OLD TOWN: THE LANDS
The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is
the making of the other.
The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and
more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the
whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for
miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
expressed in these two words.
Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations: not in
extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as in some Black
Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally
termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
gazer's head, planted on the steep hillside; as for the garret, all the
furniture may be in the pawnshop, but it commands a famous prospect to
the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of
flowering lilacs in the spring.
It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a
conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
qualities we find it irksome to, conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you
see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and
a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court
where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their
doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs.
Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still
erect, with some insignia of its former state--some scutcheon, some holy
or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where
famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out
pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The
Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is
given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when
powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine
faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter
at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers.
These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
different order--skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot children;
big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel
petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising
constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.
One of the earliest marks of these _degringolades_ is, that the victim
begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every
window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had
played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave
him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch
of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made
Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an
aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and
lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past--perhaps
the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch-bowl,
some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the
chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That
is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
room; the _land_ would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
In one house, perhaps, twoscore families herd together; and, perhaps,
not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
from another in the twinkling of an eye.
One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the
policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring
on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made
itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its
quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its
time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more
than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time,
and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the
quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and
contained it.
There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in the High Street. The building
had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed
up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of
the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered
on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the
black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a
hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical
shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the
morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded
more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a
brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many
a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here
it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle
still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the
Queen was pasted over the chimney, So, by this disaster, you had a
glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the
revolving years. The _land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much!
Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun
looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over
the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude
of people could exclaim with truth: "The house that I was born in fell
last night!"