How the Scots Invented the Modern World (45 page)

Walpole found the poems dull—“it tires me to death to read how many ways a warrior is like the moon, or the sun, or a rock, or a lion”— and pronounced them a “fraud.” Hume’s objections were sociological: “it is indeed strange,” he wrote to Gibbon, “that any men of sense could have imagined it possible that above twenty thousand verses, along with numberless historical facts, could have been preserved by oral tradition, during fifty generations, by the rudest perhaps of all the European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled”—namely, the Highland Scots.

Dr. Johnson, sensibly enough, wanted to know where the originals were, and why Macpherson always promised to produce them, but never did. When he and Boswell did their tour of the Hebrides in 1773, they brought along their copies of Ossian to compare with what the local natives could remember of the Gaelic tales. Sometimes the verses checked out; often they did not. Johnson pronounced them clever forgeries, and Macpherson furiously responded, even threatening to beat the older man up.

There matters stood until 1805, when the Highland Society of Edinburgh undertook a full investigation of Macpherson’s papers after his death. Their research showed that the critics had been correct. Macpherson had used some genuine Gaelic fragments in his text, but the bulk, including the poem’s elaborate subplots, were his own invention. From that point on, “Ossian” became synonymous with literary hoax.

But, having lost the battle, Macpherson also won the war. In the end, as Hume observed, people believe what they want to believe—and they wanted to believe in Ossian. The image of an aging, bearded bard crouched on a mountaintop composing tales of vanished heroes, gods, and maidens stirred the eighteenth-century imagination. The Ossian poems were translated into every major European language, including Russian and Hungarian. They launched European romanticism in its earliest phase. They seemed to confirm Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea that people in primitive cultures are nobler, purer, and more creative than their counterparts in more “advanced” cultures—an idea that survives in the multiculturalist passions of our own day.

The best of Macpherson’s efforts,
Fingal,
would inspire poets as diverse as Lord Byron, Robert Burns (who said Ossian was “one of the glorious models after which I endeavor to form my conduct”), William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tennyson, and Goethe. The German philosopher J. G. Herder and the French poet Chateaubriand took the Ossian poems as models of what a great national literature should look like.
Fingal
was Napoleon’s favorite reading; he even commissioned the painter Jean-Auguste Ingres to decorate his palace at Malmaison with scenes from the poems. Macpherson himself was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1796, not far from the tomb of his most famous opponent, Samuel Johnson.

Macpherson had also triggered a vogue for all things old and medieval, both on the Continent and in Britain. People became fascinated by long-forgotten chivalric poetry and epics, which correct taste had once denounced as barbaric and “Gothick,” and by Celtic folk culture. The hunt was on for other ancient poems, songs, and ballads, and one of the hunters was Walter Scott. He knew Macpherson’s work was largely a “tissue of forgeries,” but he also knew that a rich oral tradition really did survive in rural Scotland, much of it very old. He had encountered some of it firsthand at his father’s house, when elderly Highland clients visited, some of whom had fought at Culloden, and could recite stories about the battle and other great deeds of warriors and chiefs.

In 1792, as he was waiting to enter the Bar, Scott made a walking tour of the Border country: Rosebank, Upper Tyneside, and the Cheviot and Eildon Hills, with Ettrick Forest behind them. This was his ancestral home, a vista of rolling hills, forests, and ruined abbeys, a beautiful but violent land that had known centuries of battles and “rieving wars” between Lowlanders and English, and among Lowland clans such as the Douglasses, the Maxwells, and the Homes. With the help of a friend, Scott heard and wrote down a number of the ancient “riding ballads,” which celebrated the exploits of the daring raiders and brigands who had haunted the hills a century or more ago, and which were still known to their descendants. The next year he toured Perthshire and the eastern Highlands, returning several times over the next decade to the Border country to collect more ballads. In 1799 he was made deputy sheriff
²⁷
of Selkirkshire, which allowed him to expand his search. Finally he decided to approach an Edinburgh publisher, John Ballantyne, with an idea: “I have been for years collecting old Border Ballads, and I think I could, with little trouble, put together such a collection from them as might make a neat little volume, to sell for four or five shillings.”

The “neat little volume” appeared in February of 1802. Scott was immediately swamped with praise. He had managed to do honestly what Macpherson had done dishonestly: collect surviving specimens of an oral tradition—in Border dialect, not Gaelic—sift through the variants, and set it all down on paper. What it revealed was a literary heritage even more impressive than Ossian’s, since it was genuine—a lusty celebration of long-lost battles and fighting men:

Now Liddesdale has ridden a raid,
But I wat they had better hae staid at home;
For Michael o’Winfield he is dead,
And Jock o’ the Side is prisoner ta’en.

The ballads offered a sense of dramatic pathos:

For Mangerton House Lady Downie has gane,
Her coats she has kilted up to her knee;
And down the water w’speed she rins,
While tears in spaits fa fast frae her ee.

There was sardonic and stoic humor, as in Johnny Armstrong’s farewell before his execution for murder, or “Armstrong’s Good Night”:

This night is my departing night;
For here nae longer must I stay;
There’s neither friend nor foe o’ mine,
But wishes me away.

What I have done thro’ lack of wit,
I never, never can recall,
I hope ye’re a my friends as yet,
Goodnight and joy be with you all!

And passages of haunting beauty:

Adieu, the lily and the rose,
The primrose fair to see;
Adieu, my lady, and only joy!
For I may not stay with thee.

Scott had opened up a new world, in which ordinary men and women spoke with an eloquence preserved over generations. It was a voice that even men of letters had to acknowledge was genuine poetry: a Scots voice he recorded accent for accent, word for word, both in his poems and later in his novels.
Scottish Border Minstrelsy
sold out in England as well as Scotland, with translations into German (the brothers Grimm, fellow collectors of oral tradition, held it in high regard), Swedish, and Danish. An American edition made him famous across the Atlantic, and inspired collectors of American folk culture such as Washington Irving.

Scott published a second volume in 1803, and then a third—but this time of his own work, in acknowledged imitation of the archaic style of Scottish tradition.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
did Ossian one better: it created a modern, poetic, anticlassical idiom based on medieval forms, as Macpherson had tried to do, but with a stronger sense of historical context:

Moor, moor the barge, ye gallant crew!
And gentle ladye, deign to stay!
Rest thee in Castle Ravensheuch,
Nor tempt the stormy firth today.

The blackened wave is edged with white;
To inch and rock the sea-mews fly;
The fishers have heard the Water-Sprite,
Whose screams forebode that wreck is nigh.

Although they were fiction, everything about the poems rang true: the language; the setting, thanks to Scott’s painstaking research in old history and law books; and the love stories, which, although set in medieval garb, appealed to modern men and women.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel
launched Scott’s writing career and filled a temporary void in literary taste. Burns was dead. The Lake Poets were still largely unknown; Byron’s first published work was a year away. So Scott became Britain’s reigning poet and a Scottish national hero. He avoided alienating the official literary establishment as Burns had done; he was also honest about what he was trying to do, which Macpherson had not been. By combining Ossian and the Romantic school’s taste for drama, strong emotions, and breathtaking scenery, and the Scottish school’s hardheaded sense of historical truth, Scott had struck on a formula for literary success.

He created for his readers a magical realm of the imagination. Here was a vanished time and place, of romantic heroes in chain mail, of blushing heroines, ruthless villains, and mysterious sages, along with genuine historical events and battles, all described accurately to the last detail—and all set in a real Scottish landscape, from the Lowlands and Borders (in
Marmion
) to the Highlands (in
Lady of the Lake
and
Lord of the
Isles
). Through the success of his works, Scott single-handedly created a new industry, that of Highland tourism. Each summer, post coaches, inns, and ferry points were filled with men and women on their way to visit Loch Katrine, the setting for
Lady of the Lake,
or tramp the Trossachs, or find some new glen or vista that reminded them of their favorite passage from
Rokeby
or
The Bridal of Triermain.

Lady of the Lake
sold twenty thousand copies, plus two thousand copies of the deluxe edition. When his epic poem,
Marmion,
was finished, publisher Archibald Constable offered him one thousand guineas for it, sight unseen. Constable was also publisher of the
Edinburgh Review,
to which Scott submitted articles. Scott and editor Francis Jeffrey had been friends since High School, despite their political differences. For while Jeffrey was a dedicated Whig, even a radical one, Britain’s best-selling author was a Tory and a fierce enemy of reform and revolution.

What drew educated Scotsmen such as Scott to the conservative Tory camp rather than to the liberal Whigs? Not all were benighted reactionaries or Dundas place-seekers, despite what Whigs claimed. Under William Pitt, the Tories had supported a cause dear to the hearts of many Scottish Presbyterians, antislavery—that was the issue, for instance, that drew Thomas Macaulay’s father to their ranks. Tories were also the party of patriots. The Whigs in Parliament had opposed war against France, and had even gone on strike to undermine it. But the Tories had been forthright “hawks” from the start, promising no peace with a regime built on terror, regicide, and conquest. Their Great Britain was now the last bulwark of Europe’s freedom.

The wars against the French Revolution and then Napoleon struck a strong nerve in Scotland. The old, middle-class Scottish commitment to the British Union had discovered a new outlet. Its visible expression was Edinburgh’s National Monument dedicated to Scotland’s war dead, which William Playfair got under way on Calton Hill after a public subscription raised 24,000 pounds for it. In the end it proved too ambitious, even for Playfair. But its twelve unadorned Doric columns standing stark against the Edinburgh sky make it seem a more fitting monument today than if it had been finished—and fitting also as the culmination of Edinburgh’s neoclassical age.

Gripped by patriotic fever, everyone joined the militia. Parliament had finally relented and permitted volunteer militia regiments to be raised in Scotland. Adam Ferguson’s dream of forty years earlier was finally realized, and Edinburgh’s middle-class intellectuals signed up with enthusiasm. “We were all soldiers,” Henry Cockburn remembered of the uncertain days in 1803, when Napoleon threatened Britain with invasion, and Whigs and Tories joined forces to defend the island. Cockburn himself ended up commanding a company of infantry. Henry Brougham joined the artillery and served the same cannon as William Playfair. Francis Horner enlisted in the so-called Gentleman Regiment as a private, and could be seen prowling the Edinburgh streets with his musket. Walter Scott, with his boyhood fantasies about “a regiment of horse,” gravitated to the cavalry.

Despite his physical handicap, he proved a keen and skillful officer, and became quartermaster of his regiment. Cockburn recalled, “It was with him an absolute passion. . . . He drilled, and drank, and made songs, with a hearty conscientious earnestness which inspired or shamed everybody within the attraction.” Scott took his mounted saber practice with deadly seriousness, galloping at the target and swinging his sword with a shout of, “Cut them down, the villains, cut them down!” as if he were really doing battle with a French cuirassier.

Patriotism fired his view of Scottish politics, as well. As with many middle-class Scots, the outbreaks of popular unrest in the 1790s, in both Scotland and England, terrified him. He saw their blue-collar instigators as traitors, and grimly supported the government’s harsh repression as the Black Watch patrolled Ayrshire and the approaches to Kilmarnock. Scott hated revolution as much as he loved his country, and for the same reason. For all his genuine sympathy with ordinary people, violence and attacks on the principle of property left Walter Scott cold. And so he, like the rest of urban Scotland, did nothing to stop the ugly episode that would scar the nation for the next fifty years: the Highland Clearances.