NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY
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 the 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 realization 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 window, and the
passengers flee along Princes Street before the galloping squalls.
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 countryman, 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 connection, to
deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
of a voice, its dull ears, 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.
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, "subterranean 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
Cannon-mills 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
null-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 play-grounds 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 mostly artfully stained to represent a
landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to
flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set
his heart beating for travel and pure air.