MOVING
to and fro in Edinburgh we have come on the tracks of many eminent people,
some of them great writers. I have picked out for special mention three of
them. I here gather into one whole the complete literary story of the
capital. The connection of Edinburgh with literature is very close. A long
series of writers of the first rank lived and worked here. The story is
finished. It is one of the piquant contrasts between the old and the new,
and between spiritual splendour and material prosperity, that, spite its
wealth and population and culture, New Edinburgh is as nothing to Old. "A
hotbed of genius," so Smollett well named that small, quaint, unsavoury
eighteenth-century city. No one says that of the caput rnortuum of
to-day. The mere fact that a man was a "residenter" does not make him one
of the Edinburgh writers. Walter Kennedy, in the words of Dunbar, "brought
the Carrick clay to Edinburgh corrse," yet we may safely pass him by. More
than two hundred years after a more
illustrious figure brought the Carrick, or rather Kyle, clay to Edinburgh,
moved like a comet among its fixed stars, but Robert Bums was professedly
a visitor, and so was the first James. Thus we cannot credit the Kinges
Quair, or Pebles to the
Play, and (if he were, in fact, the
gifted author) Christis Kirk on the Green, to an Edinburgh man.
When we come to James IV. it is quite other. He was much in Edinburgh.
Holyrood was his headquarters so to speak, and attached to his Court were
a body of poets, the old Makaris, men of genius and learning, whose lines
are to us "unsavoury and sour" only because we do not take the trouble to
understand them. Three eminent figures rise above their fellows. These
were William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay. Of these Dunbar
is easily first. He wrote much of the highest and most various excellence;
he was the poet of love and satire. How often he paced the High Street and
noted the busy scenes of city life! He is not complimentary to Edinburgh;
he pictures it very much as Fergusson did long afterwards, but not with
the sympathy of a native. He was born not far off in the Lothian fields;
perhaps he preferred the country to the town. At any rate, in one of his
most famous verses he pictures what there ought to be at the Cross, and
what in fact there was, and you learn that very early indeed Edinburgh had
acquired its evil reputation for
uncleanness. In what rapturous strains, on the other hand, did he sing of
London in the Guildhall Recitation: "London, thou art the floure of
cities all!" In the Thistle and the Rose he carolled love strains
on the marriage of Margaret Tudor to his master. But if such things are
too much for the modern reader, let him at least try Kind Kittok, a
daring Rabelaisian adventure in this world and the next, such as Bums
might have written had he been born two centuries earlier. Of Gawin
Douglas I will only here recall that he was Provost of St Giles, and
Lyndsay’s official position fixed him to the court, and so for long
periods to Edinburgh. Lyndsay’s genius is not as great as Dunbar’s, and
yet he was more popular. He appealed more to the man in the street, so to
speak; voiced the popular discontent against the priests and the Church,
and yet died without formally renouncing that Church. He is the link
between the Makaris and the reformers.
As we look back on the time of James
IV. it shapes itself as golden age; a brief spell of fine weather when
what was always being sown was for once allowed to bring forth fruit. And
then came the Reformation and the rule of the Kirk, and there was an end
of the Makaris and poetry was banished to the muir and the hillside. Yet
two great writers adorned Edinburgh under Mary and her son. These were
John Knox and George Buchanan. Of Knox I speak elsewhere. Buchanan was a
scholar, and therefore he wrote in Latin, and to the acquisition of Latin
verse and Latin prose he gave the best years of his life. He had his
reward; he had Europe for his audience, and he acquired the reputation of
being the one great scholar his country had produced. It is hard to say
how a cultured Roman would judge him or any modern Latin. Of course he is
grammatical and all that, yet his History is no more like Livy than
chalk is like cheese. How could it be? He wrote little in Scots, and that
was his loss and ours; he is a strange, elusive personality. Knox stands
out clear and definite; you almost feel you had met him there by the
Netherbow, but you never say the last word, even to yourself, about
Buchanan. These great figures vanished, and in this chapter, at any rate,
I will not dwell on Drummond of Hawthornden and other minors, who might
fairly swell the literary annals of Edinburgh. It is said that the
influence of the Kirk was unfavourable to literature; it was stem and
severe and repressed all human enjoyment. There is some truth in this, but
only some. The Presbyterians were but a party in the nation, and in the
seventeenth century they were not always at the top. Men had more
elemental and more desperate things to think of than literary composition;
life is more than letters. In the seventeenth century your life was in
danger if you were in great place or in small, from pounds or famine, or
civil or religious commotion. Whenever things got a little easier letters
revived, and when, after the last Jacobite rising, Edinburgh turned aside
from the Stuart dream and the past and began to extend and grow rich, she
had, at the very beginning, a period of splendid literary activity.
Allan Ramsay stands at the head of
this new era. What an interesting figure he makes, this barber and
bookseller and author of gentle blood and small stature, and quick
movements and merry eye! Perhaps you must be born in Edinburgh to have
that peculiar depth of affection for her that Scott possessed, and
Fergusson and Stevenson, but Allan Ramsay came into her so early, and
stayed in her so long and knew her so well, that it were hard to consider
him other than native. It is not many years since his shop in the High
Street, opposite Niddry’s Wynd, was swept away; his still more famous
place at the east end of the Luckenbooths, the shop that was afterwards
occupied by Creech, went with that historic pile. I will not give a list
of his works or tell at length how, in the Tea-Table Miscellany, he
half revived and half destroyed many an old Scots song. He could be
dignified and proper.
"Dalhousie of an auld descent
My stoup, my pride, my ornament."
And his most famous piece, The
Gentle Shepherd, is fit for maidens as well as men; but he was most at
home in that dim Edinburgh underworld which rises up before us with a
certain unholy attraction, that gross underworld of the tavern, where
drunkenness and sculduddery was the order of the day. At what exact spot
on Bruntsfield Links stood that long-vanished alehouse, where umquhile
Maggy Johnstoun dispensed her treasures to all Edinburgh? An ideal
alehouse, though the ideal was purely Caledonian.’
"There we got fou wi’ little cost
And muckle speed."
What a prudence, what an iron will
Ramsay possessed! Had he let himself go he had never been out of the
tavern; his fall had been swifter and surer than Fergusson’s and a hundred
others. But he knew when to stop, not a common knowledge in old Edinburgh.
As he was human his prudence or his judgment failed now and again. The
theatre in Carrubber’s Close nearly ruined him, but he pulled through, and
he kept still through the ‘45, sentimental Jacobite as he was. And so he
prospered and gathered money, and died well off and respected, a very
human and sympathetic, if not altogether admirable, figure.
Then came the era of the mighty, for
there were giants in Edinburgh in those days: David Hume and Adam Smith,
and Principal William Robertson, and witty and learned judges, as Kames
and Monboddo and Hailes, and lesser figures as "Bozzy," and "Ossian"
Macpherson, and "Jupiter" Carlyle, and John Home of Douglas
notoriety, and delightful gifted women speaking Scots with elegance and
propriety, and prouder of their race than that they had written immortal
song; such were Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie, and Mrs Cockburn and
Lady Ann Barnard, and Caroline, Lady Nairne. Edinburgh was surely a
"hotbed of genius." It held its own with London. Its men took permanent
places in English literature. The best blood in England came north to sit
at the feet of those Gamaliels! What a delightful place to live in
Edinburgh must have been! Great as writers, they were equally great as
men. They were contented with small means and simple pleasures; wealth
they neither despised nor envied. Without mean jealousies and without envy
of each other, they took an honest and unaffected pride in the fame of
their friends. A certain gentle and benevolent irony coloured the life of
the chief among them. They were brave in life and in death, whatever were
their creeds, and the greatest were not merely of Edinburgh or of
Scotland, but of the universe. I could tell a hundred stories of those
giants, of their wisdom as of serpents and their harmlessness as of doves,
but a few words as to one of them must here suffice for sample. In Panmure
House, hard by the Canongate Churchyard, where is buried what is mortal of
this immortal, Adam Smith lived from 1778 till his death in 1790. Here it
was his habit to entertain his friends at supper each Sunday night. We
have no record of the feast. You may believe it was the simplest fare in
Edinburgh; but you will also believe the claret was good, for to the Scot
the "Auld Enemy" was not France and the punch compounded by the hand of a
cunning artist. But at the last Smith was sick unto death. He knew the end
was at hand and he was prepared, but it was no reason why he should not
entertain his friends; he welcomed them as of old, and did the honours as
he was wont to do, and then asked permission to retire. "My friends, I
fear I must leave this happy meeting, and that I may never see you again."
This was Saturday, the 10th June 1790, and before the week had run its
course our host was dead. And the historic street missed the
carefully-dressed little man with his shambling, "vermicular" walk and
vacant stare. To many an old friend it can never have looked the same
again.
There was many a scene of less
decorum in Edinburgh. Shakespeare, or all tradition lies, followed in
practice the theory of his own Autolycus, that "a quart of ale is a dish
for a king," a theory and practice that we know found favour in Old
Edinburgh; though the climate, it was urged, called for something
better than ale.
There is so ludicrous a tang about Bozzy’s dissipation, as there was about
his other pranks, that it makes us smile rather than sneer. Once he was
much "disguised in liquor," quite helpless, indeed. "Drunk again, you
dog," as the great Samuel might have remarked—as he, in fact, did remark
on one occasion during the tour to the Western Isles; it was an early
reminiscence of young Frank Jeffrey, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, that he had
assisted the greatest of biographers to bed. Next morning Boswell was duly
informed of Jeffrey’s share in the pious duty. He thanked him, patted him
on the head as a promising lad, and with that engaging absurdity of which
he, above all other men, had the trick, said, "If you go on as you’ve
begun you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet?" Jeffrey himself, as a
young advocate pleading before the General Assembly on behalf of a
bibulous divine, was guilty of an expression of great absurdity or of
great impudence. In either case it showed a very peculiar sense of humour.
"Was there," he asked, "a single reverend gentleman in the house who could
lay his hand on his heart and say he had never been overtaken with the
same infirmity?" The Assembly did
not own the soft impeachment; the members
showed themselves highly indignant, though they were too easily placated
by an apology that reads almost worse than the offence. The orator had his
ill-timed jest, if it was one, and Lord Cockburn, who tells the story,
omits to record the result to the client.
The name of Jeffrey reminds us that
we are in a new era. From October 1822 to January 1829, that is during the
brilliant youth and early manhood of the Edinburgh Review, he was
editor, though we must make a partial exception as regards the first two
or three numbers. I do not put him forward as a link between the two eras;
the link, if it existed, was Henry Mackenzie, known as the Man of Feeling,
from his chief work. He was born in 1747 in Libberton’s Wynd; he died in
1831 in Heriot Row, and was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard. He was a
W.S. and a shrewd man of business, but his fame in letters was great—even
greater than the deserved respect with which he was regarded for his other
excellent qualities. He knew all Edinburgh of two great generations, but
in letters he belongs to a peculiar phase of the eighteenth century. Of
his merits or demerits you cannot judge, for you cannot read him. He
speaks an unknown tongue albeit you see it is excellent English. The
letters begin to dance before your eyes, your head turns round, and you
presently close the volume in despair. But I get away too far from Jeffrey
and his Review. When the great men of the eighteenth century died
off the end was not yet, even as against London Edinburgh was destined to
another period of triumph. If she did not produce as before she held the
critical rod; if she could not crush the head she could always bruise the
heel of every contemporary English man of letters. The new era was the era
of two periodicals and the men who wrote for them; these were the
Edinburgh Review and Blackwood. The idea of the first was due
to Sidney Smith. The story has often been told how the thing took birth at
an evening supper in an upper flat in Buccleuch Place, and how Smith
suggested as a motto the Virgilian line—slightly adapted—Tenui musam
meditamur avena." "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal" was
the original and felicitous translation. With Smith and Jeffrey were
Horner and Brougham and other young men. The eldest was scarce over
thirty, and Brougham was but twenty-three. They had little money but
plenty brains, and the most absolute belief in their own powers, which
their after careers abundantly justified. They came in at the tail-end of
the "Dundas despotism." It seemed to them that the life of the country was
ground down and repressed, that good and bad were stereotyped in one
settled form. Some of the same spirit for good and ill animated them as
animated, under different conditions and in different days, Burns and
Heine. They were soldiers in the war of liberation, knights of the Holy
Ghost, in that strange phrase of the German poet. They scented the battle
from afar. As they laid their plans that wild Edinburgh wind, which is a
part, and a very impressive part, of the northern capital wailed in one of
its fretful fits round the tall land in a nook whereof they sat. It
reminded them of the spiritual storm that they were about to create, yet
even they took some precautions. The contributors corrected their proofs
in Willison’s office in Craig’s Close, and thither the conspirators were
wont to repair, singly and by different paths, probably at nightfall,
possibly in disguise.
The pay was royal, extravagant for
that time; twenty-five guineas a sheet was not unusual. The views were
novel and daring, the style firm and confident. Matters were not minced.
Jeffrey "went" for the "Lake school" and many other schools and beliefs.
The excitement was tremendous. Read English Bards and Scottish
Reviewers and you get some idea, though from an enemy, of the strength
of the Edinburgh in its youth; better still, take up Macaulay’s
Essays (after all, the only piece of the early Review that
remains current literature), and think of it as fresh and new, and then
you know what that generation was. The publisher was Archibald Constable,
surely a prince among publishers, though his end was unfortunate. He was
by some named "the crafty," "and he had a notable horn in his forehead
with which he ruled the nations." Thus the Chaldee Manuscript. And
we are reminded that the Review was not allowed to have everything
its own way. When the Whigs came into power at last a chosen band was
found ready to assault them in turn, and in Blackwood’s Magazine,
of which the first number appeared in October 1817, they found a new
organ. The chief of these were Wilson and Lockhart and Hogg. In that same
Manuscript they are very admirably hit off. Wilson is the beautiful
leopard from the valley of the palm trees; Lockhart was the scorpion which
delighted to sting the faces of men; Hogg was the great wild boar from the
forest of Lebanon whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle. The first
number sealed that Blackwood’s was to be one of the forces of the
day, and it did so through this same Chaldee Manuscript, which was
simply a brilliant skit on contemporary Edinburgh. You see that Edinburgh
was still a world of its own, and a world to which the English-speaking
race listened, with dissent and scorn and anger it may be, yet they
listened. The Review was Whig and the Magazine Tory; the
Review had attacked the Tory poets, the Magazine stuck up for
them. In splendid daring, or confident audacity and plain speaking and
conceit of themselves, it were hard to say which bore the palm. Of course
they were often wrong. Blackwood, in its attacks on the Cockney
school, said things about Keats and Shelley that read now like
blasphemies, but I cannot trace the various points in their history.
London has annexed the Edinburgh just as it did the other day the
Encyclopcedia Britannica.
Of old Encyclopadias were such a feature of
Edinburgh that they might be called the literary staple of the place, and
Blackwood is more of the Empire than the Town. The North British
Review (1854-1871), notwithstanding its singular ability, I can but
mention.
A brilliant attempt was made to
revive the critical glories of Edinburgh in the Scot’s Observer, a
weekly which by its daring, its learning and its wit deserved a success
which modem Edinburgh could not give. The Review and the
Magazine leapt into fame at once, but a periodical cannot do that
nowadays, and the Edinburgh folk who started it had to go south for their
editor. In the late W. E. Henley they found a heaven-born one, but were it
fate or too hard conditions the Observer never took the place it so
well deserved, and the band of Edinburgh writers, even the smaller fry,
have completely disappeared. Dr John Brown not quite unworthily closed the
list. Rab and his Friends is his masterpiece, and everybody knows
that slight story with what Mr J. N. Millar has well called its
"excruciating pathos." It is a gem but not flawless. The subject was
difficult and the treatment is perilously near "Kailyard." It was saved by
the touch of real genius in its amiable author. When Brown died he had no
successor. It is now the night without a star, yet Edinburgh might be
supposed to offer every attraction to a man of letters, but the wind
bloweth where it listeth, and in that airt it does not to-day even
whisper. |