The Opportunity of the Isles

Extract

The men of the Hebrides smile tolerantly when the stranger from the south, after a week’s visit, decides that the only possible life to-day is one of retirement, the eremitical life lived alone on a croft among these sea-bound strips of land. The natives are used to this type of enthusiasm; it “takes” many people in this way. But when the stranger has returned to his own place on the mainland, he soon decides that electric light and heat, railways and twice-daily posts, are his happy portion and that the life on the isles is a romantic dream. And so the natives out there, battling with their gales, scraping a hard livelihood from the rocky ground or netting it from the petulant sea, are led to laugh at these effervescent dreams.

And yet the “call of the isles” is real enough, and even though it has resulted only in a few sophisticated settlers bringing their complacent materialism in their industrially-fed cheque books to a well apportioned cottage here and there, why should this call be ridiculed? It may cover a genuine vocation only superficially allied to a romantic taste for islands and sea. At least we must admit the modern need for the eremitical vocation as such and if there are certain places where that vocation manifests itself rather than in others, that is no more than the desert was to the early fathers. Modern industrial city life is as corrupt now as was the decaying urban society of the third century, though it is painted in less lurid colours.