A SUMMER IN SKYE
BY ALEXANDER SMITH
AUTHOR OF "A LIFE DRAMA," ETC.
VOLUME I.
ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER
148 STRAND, LONDON
1865
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
EDINBURGH
STIRLING AND THE NORTH
OBAN
SKYE AT LAST
AT MR M'IAN'S
A BASKET OF FRAGMENTS
THE SECOND SIGHT
IN A SKYE BOTHY
A SUMMER IN SKYE.
_EDINBURGH._
Summer has leaped suddenly on Edinburgh like a tiger. The air is
still and hot above the houses; but every now and then a breath of
east wind startles you through the warm sunshine--like a sudden
sarcasm felt through a strain of flattery--and passes on detested of
every organism. But, with this exception, the atmosphere is so
close, so laden with a body of heat, that a thunderstorm would be
almost welcomed as a relief. Edinburgh, on her crags, held high
towards the sun--too distant the sea to send cool breezes to street
and square--is at this moment an uncomfortable dwelling-place.
Beautiful as ever, of course--for nothing can be finer than the of
the Old Town etched on hot summer azure--but close, breathless,
suffocating. Great volumes of white smoke surge out of the railway
station; great choking puffs of dust issue from the houses and shops
that are being gutted in Princes Street. The Castle rock is gray;
the trees are of a dingy olive; languid "swells," arm-in-arm,
promenade uneasily the heated pavement; water-carts everywhere
dispense their treasures; and the only human being really to be
envied in the city is the small boy who, with trousers tucked up, and
unheeding of maternal vengeance, marches coolly in the fringe of the
ambulating shower-bath. Oh for one hour of heavy rain! Thereafter
would the heavens wear a clear and tender, instead of a dim and
sultry hue. Then would the Castle rock brighten in colour, and the
trees and grassy slopes doff their dingy olives for the emeralds of
April. Then would the streets be cooled, and the dust be allayed.
Then would the belts of city verdure, refreshed, pour forth gratitude
in balmy smells; and Fife--low-lying across the Forth--break from its
hot neutral tint into the greens, purples, and yellows that of right
belong to it. But rain won't come; and for weeks, perhaps, there
will be nothing but hot sun above, and hot street beneath; and for
the respiration of poor human lungs an atmosphere of heated dust,
tempered with east wind.
[Sidenote: Joy of vacation.]
Moreover, one is tired and jaded. The whole man, body and soul, like
sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, is fagged with work,
eaten up of impatience, and haunted with visions of vacation. One
"babbles o' green fields," like a very Falstaff; and the poor tired
ears hum with sea-music like a couple of sea-shells. At last it
comes, the 1st of August, and then--like an arrow from a Tartar's
bow, like a bird from its cage, like a lover to his mistress--one is
off; and before the wild scarlets of sunset die on the northern sea,
one is in the silence of the hills, those eternal sun-dials that tell
the hours to the shepherd, and in one's nostrils is the smell of
peat-reek, and in one's throat the flavour of usquebaugh. Then come
long floating summer days, so silent the wilderness, that one can
hear one's heart beat; then come long silent nights, the waves heard
upon the shore, although _that_ is a mile away, in which one snatches
the "fearful joy" of a ghost story, told by shepherd or fisher, who
believes in it as in his own existence. Then one beholds sunset, not
through the smoked glass of towns, but gloriously through the
clearness of enkindled air. Then one makes acquaintance with
sunrise, which to the dweller in a city, who conforms to the usual
proprieties, is about the rarest of this world's sights.
[Sidenote: Idleness in the North.]
Mr De Quincey maintains, in one of his essays, that dinner--dinner
about seven in the evening, for which one dresses, which creeps on
with multitudinous courses and _entrées_, which, so far from being a
gross satisfaction of appetite, is a feast noble, graceful, adorned
with the presence and smile of beauty, and which, from the very
stateliness of its progress, gives opportunities for conversation and
the encounter of polished minds--saves over-wrought London from
insanity. This is no mere humorous exaggeration, but a very truth;
and what dinner is to the day the Highlands are to the year. Away in
the north, amid its green or stony silences, jaded hand and brain
find repose--repose, the depth and intensity of which the idler can
never know. In that blessed idleness you become in a strange way
acquainted with yourself; for in the world you are too constantly
occupied to spend much time in your own company. You live abroad all
day, as it were, and only come home to sleep. Away in the north you
have nothing else to do, and cannot quite help yourself; and
conscience, who has kept open a watchful eye, although her lips have
been sealed these many months, gets disagreeably communicative, and
tells her mind pretty freely about certain little shabby
selfishnesses and unmanly violences of temper, which you had quietly
consigned--like a document which you were for ever done with--to the
waste-basket of forgetfulness. And the quiet, the silence, the rest,
is not only good for the soul, it is good for the body too. You
flourish like a flower in the open air; the hurried pulse beats a
wholesome measure; evil dreams roll off your slumbers; indigestion
dies. During your two months' vacation, you amass a fund of
superfluous health, and can draw on it during the ten months that
succeed. And in going to the north, and wandering about the north,
it is best to take everything quietly and in moderation. It is
better to read one good book leisurely, lingering over the finer
passages, returning frequently on an exquisite sentence, closing the
volume, now and then, to run down in your own mind a new thought
started by its perusal, than to rush in a swift perfunctory manner
through half a library. It is better to sit down to dinner in a
moderate frame of mind, to please the palate as well as satisfy the
appetite, to educe the sweet juices of meats by sufficient
mastication, to make your glass of port "a linked sweetness long
drawn out," than to bolt everything like a leathern-faced Yankee for
whom the cars are waiting, and who fears that before he has had his
money's worth, he will be summoned by the railway bell. And shall
one, who wishes to extract from the world as much enjoyment as his
nature will allow him, treat the Highlands less respectfully than he
will his dinner? So at least will not I. My bourne is the island of
which Douglas dreamed on the morning of Otterburn; but even to it I
will not unnecessarily hurry, but will look on many places on my way.
You have to go to London; but unless your business is urgent, you are
a fool to go thither like a parcel in the night train and miss York
and Peterborough. It is very fine to arrive at majority, and the
management of your fortune which has been all the while accumulating
for years; but you do not wish to do so at a sudden leap--to miss the
April eyes and April heart of seventeen!
[Sidenote: Preparations for Highland travel.]
The Highlands can be enjoyed in the utmost simplicity; and the best
preparations are--money to a moderate extent in one's pocket, a
knapsack containing a spare shirt and a toothbrush, and a courage
that does not fear to breast the steep of the hill, and to encounter
the pelting of a Highland shower. No man knows a country till he has
walked through it; he then tastes the sweets and the bitters of it.
He beholds its grand and important points, and all the subtler and
concealed beauties that lie out of the beaten track. Then, O reader,
in the most glorious of the months, the very crown and summit of the
fruitful year, hanging in equal poise between summer and autumn,
leave London or Edinburgh, or whatever city your lot may happen to be
cast in, and accompany me on my wanderings. Our course will lead us
by ancient battle-fields, by castles standing in hearing of the
surge; by the bases of mighty mountains, along the wanderings of
hollow glens; and if the weather holds, we may see the keen ridges of
Blaavin and the Cuchullin hills; listen to a legend old as Ossian,
while sitting on the broken stair of the castle of Duntulm, beaten
for centuries by the salt flake and the wind; and in the pauses of
ghostly talk in the long autumn nights, when the rain is on the
hills, we may hear--more wonderful than any legend, carrying you away
to misty regions and half-forgotten times--the music which haunted
the Berserkers of old, the thunder of the northern sea!
[Sidenote: Books written about Edinburgh.]
A perfect library of books has been written about Edinburgh. Defoe,
in his own matter-of-fact, garrulous way, has described the city.
Its towering streets, and the follies of its society, are reflected
in the inimitable pages of "Humphrey Clinker." Certain aspects of
city life, city amusements, city dissipations, are mirrored in the
clear, although somewhat shallow, stream of Fergusson's humour. The
old life of the place, the traffic in the streets, the old-fashioned
shops, the citizens with cocked hats and powdered hair, with
hospitable paunches and double chins, with no end of wrinkles, and
hints of latent humour in their worldly-wise faces, with gold-headed
sticks, and shapely limbs encased in close-fitting small-clothes, are
found in "Kay's Portraits." Passing Scott's other services to the
city--the magnificent description in "Marmion," the "high jinks" in
"Guy Mannering," the broils of the nobles and wild chieftains who
attended the Court of the Jameses in "The Abbot"--he has, in "The
Heart of Mid-Lothian," made immortal many of the city localities; and
the central character of Jeanie Deans is so unassumingly and sweetly
_Scotch_, that she seems as much a portion of the place as Holyrood,
the Castle, or the Crags. In Lockhart's "Peter's Letters to his
Kinsfolk," we have sketches of society nearer our own time, when the
_Edinburgh Review_ flourished, when the city was really the Modern
Athens, and a seat of criticism giving laws to the empire. In these
pages, we are introduced to Jeffrey, to John Wilson, the Ettrick
Shepherd, and Dr Chalmers. Then came _Blackwood's Magazine_, the
"Chaldee Manuscript," the "Noctes," and "Margaret Lindsay." Then the
"Traditions of Edinburgh," by Mr Robert Chambers; thereafter the
well-known _Edinburgh Journal_. Since then we have had Lord
Cockburn's chatty "Memorials of his Time." Almost the other day we
had Dean Ramsay's Lectures, filled with pleasant antiquarianism, and
information relative to the men and women who flourished half a
century ago. And the list may be closed with "Edinburgh Dissected,"
written after the fashion of Lockhart's "Letters,"--a book containing
pleasant reading enough, although it wants the brilliancy, the
acuteness, the eloquence, and possesses all the ill-nature, of its
famous prototype.
[Sidenote: Sir Walter Scott.]
Scott has done more for Edinburgh than all her great men put
together. Burns has hardly left a trace of himself in the northern
capital. During his residence there his spirit was soured, and he
was taught to drink whisky-punch--obligations which he repaid by
addressing "Edina, Scotia's darling seat," in a copy of his tamest
verses. Scott discovered that the city was beautiful--he sang its
praises over the world--and he has put more coin into the pockets of
its inhabitants than if he had established a branch of manufacture of
which they had the monopoly. Scott's novels were to Edinburgh what
the tobacco trade was to Glasgow about the close of the last century.
Although several labourers were before him in the field of the Border
Ballads, he made fashionable those wonderful stories of humour and
pathos. As soon as "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared,
everybody was raving about Melrose and moonlight. He wrote "The Lady
of the Lake," and next year a thousand tourists descended on the
Trosachs, watched the sun setting on Loch Katrine, and began to take
lessons on the bagpipe. He improved the Highlands as much as General
Wade did when he struck through them his military roads. Where his
muse was one year, a mail-coach and a hotel were the next. His poems
are grated down into guidebooks. Never was an author so popular as
Scott, and never was popularity worn so lightly and gracefully. In
his own heart he did not value it highly; and he cared more for his
plantations at Abbotsford than for his poems and novels. He would
rather have been praised by Tom Purdie than by any critic. He was a
great, simple, sincere, warm-hearted man. He never turned aside from
his fellows in gloomy scorn; his lip never curled with a fine
disdain. He never ground his teeth save when in the agonies of
toothache. He liked society, his friends, his dogs, his domestics,
his trees, his historical nick-nacks. At Abbotsford, he would write
a chapter of a novel before his guests were out of bed, spend the day
with them, and then, at dinner, with his store of shrewd Scottish
anecdote, brighten the table more than did the champagne. When in
Edinburgh, any one might see him in the streets or in the Parliament
House. He was loved by everybody. No one so popular among the
souters of Selkirk as the Shirra. George IV., on his visit to the
northern kingdom, declared that Scott was the man he most wished to
see. He was the deepest, simplest, man of his time. The mass of his
greatness takes away from our sense of its height. He sinks like Ben
Cruachan, shoulder after shoulder, slowly, till its base is twenty
miles in girth. Scotland is Scott-land. He is the light in which it
is seen. He has proclaimed over all the world Scottish story,
Scottish humour, Scottish feeling, Scottish virtue; and he has put
money into the pockets of Scottish hotel-keepers, Scottish tailors,
Scottish boatmen, and the drivers of the Highland mails.
[Sidenote: Beauty of Edinburgh.]
Every true Scotsman believes Edinburgh to be the most picturesque
city in the world; and truly, standing on the Calton Hill at early
morning, when the smoke of fires newly-kindled hangs in azure swathes
and veils about the Old Town--which from that point resembles a huge
lizard, the Castle its head, church-spires spikes upon its scaly
back, creeping up from its lair beneath the Crags to look out on the
morning world--one is quite inclined to pardon the enthusiasm of the
North Briton. The finest view from the interior is obtained from the
corner of St Andrew Street, looking west. Straight before you the
Mound crosses the valley, bearing the white Academy buildings;
beyond, the Castle lifts, from grassy slopes and billows of summer
foliage, its weather-stained towers and fortifications, the Half-Moon
battery giving the folds of its standard to the wind. Living in
Edinburgh there abides, above all things, a sense of its beauty.
Hill, crag, castle, rock, blue stretch of sea, the picturesque ridge
of the Old Town, the squares and terraces of the New--these things
seen once are not to be forgotten. The quick life of to-day sounding
around the relics of antiquity, and overshadowed by the august
traditions of a kingdom, makes residence in Edinburgh more impressive
than residence in any other British city. I have just come
in--surely it never looked so fair before? What a poem is that
Princes Street! The puppets of the busy, many-coloured hour move
about on its pavement, while across the ravine Time has piled up the
Old Town, ridge on ridge, gray as a rocky coast washed and worn by
the foam of centuries; peaked and jagged by gable and roof; windowed
from basement to cope; the whole surmounted by St Giles's airy crown.
The New is there looking at the Old. Two Times are brought face to
face, and are yet separated by a thousand years. [Sidenote:
Edinburgh at night.] Wonderful on winter nights, when the gully is
filled with darkness, and out of it rises, against the sombre blue
and the frosty stars, that mass and bulwark of gloom, pierced and
quivering with innumerable lights. There is nothing in Europe to
match that, I think. Could you but roll a river down the valley it
would be sublime. Finer still, to place one's-self near the Burns
Monument and look toward the Castle. It is more astonishing than an
Eastern dream. A city rises up before you painted by fire on night.
High in air a bridge of lights leaps the chasm; a few emerald lamps,
like glow-worms, are moving silently about in the railway station
below; a solitary crimson one is at rest. That ridged and chimneyed
bulk of blackness, with splendour bursting out at every pore, is the
wonderful Old Town, where Scottish history mainly transacted itself;
while, opposite, the modern Princes Street is blazing throughout its
length. During the day the Castle looks down upon the city as if out
of another world; stern with all its peacefulness, its garniture of
trees, its slopes of grass. The rock is dingy enough in colour, but
after a shower, its lichens laugh out greenly in the returning sun,
while the rainbow is brightening on the lowering sky beyond. How
deep the shadow which the Castle throws at noon over the gardens at
its feet where the children play! How grand when giant bulk and
towery crown blacken against sunset! Fair, too, the New Town sloping
to the sea. From George Street, which crowns the ridge, the eye is
led down sweeping streets of stately architecture to the villas and
woods that fill the lower ground, and fringe the shore; to the bright
azure belt of the Forth with its smoking steamer or its creeping
sail; beyond, to the shores of Fife, soft blue, and flecked with
fleeting shadows in the keen clear light of spring, dark purple in
the summer heat, tarnished gold in the autumn haze; and farther away
still, just distinguishable on the paler sky, the crest of some
distant peak, carrying the imagination into the illimitable world.
Residence in Edinburgh is an education in itself. Its beauty refines
one like being in love. It is perennial, like a play of
Shakespeare's. Nothing can stale its infinite variety.
[Sidenote: The Canongate.]
From a historical and picturesque point of view, the Old Town is the
most interesting part of Edinburgh; and the great street running from
Holyrood to the Castle--in various portions of its length called the
Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the Canongate--is the most
interesting part of the Old Town. In that street the houses preserve
their ancient appearance; they climb up heavenward, story upon story,
with outside stairs and wooden panellings, all strangely peaked and
gabled. With the exception of the inhabitants, who exist amidst
squalor, and filth, and evil smells undeniably modern, everything in
this long street breathes of the antique world. If you penetrate the
narrow wynds that run at right angles from it, you see traces of
ancient gardens. Occasionally the original names are retained, and
they touch the visitor pathetically, like the scent of long-withered
flowers. Old armorial bearings may yet be traced above the doorways.
Two centuries ago fair eyes looked down from yonder window, now in
possession of a drunken Irishwoman. If we but knew it, every crazy
tenement has its tragic story; every crumbling wall could its tale
unfold. The Canongate is Scottish history fossilised. What ghosts
of kings and queens walk there! What strifes of steel-clad nobles!
What wretches borne along, in the sight of peopled windows, to the
grim embrace of the "maiden!" What hurrying of burgesses to man the
city walls at the approach of the Southron! What lamentations over
disastrous battle days! James rode up this street on his way to
Flodden. Montrose was dragged up hither on a hurdle, and smote, with
disdainful glance, his foes gathered together on the balcony. Jenny
Geddes flung her stool at the priest in the church yonder. John Knox
came up here to his house after his interview with Mary at
Holyrood--grim and stern, and unmelted by the tears of a queen. In
later days the Pretender rode down the Canongate, his eyes dazzled by
the glitter of his father's crown, while bagpipes skirled around, and
Jacobite ladies, with white knots in their bosoms, looked down from
lofty windows, admiring the beauty of the "Young Ascanius," and his
long yellow hair. Down here of an evening rode Dr Johnson and
Boswell, and turned in to the White Horse. David Hume had his
dwelling in this street, and trod its pavements, much meditating the
wars of the Roses and the Parliament, and the fates of English
sovereigns. One day a burly ploughman from Ayrshire, with swarthy
features and wonderful black eyes, came down here and turned into
yonder churchyard to stand, with cloudy lids and forehead reverently
bared, beside the grave of poor Fergusson. Down the street, too,
often limped a little boy, Walter Scott by name, destined in after
years to write its "Chronicles." The Canongate once seen is never to
be forgotten. The visitor starts a ghost at every step. Nobles,
grave senators, jovial lawyers, had once their abodes here. In the
old, low-roofed rooms, half-way to the stars, philosophers talked,
wits corruscated, and gallant young fellows, sowing wild oats in the
middle of last century, wore rapiers and lace ruffles, and drank
claret jovially out of silver stoups. In every room a minuet has
been walked, while chairmen and linkmen clustered on the pavement
beneath. But the Canongate has fallen from its high estate. Quite
another race of people are its present inhabitants. The vices to be
seen are not genteel. Whisky has supplanted claret. Nobility has
fled, and squalor taken possession. Wild, half-naked children swarm
around every door-step. Ruffians lounge about the mouths of the
wynds. Female faces, worthy of the "Inferno," look down from broken
windows. Riots are frequent; and drunken mothers reel past scolding
white atomies of children that nestle wailing in their bosoms--little
wretches to whom Death were the greatest benefactor. The Canongate
is avoided by respectable people, and yet it has many visitors. The
tourist is anxious to make acquaintance with it. Gentlemen of obtuse
olfactory nerve, and of an antiquarian turn of mind, go down its
closes and climb its spiral stairs. Deep down these wynds the artist
pitches his stool, and spends the day sketching some picturesque
gable or doorway. The fever-van comes frequently here to convey some
poor sufferer to the hospital. Hither comes the detective in plain
clothes on the scent of a burglar. And when evening falls, and the
lamps are lit, there is a sudden hubbub and crowd of people, and
presently from its midst emerge a couple of policemen and a barrow
with a poor, half-clad, tipsy woman from the sister island crouching
upon it, her hair hanging loose about her face, her hands quivering
with impotent rage, and her tongue wild with curses. Attended by
small boys, who bait her with taunts and nicknames, and who
appreciate the comic element which so strangely underlies the
horrible sight, she is conveyed to the police cell, and will be
brought before the magistrate to-morrow--for the twentieth time
perhaps--as a "drunk and disorderly," and dealt with accordingly.
This is the kind of life the Canongate presents to-day--a contrast
with the time when the tall buildings enclosed the high birth and
beauty of a kingdom, and when the street beneath rang to the
horse-hoofs of a king.
[Sidenote: The Cowgate]
The New Town is divided from the Old by a gorge or valley, now
occupied by a railway station; and the means of communication are the
Mound, Waverley Bridge, and the North Bridge. With the exception of
the Canongate, the more filthy and tumble-down portions of the city
are well kept out of sight. You stand on the South Bridge, and
looking down, instead of a stream, you see the Cowgate, the dirtiest,
narrowest, most densely peopled of Edinburgh streets. Admired once
by a French ambassador at the court of one of the Jameses, and yet
with certain traces of departed splendour, the Cowgate has fallen
into the sere and yellow leaf of furniture brokers, second-hand
jewellers, and vendors of deleterious alcohol. These second-hand
jewellers' shops, the trinkets seen by bleared gaslight, are the most
melancholy sights I know. Watches hang there that once ticked
comfortably in the fobs of prosperous men, rings that were once
placed by happy bridegrooms on the fingers of happy brides, jewels in
which lives the sacredness of death-beds. What tragedies, what
disruptions of households, what fell pressure of poverty brought them
here! Looking in through the foul windows, the trinkets remind one
of shipwrecked gold embedded in the ooze of ocean--gold that speaks
of unknown, yet certain, storm and disaster, of the yielding of
planks, of the cry of drowning men. Who has the heart to buy them, I
wonder? The Cowgate is the Irish portion of the city. Edinburgh
leaps over it with bridges; its inhabitants are morally and
geographically the lower orders. They keep to their own quarters,
and seldom come up to the light of day. Many an Edinburgh man has
never set his foot in the street; the condition of the inhabitants is
as little known to respectable Edinburgh as are the habits of moles,
earth-worms, and the mining population. The people of the Cowgate
seldom visit the upper streets. You may walk about the New Town for
a twelvemonth before one of these Cowgate pariahs comes between the
wind and your gentility. Should you wish to see that strange people
"at home," you must visit them. The Cowgate will not come to you:
you must go to the Cowgate. The Cowgate holds high drunken carnival
every Saturday night; and to walk along it then, from the West Port,
through the noble open space of the Grassmarket--where the
Covenanters and Captain Porteous suffered--on to Holy rood, is one of
the world's sights, and one that does not particularly raise your
estimate of human nature. For nights after your dreams will pass
from brawl to brawl, shoals of hideous faces will oppress you, sodden
countenances of brutal men, women with loud voices and frantic
gesticulations, children who have never known innocence. It is
amazing of what ugliness the human face is capable. The devil marks
his children as a shepherd marks his sheep--that he may know them and
claim them again. Many a face flits past here bearing the
sign-manual of the fiend.
[Sidenote: Intellectual greatness of Edinburgh.]
But Edinburgh keeps all these evil things out of sight, and smiles,
with Castle, tower, church-spire, and pyramid rising into sunlight
out of garden spaces and belts of foliage. The Cowgate has no power
to mar her beauty. There may be a canker at the heart of the
peach--there is neither pit nor stain on its dusty velvet. Throned
on crags, Edinburgh takes every eye; and, not content with supremacy
in beauty, she claims an intellectual supremacy also. She is a
patrician amongst British cities, "A penniless lass wi' a lang
pedigree." She has wit if she lacks wealth: she counts great men
against millionaires. The success of the actor is insecure until
thereunto Edinburgh has set her seal. The poet trembles before the
Edinburgh critics. The singer respects the delicacy of the Edinburgh
ear. Coarse London may roar with applause: fastidious Edinburgh
sniffs disdain, and sneers reputations away. London is the stomach
of the empire--Edinburgh the quick, subtle, far-darting brain. Some
pretension of this kind the visitor hears on all sides of him. It is
quite wonderful how Edinburgh purrs over her own literary
achievements. Swift, in the dark years that preceded his death,
looking one day over some of the productions of his prime, exclaimed,
"Good heaven! what a genius I once was!" Edinburgh, looking some
fifty years back on herself, is perpetually expressing astonishment
and delight. Mouldering Highland families, when they are unable to
retain a sufficient following of servants, fill up the gaps with
ghosts. Edinburgh maintains her dignity after a similar fashion, and
for a similar reason. Lord-Advocate Moncreiff, one of the members
for the city, hardly ever addresses his fellow-citizens without
recalling the names of Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd, and the other
stars that of yore made the welkin bright. On every side we hear of
the brilliant society of forty years ago. Edinburgh considers
herself supreme in talent--just as it is taken for granted to-day
that the present English navy is the most powerful in the world,
because Nelson won Trafalgar. The Whigs consider the _Edinburgh
Review_ the most wonderful effort of human genius. The Tories would
agree with them, if they were not bound to consider _Blackwood's
Magazine_ a still greater effort. It may be said that Burns, Scott,
and Carlyle are the only men really great in literature--taking
_great_ in a European sense--who, during the last eighty years, have
been connected with Edinburgh. I do not include Wilson in the list;
for although he was as splendid as any of these for the moment, he
was evanescent as a Northern light. In the whole man there was
something spectacular. A review is superficially very like a battle.
In both there is the rattle of musketry, the boom of great guns, the
deploying of endless brigades, charges of brazen squadrons that shake
the ground--only the battle changes kingdoms, while the review is
gone with its own smoke-wreaths. Scott lived in or near Edinburgh
during the whole course of his life. Burns lived there but a few
months. Carlyle went to London early, where he has written his
important works, and made his reputation. Let the city boast of
Scott--no one will say she does wrong in that--but it is not so easy
to discover the amazing brilliancy of her other literary lights.
Their reputations, after all, are to a great extent local. What
blazes a sun at Edinburgh, would, if transported to London, not
unfrequently become a farthing candle. [Sidenote: Lord Jeffrey.]
Lord Jeffrey--when shall we cease to hear his praises? With perfect
truthfulness one may admit that his lordship was no common man. His
"vision" was sharp and clear enough within its range. He was unable
to relish certain literary forms, as some men are unable to relish
certain dishes--an inaptitude that might arise from fastidiousness of
palate, or from weakness of digestion. His style was perspicuous; he
had an icy sparkle of epigram and antithesis, some wit, and no
enthusiasm. He wrote many clever papers, made many clever speeches,
said many clever things. But the man who could so egregiously
blunder as to "Wilhelm Meister," who hooted Wordsworth through his
entire career, who had the insolence to pen the sentence that opens
the notice of the "Excursion" in the _Edinburgh Review_, and who,
when writing tardily, but really well, on Keats, could pass over the
"Hyperion" with a slighting remark, might be possessed of
distinguished parts, but no claim can be made for him to the
character of a great critic. Hazlitt, wilful, passionate,
splendidly-gifted, in whose very eccentricities and fierce vagaries
there was a generosity which belongs only to fine natures, has sunk
away into an almost unknown London grave, and his works into
unmerited oblivion; while Lord Jeffrey yet makes radiant with his
memory the city of his birth. In point of natural gifts and
endowment--in point, too, of literary issue and result--the
Englishman far surpassed the Scot. Why have their destinies been so
different? One considerable reason is that Hazlitt lived in
London--Jeffrey in Edinburgh. Hazlitt was partially lost in an
impatient crowd and rush of talent. Jeffrey stood, patent to every
eye, in an open space in which there were few competitors. London
does not brag about Hazlitt--Edinburgh brags about Jeffrey. The
Londoner, when he visits Edinburgh, is astonished to find that it
possesses a Valhalla filled with gods--chiefly legal ones--of whose
names and deeds he was previously in ignorance. The ground breaks
into unexpected flowerage beneath his feet. He may conceive to-day
to be a little cloudy--may even suspect east wind to be abroad--but
the discomfort is balanced by the reports he hears on every side of
the beauty, warmth, and splendour of yesterday. He puts out his
hands and warms them, if he can, at that fire of the past. "Ah! that
society of forty years ago! Never on this earth did the like exist.
Those astonishing men, Horner, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd! What
wit was theirs--what eloquence, what genius! What a city this
Edinburgh once was!"
[Sidenote: A Scottish Weimar.]
Edinburgh is not only in point of beauty the first of British
cities--but, considering its population, the general tone of its
society is more intellectual than that of any other. In no other
city will you find so general an appreciation of books, art, music,
and objects of antiquarian interest. It is peculiarly free from the
taint of the ledger and the counting-house. It is a Weimar without a
Goethe--Boston without its nasal twang. But it wants variety; it is
mainly a city of the professions. London, for instance, contains
every class of people; it is the seat of legislature as well as of
wealth; it embraces Seven Dials as well as Belgravia. In that vast
community class melts imperceptibly into class, from the Sovereign on
the throne to the wretch in the condemned cell. In that
finely-graduated scale, the professions take their own place. In
Edinburgh matters are quite different. It retains the gauds which
royalty cast off when it went South, and takes a melancholy pleasure
in regarding these--as a lady the love-tokens of a lover who has
deserted her to marry into a family of higher rank. A crown and
sceptre lie up in the Castle, but no brow wears the diadem, no hand
lifts the golden rod. There is a palace at the foot of the
Canongate, but it is a hotel for her Majesty, _en route_ for
Balmoral--a place where the Commissioner to the Church of Scotland
holds his phantom Court. With these exceptions, the old halls echo
only the footfalls of the tourist and sight-seer. When royalty went
to London, nobility followed; and in Edinburgh the field is left now,
and has been so left for a long time back, to Law, Physic, and
Divinity. [Sidenote: The professions in Edinburgh.] The professions
predominate: than these there is nothing higher. At Edinburgh a Lord
of Session is a Prince of the Blood, a Professor a Cabinet Minister,
an Advocate an heir to a peerage. The University and the Courts of
Justice are to Edinburgh what the Court and the Houses of Lords and
Commons are to London. That the Scottish nobility should spend their
seasons in London is not to be regretted for the sake of Edinburgh
shopkeepers only--their absence affects interests infinitely higher.
In the event of a superabundance of princes, and a difficulty as to
what should be done with them, it has been frequently suggested that
one should be stationed in Dublin, another in Edinburgh, to hold
Court in these cities. Gold is everywhere preferred to paper; and in
the Irish capital royalty in the person of Prince Patrick would be
more satisfactory than its shadow in the person of a Lord-Lieutenant.
A Prince of the Blood in Dublin would be gratefully received by the
warm-hearted Irish people. His permanent presence amongst them would
cancel the remembrance of centuries of misgovernment; it would strike
away for ever the badge and collar of conquest. In Edinburgh we have
_had_ princes of late years, and seen the uses of them. A prince at
Holyrood would effect for the country what Scottish Rights'
Associations and University reformers have so long desired. The
nobility would again gather--for a portion of the year at least--to
their ancient capital; and their sons, as of old, would be found in
the University class-rooms. Under the new influence, life would be
gayer, airier, brighter. The social tyranny of the professions would
to some extent be broken up, the atmosphere would become less legal,
and a new standard would be introduced whereby to measure men and
their pretensions. For the Prince himself, good results might be
expected. He would at the least have some specific public duties to
perform; and he would, through intercourse, become attached to the
people, as the people in their turn would become attached to him.
Edinburgh needs some little gaiety and courtly pomp to break the
coldness of gray stony streets; to brighten a somewhat sombre
atmosphere; to mollify the east wind that blows half the year, and
the "professional sectarianism" that blows the whole year round. You
always suspect the east wind, somehow, in the city. You go to
dinner: the east wind is blowing chillily from hostess to host. You
go to church, a bitter east wind is blowing in the sermon. The text
is that divine one, GOD IS LOVE; and the discourse that follows is
full of all uncharitableness.
[Sidenote: Spiritual atmosphere of the city.]
Of all British cities, Edinburgh--Weimar-like in its intellectual and
æsthetic leanings, Florence-like in its freedom from the stains of
trade, and more than Florence-like in its beauty--is the one best
suited for the conduct of a lettered life. The city as an entity
does not stimulate like London, the present moment is not nearly so
intense, life does not roar and chafe--it murmurs only; and this
interest of the hour, mingled with something of the quietude of
distance and the past--which is the spiritual atmosphere of the
city--is the most favourable of all conditions for intellectual work
or intellectual enjoyment. You have libraries--you have the society
of cultivated men and women--you have the eye constantly fed by
beauty--the Old Town, jagged, picturesque, piled up; and the airy,
open, coldly-sunny, unhurried, uncrowded streets of the New
Town--and, above all, you can "sport your oak," as they say at
Cambridge, and be quit of the world, the gossip, and the dun. In
Edinburgh, you do not require to create quiet for yourself; you can
have it ready-made. Life is leisurely; but it is not the leisure of
a village, arising from a deficiency of ideas and motives--it is the
leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history, which
has done its work, which does not require to weave its own clothing,
to dig its own coals, to smelt its own iron. And then, in Edinburgh,
above all British cities, you are released from the vulgarising
dominion of the hour. The past confronts you at every street corner.
The Castle looks down out of history on its gayest thoroughfare. The
winds of fable are blowing across Arthur's Seat. Old kings dwelt in
Holyrood. Go out of the city where you will, the past attends you
like a cicerone. Go down to North Berwick, and the red shell of
Tantallon speaks to you of the might of the Douglases. Across the
sea, from the gray-green Bass, through a cloud of gannets, comes the
sigh of prisoners. From the long sea-board of Fife--which you can
see from George Street--starts a remembrance of the Jameses. Queen
Mary is at Craigmillar, Napier at Merchiston, Ben Jonson and Drummond
at Hawthornden, Prince Charles in the little inn at Duddingston; and
if you go out to Linlithgow, there is the smoke of Bothwellhaugh's
fusee, and the Great Regent falling in the crooked street. Thus the
past checkmates the present. [Sidenote: Influence of the past.] To
an imaginative man, life in or near Edinburgh is like residence in an
old castle:--the rooms are furnished in consonance with modern taste
and convenience; the people who move about wear modern costume, and
talk of current events in current colloquial phrases; there is the
last newspaper and book in the library, the air from the last new
opera in the drawing-room; but while the hour flies past, a subtle
influence enters into it--enriching, dignifying--from oak panelling
and carvings on the roof--from the picture of the peaked-bearded
ancestor on the wall--from the picture of the fanned and hooped
lady--from the old suit of armour and the moth-eaten banner. On the
intellectual man, living or working in Edinburgh, the light comes
through the stained window of the past. To-day's event is not raw
and _brusque_; it comes draped in romantic colour, hued with ancient
gules and or. And when he has done his six hours' work, he can take
the noblest and most renovating exercise. He can throw down his pen,
put aside his papers, and walk round the Queen's Drive, where the
wind from the sea is always fresh and keen; and in his hour's walk he
has wonderful variety of scenery--the fat Lothians--the craggy
hillside--the valley, which seems a bit of the Highlands--the wide
sea, with smoky towns on its margin, and islands on its bosom--lakes
with swans and rushes--ruins of castle, palace, and chapel--and,
finally, homeward by the high towering street through which Scottish
history has rushed like a stream. There is no such hour's walk as
this for starting ideas, or, having started, captured, and used them,
for getting quit of them again.
[Sidenote: Summer in Edinburgh.]
Edinburgh is at this moment in the full blaze of her beauty. The
public gardens are in blossom. The trees that clothe the base of the
Castle rock are clad in green: the "ridgy back" of the Old Town jags
the clear azure. Princes Street is warm and sunny--'tis a very
flower-bed of parasols, twinkling, rainbow-coloured. Shop windows
are enchantment, the flag streams from the Halfmoon Battery,
church-spires sparkle sun-gilt, gay equipages dash past, the military
band is heard from afar. The tourist is already here in wonderful
Tweed costume. Every week the wanderers increase, and in a short
time the city will be theirs. By August the inhabitants have fled.
The University lets loose, on unoffending humanity, a horde of
juvenile M.D.'s warranted to dispense--with the sixth commandment.
Beauty listens to what the wild waves are saying. Valour cruises in
the Mediterranean; and Law, up to the knees in heather, stalks his
stag on the slopes of Ben-Muich-dhui. Those who, from private and
most urgent reasons, are forced to remain behind, put brown paper in
their front windows; inform the world by placard that letters and
parcels may be left at No. 26 round the corner, and live fashionably
in their back-parlours. At twilight only do they adventure forth;
and if they meet a friend--who ought like the rest of the world to be
miles away--they have only of course come up from the sea-side, or
their relation's shooting-box, for a night, to look after some
imperative business. Tweed-clad tourists are everywhere: they stand
on Arthur's Seat, they speculate on the birthplace of Mons Meg, they
admire Roslin, eat haggis, attempt whisky-punch, and crowd to Dr
Guthrie's church on Sundays. By October the last tourist has
departed, and the first student has arrived. Tailors put forth their
gaudiest fabrics to attract the eye of ingenuous youth. Whole
streets bristle with "lodgings to let." Edinburgh is again filled.
The University class-rooms are crowded; a hundred schools are busy;
and Young Briefless,
"Who never is, but always to be, fee'd,"
the sun-brown yet on his face, paces the floor of the Parliament
House, four hours a day, in his professional finery of horse-hair and
bombazine. During the winter-time are assemblies and dinner-parties.
There is a fortnight's opera, with the entire fashionable world in
the boxes. The Philosophical Institution is in full session; while a
whole army of eloquent lecturers do battle with ignorance on public
platforms--each effulging like Phœbus, with his waggon-load of
blazing day--at whose coming night perishes, shot through with orient
beams. Neither mind nor body is neglected during the Edinburgh
season.
[Sidenote: The Scottish Academy.]
In spring time, when the east winds blow, and grey walls of
_haar_--clammy, stinging, heaven-high, making disastrous twilight of
the brightest noon--come in from the German Ocean, and when coughs
and colds do most abound, the Royal Scottish Academy opens her
many-pictured walls. From February to May this is the most
fashionable lounge in Edinburgh. The rooms are warm, so thickly
carpeted that no footfall is heard, and there are seats in abundance.
It is quite wonderful how many young ladies and gentlemen get
suddenly interested in art. The Exhibition is a charming place for
flirtation; and when Romeo is short in the matter of small talk--as
Romeo sometimes will be--there is always a picture at hand to suggest
a topic. Romeo may say a world of pretty things while he turns up
the number of a picture in Juliet's catalogue--for without a
catalogue Juliet never appears in the rooms. Before the season
closes, she has her catalogue by heart, and could repeat it to you
from beginning to end more glibly than she could her Catechism.
Cupid never dies; and fingers will tingle as sweetly when they touch
over an Exhibition catalogue as over the dangerous pages of "Lancelot
of the Lake." If many marriages are not made here, there are gay
deceivers in the world, and the picture of deserted Ophelia--the
blank smile on her mouth, flowerets stuck in her yellow hair--slowly
sinking in the weedy pool, produces no suitable moral effect. To
other than young ladies and gentlemen the rooms are interesting, for
Scottish art is at this moment more powerful than Scottish
literature. Perhaps some half-dozen pictures in each Academy's
Exhibition are the most notable intellectual products that Scotland
can present for the year. The Scottish brush is stronger than the
Scottish pen. It is in landscape and--at all events up till the
other day, when Sir John Watson Gordon died--in portraiture that the
Scotch school excels. It excels in the one in virtue of the national
scenery, and in the other in virtue of the national insight and
humour. For the making of a good portrait a great deal more is
required than excellent colour and dexterous brush-work--shrewdness,
insight, imagination, common sense, and many another mental quality
besides, are needed. No man can paint a good portrait unless he
knows his sitter thoroughly; and every good portrait is a kind of
biography. It is curious, as indicating that the instinct for
biography and portrait-painting are alike in essence, that in both
walks of art the Scotch have been unusually successful. It would
seem that there is something in the national character predisposing
to excellence in these departments of effort. Strictly to inquire
how far this predisposition arises from the national shrewdness or
the national humour, would be needless; thus much is certain, that
Scotland has at various times produced the best portrait-painters and
the best writers of biography to be found in the compass of the
islands. In the past, she can point to Boswell's "Life of Johnson"
and Raeburn's portraits: she yet can claim Thomas Carlyle; and but
lately she could claim Sir John Watson Gordon. Thomas Carlyle is a
portrait-painter, and Sir John Watson Gordon was a biographer.
[Sidenote: Scottish portraiture.]