What's Mine's Mine — Volume 1

by George MacDonald

This reply gave occasion to a good deal of talk at the New House, not entirely of a sort which the friends of the chief would have enjoyed hearing. Frequent were the bursts of laughter from the men at the assumption of the title of CHIEF by a man with no more land than he could just manage to live upon. The village they said, and said truly, in which the greater number of HIS PEOPLE lived, was not his at all—not a foot of the ground on which it stood, not a stone or sod of which it was built—but belonged to a certain Canadian, who was about to turn all his territory around and adjacent into a deer forest! They could not see that, if there had ever been anything genuine in the patriarchal relation, the mere loss of the clan-property could no more cause the chieftainship to cease, than could the loss of the silver-hilted Andrew Ferrara, handed down from father to son for so many generations.

There are dull people, and just as many clever people, who look upon customs of society as on laws of nature, and judge the worth of others by their knowledge or ignorance of the same. So doing they disable themselves from understanding the essential, which is, like love, the fulfilling of the law. A certain Englishman gave great offence in an Arab tent by striding across the food placed for the company on the ground: would any Celt, Irish or Welsh, have been guilty of such a blunder? But there was not any overt offence on the present occasion. They called it indeed a cool proposal that THEY should put off their Christmas party for that of a ploughman in shabby kilt and hob-nailed shoes; but on their amused indignation supervened the thought that they were in a wild part of the country, where it would be absurd to expect the SAVOIR VIVRE of the south, and it would be amusing to see the customs of the land. By suggestion and seeming response, the clever Christina, unsuspected even of Mercy, was the motive power to bring about the acceptance of the chief's invitation.

A friendly answer was returned: they would not go to dinner, they said, as it was their custom also to dine at home on Christmas-eve; but they would dine early, and spend the evening with them.

To the laird the presence of the lowland girls promised a great addition to the merry-making. During the last thirty years, all the gentlemen-farmers of the clan, and most of the humbler tacksmen as well, had vanished, and there was a wide intellectual space between all those left and the family of the chief. Often when Ian was away, would Alister, notwithstanding his love to his people and their entire response, have felt lonely but for labour.

There being in the cottage no room equal to the reception of a large company, and the laird receiving all the members of the clan—"poor," I was going to say, "and rich," but there were no rich—as well as any neighbour or traveller who chose to appear, the father of the present chief had had good regard to the necessities of entertainment in the construction of a new barn: companionship, large feasting, and dancing, had been even more considered than the storing and threshing of his corn.

There are in these days many who will mock; but for my part I am proud of a race whose social relations are the last upon which they will retrench, whose latest yielded pleasure is their hospitality. It is a common feeling that only the WELL-TO-DO have a right to be hospitable: the ideal flower of hospitality is almost unknown to the rich; it can hardly be grown save in the gardens of the poor; it is one of their beatitudes.

Means in Glenruadh had been shrinking for many years, but the heart of the chief never shrank. His dwelling dwindled from a castle to a house, from a house to a cottage; but the hospitality did not dwindle. As the money vanished, the show diminished; the place of entertainment from a hall became a kitchen, from a kitchen changed to a barn; but the heart of the chief was the same; the entertainment was but little altered, the hospitality not in the least. When things grow hard, the first saving is generally off others; the Macruadh's was off himself. The land was not his, save as steward of the grace of God! Let it not be supposed he ran in debt: with his mother at the head, or rather the heart of affairs, that could not be. She was not one to regard as hospitality a readiness to share what you have not!

Little did good Doctor Johnson suspect the shifts to which some of the highland families he visited were driven—not to feed, but to house him: and housing in certain conditions of society is the large half of hospitality. Where he did not find his quarters comfortable, he did not know what crowding had to be devised, what inconveniences endured by the family, that he might have what ease and freedom were possible. Be it in stone hall or thatched cottage, the chief must entertain the stranger as well as befriend his own! This was the fulfilling of his office—none the less that it had descended upon him in evil times. That seldom if ever had a chief been Christian enough or strong enough to fill to the full the relation of father of his people, was nothing against the ideal fact in the existent relation; it was rather for it: now that the chieftainship had come to a man with a large notion of what it required of him, he was the more, not the less ready to aim at the mark of the idea; he was not the more easily to be turned aside from a true attempt to live up to his calling, that many had yielded and were swept along bound slaves in the triumph of Mammon! He looked on his calling as entirely enough to fill full the life that would fulfil the calling. It was ambition enough for him to be the head of his family, with the highest of earthly relations to realize toward its members. As to the vulgar notion of a man's obligation to himself, he had learned to despise it.

"Rubbish!" Ian would say. "I owe my self nothing. What has my self ever done for me, but lead me wrong? What but it has come between me and my duty—between me and my very Father in heaven—between me and my fellow man! The fools of greed would persuade that a man has no right to waste himself in the low content of making and sharing a humble living; he ought to make money! make a figure in the world, forsooth! be somebody! 'Dwell among the people!' such would say: 'Bah! Let them look after themselves! If they cannot pay their rents, others will; what is it to you if the rents are paid? Send them about their business; turn the land into a deer-forest or a sheep-farm, and clear them out! They have no rights! A man is bound to the children of his body begotten; the people are nothing to him! A man is not his brother's keeper—except when he has got him in prison! And so on, in the name of the great devil!"

Whether there was enough in Alister to have met and overcome the spirit of the world, had he been brought up at Oxford or Cambridge, I have not to determine; there was that in him at least which would have come to, repent bitterly had he yielded; but brought up as he was, he was not only able to entertain the exalted idea presented to him, but to receive and make it his. With joy he recognized the higher dignity of the shepherd of a few poor, lean, wool-torn human sheep, than of the man who stands for himself, however "spacious in the possession of dirt." He who holds dead land a possession, and living souls none of his, needs wake no curse, for he is in the very pit of creation, a live outrage on the human family.