rocks, the wind bends and dwarfs his pine wood, and as Nature is cruel to him, and as his light and heat are gathered from the moor, and his most plenteous food from the whirlpool and the foam, we need not be surprised that few are the gracious shapes that haunt his fancy.
Campbell of Isla was just in time to save from oblivion the Gaelic shape of far-travelled tales which even a generation ago the Gael felt half ashamed to repeat before unsympathetic strangers, and which now linger only in secluded glens and islands, told in the native tongue round peat fires by old folks too dim-eyed for newspapers. Superstition dies harder than romance; but of his superstitions he still less cares to speak, nor always to confess them to himself. They too are catholic and human, shaped by the environment of his life from the same materials as in fatter lands have dwindled to a horse-shoe nailed on a stable door. The student of mankind needs little research to fashion such shadowy images as come so ready to the mind’s eye, “where every object of nature, even the unreasoning dreams of sleep, are mirrors which flash back death”; and from the Highlander’s misty shrouds of moor and sea, from the wraiths of his swollen waters, from ominous lights burning on cruel waves, from ghostly stirrings and tappings about his lone home, he may well have turned to the faith preached by St. Columba, yet is slow of assured belief that—
God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world!
CHAPTER VI
TOURISTS
The moralist who loved a good hater has surely no right to complain of not attracting affection; but I fear to shock many excellent persons in professing that Dr. Johnson seems to me an overrated personality. It is a commonplace that he shows much greater in Boswell than in his own books; and to that infatuated worshipper we owe a rarely intimate knowledge of one who appeals to John Bull as full of darling national faults. No wonder that English writers should take a warm interest in such a “character,” and that Cockneys should crown him as their king; but when one finds Scotsmen of insight, like Macaulay and Carlyle, joining the chorus of veneration, one hesitates to put forward one’s own doubts to the contrary.