EDINBURGH, according to Mr. Ruskin, shares with Rome the honour of being the dirtiest city in Europe. Relying on the accuracy of Mr. Ruskin’s observa- tion, one may say that the slums of the Edinburgh Lawn- market (now rapidly disappearing) have achieved the highest distinction in their own line of business. And yet it is out of these slums that the Evergreen has come forth. It has grown up on the soil of these whilom filth wells. The inscription on its title-page,“Published in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues,” is not a fanciful legend, but a sober fact. Pro- fessor Geddes himself, it is true, has outgrown his residence in James Court, and moved his abode westward up the Castlehill to the site inhabited by Allan Ramsay — the eponymous hero of the Evergreen. But those of the “colleagues” who have most to do with the publication of the Evergreen still live and do most of their business in that branch of University Hall located in the Lawnmarket close dignified by the name of Riddle’s Court, and until re- cently inhabited too much by prostitutes and thieves — actual and incipient. Now the point on which critics of the Evergreen are most nearly agreed is that, whatever it is, in external form it is a book of beauty. A fine art production from what was one of the filthiest and most degraded slums of Europe! Another illustration that the Scotch are a humorous people.

And yet the reviewers have, most of them, assumed that the Evergreen is either one more illustrated magazine of the usual type, or is merely a Scottish version of an existing English quarterly, in green instead of yellow. Truth to tell, the new Scottish quarterly is not primarily an organ of art and literature at all. It is primarily the beginning of an effort to give periodic expression in print to a movement that is mainly architectural, educational, scientific. Thus it is a bye-product of social life rather than a literary and artistic main-product. Though doubtless an endeavor has been made to impart to it such added graces of diction and decoration as were available.

Its decorations are the visible link that connect the Evergreen with the builder’s craft. These decorations have found no favour in the eyes of literary critics. As a fact, there is little or nothing of the literary style of picture about them. They are to a considerable extent simple transcrip- tions 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.

The “house beautiful” is, of course, a single step towards the chief end of architecture — the city beautiful. But to talk of the rebuilding of cities is to plunge into controversial economics, which is no part of the purpose of the Evergreen. Its policy is with reclamation rather than with declamation, with house rather than with householders. But there is, too, a side of the movement which is directly educational. The endeavor is to organise a system of education based, not on use and wont, but on the organization of know- ledge, and in immediate relation to the realities of con- temporary life, thought, and action. This involves, of course, a co-ordination of all the forces at the disposal of science and industry, of literature and art, of morals and religion, and their harmonious concentration on the training of the student. Here, again, theory and practice have pro- ceeded hand in hand. And such experimental results as have been already achieved are likely to prove valuable in proportion as they are used as the seed-plots of further experiment. For these particular experiments those interested in the Educational Revolution should be referred, however, not so much to the Evergreen as to a little book by Professor Geddes, announced to be in the press, entitled “A Northern College—Experimental Studies in Higher Education.”

That the Evergreen is also to be deemed a scientific publica- tion may be inferred from the trouble which Nature has taken to demolish its scientific pretensions. The gist of a review running into three columns is summarized in the extract: “Bad from cover to cover, and even the covers are bad.” It is one of the purposes of the Evergreen to present a biological reading of the drama of the Seasons. The science of living nature, as found in White of Selborne and Richard Jefferies, is known to many who spend their lives in the country. The science of living nature, as taught in the schools and universities, is known to some who spend their lives in cities. That view which endeavours to combine both sets of truths ought to approach nearer to the realities of things. It is at a presentment of this latter that the Evergreen aims in recording and interpreting the biology of the Seasons. And in its advocacy of the study of life as Living Nature in its Seasons, instead of the mere anatomy and analysis of things dead, the Evergreen of course runs right in the teeth of orthodox scientific educa- tion and the journal which the Evergreen writers would call (Inorganic) Nature.

The old astronomical religions (and indeed Christianity in the early centuries of its State-establishment) recognised the part played by the seasonal rhythm in the evolution of the living world. But since Europe, a century or so ago, revived its interest in the doctrine of evolution, man has lived in a city life which approximates to perpetual winter. How then could it be otherwise than that, in the first flush of scientific analysis, the accepted theory of the universe should contain more than a touch of frost? But nowadays something of spring life and summer warmth returns. We are passing from the analytic to the synthetic stage in all things. And again, as in the old astronomical religions, the separate sciences are uniting into one common doctrine, one single account of the development of nature, man, and society. It is inevitable that this wider, all-embracing view should involve some departure from the orthodox Darwinian theory of the universe, which grew up in the days of disparate specialism, when Faraday found it necessary to “keep his science in one pocket and his religion in the other.” If the general reader asked for the exact spot where the naturalistic and humanistic streams united in modern times (a foolish ques- tion), most would point to Professor Drummond’s “Ascent of Man.” On its naturalistic side this book popularizes that view of evolution which is set forth by Professor Geddes and Mr. Arthur Thomson in their book on “The Evolu- tion of Sex,” and in their articles on evolution, etc., etc., in Chambers’ Enclycopedia. Evolution thus regarded takes place “not primarily through struggle at the margin of sub- sistence, through cumulative patentings and undersellings, but primarily through Sex with its consequences of family and wider co-operation.”

Such is the scientific standpoint of the Evergreen. Dar- winism, it has been said, derives its philosophical parentage from the economic writings of Adam Smith. If that be so, the shade of Adam Smith (which doubtless still haunts the Edinburgh Lawnmarket) will be rejoiced to think that “The Wealth of Nations” was supplemented by a later treatise on “The Moral Sentiments.”

The Darwinian view of evolution is to this new-old one as a telescope is to a binocular; the one tube of the binocular gives the naturalistic and the other the humanistic view, the two together a harmonious whole. The analogy may be extended to the two smaller limbs of the binocular that telescope in the larger. On the side of the naturalistic view, human life, though a part of Nature, is a special part which is drawn out for a more detailed study. And on the side of the humanistic or social view of the binocular, the student draws out from the general world (i.e., the main and united tube) and receives for special investigation that local section of general society to which he himself happens to belong. This binocular arrangement is adopted in the Evergreen (for the sake of system and lucidity). Hence the fourfold division of the contents of the magazine regarded as a Northern “Seasonal.”

I. The Season in Nature.

II. The Season in Life.

III. The Season in the World.

IV. The Season in the North.

The last section — the Seasons in the North (i.e. Scotland) — is an expression of that local association and personal comradeship in which every new school and movement begins. The book has taken form among a group of younger Scottish writers and painters, students and men of science, whom historic sympathies and common aims are bringing back to old Edinburgh. If in this section of the Evergreen the literary note is dominant, it is literature as a means rather than an end. In 1724 Allan Ramsay published his Evergreen, desiring thereby to stimulate the return to local and national tradition and living nature. Those who inherit Ramsay’s old home are ambitious “to follow in his steps as workers and writers, publishers and builders.”

Amongst the “local and national” traditions which patriotic Scotsmen are to-day trying to revive and keep alive, the present Evergreen specially concerns itself with those connected with Scottish nationalism, Celtic literature and art, and the old Continental sympathies of Scotland, more particularly the “ancient league with France.”). The Evergreen of Spring and Autumn gave some evidence that the Continental connexion is still a living and fruitful one. The Franco-Scottish Society now being organized in Paris and Edinburgh is a formal academic recognition of the lately revived custom of interchange between French and Scottish students. In the incipient Celtic Renascence, Ireland has played a much more conscious part than Scotland. But the writings of Fiona Macleod are gradually disclosing to the British public quite another Scotland than that with which lowland writers have familiarized them. And it is generally overlooked, too, that in Art the Glasgow School, in consideration of its local origin and its emphasis on colour and decorative treatment of subject, may be counted congenitally part of the Celtic Renascence. To many, the most hopeless quest will seem the endeavour to restore Edinburgh to its position as a culture capital, and to make Scotland again a power (of culture) in Europe, as it was in recent, in medieval, and most of all ancient times. Yet who knows? V. BRANFORD.