Authors: Ian Buruma
Those in search of genuine Scottish ancestry can turn to the many places that will find your clan by computer. And those whose idea of Scottishness was picked up from Hollywood might look into a shop called Braveheart Trading Port, which sells heads of William Wallace, videotapes of the Battle at Bannockburn, spears, shields, and dirks,
“hand-made by traditional forge methods,” and a plaster cast of Sean Connery’s head, wearing a
Braveheart
hat. And in the midst of all this tartan tat is the Canongate Kirk, where Adam Smith lies buried in a small, dignified tomb, bearing the modest words:
HERE ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF ADAM SMITH AUTHOR OF THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS AND WEALTH OF NATIONS
. The tomb is decorated with a pattern of sunrays.
But it would be too simple to cut the city in half like this, or to assume that the tartanry is strictly for tourists, or even that there is an absolute division between rationalism and romanticism. Faujas visited Adam Smith in Edinburgh. They spoke French and got on well. Smith spoke warmly about Voltaire, whose “ridicule and sarcasms,” he said, “have prepared men’s minds for the light of truth.” After conversing about Voltaire, Rousseau, and the importance of reason, Smith suggested a musical entertainment. So Faujas found himself the next morning in the company of Smith and various other Edinburgh worthies at a contest of bagpipers, to be judged by Highland lairds. The Frenchman was subjected to “an insupportable uproar” by “the noisiest and most discordant sounds from an instrument which lacerates the ear.” But Smith and his fellow Scots reacted very differently. These “grave men and high-bred women shed tears” at the wild and plaintive airs. Faujas concluded that the extraordinary effect of these compositions on the Scots could be explained only in historical, and not musical, terms. It was by no means a foolish observation.
I walked down the road from Arthur’s Seat, past the Burns monument, in the direction of Holyrood Palace, where myth begins to take over from common sense, and came across a van painted in blue and white and daubed with slogans:
SCOTLAND, A NATION BETRAYED; KEEP WESTMINSTER AT BAY
!
; DEMOCRACY FOR SCOTLAND
. A thin man in need of a shave stood outside playing melancholy tunes on a mouth organ. Inside the van was a map of Scotland, a poster with the arms and tartans of the clans, and a piece that read: “For I am the Wallace and I shall not yield to the English despots.”
To say that this shabby eccentric represented Scotland would be absurd. But the slogans on his van might help to explain the Scottish taste for myth and poetic patriotism. A nation at ease with its political institutions has no need for
Braveheart
or Ossian. Macpherson’s collections of Ossianic verse came out thirteen years after the defeat of the
Jacobite rebels at Culloden and fifty-three years after the union with England. Scotland no longer had its own elected government, or its own monarchy. The government of the union was in London. Edinburgh had philosophers and scientists and fine civic institutions—libraries, universities, museums, welfare societies—but no parliament. And no place had been subject to such violent changes in its political and cultural traditions as the Highlands, where Macpherson grew up. What hadn’t been destroyed in wars and failed rebellions was being ravaged by new industry. Where there is no political identity, historical and cultural romance take over. The market was ready for a Scottish Homer who kept the tribal memory alive and sang in praise of ancient virtues. And the tribal memory is of a romantic community based on feeling, manners, and culture, but not politics.
The tribal memory was reinvented by Sir Walter Scott less than a century later. When Fontane visited Abbotsford, Scott’s own “romance in stone,” a Scottish baronial mishmash of medieval and Gothic and rococo, he thought how remarkable it was that as recently as the 1790s, Scotland had seemed as remote to most Europeans as Jutland. But now, less than a hundred years later, there was “no other small nation, except possibly Switzerland, whose fate found, and continues to find so much sympathetic interest in the world as Scotland.” And this, he wrote, was due to Scott’s historical novels. It was not that Scottish history per se was important to Europeans. It was because of the “poetic importance” given to history by the “national poet.” In a way, then, Scott was the Ossian of his day. Like Fingal, Rob Roy and other Scott heroes were the last survivors of a purer, more natural, more authentic world. At the Rob Roy Centre in Callander, yet another touristic shrine to Scottish authenticity, I saw a video show about Rob Roy. His talking head appeared on a screen to tell us how much Scotland had changed. A man’s word used to be as good as his honor, said Rob’s head, but now, in Edinburgh and England, “a man will tell you one thing, and write another.” The booming voice expressed rage, the lips were curled in anger. It boomed: “Now the pen rules!” Nature is pure, civilization lies.
Scott’s romances, like
Ossianismus
, injected swirls of fog into European fantasies everywhere, but in Germany in particular. The German idea of nationhood was based on culture, language, and history, not on political institutions. That is why Ossianic Scotland appealed. And this
Ossianic appeal was boosted in Scotland itself by that most Germanic of British royal couples, Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria and Albert were steeped in Ossianism. They visited Fingal’s Cave with the children in 1847. On Sunday evenings at Balmoral—itself a Scottish fantasy, partly based on Abbotsford, partly on Prince Albert’s native
Schloss
at Rosenau, which in turn was inspired by the Scottish style—they would sit side by side on the tartan sofa at the gray stone hearth, with a huge Gaelic dictionary spread out on their knees. They read by the light of the splendid candelabra designed by Albert: candles nestled cosily in silver thistles, sprouting from a central shaft of staghorn, set on a base of silver stag heads interspersed with cairngorms.
Albert loved Scotland because he thought it looked like Germany. The landscape around Balmoral reminded him of the forests in Thuringia. Dalkeith, he noted, was “very German-looking.” Even the people “looked like Germans.” Albert wrote to his stepmother, Duchess Marie of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, that the Scottish people were “more natural and marked by that honesty and sympathy which always distinguishes the inhabitants of mountainous countries who live far away from town.” Victoria’s diaries are full of loving references to the “wildness” of the Scottish landscape and people. Scotland’s greatest attraction to the queen and her consort was the lack, in their eyes, of devious sophistication, of metropolitan politics, indeed of civilization. The Scotto-German fantasy of Balmoral was their refuge from the carping press, the supercilious English aristocracy, and the intrigues of politicians that could make life in London such a torment. Balmoral was “a dear paradise” for the queen, and it was “
all
my dear Albert’s
own
creation …”
Balmoralism was a carefully contrived simulacrum of the wild, natural life. The queen in particular loved to see rugged Highlanders tossing cabers, throwing hammers, and putting stones. And Albert was a keen builder of the stone memorials known as cairns. Or rather, he would have the stones piled up high by the household staff. Then, to much piping, whisky drinking, and dancing of reels, Albert would climb on top of the cairn. The queen recalled the occasion in her diary as having been most
“gemütlich.”
There were limits, however, to how much ruggedness Albert would put up with. He liked to shoot stags. He was in fact obsessed by it. But his habit of shooting them through the
window of his drawing room was unorthodox. And his idea of having gillies dig a trench so he could stalk his prey without having to crawl on his stomach was thought locally to be a somewhat “German device.”
Scotland as an Arcadian refuge from artificial civilization: this Victorian and Albertian fantasy was by no means unique; it had a history and was widespread. Scottophilia is different from Voltaire’s Anglophilia. Which is not to say that Scottophilia is incompatible with Anglophilia. Mendelssohn, who would shiver with pleasure at the mere mention of England, was also a great Scottophile. He went to Scotland, he once said, “to understand the English.” I’m not sure what he meant by this. But we know he thought Scotland’s northern climate and wild scenery would be naturally receptive to music. Although he was horribly seasick on his way to Staffa, he was overwhelmed by its beauty, unlike his traveling companion, Karl Klingemann, who hated that “odiously celebrated Fingal’s Cave.” Mendelssohn’s
Hebrides
Overture is a musical celebration of wild nature, of hissing waves and whistling winds and shrieking gulls.
It was possible to love both England and Scotland, as Mendelssohn did, and Fontane, and many others. But they were loves of a different kind. European Anglophilia, on the whole, followed the precepts of Voltaire. It was an idealization of political institutions, of social arrangements, of a civilized society. The cult of Scotland, and particularly the Scottish islands and Highlands, was the opposite: a romance of a precivilization, of an apolitical community, of natural men, even, perhaps, noble savages. Anglophiles would have been drawn more to Adam Smith than to Ossian. The Anglophile’s idea of England is really about Britain. The Ossianic concept of a national community begins when Britain is broken into its different parts. The English cult of Saxonism and King Alfred was, after all, a form of Ossianism too, but English political institutions were extended to the whole of Britain, so English and British identities became blurred. In other words, neither
Ossianismus
nor
Shakespearomanie
were typical of European Anglophilia, but were instead romantic aberrations.
And yet there is often something romantic about the Anglophile’s worship of British institutions too. For it contains a love of history and tradition. It is never Utopian, but often Arcadian. The idea of Britain as a civilized society, ruled by law, parliament, and a constitutional
monarchy, found its natural, Arcadian expression in England itself and was imitated all over Europe. You only have to look at Stowe, the garden park laid out and extended by Lord Cobham during the first half of the eighteenth century. All the typical features of an eighteenth-century English landscape garden are there: a hermitage, a Chinese house, a Saxon temple, a Gothic temple, classical temples, classical columns, a Grecian valley, a Palladian bridge, an Imperial Closet, artificial ruins, artfully constructed waterfalls, sweeping fields for grazing sheep, grottoes, stone tributes to the Hanover king, an Egyptian pyramid, an obelisk, a Temple of Ancient Virtue, a lake, Elysian Fields, and the Monuments of British Worthies.
The Worthies represent a Whig Walhalla. Milton is there, and Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Newton, and King Alfred, as the founder of the English constitution, and John Hampden, who supported “the Liberties of his Country” in Parliament, in “Opposition to an arbitrary Court.” And then there is Sir Thomas Gresham, whose inscription I shall quote in full to give the peculiar flavor of eighteenth-century Whig thinking: “Sir Thomas Gresham: Who, by the honourable Profession of Merchant, having enriched himself, and his Country; for carrying on the Commerce of the World, built the
ROYAL EXCHANGE
.”
This British Arcadia was forged out of nature, but it is cultivated, civilized, artificial, tamed. It is a man-made monument made to look natural. This is the very opposite of Fingal’s Cave, an example of untamed nature that looks man-made.
C
HAPTER
F
IVE
T
HE
P
ARKOMANE
P
RINCE
H
ERMANN VON
P
ÜCKLER
-M
USKAU
,
ALSO KNOWN AS
Prince Pickle (in England), Lord Smorltork (in
Pickwick Papers
), the “parkomane,” or “the Goethe of landscape gardening,” met Goethe in Weimar on September 14, 1826. They went for a stroll through Goethe’s park on the river Ilm and admired the sights: a grotto containing a stone sphinx, a Roman villa, a rose garden, and a flight of stone steps leading to the river, where Christel von Lassberg drowned herself with a copy of
Werther
pressed to her breast. Walking side by side, they talked about Sir Walter Scott, the German genius for translation, and gardens. Goethe advised his young friend to pursue his interest in gardens. Nature, he said, offers the best education, because it can make anyone feel happy.
Then they discussed politics. Goethe dismissed political theories. If every man would simply stick to his own affairs, he said, any form of government would do. Pückler disagreed. Goodness, he said, would be served only under a constitutional government, which guaranteed the security of life and property. England, he ventured, was the best example of good constitutional government. Goethe shook his head at such
foolishness. It made him quite agitated. England was a particularly unfortunate example, he said, for no society was as selfish as English society. Indeed the English were quite inhuman in their political and personal relations. No, only if men learnt to cultivate restraint and modesty in themselves would general happiness ensue.
Pückler was less rarefied than Goethe. He was attracted to “progressive,” sometimes even radical politics. He frequented Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin, whose highly cultivated members flirted with the proto-socialist ideas of Saint-Simon. And he was attracted to Rousseau’s notions of natural freedom and the people’s will. He had expressed sympathy for republicans, and for socialists gathered under the banner of Young Germany. But he was also an aristocrat, proud of bloodlines that went back, so he liked to believe, to a character in the
Nibelungenlied
. Although he was a Francophile by inclination and upbringing, his particular style of noblesse oblige made him look to England, not France, as a model of liberalism governed by nobility.