chapter ix

winter and new year

the scotch 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 fire-side. 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 a 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 winter 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, fire-lit 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, are 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, marvelling 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 stoke of fate for this calvinistic people, the year’s anniversary fails 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 scotch 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 launced forth into a secular bravura.

currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-holds. for weeks before the great morning, confectioners display stacks of scotch 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. every one looks for his handsel. the postman 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 or sentiment and a measure of strength in the handling. all over the town, you may see comforter’d schoolboys hasting 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 inexpedient 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-inarm, 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 scotch bun will scarce 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. duddingstone 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 joug; 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.