The grace of forest charms decayed
And pastoral melancholy.'
On the influence of the upland scenery of southern Scotland upon the genius of Scott I must not enter. He spent his boyhood within sight of these hills, he made them his chief home throughout life, and when, shattered in health and fortunes, he returned from Italy, it was among these hills, and in hearing of the murmur of the Tweed, that he wished to die. No one can read the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' or 'Marmion,' without coming under the spell of the Border scenery. Among the descriptive sketches of landscape in the Waverley Novels, none are more lovingly and graphically painted than those where Scott drew from the vivid recollections of his journeys among the dales and moors of the Southern Uplands.
III. For the purposes of our present inquiry, I would class together as Highlands all the higher, more rugged, and mountainous ground, which differs on the whole from the uplands, not only in its greater elevation, but in the more irregular rocky forms of its surface, the narrower crests of its ridges, and the more peaked shapes of its summits. The geological structure of these tracts of country is generally so complicated that it gives rise to much greater variety of outline than is to be found in either of the other types of scenery. Each kind of rock yields to the weather in its own characteristic way, and as the rainfall is heavier and the slopes are steeper there than elsewhere, the influence of the weather upon the topography is more especially prominent.
In the northern parts of Wales where a group of ancient volcanic rocks has been laid bare by the stupendous denudation of the surface, a small tract of truly highland scenery has been carved out in Cader Idris, Arenig, Snowdon, and the surrounding heights in Caernarvonshire and Merionethshire. Another isolated area of volcanic hills forms the picturesque district of the Lakes. But it is in Scotland that this type is displayed on the largest scale and in the most varied diversity. The Scottish Highlands are built up of the most ancient rocks of the British Islands, and possess a geological structure of extraordinary complexity. They include a vast variety of materials which, rising to the highest elevations in the country, and exposed to the severest climate, have impressed their individual characters upon the landscapes. Thus, in the north-west, where the simplest grouping of rocks is to be seen, masses of horizontal dark-red sandstone have been carved into the huge pyramids that form so singular a feature in the scenery of Ross and Sutherland (p. 71). In the central and south-western counties, gleaming white cones show where the quartzites rise to the surface. In the eastern Grampians, high craggy moors, encircled with stupendous corries and precipices, mark the sites of the bosses of granite. Among the Western Isles, dark splintered crests and pinnacles point out the position of the gabbros. Perhaps the most rugged ground is to be seen among the mica-schists, which combine a wonderful array of pointed peak and notched ridge, with tumultuous masses of craggy declivity.
In the eastern Grampians, the mountains include broad tracts of undulating moorland, which, though lying along the summits of the chain, are level enough to be capable of conversion into racecourses. These hills are separated from the sea by a tract of lowland, and lie thus entirely inland. On the west side of the Highlands, however, the ground between the straths and glens mounts upward into narrow ridges, not infrequently sharpened into knife-edged crests, while the whole aspect of the landscape is rugged, rocky, and bare. Land and sea appear there to be inextricably intermingled. Islands, peninsulas, and promontories are penetrated or surrounded by sounds and sea-lochs, in such a curious way that even in what might be thought to be the very heart of the country, the tides of the Atlantic are found to ebb and flow into remote and solitary glens. The mountains plunge abruptly into the salt water, and for the most part only along the valley-bottoms are little strips of level land to be seen.
As a consequence of this intricate interlacing of land and sea, the warm, damp breezes from the Atlantic furnish abundance of mist, cloud, and rain to the western Highlands. Thus to the wildness of rugged mountains and stormy firths, there is added a marvellous range of atmospheric effect. Nowhere in Britain can such an union be beheld of picturesque mountain-form and of clear and vivid colour. Nowhere is the grandeur of a winter storm more impressive than when a south-westerly gale drives the breakers against the headlands, howls up the glens, and fills every gully with a foaming torrent.
The scenery of the western Highlands of Scotland was first brought prominently before the world by the publication in the year 1760 of what purported to be Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands. The success of this volume encouraged the translator, James Macpherson, to prepare a much larger collection which he combined into an epic poem and published in 1762, under the name of Fingall. A second epic, Temora, appeared during the following year. Keen discussion arose as to the authenticity of these poems. They were by one group of writers upheld as a priceless contribution to literature, recovered by the skill and labour of one man from the lips of the peasantry, and from faded manuscripts that handed down the traditions of a long vanished past. By another class of disputants they were branded as impudent forgeries palmed off upon the credulity of the world by Macpherson himself.
Into this unhappy and still unsettled controversy I have no intention of entering. For my present purpose it is not necessary to decide whether the so-called poems of Ossian were genuine ancient Celtic productions or were entirely fabricated after the middle of last century, though I think we may safely steer a middle course between the extreme views that have been put forward on either side. Few persons now believe that Macpherson's Epics ever existed as such among the Highlanders. But, on the other hand, it is generally admitted that he really did find a number of Ossianic fragments and that he strung these together no doubt with copious connecting material of his own. How much was genuine and old, and how much spurious and modern, has never yet been satisfactorily determined. But in estimating the influence of Macpherson's Ossian on literature, we have no need to consider the age of the poems. None of these were known to the world at large until 1760, and we have therefore only to concern ourselves with their history from that year onwards.
Those who have engaged in the controversy have almost wholly entered it from the literary or antiquarian side. I prefer to approach it from the side of the scenery and topography of the West Highlands, and to inquire how far the Ossianic landscape was a true representation of nature, whether there was anything in it new to our literature, and whether it exerted any lasting effect on the attitude of society towards the type of scenery which it depicted.