people among whom property is more safe from aggression than the still poor dependents of the Highland thieves of old " 1

So habituated has the historian become to regarding the Celt as something "peculiar," that even in verbally recognising such an influence as that of "conditions,” he must needs term "remarkable" a phenomenon perfectly normal and natural, and in the same breath proceed to speak as if the remaining bad practices of the Highlanders were perversely independent of causal conditions. When he is dealing with the prevalence and the mischief of smuggling in the Lowlands, he never thinks of attributing the evil to a "signal retention of bad practices": here the economist as well as the Teutophile traces the cause to unwise fiscal legislation. But with the Celt it is different. It is no longer his nature to steal: it even becomes his nature to be honest, so that his honesty perhaps does him no great credit; but it is still his nature to be spontaneously objectionable somehow. And after the one concession, the historiographer proceeds to the other detractions above noted, and revels at length 2 in a demonstration of the "peculiarity" that among the Highlanders before the '45 the gentlemen of the clan were large, strong, and well-fed, and the humbler people small and ill-fed; throwing in a final self-annihilative hint that perhaps the ruling caste were at bottom "of a Gothic race "and only the others truly Celts! As if he had not been describing a social phenomenon common to every nation in the civilised world! And as if that ruling caste were not on his own showing a main factor in all the vices of cruelty, indolence, and predacity which he has all along been charging on "the Celt!"

Such is the fashion in which the best and completest History of Scotland deals with that section of the Scottish people which has given its race-name to the nation, and which, since its real union with the rest, has taken an ever-increasing share in the national performance of every order. One does not call the historian's method ungenerous: one does not look to him to be generous but to be in the barest sense just—that is, to be scientific; and on the contrary he is found carrying injustice to the extremes of farce, and compendiously leaving science out of the question. I should be sorry to seem, in discussing such malfeasance, to overlook the merit, the learning, the judgment, which mark the work in other regards, and which will probably keep it long in possession of the field even if all the foregoing strictures become unquestioned commonplaces. They point to an almost 2 VIII. 524-5.

1 VIII. 458.

unique flaw in the historian's intelligence, which will doubtless be one day classed as one of the follies of the wise. But the flaw is at least serious enough to call for this much exposure. Human folly becomes rather a dismal thing when it strikes a deep rift of unreason through the laborious work of an industrious and capable scholar, and leaves the readers for whom he wrote divided between disgust and derision. In the circumstances the best service all round would seem to be to try to show precisely the extent of the flaw.

IT remains to seek for critical explanations; and in looking for the causes of Burton's wrongdoing, as we have sought reasons for more general historic phenomena, one finds some light in the antecedents. To begin with, his Celtophobia seems to have been partly developed by way of a crude sociological reaction against the way of looking at things Celtic which had been set up or strengthened by the sympathetic genius of Sir Walter Scott. After centuries in which Lowland Scots and Englishmen alike had been wont for the most part to regard the Highlander as an insufferable savage, Scott suddenly presented him to the world in colours of poetry on a background of thrilling romance. Scott indeed had not begun the sympathetic movement: the falsetto prose-poetry of "Ossian," concocted by Macpherson on the nuclei of fragments of genuine old Celtic poetry, had had, despite damaging criticism, a wonderful success throughout Europe, supplying as it did a new flavour to a world which was on the way to breaking with worn-out convention and tradition in many things; and the new romantic movement set up in Germany tended in the same direction; so that there was a set of taste towards things Celtic before Scott reinforced it. Indeed, before his time one of the ablest of Scotch scholars, Pinkerton, had had to battle with a good deal of uncritical doctrine concerning supposititious proto-Celtic civilisation.1 But

1 The rejection of later forms of this doctrine is the sole reasonable element in the work entitled Celticism a Myth, by J. C. Roger, F.R.A.S., etc., (2nd ed. 1889) a brawling book, whose spirit may be gathered from its deliverances:-"I believe that no man of Celtic race 'ever attained real greatness in literature, science, art, political or military life,' only, I very much doubt if such a thing as 'pure Celtic blood' anywhere exists" (pp. 14-15): “I am content to believe myself of that great Teutonic stock which has ruled the world in the past, and will rule it to the end of time" (pref.). Such are the judgments and tempers to which Burton's ethnography appeals.

Scott's genius at once multiplied tenfold what movement there was, creating not only in Scotland and England but in France and Germany an aesthetic passion for everything Highland. And the salutary result remains to this day, in the modern habit among Lowland Scots of broadly identifying their country with its "Celtic" population, who are so much the most picturesque element in it—this despite all the efforts of Burton, and despite the fact that in the national poet, Burns, there is practically no trace of the new spirit.1

It was against this attitude, which had been popular for a generation before, that Burton reacted; and he did so not merely because of his prejudice but because of the way in which that had been reinforced by his training. One of his earlier works is a forgotten treatise on Political Economy, peculiarly arid in its kind, which shows him to have been one of the narrowest of the post-Smithian school of laissezfaire capitalism and competition. Such a thinker, unless safeguarded by a special sympathy, was almost sure to resist what he would regard as the sentimental way of looking at Highland life, past and present; and it is instructive for progressive people to-day to reflect that much of what stood for Liberalism in Burton's youth—the middle-class revolt against landlordism -could be thus fatally narrow in its view of an important social problem, while the Tory Scott, often narrow and foolish and bigoted enough in his attitude to different problems, could yet in virtue of his literary instincts and sympathies rise to a humaner and saner view 2 where many of the so-called Liberals were hidebound in class prejudice.3 Nowhere was the narrowing down of Smith to commercial purposes more zealously pursued than in Scotland; and Burton was influenced by the specialists in the study. Somewhat thus it came about that the fibre of wooden prejudice in his personality survived all the rationalising influence of the utilitarianism of Bentham, whose works he edited, and of the analytic philosophy of Hume, whose Life he wrote. Burton seems to have been a man in part naturally cut out for a bigot, 1 Burns's poem to 66 Highland Mary"-inferior work as it is-would no doubt help to create good feeling; but he shows none of Scott's interest in the past of the Highland race.

2 Mr Bonar, it is true, remarks of Scott's pictures in Waverley and other novels that "it is the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than the misery of the clansmen" (Malthus and his Work, p. 189). But, granting this, it remains true that Scott takes a sympathetic view of the clansmen as Compare Rob Roy.

men.

3 Cp. Macaulay (chap. XVII., end), as to Tories and Irish last century.

who somehow was delivered from the religious bigotry of his native land only to become an unavowed rationalist with a certain sociological bigotry in place of a religious. His sociological training, such as it was, had doubtless much to do with his notably impartial treatment of a number of national and religious issues in Scottish history which before his time had almost never been treated impartially; but his narrow economics, derived from M'Culloch, coinciding with his irrational prejudice against the "race" which a kindlier sentiment had been idealising among his countrymen and elsewhere in recent times, served to make him a typical bigot among historians in regard to that theme. For him, Celtic history was to be read in terms of the gospel, not of Ricardo, who, be it repeated, was a scientific analyst, but of the adaptors of Ricardo, who were the mere champions of the modern commercial form of society. And the fact that the very high-priest of that cult, of whose economics his own was a restatement, bore a Celtic name 1 while exhibiting an ideally "Saxon " stolidity of temperament, seems never to have availed to shake Burton's confidence in his machine-made solution of the Celtic problem. The Celts had remained poor: then it must be because they were not industrious. They had been cattlestealers at a later period than most of their Lowland neighbours : then they were hereditarily prone to theft. Highland agriculture, albeit on the worst land, was worse than Lowland: then the Celt was anti-agricultural. Q. E. D. His own belief appears to have been that a large percentage of the Highland population was of Teutonic descent; yet he could not so far curb the animus underlying his knowledge as to abstain from setting down the backwardness of the whole Gaelic-speaking population to "Celtic" blood.

The folly of it all is made clear to the intelligence even of the man in the street by the abundant commercial success of the Highland element in Glasgow; and by the all-round success of the same element in Canada and in every other British colony. But the written folly remains, to stimulate still the unreason of the unreasonable when a new question of racial spite arises; yet also to hold up the writer to wiser readers in days to come as a warning of the havoc that a prejudice can work in the intelligence of a historian.

1 While the Gordons, Frazers, Chisholms, and some other clans, are loosely classed as "Norman" because called by the names of Norman chiefs, and others are similarly classed as Norse and Flemish, the MacCullochs seem to pass as Celts," though the Macaulays are said to be Norse, like the Macleods and Macdougalls.

66

L

V.

J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS.

SI.

IT is with much change of feeling that one proceeds from a criticism of Burton's treatment of the Celtic element in Scottish history to a study of John Richard Green's treatment of the Celtic element in early English history. The procedures are as different as the men. Green's sympathetic and kindly nature was incapable of the stolid animosity which, as we have seen, lowers Burton's history in this connection to a mere string of inconsistent aspersions. Green had not had his philosophy of life prematurely moulded, as was Burton's, by a sectarian conception of political economy; and he was constitutionally free of the wilful obstinacy which meets reason with accumulations of sophistry. He seems to have gone on growing mentally to the end, inwardly reshaping his creed in spontaneous loyalty to all new light that reached him. Hence there is something ungrateful in the task of criticising him, especially when one remembers his avowal: "I am only too conscious of the faults and oversights in a work much of which has been written in hours of weakness and ill health," and when one recalls the worn fine face presented by his portrait. It may be possible, however, to set forth some of the shortcomings of his work, in the present connection, without wounding the sympathies he so justly inspired, and without making light of his real merits.

The "Short History of the English People" stands out from its predecessors and rivals in respect of the constant vivacity with which it seeks to bring home all episodes and phases of history to the living recognition of the reader. Green is not content to narrate, or even to comment : he must almost dramatise the most distant and fugitive facts, he must generalise the vaguest forms of knowledge, in a fashion which seems a blend of the method of the literary pulpit and the method of Carlyle. And the wish, in itself so laudable, to make all know