CHAPTER II
TARTANS
Foreigners who expect to find all Scotland lit by a sunset of romance, are disappointed in the paucity of kilts and plaids as touches of human colour upon the Highland scenery. The tartan, indeed, has gone out faster than some picturesque costumes of continental mountaineers. It was when forbidden to wear it that the thrawn Highlander clung fondly to his ancestral garb; now that he has his choice, though he may keep a kilt and gay trappings to match for occasional display, he submits to the hodden grey breeches of the Saxon for work-a-day wear. In our time, indeed, aristocratic patronage has brought forth a holiday revival of the Highland dress. Queen Victoria’s admiration set Braemar reblooming with rainbow shows; and one Stuart peer of to-day is reported as offering a kilt of his tartan gratis to any clansman who will oblige him by displaying it. But these gauds are more visible on the edge of the Highlands than in their recesses; least of all on the Islands, where men rather affect seafaring blue, and it is chiefly old women who cling to the tartan shawl as head-dress. There may be more philabegs found in London than in Glasgow, or even in Inverness; and in Lochaber or Badenoch you are less sure of encountering the tartan than on Surrey heaths about Aldershot, or in the Hertfordshire meadows near Watford, whither the Caledonian Asylum has now removed its company of young Highlanders, that till a year or so back flaunted themselves in the metropolis, exciting rude urchins to derisive cries of “Scotchie!” as in lowland Scottish towns they might be greeted with “Kiltie, kiltie, cauld legs!”
Those young Cockneys are as ignorant as some grown-up ladies and gentlemen and not a few authors, who ought to know that the “garb of old Gaul” is no more the “Scottish dress” than a tall hat and a red cloak is the English national costume for women. The comic papers caricaturing bank directors and church elders in tartans betray themselves as published within sound of Bow Bells. A London illustrated weekly lately put Lanarkshire miners into kilts, as a patch of local colour. A few words, then, may not be wasted in enlightening popular ignorance on a subject that has some real obscurities to invite learned controversy among such pundits as concern themselves with “the cut of Adam’s philabeg.”
And first let me remonstrate with Friend Ezra Q. Broadbrim of Philadelphia and Miss Virginia M’Adam of Vermont, who profess to be as much shocked at bare knees as at the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medici. A generation back England had a like squeamishness, when even on the northern stage Rob Roy and the Dougal Cratur felt it proper to wear tights; nay, a century ago certain prim ladies of Edinburgh thought fit to publish in the Courant how they must avert their eyes from hairy-shanked cattle-drovers out of Highland glens. The example of our athletic youth has gone to shame down such mock modesty. As well be scandalised by the Scotch lasses who display their comely limbs in washing-tubs, not so liberally, indeed, as did their mothers, thanks to the leering of Cockney cads, who may be born at Paisley as at Peckham! And let those who find the Highland dress too Arcadian know to their confounding that the Celt, whether of Scotland or Ireland, is a model for the Saxon in the morals that here seem open to question. As to healthfulness, the experience of Highland soldiers all over the world bears out Dr. Jaeger’s doctrine of a thick girdle round the middle of the body being best for both hot and cold weather: the seat of life protected, and the extremities left to take care of themselves. There is a very Cockney novel of truly Cockney days, in which “Sir Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” appears in the Fleet Prison wearing a snuff-shop kilt, as represented by the artist; and a visitor judges it as well he can’t go out, for fear of catching cold! As to picturesqueness, ask any artist wrestling with his “Portrait of a Gentleman”—heaven help him if Mars or Minerva cannot cast some cloud over the lay figure draped by twentieth-century tailors!
The kilt is believed to be the oldest fashion of dress in the world, the original material having been fig leaves, seaweeds, or such like. In the days of Roman power a full skirt was the badge of civilisation, distinguishing the togati from braccati barbarians. The whirligig of time was to bring about an exchange of fashion as to form; but Pliny and other writers describe the Celts of classic days as arrayed in a kind of tartan. It may have been under some Epping Forest or Hampstead Heath check that Boadicea hid her stripes, “bleeding from the Roman rods.” There is question as to if, when, or how far the old Highlanders gave up trews, tight-fitting hose all of a piece, for what seems to have been a single piece of rough cloth wrapped about the upper and belted about the lower part of the body. Bare legs was certainly the feature that three centuries ago put the nickname “Redshanks” on both Scottish and Irish kernes. A Norwegian king got at home the sobriquet of Magnus Barefoot when he brought back from the Hebrides a fashion of apparel he found there. On the other hand, there are parts of the Highlands where the kilt appears never to have become popular, while in some form or other the breacan, tartan, was everywhere worn by both sexes, the first patterns of which may have been suggested by varied hues of decay in Adam’s leafy garment: Eve, no doubt, had a new one at frequent intervals from some Pandemoniac Paris.
The groundwork of ancient costume for Scottish and Irish Celts seems to have been a linen shirt dyed with saffron or smeared with pitch; and perhaps the poorer class habitually wore little more, while the chieftains and their attendants learned from mailed foemen to use defensive armour. But what has come, rightly or wrongly, to be considered the characteristic dress of a Highlander was formerly the belted plaid, the lower part of it plaited in the manner of the kilt, the upper part capable of being folded round the body in various ways; and hydropathists should be interested to know that to keep himself warm when sleeping on the open ground, the hardy clansman used to dip his loose wrapping in water. That story of the snowball pillow scouted as effeminate luxury, is told of several clans; and Burt, early in the seventeenth century, reports the scorn of Highland women for a degenerate duinewassal who had donned a Lowland greatcoat. There could have been no want of tough hardiness about the men who, under Montrose, made marches of sixty miles a day by rough mountain paths.
By and by the idea would be hit on of separating body and skirt of an encumbering costume that, serving both for dress and blanket, had to be thrown off when it came to hot fighting or active business. Thus was developed the philabeg or little kilt which we know, in its present form vainly said to be the invention of an Englishman, even of an army-tailor, and, there is strange whisper, of some Quaker! J. F. Campbell of Isla, Lord Archibald Campbell, and other writers make out, however, by help of old pictures and older sculptures, a very good case for antiquity both of the kilt and the diverse patterns of tartan. John Major, teacher of Knox and Buchanan, speaks of the “wild Scots” as dressed in “patchwork,” and going naked from mid-leg. A print in the British Museum shows kilts among the Scottish auxiliaries of Gustavus Adolphus. Sir R. M. Keith, in Frederick the Great’s time, wrote home from Germany for “a plaid of my colours sewed and plaited on a waist belt ... in which to show my nakedness to the best advantage”; but he does not use the name kilt for what in the army was at first an undress uniform. “Till he got his plaid kilted on him” took some time; and this phrase, used of one of the 1745 heroes, explains the name which Burt spelt quelt.