I have been watching you for more than a hundred years now. Most of you never look up and notice me but this is a great spot looking down over the railway and the gardens. When exactly I got to be up here and who put me here I am not sure but I like watching. It is what cats do best. If you watch Princes Street for long enough you will see the whole world go by, houses rise and fall, shops come and go, marches go up and down, destruction, construction and argument. I was sorry when the steam trains went away. Arrival and departure was always a moment of excitement. But now the trams are back. The Professor would have liked that. He had a quiet admiration for the old trams. He also liked the colours of advertisements and shops. They were not quite the art of the art schools and he knew he was not supposed to like them. He was after all an active member of the Cockburn Society which was busy trying to protect the taste and appearance of the city. I have seen what he wrote about those trams. Your business, he would say, ‘is not to think but to see’.
Look at the tramway cars outside. Anyone can see more or less their ugliness, but a far more searching test of artistic progress is the measure in which we can see positive beauty. Nothing in the range of human experience promises less than those big red and yellow boxes with their advertisements. Yet set them running up and down rails, and watch how the strong foreground colour and mass of the nearest one instantly brings out the perspective of the street through its misty distance. Before it has gone two or three hundred yards you see its colour is surely somewhat changed. … They are playing for us the game of colour these ugly cars; and with the artist we may daily find them beguile for us the dismalness of our formal street. In the same way the hoarding with its bills needs only distance to refine it; indeed as Ruskin tells us somewhere, these are now well-nigh our only source of street effect; no doubt fitly so, since the exchange of the public decorator for bill sticker, dignified, of course, as advertising contractor, is only the most obvious artistic feature of our “progress in the arts”.
I often wonder how he would have got along with recent graffiti. The perpetual conflict between the authorities and the spray can hoodies would have appealed to the anarchist in him, but in the end the quality of Edinburgh graffiti is dreadful and he would have asked for help from friends in France and Germany and North America. Can the streets of Edinburgh compete or do we need to learn to look?
He did like watching people.
Test now your colour sense upon the passing figures; say which are the more picturesque, the more intrinsically beautiful. Those gentlemen with frockcoats and tall shiny hats? Those fine ladies with new dresses so tightly stretched and strangely humped over a rudely idealized figure built outside their own? Or that poor woman, with baby wrapped in her faded shawl, and the ragged urchin turning somersaults behind the group of little girls sitting on the kerbstone?
We all prefer prosperity to poverty, he admitted, but the effect of this on shop windows was not good. The result was an ‘artistic rendering in the doll-like fashion plates in the tailor and dressmakers.’
He did like his colour. I have seen some scraps of a letter he was writing to the newspapers. He did not find writing easy but the general message was clear. He had just moved into a place called James Court off the Lawnmarket. This was before he built this great palace where I am now. It was, if you will forgive an old word, a rather dreich place. The first thing he did was to slap paint around. He asked Mr Macfarlane of the Old Edinburgh Exhibition, held in the Meadows a couple of years before, what were the best colours to use.
While securing variety of colour not only harmony but brightness has been arrived at, especially as the colour must necessarily become duller by smoke and exposure to the weather.
The object however has been by no means merely an artistic or sentimental one, although the work is still far from complete, the gain of light in all the houses in the Court is already very considerable. …. It is a familiar saying that a gas lamp is as good as a policeman but since whitewash practically doubles the value of gas lamps the gain to the public peace and safety is a real and practical one.
Hence the peculiar nonsense of saying as so many of ignorant and supercilious people especially among the worse educated members of the middle class are found doing that poor and uneducated people and children do not appreciate good surroundings.
So more colour meant better health and less crime. There was a theory behind this. It was often forgotten that he was a field biologist by training. Those people he watched on the street had brains as well as stomachs. At times he almost spoke as if the brain was more important than the stomach.
… man if he is to remain healthy and remain civilized, must not only aim at the highest standard of cerebral as well as non cerebral excellence … but must take especial heed of his environment … the belly and members are dominated by a brain developed and maintained through the constant and varied stimulus of the senses … [John Ruskin Economist]
The working classes, like any other, will be in well being in proportion as they become healthy organisms, leading fuller lives in richer surroundings both of art and nature, adjusted to satisfying all their needs alike [The Claims of Labour]
Do not ignore the supreme needs of the brain.
There was a time when he thought that being an art critic and following Mr Ruskin was the way to reach people with his ideas but he always found art galleries frustrating and became a great man for wall murals of all kinds.
Instead of this endless labour on little panels, scattered hither and thither to flap idly upon rich men’s walls, grant any of these painters one continued task for his fellow citizens, old or young – make him work for hall or school, for street or square, and see the result. … give our friend Mr Pettie a city hall, and see what a waking up there would be!
The Professor had a great reputation for rushing about which was some-what unfair. He spent a lot of time looking and watching the street and the buildings of places he wrote and thought about. I remember when he came back from India with a report on the city of Indore. He had spent a lot of his time just walking and looking and learning. There was the wide street, the carts in the market place and the old palace square for parades and processions. This watching and looking taught him ‘the clear cut stratification of castes’ which he asked planners to respect even if they did not accept.
In every house, but in every lane and turning, there is a record worth deciphering … the actual human complex … interwoven with the local history of architecture.
He always seemed to have Scottish and English cities in mind when he wrote. He thought Indore was like St Andrews, then it was Manchester or Edinburgh. Details he took from his home patch; ‘set up a pigeon cote, so as to have any remaining crumbs eaten up forthwith’ was his cure for rats and plague. Look just to the west of where I am and you will see he added pigeon cotes to Ramsay Garden. Not sure if there are any pigeons there now.
He searched for everyday detail by watching ‘the changing and cinema like aspect of the street.’ I often wonder what he would have done with moving pictures if he had started his work on cities a decade later. He had a great love of the new technologies. I remember the debate when they hired one of the new phonographs for the first time and Mrs Geddes was always insistent on having electricity in the new houses in Ramsay Garden. He was one of those who used photography as a way of exploring the city and he had always seen exhibitions as a way of bringing what he had found to as many people as possible. The moving film and the picture house should have been next but the years after 1916 were a terrible time. His favourite son and his dear wife died within a short time of each other and the Great War in France was not a good time for some-one who believed in the positive evolution of human kind. He was never the same again after that.
Well, after more than a hundred years perched up here watching the street change, I do not get out as much as I used to do. I used to like visiting number fourteen where the Professor lived especially when he held his summer meetings but the place is closed up now and the door always locked so I don’t go there any more. There are times when a cat can slip away unseen and watch the changing cinema of the street.
Robert Morris spent all his tax paying life in Scotland and remains professor emeritus, having taught economic and social history for many years at Edinburgh University.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. I]
