LEGENDS
The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property
of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake"
for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the
"Pirate," so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run
of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as
delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only
forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest,
a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and
high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages
in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic,
not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature
in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror,
when the wind pipes around the tall _lands_, and hoots adown arched
passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering
and flaring in the gusts.
Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at
a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High
Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims
with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously
fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been
vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his
visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh
burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all
the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of
these great _lands_, had told him of a projected visit to the country,
and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the
night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in
the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a
jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a
thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is
characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little
episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
into the air off his own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the
career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye,
he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among
the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried before
them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried on the
Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if
they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged
and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed,
furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of
the story is about such houses. Two generations back they still stood
dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
schoolboy only shouted through the key-hole and made off; for within, it
was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
neglect.
And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall,
black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas
was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their
old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our
intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this
superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the
outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the
facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of
myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and
even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females,
"stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at
unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his
abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to
sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled the structure with the
ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's
coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at
night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major
through the glasses.
Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
something worse--a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out--on some
point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor
separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture--he had a
Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be
overstepped for ever.
Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race--the most
perverse and melancholy in man's annals--this will seem only a figure of
much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
Forth--a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for
a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake up
here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the
Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear
each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street
between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet
there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each
other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than
two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private
homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the
West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments;
and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that
surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the
Sabbath morning, from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the
borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their
symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But
in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now
lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the
same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their
peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than
that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin;
the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against
"right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few
worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a
comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fantastic
tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the success of this
remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on
the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the
steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned
once more into useful building material, if people who think almost
exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship God
under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to
pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?