Sir Walter's Edinburgh

English Studies ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20 Sir Walter's Edinburgh J. A. Falconer To cite this article: J. A. Falconer (1921) Sir Walter's Edinburgh, English Studies, 3:1-6, 33-42, DOI: 10.1080/00138382108596413 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138382108596413 Published online: 13 Aug 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=nest20 Download by: [137.189.171.235] Date: 13 June 2016, At: 04:32 Sir Walter's Edinburgh. The spell of Edinburgh is |woven of many and subtle charms, of whose variety the tributes of her admirers are eloquent. Tennyson, I think it was, spoke of her as "the old grey city by the sea"; her natives, thinking of the thin haze of smoke that overhangs her in daytime, fondly call her "Auid Reekie"; scholars have named her "the Northern Athens" from her literary reputation and Acropolis-like build ; and finally Scott, whose peculiar perquisite Edinburgh surely was, thinking of her as she stands out against the northern sky, the grim castle crowning the height in dusky grandeur, the city piled high and close along the dropping ridge, calls her "mine own romantic town". The city has a witchery for everyone, stranger and native. The secret lies in its situation and architecture and story. The Castle must have been built before the town as a chief's stronghold, impregnable on the furthest point of a massive shoulder of rock; the town accumulating not only, as towns did in the good old days, for safety's sake round the base of the Castle Rock, but along the shoulder which gradually slopes down from it, thus forming the single main street. Hence comes the striking impression you get from the south, of an aerial city — it is built on the skyline. Even more the romance lies in the character of the streets — the towering "lands", as the houses are called their quaint gables, and the bewildering aspect of streets in the air above you and far beneath your feet. Walking unconcernedly on to the Dean Bridge, you discover a deep valley under you which, for wild beauty, rivals a highland glen; on the South Bridge in the busy centre of the city you are startled to find yourself above the roofs of an underground town. The place, says Robert Louis Stevenson, "is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland Hills. You look down an alley, and Downloaded by [] at 04:32 13 June 2016 see ships tacking for the Baltic." Or you walk down the High Street and, glancing through a close, find you are gazing into sheer space — the rest of the town vanished as if you and your street were poised in mid-air! If, on an August evening, you climb Arthur's Seat at the bottom of the Canon- gate you may discover that while your back was turned, the autumn mist has thrown a pall over the city below and that you stand solitary, facing across a snowy sea the twinkling lights of the Castle. Then too the bewildering tallness of the "lands". They are high enough from the front — usually six or more stories; but viewed from the back, from the Cowgate for instance, they form a vast pile of gables and turrets fifteen and sixteen stories in the air above your head. No wonder that the streets which intersect these lands, look mere lanes. Edinburgh is not medieval like Nürnberg, for the old town was destroyed by the English in the sixteenth century and the oldest houses date from that period. They are built in a combination of French and Flemish style distinguishing them from English houses and reminding us of the long-standing alliance with France against the "auld enemy of England". The gables are corbie- stepped in the manner so familiar in Holland and Flanders, project and 34 point at all angles, and not infrequently over-hang the pavements like a ship's stern. Add to this, the tall round night-cap towers, the steep roofs with their long chimneys, the numerous outside stairs, and you have the union of sublimity, quaintness, and soft charm which is Edinburgh's charact- eristic. There is nothing of the old wealth and power and cathedral grandeur which marks London; it is an effect at once homelier and more aesthetic. If the City itself is a gem of rare price, it nestles in an appropriate casket. Had Edinburgh stood in the midst of hills, the long ridge and jutting crags would have been dwarfed and lost; placed as it is in an open landscape, Edinburgh is not only visible far and wide but commands a glorious view in every direction. Standing on the highest bastion of the Castle wall, facing southwards as the watchman on that bastion must often have done, you see the heather-clad Lammermoors lining the horizon, and on the south- west, if it be clear, far away in Galloway you will just make out the rounded cone of Tinto Tap. To the West, is the smiling wooded strath which stretches to Linlithgow, home of kings; to the East, the view is closed by Arthur's Seat, from which the British King is reputed to have watched the defeat of the Picts in the valley below. To the North at your very feet, the Forth, studded with sails and islands "like emeralds chased in gold", opens out to the sea along the white Fifeshire cliffs; and low against the north-western sky rise the blue Grampians, peak after peak, "That like giants stand To sentinel enchanted land." Over all broods the spirit of the past. It is impossible to imagine a city more haunted by history ; even to the least imaginative, the sense that these old gray walls have looked down on strange, grim events, is irresistible. They tell no troubadour's tale of dainty squires and love-sick ladies dancing in gardens bright with may ; nor is this the cloistral mood of dreaming spires that pervades Oxford. For nothing debonaire must you look on this stage of history ; alone in all that story rises the gracious figure of Queen Mary with her winsome smile and gay jest ; but the sunny girl-queen of the French Court was soon changed in the harsh antagonism of Scotland Downloaded by [] at 04:32 13 June 2016 into an avenging fury, and a fury in the toils. The story of Edinburgh is one of reddest human passion, of masterless barons, ruthless kings, the clang of arms, the howl of an infuriated mob. Every stone in Edinburgh has its story, they say, and it is almost literally true. Every step you take through the Old Town is over historic ground. The High Street and Canongate form perhaps the most historic street in Europe. In it or at the Castle and Palace which form its two ends, was enacted for centuries almost the whole of the feudal drama of Scotland. The City was the seat of kings, and this long street one string of baronial residences. Scott more than all the historians has charged city, streets, and houses with meaning. There is no national event from 1500 onwards in which Edinburgh played a foremost part that has not been conjured up before us by the Wizard of the North. For Scott was national to the back-bone; his pride and boast was Scotland; his chief interest was Scottish life and history. Unlike Campbell, who sang the Mariners of England, he sang the deeds of Scotland. He never loses his individuality as a Scot in his nationality as a Briton. His patriotism speaks in every word he writes. When, for example, he 35 describes the fatal error at Flodden by which the English were able to inflict on the Scots a defeat as overwhelming as that which the Scots had inflicted on them at Bannockburn, one hears how, three centuries later, Scott's heart is bursting with passionate regret: "Oh for one hour of Wallace Wight, Or well-skilled Bruce to rule the fight And cry — 'St. Andrew and our right !' Another sight had seen that morn, From fate's dark book a leaf been torn, And Flodden had been Bannockburn." He never submerged his Scottish point of view. It was "the harp of the North" the last Minstrel wished to awaken, and the good old times before "a stranger filled the Stuarts' throne" that he sang. To the end of his life Scott was unable to free himself entirely from the old Scottish antagonism to England. George IV, indeed, won his heart ; but then George IV put on a kilt when he visited Edinburgh. This intense love of country, however it might be in some respects a weakness, was Scott's poetic strength. It largely inspired the beauty and truth of his writings. He saw Scotland, even with the bodily eye, as nobody had ever seen it before. Whereas there had been before Scott no general taste for scenery even in Scotland, Burns for example ignoring the grand features of landscape for the humble daisy or timorous field-mouse, Scott is never tired of gazing at the straths and mountain-sides of his beautiful country, forgetting the detail in the bolder features. His heroes and heroines traverse the Highland glens or sail along the wild West Coast only as foreground figures in a canvas, to lend animation to the picture.

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