Chapter IX
Winter and New Year
The Scotch1 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 aligned2 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 desolate3, 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 inclemency5 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 hearth6 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 stout7 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 wade8 in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere more apparently9 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 pervades10 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 akin11 to tenderness; and sounds the praises of the act of drinking as if it were virtuous12, or at least witty13, in itself. The kindly14 jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern15 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 sordid16 pleasures. A Scot of poetic17 temperament18, 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 physically19 disgusting in the bleak20 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 perturbed21 and pallid22 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 drenched23 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 shrieking24 and raving25 overhead with a noise of shipwrecks26 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 indigo27 upon a sky of luminous28 green. The wind may still be cold, but there is a briskness29 in the air that stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into two divisions: one, the knight30 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 periphery31, but stepping through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember, triply cased in grease, whom no extremity32 of temperature could vanquish33. ‘Well,’ would be his jovial34 salutation, ‘here’s a sneezer!’ And the look of these warm fellows is tonic35, and upholds their drooping36 fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue37 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 brace38 of barefoot lassies were seen coming eastward39 in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were miserably40 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 tune41 to give them music. The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof42 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, marvelling43 at the silence and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the words. The reverberation44 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 dyke45, and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek46, 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 virgin47 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 gaily48 in the — bosom49. It is New-year’s weather.
New-year’s Day, the great national festival, is a time of family expansions and of deep carousal50. 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 banished51 from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two loyalties52, 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 convivial53 musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung suspended in this manner on the brink54 of their diversions. From ten o’clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning55 their instruments: and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open, his bow in readiness across the fiddle56, his foot already raised to mark the time, and his nerves braced57 for execution; for hardly had the twelfth stroke. sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had launced forth58 into a secular59 bravura60.
Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-holds. For weeks before the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scotch bun — a dense61, black substance, inimical to life — and full moons of shortbread adorned62 with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the family affections. ‘Frae Auld4 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 Manor63 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 calamity64 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 taverns65, 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 vernacular66 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 squander67 their half-crowns. There are an infinity68 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 Syne69 is much in people’s mouths; and whisky and shortbread are staple70 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 thronged71 from end to end, become a place for delicate pilotage. Singly or arm-inarm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries72 of the New Year go meandering73 in and out and cannoning74 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 epic75 honours of military intervention76. But the great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own college days, the spirit appreciably77 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 patriotism78 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 urchin79 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 abrupt80 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 promontory81; and the village smoke rises from among goodly trees. At the church gates, is the historical Joug; a place of penance82 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 graceful83 inclinations84; 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 kindled85 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.
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scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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aligned
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| adj.对齐的，均衡的 | |
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desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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auld
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| adj.老的，旧的 | |
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inclemency
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| n.险恶，严酷 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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wade
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| v.跋涉，涉水；n.跋涉 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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pervades
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的第三人称单数 ) | |
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akin
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| adj.同族的，类似的 | |
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virtuous
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| adj.有品德的，善良的，贞洁的，有效力的 | |
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witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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perturbed
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| adj.烦燥不安的v.使（某人）烦恼，不安( perturb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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pallid
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| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
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drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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shrieking
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| v.尖叫( shriek的现在分词 ) | |
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raving
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| adj.说胡话的；疯狂的，怒吼的；非常漂亮的；令人醉心[痴心]的v.胡言乱语(rave的现在分词)n.胡话；疯话adv.胡言乱语地；疯狂地 | |
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shipwrecks
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| 海难，船只失事( shipwreck的名词复数 )； 沉船 | |
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indigo
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| n.靛青，靛蓝 | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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briskness
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| n.敏捷，活泼 | |
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knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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periphery
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| n.(圆体的)外面；周围 | |
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extremity
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| n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度 | |
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vanquish
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| v.征服，战胜；克服；抑制 | |
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jovial
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| adj.快乐的，好交际的 | |
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tonic
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| n./adj.滋补品，补药，强身的，健体的 | |
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drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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brace
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| n. 支柱,曲柄,大括号; v. 绷紧,顶住,(为困难或坏事)做准备 | |
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eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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miserably
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| adv.痛苦地；悲惨地；糟糕地；极度地 | |
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tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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reproof
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| n.斥责，责备 | |
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marvelling
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| v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的现在分词 ) | |
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reverberation
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| 反响； 回响； 反射； 反射物 | |
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dyke
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| n.堤，水坝，排水沟 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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gaily
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| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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carousal
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| n.喧闹的酒会 | |
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banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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loyalties
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| n.忠诚( loyalty的名词复数 )；忠心；忠于…感情；要忠于…的强烈感情 | |
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convivial
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| adj.狂欢的，欢乐的 | |
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brink
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| n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿 | |
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tuning
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| n.调谐，调整，调音v.调音( tune的现在分词 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调 | |
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fiddle
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| n.小提琴；vi.拉提琴；不停拨弄，乱动 | |
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braced
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| adj.拉牢的v.支住( brace的过去式和过去分词 )；撑牢；使自己站稳；振作起来 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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bravura
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| n.华美的乐曲；勇敢大胆的表现；adj.壮勇华丽的 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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calamity
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| n.灾害，祸患，不幸事件 | |
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taverns
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| n.小旅馆，客栈，酒馆( tavern的名词复数 ) | |
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vernacular
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| adj.地方的，用地方语写成的；n.白话；行话；本国语；动植物的俗名 | |
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squander
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| v.浪费，挥霍 | |
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infinity
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| n.无限，无穷，大量 | |
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syne
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| adv.自彼时至此时，曾经 | |
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staple
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| n.主要产物，常用品，主要要素，原料，订书钉，钩环；adj.主要的，重要的；vt.分类 | |
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thronged
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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votaries
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| n.信徒( votary的名词复数 )；追随者；（天主教）修士；修女 | |
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meandering
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| 蜿蜒的河流，漫步，聊天 | |
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cannoning
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| vi.与…猛撞（cannon的现在分词形式） | |
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epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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intervention
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| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
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appreciably
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| adv.相当大地 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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urchin
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| n.顽童；海胆 | |
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80
abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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81
promontory
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| n.海角；岬 | |
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82
penance
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| n.（赎罪的）惩罪 | |
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83
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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84
inclinations
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| 倾向( inclination的名词复数 )； 倾斜； 爱好； 斜坡 | |
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85
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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