Calton Hill by Robert Louis Stevenson
Calton
Hill by Robert Louis Stevenson
The
east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs
on one side of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the
other hand, completes the circuit. You mount by stairs in
a cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of monuments.
Dugald Stewart has the honours of situation and architecture;
Burns is memorialised lower down upon a spur; Lord Nelson,
as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the
Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and
yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butter-churn;
comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks.
But the chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, 'the
Modern Ruin' as it has been called, an imposing object from
far and near, and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that
false air; of a Modern Athens which has earned for her so
many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a National Monument;
and its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
national characteristics. The old Observatory - a quaint brown
building on the edge of the steep - and the new Observatory
- a classical edifice with a dome - occupy the central portion
of the summit. All these are scattered on a green turf, browsed
over by some sheep.
The
scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice
to the dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely
commemorated than Burns. Immediately below, in the Canongate
churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's master in his art,
who died insane while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart
has been somewhat too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh
poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgotten.
The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in Scotland
and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly suppress
all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse
and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence
him in his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns himself
not only acknowledged his debt in a fragment of autobiography,
but erected a tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard.
This was worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain; and
although I think I have read nearly all the biographies of
Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of nature
was not violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to
the credit of his follower's originality. There is a kind
of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and
Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class
of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all
others. They are indeed mistaken if they think to please the
great originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with fame,
cannot do better than dedicate his labours to the memory of
Burns, who will be the best delighted of the dead.
Of
all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best;
since you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle,
and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat.
It is the place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine
and east wind which are so common in our more than temperate
summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a little of the
freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter,
which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings
with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolourizer, although
not thick enough to obscure outlines near at hand. But the
haze lies more thickly to windward at the far end of Musselburgh
Bay; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the
hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin
sea fog.
Immediately
underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail - a large
place, castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself
on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by
tourists as the Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female
prisoners taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other,
schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic chimney
rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and
there is Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined
abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly too and fro before
the door like a mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of
an outpost, you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge,
over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where
Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine
to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's
Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags: and thence, by
knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises
to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain
in virtue of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the
right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one above
another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged
crown of bastions on the western sky. - Perhaps it is now
one in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball
rises to the summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and,
far away, a puff of smoke followed by a report bursts from
the half-moon battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun
by which people set their watches, as far as the sea coast
or in hill farms upon the Pentlands. - To complete the view,
the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and
has a broad look over the valley between the Old Town and
the New: here, full of railway trains and stepped over by
the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green
with trees and gardens.
On
the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself
nor has it so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it
commands a striking prospect. A gully separates it from the
New Town. This is Greenside, where witches were burned and
tournaments held in former days. Down that almost precipitous
bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as they say,
attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tesselated with
sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating
carpets is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run
out to Leith; Leith camps on the seaside with her forest of
masts; Leith roads are full of ships at anchor; the sun picks
out the white pharos upon Inchkeith Island; the Firth extends
on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the towns of Fifeshire
sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the opposite
coast; and the hills enclose the view, except to the farthest
east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea.
There lies the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick
Spens and his Scots Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither
side of Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they sailed to
seek a queen for Scotland.
'O
lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land!'
The
sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of
storm and sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the
fisherwomen of Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans,
but crowding to the tail of the harbour with a shawl about
their ears, may still look vainly for brave Scotsmen who will
return no more, or boats that have gone on their last fishing.
Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have
gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the
London smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies'
fingers; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape,
now a star of guidance; and the lee shore to the east of the
Inchcape, is that Forfarshire coast where Mucklebackit sorrowed
for his son.
These
are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they
are all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each
stands out in delicate relief against the rest, what manifold
detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate and accentuate
the picture, is a matter for a person on the spot, and turning
swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind together in one comprehensive
look. It is the character of such a prospect, to be full of
change and of things moving. The multiplicity embarrasses
the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow,
or follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city,
and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play
about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare
where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge
of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and
church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on
one of the multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps.
The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard,
far and near, faint and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps
a bird goes dipping evenly over the housetops, like a gull
across the waves. And here you are in the meantime, on this
pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by
monumental buildings.
Return
thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of
frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsedly in
the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating
as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect;
the patient astronomer, flat on his back under the Observatory
dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your only neighbour;
and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of the
city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time,
the rattle of carriages and the continuous keen jingle of
the tramway bells. An hour or so before, the gas was turned
on; lamplighters scoured the city; in every house, from kitchen
to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed forth into the dusk.
And so now, although the town lies blue and darkling on her
hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far and
near along the pavements and upon the high facades. Moving
lights of the railway pass and repass below the stationary
lights upon the bridge. Lights burn in the jail. Lights burn
high up in the tall LANDS and on the Castle turrets, they
burn low down in Greenside or along the Park. They run out
one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk in a
procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith
Pier. Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped
out upon the ground of blackness, as when a child pricks a
drawing full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle; not
the darkest night of winter can conceal her high station and
fanciful design; every evening in the year she proceeds to
illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if
to complete the scheme - or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh
were beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country -
half-way over to Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith,
and far to seaward, yet another on the May.
And
while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums
and bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air
thrills with the sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last
rising flourish mounts and melts into the darkness like a
star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding in the labours of
the day.
