It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the
Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as
the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be
said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the
unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the
New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly
picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the
sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion for
Paradise: ‘The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind a matter of a point
free.’ He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are promised
pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly somewhat
higher. But there are bright and temperate days—with soft air coming
from the inland hills, military music sounding bravely from the hollow of
the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes Street—when I
have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands in sentiment
with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has been much tumbled
round Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more agreeable to witness?
On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air of festival. It seems
(I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if it were a trifle too
good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It has the scenic
quality that would best set off a life of unthinking, open-air diversion.
It was meant by nature for the realisation of the society of comic
operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but towardly, how all
the world and his wife would flock into these gardens in the cool of the
evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant drinks, to see the moon
rise from behind Arthur’s Seat and shine upon the spires and monuments
and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas! and the next morning the
rain is splashing on the windows, and the passengers flee along Princes
Street before the galloping squalls.
[Picture: The Royal Institution]
It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and
short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the
situation. The architect was essentially a town bird, and he laid out
the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his
eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern
slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and
beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the
houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on
what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost
in the ranks; and, in a word, it is too often only from attic-windows, or
here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond the city
upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more
surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a mile
or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue
arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.
Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns’s model, once saw a butterfly at the
Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This
painted country man, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in
such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral considerations
a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a fanciful sort of
way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city does the sight
of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall
certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place
is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch,
you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you
turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane:—and behold! you
are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner,
and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down
an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one thing;
it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to overlook
the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life;
it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature’s unconcern: that
he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the Spring
green brightens in the wood or the field grows black under a moving
ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connexion, to deplore the
slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice,
its dull cars, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people
are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a
superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects of vision, not
only a few yards, but a few miles from where you stand:—think how
agreeably your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts
would be diversified, as you walked the Edinburgh streets! For you might
pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst of the city traffic, and
perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon a
heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in
a country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed and
rustic visage; or a fisher racing seawards, with the tiller under his
elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind, would fling you a salutation
from between Anst’er and the May.
To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the Old
Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town
shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious
how much description would apply commonly to either. The same sudden
accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the
same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to be
observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to Princes Street
from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap over
the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet, you
look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street;
and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the
New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to speak,
over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human race. But
at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel order.
The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between
gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most
commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card-cases pass to and fro
about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the extended
city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its
growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it is strange to
see one still surviving—and to see it some hundreds of feet below your
path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried Herculaneum?
Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines upon the roofs of
Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its chimneys; the dusty miller
comes to his door, looks at the gurgling water, hearkens to the turning
wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps whistles an air of his
own to enrich the symphony—for all the world as if Edinburgh were still
the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quietest of
hamlets buried a mile or so in the green country.
[Picture: In the Village of Dean]
It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode in
a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) known as
Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may
harry a bird’s nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places
that still smell of the plough in memory’s nostrils. Here, one had heard
a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to
eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the
site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but
partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on many an
escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs full of piping
birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were neither town nor
country; and I think that both for my companions and myself, there was a
special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment as of foreign
travel, when we hit in our excursions on the butt-end of some former
hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and
squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the
trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake,
the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open
thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressiveness to
a young mind. It was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore
than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth’s novels; and these two words,
‘subterreanean passage,’ were in themselves an irresistible attraction,
and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and the
black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle Rock
from West Princes Street Gardens, and lay a triumphal hand against the
rampart itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And
there are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my mind under a
very strong illumination of remembered pleasure. But the effect of not
one of them all will compare with the discoverer’s joy, and the sense of
old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with which I
explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, or the nugget of
cottages at Broughton Market. They were more rural than the open
country, and gave a greater impression of antiquity than the oldest
_land_ upon the High Street. They too, like Fergusson’s butterfly, had a
quaint air of having wandered far from their own place; they looked
abashed and homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their
outside stairs and running mill-streams; there were corners that smelt
like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils; and the
people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in
Colinton or Cramond.
In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of
the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the
workmen’s quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can
cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we
can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may
forget the stories and the playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some
possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
cataclysm of nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully stained to represent a
landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorns begin to
flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
our streets, the country hilltops find out a young man’s eyes, and set
his heart beating for travel and pure air.