Authors: Ian Buruma
I had wanted to visit Staffa to address a problem, not so far mentioned in this book: the confusion of England with Britain. Voltaire would have thought only in terms of England. So would the promoters of “ancient English liberties.” But the “English thinking” most admired by the Enlightenment
philosphes
stemmed from Edinburgh as much as from London. David Hume and Adam Smith were Scots. But given their influence in London, as well as Paris and Berlin, it would be more accurate to call them British. James Boswell was certainly Scottish, but London was his home. James Macpherson was the most Scottish of all. Yet he lies buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the tomb of Dr. Johnson, who thought he was a fraud. How to distinguish then among Britain, Scotland, and England? As a first step toward resolving this problem, I shall try to make a distinction between Anglo- and Scottophilia.
It was a perfect day for a trip to the islands. The sun was shining, and the launch was buffeted, not unpleasantly, by the choppy swell. The streaks of white vapor trails crisscrossing the clear blue sky looked out of place, like artificial intrusions on a scene of pristine nature—rocks, trees, and water. The other intrusion was the crackling sound, barely audible over the wind and the waves and the keening gulls, of our captain, commenting on the scenery with a microphone. The dozen or so people on board were mostly tourists from Germany. There was one girl from South Korea, who wore blue jeans, fashionably torn at the knees. She spent most of the time reading a Jane Austen novel in Korean.
The captain, a bluff Lowlander in a green tweed jacket, whose wet pink gums showed when he grinned, pointed out some of the islands in the distance and told us about the wildlife. He also mentioned the “clearances”: most peasants had been forced off the islands by landlords in the nineteenth century, when sheep farming was seen as the rational way forward and people became a burden. Entire communities shifted from the islands and Highlands to North America, often taking the names of their native towns with them. One of the small towns on Mull was called Calgary. But the captain said nothing about Ossian. Perhaps James Macpherson’s reputation as a faker had become a source of embarrassment to the Scots. But why then call the boat
Ossian of Staffa
?
I had started my trip to Mull from Oban. In the pink-walled room
of my bed and breakfast, I had been reading Theodor Fontane’s account of his Scottish travels in 1858. Fontane had stayed at the Caledonian Hotel in Oban. There he ran into a businessman from Newcastle. Fontane was a good journalist as well as a brilliant writer, and he quickly extracted the man’s life story. He turned out to be a Highland Scot, born in Glen Moriston. After living in England for thirty years, he had decided to pay his native village a visit. But nostalgic as he may have been for the scene of his childhood, he had not been prepared for the endless talk of patriotism and honor betrayed, always in a bitter tone of accusation. He was made to feel a traitor for going south. In short, he could not wait to get back to Newcastle.
I left Fontane in my B & B and went out for a drink. Near the wharf, where the ferries leave for Mull, I found a so-called Celtic Entertainment Centre, named Tir Na n’Og after Ossian’s retreat with the fairy princess. It was a huge space inside a disused nineteenth-century kirk, with a dance floor, a restaurant, and a bar. The Tir Na n’Og offered “authentic Scottish food and drink, music, art and poetry.” Drinks included cocktails named “the Jacobite” and “Braveheart.” The “authentic Scottish music” was provided by a rock band from Leeds, which showed a particular fondness for songs by the Eagles. I noticed a number of German tourists tapping their sturdy shoes to “Hotel California.”
There is a market for Celtic romance, or the modern version of
Ossianismus
. It brings in the tourists. Not just foreign tourists, but Scots as well. The movie
Braveheart
, produced in Hollywood, starring an Australian, and shot largely in Ireland, was an updated version of Fingal’s battles against foreign invaders. It was greeted in Scotland as a patriotic masterpiece. The real William Wallace was a small local landowner, probably of Welsh ancestry, who defeated an English army in 1297 and was captured eight years later, to be tortured, hanged, disemboweled, and drawn and quartered for treachery to the English king. The movie Wallace was made into an Ossianic figure: a tribal hero standing up against the invaders. Fingal, king of the Caledonians, did not fight the English of course. His enemies were Scandinavians. But the tone of Ossian’s lament for Fingal’s heroes is echoed in
Braveheart:
the same celebration of bravery mixed with melancholy about the lost virtues of a vanished world. The last words of the film are a tribute to the “warrior poets” who had “fought like Scots.” The spiritual home of warrior poets is Fingal’s Cave.
Seen from a distance, Fingal’s Cave, with its basalt columns, resembles a row of staples. Closer up the staples look more like burnt logs, pressed together in a charcoal log cabin. When we reached the mouth of the cave and the
Ossian of Staffa
came to a temporary halt, giving us a chance to look inside, I could see what Fontane meant when he described the place as a Gothic church. The arched entrance and the pillars, shaped like waterspouts, reminded him of Westminster Abbey, and most particularly of Henry VII’s chapel. This was not an entirely original observation. Horace Walpole had also said that the cave “proves that nature loves Gothic architecture.” The place looks man-made, a product of human civilization in the guise of nature. The cave in fact is a bit like the Fingalians themselves, who were human beings, yet acted like forces of nature. They cried like the wind, or arrived like clouds of rain, or rolled into battle like the waves of the sea.
After landing, we were able to roam around the island for an hour, more than enough time to explore everything of interest, unless you are a geologist. There is nobody living on Staffa now. When it was discovered in 1772 by a party of scientific men led by Sir Joseph Banks, on the way to Iceland, there was one hut. Banks and his friends were invited to stay by its solitary owner, who was so happy to see them that he sat up all night singing songs in Erse. When the visitors woke up the next morning, they were covered in lice. Banks did not wish to be rude but thought he ought to mention the fact. His pride deeply wounded, the crofter accused his guests of having imported the vermin from England. But still, one of the party, Uno von Troil, the bishop of Linköping, was impressed enough by Fingal’s Cave to compare it favorably to the colonnade of the Louvre, or even to St. Peter’s in Rome. Indeed, he said, it was superior to “all that the genius, the taste, and the luxury of the Greeks could invent.” Twelve years later, when the French geologist Faujas de Saint-Fond arrived at Staffa, the hut had turned into a cottage. One man had grown into a family. The place was still infested with lice.
The cottage is gone. Not even the ruins remain. There is no sign of cultivation, let alone human habitation. All you see is rock, grass, and the sea churning all around. The echoing sound of water sloshing into the cave and crashing up against the colonnaded basalt walls explains the origin of the name of the cave. In Gaelic it is an-ua-vine:
an
, the;
ua
, grotto;
vine
, melodious. The genetive of Fingal in Erse is
Fine. Fine ua:
Fingal’s Cave. Inside, the cave looked less like a Gothic chapel to me than a lopsided church organ. The ground was slippery and the ledge along the wall narrow. The place gave off a faint smell of urine. My fellow tourists pointed their cameras into the dark interior, splashing the rock with flashlight.
The legend of Fingal long preceded the visit to Staffa by Banks. Macpherson had traveled around the islands and Highlands in search of material almost twenty years before. He had started off as an ambitious private tutor with some knowledge of Gaelic. In the late 1750s he heard rumors that famous literary figures in Edinburgh were speculating about the possible existence of hitherto undiscovered ancient epics. A Scottish Homer was not out of the question. So Macpherson, with an eye on the main chance, set off to find these hidden masterpieces of epic poetry. He talked to peasants. He picked up a few songs here, the odd ballad there. And in 1760, he published
Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language
. The excitement in Edinburgh was beyond all bounds. Adam Smith thought it was marvelous. And David Hume declared the findings quite sound. After all, he said, with questionable logic, Highlanders still give the names of the ancient heroes to their dogs.
Macpherson became very famous. The pressure to find more was irresistible. So off he went again, to the western isles and into the Highlands, and he came back with
Fingal
. There were no original texts. And the crude Gaelic of Macpherson’s discovery showed traces of literally translated English. Not everyone believed in the soundness of his finds. Dr. Johnson suspected him almost from the beginning. But the excitement swept across Europe. Goethe read
Fingal
. Herder worshiped
Fingal
. Napoleon had a copy of
Fingal
(smelling of patchouli, camphor, and snuff) with him on his military campaigns.
Certainly by the time Faujas de Saint-Fond arrived in 1784,
Ossianismus
was well established. The boatmen who rowed him to Staffa from Turloisk gave him a recital of ancient ballads, for as he observed, “They love everything about Ossian, and they seemed to regard it as happiness and honour to conduct strangers to Fingal’s Cave.” In other words, Ossianism had become one of the regional attractions for travelers to the north. Yet that was not why Faujas was there.
Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond was a naturalist with a passion
for volcanic rock. In 1778, he published a classic folio volume on the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne. There was a fierce debate at the time in scientific circles about the origin of basalt. “Vulcanists” were pitted against “Neptunists”: was basalt the product of volcanic eruptions or of a chemical process in the sea? Faujas argued for the former. Like all scientific men of the Enlightenment, Faujas was obsessed with discovering the laws of nature. “There is a chemistry in nature,” he wrote, “far higher than that of art …” The rocky colonnades of the Isle of Staffa, then, might contain the secrets of the world’s creation. Faujas set out to prove that the Scottish isles were volcanic. Art, he said, had no place at Fingal’s Cave, but he could understand why “tradition should have made it the abode of a hero.”
He was right, both about the volcanic origin of the rock and the cave’s mysterious atmosphere. Art and science come together in a curious way at Fingal’s Cave. Naturalists analyze the rocks, and call them by their scientific names, to discover the laws of nature. Unscientific travelers reach for artistic metaphors to describe the same place. Mendelssohn, in 1829, was too moved for words and wrote the first bars of the
Hebrides
Overture (opus 26). And romantics searching for pristine communal roots, for an ancestral tribe unsullied by politics and other marks of bloody civilization, see it as the palace of Fingal, last of the Celts. Two types of story, one scientific, the other poetic, to account for things that happened long before men could write.
One of the ironies of Macpherson’s alleged fraud was that skeptics, such as Dr. Johnson, demanded documentary evidence of Ossian’s authenticity, whereas for Ossianists, like Herder, the absence of a text was an essential part of its value. Ossian’s lament for his lost tribe was the genuine voice of the people, transmitted from bard to bard, singer to singer, unspoilt by the civilized pen. Macpherson’s
Fragments of Ancient Poetry
seemed to be exactly that: fragments, shards of an ancient creation, as authentic as the basalt remains of a prehistoric volcanic eruption.
Forty-eight hours before visiting Fingal’s Cave, I was in Edinburgh, standing on the volcanic rock of Arthur’s Seat, the spot where Boswell once sat with his student friends, shouting: “Voltaire! Rousseau! Immortal names!” And I thought about the peculiar dichotomy in the way modern Scots see themselves and are seen by others. Science and mythology, the universal and the resolutely local, seem to exist side by
side, as though holding each other in balance. From where I stood, with my back to the Greek columns commemorating the Scottish regiments that fought at Waterloo, I could see the classical monuments to Scottish heroes, built very much in the style of the Teutonic gods in the Bavarian Walhalla. In fact this
was
the Scottish Walhalla.
There were monuments to Dugald Stewart, the father of “common-sense philosophy,” and John Playfair, the geologist and mathematician. Theodor Fontane was struck by these figures, because he had never heard of them. “Abroad,” he said, “we only know the romantic half of Scotland …” Looking farther down the hill, the romantic side is visible too: there is Walter Scott’s Gothic monument, crumbling so badly that bits of masonry have been known to drop on tourists passing by; and there, on the other side of the hill, the rather grandiose tribute to Robert Burns, the poet.
North of the Scott monument lies New Town, representing the European Enlightenment, universalism, scientific enquiry, and the union with England and Wales under the Hanover crown. The classical squares and crescents, and the precisely gridded streets, laid out with the elegant logic of a formal French garden, are urban monuments to the Age of Reason. But then you look toward the south, across Waverley Bridge, and you see Old Town, where Scottish romance rules. Instead of Georgian terraces there is a mixture of mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century “traditional” pastiche. Along the Royal Mile, from Holyrood to Edinburgh Castle, tourists are sold the symbols of old Scotland, most of which are of recent invention. This being a marketplace of bogus tradition, I counted the number of shop signs with the words “genuine” or “authentic” in them. There were at least ten. One shop actually was called The Genuine Article, selling tartan dolls and cable-knit jumpers. Another offered authentic Celtic and Pictish knitwear. There were purveyors of “authentic, traditional, natural Scotch whisky.” An establishment named The Scottish Experience advertised “traditional Scottish evenings,” featuring, among other authentic delights, a “Prince Charlie Extravaganza.”