Describing the origins of the Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, Patrick Geddes looks back to December 1894, when ‘two or three of the young writers and artists of our little germ of a college, which had just before absorbed Allan Ramsay’s old “goosepie” into its new buildings, gathered some of their own work and requisitioned some of their friends’ into a Christmas Book and called it the “New Evergreen”. As Geddes explains, ‘This was, of course, in memory of Allan’s “Evergreen” of 1724, a collection of simple verse, perhaps without great merit of their own, but which served […] to suggest better things to others — in his case to no less than Percy, Burns, and Scott’. A collection of poetry, art, and essays, The New Evergreen: The Christmas Book of University Hall inspired the ‘public and larger venture’ of a periodical in four volumes, Spring (1895), Autumn (1895), Summer (1896), and Winter (1896–97).
In its various forms, Geddes’ Evergreen is the product of his redevelopment of the poet, playwright, and wigmaker Allan Ramsay’s former home at the top of the Royal Mile, known as the Goosepie in recognition of its unusual, octagonal shape. Having purchased the house in 1890, Geddes set it at the heart of his project of urban renewal, seeking to create a physical environment capable of nurturing an intellectual community, a place where academics, writers, artists, and other professions might be brought into a productive association, a genuine synthesis of ‘town and gown’. Geddes’ Evergreen articulates this social and cultural vision, yet the particular form this expression takes demands closer examination: lacking the popularity of the Tea-Table Miscellany (1724–37), Ramsay’s Ever Green was not his most notable achievement. While the Tea-Table Miscellany became an ongoing venture, with three further volumes of traditional Scottish songs printed in multiple editions, the Ever Green failed to capture the imagination of a contemporary reading public, and only two of the four projected volumes ever saw the light of day. Why then did the inhabitants of Geddes’ University Hall settle on the Ever Green as inspiration for their own publishing venture? This essay seeks to tease out some of the resonances of this choice, exploring the dialogic relationship between Ramsay’s collection and Geddes’ reciprocal work of material and cultural renewal.
Ramsay’s own title stakes a claim to enduring fame for the poems collected within his Ever Green. Taken from Pope’s Essay on Criticism, the epigraph to volume one associates its contents with the perennial quality of the classical poets:
Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands
Above the Reach of sacrilegious Hands,
Secure from Flames, from Envys fiercer Rage
Destructive War and all devouring Age.
Pope’s lines gesture towards the part Ramsay’s Ever Green itself is to play in preserving its poetic contents, and this sense of the collection’s function is underlined in Ramsay’s most notorious creative intervention in his medieval materials, the ‘Postscript’ that supplements Dunbar’s ‘I that in Heil wes’. Dunbar’s poetic meditation on the inevitability of death and the hope for resurrection to eternal life is given a new twist in Ramsay’s hands, as well as a more familiar title, ‘A Lament for the Loss of the Poets’. Ramsay borrows Dunbar’s voice to prophecy the role of his own major source, the Bannatyne Manuscript, and of the Ever Green itself in propagating a Scottish literary tradition. Complete with a footnote acknowledging Ramsay’s patron, William Carmichael, for the loan of the Bannatyne Manuscript, the postscript anticipates Ramsay as ‘a Lad’ who will ‘Revive our Fame and Memorie /Then sall we flourish EVIR GRENE’. In the role imagined here, Ramsay’s collection serves the interests of literary conservation, renewing a tradition to be transmitted within a national empire: ‘Far sall we fare, baith Eist and West /Owre ilka Clyme by Scots possest’.
Geddes’ conception of Ramsay’s Ever Green, as a collection of ‘simple verse’ that inspired Percy and Scott marks a recognition of the collection’s antiquarian function, and a sense of its place in the history of an engagement with the past that gave birth to medieval studies. Geddes’ allusion to Scott in particular suggests an awareness not only of how Ramsay’s activities shaped Scott’s conception of a popular literary tradition within Scotland, but perhaps also of Ramsay’s role in bringing the Bannatyne Manuscript to public attention. As titular patron of the antiquarian printing society Scott founded in 1823, the Bannatyne Club, the manuscript’s maker, George Bannatyne, plays a fundamental part in the foundation of Scottish studies. The Bannatyne Club’s mission statement would later become the basis for the constitution of the Scottish Text Society (1882–): both originally defined their purpose as the publication of ‘Works illustrative of the Scottish Language, Literature and History prior to the Union’.
For Geddes and his associates, however, the name of Evergreen held an appeal beyond its recollection of Scotland’s literary past. The diverse contents of Geddes’ Evergreen, where contributions from scientists and social scientists take their place alongside art and creative writing, represent a synthesis that disrupts the increasing tendency towards the fragmentation of knowledge into specialist disciplinary channels in the universities of Geddes’ time. As Geddes argues, rather than being ‘swept up into a Dryasdust Journal of their own’, these academic distinctions ‘all melt down for the Evergreen and weld into a chain, of which our individual essays are the links, and which I may call “The House the Sun Built”‘. As Geddes’ analogy suggests, the Evergreen appeals in its evocation of the natural growth stimulated by the sun, and the twin strands of growth and collaboration are connected through the conception of evolution Geddes explored with J. Arthur Thomson in The Evolution of Sex. For Geddes, evolution is ‘not primarily through Struggle at the margin of subsistence’, but ‘primarily through Sex with its consequences of family and wider co-operation’. The productive intermixture of disciplines within the Evergreen mirrors the social exchange promoted between students, lecturers, and others within the community at Ramsay Gardens, and the sense of the Evergreen‘s link to the idea of evolution is underlined in Geddes’ account of its publication: ‘there was no editor, indeed, nor hardly is yet, but what I may perhaps best describe as a struggle for existence’.
As an outgrowth from Geddes’ project of urban redevelopment in Ramsay Gardens, The Evergreen models Geddes’ conception of the city as ‘the organ of human evolution’. In Coming Polity, he writes of the city as
the vehicle of acquired inheritance. It accumulates and embodies the culture heritage of a region, and combines it in some measure and kind with the culture heritage of larger units, national, racial, religious, human […] Like a phonographic plate, the city receives the experiences of each passing generation and hands the record on to the next. It is the instrument primarily of the regional memory, but serves also as the memory of larger groups.
The city’s mnemonic function is ‘far from passive’, however, but ‘also (and essentially) active, creative, evocatory. By some subtle alchemy, the spirit of the city selects and blends memories of the past with experiences of the present and hopes for the future.’ As a creative synthesis of the memories of Edinburgh’s past and the product of co-operative human effort, Geddes’ Evergreen embodies his conception of the city as organ of human evolution in microcosmic form.
Geddes’ sense of the reciprocity of memory, creativity, and urban development is articulated in his contribution to the first volume of The Evergreen, Spring. In ‘The Scots Renascence’, Geddes observes
When we remember how every movement — moral or social, industrial or spiritual — sooner or later takes architectural embodiment, we shall better understand the meaning both of the Old New Town and of this New Old one. We remember too how often architectural movements have accompanied and preceded literary ones.
For Geddes, of ‘the many traditions of the historic houses […] none has been more inspiring, as none more persistently characteristic of Edinburgh than that of Allan Ramsay, who amid much other sowing and planting, edited an “Evergreen” in 1724.’
Ramsay’s ‘little collection of old-world verse, with its return at once to local tradition and living nature’ is ‘as little in harmony with the then existing fashion of the day in literature as its new namesake would hope to be with that of our own’. In contrast with ‘the all-pervading “Decadence”’ of his time, Geddes’ Evergreen is framed as a tentative germination: an ‘organic beginning’ in need of fit time to ‘survive and grow’; a ‘replanting of the old poet’s unsunned hillside’; the shivering of an ‘early bud’ as Spring breathes in the North. Vernal metaphors underline Geddes’ sense that engagement with the past is an essential element in new growth, a means at once of living in the present and meeting the demands of the future.
Geddes’ conception of the city as organ of human evolution and embodiment of cultural heritage suggests the extent to which his 1890s projects in Edinburgh’s Old Town are not simply contemporaneous, but mutually reinforcing. Geddes’ purchase of the Outlook Tower, now the Camera Obscura, in 1892, can be set alongside the construction work at Ramsay Garden, and the publication of the Evergreen. Visitors to the civic museum Geddes housed in this public observatory first met with the panoramic views of the city from the tower and the projected images supplied by the camera obscura, then moved through a series of exhibitions on each floor, spiraling outwards from the city through the nation, its language, Europe, and the world. As this progression implies, Geddes’ concern with Edinburgh was not purely local: Edinburgh stood as a paradigmatic example of the city in its regional context through the close correspondence between its topography and that of the idealised model Geddes developed to describe the interrelationship between the environment, the historic diversification of human labour, and the forms of human settlement, the ‘valley section’. Geddes regarded the Outlook Tower as a prototype structure that might be introduced in other cities, enabling similar forms of productive engagement with the past, and a movement from the local to the universal: it was an ‘amphitheatre of social evolution’, where ‘man’s struggle for life’ might be studied.
As material structures that facilitate reflection on cultural heritage, embodied within the urban environment, the Outlook Tower, Ramsay Garden, and the Evergreen fulfill reciprocal roles in Geddes’ model of evolution. The Outlook Tower enables reflection on the urban fabric as an accretion of cultural heritage legible to those who have ‘learned to read the concrete tide-marks of history, to interpret the strata laid down by each period, which are to the books called History, as the natural strata to the books of Geology’. The Evergreen too blends past memories with present experience and future expectations: in building on Ramsay’s Ever Green, Geddes’ publication recalls the ways in which Ramsay’s anthology is itself a creative reworking of a multifarious Edinburgh tradition. Ramsay’s major source is the Bannatyne Manuscript, an anthology of poetry in Scots and English compiled in Edinburgh by George Bannatyne, then in his early twenties. Bannatyne claims to have transcribed the collection in the last three months of 1568, in time of plague when ‘we fra labor was compeld to rest’. The sheer size of Bannatyne’s anthology, together with alterations to dates given within the collection, lay his account of its production open to question, however. Bannatyne’s manuscript reflects his own social position and the network of cultural contacts at his disposal, including family connections such as the poet Alexander Scott, whose poems appear alongside songs and other texts Bannatyne found in printed anthologies, and elsewhere. Alongside contemporary and anonymous work, we find medieval poems by Chaucer, Henryson, and Dunbar. Bannatyne presents his materials in a complex, and highly unusual, five-part arrangement by genre: devotional, moral, comic, love poems, and finally fables. Bannatyne’s collection shapes his cultural heritage into a form that serves the interests of a community of ‘reverend readers’ addressed in a series of editorial poems. At the same time, the collection stakes Bannatyne’s own claim to cultural capital, positioning him in an authoritative relationship to the aesthetic and moral values of his society.
In making his Ever Green, Allan Ramsay reformulated the materials of Bannatyne’s collection, drawing overwhelmingly on his selection of comic poems to create an image of Scottish literature that emphasises Ramsay’s ideal of ‘Strength of Thought and Simplicity of Stile’. Ramsay depicts the Ever Green poets as ‘good old Bards’, whose ‘poetry is the Product of their own Country, not pilfered and spoiled in the Transportation from abroad: Their Images are native, and their Landskip domestick, copied from those Fields and Meadows we every day behold’. Although Ramsay’s collection encompasses the poetry of a courtly elite, influenced by European tradition, the accent of his Ever Green falls on comic poems of rural life and labour, such as ‘The Wife of Auchtermuchty’. Ramsay’s version of Scottish literature is one that anticipates his own use of vernacular Scots as the basis of a poetry that represents the lives of working people. Creative additions and elaborations expose the extent to which Ramsay’s Ever Green is a conscious reworking of the literary past: Ramsay’s Vision, for example, is a pastiche of medieval dream vision poetry. Presented to the reader as a fourteenth-century Latin poem translated in the sixteenth century, the Vision adopts the mode of prophecy to offer a timely reflection on Scotland’s past and future prospects as an independent nation.
Awakening the echoes of an Edinburgh tradition that connects to the national past, Patrick Geddes’ nineteenth-century Evergreen draws in its wake the memory of Walter Scott’s Bannatyne Club, whose printing of ‘Works illustrative’ of Scotland’s past fosters a distinctive sense of Scottish identity in a wider British context. Geddes’ own sense of Scotland’s cultural specificity is fully compatible with membership of the British Union and internationalism: for him ‘the older loves and kinships, the smaller nationality’ do not demand rejection of ‘our part in the larger responsibilities of united nationality and race’. The Celticism of his Celtic Revival celebrates the interconnecting identities of Wales, Ireland, and France, rather than Scotland alone, and the united diversity of pieces within The Evergreen speak to this sense of shared Celtic identity, in pieces from John Duncan’s Anima Celtica to Edith Wingate Rinder’s ‘Amel and Penhor (A Breton Legend)’. Other pieces address the more localised past of the Bannatynian tradition represented by Ramsay’s Ever Green: Charles Hodge Mackie’s image Robene and Makyn offers a visual interpretation of Robert Henryson’s comic pastoral poem about a shepherd’s botched wooing. Elsewhere, Pittendrigh Macgillivray’s ‘Ane Playnt of Luve’ recalls the creative appropriations of the past carried out by Ramsay and Scott’s Bannatynians, in ventriloquising the language and experience of Older Scots as the medium of new work. The link between the Evergreen as a structure raised on the foundation of Ramsay’s work and the Geddesian development of Ramsay Gardens is reinforced by continuities within their decorative schemes: as Victor Brandord observes, decorations ‘are the visible link that connect the Evergreen with the builder’s craft […] They are to a ocnsiderable extent simple transcriptions into black and white of detached parts from the series of mural decorations which the artists, temporarily turned craftsmen, have painted on various walls of University Hall’.
In taking Allan Ramsay’s Ever Green as inspiration for a series of publications celebrating an urban development and a collaborative mode of life, Geddes and his collaborators articulate the city’s function as living organ of evolution, bearing witness not only to the history of Edinburgh’s productive engagement with the past, but pointing towards the possible ways in which that past might shape humanity’s future.
Elizabeth Elliott is co-editor of The Evergreen: A New Season in the North and a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on the cultural influence of the Bannatyne Manuscript and its Evergreen legacy.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. I]
