Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
Day by day, one new villa, one new object of
offence, is added to another; all around Newington and
Morningside, the dismallest structures keep springing up
like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with them,
each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and
carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an
eye discovers their true character. They are not houses;
for they were not designed with a view to human
habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they
tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of man.
They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing
is built where every measurement is in clamant
disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no
style of art, only to a form of business much to be
regretted.
Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where
the size of the windows bears no rational relation to the
size of the front? Is there any profit in a misplaced
chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy builder gain
more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be
omitted, and green timber employed, in the construction
of even a very elegant design; and there is no reason why
a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so
situated as to look comely from without. On the other
hand, there is a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring
fiasco like the fall of Lucifer. There are daring and
gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
being contemptible; and we know that 'fools rush in where
angels fear to tread.' But to aim at making a common-
place villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each
particular; to attempt the homeliest achievement, and to
attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to
outstrip all competitors in the art of conceiving and
rendering permanent deformity; and to do all this in what
is, by nature, one of the most agreeable neighbourhoods
in Britain:- what are we to say, but that this also is a
distinction, hard to earn although not greatly
worshipful?
Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive;
but these things offend the plainest taste. It is a
danger which threatens the amenity of the town; and as
this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before
we gain the country air. If the population of Edinburgh
were a living, autonomous body, it would arise like one
man and make night hideous with arson; the builders and
their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews
of yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive
cutlass in the other; and as soon as one of these masonic
wonders had been consummated, right-minded iconoclasts
should fall thereon and make an end of it at once.
Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder
or two. It is no use asking them to employ an architect;
for that would be to touch them in a delicate quarter,
and its use would largely depend on what architect they
were minded to call in. But let them get any architect
in the world to point out any reasonably well-
proportioned villa, not his own design; and let them
reproduce that model to satiety.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CALTON HILL.
THE east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy
hill, of no great elevation, which the town embraces.
The old London road runs on one side of it; while the New
Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes the
circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to
find yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart
has the honours of situation and architecture; Burns is
memorialised lower down upon a spur; Lord Nelson, as
befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the
Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently
and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and
a butter-churn; comparisons apart, it ranks among the
vilest of men's handiworks. But the chief feature is an
unfinished range of columns, 'the Modern Ruin' as it has
been called, an imposing object from far and near, and
giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air; of a
Modern Athens which has earned for her so many slighting
speeches. It was meant to be a National Monument; and
its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
national characteristics. The old Observatory - a quaint
brown building on the edge of the steep - and the new
Observatory - a classical edifice with a dome - occupy
the central portion of the summit. All these are
scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.
The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's
injustice to the dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather
more handsomely commemorated than Burns. Immediately
below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert
Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane
while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been
somewhat too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet,
on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgotten. The
votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
Scotland and more remarkable for number than discretion,
eagerly suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him
the poetic impulse and, up to the time when he grew
famous, continued to influence him in his manner and the
choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged
his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a
tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was
worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain; and
although I think I have read nearly all the biographies
of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not
sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll
Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to
gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
without disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken
if they think to please the great originals; and whoever
puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better than
dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns, who will be
the best delighted of the dead.
Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is
perhaps the best; since you can see the Castle, which you
lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot
see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on one
of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so
common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze
comes off the sea, with a little of the freshness, and
that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is
delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It
brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning
decolourizer, although not thick enough to obscure
outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the
Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the
Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea
fog.
Immediately underneath upon the south, you command
the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts
of the new Jail - a large place, castellated to the
extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the
Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners
taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other,
schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller
and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a
little farther, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its
Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry
pacing smartly too and fro before the door like a
mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost,
you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over
which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where
Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white
wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead,
lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to
Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of
Salisbury Crags: and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark
and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue
of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the
right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one
above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. -
Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same
instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's
flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke
followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at
the Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set
their watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms
upon the Pentlands. - To complete the view, the eye
enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the
New: here, full of railway trains and stepped over by the
high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green
with trees and gardens.
On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt
in itself nor has it so exceptional an outlook; and yet
even here it commands a striking prospect. A gully
separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside, where
witches were burned and tournaments held in former days.
Down that almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his
horse, and so first, as they say, attracted the bright
eyes of Mary. It is now tesselated with sheets and
blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating
carpets is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs
run out to Leith; Leith camps on the seaside with her
forest of masts; Leith roads are full of ships at anchor;
the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith Island;
the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the
May; the towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of
blowing smoke, along the opposite coast; and the hills
enclose the view, except to the farthest east, where the
haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and
his Scots Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of
Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a
queen for Scotland.
'O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land!'
The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring
thoughts of storm and sea disaster. The sailors' wives
of Leith and the fisherwomen of Cockenzie, not sitting
languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail of the
harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look
vainly for brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or
boats that have gone on their last fishing. Since Sir
Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have gone
down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the
London smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from
ladies' fingers; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the
fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance; and the lee shore
to the east of the Inchcape, is that Forfarshire coast
where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.
These are the main features of the scene roughly
sketched. How they are all tilted by the inclination of
the ground, how each stands out in delicate relief
against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a
matter for a person on the spot, and turning swiftly on
his heels, to grasp and bind together in one
comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The
multiplicity embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so
much, suffers itself to grow absorbed with single points.
You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a
country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban
doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where
people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of
chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and
church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At
one of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure
moving; on one of the multitude of roofs, you watch
clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and
scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint
and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes
dipping evenly over the housetops, like a gull across the
waves. And here you are in the meantime, on this
pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked upon
by monumental buildings.
Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night,
with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two
set sparsedly in the vault of heaven; and you will find a
sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps.
The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat
on his back under the Observatory dome and spying
heaven's secrets, is your only neighbour; and yet from
all round you there come up the dull hum of the city, the
tramp of countless people marching out of time, the
rattle of carriages and the continuous keen jingle of the
tramway bells. An hour or so before, the gas was turned
on; lamplighters scoured the city; in every house, from
kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed forth
into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue
and darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the
bright element shine far and near along the pavements and
upon the high facades. Moving lights of the railway pass
and repass below the stationary lights upon the bridge.
Lights burn in the jail. Lights burn high up in the tall
LANDS and on the Castle turrets, they burn low down in
Greenside or along the Park. They run out one beyond the
other into the dark country. They walk in a procession
down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier.
Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out
upon the ground of blackness, as when a child pricks a
drawing full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle;
not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high
station and fanciful design; every evening in the year
she proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own
beauty; and as if to complete the scheme - or rather as
if some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend to the
adjacent sea and country - half-way over to Fife, there
is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to
seaward, yet another on the May.
And while you are looking, across upon the Castle
Hill, the drums and bugles begin to recall the scattered
garrison; the air thrills with the sound; the bugles sing
aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and melts into
the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly
rounding in the labours of the day.
CHAPTER IX.
WINTER AND NEW YEAR.
THE Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of
reproach against the winter wind. SNELL, BLAE, NIRLY,
and SCOWTHERING, are four of these significant vocables;
they are all words that carry a shiver with them; and for
my part, as I see them aligned before me on the page, I
am persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth
from Burntisland and the northern hills; I think I can
hear it howl in the chimney, and as I set my face
northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
in the names of places there is often a desolate,
inhospitable sound; and I remember two from the near
neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame and Blaw-weary,
that would promise but starving comfort to their
inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus
endowed the language of Scotland with words, has also
largely modified the spirit of its poetry. Both poverty
and a northern climate teach men the love of the hearth
and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its
own right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong
waters. In Scotland, all our singers have a stave or two
for blazing fires and stout potations:- to get indoors
out of the wind and to swallow something hot to the
stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they
dwelt!
And this is not only so in country districts where
the shepherd must wade in the snow all day after his
flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere more
apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh
poet, Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and
willingly slunk from the robustious winter to an inn
fire-side. Love was absent from his life, or only
present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the
least serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by
comparison; and so there is nothing to temper the
sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the poor boy's
verses. Although it is characteristic of his native
town, and the manners of its youth to the present day,
this spirit has perhaps done something to restrict his
popularity. He recalls a supper-party pleasantry with
something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least
witty, in itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of
tavern parlours, and the revelry of lawyers' clerks, do
not offer by themselves the materials of a rich
existence. It was not choice, so much as an external
fate, that kept Fergusson in this round of sordid
pleasures. A Scot of poetic temperament, and without
religious exaltation, drops as if by nature into the
public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what
else is a man to do in this dog's weather?
To none but those who have themselves suffered the
thing in the body, can the gloom and depression of our
Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some constitutions
there is something almost physically disgusting in the
bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the
sickly sky depresses them; and they turn back from their
walk to avoid the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going
down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so
short that a man does much of his business, and certainly
all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The
roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so
drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered
how they found the heart to undress. And meantime the
wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it
shrieking and raving overhead with a noise of shipwrecks
and of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly
that there are times when the heart turns sick in a man's
inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the
warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to one
who has been long struggling with the seas.
As the weather hardens towards frost, the world
begins to improve for Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb,
sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of the city stamped
in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that
stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour
and downcast. They fall into two divisions: one, the
knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom Winter
has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-
year's fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his
periphery, but stepping through it by the glow of his
internal fires. Such an one I remember, triply cased in
grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
'Well,' would be his jovial salutation, 'here's a
sneezer!' And the look of these warm fellows is tonic,
and upholds their drooping fellow-townsmen. There is yet
another class who do not depend on corporal advantages,
but support the winter in virtue of a brave and merry
heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but
with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the
lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the
growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies were seen
coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was
as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than
seven. They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so
cold, you would have thought no one could lay a naked
foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if
you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them
music. The person who saw this, and whose heart was full
of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has
been of use to him ever since, and which he now hands on,
with his good wishes, to the reader.
At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and
all the sloping country, are sheeted up in white. If it
has happened in the dark hours, nurses pluck their
children out of bed and run with them to some commanding
window, whence they may see the change that has been
worked upon earth's face. 'A' the hills are covered wi'
snaw,' they sing, 'and Winter's noo come fairly!' And
the children, marvelling at the silence and the white
landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale
daylight, and brings all objects nearer the eye. The
Pentlands are smooth and glittering, with here and there
the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke, and here and there,
if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man
might almost jump across, between well-powdered Lothian
and well-powdered Fife. And the effect is not, as in
other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets are soon
trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white;
and you have only to lift your eyes and look over miles
of country snow. An indescribable cheerfulness breathes
about the city; and the well-fed heart sits lightly and
beats gaily in the - bosom. It is New-year's weather.
New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a
time of family expansions and of deep carousal.
Sometimes, by a sore stoke of fate for this Calvinistic
people, the year's anniversary fails upon a Sunday, when
the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and
even whistling is banished from our homes and highways,
and the oldest toper feels called upon to go to church.
Thus pulled about, as if between two loyalties, the
Scotch have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the
annual observance. A party of convivial musicians, next
door to a friend of mine, hung suspended in this manner
on the brink of their diversions. From ten o'clock on
Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their
instruments: and as the hour of liberty drew near, each
must have had his music open, his bow in readiness across
the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark the time, and
his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
twelfth stroke. sounded from the earliest steeple, before
they had launced forth into a secular bravura.
Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-
holds. For weeks before the great morning, confectioners
display stacks of Scotch bun - a dense, black substance,
inimical to life - and full moons of shortbread adorned
with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the
season and the family affections. 'Frae Auld Reekie,' 'A
guid New Year to ye a',' 'For the Auld Folk at Hame,' are
among the most favoured of these devices. Can you not
see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or
perhaps in Manor Glen among the rowans, and the old
people receiving the parcel with moist eyes and a prayer
for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this season, on the
threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that
unite them; they reckon the number of their friends, like
allies before a war; and the prayers grow longer in the
morning as the absent are recommended by name into God's
keeping.
On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a
Sunday; only taverns, toyshops, and other holiday
magazines, keep open doors. Every one looks for his
handsel. The postman and the lamplighters have left, at
every house in their districts, a copy of vernacular
verses, asking and thanking in a breath; and it is
characteristic of Scotland that these verses may have
sometimes a touch of reality in detail or sentiment and a
measure of strength in the handling. All over the town,
you may see comforter'd schoolboys hasting to squander
their half-crowns. There are an infinity of visits to be
paid; all the world is in the street, except the daintier
classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and
whisky and shortbread are staple articles of consumption.
From an early hour a stranger will be impressed by the
number of drunken men; and by afternoon drunkenness has
spread to the women. With some classes of society, it is
as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving
their wages for perhaps a month to do the season honour.
Many carry a whisky-bottle in their pocket, which they
will press with embarrassing effusion on a perfect
stranger. It is inexpedient to risk one's body in a cab,
or not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the
driver. The streets, which are thronged from end to end,
become a place for delicate pilotage. Singly or arm-in-
arm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the
votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
cannoning one against another; and now and again, one
falls and lies as he has fallen. Before night, so many
have gone to bed or the police office, that the streets
seem almost clearer. And as GUISARDS and FIRST-FOOTERS
are now not much seen except in country places, when once
the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron
railings, the festivities begin to find their way indoors
and something like quiet returns upon the town. But
think, in these piled LANDS, of all the senseless
snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!