The Spell of Scotland Part 1

The Spell of Scotland.

by Keith Clark.

CHAPTER I

HAME, HAME, HAME!

"It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be, And it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!"

Time was when half a hundred ports ringing round the semi-island of Scotland invited your boat to make harbour; you could "return" at almost any point of entry you chose, or chance chose for you.

To-day, if you have been gone for two hundred and fifty years, or if you never were "of Scotia dear," except as a mere reading person with an inclination toward romance, you can make harbour after a transatlantic voyage at but one sea-city, and that many miles up a broad in-reaching river. Or, you can come up the English roads by Carlisle or by Newcastle, and cross the Border in the conquering way, which never yet was all-conquering. There is s.h.i.+pping, of course, out of the half hundred old harbours. But it is largely the s.h.i.+pping that goes and comes, fis.h.i.+ng boats and coast pliers and the pleasure boats of the western isles.

You cannot come back from the far corners of the earth--to which Scotland has sent such majorities of her sons, since the old days when she squandered them in battle on the Border or on the Continent, to the new days when she squanders them in colonization so that half a dozen of her counties show decline in population--but you must come to Glasgow.

The steamers are second-cla.s.s compared with those which make port farther south. They are slower. But their very lack of modern splendour and their slow speed give time in which to reconstruct your Scotland, out of which perhaps you have been banished since the Covenant, or the Fifteen, or the Forty Five; or perhaps out of which you have never taken the strain which makes you romantic and Cavalier, or Presbyterian and canny. We who have it think that you who have it not lose something very precious for which there is no subst.i.tute. We pity you. More clannish than most national tribesmen, we cannot understand how you can endure existence without a drop of Scotch.

Always when I go to Scotland I feel myself returning "home."

Notwithstanding that it is two centuries and a bittock since my clerical ancestor left his home, driven out no doubt by the fluctuant fortunes of Covenanter and Cavalier, or, it may be, because he believed he carried the only true faith in his chalice--only he did not carry a chalice--and, either he would keep it undefiled in the New World, or he would share it with the benighted in the New World; I know not.

All that I know is that in spite of the fact that the Scotch in me has not been replenished since those two centuries and odd, I still feel that it is a search after ancestors when I go back to Scotland. And, if a decree of banishment was pa.s.sed by the unspeakable Hanoverians after the first Rising, and lands and treasure were forfeited, still I look on entire Scotland as my demesne. I surrender not one least portion of it.

Not any castle, ruined or restored, is alien to me. Highlander and Lowlander are my undivisive kin. However empty may seem the moorlands and the woodlands except of grouse and deer, there is not a square foot of the twenty-nine thousand seven hundred eighty-five square miles but is filled for me with a longer procession, if not all of them royal, than moved ghostly across the vision of Macbeth.

Nothing happens any longer in Scotland. Everything has happened. Quite true, Scotland may some time rea.s.sert itself, demand its independence, cease from its romantic reliance on the fact that it did furnish to England, to the British Empire, the royal line, the Stewarts. Even Queen Victoria, who was so little a Stewart, much more a Hanoverian and a Puritan, was most proud of her Stewart blood, and regarded her summers in the Highlands as the most ancestral thing in her experience.

Scotland may at sometime dissolve the Union, which has been a union of equality, accept the lower estate of a province, an American "state,"

among the possible four of "Great Britain and Ireland," and enter on a more vigorous provincial life, live her own life, instead of exporting vigour to the colonies--and her exportation is almost done. She may fill this great silence which lies over the land, and is fairly audible in the deserted Highlands, with something of the human note instead of the call of the plover.

But, for us, for the traveler of to-day, and at least for another generation, Scotland is a land where nothing happens, where everything has happened. It has happened abundantly, mult.i.tudinously, splendidly.

No one can regret--except he is a reformer and a socialist--the absence of the doings of to-day; they would be so realistic, so actual, so small, so of the province and the parish. Whereas in the Golden Age, which is the true age of Scotland, men did everything--loving and fighting, murdering and marauding, with a splendour which makes it seem fairly not of our kind, of another time and of another world.

You must know your Scottish history, you must be filled with Scottish romance, above all, you must know your poetry and ballads, if you would rebuild and refill the country as you go. Not only over fair Melrose lies the moonlight of romance, making the ruin more lovely and more complete than the abbey could ever have been in its most established days, but over the entire land there lies the silver pall of moonlight, making, I doubt not, all things lovelier than in reality.

We truly felt that we should have arranged for "a hundred pipers an' a'

an' a'." But we left King's Cross station in something of disguise. The c.o.c.kneys did not know that we were returning to Scotland. Our landing was to be made as quietly, without pibroch, as when the Old Pretender landed at Peterhead on the far northeastern corner, or when the Young Pretender landed at Moidart on the far western rim of the islands. And neither they nor we pretenders.

The East Coast route is a pleasant way, and I am certain the hundred pipers, or whoever were the merry musicmakers who led the English troops up that way when Edward First was king, and all the Edwards who followed him, and the Richards and the Henrys--they all measured ambition with Scotland and failed--I am certain they made vastly more noise than this excellently managed railway which moves across the English landscape with due English decorum.

We were to stop at Peterborough, and walk out to where, "on that ensanguined block at Fotheringay," the queenliest queen of them all laid her head and died that her son, James Sixth of Scotland, might become First of England. We stopped at York for the minster, and because Alexander III was here married to Margaret, daughter of Henry III; and their daughter being married to Eric of Norway in those old days when Scotland and Norway were kin, became mother to the Maid of Norway, one of the most pathetic and outstanding figures in Scottish history, simply because she died--and from her death came divisions to the kingdom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES VI.]

We paused at Durham, where in that gorgeous tomb St. Cuthbert lies buried after a brave and Scottish life. We only looked across the purpling sea where already the day was fading, where the slant rays of the sun shone on Lindisfarne, which the spirit of St. Cuthbert must prefer to Durham.

All unconsciously an old song came to sing itself as I looked across that wide water--

"My love's in Germanie, Send him hame, send him hame, My love's in Germanie, Fighting for royalty, He's as brave as brave can be, Send him hame, send him hame!"

Full many a la.s.s has looked across this sea and sung this lay--and shall again.

The way is filled with ghosts, long, long processions, moving up and down the land. A boundary is always a lodestone, a lodeline. Why do men establish it except that other men dispute it? In the old days England called it treason for a Borderer, man or woman, to intermarry with Scotch Borderer. The lure, you see, went far. Even so that kings and ladies, David and Matilda, in the opposing edges of the Border, married each other. And always there was Gretna Green.

Agricola came this way, and the Emperor Severus. There is that interesting, far-journeying aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the "Gil Blas of the Middle Ages," who later became Pius II. He came to this country by boat, but becoming afraid of the sea, returned by land, even opposite to the way we are going. Froissart came, but reports little. Perhaps Chaucer, but not certainly. George Fox came and called the Scots "a dark carnal people."

With the Act of Union the stream grows steady and full. There is Ben Jonson, trudging along the green roadway out yonder; for on foot, and all the way from London, he came northward to visit William Drummond of Hawthornden. Who would not journey to such a name? But, alas, a fire destroyed "my journey into Scotland sung with all the adventures." All that I know of Ben is that he was impressed with Lomond--two hundred years before Scott.

And there trails Taylor, "water poet," hoping to rival Rare Ben, on his "Pennyless Pilgrimage," when he actually went into Scotland without a penny, and succeeded in getting gold to further him on his way--"Marr, Murraye, Elgin, Bughan, and the Lord of Erskine, all of these I thank them, gave me gold to defray my charges in my journey."

James Howell, carries a thin portfolio as he travels the highway. But we must remember that he wrote his "Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland" in the Fleet.

Here is Doctor Johnson, in a post chaise. Of course, Sir! "Mr. Boswell, an active lively fellow is to conduct me round the country." And he's still a lively conductor. Surely you can see the Doctor, in his high boots, and his very wide brown cloth great coat with pockets which might be carrying two volumes of his folio dictionary, and in his hand a large oak staff. One tries to forget that years before this journey he had said to Boswell, "Sir, the n.o.blest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees is the highroad that leads him to London." And, was there any malice in Boswell's final record--"My ill.u.s.trious friend, being now desirous to be again in the great theater of life and animated existence"?

The poet Gray preceded him a little, and even John Wesley moves along the highroad seeking to save Scottish souls as well as English. A few years afterward James Hogg comes down this way to visit his countryman, Tammas Carlyle in London; who saw Hogg as "a little red-skinned stiff rock of a body with quite the common air of an Ettrick shepherd."

There is Scott, many times, from the age of five when he went to Bath, till that last journey back from Italy--to Dryburgh! And Shadowy Jeanie Deans comes downward, walking her "twenty-five miles and a bittock a day," to save her sister from death.

Disraeli comes up this way when he was young and the world was his oyster. Stevenson pa.s.ses up and down, sending his merry men up and down.

And one of the most native is William Winter--"With a quick sense of freedom and of home, I dashed across the Border and was in Scotland."

There is a barricade of the Cheviots stretching across between the two countries, but the Romans built a Wall to make the division more apparent. In the dawn of the centuries the Romans came hither, and attempting to come to Ultima Thule, Picts and Scots--whatever they were, at least they were brave--met the Romans on the Border, as yet unreported in the world's history and undefined in the world's geography, and sent them back into what is England. The Romans in single journeys, and in certain imperial attempts, did penetrate as far as Inverness. But they never conquered Scotland. Only Scotland of all the world held them back. And in order to define their defeat and to place limits to the unlimited Roman Empire, the Great Wall was built, built by Hadrian, that men might know where civilization, that splendid thing called Roman civilization, and barbarism did meet. Scotland was barbarism. And I think, not in apology but in all pride, she has remained something of this ever since. Never conquered, never subdued.

The Wall was, in truth, a very palpable thing, stretching from the Solway to the North Sea at the Tyne, with ample width for the constant patrol, with lookout towers at regular and frequent intervals, with soldiers gathered from every corner of the Empire, often the sp.a.w.n of it, and with much traffic and with even permanent villas built the secure side of the barrier. If you meet Puck on Pook's hill, he will tell you all about it.

Our fast express moves swiftly northward, through the littoral of Northumberland, as the s.h.i.+p bearing Sister Clare moved through the sea--

"And now the vessel skirts the strand Of mountainous Northumberland; Towns, towers, and hills successive rise, And catch the nun's delighted eyes."

_Berwick_

The voyager enters Berwick with a curious feeling. It is because of the voyagers who have preceded him that this town is singular among all the towns of the Empire. It is of the Empire, it is of Britain; but battled round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began, it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed,"

as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's town.

For it is an independent borough (1551) since the men who fared before us could not determine which should possess it, and so our very own time records that history in an actual fact. I do not suppose the present serious-looking, trades-minded people of the city, with their dash of fair Danish, remember their singular situation day by day. The tumult and the shouting have died which made "the Border" the most embattled place in the empire, and Berwick-upon-Tweed the shuttlec.o.c.k in this international game of badminton.

It is a dual town at the best. But what has it not witnessed, what refuge, what p.a.w.n, has it not been, this capital of the Debatable Land, this Key of the Border.

The Tweed is here spanned by the Royal Border Bridge, opened in 1850, and called "the last Act of Union." But there is another bridge, a Roman bridge of many spans, antique looking as the Roman-Moorish-Spanish bridge at Cordova, and as antique as 1609, an Act of Union following swiftly on the footsteps of King James VI--who joyously paused here to fire a salute to himself, on his way to the imperial throne.

The walls of Berwick, dismantled in 1820 and become a promenade for peaceful townsfolk and curious sightseers, date no farther back than Elizabeth's time. But she had sore need of them; for this "our town,"

was the refuge for her harriers on retaliatory Border raids, particularly that most terrible Monday-to-Sat.u.r.day foray of 1570, that answer to an attempt to rea.s.sert the rights of Mary, when fifty castles and peels and three hundred villages were laid waste in order that Scotland might know that Elizabeth was king.

It was her kingly father, the Eighth Henry, who ordered Hertford into Scotland--"There to put all to fire and sword, to burn Edinburgh town, and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of G.o.d lighted upon it for their falsehood and disloyalty.

Sack Holyrood House and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye conveniently can. Sack Leith and burn it and subvert it, and all the rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception, when any resistance is made against you. And this done, pa.s.s over to the Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among the rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the Cardinal's town of St.

Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, especially such as either in friends.h.i.+p or blood be allied to the Cardinal. The accomplishment of all this shall be most acceptable to the Majesty and Honour of the King."

Berwick has known gentler moments, even marrying and giving in marriage.

It was at this Border town that David, son of the Bruce, and Joanna, sister of Edward III, were united in marriage. Even then did the kingdoms seek an Act of Union. And Prince David was four, and Princess Joanna was six. There was much feasting by day and much revelry by night, among the n.o.bles of the two realms, while, no doubt, the babies nodded drowsily.