Heavy and thick as a wall of brick,
But not so heavy and not so thick
As—
some volumes of travel one could mention.
One need not waste many words on the Cockney tourists who get the length of Skye to stare at the children’s bare legs and to sniff at the peat fires, such admiration as they are capable of being directed by tourist tickets and guide-books. By Cockneyism I do not mean citizenship of the world’s greatest city; indeed it is not for me to file the international nest that has grown so big round the sound of Bow Bells. To be a right Cockney is to be impotent of any outlook but from our own Charing Cross or other restricted observatory, in which moral sense we are all by nature Cockneys, some more, some less. There are Cockneys of time as well as of place. The eighteenth was very much of a Cockney century, hoodwinked by its own wigs, nightcaps, pews, quartos, and other indispensable institutions. The nineteenth century has taken pains to foster a more catholic spirit; but some of its sons are slow to learn how poor is their little duck puddle or brackish lochan beside the ocean that goes round the earth, itself a drop in that inconceivable immensity of forces and phenomena against which the brightest human life flies out to die like the tiniest peat spark.
To my mind some of the most offensive Cockneys are those who never drop the h of “Hail Columbia!” I am not specially dotting the i’s of this remark for a certain couple that some years ago undertook to make Johnson’s tour on foot, then, finding the weather chill and wet, came back to publish an ill-humoured and well-illustrated book that got them into critical hot water. Still less need one have anything but a thousand welcomes for the American travellers who are travellers indeed, who look through glasses of knowledge and sympathy rather than through prejudiced goggles dulling every prospect, seen as from the rush of a motor-car. But there is a kind of U.S.A. bookmaker, who very much “fancies” his acuteness, bounded on one side by the spelling-book and on the other by the sensational newspaper; and such a smart descendant of ours has no shame in exposing his narrow-mindedness while exulting over the nakedness of his grandfatherland. Boswell did not write himself down an ass more plainly than some note-takers I could quote, whose standard of measurement seems always the Capitol at Washington, the water tower of Chicago, the Nob Hill of ’Frisco, or some other universal hub of their self-satisfaction. What they always cry out upon is the poverty, the shiftlessness, the backwardness of Highland homes, for which they go on to blame the landlords as tyrants unscrupulous as Tammany bosses, or Western evictors of Nez Percés Indians. Their pity for the poor does them credit; but much of it is wasted by complacent philanthropists unable to conceive how life may be worth living without ice-cream, elevators, political “machines,” hourly newspaper editions, endless Stock Exchange tapes, and the like necessaries of high-toned civilisation. To this kind of transatlantic tripper who comes hurriedly poking into lordly hall and smoky hovel, peeping with such an uppish air on our manners and customs as if we were Sandwich Islanders, one would say Procul este profani! but of course one might as well try to scare a yellow-press reporter with a notice to trespassers. And when the like of him has published his hasty impressions, these may make wholesome study for us as showing how our ancient idols strike a stranger from some exceedingly “up to date” standpoint.
To find the western islands described with insight and sympathy one can go to the writers above quoted, and to Miss Gordon Cumming’s Hebrides, which I have not quoted on Skye, for fear of being tempted to deck my grey page unduly in borrowed plumes as from some bird of paradise. She was doubly a Highlander by blood, who could also inform her survey with comparisons wide-drawn from other lands. Buchanan, I fear, was born south of the Border, yet his forebears must have heard the slogan of the wild Macfarlanes on Loch Lomond. As for Alexander Smith, unless descended from some Highland Gow, such as that Hal who fought on the Inch of Perth, he may frankly be set down for a Sassenach, a Kilmarnock body “at that”; but this poet’s prose is thick set with Highlands of fancy; and no book of the kind makes better reading than his Summer in Skye. All these writers, by the way, have a good word for Dr. Johnson, who so roughly abused their country; and when I consider how that worthy did penance at Uttoxeter for a sin of his youth, I am half-minded to humble myself on the cutty-stool as else unable to look up to one whom so many better men have judged great and wise.