WINTER AND NEW YEAR
The Scots dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
winter wind. _Snell_, _blae_, _nirly_, and _scowthering_, are four of
these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and
as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound;
and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame
and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their
inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the
language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of
its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of
the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own
right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all
our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout
potations:--to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something hot
to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt!
And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must
wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and
nowhere more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
a man to do in this dog's weather?
To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in
a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
struggling with the seas.
As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.
At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
country, is sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets
are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you
have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's
weather.
New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for
this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday,
when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper
feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
loyalties, the Scots have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments;
and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark
the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had
launched forth into a secular bravura.
Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before
the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun--a dense,
black substance, inimical to life--and full moons of shortbread adorned
with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For
the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favoured of these devices.
Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with
moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this
season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they
reckon the number of their friends, like allies before a war; and the
prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name
into God's keeping.
On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Everyone looks
for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every
house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail of sentiment and
a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
comforter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their half-crowns. There
are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street,
except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and
shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a
stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by
afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of
society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in
their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a
perfect stranger. It is not expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or
not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets,
which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate
pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and
quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
cannoning one against another; and now and again, one falls, and lies as
he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police
office, that the streets seem almost clearer. And as _guisards_ and
_first-footers_ are now not much seen except in country places, when
once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings,
the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
returns upon the town. But think, in these piled _lands_, of all the
senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!
Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and
one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the
great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own
college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on
the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a
creature of the national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The
patriotism that leads a man to eat Scots bun will scarcely desert him at
the curling pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to
school; and the profession of errand-boy is transformed into a holiday
amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely
provided. Duddingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern side of
Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the
reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above
it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly
trees. At the church gates is the historical _jougs_, a place of penance
for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical _louping-on stane_,
from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here
Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon
Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter before the burglary
in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises
to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is
worth a climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's
Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is
thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a
thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away,
with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into
the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black
clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch
is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow
reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole
field is full of skimming lights.