Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

Everybody will remember as a pendant—but one so much more grave that we hesitate to cite it, though the coincidence is curious—the pause made by Dante in the beginning of the Inferno, which resembles so exactly the pause in Scott's career. The great Florentine had written seven cantos of his wonderful poem when the rush of his affairs carried him away from all such tranquil work and left the Latin fragment, among other more vulgar papers, shovelled hastily into some big cassone in the house in Florence from which he was a banished man. It was found there after five years by a nephew who would fain have tried his prentice hand upon the poem, yet finally took the better part of sending it to its author—who immediately resumed Io dico sequitando, in a burst of satisfaction to have recovered what he must have begun with far more zeal and intention than Scott. The resemblance, however, which is so curiously exact, the seven cantos and the seven chapters, the five years' interval, the satisfaction of the work resumed, is, different as are the men and their work, one of those fantastic parallels which are delightful to the fantastic soul. Nothing could be more unlike than that dark and splendid poem to Scott's sunshiny and kindly art; nothing less resembling than the proud embittered exile with his hand against every man, and the genial romancer whose heart overflowed with the milk of human kindness. Yet this strange occurrence in both lives takes an enhanced interest from the curious dissimilarity which makes the repetition of the fact more curious still.

The sudden burst into light and publicity of a gift which had been growing through all the changes of private life, of the wonderful stream of knowledge, recollection, divination, boundless acquaintance with and affection for human nature, which had gladdened the Edinburgh streets, the Musselburgh sands, the Southland moors and river-sides, since ever Walter Scott had begun to roam among them, with his cheerful band of friends, his good stories, his kind and gentle thoughts—was received by the world with a burst of delighted recognition to which we know no parallel. We do not know, alas! what happened when the audience in the Globe Theatre made a similar discovery. Perhaps the greater gift, by its very splendour, would be less easily perceived in the dazzling of a glory hitherto unknown, and obscured it may be by jealousies of actors and their inaptitude to do justice to the wonderful poetry put into their hands. But of that we know nothing. We know, however, that there were no two opinions about Waverley. It took the world by storm, which had had no such new sensation and no such delightful amusement for many a day. It was not only the beginning of a new and wonderful school in romance, a fresh chapter in literature, but the revelation of a region and a race unknown. Scotland had begun to glow in the sunshine of poetry, in glimpses of Burns's westland hills and fields, of Scott's moss-troopers and romantic landscapes, visions of battle and old tradition: but the wider horizon of a life more familiar, of a broad country full of nature, full of character, running over with fun and pawky humour, thrilling with high enthusiasm and devotion, where men were still ready to risk everything in life for a falling cause, and other men not unwilling to pick up the spoils, was a discovery and surprise more delightful than anything that had happened to the generation. The books flew through the island like magic, penetrating to corners unthought of, uniting gentle and simple in an enthusiasm beyond parallel. How the multitude got at them at all it is difficult to understand, for these were the days of really high prices, before the actual cost of a book got modified by one-half as now, and when there were as yet no cheap editions. Waverley was printed in three small volumes at the cost of a guinea. We believe that to buy books was more usual then than now, and there were circulating libraries everywhere, conveying perhaps the stream of literature more evenly over the country than can be attained by one gigantic Mudie. At all events; by whatever means it was procured, Waverley and its successors were read everywhere, not only in great houses but in small, wherever there was intelligence and a taste for books; and the interest, the curiosity, the eagerness, were everywhere overwhelming. I have heard of girls in a dressmaker's workroom who kept the last volume in a drawer, from whence it was read aloud by one to the rest, the drawer being closed hurriedly whenever the mistress came that way. From this humble scene to the highest in the land, where the Prince Regent sat—

"His table spread with tea and toast,Death-warrants, and the Morning Post,"

these volumes went everywhere. One of them lies before me now in rough boards of paper, with the "blue back" of which one of Scott's correspondents talks, not a prepossessing volume, but independent of externals and all things else except its own native excellence and power.

For fifteen years after, this stream of living literature poured forth in the largest generous volume like a great river, through every region where English was spoken or known. His work was as the march of a battalion, always increasing, new detachments appearing suddenly, now an individual, now a group, to join the line. The Baron of Bradwardine with his attendant bailie; Vich Ian Vohr and noble Evan Dhu, and all the clan; the family at Ellangowan and that at Charlieshope, good Dandie and all his delightful belongings; Jock Jabos and the rest; Monkbarns and Edie Ochiltree, and all the pathos of the Mucklebackits; Bailie Nicol Jarvie and the Dougal Cratur; humours of the clachan and the hillside; Jeanie Deans in her perfect humbleness and truth. It would be vain to attempt to name the new inhabitants of Scotland who appeared out of the unseen wherever Scott moved. Neither to himself nor to his audience could it seem that these friends of all were new created, invented by any man. Scott, who alone could do it, withdrew the veil that had concealed them. He opened up an entire country, a full world of men and women, so living, so various, with their natural garb of fitting language, and their heart of natural sentiment, and the thoughts which they must have been thinking, by inalienable right of their humanity. There might have been better plots or more carefully constructed stories; as indeed in life, heaven knows, all our stories might be much better constructed; but could we conceive it possible that these, our country-folk and friends, could be dismissed again off the face of the earth, how impoverished, how diminished, would Scotland be! The want of them is more than we could contemplate, and we can well understand how our country must have appeared to the world a poor little turbulent country, without warmth or wealth, before these representatives of a robust and manifold race were born.

Yet, amid the delightful enrichment of these productions to the nation and the world, the man himself who produced them was perhaps the finest revelation of all. And here he transcends for once the larger kindred genius of whom we do not know, yet believe, that he was such a man as Scott, though better off in one way and less well in others. Shakspeare must have been somewhat oppressed with noble patrons, which Scott never was—patrons to whom his own splendid courtesy and the magnifying glamour in his poetic eyes must sometimes have made him more flattering than was needful, overwhelming them with magnificent words; but on the other hand he had not those modern drawbacks under which Scott's great career was so bitterly burdened, the strain for money, the constant combat with debt and liability. To bear the first yoke must have taken much of a man's strength and tired him exceedingly: but to bear the second is perhaps the severest test to which any buoyant spirit can be put. And from the very beginning of his career as a novelist Scott had this burden upon his shoulders. He bore the chains very lightly at first with a hundred hairbreadth 'scapes which made the struggle—as even that struggle can be made while the sufferer is strong and young—almost exhilarating, with a glee in the relief and the power to surmount every difficulty, and a faith strengthened by numberless examples of the certainty—however dark things might seem up to the very last moment—of bursting through, with an exquisite sensation of success, the hardest coil of circumstance. But as Scott grew older these obstacles grew stronger; he could not put sense or prudence into the heads of his colleagues, and it was hard to teach himself, the most liberal, the most hospitable and princely of entertainers, those habits of frugality which are never harder to learn than by a Scots gentleman of the ancient strain accustomed to keep open house. I do not think it has ever been acknowledged that there is in this desperate struggle to keep afloat a certain intoxication of its own. To foil your pursuers, your enemies, whether they take the form of armed assailants or of pressing creditors, by ever another and another daring combination, by sudden reliefs unthought of, by a bold coup executed at the very moment when the crisis seems inevitable, by all the happy yet desperate chances of warfare, has a fascination in it which no one could conceive as attending a sordid struggle for money. The pursuit becomes exciting, breathless, in proportion as it becomes desperate. Sometimes, when all the stars in their courses have seemed to be fighting against the combatant, a sudden aid like the very interposition of heaven will bring him safety; and a confidence in this interposition takes possession of him. He does not see how deliverance can come, but it will come. His labouring breast strains, his brain whirls, he is at his last gasp: when all at once the heart leaps up in his bosom, the wheels in his head stand still, a flash of satisfaction comes over him. Once more and once more, again and again, at the last gasp of the struggle he is saved.

No doubt something of this was in the long and desperate fight which Scott waged with the creditors of the Ballantynes, who were also his own. The worst of the struggle is that it almost legalises a prodigality which to men always fixed on solid ground would be impossible. The conviction that the money will come somehow, added to the still more intoxicating conviction that this somehow depends oftenest upon your own unrivalled power of work, and the confidence which all men have in you, permits, almost sanctions, a yielding to personal temptations, and the indulgence of a little taste and inclination of your own in the midst of so many burdens for others. Thus Abbotsford grew, of which all the critics have talked as if its, alas! somewhat sham antiquity and its few acres had been the cause of all the trouble. One could have wished that Scott's taste had been more true, that he had so dearly bought and so fondly collected curiosities more worthy, that he should have had a genuine old house, a direct and happy lineage, son and son's son, to bear his name—not to posterity, with whom it was safe, but on Tweedside among the other Scotts,—a kindly and not ignoble ambition. But he has himself forestalled the criticisms of the antiquarians by that delightful record of good Monkbarns's mistakes and deceptions which would make us forgive him for any "lang ladle" or fictitious relic; and it would be a hard heart that would be otherwise than thankful that he had so much as Abbotsford to indemnify him for his labours and trials. As the time approached when he was no longer able to maintain that gallant struggle, and the power of labour failed and confidence was lost, the position of the man becomes more tragical than the spectator can well bear to look upon. Who can read unmoved the story of the time when his faithful friends (though it was their necessities that had pulled him down to the ground of this bitter failure) had to come and tell him that his last romance was scarcely worth paper and print? who could refrain from going down on his knees to kiss that failing hand which could now only bring forth Count Robert of Paris where once it had set out in glorious array of battle Sir Kenneth of Scotland, and the stout old Constable of Chester, and Front de Bœuf, and the Scottish archers—and which still could not be inactive, but would struggle on, on—to pay that miserable money and leave behind a spotless name!

There is one melancholy and almost terrible consolation in such a heartbreaking record, terrible from the light it throws upon the constitution of human nature and the conditions of that supreme sympathy which is the noblest kind of fame. Had Sir Walter been able to throw his burdens from him, had he loosed the millstone from his neck and retired in full credit and comfort to his Abbotsford to pass the conclusion of peaceful and glorious days on the banks of the Tweed—had we known him only as the greatest romancist of the world, the next to Shakspeare in large creation and revelation of mankind, proud had every Scotsman been of his name, and fondly had the nation cherished his memory. But when his brilliant and wonderful life fell under the shadow of all these tragical clouds, when its course was arrested by obstacles which are usually unsurmountable, before which any other man must have broken down, when he stood in the face of fate, in the face of every misfortune, broken in health, in hope, in power, a lonely man where he had been the centre of every joy in life, an enchanter with his magic wand broken and his witchery gone—then, and then only, does Scott attain his highest greatness and give the world most noble assurance of a man. His diary as his life dwindles away, that life once so splendid and so full, is like the noblest poem—its broken and falling sentences go direct to the heart. Fuimus was never written more grandly, with more noble patience and valour. Without this downfall his triumph might have been but as the other triumph—the tragedy of the conclusion is a sight for men and angels. Lockhart, who preserves the record for us, becomes for the time the greatest, with a subject more moving, more noble, than any that his hero had selected from the records of the ages. The pity and anguish grow too much for the spectator. We are spectators no longer, but mournful and devoted retainers standing about, all hushed and silent, scarcely able either to shed or to restrain the choking tears.

One asks one's self, Is this the cost of supreme human power? is it to be bought by nothing but the agony in which failure, real or apparent, is a part, and in which all the exquisite tenement of reputation, happiness, and delightsome life seems to crumble down like a house of cards before our eyes? Dread question for the genius of the future, sad yet sublime problem of the past! At all events it was so in the life of Scott, which in all its greatness was never so great, so touching, so secure of love and honour, as in the moment when his weapons fell from his hands and his genius and being alike failed, breaking down in a last supreme struggle for justice and honour and fair dealing, to avoid what he thought disgrace and the intolerable stigma of having done any man wrong.

It is a penalty of such greatness, especially in the midst of an enthusiastic and unanimous country, that it becomes more or less a thing to trade upon, the subject of vague patriotic vapourings, and much froth of foolish talk from uninstructed lips in the following generations. As Stratford-on-Avon is in respect to Shakspeare all Scotland is in respect to Burns and Scott. It has even become a mark of culture and superiority among certain fine spirits in consequence to pretend to despise the former of these names—perhaps really to despise it, for there is no fathom that can sound the depths of human foolishness even in the learned and wise. The vulgarity of fame when it becomes the cry of the most prosaic is, however, calculated justly to alarm the literary soul, and in the excess of Scott monuments, and wooden quaighs, and tartan paper-knives, there is a damping and depressing quality which we must all acknowledge.

SIR WALTER SCOTT'S HOUSE

We need not, however, in these follies forget the illuminating presence of Scott in the midst of all the picturesque scenes of what he has proudly called "mine own romantic town." From the High School Yards and "the kittle nine steps," from George Square, lying cosy but grey in the hollow amid the enlarged and beautiful openings of the Meadows, to the Parliament House, withdrawn in the square, once blocked by the Old Tolbooth, now confronted solely by an embellished and restored cathedral, and to the sober street on the other side of the hollow, where to 39 North Castle Street he took his bride and set up his independent home, there is no corner of Edinburgh where his step and voice have not been. And some of the most characteristic scenes which we can call to mind in recent history rise before us in his narrative as if we had been there. The Porteous Mob riots in our ears, the flare of the sudden fire at the gates of the Tolbooth, the blinding smoke, the tramp of the crowd, the sudden concentrated force of that many-headed multitude stilled by stern resolve into unity and action, are as visible as if they had happened yesterday. And after ransacking all the serious volumes that tell the story and picture the aspect of old Edinburgh, we turn back to that tale, and for the first time see the tortuous passage between the church and the Tolbooth, the dark old prison with its lofty turrets, the Luckenbooths linked on to its dark shadow, oppressing the now wide thoroughfare of the High Street, where these buildings have left no trace. No topographical record or painstaking print comes within a hundred miles of that picture, dashed in boldly by the way, to the entrancing tale. I cannot refrain from placing here one or two vignettes, which I have no doubt the artist himself will allow to surpass his best efforts, and which set the landscape before us with a distinct yet ideal and poetical grace which pencil and graver can very seldom equal. The first is of the exterior aspect of Edinburgh.

"Marching in this manner they speedily reached an eminence, from which they could view Edinburgh stretching along the ridgy hill which slopes eastward from the Castle. The latter, being in a state of siege, or rather of blockade, by the northern insurgents, who had already occupied the town for two or three days, fired at intervals upon such parties of Highlanders as exposed themselves, either on the main street, or elsewhere in the vicinity of the fortress. The morning being calm and fair, the effect of this dropping fire was to invest the Castle in wreaths of smoke, the edges of which dissipated slowly in the air, while the central veil was darkened ever and anon by fresh clouds poured forth from the battlements; the whole giving, by the partial concealment, an appearance of grandeur and gloom, rendered more terrific when Waverley reflected on the cause by which it was produced, and that each explosion might ring some brave man's knell."

The second introduces us to the interior of the city.

"Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering, after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pie-men, for it had, as his guide assured him, just 'chappit eight upon the Tron.' It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry and of license, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by night especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect on the imagination. The extraordinary height of the houses was marked by lights, which, glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended so high among the attics, that they seemed at length to twinkle in the middle sky. This coup d'œil, which still subsists in a certain degree, was then more imposing, owing to the uninterrupted range of buildings on each side, which, broken only at the space where the North Bridge joins the main street, formed a superb and uniform Place, extending from the front of the Luckenbooths to the head of the Canongate, and corresponding in breadth and length to the uncommon height of the buildings on either side."

Since then this great Place has become more majestic, as well as more open, by the clearing away of the Luckenbooths: but nothing can be finer than the touch of the graphic yet reticent pencil which sets down before us the glimmering of the irregular lights which seemed at last to twinkle in the middle sky. This was how the main street of Edinburgh still appeared when Scott himself was a boy, and no doubt he must have caught the aspect of the previous sketch on some king's birthday or other public holiday, the 4th of June perhaps, that familiar festival in other regions, when the guns of the Castle were saluting and the smoke hanging about those heights like a veil.

It was one of the privations of Scott's life as it began to fall into its last subdued and suffering stage that he had to give up his Edinburgh house and the cheerful company which had so long made his winters pleasant. He loved the country and his home there at all seasons, as the readers of the poetical chapters of friendly dedication and communing addressed to different friends between the cantos of Marmion will well remember: but yet the yearly change, the natural transfer of life in the short days to the cheerful surroundings of town, the twinkling of those very lights, the assembling of bright faces, the meeting of old friends, were always dear to him, and this sacrifice was not one of the least which he made during the tremendous struggle of his waning years.

GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH

With no other name could we so fitly close the story of our ancient capital, a story fitfully told with many breaks and omissions, yet offering some thread of connection to link together the different eras of a picturesque and characteristic national life. Had space and knowledge permitted, there is, in the records of Scottish law alone, much that is interesting, along with a still larger contribution of wit and humour and individual character, to the elucidation of the period which passed between the end of the history of Edinburgh under her native kings and the beginning of her brilliant record under the modern reign of literature and poetry. This book, however, does not pretend to set forth the Edinburgh of the Kirk or the Parliament House, each of which has an existing record of its own. Seated on the rocks which are more old than any history, though those precipices are now veiled with verdure and softness, and the iron way of triumphant modern science runs at their feet; with her crown of sacred architecture hanging over her among the mists, and the little primeval shrine mounted upon her highest ridge; with her palace, all too small for the requirements of an enlarged and splendid royalty, and the great crouched and dormant sentinel of nature watching over her through all the centuries; with her partner, sober and ample, like a comely matron, attended by all the modern arts and comforts, seated at the old mother's feet,—Edinburgh can never be less than royal, one of the crowned and queenly cities of the world. It does not need for this distinction that there should be millions of inhabitants within her walls, or all the great threads of industry and wealth gathered in her hands. The pathos of much that is past and over for ever, the awe of many tragedies, a recollection almost more true than any reality of the present, of ages and glories gone—add a charm which the wealthiest and greatest interests of to-day cannot give, to the city, always living, always stirring, where she stands amid traditionary smoke and mist, the grey metropolis of the North, the Edinburgh of a thousand fond associations,

Our Own Romantic TownTHE END

1

We here take Shakspeare's Prince Hal for granted, as we feel disposed at all times to take the poet's word in defiance of history; though no doubt the historical argument is calculated to throw a chill of doubt upon that gay and brilliant image.