What a delightful thing it is to be first enthralled with a drama, romance, or poem, and then to enjoy a topographical appendix, in the form of a ramble over the ground—where it never happened!
In Scotland there was once a Macbeth MacFinleigh, King of Scotland for seventeen years, stout fighter, patron of the Culdees, and pilgrim to Rome. He appears to have had all the accomplishments of royalty, piety, belligerency, and whatever seemed necessary for an eleventh-century man in power. In a word, he was in harmony with his age and environment and did what was expected of him.
Not much is known of this Macbeth, but details of reality are never necessary to literary immortality. Did not our own Irving, out of three lines and a half of record, which concerned only one passing incident, construct the colossal figure of Anthony van Corlear, the trumpeter? And are not Anthony’s Nose, and Spuyten Duyvil, on the Hudson, monumental evidences, in rock and water, of the personality of the handsome fellow who broke the hearts of both Dutch and Yankee maidens?
Our old Dundee friend, Hector Boece (1465–1536), of King’s College, Aberdeen, who wrote that lovely work of fiction, entitled the “History of Scotland,” incorporated in his twelfth book what the old chronicler, John of Fordun, of the century before, had written; but with liberal decorations and embroideries. Boece, in turn, was utilized by that charming rambler through the past, Raphael Holinshed, whose illustrated volumes, as they fell from the press, were devoured by Shakespeare. Boece’s twelfth book, rich in fables, inventions, and delightfully baseless anecdotes, contains the very much expanded story of Macbeth. Except the murder of Duncan and the probable character of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s drama scarcely touches history at more than two or three points. Yet all that a genius, like the bard of Avon, needs, is a small base-line of fact, whence to describe meridians of the immensities and infinities from airy nothings. There are realities of truth independent of place or time, and this Shakespeare knew.
Yet as, a half-century before the battle of Gettysburg, a visiting British officer saw the possibilities of the site, and exclaimed, “What a place for a battlefield,” so, fifty years or more before Shakespeare put “Macbeth” upon the boards, Buchanan had already pointed out the fitness of the legend for the stage.
After studying, lecturing upon, seeing “Macbeth” played by great actors, and meeting all sorts of cranks who theorized upon it, it was delightful, with some lively young folks, to visit Glamis, only a few miles from Dundee and now one of the finest baronial castles in Scotland. Such an imposing mass of towers, turrets, domes, and battlements! Glamis of old was a thanedom and a thane was an hereditary tenant of the king; that is, a feudal ruler. Macbeth, the thane of Glamis, held rank as earl. Not satisfied with even so high an honor, this vassal, Macbeth, murdered King Duncan and usurped his throne.
Why? Well, the chronicler says, “but specialie his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing as she that was verie ambitious, burning in an unquenchable desire to beare the name of a queen.” Unwilling to trust to the strength of the feudal stronghold of Glamis, this picturesque murderer of kings and of sleep, after the ruin wrought, went westward and built a fortress at Dunsinane Hill. He knew that his enemies, old and new, would soon rise up against him.
These were the days when most of the early “kings” of Scotland met with violent deaths. Near the village is a cairn of stones, surrounding a boulder, which is called “Malcolm’s gravestone,” and is supposed to mark the place where the King Malcolm II, after being slain by assassins, was buried. His father, Malcolm I, who reigned from 943 to 954, had been killed at Stonehaven. Malcolm II, his son, held the sceptre from 1005 to 1034.
It is well to stop awhile at Glamis Castle, not that it was the scene of the murder of Duncan, but it has plenty of fascinating lore of its own, besides having Macbeth as a tenant.
It was at Glamis Castle, in 1745, that Bonnie Prince Charlie slept on one night, to be succeeded on the next by the Duke of Cumberland, who occupied the very same room. The housekeeper conducts the visitor over the historic and antique portion of the castle, and the place is well worth seeing, for it makes the past seem very real. Moreover, though such sight-seeing does not supply facts, in place of Shakespeare’s creation, it helps to the enjoyment of the truth personified. We may delight in facts, for they are necessary; but truth is more. Whatever the facts concerning the historical Macbeth, they were long ago “stranded on the shore of the oblivious years.” They were, but the truth was, and is, and is to come. Human nature is the one thing that changes not, and that eternal element Shakespeare pictured.
We were visiting Dunkeld, in company with a party of pretty maidens and rosy-cheeked Scottish youth from Dundee, seeing its cathedral, ruins, waterfalls, and modern products, when we first realized that we were in the land of Macbeth. Immediately, all the useful and statistical data, gathered up on that August day, and even the fact that Dunkeld, now having fewer than a thousand people, was once a bishopric, seemed to fade into insignificance compared with the value and importance of the imaginary—the world outside of history and of science. We looked southward to see Birnam wood, whose trees and branches were to move to Dunsinane in the Scotland hills and fulfil the sinister prophecy of the witches.
Later on, we found comrades for a walk to Dunsinane Hill, which is only twelve miles northwest of Dundee. All who have read Shakespeare know that this was the scene of the closing tragedy in the play of “Macbeth.” We pass red-roofed cottages, and the ruins of an old feudal stronghold. It is a square tower, having walls of immense thickness, with the deep, well-like dungeon, cut into the rock, down which the keeper lowers for you a lighted candle. In place of the old arched floors, which added strength and solidity to the tower walls, there are platforms reached by stairways. Ascending to the top of the tower and emerging by a doorway to the bartizan on the outside, we have a most magnificent view of the wide-spreading valley of the Tay, with its manifold tokens of a rich civilization, lying like a panorama at our feet. One of these is Kinaird Castle, which belonged to a family which, having taken the wrong side in the uprising of 1715, had their lands forfeited.
Leaving this mass of stone behind us, we pass on to the upland moors, and after three or four miles see the two bold hills, the King’s Seat and Dunsinane. As we proceed, we find several old stones which, not being rolling, have gathered on their faces a rich crop of the moss of legend. The southern face of Dunsinane Hill is sheer and steep, but the view from the top is magnificent. Here on the summit we can barely trace the foundations of the second castle of Macbeth, which he built after leaving Glamis and to which he retired. Here he lived in the hope of finding security, the witches having predicted that he would never be conquered until “Birnam wood came to Dunsinane.” Thinking to make assurance doubly sure, he compelled the nobles and their retainers to build new fortifications for him. Men and oxen were so roughly impressed in the work that he made enemies of old friends and rupture soon occurred between him and Macduff.
After his father’s murder, Malcolm fled to England, whence a powerful army was sent to invade Scotland. The Scots joined the standard of the young prince and the army marched northward unopposed and encamped twelve miles away, at Birnam, under the shelter of a forest, which then covered the hill, but is now no more. The soldiers, each one having cut down a branch of a tree,—probably not with any knowledge of the witch’s prophecy, but to conceal their numbers,—made a moving mass of green. Macbeth, looking out from the battlements of his castle, beheld what seemed to him a vast forest in motion across the plain to overwhelm him with destruction.
Whatever was really true in the matter, tradition has adopted the element of poetical justice so often illustrated by the great Shakespeare, though some reports are that Macbeth escaped from two battles with his life and kept up a guerilla warfare in the north, until killed in a conflict in Aberdeenshire. In another Scottish town, we were shown a school which stands on the site of the old castle of the Macduffs, the Thanes or Earls of Fife.
The touch of genius has made the name of Macbeth immortal. He is known wherever the English language is read or spoken. How different is the fate of those humbler folk, who lie in the ooze of the past, unrecalled by poet or dramatist! In not a few places in Scotland, one meets the pathetic sight of old tombs and graveyards that are, in some instances, hardly visible for the greenery that covers them. Here “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” but even the hamlet is gone, the church is in ruins, and the descendants of those who once lived and loved and died are now on various continents. They have found other homes, and most of them, children of the new lands, only vaguely remember, or most probably are ignorant of, the place in which their forefathers dwelt and whence their parents or grandparents came.
Occasionally one meets an old man or woman in the great cities, like Glasgow or Dundee, who will tell of the joys remembered or glories passed away, naming the village, perhaps in the glens or on the carses, which one cannot find on the map, or may discover only by consulting some old gazetteer in the libraries.
To me, an American, these white-haired old folks I saluted on the moors and in the glens, recalled the words of our own Holmes, and especially that stanza which President Lincoln thought the most pathetic in the English language:—
Yet who—unless a Mark Twain, who could drop a tear over Father Adam’s grave—will weep over the long departed Picts? More often, while reading the books, rather than when rambling among the country folk in Scotland, do we hear of these shadowy figures, who live in ethnology rather than in local tradition.
For example, what became of the “Picts,” who figure so largely in ancient writings, before Pictland became Scotland? Old legends represent King Kenneth II, who died in 995, as having “exterminated” the Picts, who had slain his father. Thus these aborigines sank, in popular tradition, to mere mythology. A Pict now seems but as a nixie, a brownie, or some sort of mythical, even fairy folk, hardly human, to whom great feats, including even the building of Glasgow Cathedral, are attributed. In 1814, Sir Walter Scott met a dwarfish traveller in the Orkneys, whom the natives regarded as a “Pecht” or Pict. So says Andrew Lang. The Picts have been so swallowed up in oblivion that they are like “the ten lost tribes of Israel”—who never were “lost” in any sense but that of absence of records, and from a genealogical point of view. I have met intelligent persons who thought “the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee”—so denominated by Henri Havard—were as Pompeii and only waiting to be excavated and come to resurrection in museums!
The Picts of Scotland are exactly where the ancient Ebisu or Ainu of Japan are—in the veins of the people now called the Japanese. The descendants of the Picts to-day talk Scotch, or English, either of the American or British variety. It is no more fashionable in Scotland to trace one’s lineage to Pictish forebears, than in Japan to the Ainu or Ebisu, from whom millions of Japanese are descended. Who wants to be descended from common savages, when gods, kings, nobles, and chiefs are as plentiful as herring or blackberries?