Sir Walter evidently appreciated these phenomena. Knowing human nature well, he did not hesitate to be frank about his own forebears. He made of the old scenes of slaughter a new enchanted land, into which one can now travel unarmed and without guards. As Roderick Dhu justified to Fitz James the profession of cattle-lifting, which he, like his ancestors, followed, so Lockhart tells that when the last bullock, which Auld Watts had provided from the English pastures, was consumed, Mary Scott, the flower of Yarrow, placed on her table a dish containing a pair of clean spurs. This was a hint to the company that they must bestir themselves for their next dinner. In those days when the rule was to “love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy” (is it yet repealed?) cattle-stealing was a virtuous occupation just as war is, and will be, unless the United States of the World is formed.
ABBOTSFORD
By 1610 the mounted police had done their work so well that the borders were reported, by King James’s commissioners, to be as peaceable and quiet as any part of any civil kingdom in Christendom. In a word, the pioneers of civilization, on either side of the frontier, were like men who blast the rocks, fill up the swamps, and grade the prairies and canyons, so that we can sleep in the berths and eat in the dining-cars of the “Flying Scotchman” or the “Overland Limited.” Much of the waste land, long ago reclaimed, is now covered with the gardens, fertile fields, and fair homes of ladies, gentlemen, and Christians. After the enormous mineral wealth of this region had been exploited, moss troopers and cattle-thieves were as much out of place as are the cowboys—except on the stage, which is an indestructible museum of antiquities.
Certainly, for the literary enjoyment of succeeding centuries, it was a good thing that the memorials of this period of turbulence were ultimately transformed, by the relieved people, into material for legend and song; yes, even so that Scott could build Abbotsford without moat or drawbridge. The poetry of the situation is vastly more enjoyable to-day than was the prose of reality during several centuries. In like manner, we, who, in our upholstered chairs, with our feet against the fender of the winter fire-grate, delight in and admire the red Iroquois in Cooper’s novels, necessarily take a different view of the whole Indian “problem” than could our ancestors, so many of whose scalps adorned the walls of the Long House of the Forest Republic.
In our annals the name of General John Sullivan as one who avenged the destruction of the Scotch settlements on the Susquehanna, and opened for our fathers the westward paths of civilization, must go down to history with the same halo of fame as that which surrounds Sir William Cranstoun and his little company of moss troopers of the new sort. Moreover, when the white man is no longer busy in depositing lead inside the redskin’s cuticle, while the copper-colored savage ceases to raise the hair of his affectionate white brother, there is a better common understanding of one another’s psychology, besides more room for mutual appreciation. Verily, history fills with its oil the fragrant lamp of literature that illuminates while it charms.
CHAPTER VII
THE LAY OF THE LAND: DUNFERMLINE
How many people, in their inmost souls, wish to be considered prophets! Andrew Lang, in his “History of Scotland,” calls attention to that “wisdom after the event,” which is so often exhibited, not only by the commonplace person, who loves to be an incarnate “I told you so,” but even by those who pose as genuine prophets. To such, the map of Scotland seems in part a foreshadowing of her history. One thinks of the Highlands as an extension northeastwardly of the older Scotia, or Ireland, or as but the island itself moved diagonally or in the direction named. Draw a line reaching from Dumbarton, on the Clyde, to Stonehaven, on the German Ocean, and you have, on the north and west, Celtic Scotland. Here, for the most part, are ranges of mountains, lines of hills, and the great waterway from southwest to northeast. In the extreme north, however, in Sutherland and Caithness, both upraised land and flowing water seem, for the most part, to run from south to north.
In other words, one would suppose from the map that the people dwelling on the rather flat lowlands would be of one race and with one kind of civilization, while the inhabitants of the hills would greatly differ. In the Highlands, defence would be easy and offence would be hard, strongholds would be more numerous, general communication impracticable, social improvement slow, and common feeling with the Lowlanders be a long time coming. The Celtic clansmen of the hills, usually living and dying in the same glen, were not famed as travellers. “All travel has its advantages,” says Dr. Johnson. “If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” So wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his “Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.” That famous book gave most Englishmen their first idea of the region which is now a summer annex to England—enormous tracts of the Highlands being in latter days the property of English landlords.
Yet, while it is true that the map might lead an observer to anticipate that the later comers, of Germanic race and speech, would dispossess the Celts and form a kingdom separate from and hostile to theirs,—with no union until six hundred years had passed by,—we may ask another question. What is there, in Scottish topography, that would be a prophecy of the northern half of the British Isles separating into a Scottish nation apart from England?