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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtru reproduit en un seul cliche, 11 est filmd d partir de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n^cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m6thode. 1 2 3 32X 1 2 3 4 5 6 I PROFESSOR BLACKIE. ) 1 h f PM mmmmm mm Am WWWtMih riW g fi i i il iill lt iiN H I* Ti1llif|-|||jnf|-| -I iiiiiiTiii II j.. 'OMxtiynj. ^k. jS. /r^//Lc/K f SSOR BLACKrE S AND D0INa5. m' iiiastratl#«*. KlfW'Wf'M'; #■"■* PROFESSOR BLACKIE His Sayings and Doinos. A biographical sketch By His Nephew HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY. With Illustrations. London: JAMES CLARKE & CO. 1895. 2C< 51963 THIS ACCOUNT OP JOHW STUART BLACKIE IS DEDICATED, IN SYMPATHY AND RESPECT, TO HIS WIPE, WHOSE LOSS A NATION SHARES. y THE BOOK, AND ITS SUBJECT. This is a small book about a great man. A biography — not indeed complete, for no two octavos could give a full account of such a life, but approaching completeness — will have been published before this appears in print. Miss Anna Stoddart has produced, from plentiful stores of authori- tative information, a work to which I hope many readers of these pages may be induced to turn. Indeed, it is not for those who can obtain the larger work that the smaller has been written, but for the many who cannot. It will be evident at the same time that the present volume has an entirely independent origin and existence. A strong man breasts the tide ; a great man turns it. Not once alone, nor only twice, did Blackie justify his title by such a test. Neither of him nor of any man can it be said that he was always great and VI altogether original; and I am not con- cerned, even if it were possible for me, to determine his precise degree of greatness or originality. Much of our debt to Blackie is owing to Bunsen ; some, far less than is commonly imagined, to Carlyle. He himself said that the writers who had most influenced him were Aristotle, Plato, Goethe, Shakespere, Scott, Burns, Words- worth, and the Apostle Paul. From a multitude of other sources he drew such nourishment as they had for him, assim- ilating the good and rejecting the useless with a peculiarly active mental digestion. " Perhaps even more important," he said, " towards the achievement of a noble life than a memory well stored with sacred texts is an imagination well decorated with heroic pictures." In both these ways hiB mind was richly furnished, aad from such a storehouse he brought forth continually ^' things old and new." Deny the existence of originality if you will — trace all good things right up to heaven, by a Jacob's ladder direct or through long lines of ancestors and teachers — and the fact remains that John Stuart Blackie VII clothed with a new form the ideas he had received, and charged them afresh with a penetrating force that made men listen and accept. He was a seer, who saw deeply if not always to the bottom, and opened the eyes of other men to see. He was a prophet who made prophets ; a teacher who not only taught but inspired others to teach. He showed jbhe young how to quit themselves like men, the old how to keep the spirit of youth. He presented to the student, as Professor Laurie has said, " the true type of the scholar in the large and unconventional sense of that word : always in search of the truth, always proclaiming the inalien- able right of reason to be heard in the affairs of men ; always proclaiming the eternal attractions of the good and the beautiful within or without the academic walls." A man of the world who set a shiring example of unworldliness, he was too genuinely religious to be " other-worldly." Most orthodox of heretics, his Protestant- ism was as deep as his Catholicity was wide. A fervid patriot, he proved his love 1 . ii ■ ■ mmmmtia • « • VIU by chastising his country even more than by chastising her foes ; and his country- men, to their credit be it said, came to love him with a personal devotion such as no flatterer could have won. His sayings and doings often made them angry ; but the roots of his popularity ran deep, into the Scottish heart. Edulburgl^— well, he was a part of the city. Not Sir Walter's monument nor the Castle Rock itself was a more familiar object than the old but ever young Professor, marching along so lithe and erect, — the brown plaid wound over his chest and shoulders, the stout silver- jj nobbed staff in his hand, the clean- cut face full of distinction, the long white hair flowing from a wideawake pressed well down over the keen, grey eyes. The citizens felt a pride of ownership in him. He poured shame upon their idols — fashion in West-end circles and democ- T&cy in the multitude — ^but they still cherished, in the one case a genteel and in the other an overflowing, affection for their censor. From Edinburgh you may travel round the world in any direction, sure that wherever you find a Scottish IX heart you will see a face that brightens with affection at the sound of Blackie's name. Great as he was in the public esteem, he had a private fame still more illus- trious. He brought into the home a soul- unspotted by the impurities of the outside world. The more intimately he was known, the more dearly he was loved and the more fervently admired. He was " a hero to his valet." To call him the last of the Scots would be a piece of pessimism, and pessimism is a vice that he abhorred. There are men in Scotland yet, and in every Scottish community in the world, who are carrying forward the flag he lifted so high. But Scotland seems a different place since he has gone, and Scotsmen are a nation bereaved. Thou brave old Scot! And art thou gone ? How much of light with thee's departed I Philosopher, yet full of fun, Great humorist, yet human-hearted ; A Caledonian, yet not dour, A scholar, yet not dry-as-dusty, A pietist, yet never sour ! O stout and tender, time and trusty, j t \ i Octogenarian optimist, The world for thee seemed aye more sunny; We loved thee better for each twist Which streaked a soul as sweet as honey. We shall not see thy like again ! We've fallen on times most queer and quacky, And oft shall miss the healthy brain And manly heart of brave old Blackie ! * The aim of the following pages is not to give a severely chro^.ological list of Professor Blackie's doings and sayings. Although he did one thing at a time and did that well, it was never long before he was doing something else. Sub- serviency to dates in the case of such a man would keep the reader dancing from subject to subject and back again in a peculiarly bewildering fashion. The writer has attempted to give not only a plain narrative of the Professor's outward doings, but a moderately coherent account of his sayings on the great questions with which he dealt. No attempt has been made to hide such incidents, however laughable, and such extreme and auda- cious assertions, hasty as they sometimes * From "Punch/* March 9th, 1895, by permission of the Proprietors. L XI were, as show the perennially boyish side of the Professor's nature. Of incidents that might bring anything worse than laughter upon his memory there are none to hide. In writing the Life of Eobert Burns, Blackie said: "I have allowed the poet, both in his verse and in his prose, to be as much as possible his own portrait painter." I have followed this example, while grate- fully taking advantage of the reminis- cences of old students and other friends, and not neglecting the duty of inde- pendent research. The book has been finished neither without difficulty nor to the writer's satisfaction ; but if, as I hope, it helps to spread and perpetuate the knowledge of the good and wise Professor, its aim will be achieved and its existence justified. H. A. Kennedy, "^"■ rJ M'fe 4 smm CONTENTS. CHAPTSB PAOE I. His Forebears 1 II. The Boy 14 III. Going to be a Minister 22 IV. Germany and Italy 34 V. "Stickit" 46 VI. The Fight for the Chair 59 VII. Professor of Humanity 67 VIII. Ezcursiors ... 85 IX. The Greek Chair 102 X. Educational Beform ... 110 XL Bational Greek 122 XII. Professor and Students 136 XIII. Noctes Hellenicee 166 XIV. His Politics ... 163 XV. The Highlanders' Champion 175 XVI. The Celtic Chair 185 XVII. The Scottish Nationalist 206 XVIII. Poet and Versemaker 218 XIX. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful 234 XX. Self-Culture, and Some Other Books 271 XXI. English Excursions 285 XXII. Farther Afield 298 XXIII. The Man, and Some of His Friends... 312 XXIV. The End 329 Published Works of John Stuart jjIctCKIG ••• •■• ••• »tt oOo J.I1€l6X •*• •!• ••• ••• «*a 341 I 11 ^ll » 5 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAOS 17 112 312 PoBTBAiTS or John Stuabt Blackib. As a Boy of Five. From " The Strand Maga- zine/' Engraved from an oil painting in the posaession of Mrs. Blackie At the Age of 45. From " The Strand Maga- zine." Engraved from a lithograph ... At the Age of 68. From a photo by Macara At the Age of 80. Etched from a photo- graph by Elliot and Fry. (Frontispiece.) From a Political Cartoon, 1880 166 "A Professor of the Highlands" 196 Albxandbb Blackib. From an oil painting by Sir Watson Gordon, President of the Eoyal Scottish Academy, in the possession of Mrs. Kennedy Gbobob S. Blackib. From a steel engraving Thb Hombs of John Stuabt Blackib. His Father's House, Marischal Street, Aber- deen; and the Humanity Professor's House in Old Aberdeen His Edinburgh Homes : 24 Hill Street, from 1860 to 1882 } 9 Douglas Crescent, 1882 to XOoo ••• ... ... •.• ... His Highland Home: Altnaoraig, Oban.... 8 93 88 152 192 '/ XVI niuBtrations, \i ■ <■ i - s 11 f A ' 1 ■ I PAOI HiB Univbrsitiks. Mariscbal College, Aberdeen 69 Arms of Marischal College, Aberdeen ... 67 Edinburgh University 138 Arms of Edinburgh University 102 Facsimiles. Letter from Edinburgh, 1824 24 Latin Exercise for "th^Gooders," 1827 ... 32 Last Letter from Aberdeen, 1852 106 JUain ! ... ... ... ... ,, ... 188 His Favourite Mottoes 241 Letter from His Father : •' Victory," 1852 104 Stodabt Arms 3 \ St. Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh ... 336 PROFESSOR BLACKIE, HIS SAYINGS AND DOINGS. HIS FOEEBEAES. Thi; story of John Stuart Blackie, if a man's life began at his birth, should open in Glasgow ; but when we begin to ascend the ancestral streams which met there eighty-six years ago, we find ourselves in far more attractive surroundings. The Blackies, a small but energetic tribe, belong to Kelso, in the border country. For the most part mechanics and " mer- chants," or tradesmen, achieving the high nobility of honest work, until this century they were unknown to fame. Alexander Blackie, the son of a Kelso *^ merchant '* and of Alison Stuart his wife, was early left an orphan. He was not friendless, or left entirely to his own devices. In Glasgow, where he worked for his bread from the 1 2 Professor Blackie. ■^i age of fourteen, he was faithfully put through his catechism on Sunday evenings by his mother's kinswoman, Mrs. Lock- hart. Mrs. Lockhart's own boy, John, became the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott. As for John Lockhart*s cousin — " Scotch cousin," in what degree I cannot tell — at first he seems to have thought of becoming a manufacturer. At any rate, he worked at the loom ; and in more prosperous days, especially when his guests were "ower genteel," he used to apologise for his inability to sit still on a chair by saying, " When I was a weaver in Glasgow ! " Later on — but he was still a very young man — he carried on the trade of a drysalter, or oilman. At the head of a long list of entries in the old two-volume family Bible stands this : " Alexander Blackie and Helen Stodart, married at Airbless by the Rev. William Thomson, of Dalziel, 7th July, 1807." The Stodarts were a Hamilton family of some repute ; perhaps a couple of pegs higher than the Blackies in the social scale, if that were of any conse- quence. A cousin, great in heraldry, Mr. His Forebears, 8 POST NUBE8 LUX. jiftointct. Hobert Eiddell Stodart, has traced them back to John Stodart in Liberton — ^three miles south of Edinburgh — who was a very old man when Charles I. and his Parlia- ment came to blows. John's ^eat - grandson, James, had nine children, of whom three may here be mentioned — namely the third, James, a farmer, who gave Robert Burns his breakfast on the poet's famous pony-ride to Edin- burgh; the fourth, John, with whom Rob took his lunch, and who became the grandfather of William and Robert Chambers ; and the fifth, William, an architect of some note, a man of lite- rary taste, a friend of the poet Graeme, and the grandfather of John Stuart Blackie. William Stodart was born in 1740, five years before Prince Charlie's rebellion, and married Christina Naismith, 4 Professor BlacMe, daughter of Hamilton's chief magistrate. The architect died, a few days after his wife, in 1790, leaving Bothwell Brig and four small daughters to witness that he had not lived in vain. The eldest of these little orphans — she was only seven — was the Helen of our old Bible. She was brought up, together with her sisters Marion and Margaret, by her mother's kinsfolk. A few minutes spent in looking at the mother of such a son cannot be wasted, and no apology is needed for presenting such dim outlines of a word- portrait as exist. But for one bosom friend, who valued her letters enough to copy and bind them, we should know next to nothing of Helen Stodart. From these letters, which begin in 180 1< and continue nearly till her death in 1821, it is clear that she was a young woman of remarkable character. " Blest with the best education," as she says, and " bookishly inclined," she had that strong dash, of common-sense which afterwards kept her scholar-son from becoming a pedant. This quality would have saved her from degenerating into a blue-stock- His Forehears, 5 ing, even if a family of ten had not removed the possibility of such a fate. Genuinely religious, her soul rose against the high-and-dry discourses of her day, as well PwS against the morbid extreme of religiosity. " Lat us nob mourn over those virtues we do not possess," she exhorts her friend, '* but be active and vigilant ; seek and we shall find ; let us be cheerful in doing our duty." She early came to the practical conclusion, not even now so generally admitted as it ought to be, that *•' JFaith in Christ, if it does not influence our whole conduct in this life, can avail little in another." Despising those *' sequestered virtues " which are " too delicately brought up to endure fatigue," fihe avows, "I am always aiming to be what I have never attained." Naturally, she discarded that mental asceticism which confines the aspiring heart to ^' re- ligious " literature. '^ Too much religious and sentimental reading clogs the mind," «he says in one place ; and in another, " I always thought much reading of books of Divinity rather weakened and overwhelmed the mind than strengthened and ennobled 6 Profesdor Blachie. it." Nature she loved, but not solitude. ^^We have had variety of employment for our hands ; our ears are charmed with rural music, our eyes feasted with rural scenes ; but what are these? Quite in- sipid without society ! " This was in 1806. She had quite enough of society before long, though not always of the ideal kind with which she would have peopled the rural paradise of Airbliss and Sil- verton. Marriage came in 1807. At first the young couple made their home on the Abbey Hill, near Holyrood Palace; but after a few months they moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow. There, at Mel- ville Place, on Ma/ 29th, 1808, the first child was born. On July 28th, 1809, in Charlotte Street, came the second, who was baptized as ^^John Stuart" by the Eev. Henry Mushet, of Shuttlestone, "With these two little ones, and a still more recent arrival, Mr. Blackie in 1812 took his wife to Aberdeen, having been appointed by the Commercial Bank as ita first agent in that city. The family settled down — Aberdonians, at any rate,, will like to know these trifles — in a* ; I ill jn :3. SL. His Forebears, 7 strangely-situated house, with its front on Marischal Street and its side several storeys lower on Virginia Street, one road being carried over the other by a bridge. Marischal Street has come down in the world since then, though its bridge is as high as ever. The bank is now a humble eating-house ; but the lodgers who share the upper floors no longer have to send to the top of the street for their water, as the banker had. A peep of the River Dee and the heather slopes beyond was to be had from the windows, but otherwise the view consisted of granite — not the clean granite of the newer town, but black with the dust of countless coal carts passing up from the wharf. The surroundings were not calculated to feed the love for beauty in a woman or develop it in a child. As to surroundings of the human sort, the young wife says : " We live very retired. The people in this town visit in a very ceremonious style, which neither Mr. Blackie nor I like; and so we are not obliged to cultivate many friends." "I have not that enlightened society which my imagination pictures, but I have inde- . Jl H 8 Professor Blachie, pendence, which of all things I enjoy. I am not obliged to receive idle and insipid Tisitors that I do not care for." " There is no music amongst us, — little entertain- ment of any kind but eating and drinking; I mean dinner parties. From tea till supper the never-failing entertainment is cards. Then the toddy commences, which lasts till twelve or one." Although husband and wife agreed as to the shortcomings of Aberdeen society, they could not compensate each other for the deficiency. Alexander Blackie was a lively fellow, a singer of rattling songs, with " a great flow of spirits," " a ready tongue," "full of joke and fun," "very famous at talking nonsense," quick of temper, and a keen man of business. His son-in-law gives an illustration of this last quality. A certain firm, of the highest repute, owed the Commercial Bank £40,000. Mr. Blackie came to a shrewd conclusion that the firm were going beyond their depth, and, resisting all influence and pressure, even from his own directors, he left no stone unturned till the debt was all paid off. Soon after 11 ALEXANDER BLACKIE. I His Forebears, 9 that the firm failed, bringing another Aber- deen Bank down in the crash ; and the Commercial Bank directors thanked Mr. Blackie for saving them from themselves. This by the way. According to the childish recollections of one who spent much time in her house, Mrs. Blackie " was a good height, dark hair, dark eyes beaming with kindness, nimble in her movements, cheerful in manner, did not care about dress, though always tidy, and a great reader." An attractive picture, but in- complete. The banker's wife was a far more serious thinker than himself, and too profound for him either to sympathise with or to understand, especially as she was *^ bitter bad at speaking." Their eldest daughter, who was nearly thirteen when her mother died, preserved the impression that " she was a very quiet, timid person, silent and reserved, and cer- tainly not demonstrative to her children." The meagreness of these recollections, to which Professor Blackie could add nothing, is poorly supplemented by a solitary incident, not bearing on the family life but recalling an event of 10 Professor BlacJeie, 'I 1 interest in the history of public opinion. To use the daughter's words : " On the occasion of the illumination for Queen Caroline's acquittal, my mother and father were dining at Mr. Ewing's,. opposite us. As she was standing at the lighted window dressed for the occasion, with a white satin hat and feathers, which happened to be the favourite costume of the queen, the crowd below gave a shout of applause, supposing that she was intended as a representation of theii* idol.'* Only a mother knows what the burden of motherhood means ; and Helen Blackie had the burden in overflowing measure, with neither opportunity nor capacity for much of the compensating joy. '' I have been sadly kept down," she wrote in 1815, when she had three children living' and had buried two^*' sadly kept down with a small family, fully as large as I am able to manage, having not much ability that way." When three more children had come, and two gone, she continued: "As to my own method with children, I have nothing to boast of. The task is difi&cult. Some ', Hia Forebears, 11 people have a natural turn for it, wticb I am afraid is not the case with me.'* The general cares of the household, too, were heavy. She had not been idle in her maiden days; the spinning-wheel was her steady companion at Airblissj but she was "a bad hand at gown-making or anything of that kind." "Very dif- ferent is the case now," she writes after eleven years of married life. *' It is not as in days of old, when you once told me that my own thoughts were my greatest amusement." "We have enough to make ourselves and friends comfortable," she was able to say, "and a little to give away to the Bible Society " ; but such savings were made at heavy cost to the housewife. Acknowledging a shawl sent from India by her friend, she remarks, ** It is the piece of dress I stood most in want of, but I have got so many to pro- vide for that I myself am always the last person to be considered." At another time, *^ I have so much to sew, and such a. bustle in the house, that I have little quiet for reading, although I attempt it sometimes" — and gallantly she kept up the 12 Professor Blachie, attempt to the end. " My grand aim in all my domestic economy is to preserve my temper unruffled if possible ! I would wish to be as little impressed with dis- agreeable trifles as possible " — an opti- mism of the deliberately-aimed-at sort, like that which her son so happily achieved. Fortunately, there was a sister to carry part of the housewife's load. Marion Stodart was a second, and perhaps more motherly, mother to Helen's children. It was she who sang to them the old Scottish songs, most ravishing of entertainments to a Scottish child. One of these ballads, which seems to have dropped out of sight and hearing, was a tragic legend of the West country : There were seven gypsies all in a row, And they were brisk and bonny, O ; They sang till they came to the Earl o' Cassilis' gate, And there they sang sae sweetly, O. They sang sae sweet, and sae complete, That doun came the fair leddy, O ; AjQd when they saw her weel-f aured face They cast the glamour ower her, O. So she's taen off her high-heeled shoes That are made o' the Spanish leather, O, ■ji r iwuitJt-i i f~iim ' , ' ftaJW«tJ Hia Forebears, And she's put on her Highland brogues To skip amang the heather, O. 18 On the discovery of which the Earl *^ saddled to him his milk-white steed,'* and rested not till he had hanged the seven gypsies on a tree. It was Marion Stodart who took charge of the six motherless balms in 1821, when Helen Blackie brought her tenth child into the world and died. Four years later Alexander Blackie married a beautiful widow, Mrs. Margaret Paterson, a grand- daughter of James Watt, and five more children were the result; but Marion Stodart was still the angel of the house, and lived not only to comfort ber brother- in-law when for a second time be was left a widower, but to see iiex- youngest niece a grandmother, and her eldest nephew an old man. n. THE BOY. When this same nephew was only six years old, his mother was able to say, *'He seems a steady boy, and fond of his books." Two years later she spoke of her family as "all fine lively children, none of them beautiful, but all have something pleasing — a certain some- thing which I cannot describe.'' In the same year, however, she ventured on a piece of description which deserves our gratitude. *^As for John, he is all consideration. He is also possessed of a good deal of the milk of human kindness. He is rapid in all his motions, and methodical to a fault. Nothing that can be done to-day is put ofB till to-morrow with John. He is ever happy with the present; anything new rather vexes than delights him." Then follows a prophecy of which the beginning is as safe and the ending as wrong as The B1, rs is ai a id ^1 il le told an Aberdeen audience only last year, with jovial exaggeration ; ^'nobody talked about anything but Latin grammar. All the beauty of God's creation was never looked at for a moment." A " systematic training of the body for grace and strength " was equally undreamt of in the granite city. However, he says, '' we had * robbers and rangers' for our legs, and marbles and hoops for our arms and fingers and our eyes ; and every Wednes- day and Saturday afternoon we had free time to perambulate the green ' links ' on both sides of the ^ Broad hill,' giving scope to our kites (which we called dragons), and speeding our balls from hole to hole with that combination of strength and calculation which the noble game of golf requires. For cr^el sports, such as hanging cats, and bloody noses, and a boyish pugilism, I had never any taste." No taste> l.ut some capacity, it seems. One of his schoolfellows quarrelled with him and flung the usual challenge : " Will you fight me?" "No," said little Blackie, "but I'll knock you down "; and he did. 20 Professor Blackie. lii! After four years of Latin grammar and less-considered trifles, the boy was sent to Marischal College, ^* where, for a few, in those stern granite countries," as Carlyle says in a reference to the founder, ^^the diviner pursuits are still possible (thank God and this Keith) on frugal oatmeal." Blackie has put on record that Scottish students " died rather of eating too little than of eating too much "; but he was never in danger from either. That his mental digestion did not suffer more than his physical is surprising, for he entered- the University at the ridiculous age of twelve — ^^ an age not uncommon in those days, when, by the fault of the ignoble nobles who, at the Eeformation, seized on the funds that should have been appro- priated to middle schools and colleges, the universities were doomed, as they still are in no small measure, to devote themselves to the drill of crude boys rather than to the stimulation of, ambitious youth." The mental stage he had reached in 1821 Blackie describes thus : '' From the school I learned the habit of persistent intel- The Boy, 21 lectual work over books^^, of accuracy in whatever I handled, and of a laudable ambition to do my best in competition with my comrades ; but, beyond this in- tellectual drill, principally through the medium of the Latin language, I learned little at school." His college career may be put in one sentence, also of his own : "I went through 'the usual routine of Greek, mathematics, natural history, and natural philosophy, during a three years' course, with credit in three of the classes and distinction in one." Strange to say, it was in mathematics that he achieved this fleeting distinction. " Some people say," he remarked twenty years after- wards, '' that mathematics is a science for angels; but I could never manage it." " But ! " Now came the great question, always hard enough to answer. What is the boy to do when he becomes a man ? Alexander Blackie wanted to make a lawyer of him, and John actually spent six months in a solicitor's office. Fancy the feelings of a human Jack-in-the-box with the lid screwed down! r in. GOING TO BE A MINISTER. When John was a little lad of six, and his parents had been discussing the matter of education, his mother wrote to her friend in India, ^' I would like that the minister would take John under his charge, as I wish to have him educated for the Church." The boy's own ambition was that of his mother — dead three years, at this crisis. ^^Bom in Glasgow and edu- cated in Aberdeen," he told the Aber- donians last year, "a man should be a match for the devil." He was no match for the devil in 1824, in his own opinion, but he was eager to prepare for the conflict, and the front rank, so far as he then saw, wat composed of ministers. His tendency to the p\ilpit was strengthened by an incident which he never forgot. '* At that period an intimate friend of my father, who used to come in Going to be a Minister, 28 early in the evening and take a hand at cards and a glass of wine, died suddenly. I was a thoughtful youth^ and naturally such a striking exhibition of the great mystery of death so close to the family fireside made me think. I became very serious, and fell, in the fashion of young men, a willing victim to the action of strong feelings and untempered imaginings, which only experience could teach me to regulate." With his father's permission he escaped from the lawyer's office and went up to Edinburgh — " there," as he tells us, " to finish my quinquennial career of Arts by attending the logic class and second Greek in the firso year and the moral philosophy in the second, to which I added chemistry : a breadth and variety of purely human culture which our Scottish Church has wisely ordained to precede the special studies that belong to the clerical profes- sion, and which, I believe, always admit- ting our inferiority in the higher scholar- ship, renders our Scottish theologians more intelligent and more accomplished men than the young aspirants foi episcopal honours in the sister kingdom." f« H 24 Professor Blackie, A curious old letter lies before me, writ- ten (partly printed) by the boy of fifteen soon after his arrival in Edinburgh to the little sister Marion, then five years old, in Aberdeen. It is a sweet and simple letter, rather more serious in tone than might be expected. It begins : " I was very glad to hear that you and James were turned such good scholars. what good children you must be. All good children read the Good book, the Bible, But remember, MARION, that you must be a good girl, too, for if you read the Bible and be not a good girl it will be very bad. Can Dodle read any now ? " Dodle is baby Helen,* now three and a-half . Here are a few more sentences : «U^ *y(fe.'e^ -^V**^ -2*^#l- /cia.^^ <2rfiu;<^/dx a^icyC — • 2u., ^'-^ 7 Going to he a Minister. 25 " There has been a great fire here which has burnt a great number of houses. What do you think will become of all the poor people who lived in them? If you were here would you not give them some money to buy a house, or to help them to buy a house? Yes, James and Marion and Dodle would all do it. , . . Good Marion ! I am glad that you are a good girl. Never he bad, for I cannot love bad girls," In another letter, written while he was staying with his " Uncle and Aunt Gibson " at a farm in Ladhope, before the Edinburgh classes began, the young man tells of his '' delicate stomach," and how severely it has made its delicacy known. " They say," however, " I am looking far more stout and healthy than when I first came out, though they were all much surprised at my *thin bit' arms." His uncle writes in a postscript: ^^ Dearest John is .. much stouter than when he came here, and he is the delight of everybody who sees him." John himself had given a delightful picture of the family circle: — "There is a continual . 1 26 Professor Blackie, w j 'i smile on the face of the individuals here. Every morning and every evening they shake hands together^ and for the most part salute with a kiss. Indeed, Aunt Gibson kisses me more than twice a day, and has for me almost a mother's kindness." Writing in March, 1826, to his Aunt Marion, the student says : ^^ Professor Wilson is at present lecturing on the Grecian philosophy. This is a very profitable subject of contemplation. In each of these systems of morals framed by the wise men of Greece we see much to admire and much to pity." More to pity than to admire, however; for the two lessons he draws from this exercise are that we should be thankful for the clearer light we have received in the Scrip- tures and ashamed of the little good we have achieved by it. In the same letter he writes : " I have no expec- tation of a prize this winter ; my studies have not been diligently pursued. I, have made little progress in them. Nor could it be otherwise when the Going to be a Minister, 27 blessing of God was not with me and I was not simply and sincerely devoting all my powers to His glory." In fact, the young student's mind was so distracted by religious emotions and speculations that he was quite unfit for common studies. Describing this painful experience in ^^The Young Man," he says : " I became overwhelmingly serious after the extreme Calvinistic type native to Scotland, and began immediately an other-worldly sort of piety which in- terfered seriously with my enjoyment of life and with the further progress of my academical studies. To such a degree, indeed, was I puzzled and preoccupied with profound theological problems about election, reprobation, and other points of the severe Calvinistic theology, that I abstained from reading many books of approved literary excellence, because I thought they were too worldly in their tone, and not sufficiently in har- mony with the spirit of reverential seriousness without which all knowledge and all cleverness merely make a man a more efficient agent of the devil. So far 1 I ' I 28 Professor Blachie, M did this extreme religiosity lead me that I remember well, when I went up at the end of my fifth academical year to receive my certificate of attendance from John Wilson, the Professor expressed his regret that he could not give me a testimonial of the highest kind, because, though I had written one very excellent essay during the session, I had written only one. To this I could say nothing, the true cause of my deficiency, a morbid religiosity, being so personal and peculiar; all I could do was to cover my face and burst into tears, and leave the room." One outcome of the two years at Edin- burgh University — two barren years for the most part — was the warm friend- ship that sprang up between young Blackie and the aforesaid John Wilson, the famous "Christopher North," who was then, what Blackie afterwards became, the most noted inhabitant of the capital. With unshaken resolve Blackie now mounted another step on the pulpit stair, Eeturning to Marischal College, he en- I 1 Going to he a Minister. 29 tered in the theological faculty. He went in for his new studies with enthusiasm, and did his exercises well for the required space of three years. Long before that term was out the warmth of his heart had softened the rigidity of his creed, which afterwards took so elastic, not to say fluid, a form. The students had to write sample sermons for their professors and fellow-students to criticise. In one of his discourses Blackie let his incipient Arminianism show itself, and Dr. Meams snubbed him severely. In criticising other men's sermons he ^ on some college fame, not, for sure, becau ^ of his zeal in exposing doctrinal errors, b. through his gift of tongues. "Principal Brown had been taught in Holland, and knew Latin very well indeed. He laid it down as a rule," Blackie tells us, *' that if there was to be any criticism of the discourse it must be in Latin. I remem- ber that I was the only one having the hardihood to criticise in Latin, and I made some little reputation as a Latin scholar." Not long after he had plunged into the wr 30 Profess w- BlacMe, professional study of theology, his father — who was no theologian, but a shrewd man in other matters than finance — notice^l that the young man's intellectual vision was still somewhat clouded uy uver-seriousness, and sent him to take the advice of an equally shrewd divine, Dr. Patrick Forbes, then professor of Latin and chemistry at King's College. Here is Blackie's account of the interview, which iiad great results : — " I immediately made a declaration that in dealing with a subject of so extensive a range as Christian theology I had deemed it advisable to commence with a general systematic scheme of the whole subject, and had accordingly submitted myself to the orthodox guidance of Boston's *Body of Divinity.' ^Boston! Boston ! Body! Body! ' said the stout old doctor; * neither Boston, nor Calvin, nor any other D.D. must be allowed to stand between you and your Protestant Bible. Let them stalk about on the stilts of a scholastic dogmatism as high as they please, but you place yourself at the feet of Jesus Christ and learn n! d r d In Going to be a Minister, 31 from Him directly. Take your Greek Testament, interleave it, and make notes carefully of what you read ; make a vow to read no Body of Divinity for two years, and after that you will likely find that they are not worth reading.' '^I followed his instructions conscien- tiously," the young man adds, now old, '' and have, during the whole course of ^ life protracted considerably beyond the usual term, known how to combine profit- ably and carefully the study of the original Scriptures with a total abstinence from theological systems and sectarian commen- taries." A complete digest of the New Testament, in Greek, was one of the immediate results of the Professor's advice to this student, whose voracity for work, checked in its monstrous meal of Boston, was instantly let loose upon the more wholesome victual set before it. Nor was he so engrossed in professional studies that he could not find time to give the ^' gooders " their first lessons in botany, sitting on the banks of the Don at Caskie Ben, or to painfully print t 82 Professor BlacJcie, 4 I f. for their instruction a long series of original Latin exercises, of which this is a specimen * : — vet wtUc'»' ^^'^^^ oir^nt^u^Um. U^^t^^.C»aiUi^ Si^Mt tevtilv. ClUii van The three years passed without a catas- trophe. The potential parson managed to escape, with all his infant heresies, the utter condemnation of his professors, and was ready to emerge from his probationary chrysalis in full-blown gown and bands. '^ And why was I not licensed to preach ? The why," he tells us, " lay in a good idea of my good father." Whether Mr. Blackie had any strong conviction that his son ought not to be a minister, or whether he * On a reduced scale, as with the other facsimiles. Going to be a Minister. 33 simply wished to equip "his young theo- %ical Johnme" more fully for his^mii^s- i^tharSslf 5T"' ''''"'^'' nu jrroressor Forbes once more appealed m the way with a s.gges^fon thj youug BlacKe should go off with a and „1/r"^ ^°'^'''' ^ ^^' Continent, and add two years in a German uniyersit; I IV. GEEMAlfY AND ITALY. ^ The fathers having agreed to this plan, the three sons were packed off by coach to Edinburgh, and took ship at Leith for the !N"orth Sea passage. Landing at Hamburg, they made their way to Gottingen. There they spent six months '^ eagerly drinking in living waters from Heeren in history, Otfried Miiller in philology," and other sources. The consuming energy with which young Blackie not only set about his appointed work but created new tasks for himself considerably astonished his com- rades, the elder of whom (the Rev. John Forbes, D.D., LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Oriental Languages, Aberdeen) still preserves, at the hale old age of ninety- three, p. vivid recollection of the ex- perience. To begin with, as Blackie tells us himself, he gripped, overcame, and made a friend of his first enemy, the Germany and Italy, 85 Oerman language^ as Jacob wrestled with the angel. " I learnt how to learn languages, not by a painful machinery of dry rules and dead books, but just as we learn to swim by plunging into the water and plashing about. It is fear that would make you sink, not the weight of your body. I did not know a single word of German when I stepped •out of the Leith packet (there were no steamboats in those days) at Ham- burg, but before I had been three months in Gottingen I followed Professor Heeren's lectures on history as pleasantly as if they had been in English; not," he assures us, '^ because I had any special gift of learning languages, but because I plashed about daily in the element and breathed the atmosphere of German." This was only one of the "notable revelations " that were speedily made to him, and perhaps the least of a revelation, for he had learnt to speak Latin by the «ame fearless and natural method at home. " The next thing I learned," he continues, " was that the German univer- 36 Professor Blachie, 1 sities are the model institutions of the kind, the real iraveiria-ri^fiiov, as the Greeks phrase it, or bazaar of universal know- ledge, while the Scottish Universities,, except in the medical department in Edinburgh, are mere shops for retail trade in certain useful articles ; and the English universities are shops of a higher order and more gentlemanly appearance, dealing only in a few select articles sought after by persons of much money and great leisure, more from a certain aristocratic tradition and respectable show than from any practical fruits which they are destined to bear." He does not tell us how soon he communicated this un- pleasant discovery to his fellow country- men, and thus flung himself into that struggle for university reform which is one of his many claims upon the national gratitude. His fellow-traveller supplies the omisdion. " Blackie," he says, *^ waa very quick at picking up German; he had got a few words even as we were passing through Hamburg; he was very ready in talking to the German stu- dents, and studied the German grammar Germany and Italy. 37 Tery keenly. We soon noticed that he was busy writing — he would not say what — and at last we found that by the time we had been six weeks in Got- tingen he had written an article to fiend home on the inferiority of the Scottish universities ! " This article, the first shot in a brilliant campaign, was published in "The Edinburgh Literary Journal." Busy as he was enlarging his own mind, and transmitting his new light to the nation he had left sitting in darkness, Blackie was no more of a recluse then than in his sunny after life. He threw himself into the life around him, joining his fellow-students in all their amuse- ments except one. He visited the duel- ling-halls, though the more cautious Eorbes's left him to go alone; but he would not fight, and it is not recorded that he had to knock any German down as an alternative. "As a stu- dent among students," he says, " I lived in the most intimate fellowship with the Burschen, and joined in all their fitudies and recreations, except that I T ■ ^ u ! 38 Professor Blackie, did not fight a duel, or come home with a scar of honourable folly on my ^-ice." As for those unclean courses to which. e'C/y young man is tempted, and into- whi^h the weaker-minded stray under various contemptible excuses, Blackie's. mind was absolutely made up from the beginning. '* Along with the stem theology of Calvin," he told the young men of later generations, '^ I got the pure morality of the Gospel, and after drop- ping the one, as the wisdom of life gradually taught me, I had the sense to stick closely by the other"; and so he "was preserved untouched by those sensual excesses and youthful lusts which when they once get free rein are sure to poison the fountain-head and trouble the flow of all noble emo- tion in the soul." No wonder that on a calm retrospect he described ^'the early adoption of the Bible standard of morality as by far the most valuable educative influence" in his hfe, or that the advantages far out-weighed the disadvantages of the "hyper-Cal- Hi Germany and Italy, 89 1- Tinistic soul-cancer" from which he had suffered. The narrow theological shell, which we saw beginning to crack before the horrified eyes of Dr. Meama, burst and fell off altogether under the expanding in- fluence of German suns like Fichte, Schiller, Eichter, and Goethe. For a time he seemed to be parting from much of religion itself, along with the uncongenial forms in which be had generally met it. That he saw his mistake before his mind had time to become hardened in the extreme fashion of scepticism is probably due to his meet- ing with Baron von Bun sen after leaving Germany. Meanwhile, we had better get back to Gottingen. The session passed in peace, and the three young Scotsmen agreed to begin their holidays with a walking tour in the Harz Mountains. The eldest, who was also the purse-bearer, proposed that in case of a difference of opinion (which he quite anticipated) as to future plans, a vote should be taken, and the majority should have their way. But on the first application of the new rule, when the two l iiW/iU I J." i-ij i ; i i. ii Bti w - | i i far «i i 40 Professor Blackie. brothers voted for going off to Leipzig Fair, young Blackie, resolved on seeing more of the mountains, claimed the right of secession. The Forbes's returned to Gottingen for another session, while Blackie, the Hanoverian town having dis- agreed with his health, made his way to Berlin. For six months he listened to *^Ranke expatiating on the virtues and villainies of the Popes, Boeckh expounding the pregnant sentences of Athenian wisdom in the choral odes of Sophocles, and Neander teaching German speculation to shake hands with Hebrew Platonism in the Gospel of John." Under this rush of inspiration the young Aberdonian felt as if he was conversing with Luther, and Melanchthon, and Erasmus, " in the days when learning meant thinking and Greek meant wisdom. I likewise," he goes on to say, ^^had the advantage of hearing Schleiermacher, with his graceful little figure and his chaste earnestness, preach- ing regularly every Sunday in the Trini- tats-Kirche. With such advantages I could not fail to take the first step in true scholarship, by being made fully alive Germany and Italy. 41 to the smallness of my own, and indeed of all Scottish attainments in the higher learning." The young student had found his *' model thinker " in Goethe : he was now to find his "model man" in another German — but not in Germany. Blackie was happy in his relations with his teachers at both the German universities. At Gottin- gen old Professor Blumenbach had been very kind to him and his companions ; and on leaving Berlin he received from Neander a greater boon than any course of lectures. ** The greatest benefit," he says, ^' which I got from my twelve months' experience of German academical life was from a letter of introduction which Neander gave me, when leaving Berlin for Rome, to a great German man at that time acting as Prussian ambassador at the papal Court." With this letter in his pocket Blackie travelled through Bohemia and Austria to Rome, where he presented it to the man who was to mould so much of his nature. "** Baron von Bunsen," he says, " was as learned in Greok and Latin, in Hebrew, and English, and Italian, as any professor; but ^^-■^v^fflSSBK I* Jl 9 i I 42 Professor BlacJcie, he was far more than a professor. He wa© a man of life and of society, and moved with dignity and grace and effect on the diplomatic stage that belonged to his positu)n. He was, moreover, a man of piety, and, like Gladstone, of special theological study, but of a piety healthy and cheerful,, and as far as possible removed from the rigid orthodoxy and the sacred gloom of the Calvinistic doctors, whose contagion had so severely affected me in my first outlook into the seriousness of responsible life." The great man was very fond of patronising and helping young men, and Blackie's fine open nature helped to ripen the acquaintance into a friendship of the warmest kind, which endured for a long series of years, in Heidelberg and London as well as Rome. *^ Familiar intercourse with a noble, well-rounded, and highly- cultured man is the greatest piece of good fortune that can happen to a young man in his entrance on life. This good fortune was mine," writes Blackie, recalling those old Roman days; " and I advise all men to pray for no higher blessiuj. lan the reverential and loving fellowship with. Oermany and Italy, ' 4$ )d in such a man, to whom they may look up daily, and grow by his gracious in» fluence, as the flower looks up to the sun and grows with the brightness of the summer." The fifteen months that Blackie spent in Italy are memorable also for the new fields of learning which he speedily added to his German conquests. One of these was archaeology, the study of the monu- ments of Greek and Eoman art which continually met his eyes — in the Capitol, and the Vatican, and almost at every street comer. "With this delightful study as the sister of philology," he writes, "I occupied myself so seriously that Professor Gerhard, then the leading man in the Archaeological Institute at Eome, requested me to write an account of a newly-discovered sarcophagus repre- senting a battle between Romans and barbarians. This I did to his satisfaction, using Italian, with which I was quite familiar, as the medium of expression " r and the curious may still inspect in the British Museum an old brown treatise,, formidably elaborate in its contents, and pi^S!>|iiail.2!«SSS!fWW!!»'Wi!«3«w^ 44 Professor Blackie, bearing on the title-page these words: InTOBNO UN 8AB00FAG0 BINVENUTO NELLA ViGNA Ammendola 8ulla via Appia. ILLU8TBAZI0NE DI GlOVANNI BlACKIE. Bom A. 1831. Here was a guttural Scotsman, fresh from guttural Germany, able to speak and write in perfect Italian after a few months' experience! The spectacle is surprising enough, even when we remember his achievement at Gottingen. His method was the same in both cases — ^the method of nature. He learnt to speak by speak- ing, chatting with the Italians as he bad with the Prussians, utterly careless whether he amused them or not. It was in Italy, too, that he laid the foundation^ — in ground prepared by nature, to be sure — of that love of beauty which he was never tired of preaching to his fellow-countrymen. For one thing, as he spent his time chiefly in Rome and the neighbourhood, he '* naturally fell into the society of artists, both German and English, and received the greatest benefit," he tells us, ^'not only from the pure humanity that characterises that class. m'm Germany and Italy. 45 but specially from this : they taught me to use my eyes, an exercise too often neglected in the bookish style of teaching to which too many of our modem educa- tors have enslaved themselves." rn I 1 i V. " STICK3T." > & I k At last the young traveller turned his face northwards, his boxes packed with presents for his step-mother and the rest of the Aberdeen household, and his *' head full of pictures, statues, churches, and other beautiful objects." One can imagine the astonishment, not to say horror, that sermons preached under the combined inspiration of Eome and Berlin would have excited in a Scottish Presby- terian congregation sixty years ago. Happily for the peace of his Church, the young minister stuck fast on the very threshold of the pulpit. He could not conscientiously declare the creed of his Church to be the expression of his heart's belief. He was " much friven to thinking, and thinking is twin sister to doubt." The absolute orthodoxy with which he had set out on his ^ (( StickiU » 47 theological career half-a-dozen years before had been '^rudely shaken,'* not only by the great writers who have been named, but " by continued familiar intercourse with such large and liberal Christian men as Professor Neander and Baron Bunsen." The elder Blackie was not greatly dis- appointed, though he must have grudged the three years his son had spent learning to be a stickit minister. Stickit he was, and there was an e^^.d of it. What re- mained but to re-enter the despised pro- fession of the law, " with a side glance at literature if the Pandects and the statute books should fail " ? Up to Edinburgh he went again, therefore, to supplement his ten years of college work with three of special training for the Bar. ^^My father," he says, ^^vdth his old liberality, pro- mised to give me an allowance of £100 for three years, and after that I was to shift for myself. I knew he was a man of his word, so I set my face to the writer's desk and the Institutes," studying hard, and taking part in the debates of the Specu- lative and Juridical Societies, "and i 48 Professor BlacJcie. bravely passed as advocate on the usual presentation of a Latin thesis and exami- nation in the general outlines of Scottish law." Thus it came to pass that in 1834 John Stuart Blackie was called to the Bar, and went on circuit with the rest of the budding chancellors. There is a legend that he had one case, and lost it. A dili- gent Aberdeen journalist^ has unearthed enough of the ancient records of his town to show that Blackie had '' a fairly busy time of it" when the Court sat there in the autumn of '34. A local paper reported his first case in this little paragraph : — *^ Alexander Watt, a boy apparently ten or eleven years of age, was placed at the bar charged with theft, and two previous convictions. Panel pleaded guilty ; and the Advocate-Depute having restricted the libel, Mr. J. S. Blackie urged in mitigation that the boy had been driven from home by the conduct of a drunken fatl r. Lord Medwyn, after a serious advice to the panel as to * See " The Evening Gazette/' March 16, 1895. ''Stichitr 4& his future behaviour, sentenced him to twelve months' imprisonment in Bride- well." A friend who went to court especially to hear the most important of the cases entrusted to the young advocate tells me that it was " something to do with a cat.'* This must have been the case in which, as appears from the scanty reports of the period, a certain William Walls was charged with having, '' at or near the door of the dwelling-house upon the farm of Dencadlie, or Dencallie, parish of Strichen, then occupied by him," shot Mr. " John Forsyth, farmer, residing at Greens, in said parish, with a gun, whereby the said Forsyth was severely wounded, to the injury of his person and the efPusion of blood, with intent to murder, maim, dis- figure or disable him. Mr. J. S. Blackie," we are informed, ^^ made a forcible appeal to the jury on behalf of the prisoner, contending that he had fired at the cat, and not at Forsyth." The judge, how- ever, ^^felt that his sense of justice would not allow him to pass any other sentence than that next to the highest punisliment 50 Professor BlacJcie, I \ ■ti of the law, namely, that of transportation for life." One other case, perhaps the most notable of all that came into his hands, may be mentioned because of its con- nection with the politics of sixty years ago. Alexander Blackie was an advanced Whig — he had been one of the chief speakers at a great Reform demonstration on the Broad Hill in 1832 ; and later on, when Whiggery as a whole was rather shy of Free Trade, Alexander Blackie was one of the few prominent A^berdonians who showed themselves on the platform with Richard Cobden. John Stuart, as his father's son, and as (at this time) a Radical himself, was asked to defend two indiscreet members of the party from the charge of mobbing and rioting on the occasion of a public dinner at Banff. When he was cross-examining some of the Crown witnesses, " Mr. Blackie was asked what he intended to prove. He stated that he wished to show who were the parties who commenced the riot. The mob, he said, was not, as had been said, a many-sided monster, but a monster all heart and no I il i! " sticMt:* 51 .11 id head. He wislied to know what it was which brought these countrymen, this junta, these self- constituted police " (the anti-mob, in short) '' into the town. Lord Medwyn said the counsel was endeavouring to turn the case into a political affair. Mr. Blackie denied that he had endeavoured to do so. He had never mentioned the words Whig or Tory. The counsel for the other panels had spoken of cheers given for Colonel Hay. He (Mr. Blackie) might, if he had been willing, have spoken of groans given for Mr. Brodie. (Laughter.) Lord Medwyn said, if Mr. Blackie*s client had confined himself to cheers for one party or groans for another, there could have been no objection at all to his conduct. There was nothing wrong in such ebullitions of feeling. But, alas, he had not confined himself to cheers and groans, but had proceeded to blows." Mr. Blackie "addressed the jury at con- siderable length *' — a few extracts from that speech would have been welcome — " maintaining that no case had been made out by the prosecution." One of the prisoners was discharged; the other, a I 52 Professor Blachie, young lad, though convicted only of assault, and recommended to mercy by the jury, was sentenced to six weeks* imprisonment. The Whigs did not let the matter drop there ; and Lord Medwyn was charged by the local party paper with having sent Blackie's client to gaol "to propitiate the deity of appearances." This was in the autumn of 1835. It is the only record which has preserved for us a single incident characteristic of the young lawyer who afterwards for many years enjoyed the honour of verbatim reports. In the absence of knowledge to the contrary, a belief has grown up that Blackie invariably succeeded in obtaining verdicts of " guilty " and extra heavy sentences for his clients. So, at any rate, said Blackie's friend Dr. Kilgour, at a farewell banquet given to the Professor in 1852. The facetious physician could scarcely foresee that his remark would travel over the world for half-a-century, or he would have attached the label, " This is a joke." It is quite undeniable, however, that Blackie did not win that speedy success which might have con- i (( sticut:' 53 It quered his old dislike for the law. ^* The lawyers had a notion," he once said, *^ that I had too much German, and that I had not a business head, which perhaps was true." His fees were " almost null." To be sure, this troubled him little. He used to entertain the convivial gatherings of his friends by laughing at himself in song. We can imagine the shout that went round the table when Blackie rose to sing : — GIYE A FEE. A New Song for Young Barristers. (Air : " Buy a Broom.") O listen, of Scotcli and of civil law doctors all, Solicitors, agents, accountants, to me ! O listen, of strifes and of lawsuits concoctors all, And give to a poor starving lawyer a fee ! Give a fee ! give a fee ! give a fee ! give a fee ! O give to a poor starving lawyer a fee ! Happily, he had a second string to his bow. Indeed, Literature was his first string, and Law only the second. While studying con- scientiously, but without ambition or affec- tion, for the Bar, his pen was brisk and Ill If 64 Professor Blackie, busy at the work he loved. Before the three years were ended, he was making £100 a year, independently of the paternal aid, by writing articles in " Tait " and " Black- wood " and the " Foreign Quarterly Eeview " ; and he went diligently on with his literary career while practising at the Bar. His subjects were largely German; and, while he profited by the wave of interest in German literature which Carlyle raised, Blackie's own efforts did much to keep the billow rolling. He was the fit"st, as Dr. Kirchner has re- cently reminded us,* to ii 'roduce '* Ecker- mann's Conversations with Goethe'* to the British public, by an article in the *' Foreign Quarterly " ; and Blackie's first book, published in the year that saw its author's futile call to the Bar, was a translation of Goethe's Faust. This was a bold attempt for a young poet; but Blackie had drunk so deeply of his author's spirit that Goethe's biographer,. George Henry Lewes, preferred his- translation to any other, and usually followed it. *' In general tone and effect,"" * In the " lUustrirte Zeitun":." »l " 8HckiL'* 55 Blackie writes in his preface, "I have carefully followed the movement of the original. To have done otherwise, indeed, would have been difficult for me, to whom the movement of the original, in all its changes, has long been as familiar as the responses of the Church service to a devout Episcopalian." Nevertheless, the translator was not over confident in his own power for such a great work, and he gladly accepted the help of " Christopher North" — who corrected rhymes which would have been correct in Aberdeen — of Sir "William Hamilton and Mr. George Moir (the "Delta" of " Blackwood ") in revising the proofs and collecting material for the very curious notes on the witch- craft and astrology of the Middle Ages. The translation was reprinted, after being largely rewritten, in 1880. With his reputation as a German scholar lifted higher than ever by this book, Blackie gained in favour with the editors. He reviewed German books, ex- pounded — in the "Westminster Review" — the Prussian constitution, and wrote what is considered ' "*ne of the clearest mill- 58 Professor Blackie, tary monographs, describing Napoleon's Leipzig Campaign." This last, and several kindred articles, were intended to form part of a work on the Liberation War in Germany, for which Blackie collected large materials at a time when Providence had not yet marked out for him " a less genial but more useful sphere of action." Another great plan of his was that of " a large work on eesthetical philosophy." The complete scheme of this work was drawn up when he was fresh from the beauties of Italy; but, ** being convinced afterwards that the British mind is remarkably intolerant of big books on theoretical subjects," he allowed the pro- ject to drop. Many years afterwards, as we shall see, he revived the subject in a form which the British mind was delighted to tolerate. Two momentary glimpses will show Blackie as the affectionate brother in the midst of his legal and literary struggles. In 1834 we see him taking his little sister Helen through the streets and over the hills of Edinburgh, on her first visit to the Capital, and — a professor already by nature et Stichit, a w — so instilling the principles of botany and architecture that they have not been forgotten in sixty years. In 1836 he is off on a walking tour in the Border country, and sending his sister a descrip- tion, in 300 lines of verse crowded on a single sheet, of what he had seen and done. Let us make room for just this scrap of doggerel : — how I swilled the cups of tea ! Much better, I vow, than wine they be ! Much better when tongues are parched with heat, With empty stomachs and weary feet ; 1 swilled the cups, full three times three. Of darkest Inverleithen tea ; Dark as the sea when tempest-tost, Dark as the whiskers of my host. For six years Blackie went on with his reviewing, and more casually with his pleading ; but neither the editors nor the prisoners could supply him with the niche he was made to fill. '' I was now thirty years old," he says, "and, having no special genius for law, must have drifted into the wide field of general literature, with a fair chance of making shipwreck, I 58 Professor BlacJcie, as I am by nature and habit too much of a severe, systematic student to make a living by the graceful playfuhiess of a writer in magazines, or the pugilistic dexterity of the politician." •v / *,.! VI VI. 'I V)] THE FIGHT FOR THE CHAIR. By the irony of events, it was the " dex- terity of the politician " that opened a new career to the stickit lawyer. '* A happy combination of personal merit in the travelled scholar and paternal influence in the world of patronage led to my appointment as Professor of Latin in the newly - created chair in the Marischal College, Aberdeen." -^^j- Before this there had been no chair of Latin (or Humanity, as the Scotch phrase goes) in Marischal College, though lectures on Latin were given to the students by Dr. Melvin, rector of the Grammar School. On the 1st of May, 1839, the Home Secre- tary signed a decree at once establishing such a chair, and appointing John Stuart Blackie to fill it. This was brought about by the influence of the Whig Member of Parliament for the city, Mr. Alexander p« ■u Professor Blackie. Bannerman. The chair was wanted — no doubt about that — and in obtaining it from the Government Mr. Bannerman acted as a friend of his constituents ; but in getting the new place for Blackie before any one else knew there was a place to apply for, the M.P. acted as a friend of one particular constituent, Alexander Blackie — one of Bannerman's chief supporters and most intimate friends. However, it is as well to re- member that the politician's recommen- dation was strongly endorsed by high educational authorities. v ; The wrath of the Tories at the perpe- tration of a "political job" by another party was deep and furious. We shake our heads over the lapse of journalism into personalities ; but we may pluck up heart when we read the personalities of our predecessors. Imagine the bitterness of party feeling that could inspire an editor with language like this: — "the absurdly-ridiculou.:. appointment of Master John Blackie, alias Faust; a boy in common-sense, a very child in talents, a very infant of the classics, a very fool -■^ v^, i The Fight for the Chair, 61 when labouring on the circuit in his pro- fession." ^^ He has a professorship made up for him^ gets a gown put over his back instead of a child's frock and pinafore, with £300 a-year " — the salary was really £200 — *^and his fees instead of a bawbee to buy gibbery* ! " Angry Tories apart, there was a widespread though ill-informed opinion that the new chair should have been given to Melvin, a man who had explored every micro- scopical nook and cranry in the whole Latin language, who had in his library as many editions of Horace as there were days in the year, and who had become, as Blackie himself said, *^one of the most accurate and elegant Lati]iists in the country." Thirteen years later, when Blackie left Aberdeen and the Tories were in power, Melvin's appointment to the vacant chair was taken for granted by everyone — except the Government, who ippointed somebody else. ^* Wounded in the house of his iriends," the Grammar School rector died in the following year. Melvin or no Melvin, Tories or no " • * Gingerbread. 62 Professor Blackie. u I 'f*l i ; ' 111 Tories, the decree lay there in black and white with *' John Eussell " at the foot, and in the natural course of events the " lucky son of a Whig father " should at once have assumed the title by which the last two generations have known him. But the natural course of events was not the road Blackie's affairs were in the habit of travelling. Like a fairy-tale prince caught in an enchanted forest, twice he had struggled towards apparent outlets only to find himself back in the middle of the wood ; and now, as the open world lay just before him, the way out was a third time barred. m ^S s The event that has now to be set down made a great noise at the time and is famous stilL It marks a distinct and per- manent gain in the struggle for religious liberty. At that time, before a professor could begin his work he had to produce to the University Senate a certificate from the Aberdeen Presbytery— ministers and elders of the Established Church — that he had signed the Westminster Confession. Now Blackie's opinion of creeds and tests was The Fight for the Chair. 63 pretty well known, for lie had expressed it vigorously enough in Aberdeen three years before, when speaking on liberty of thought at a great Whig banquet. The Aberdonian Tories thought they had him now. They were loudly anxious to know what he was going to do about the creed and test that stood between him and a professorship. Blackie was equal to the emergency. On July 2nd the reverend assembly met ; the Confession was produced, full-length — and the young heretic signed it, saying as he did so, *^ I have signed not as my private confession of faith, nor as a churchman learned in theology, ^ut in my public profession and capacity, and in reference to university offices and duties merely. I am a warm friend of the Church of Scotland, and I have been accustomed to worship according to the Presbyterian form, and will continue to do so; but I am not sufficiently learned in theology to be able to decide on many articles of the confession of faith." In answer to the remark of a presbyter that they had nothing to do with any 'i liail iijUiilititiiiifl ilH'tilM 64 Professor BlacJcie, mental reservations, the young professor warmly declared that he had no mental reservations whatever. He had said what he had in justice to the Presbytery as well as to himself. Let them now, if they were dissatisfied, proceed to evict him from the chair. To ensure an accurate report of what had occurred, Blackie sent to a local newspaper a letter in which he gave the exact words of his declaration, and added : " I hold that in law a non- theological professor is not subject to the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church. He signs the articles as articles of peace only." In this case they proved articles of war. The Presbytery, doubtless after some inward wrestlings, decided to send the necessary certificate of signature to the University Senate. On this an editorial marplot raised a storm of outraged orthodoxy in his newspaper, and a dozen elders, representing as many parishes, petitioned the Presbytery to reverse its decision in view of the ^' great injury to the Protestant religion" that Mr. Blackie's admission, ander the circum- stances, would cause. The Presbytery The Fight for the Chair, took fright, met again on the 3rd of September, and decided to undo, if possible, what they had done. A written statement was handed in from Mr. Blackie, supplementing his previous decla- ration, and respectfully disputing the power of the Presbytery to recall or suspend his certificate ; but " this expla- nation" was thrown aside as "not satisfactory," only two members daring to dissent. The Senate would have dis- regarded the Presbytery's second thoughts and inducted the new professor to his chair, having no stomach for a fight in the law-courts ; but by this time the courage of the Presbyters had been screwed up to the requisite degree of obstinacy, and they took all the risk on their own shoulders. The question was fought out in the courts, the Presbytery was declared to have no power to do more than witness and certify to the signature, as Blackie had claimed from the outset, and the Presbyters had to pay their costs out of their individual pockets, to the great disgust of the dis- sentient pair. The judgment was a long time in coming, and two years had gone iii »«»«»l '<^ a % *> .>" .^'' .'^ C^ o'S. o v-p. ^^ <^ /A Photographic ^Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 872-4503 #■* JO iV \\ ^V ^''I^>^/i^ 70 Professor Blachie. bj his large humanity. Devoted to books, but not a bookworm, a student of life as well as of literature, he was our com- panion and guide rather than our master. Historjr, philosophy, and poetry charmed him, but the love of nature seemed his passion. He glowed with eloquence as he spoke of the mountains and rivers of Scot- land, of the heather and the bracken, so dear to his heart. And on the prize- giving day, when, in violation of the estab- lished order of things, he filled his plat- form with ladies, he declaimed his verses, pithily describing the students by name" — like this, happily preserved from the same year by another hand : — Davidson, mantling with the poet's crimson, Though forced last year to bow the head to Simpson. The steady Smith, the brisk mercurial "White, The calm Machray, the good and gentle Knight, Stanley, and Stevenson, and Stoddart — ^he May shine elsewhere ; be never shone with me ! Wee Wattle, William Thomson, and James Hill, Chalmers, and Sackville, who with ready skill And classic grace plies his pictorial manum To furnish the Museum Blackianum. He had been caught caricaturing his I Professor of Humanity, 71 professor, perhaps. The teachers were immortalised along with the taught,— The ponderous Oiark, the light and nimble Bain, Blackie, whose will the devil could not bend, And Brown, the students' father and their friend Ending "always with a summons to throw away dusty books and betake ourselves to the hills and streams of our own land. Who could fail to love such a man ? " It was not only his natural sympathy with the young that made Blackie their "companion rather than master." The coldness and formality of Aberdeen society, frozen several degrees harder by the political and theological and Melvinian prejudices aroused at the time of his appointment, made him feel that while he - knew "everybody in Aberdeen" exter- nally, "internally" he knew next to no one. "I therefore," he says, "very naturaUy kept myself within the hedge of my own academic garden, and made friends and companions of the boys, since the men everywhere seemed to eye me either with suspicion or indifference.'' His contact 72 Professor Blachie. with the students was ^^not confined to the class-room, but carried" — in Dr. White's time — '^into the Saturday read- ings at his house, when, aftc^r Tork done, he delighted us by singing German songs,, and by his genial gaiety a" Like some of the other professors, he used to invite batches of the students to breakfast on Saturday mornings. ^^That a profound philosopher,'' Blackie wrote many years afterwards, thinking not of himself but of Heraclitus, "who despised the shallow thinkers about him, should prefer playing at astragals with a boy, is quite natural and stands in tradition." Looking back from the shores of Lake Michigan, in 1896, to the banks of the Dee in 1861, another of " Blackie's boys " says : " The Professor allowed great free- dom in the way of applause in his class, and once in a while, when it became too demonstrative, he would say, ^ Now, you must not make so much noise, or Dr. Cruickshank ' — ^whose class was across the corridor — ' will be saying, " That fellow Blackie does not know how to keep his class in order," ' He seemed to thoroughly Professor of Hnmanity, 73 believe that ' boy? will be boys^ and never criticised the snowball fights that used to take place in the quadrangle^ but rather seemed to enter into the spirit of all the youthful capers of the students. Every week or two," perhaps not quite so often, " on Saturday, he had what he called a dies poetica, when those students who were poetically inclined could bring their con- tributions and read them before the Pro- fessor and the class and such visitors as the Professor might invite. On these occasions Mrs. Blackie very often attended, and entered into the spirit of the occa- sion." The same writer tells how a friend, when the Professor had given up his house and was lodging in the new town, called one day on the landlady. The visitor was dismayed to hear a tempest of oratory in a foreign tongue raging appa- rently in an upper room. ''Is that a madman in the house 9" "O no," said the landlady, "it's only Mr. Blackie reciting some of his pieces." After forty years' experience of it Blackie could describe the work of a Scottish academical teacher as "the happiest of 74 Professor Blachie, human avocations " ; but the happiness was tempered for many years by some of the absurd conditions under which the work had to be carried on. He touched on the worst of these when telling how he himself went to college at the age of twelve. Nominally a University pro- fessor, and eager to do the work of a University — the work of education in ita highest and broadest aspect — ^he was confronted with rows of boys who should have spent several more years at school, and he had to grovel in the weak and beggarly elements for their sake. In one of his earliest lectures, by the way, Blackie happened to make some assertion on the authority of Grimm, the gvea^t German philologist : ^' but I suppose you never heard of Grimm," he added, in the bitterness of his soul. To his great astonishment the whole class claimed to know Grimm intimately, and laughed as if someone had made a joke. It turned out that " Grim "— « Grim Pluto "—was the boys* nickname for the Grammar School rector. Even those who had got their grammar from Melvin had often been Professor of Humanity, 1h after the ascent of the Buachaill Etive, a man on a horse asked me where I had been. I answered, *0n the top of the Buachaill.' * What business had you there?' said he. 'Seeing the glorious works of God,' said I. * You have been disturbing the sheep,' said he ; ' you will have to answer to my master for that.' ' I saw no sheep there,' was my reply ; *and as for your master, who claims a right to keep the Scottish braes as his private property, nothing could give me greater pleasure than to answer him publicly either at Fort William or at Edinburgh in the Court of Session.* Of course^ I heard nothing more of the matter. " The heather braes are f i-ee to any man, I hold, to tread, who bravely wiU and can." The last place in which we should expect to find him, after such a glimpse of his holiday habits, is a hydropathic institute, with its strict supervisions and 92 Professor Blachie, ft .i! prohibitions. "Chains and slavery surely, after the Buachaill Etive ! Yet we find him undergoing this regimen in 1849, and telling the world to go and do likewise. Among the millions of for- gotten pamphlets in the bowels of the British Museum there is one composed of five letters on " The Water Cure in Scot- land,'* written from Dunoon by John Stuart Blackie to the Aberdeen " Herald." ^' We rise every morning at six o'clock," the Latin Professor says,^^ and jump into a trough of cold water immediately after we jump out of bed, and drink four tumblers of the same ' best beverage ' — dpiarov fih vBoyp (Pindar) — cold from the hillside before breakfast." *'Cold tub" was always a part of the Blackie system of life ; but getting up at six was a mere episode, and was forgotten by the time he came to write the " Self -Culture." *'As to early rising," he says there, "which makes such a famous figure in some biographies, I can say little about it, as it is a virtue which I was never able to practise." After ten years of teaching in Aberdeen, ^^j[^ The Greek Chair* 107 ,^ ^ Writing three days after the election to thank his brother-in-law for bringing influence to bear en certain Nonconformist members of the Council and helping to produce a " quite unexpected " result, the Professor said : — '*Now I enter among friends every- where. *A11 the world,' Hunter writes, ^ now discover that ' my ' claims were the highest ' ! Much obliged. I am thankful to Providence that a larger sphere of activity is now opened up to me. But I rejoice, above all things, that bigotry and sectarianism hiive been defeated. The election was substantially, with most of the electors, a mere affair of Churches. Quousque tandem ? Is this the kind of practical Christianity that the world is called on to respect in the nineteenth century ? Thank Heaven, there is a dif- ferent picture in the Gospels and in HIM who pled the cause of the heterodox Samaritan." " When I go to Edinburgh," he said in another letter, " I feel as if I were going home after a long banishment." His father, by the way, had brought his 108 Professor Blachie, household to Edinburgh, where he occu- pied himself as an amateur gardener and a director of the Philosophical Institution. " I have sometimes the notion that if my life in Aberdeen has been my church militant, my career in Edinburgh will be my church triumphant. But about the future I think little ; who knows but Providence may wish to make a victim of me in the test business P " This groundless fear apart, it was " not without trembling " that Blackie went to Edir burgh. " IJo doubt," he said, " my flaming certificates will have excited un- reasonable expectations in the minds of some persons, which I am more likely to" undershoot than to surpass. But a man who understands his subject is a fool to fret himself about his audience. Dash in, move your arms and legs, and trust to Providence, and you are not likely to be drowned in the deepest water." The "flaming certificates" are all on view in the national storehouse of printed things, and only one demands a place here. It is from Thomas Carlyle, who describes his friend as '^ a man of lively intellectual The Greek Chair, 109 faculties, of ardent friendly character, and o± wide speculation and acquirement. la all things he means sincerely; is of Hopeful, rapid nature, very fearless, very Wly, without iU-humour and without g(Une« So Blackie left Aberdeen, after a pubUc banquet at which those who loyed him and those who only admired him, and those who were glad to have him go for the sake of their nerves, united to bid him farewell ; left his friends the students to gnash their teeth over the English pro- nuncmtwn of Latin introduced by his successor; and became a citizen of Edinburgh for t!ie rest of his days. X. EDUCATIONAL EEFOEM. v Glad as he was to get his new post, Blackie was as far as possible from think- ing it a place to rest and be thankful in. It was a vantage-ground, rather, from which he could wage war more freely against educational and other abuses. In the very letter which thanked "My Lord Provost and Gentlemen '* for the honour they had conferred on him, he told them his '^ strenuous care for the future " would be " to advance the interests and raise the standard of classical education in Scot- land." He found the same " radical vice '* in Edinburgh as in Aberdeen : a defective school system, turning out boys without the preliminary knowledge which would fit them for university learning. In Edin- burgh matters were in some respects worse, for the classes were much larger, and there was '^ no Hellenic Br. Melvin Educational Reform, existing in the schools from which the Edinburgh Greek classes drew their supply." Blackie immediately got the Town Council to introduce an entrance examination for the Greek classes ; and he secured his former student, Mr. Donaldson, as his assistant, to '^ coach " the more ignorant of those who knew just enough to pass. In his inaugural lecture he set up a high ideal of classical culture before the university, and tried to rouse the sleep- ing ambitions of his countrymen. Greek, Sidney Smith had said, never marched in great force beyond the Tweed: but, said Blackie, " a half-starved hound will win the race before an overfed spaniel. So may we, Greek starvelings here on the Firth of Forth, yet get the start of those sleek Hellenists on the banks of the Cam and Isis, if we only rouse our mettle properly and do our best." A little later he was .addressing the Lord Provost and Town Council on "the advancement of learning in Scotland," and reproachfully telling them that in Berlin University there were twelve lecturers expounding various branches of Greek literature and 11^ f n(, 112 Professor BlacJcie, art. ^' And you/' he said, " you have one to do all — or rather to do none at all, only to teach the elementary command of the THE PROFESSOR AT THE AQE OF 45. Greek language as it is acquired at a German school." " Greek," he wrote in the following year, " is an exotic in Scot- Educational Reform, 113 land^ and can never floui'sli without glass ; but ttey leave the poor plant in the open air as if it "were cabbages or potatoes. O wisdom ! " This was in 1866. Four years later, thanks largely to Blachie's agitation and partly to a scheme of University reform which he prepared and which a Scottish national society brought to the notice of every Member of Pari i am ent, a considerable measure of reform was obtained. As often happens, he who had been the soul of the movement in its early and struggling days, a voice crying in the wilderness with hardly so much as an echo, was almost ignored when the cause became popular and the laggards were swarming to the front. For example, two and a-half columns of « The Times " for January 2nd, 1858, are filled with the report of a great public meeting in Edinburgh, under the auspices of the Association for the Extension and Improvement of the Scottish Universities. Dr. Candlish, Principal Tulloch, Lord Neaves, Dr. Guthrie, and nine or ten others made speeches ; but the only sign of Blackie's existence is a reproachful 8 114 Professor Blackie, i 1 1 ri! remark by the Chairman, Lord Chief Justice Campbell, that his friend the Professor should not lead Englishmen to exaggerate the defects of Scottish scholarship. This the Professor had answered in advance. In " The Times " of November 11th, 1857 (side by side with announcements of the capture of Delhi and the relief of Lucknow), there is a two- column report of Blackie's introductory lecture for the winter session. After com- paring Edinburgh and Oxford, though not flattering either, he said : ^^ So long as I see the most glaring defects and the most unmitigated absurdities tolerated in our existing University system, I shall con- sider it my duty, on every suitable occasion, to stand forward and denounce them, that both my own usefulness may no longer be marred and the intellectual character of the nation no longer degraded by the continuance of puerile practices in our highest seats of learning." Among other points on which he dwelt was the need of greater encouragements and rewards for scholarship in the Northern Universities. '^Even Scotsmen, whose • Educational Reform, 115 brains are as hard as reapers' loins, cannot afford to study and to starve at the same time.'* The wound he declared to be incurable unless a swift remedy were applied; and he asked whether Scotland would " voluntarily surrender to a foreign people and to a strange system the highest education of her noblest sons." The Professor's battle was only half won. His country's educational system, the measureless importance of which even Scotsmen but half realise, was improved, but it was painfully far from perfect. There were two great idols set up in the land — Oram and Shop ; until they could be deposed Blackie reckoned his work unfin- ished. They are still standing; but the worshippers of Cram are in open revolt, and Shop will presently be dragged from the high altar to its appropriate niche. Blackie, as a practical man, had no objec- tion to special study for special work. He was a specialist himself, and studied most systematically ; though the outside public were bewildered into a different impression by his amazing versatility. A desultory and miscellaneous habit of reading, he 116 Professor Blachie, 'I I 1 ' ; ^1 once remarked, was " like the racing of some little dog about the moor, snuffing everything and catching nothing." What he abhorred was to see a man so fill him- self with the speciality of his profession as to have no "room for broadly human interests — a habit that has blighted the lives of great men enough. "Avoid pro- fessionalism ! '* he cried. " Medicine has as much to do with a knowledge of human nature and of the human soul as with the virtues of cunningly-mingled drugs and the revelations of a technical diagnosis ; and theology is generally the least human and least evangelical when it is most stiffly orthodox and most nicely professional." "Not a few persons are a sort of human lobster : they live in a hard shell formed out of some professional, ecclesiastical, political, or classical crust, and cautiously creep their way within certain beaten bounds, beyond which they have no desires." These words are from " Self Culture," and were not printed for twenty years after Blackie came to Edinburgh ; but his ideas about education were fresh, healthy. Educational Reform, 117 irs ds human, and consistent, all though his publio life. Only seven years ago, for example^ he published "A Letter to the People of Scotland on the Eeform of their Academical Institutions," pleading, as he had pled forty years before, for ^Hho- rough and far-reaching reforms " in the machinery of our educational institutions, urging that boys should be educated up to a much higher standard at school — a " gym- nasium," college, or middle school being established in every county — so that a professor might devote all his energies to teaching of the highest kind. Education — as wo all know, but grudge to confess, so woefully is our practice at odds with such a principle — is the drawing out of talents, the development •of powers. '^The best educated man is the man who has been well trained to do as many things as possible for himself."''^ What an ignoramus a scholar may be under this definition ! Books, much as he loved them, were of quite secondary importance in education, according to Blackie, and bookishness a * Tract on Education, 1868. 118 Professor Blackie* h 'li t1; ► * / disease. "What a student should specially see to, hoth in respect of health and of good taste " (here we dip into Self Culture again) "is not to carry the breath of books with him wherever he goes, as some people carry the odour of tobacco." The young should "commence their studies as much as possible by direct observation of facts.'* "All the natural sciences are particularly valuable, not only as supplying the mind with the most rich, varioup, and beautiful furniture, but as teaching people that most useful of all arts — how to use their eyes. Among the most useful primary studies are Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Geology, Chemistry, Archi- tecture, Drawing, and the Fine Arts." Along with accurate observation should go well - disciplined but active imagination. '^In history, and in the whole region of concrete facts, imagination is as necessary as in poetry ; the historian, indeed, cannot invent his facts, but he must mould them and dispose them with a graceful con- gruity ; and to do this it the work of the imagination. Fairy tales and fictitious narratives of all kinds, of course, have Educational Reform. 119 their value, and may be wisely used in the culture of the imagination. But by far the most useful exercise of this faculty is when it buckles itself to realities. Count yourself not to know a fact when you know that it took place, but then only when you see it as it did take place.'* As for the great god Cram, Blackie Bays : — " All debauch is incipient suicide ; it is the unseen current beneath the house which sooner or later washes away the foundations. So it is with study. Long- continued intense mental exercise, espe- cially in that ungrateful and ungenial form of the acquisition of knowledge called Cram, weakens the brain, disorders the stomach, and makes the general action of the whole organism languid and un- emphatic. Be warned, therefore, in time. Violent methods will certainly produce violent results. Wisdom is a good thing ; but it is not good even to be wise always." But Cram was the offspring of our examination system. What was to be done with this parent-idol? Examina- tions of some kind were necessary. The 120 Professor Blackie, 1 question was. How to conduct them " so as to hit upon the best man/' or to really discover the knowledge of a set of mc without encouraging Cram. Taking L > own particular subject, Greek, he answers : " (1) I would place before the candidate a selection of some dozen passages of the best prose writers in the Greek language, but passages not involving any special linguistic difficulty, in the rich and various groups of its literary existence, from Herodotus to Polybius and Clemens of Alexandria, and from the Church father.* through the whole series of Byzant; writers, down to Phranzes, in tiit> fifteenth century, and from him forward to Tricoupi, Eangabes, Bikelas, in the most recent phase of that wonderful continuity of cultivated human speech, and should require of him to ac- company his translation of these pas- sages into clear, vigorous and tasteful English, with such remarks on the his- torical sequence and social significance of the facts recorded or the opinions expressed as would naturally suggest themselves to a thoughtful and sympa- Educational Mc/orm» 121 thetic young reader " — under the stimulus of a thoughtful and sympathetic teacher. *' (2) I would then place before him the names of some dozen or a score of famous Greek authors, from Homer to Rangabes, and ask him to write what he knew of them, from the general history of Greek literature or from special study. (3) I would hang up before him on the wall of the examination room a series of some dozen or a score of engravings of well- known places, and portraits of famous persons in Greek, Roman, and recent times, and request him to stand up before me and describe . '^a voce in the Greek language both the p. ^ure before him and the memories which it recalled, with the feelings which it stirred in his bosom; and I should then request him to retire and set down in cool writing what he had written in fervid speech.' i» r b XT EATIONAL GREEK. So much for Blackie as the reformer of education in general. As the reader, though he may be reckoned a profound Greek scholar, has probably never heard of Rangabes or Bikelas, let the professor now be introduced as reformer of Greek education in particular. He repudiated, it should be said, any claim of the Greek language to the fictitious primacy given to it in the English Universities. " George Buchanan, John Milton and John Jjocke studied Latin and Greek because these languages were the key to the only great storehouses of useful knowledge and high culture then open to the world. It is not so now. The most rich and various store- houses of all sorts of knowledge, both speculative and practical, are open to a modern British man without any key but his mother topgue." " What was once an / Rational Greek, 123 anomalous necessity has now become an absurd anachronism and a scholastic tra- dition, defended mainly on the groi: -id , that it is valuable, like mathematics, as a mental discipline — is, in fact, the one in- dispensable course of drill without which, in these latter days, a well-educated man cannot be produced. But this is a gross exaggeration." " The Greeks learned no language but their mother tongue, and were nothing the less the wisest people in the ancient world, and the teachers of wisdom to all generations ; but even on the supposition that linguistic training is the very best possible, it is quite certain that German is as good for this purpose as either Latin or Greek, with this immense advantage — that the language of Goethe and Bismarck, if once learned, is likely to be used. . . Neither Latin nor Greek has any claim to be prescribed as a sine qua non to the full participation in the privileges of academical education in this country.""'*" When Greek is taught — and he was eloquent on its advantages to ministers * In " The Times," January 21, 1891. 124 Professor Blackie. and other professional men — ^let it be as a living language, and not as a curious grammatical skeleton. This was another of Blackie's messages to the dull ears of his country. It came as a revelation to most men, the knowledge that Greek is not a dead language " but a very vital speech, as any man may se(3 in a Greek newspaper — in fact, the only living bridge betwixt the remote past and the actual present of our European civilisation, and," more wonderful still, '' living in a state as free from any borrowed blot or blemish as it was in the days of Plato, of Alexander the Great or the Apcstle Paul." In a preface he contributed not long ago to a manual of modern Greek he insisted that " a language which has come down to us in an uninterrupted stream of vitality from the time of Homer to the present hour — nearly 3,000 years — and is still spoken extensively, not only in Greece proper but in various parts of the Medi- terranean, by confessedly the most acute, the best educated and the most progressive people in those parts, has a legitimate claim to be treated and studied as a living Rational Cheek, 125 language, and not to be stretched out, as dead bodies are on an anatomical table, for the purposes of the grammatical dissector." One curious but inevitablf result of the English style of teaching Greek is that our great Greek scholars, when they visit Greece, cannot even make themselves understood. It is said that Mr. Gladstone himself had to fall back on Italian ; while his friend Blackie could chat away with the Athenians in their own language as comfortably as with the Aberdonians in theirs. He took a keen interest in the domestic affairs of the nation which, after emancipating itself from Mahomedan bondage, undertook to purify the ancient language of Plato and Herodotus from the Turkish and Italian corruptions of later centuries, and is now struggling against difficulties and corruptions of another kind. He became an honorary member of the Society for the Spread of Greek Letters, at Athens, and of the Greek Philological Society at Constantinople. The breadth of his sympathies and of his studies shows itself in the volume of If T '.I V; y [: 126 Professor Blackie* *' Horse Hellenicse," whicb. he published in 1874 with B. dedication to Mr. Gladstone, *^ Statesman, Orator, and Scholar." Th< subjects of these essays vary from '' The Philological Genius and Character of the Neo-Hellenic Dialect" and "The Place and Power of Accent in Language" to *^The Spartan Constitution and the Agrarian Laws of Lycurgus," ^'The Scientific Interpretation of Myths," and ^' The Popular Poetry of Modern Greece." National poetry, as we Scotsmen ought to know, was a suVject very dear to the Pro- fessor's heart. On the Greek side of the subject here is just one quotation for the benefit of the curious. Blackie found that *^ Charon, or Death, is a great figure in the popular poetry of the modern Greeks, and is one of the very few, perhaps the only mythical personage which Byzantine orthodoxy and Slavonian barbarism have left to haunt the hills of Greece from the fair company that once peopled Olympus." And tbo Professor gives us this example, translated into English verse : — Why are the hiUs so dusky dark, so dark and sable shrouded P Rational Oreek, 127 Is it tlie wind that flouts the crag, or is it the rain that's beating P 'Tis not the wind that flouts the crag, 'tis not the rain that's falling ; 'Tis only Charon with his dead that o'er the hills is treading. The Professor of Greek was not afraid of that noble language falling into oblivion among scholars when sucli artificial and unjustifiable props as the laws of Oxford and Cambridge bliould be knocked away. *^ A language," he says, " which has sur- vived so many changes, and resisted such a succession of destructive forces, will maintain its vitality unimpaired so long as the moral motive-power of the world ig mainly Christian, and the science of the world is proud to root itself in Greek traditions." There is, he says in the same Hora Hellenica, no reason why Greek should not be studied much more than at any previous period '' when our classical scholars shall have become ashamed of their false methods and narrow prejudices, and when a succession of intelligent travellers shall have been practically convinced that it is as ea?^y to i! Hi i W I I; it: 128 Professor Blachie. ill learn Greek in Athens as to learn German in Berlin or French in Paris." But so long as the present farce is being played by our university authorities, "let Greek gram- mars and Greek lexicons be multiplied to infinity ; let certain plays of Euripides and certain treatises of Aristotle be com- mented on, so long as England shall be England, by all the aspirants to a master- ship, a deanery, or a bishopric in the kingdom ; let headmasters of large schools and tutors of colleges dilate in every form of mmgled reason and sophistry on the never-suflficiently-to-be-belauded advant- ages of a classical education ; with all this the inner soul of Greece will not be known by, or knowable to, the normal English- man ; and Greek scholarship in England will be liable to become a thing, as we have too frequently seen it, altogether without a soul — a thing that deals merely with the e-iternal shell of learning, and amuses a snugly-cabined leisure with all sorts of grammatical fribbles and philo- logical card-castles ; " * or, as he once very happily put it, '^ mere scraps and dry * Edinburgh Essays, 1857. Rational Greeh, 129 bones, a respectable tradition * having a name to live while it is dead,' a stunted, .irtificial growth, all thorns and no berries." To Blackie all this was revealed more than half-a-century ago. In 1860 he wrote for the "Aberdeen Universities Magazine " two articles to show that modem Greek is not more different from the Hellenic than is the English of Macaulay from the English of Chaucer or Wicklif . *' Wilt thou not," he concluded, " act on thy belief " that Greek is a living tongue, and to be pronounced accordingly, not in the false and conventional way ? ^' Pedantic or conservative scholars will certainly laugh at thy strange pronunciation, and call thee an affected fool: but truth, maintained in the love of it, cannot be affected. Laugh at the world if it laughs at thee, and thou wilt be a better, mightier, and earnester man for thy trials. Eor assuredly, as Paul and Pope Urban have said, it is only through much tribu- lation that thou (or anyone .else) canst enter into the kingdom of heaven ! " He opened his second session in Edinburgh with a lecture on ^^The Living Language 9 130 Professor Blackie, i! ii I of the Greeks, and Its Utility to the Classical Scholar," in which he proposed that living Hellenes should be imported to act as tutors for the lower Greek classes in the Universities, or, better still, that travelling bursaries should be established, enabling the best students to spend six months in Athens. And he saw to it that if no one else took his advice the proposal should still be carried out, by setting aside £2,600 of his own money for the purpose. When the Professor was too weak to write by his own hand, he dictated a request for information as to a class for teaching modern Greek by the con- versational method, which Mr. Christos Bougatsos, a graduate of the University of Athens, had opened in London. Pro- fessor Blackie took great interest in this experiment, which will be followed by others, one may hope, even in the ancient universities of *' England, that grand European stronghold of all reasonable and unreasonable conservatism.*' Of Blackie's other writings on the Greek language and literature, a complete list would include Rational Oreek, 131 his Edinburgh Essay on ^^The Philo- sophy of Plato," 1856 ; his paper on " The Character, Condition, and Prospects of the Greek People," in the " Westminster Review" for October, 1864; his article on ** Plato and Christianity," in the " North British Review " for November, 1861 ; and many other contributions to various reviews ; his book on " The Pro- nunciation of Greek," 1862 ; his preface to Clyde's Greek Syntax in 1866 ; parts of the '*Four Phases of Morals," and of " Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece," which fall more naturally into another chapter ; his " Greek and English Dia- logues for Use in Schools and Colleges," and his '* Greek Primer, Colloquial and Constructive." The dry titles are all of these books that can here be given. " The Wise Men of Greece," published in 1877, is a series of dramatic dialogues, designed ^' to give the general reading public, so far as they may care for wisdom, a living concrete notion of what the thought of Thales was in his day to the society of Miletus, what Pythagoras with his school of moral discipline was to Crotona, Xeno- i! I Professor Blachie, 132 phanes to Colophon, aM so with the rest " — the rest including Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Blackie's greatest work, so far as length of labour and resulting dimensions are concerned, was that on Homer — a subject on which he had already written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Of the four large volumes grouped under the title " Homer and the Iliad,'* the first and the last, composed of " Notes Philological and Archfieological," contain the results of a vast amount of research such as no scholar can despise, in a form which no intelligent man can describe as dull. The two middle volumes contain the Iliad itself, translated into English verse. As to this, it is enough to say that Blackie had no idea of making '' el poetical trans- lation so elegantly defaced as that of Pope"; that he succeeded to a large extent in rendering vivid to English minds the spirit, the ideas, and the action of the old Greek epic; and that ST«ch ruggedness as occurs in the translation hardly exceeds the demands of fidelity to 1 Rational Greek, 133 the original. These few lines^ picked out at random^ will give an idea of the metri- cal form : — Five times ten ships Achilles owned tbat swiftly ploughed the brine, And fifty men in each good ship obeyed the chief divine. Five captains over all he placed, who each with due control Led on their Bevei*al bandji ; himself was lord to sway the whole. # * As when a cunning builder well-hewn stones hath nicely joined. Tier above tier, in a palace wall, to bar the whistling wind, So helm to helm was closely pressed, and bossy shield to shield, And man to man was tightly packed o'er all the bristling field. # * As when the strength of fire divine hath seized a dry old wood, Deep in a heathy glen, and now the wind in lusty mood Rolls raving through the crackling trees the folds of the flaming flood ; So raged Achilles with his spear, and like a god the slain Upon the slain he heaped ; with blood swims all the reeking plain. 134 Professor Blachie, On the great Homeric question, the question " whether Homer wrote his own poems," as some one puts it, Blackie found the evidence insufficient to justify dogmatism, especially on the negative side ; but he keenly appreciated the " positive " work of the " negative " champion. Wolf, he says, " attempted to establish strange paradoxes, repugnant alike to the instincts of a sound sesthetical and of a healthy historical criticism"; but ^^the principal value of Wolf's theory in the eye of many genuine lovers of poetry is that while it robbed us of the poet Homer and his swarms of fair fancies, it restored to us the Greek people, and their rich garden of heroic tradition, watered by fountains of purely national feeling, and freshened by the breath of a healthy popular opinion." *^ Homer and the Iliad " — from which this last quotation is not made, by +^'^ bye — represented the work of t^ years. When the author con John Murray about getting it i o pri ^, the publisher warned him, "Never pub ish } r j Rational Greek, 135 Greek in Scotland/' "He was right there," said Blackie, after neglecting Murray's advice and finding himself about £250 out of pocket. XII. ■ Ij i^l PEOFESSOR AND STUDENTS. m " It is but a fallen university," mourned Eobert Louis Stevenson, in a briskly melancholy message to his successors in the Edinburgh class-rooms.''^ "To-day they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a prodigious deal of Greek ; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-offs. But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired and Professor Kelland is dead." Un- happily, this brightest of Blackie's many brilliant students, the man whose jewelled words make even Dullness sparkle, went before his old Professor to the happy here- after. It is sad for us who remain to think that both have gone ; sad even to think that the one never wrote his impressions of the other. To be sure, Stevenson was not * Book of the University Union Fancy Fair. Professor and Students, 137 in the Greek class abov^e a dozen times. ^' Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)^ while in the very act of writing my certificate of attend- ance," Stevenson says, ^'that he did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities ; acting upon an exten- sive and highly rational system of tr nantry, which cost me a great deal of trouble to put in exercise — perhaps as much as would have taught me Greek — and sent me forth into the world and the profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. None ever had more certificates for less education." £ut those dozen hours, des- cribed by the Great Imaginer, would have been a priceless contribution to Blackie's biography. Others have written, however, who have earned a right to be read since they lis- tened to the Greek Professor ; and every- one, it is safe to say, of the hundreds of his students, now scattered over the whole world, has some tale to tell of Blackie in old Edinburgh days. To begin with, as we have seen, aspirants for Grecian culture had to pass an exam- ! ! , ■i a 4 1 11 I EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. From a Photograph by Mr. A. A. Inglis, Edinbxirgh. Professor and Students, 139 ination before they could enter Elackie's class at all. Those who tried and failed were put in a preliminary class under the tutorship of the Professor's assistant. During the session the lads would have another chance, and those who scraped through this second examination would find themselves in the fold of the head shepherde Blackie had three classes. In the lowest, however diligent the tutor had been, Blackie found himself face to face with lads entirely unfit for the higher learning a professor is supposed to give. In the second class, which young fellows from the highest forms of the High School and Academy used to enter, the reading of Plutarch, Euripides, and even Homer, was possible ; while the score or so of students who filtered through into the third-year class were able to concern themselves chiefly with Plato. The class assembles. The Professor enters, nimble and erect, a whiff of East wind from the North Bridge coming in with him and playing among his long snowy locks. No matter how bad the ven- tilation, with sixty or even a hundred 140 Professor Blachie, I il i re- pairs of lungs using up the air, there is a breeze in that room as long as the Pro- fessor is there. "Blackie carries his breeze with him," says Mr. Barrie. As likely as not the Professor is greeted with a cheer, which he gracefully acknow- ledges. After repeating the Lord's Prayer in Greek, he opens the class-work with the remark, *^ As I was enjoying the sunset on Princes Street yesterday, I met a beautiful damsel in an ugly brown dress. Say that in Greek, Macnab." Which Macnab does as well as he can, and Macgregor, perhaps, a little better. The Professor makes a forcible remark on the incongruity, not to say criminality, of dressing a bonnie lass in a dowdy gown, and then asks Robbie Thomson to get up and turn a bit of the Iliad into vigorous English. Eobbie is in the middle of his eleventh line when the Professor breaks in, seizes on some little word that was in danger of slipping by unnoticed, tells how it came to mean what it does, and describes the state of Greece at & nae period of the word's development. Davie Johnstone is called on next, and gets through five lines ; but Professor and Students, 141 his accentuation outrages the sensitive ear of the Professor, who sings a Greek ballad to show how the language ought to be pronounced. The sixth line strikes the Professor as a good peg on which to hang the second paragraph of his lecture, and he proceeds to expound the ethical or political conditions revealed in the text, fearlessly applying its lessons to the most ticklish and controversial problems of present-day politics. The association of ideas will lead him on to dilate at one time on the poems of Ossian or of Browning, at another on the affinities of Gaelic and Greek, and to complain that no composer has yet arisen to utilise the magnificent capacity of the Gaelic tongue for an opera. In a poetic allusion to the domestic affairs of the gods Blackie finds an opportunity of confidentially advising his students never to keep any secret from their future wives. "You can't do it if you try," he observes. "The other day, while I was on a visit to a friend in the country, I climbed a tree," — he was a youngster of fifty at the time — " but I saw the farmer coming and slid down in ■i . H M 142 Professor BlacJcie, '\ such a hurry that I tore my good black coat. I put on a great coat, reached home unnoticed, and quietly got my sister to sew up the rent ; but when I next put the coat on to go out, my careful wife came to brush me down. ^ Why,' she said, ^ when did this happen?' and the whole stoiy was out." Another spell of Greek provokes another outburst of cosmo- politan wisdom from this modern Socrates ; and so the time passes until there is only a quarter of an hour left, when one of the seniors is asked to take the poem in band, and translates a page or two at full speed. The students are then instructed to produce a Greek version of *'Jack the Giant-Killer," or translate a dialogue on the respective merits and demerits of the Free and Established Kirks — composed for the occasion by the Professor — or to undertake some equally unconventional exercise, and the class is dismissed. According to Mr. Barrie, '' there was a notebook which appeared year after year " in the class. "It contained the Pro- fessor's jokes of a former session, care- fully classified by an admiring student. Professor and Students, 143 It was handed down from one year's men to the next ; and thus, if Blackie began to make a joke about haggis, the possessor of the book had only swiftly to turn to the H's, find out what the joke was, and send it along the class quicker than the Professor could speak it." Occasionally the proceedings, never humdrum but generally in good enough order, became uproarious to the point of rank rebellion. " Those who do not know their grammar sufficiently," says one of the old students from whose chronicles, verbal or published, it is safe to quote,* *' are exasperated at not having an oppor- tunity of learning more ; while those whom superior advantages have long ago • enabled to master the beggarly elements arfc delighted at not being obliged to retraverse the weary waste of verbs and particles." When, therefore, the Pro- fessor embarks on a course of things-in- general, the former faction protests by * The verbal need not be specified : the published accounts are — Mr. Charles Lowe's, in the World; Mr. J. M. Barrie's, in uhe British Weekly ; and " Fergus Mackenzie's " in Alma Mater. 144 Professor Blackie, ti %i 1 " O-O-ing and shuffling with their feet, whereupon the progressists feel bound- in honour to raise a counter-demonstra- tion, and the Professor's voice is finally- drowned in a Babel uproar of hissing, whistling, cock-crowing, and cat-calls." But it was often partisan or sectarian zeal rather than academic ambition that raised the storm. Blackie's modern heroes, worthy to be held up along with the heroes of Homer for the admiration of his class, included Dr. Guthrie and Norman Macleod; but one day he expressed a preference for Macleod. Some one hissed. '^ In a moment the Professor was as furious as a Highland tarn in a tempest, and shouted at the top of his voice, ^ Put out that Free Kirk deevil ! ' Fortunately, the imp could not be dis- covered." Blackie used to say, *^ There are three animals that hiss : a serpent, a goose, and a creature that should be a man." Once in Mr. Barrie's experience — he does not tell us what part he took in it — the class had to be broken up. "In Blackie's class-room there used to be a demonstration every time he mentioned Professor and Students. 145 )> tlie name of a distinguislied politician. On this occasion the Professor looked^ at least, as if he were angry. " I will say Beaconsfield," he exclaimed. (Cheers and hisses.) " Beaconsfield." (Uproar.) Then he would stride forward, and, seizing the railing, announce his intention of saying Beaconsfield until every goose in the room was tired of cackling. (" Question ! ") " Beaconsfield." (** No, no ! ") " Beacons- field." ('' Hear, hear," shouts of " Glad- stone," and " Three cheers for Dizzy ! ") Eventually the class was dismissed as " a bear-garden," or worse ; and five minutes afterwards the Professor would be " playing himself down the North Bridge on imaginary bagpipes." Such episodes, however, did not prevent Blackie's students — those, at any rate, who had been fairly ready for University life when they entered his class — did not prevent them from becoming good Greek scholars before Blackie had done with them. And the lad must have been dull as oblivion who failed to receive or retain the essence of the best Greek philosophy, ennobled by a Christian spirit 10 140 Professor Blachie, S i and given off with the penetrating force of genius. The function of a professor is, in Blackie's words, "to stimulate philo- sophic thought and open up the paths of scholarly research " ; and one who may be taken as the spokesman of hundreds of grateful men the world over declares that Blackie fulfilled his mission by " opening the eyes of blind youth, flashing wisdom before it, and persuading it to think." Blackie could teach Greek from the rudiments upwards, if that had been his business; and he could show others the way, which was bet^^r still. The Northern minister who as " Feigus Mackenzie " has chronicled " The Humours of Glenbruar " was present one Saturday at a gathering of Edinburgh teachers when a Normal School Principal gave a lecture. Professor Blackie attended as critic, and, having fulfilled this disagreeable duty in his own agreeable way, he gave the young men an object-lesson in the teaching of Greek by the natural method — the only effectual way of teaching Greek or any other spoken language. Stepping to the front of the rostrum, the Professor commanded a youth Professor and Students, 147 1 on the front seat to " say ijXiov" No answer. " Say ^\to7^'* he repeated. Still no reply. '^ Say ijXtov, you — " the Pro- fessor shouted, with a threatening whirl of his staff. '^"UXlov," the youth <;ried out in terror. *^Very good; now say, TOP tjXlo:'" He did, with alacrity. *' Now say opca tov t'jXlov.** ^' 'O/jw rov ^Xlov,** came the answer. " Do you know what you are saying? *' asked the Professor. *' No," said the youth : he was a reporter. The reporters insinuated themselves occasionally into the Greek class-room itself, along with truants from less attrac- tive quarters of the University. On the last day of the session, indeed, the pro- ceedings were regarded by the Press, if not by the Professor, as a fair source of ^^copy.'* The programme — apart from such interpolations by student lungs as any student memory can imagine — con- sisted of three parts. First, the distribution of prizes — generally books, but sometimes pictures on which the students had been set to write Greek meditations. Second, the speech — considerately delivered in Eng- lish for benefit of the weaker Grecians 148 Professor Blackie, —brimful of afFectionate and practical advice to those about to become citizens. Third, and last, the Greek poem, declaimed by the Professor as he alone could declaim it, chanting, in mock heroics but with many a beautiful phrase, the renown of the prize-winners, " than whom more brilliant victors were never bred on English soil, nor in this Celtic land so famed for learned men. Some envious power," the poet continues, with merry eye but only half in jest, "assigned to Scotsmen a rugged plot of earth on the chilly edge of the world. A backbone of barren rock extends from sea to sea, and the land bears everywhere a crop of stones. To the English the soil yields roses unasked ; to us, thistles, and that with labour. But strong hearts, subtlety of thought, un- bending wills, untiring hands, and a spark of the fire divine which Prometheus brought from heaven to kindle wise invention — these are the glorious gifts that the blessed ones, the givers of all good things, have bestowed on Caledonia ; our roses these ! " And then he celebrates in turn the classical conquests of " Mac- 'l! w Professor and Students. 1-19 r Master, who lays hold of knowledge like a crab clawing his prey " ; " Kennedy, gentle, mild of speech, pure in spirit, like a violet on the bank of a sacred river " — some exceptionally angelic member of the clan ; " McClymont, in whose kindly face shines the kindliness of his heart " : and so forth.^ Blackie's love for his students was not a thing of words. He visited them when they were ill, he helped them when they were poor. In the Senatus Aca- demicus he was the champion of the whole body of undergraduates. He never grew old in heart, so he could look at all thing?, as few but young men can, from a young man's standpoint. They loved him in return. They loved him as one of them- selves ; as a buoyant, hopeful idealist. Tiiey admired him for his genius, but they loved him for his candour, his courage, his open-mindedness, his transparent and unconventional sincerity. Many men out of Edinburgh still re- member the famous snow riots between town " and " gown " some thirty years * 1863. 4( 150 Professor Blackie, \? ago ; in fact, I cannot say how recent tho last of the riots may have been. Early one morning the Town Council, with com~ mendable but insufficient foresight, sent up a fire-engine to the college quadrangle to melt the snow that had fallen in the night. The medical students, being earlier still, captured the engine and played the hose up and down the street till nightfall, snow and water being more than a match for policemen's batons. Diiring one of these riots, an old student says, a score >f undergraduates were made prisoners, but (perhaps for that reason) the shops- had to keep their shutters up for a week. "I remember Blackie marching^ into the quadrangle one day. Mounting the steps to the right that led to his classroom, with the springing step of a boy, he was suddenly arrested by a snowball. Swinging round and facing the silent students, throwing aside his plaid and lifting his hat from his silvery locks, he cried out, with a dramatic gesture, * Throw away, my brave fellows ! ' '* The snowballs were instantly dropped. " I nevei*,'* says the narrator, *^ remember Professor and Students, 151 Blackie looking more picturesque than lie did on that day." There is one student story about the Professor that has appeared, at one time or another, in almost every newspaper printed in English, and still insists on a place in Blackie literature. Blackie him- self totally forgot this^ as he did many other unimportant incidents ; but it is true enough. Mr. George M. Lawson, of Newtyle, was p.n eye-witness. He says : "One morning in the spring of 1879, as the students attending the Greek class, then held in the north-east corner of the old University, were hurrying up at nine o'clock, they were confronted by a notice, posted on one of the pillars outside, some- what to this effect : — ' Owing to the out- break of fire this morning. Professor Blackie regrets that he will not be able to meet his classes to-day.' One of us — I do not claim the distinction — stroked out the * c ' of *^ classes,' whereat the laughter of the undergraduates became extreme. In the course of the morning, as I was lounging about the quadrangle awaiting the next ^lass hour, I saw Professor 152 Professor Blackie, it ■ Blackie emerge from what I think was the Senate Hall^ at the south-east corner of the buildings. A small crowd still sur- rounded the notice, and at sight of the Professor the laughter and the shouting were renewed. He walked across to see what the excitement was about, and the students readily gave way to let him see the joke at his expense. Without saying a word the Professor took out a pencil, stroked out the * 1/ and walked off. He seemed to think little about the incident, and evidently before he next heard of the joke he had forgotten all about it, as it has frequently been reported that he doubted its authenticity." Every Saturday the Professor used to have a batch of his students to breakfast. Mr. Barrie inferred, from observation, that the guests were chosen on account of their physical peculiarities, '' such as a lisp, or a glass eye, or one leg longer than the other, or a broken nose." The supply of defective students would soon have run short, even with two or three hundred men on the rolls ; but there is no doubfc that Blackie was full of tenderness for the t| ! ! Professor and Students, 153 maimed and the halt. Once, in class, he noticed that the young man whose turn it was to translate was holding the book in his left hand. " Hold the book in your right hand/' he commanded. The lad paused for a moment, but only went on with his reading. '^ Hold it in your right HAND," called out the ProfeL ^r, angered by disobedience. Some of the students hissed, and the young man with downcast eyes stretched forth a right arm without a hand. ^'My dear boy," said the Pro- fessor, coming down from his desk and embracing the youth in fatherly pity and shame, '' can you forgive me ? " Then, as the room rang with applause, ^^ I am glad that I teach a class of g€;ntlemen " — ^not serpents, this time ! Let us get back to our breakfast, with Mr. Lowe for chronicler. ^' Eight is generally the breakfast hour, and the hungry company arrive with exemplary punctuality." Whatever of .er system of selection he had, Blackie naturally gave the poor Highland students the preference over Edinburgh lads, some of whom were never '""^'''■'"^- 154 Professor Blackie, invited at all. '' It was a bit of an ordeal,'* says one of the guests, " to have to trans- late the Greek mottoes on the Professor's library walls before going down to the coffee and Findon haddocks " and a soup- tureen full of eggs, ^^ but Blackie always responded to the appeal of shyness, and seldom oppressed a young student who looked uncomfortable by professorial attentions of this nature." Mr. Lowe again speaks : — '^ The Pro- fessor welcomes all with a few kind words, and, after grace in Greek, recommends his guests, as a rule of their lives, to read, as he does, a chapter of the Septuagint every morning on rising. At these repasts the rule is that every one shall express his ideas and wants, as far as possible, in the speech of Xerophon. All the guests are somewhat sheepish and shy ; but the Professor, aided by the tact of Mrs. Blackie, will occasionally elicit a shrewd remark. Raw, red-haired Donald Macleod, from the Isle of Skye, who lives all the week on herring, oatmeal, and potatoes, being importuned, will treat the company to a Gaelic song ; and then the Professor \W Professor and Students. 155 will launch out on the importance of this tongue for philological and other purposes. Then some remark will make him revert to his past career^ and he will inflame the peripatetic ambition of his audience by referring to his wanderings all over Europe in search of truth and beauty ; or he will recount how he met that doughty champion of Chartism, Ernest Jones, on the platform of the Music Hall to hold public appeal to reason on the merits of Democracy. Then, to vary the enter- tainment, the Professor will sing one of his own songs. Then all rising will join in pealing forth ^Gaudeamus Igitur,"*^ and file out, filled in body and i]i mind, to- woo digestion on the shores of the Forth or the slopes of Arthur's Seat. ' ' \\ • ^ XIII. NOCTES HELLENICS. There were suppers as well as breakfasts at Blackie's : the legitimate successors to Noctes Ambrosianee, more sober, but just as gay. The Hellenic Society which he had planted in Aberdeen took root and flourished mightily in Edinburgh as the Hellenic Club. The club met once a fort- night, and the married members enter- tained it in turn. Whoever the host might be, Blackie was the leading spirit of the company, and if we are to attend a meeting of the club let it be at his own house in Hill Street, a thoroughfa,re already hallowed by the residence of Sir "Walter Scott. Arriving a little early, as soon as the door is opened you hear some one striding about and dropping masculine scraps of song as he goes. The owner of the voice immediately dashes out upon you and hales you through a doorway Nodes Hellenicce, 157 over whicli p^aXcTra r^ KoXd is printed in letters of gold. You find yourself at once in the master's workshop. The walls, and not the walls only, are covered with books, arranged — well, at first you think they are not arranged at all. You never saw a library like this. Books of every age and condition and of every size are packed on the same shelf. What you imagine to be disorder is really order of a rational kind. Blackie's books are not for show but for use, and they are classified not by size or binding but according to their subjects. One large section is devoted to the literature of modern Greece — the finest collection of its kind in the country, since transferred to Edinburgh University — and some of these books are pro- bably lying out on the Professor's desk or on the great working table that occupies so much of the room. The Professor keeps up a rattling monologue as he moves about the room. If you really prefer a dialogue he will listen attentively and answer relevantly, no matter how young or insignificant you are 5 not all great men are so considerate ! If, as is 1 mm MMBi 158 Professor Blackie, u« likely, you have come to listen and to look, you have time enough to do so. You see before you, if you keep your eyes moving, a lithe and erect though only middle-sized man ; with hair of the whitest and silkiest, and plenty of it; with a splendid brow, grey eyes twinkling with merriment or flashing with scorn, a perfect Grecia,n nose, firm lips and chin ; altogether a face ex- pressing immense power, — clean-shaven, and undoubtedly handsome. He wears a long blue dressing-gown, or perhaps a brown velvet jacket, and in any case a long red sash round his waist ; with a large turned-down collar, described, I believe, as Shakespearean. In a corner you may discover the big-brimmed soft straw hat that he always wears when at work, to shade his eyes — which repaid his care by never needing glasses as long as he lived. By this time, let us hope, the other Hellenists have assembled. Lord Neaves is sure to be there : the *^ Beta" of '^Black- wood's Magazine," a writer oivers de societe and Latin songs, a man of widely-varied culture. Dr. Donaldson, too, is a most Nodes Hellenicce, 169 regular attendant. He has been at the High School since 1856, and its rector since 1866; author of "The Critical History of Christian Literature and Doc- trine " ; one of the first scholars in the country; *^a granite-headed Scot," as Blackie calls him — Hard and keen, A granite block from granite Aberdeen. Then there are Sir Noel Paton, though not a Hellenist ; Erskine of Linlathen ; Professor Sellar, author of the '' Augustan Poets " ; Dr. John Muir — " Sanscrit Muir " ; David Masson, Professor of English Literature; Dr. Clyde, of the Academy; Dr. Andrew Wood, the trans- lator of Horace ; Dr. Lindsay Alexander, the Congregational minister, strong in theology and moral philosophy ; Dr. Walter C. Smith, the Free Church poet — always some of these, and four or five of Blacklegs best Greek students. Jj^or two hours some old Greek author has the honour of being read and trans- lated and discussed by such men as these. The seniors do the talking, the juniors 160 Professor Blachie, r content to read their allotted page and catch the sparks of inspiration that fly to and fro : for great is the whetting of the wits. Blackie, of course, is chief speaker. He has affinities with every one in the room — with the poet, the philologist, the divine, the philosopher, the teacher, the artist. There is scarcely a subject on which he can throw no light ; but he is far, indeed, from thinking himself infalli- ble, speaks with notable modesty of his own researches, and turns up a word in the dictionary rather than press his inter- pretation on a doubter. And how he reads ! ^* It was wonderful," says a learned friend, after thirty years in which to forget if he could ; " I never heard any one read like him. It was a chorus of Aristophanes, and the way in which he united accent and * quantity ' was marvellous. It was all so musical." The two hours fly, Aristophanes retires to his shelf, and " the Professor leads the way upstairs to where a sumptuous supper has been spread under the eye of Mrs. Blackie, who places herself, like a speaker of the House of Commons^ at the head Nodes Hellenicce, 161 of the table, a silent, much-respected — perhaps much- needed — restraining influ- ence. Song alternates with debate ; and the Professor, goaded by a remark from an ex-Professor of Divinity as to the pre- eminence of Mill as a moralist, will strike out ferociously against the Utilitar- ians, and wither up their principle by sarcastically ^'eferring to it as the greatest happiness of 'the greatest number: greatest number — Number One ! ' Or, again, he will be lashed into fury by the suggestion of some one that the person- ality of Homer is a myth, and inveigh savagely against Wolf and the whole tribe of Separatists ; which, in turn, will lead him to expatiate on the higher sys- tematising proclivities of the Germans. Or he will troll forth in lusty tones * The Quaker's Wife,' " — his father's favourite, with the son's additions — " ' The Maid of Dalnacorra,' ' A Song of Good Conserva- tives,' or the ' Herr Philister.' " Once, when roused to an extra pitch of eloquence on some burning question, the Professor wound up his speech by falling on his knees beside the wife of a reverend 11 .T^ A# VQ ^^ ^^ /, % > ^>' V ^ o 7 /a w IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I S 1^ llllll^ no mil 2.0 118 Ui u 1.25 1.8 U 1 1.6 HiotDgr^hic Sciences Corporation // ,.<;• % /. ^0 f/. ,,^ .6> \ ^^ :\ \ 6^ o ^ 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 iMii i 162 Professor Blackie, Hellenist and kissing her hand, while her daughter's cheek received a similar salute. This was the unique prerogative of a unique man, and none of his friends grudged it. What would have been in- dignantly resented from anyone else was felt to be perfectly natural and delightful from the chivalrous, pure-hearted, and loving Professor. At another of these festivals a young politician was present who had just re- canted his Conservatism and formally joined the Liberal party. Blackie sur- prised the company by making a speech in praise of the young " 'vert " (the reader can supply the prefix). The Professor even declared that he himself, though flourishing his stick in Mr. Gladstone's face on election cartoons, had found it time to turn Liberal ! And this brings us to another chapter. XIV. HIS POLITIC^. Forty years^ ago, " when the nation had entered on the Crimean war, and all Europe was excited and expectant, Blackie got up and said something which seemed a little unacademic at a large TTniversitj function. When a few voices were heard in discord with what he had said, he replied, swinging his arms about, * What ? do you think I am one of those gerund- grinders who can keep his academic soul unruffled by the war breeze which is sweeping over Europe P' This was like Blackie," adds Professor Laurie, who tells the story. It was like Blackie to take a citizen^s interest in the affairs of the State; yet he had the impartiality of a mere spectator- -impartiality, not neu- trality. He could throw himself into a political fight, but never iuto a political party. At one time he was to be seen ■■M 164 Professor Blachie, battling shoulder to shoulder with the Tories, and at another with the Liberals — it all depended on what they were fighting for at the moment. His liiost famous appearances in the political arena were as cha; pion of the constitution against de- mocracy, and as champion of Scottish Home Eule and the Scottish peasantry against landlordism and centralisation. These appearances did not represent difBerent stages of Blackie's political development. The two positions were held at the same time. The famous debate to which the Pro- fessor alluded at his breakfast-table was held on two successive nights in January, 1867, at the Edinburgh Masic Hall. In a lecture to working-men a few weeks before he had challenged any democratic champion to meet him in single combat, and Ernest Jones picked up the glove. In the discussion that followed, as on all other occasions, Blackie was perfectly frank. He did not, like some Tory politicians, attempt to clothe the naked Toryism of his doctrine with professions of re- spect for the democratic principle. It I m FROM A POLITICAL CARTOON, 1880. 166 Professor Blachie, was the democratic principle h^ explicitly denounced^ and especially its embodiment in the Eeform Bill of that period. He had no objection to give a large increase of voting power to the working men> many of whom he described as more intelligent and trustworthy in a political capacity than some classes of those im- mediately above them in the social scale. But to determine all public questions by the votes of the majority was to him ^^the rule of unreason." He would balance the democratic force by giving special repre- sentation to " the natural, moral, and in- tellectual aristocracy of the commu\uty." About seventeen years ago *a pre- sumptuous young man wrote to Professor Blackie expostulating with him for publicly supporting the Tory candidate at a bye- elecfcion in the West of Scotland. The Professor did not throw the letter into the fire. He sat down and covered eight pages of letter paper with "political maxims " for his young friend's benefit. Here are a few of them : — "A horse requires a rein as well as a spur; and a coachman is not wise who wK^n^K^tm^'^m His Politics, 167 flings aTvUy the drag because he is not now going down hill. " If the Tories are the stupid party in the State, the Liberals are the feverish party. To over-stimulated brains a little stupidity may sometimes be conducive to health. "If in domestic progress the chief honours belong to the Liberals, the Tories show their talent in the greater force and vigour of their foreign policy. " The Liberals and the Tories are equally factious, struggling for power. Those who are stirred by the passions which inspire these parties vote systematically with their party ; those who are free from those passions — ^that is, true patriots — vote /or their country. ^^ Liberty is a snare ; Equality a lie, and Fraternity a dream. '* Liberty is like wine : a little is good ; much of it is dangerous." To these let us add a motto which he never left long unspoken — "All extremes are bad " ; and this sentence from his " Self -Culture " : "A good man will as much as possible strive to be 168 Professor Blachie, shaken out of himself, and learn to study the excellences of persons and parties to whom he is naturally opposed." He believed in Liberty as necessary to free men ^^from those artificial bonds and hindrances to normal development, with which insolent power, official formalism, or ossified institutions may have enthralled them." Moreover, as he said in the last article he wrote, " in all forms of govern- ment, whether political or ecclesiastical, absolute power is a weapon too strong to be used wisely by a feeble human arm." But " it is not freedom but the use of freedom that ennobles man. Savages and nomads have always more freedom than civilised societies."^ As for Equality, here is an illustration o.^' its non-existence : " Take a class, we shall say, of one hundred young men learning Greek in the Unirersity of Edin- burgh : my experience is that out of these one hundred there will be only one man of decided eminence, and not more than half-a-dozen of superior talent ; and that the difference between those who have * Essays on Social Subjects. His Politics, 169 least and those who have most will be much greater at the end of six months' teaching than it was at the beginning.'* * You see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, Wha struts, and stai-es, and a* that ; Tho' hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that. For a' that, and a* that, •Their dignities and a' that, The rank is but the guinea stamp. The man's the gowd for a' that ! '' The man who wrote this," said Blackie, ^^was the prophet of democratic equality in the only true sense. So, also, was the Apostle Peter. * Honour all men' in their several places, and in the perform- ance of their several functions ; but in no wise worship rank. Specially, as St. Paul has it, ' Mind not high things, bat conde- scend to men of low estate.'" f "Fix this in your minds, before all things, that there are few things in social life more contemptible than a rich man who stands upon his riches. He acquires a certain social position, and iro^. i this perhaps gets M.P. tagged to his name ; but take the * Political Tracts, 1868 : "On Government." t Essays on Social Subjects. 4 FCS-t 170 Professor Blachie, creature down from his artificial elevation and look him fairly in the face, and you will find that he is a figure too insignificant to measure swords with.*' * The House of Lords, with its existing constitution ^^ repugnant alike to the plainest dictates of common-sense and the spirit of the age," Blackie declared to be an anomaly which, "even in this land of multifarious anomalies, will not bear a moment's consideration." And yet, he continued, "I believe that an Upper* House founded on common-sense principles, such as the Eoman Senate and the Spartan yepovaia, is absolutely necessary for the safety and the sound- ness of legislation ; and I am convinced, with Aristotle, that all extremes are wrong, and that for this reason any democratic body is then best when it acts under the cheek of an aristocratic body, while in the same way every aristocratic body then commands the greatest amount of influence when it is wisely seasoned by an infusion of the democratic element. Let, then, the House of Lords have the *^eK-Culture. His Politics, 171 sense and the courage to reform them- selves on the principles of Aristotle and common sense, and all the Radicals in Oldham and Birmingham will not be able to prevail against them." *' I am not a Radical/* he once said, "but I see that some things are radically wrong." Fraternity might be a dream, an ideal, but it was one which his religion held up for realisation. In "Four Phases of Morals " the author says : — " If there is only one God, the Father of the whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren; nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense of the word, becomes natural ; mere patriotism has now only a relative value." Blackie had no more admiration for the doctrines of modern socialism than for the shibboleth of the French Revolution. But he had much sympathy for those who are trying to bring fraternity out of dream- land. Writing to an ardent if not very theoretical socialist a couple of years ago he said, "I have read your article with full assent. The great diflaculty in i 1 1 172 Professor Blachie, ■j._ organising society is to reconcile a certain systematic enforced order with that greatest possible number of the greatest variety of free individuals which, so far as one can see, is the principle on which the creative Force in this wonderful world proceeds. Christianity has now been on the field as the prime mover in all social matters for nearly 2,000 years; and yet how little of that dydvrj asserts itself in our social surroundings, which, as St. Paul says, is the irXijpcofia vofiov" " You cannot honour all men," he said, many years ago, " unless you try to know all men ; and you know no man till you have looked with the eye of a brother into the best that is in him."* The extreme individualist was as far as the extreme socialist from Blackie's stand- point. "With your proudest pretensions and highest accomplishments you remain a very small creature in a very big world, and no more capable of standing alone or acting merely for yourself than a single note is in a harmony over which the constructive genius of a Beethoven or a • Self-Culture. His Politics, 173 Wagner presides." He was delighted to see the property of the individual drawn upon for the benefit of the community, and especially for large and imperial purposes. " Taxes," he declared, in one of his twenty-four maxims, " are one of the grand distinctions between civilised men and savages." ^^The progress of civilisation in its natural and healthy career is the progress of limitation and the curtailment in various ways of that freedom which originally belonged to every member of the community." * Freedom to get as much out of another man, in the form of labour or rent, as he can be driven to yield, is no man's right. *^Pay a man fairly, according to the quantity and quality of the work done — this is simply justice ; pay him a little more, and justice rises into the region of Christian love ; while anything like squeezing out of the labourer the greatest possible amount of labour for the lowest possible wage is in the highest degree both inhuman and un-Christian." f * What does History Teach ? t Essays on Social Subjects. f " } 1 I I Professor Blachie, With this notable declaration we may end the chapter. : " In all cases of general discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, the parties who are accused of stirring class against class are not the agitators who appear on the scene, but the malad- ministrators who made their appearance necessary. . . . There is no truth m the philosophy of history more certain than that whenever the multitude of the ruled rebel against their rulers, the original fault — I do not say the whole blame — bu+. the original fault and germinative cause of discontent and revolt unquestionably lies with the rulers." I XV. THE HIGHLANDEES' CHAMPION. Of all the chapters of an always honour- able career, this one deserves to be printed in letters of gold : the story of his fight for the Highland peasantry. He carried on the struggle with none but the highest motives— brotherly love for the weak and oppressed, combined withpatriotic jealousy for the honour and interests of his country and the empire at large. He was content to forfeit the friendship of some whom he honoured, rather than slacken his zeal in a cause which demanded the fervour of a prophet. Kevertheless, his words were not more vigorous than the cause was urgent. His denunciations were not in- discriminate, and his judgments were tempered by charity. It is nearly half-a-century since Blackie stepped into the vacant position of the Cofters' Champion. His early explora- 176 Professor Blachie, u i' tions of the Highlands brought him face to face with evils which no appeal to conventional phrases or unjust laws could excuse. On one of his expeditions from Aberdeen, for instance, he came to " Aultnaharra, almost the very central point of Sutherlandshire, and, resting there for a night, next day walked down the whole length of bonnie Strathnaver to the sea. During this walk," he tells us, ^' I came upon vast heaps of the ruined clachans, whence the people had been driven to make way for the economical reform commonly called the big farm system ; and, when arrived at the bottom of the strath on the seacoast, I found my- self in the midst of one of those marine cities of refuge into which the ousted crofters had been huddled ; those of them at least who had not found their way to America, " Bonnie Strathnaver ! Sutherland's pride, Swget is the breath of the birks on thy side ; But where ie the blue smoke that curled from the glen When thy lone hiUe were dappled with dwellings of menP"* * Lays of the Highlands and Islands. • The Highlanders* Champion. 177 He found, as he says, a certain relief to his sorrow in lyrical utterance ; but a friend suggested that he should send a plain prose statement of the case to ^^The Times." This he did, and a leading article was published in consequence. Con- siderable search has failed to identify this article ; but a stining " leader " appeared on June 4th, 1846, after a Special Commissioner of the paper had investigated the clearance of Glen Calvie. This event *^The Times " denounced as an *^ inhuman process," a case of " heartless oppression," and not distinguishable from hundreds of others. As soon as it became known that Professor Blackie had taken up the question, he found his breakfast- table loaded day after day with accounts from all parts of the world describing '' the process by which the very pith and marrow of rural life in the Highlands had been sacrificed to economic theories alike inhuman and impolitic." The more he saw and inquired, the more keenly he felt the bitter injustice and the folly of de- stroying our reserves of manhood. Here are two scraps of letters, the first from 12 MM 178 Frofesscr Blackie. Braemar in the forties, and the second from Oban in 1869: — "The only draw- back to the beauty of the Highlands with me — and it is a great one — is the diminu- tion of the population, and the dominance of an overgrown landed aristocracy, which cares more for deer than for men, and has, in the space of a sin^ 'e generation, been willing to forget the splendid services which these poor despised cotters did to our country in Spain and a,o Waterloo." '^ The one-sided, loveless policy of a certain school of economists, acting along with the stupidity and greed of landlords, has * improved ' this country into a solitude that pays the rent; without life or love, or memory or hope. We have lost our people : and Bens and glens, which satisfy the painter's eye, cannot feed the human heart. However, I make the best of it, being convinced thbt all grumbling IS sin." His way of making the best of it was to make it better. His tongue and pen, busy as they were with other affairs, were placed freely at the service of the Highlanders. No small share of the I I J- The Highlanders* Champion, 179 credit for the Crofters' Commission and the resulting legislation — imperfect as that legislation still is — ^belonged to the Pro- fessor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh. He was not carried ofE his feet by sentiment. He recognised that '* there were, and there still may be, cases where a certain amount of emi- gration is as beneficial to those who leave the country as to those who remain in it. But weeding is one thing, and extirpation is another."* " The sacrifice of the Highlanders to the selfishness or carelessness or ignorance of landlords armed with partial and one-sided land laws, and to a political economy, falsely so called, which mis- takes the wealth of the few for the well-being of the many, is one of the greatest blots on the face of our modem civilisation. That is the decided sentence of Sismondi, Boscher, and other Conti- nental economists who have preserved their minds Untainted by that commercial spirit which in this country has turned political economy into a pretentious * Lays of the Highlands and Islands. 180 Professor Blackie. sophistry for the purpose of giving scien- tific names to the most heartless forms of social selfishness.*' '^It is a very sad business, and not calculated to excite in the beholder a very high idea of the capability of the British Government to perform the highest function of all govern- ment — the protection of the weak against the strong." E!e refused to tar all landlords with the same brush, and one of his books dealing largely with this subject — ^^Altavona," published by Mr. Douglas in 1882 — was written in dialogue to ensure the pre- sentation of both sides. Throughout he acted on the principle that '^ offence, though it must sometimes be given, ought never to be courted. Nevertheless," as he well said, " there are occasions when a man must speak boldly out, even at the risk of plucking the beard of fair authority somewhat rudely. If he does not do so he is a coward and a poltroon, and not the less so because he has nine hundred and ninety-nine lily- livered followers at his back." ^ In this * Self-Culture. mn The Highlanders* Champion, 181 spirit lie wrote the famous sonnet on' *^ Absentee Proprietors " : — Who owns these ample hills P A lord who lives Ten months in London, and in Scotland two ; O'er the wide moors with gun in hand he drives : And, Scotland, this is all he knows of you ! Your tongue, your thoughts, your soul, are stmnge to him ; Tour faith, your courage and your patience true Touch him as near as when with hasty limb He brushes from his boot the mountain dew. Your sober church, your priestless sacraments He loveth not who loveth these— to kill The guarded game and swell the squandered rents. These be thy masters, Scotland ! These the men Who make thy people vanish from the glen ! * Blackie's most important work on this subject is one which students of the land question cannot afford to leave unread. It was published in 1886 under the title ^* The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws ; an Historico-Economical Inquiry," and was dedicated " To John Bright, the eloquent denouncer of Irish wrongs." Some idea of the severe and thorough research that went to the making of this valuable book may be got from the fact * Lays and Legends ; and in Messis Yites. 182 Frofessor Blaclcie, that the author read all the books and pamphlets he could get on rural economy and the land laws, inquired systematically into the rural economics and agrarian legislation of various countries of Europe, and made journeys of investigatioix to the Channel Islands, to Ireland, and to Italy : *'the analogy of the usurpation of the lands of the Italian yeomanry by the aristocracy in the latter days of the Boman Republic, with the consequent patriotic struggle of the Gracchi to restore the land to the people," having flashed with a painful vividness on his mind. Blackie was not very hopeful of success in this crusade, and even the report of the Crofters' Commission was an agree- able surprise to him. " The report," he wrote to a correspondent in Canada, " is much more kindly than I expected, thanks to Lord Napier, who has lived too long in India to have his type of social philosophy made after the image of John Bull's insular tradition. Whether anything will be done is a different question. Our Government never does a thing because it ! The Highlanders' Champion, 183 ought to be done, but because they are forced to do it. In Ireland the force was strong enough to wrench justice from them; in the Highlands, I fear, it will prove too weak. They will likely let the report lie on the table and do nothing, as they did many years with the Irish reports before Gladstone forced justice down their throats." Legislation came, as we know. It did not meet all the country's requirements, or rise to Professor Blackie*s standard. " If we had a Moses or Lycurgus amongst us he would undoubtedly enact — (1) That all deer forests, as luxuries of the richest class of society, should be severely taxed;" (2) that the animals should all be well fenced in from the crops of their human neighbours ; and (3) that a Govern- ment Board should keep such forests within their natural bounds, and prevent them encroaching on land " that could be profit- ably occupied by a rural population.'* "Property in land is in an altogether different position from property in movables ; " it " exists," as he had said elsewhere, " for the sake of the people." 184 Professor Blackie* <( It is not the primary business of a landholder to make money," but to ''support upon his property as large an amount of a rural population as it can conveniently maintain." The land laws of Scotland, being "made by the land- lords, in the interest of their own class mainly," had fostered a mercantile notion that a landlord " could do what he liked with his own " ;* an entirely damnable doctrine, but one that the people might now demolish without further help from a Greek professor. In a letter written early in 1886 he says: *'The Highlanders may now be left to speak for themselves, having half a dozen of M.P.'s of their own choice ; and I hope they will have sense to desire only what is reason- able and practicable, and not follow their Irish cousins in demanding that the existing world shall be turned upside down and inside out for their convenience. I mean now to let them look for help to their own kin and clan.** * Appendix to his inaugural address as Chief of the Gaelic Society at Perth, October 7th, 1880. (Douglas.) XVI. THE CELTIC CHAIR. Blackie's sayings and doings for the High- landers cannot aptly be told in a single chapter. His indignat-on at their material woes was not more fruitful than his sorrow for their disappearing language and neglected literature. "There are very few districts of my native land/* the Professor was able to say at the age of sixty-three, "from the green graves of the two drowned Margarets in Wigtown to the bleak and black savageness of Cape Wrath, and the Fuggla Rock in Shetland, which I have not visited." But the Lowlander by birth was a Celt by temperament, a Highlander at heart, and he found his divinest inspirations in the mountain air. " The features of many of our most beautiful Highland districts, under their most beau- tiful aspects, with all the best emotions I 186 Professor BlacMe, li i \ I wMch a familiarity with them can create, and all the patriotic associations with which they are intertwined, have become part of my life and of the atmosphere which I breathe." * For many years the Professor and Mrs. Blackie spent their summers on the west coast, at Oban. There they built a house in 1865, with the sea and the isles in front, the moors and the mountains in rear. Indeed, he once responded at a Highland gathering to the toast of the Highland landlords — ^his qualification being the ownership of the acre bearing his Highland home. He called it Altna- craig, " the stream by the rock." Beside the splendour of shore and ocean, inland beauties paled. " I am delighted to hear you are so satisfied with the beauty of Aberfeldy," he wrote from Oban to a friend deep in the heart of Perthshire; '* but if you come here you will see the BEAUTIFUL + THE SUBLIME = PERFEC- TION ! " The village of Aberfeldy itself annoyed him, as a blot on the face of fair Strath-Tay ; for twenty years ago there was * Lays of the Highlands and Tslands. The Celtic Chair* 187 " only one handsome building in it," lie declared, "the new Independent Church, with which, thank God, I had something to do that will mingle with a sweet echo in my deathbed hymn." But Aberfeldy became pretty familiar with the Professor's "Ciamar tha sibh 'n diugh?" and the village streets were picturesque at any rate when he marched through them. The "breastful of good-natured scolding" that he gave them as a lecture, while on a visit to " that dashing Amazon, the Countess of Breadalbane," and the little skirmish with his Highland brother-in-law o^er the Celtic superstitions which the minister's minister-father had done much to dispel, are shining items in the annals of the place. He was very happy at Oban. He rejoiced in forest and flower, sea and rock, storm- wrack and sunshine. " The sea is roaring like a cauldron," he writes with gusto, '' the white crests chasing one another like snowdrifts ; the trees tossing their arms like frantic women in a shipwreck, and .the windows of Heaven are opened in- deed." " After a few days' cessation the « j #^ 188 Professor Blackie^ Prince of the Power of the Air is again exercising his function here most diaboli- cally." To himself this was a small matter, but " Alas for the poor cotters ! " Here is a scrap of this letter in facsimile, as it was not often the Professor turned artist : R^-.' / ^>^^ /^y;r:^ ^Uit^/^ He rejoiced, too, in some of the human creatures who flocked to Oban — his own presence being one of the attractions. " From all parts of the world," he writes in 1869, '' everybody comes to Oban, We have had President Davis here, and Dean Stanley, and Lady Augusta Stanley, and a host of minor notabilities. Dr. Caird, the great preacher, lives in a neighbouring mansion. He is really a great preacher : force, dignity, grace, and subsf;antiality. His brot^ier, the Professor of Moral Philo- 1 The Celtic Chair, 189 sophy in Glasgow, is also here — a great Anglican. Dr. Norman Macleod was near us for six weeks. I had a glorious meeting with him, when he sang some excellent songs of his own composition — one espe- cially of which the text was the amount of suggestive wisdom and profound philo- sophy which lies in the wagging of a dog's tail.'* This was the man whose biography the Professor once described as " an ocean of splendour : St. Paul + Aristophanes and whose " Annals of a Highland Parish, Blackie said, *' are replete with more of the fresh breath, vivid colouring, and stirring action of a thoroughly manly style of life than any that I know outside of Homer." It was from Oban that Blackie used to go off for a fortnight's walk on what he called '* the one-shirt expedition." There was not a high mountain in Scotland that he did not get to the top of, at some time or other ; and the " Lays oB the Highlands and Islands," which he published — with some instruction on geology and other useful matters — for the benefit of tourists, were composed, he tells us, '' with no con- : i 190 Professor Blachie, ^li M < ii *-> scious purpose at all, but merely to pour forth the spontaneous happj moods of my own. soul, as they came upon me during many years' rambling among the Bens and Glens of my Scottish fatherland." On one of these '^frequent vagabond flights through the Highland hills," he says, ^^I took up my quarters for some weeks at Kinloch-Ewe, and then and there I picked up my first mustard-seed of the rare old language."* The Pro- fessor was by this time about fifty- five — an elderly man, as year? go. He never acquired a perfect highland accent ; but the fact that he mastered the Gaelic when far past middle life is a striking sign of his irresistible will, his wise methods, and his natural gifts. As far back as 1831, when he came home from the Continent, he could freely speak Latin, Greek, Italian, German, English, and even French, though it was ^^too snippy, scrappy, and polished " for his taste — and all had been acquired in the same natural way. He added Gaelic to his * Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands. ii The Celtic Chair. 191 list by talking with the Gaels, and then he plunged into their literature with the zest of an explorer opening a new continent. *' I can see him now," says Dr. Macgregor, ''walking along the shores of the loch with a Gaelic book and dictionary in his hand." Blackie never despised the dic- tionary, Greek or Gaelic. He found his new language ''not harsh and unpro- nounceable," as some imagine who judge by its spelling, " but soft, vocalic, mellifluous," and specially adapted for music. " Highland songs," he discovered, "beat English and German hollow for variety and character." As for Ossian's poems — the only piece of Gaelic literature of which the Southerner has heard — Blackie arrived at the rational belief that they were " in the main, both in tone and materials, much more ancient than Mac- pherson's time." He laughed at the "absurdity of pious trifling" that seriously derives " Jehovah " from the Gaelic Dhe (meaning God), Tha (is), and Bha (was) ; but he could honestly admit that Gaelic was " one of the oldest and least mongrel types of the great Aryan family of i t- in i 192 Professor Blachie. t.^ speech." As long ago as 1864 he opened his Greek class for the Session by a lecture on " The Gaelic Language : Its Classical Affinities and Distinctive Char- acter." '' It has become impossible/' as he said in a preface to a book of Gaelic conversations, '' to teach any one language scientifically without having some just regard to the peculiarities of all the members of the family to which that language belongs." In 1876 he introduced the Englishman and Lowlander to the unfamiliar beauties of the Northern tongue, in his genially erudite way, by the volume called, ^* The Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands." It was not his purpose ^^ to exhaust a subject, but only to excite an interest and open a vista " ; and this he did, for many a grateful Sassenach. In the English renderings of Gaelic poetry which illustrate the work, Blackie '^endeavoured to follow the spirited freedom of Dry den and our old masters, rather than the curious literalness which has been lately fashionable." But the one specimen that can find room here IC » fed h 3I1 ■^^I^H ^ <]/3 ^^K X ? 1 r 'V ? Hi .1 jH ' ' .J^^^^^^l ) .^^J fl i J^H H 1 ■ 1 I 1 ^1 . ' J^^^^^^^H 1 1 "^^^^^^^^^^^^^H^I^R * 1 1 '»" 4 ft I ' -i. The Celtic Chair, 193 IS IS from another volume, Altavona. It just a verse from Hs "Nutbrown Maiden, a dainty translation of « Ho-ro mo nighean donn bhoidheach " :— Her eye so mildly beaming, Her look so frank and free, In waking and in dreaming, ' Is evermore with me. Ho-ro, my nut-brown maiden, Hi-ri, my nut-brown maiden, Ho-ro, my nut-brown maiden, O, she's the maid for me ! ' As might have been expected, the lash of Blackie's whip fell smartly on the shoulders of those Highlanders who let their mother-tongue slip from them, who at most "content themselves with vapour- ing about Ossian, whom they never read and eulogising Duncan Ban, whom thev do not sing.-^ «They are in a great measure themselves to blame," he wrote m a letter about the same time, "for not getting the GaeHc taught in the schools." iiie great idea of education, the Pro- fessor saw, was to draw out of a man's soul what God put in him, namely, • Address to the Gaelic Society, Perth. 13 194 Professor Blackie, ;! ij li lii the best thoughts that were in his heart; and for the Highlanders that could be done best by Gaelic music, Gaelic songs, and Gaelic Bibles. But *^ they are overridden by strangers ; fashion deludes, and necessity compels. They call their own language * common and unclean' (Acts x. 14), and whosoever presents himself to be kicked in this world will surely get kicks enough." In face of the betrayal and ejection of the people by their landlords, and the desertion of their language and customs by the people themselves, the annual "Gathering" got up "for the amuse- ment of tourists, deerstalkers, and absentee lairds," was to Blackie but " a silly thing ; not silly in itself, but because it has no real life and soul in it." Writ- ing to his sister, who had invited him to visit her in Wales, he said: "The Eisteddfod is a gathering intellectually and morally far superior to our Highland exhibitions of the same kind; for the Welsh are a people, but ' the Highlands ' is now only a country that lives by show- ing itself to shoals of idle tourists and The Celtic Chair, 195 selling itself to a few Saxon hunters and English Nimrods. Often have I wished to be a part of such a sound-hearted popular manifestation : but it is a popular error largely entertained in regard to your excellent brother that he is possessed of ubiquity. The fact is I am no more possessed of ubiquity than a flea : though both of us, I confess, are very mobile little animals, and not very easy to catch." If he could not stir up the degenerate Highland imagination to a revival of the Gaelic speech, Blackie did what mortal man could — and what most others could not — ^to save the language from utter oblivion. In a letter written on the 1st of December, 1867, at Kensington — ^he had been " seduced up here by the solicitations of the kilted Celts of London " to attend some patriotic assembly — he says : ^* I assisted to do a little piece of academical business besides. The academical busi- ness was, according to the suggestion of Sir Patrick Colquhoun, late Chief Judge at Ceylon, a zealous Celt, to start the idea of a Celtic Chair in some Scottish ! 196 Professor Blachie. i I '1 1 ! \ i J . i \ c ■ i f ^: id University — if possible, Edinburgh. This I could do con amore, and may possibly live to see the idea realised." Dr. James Macgregor, Professor of Theology in Edin- burgh New College, made an attempt of this sort, but with next to no result. In 1870 the Council of Edinburgh Uni- versity decided that a Celtic Chair was desirable, and appointed a committee on the subject. Gradually the work of the committee feU, as the work of committees has a habit of falling, into the hands of a single member, — in this case the Professor of Grreek, whom a kinsman accordingly sketched in kilts, thus : — I The Celtic Chair. 197 i With Celtic impetuosity and Saxon perseverance Blackie carried this new mission to complete success. The amount of work, not always of the pleasantest, required for the collection of a £12,000 endowment fund is not to be expressed in words. Only an amateur collector of voluntary taxation who has tried to raise £200 for some object less urgent than the relief of sickness and starvation can realise a sixtieth part of the Pro- fessor's labour. If anything could have cured him of his epistolary propensities, it would have been the years he spent in the wholesale manufacture of begging- letters. But so far was he from tiring at his task, or suffering his genius to lag and his phrases to sink into the hack- neyed commonplboud of mendicity, that his latest appeals rose into Blackian verse. Look at this for a begging-letter in excelsis : — "24, Hill Street, 29th March. "Noblesse oblige ! the Frenchman says, Which means, who stands m honour pays ; And still, the more he rises, he Must pay more tax for his degree. So, Colston, you, some time ago 198 Professor Blackie, Known but as Bailie^ meek and low, Now mounted high, and proud to stand With all the learned of the land ; In aoademic Court assessor, No Principal, preacher, or professor Can outshine you ; therefore, I say, 'Tis plain, my dear sir, you must pay. Which means, of course, for me, you must Grandly fling down the shining dust, With Earls and Marquises and Dukes, And West-End swells of lofty looks, And learned scholars crammed with books, And Jiidges wigged with whalebone hair, And kilted Thanes and ladies fair, All proud a patriotic part to bear In building up the Celtic Chaib !— J. S. B. » h The Scottish Nationalist. 207 It is many, many years since Blackie first was heard pleading with his fellow- . countrymen to be what they were born — namely Scotsmen, and not to hide their natural selves in the livery prescribed by English fashion. The speech he made on " Scottish Literature " in 1861, when the foundation-stone of the Wallace Monument was laid on the crag by Stirling and Ban- nockbum, was a trumpet-blast of warning to his nation and defiance to its enemies. The Anglicised West-Endism of Edin- burgh, as a traitor in the very citadel, had to hear many stinging truths about itself. A certain able editor had refused to ioin in the Monument scheme. " But the best men have their defects," said Blackie; *' the Edinburgh Whigs were always a somewhat prosaic generation, and reads too many blue-books and lacks chivalry." "I have never seen a more beautiful city than Edinburgh," he said in later years, *^but it is a city of big- wigs, and always looking to London for a chance of bigger ! " As one most potent means of arousing a healthy national feeling, Blackie f riMflm 208 Professor BlacMe. I I li '-*' laboured unceasingly to revive a taste for the national songs. It was sad to think, he used to say, that he was the only Pro- fessor of Scottish song in all Scotland. At the Wallace celebration he asked why the songs of Scotland should not be habitually sung in all our highest schools, gym- nasiums, and colleges. "1 have a great respect," he said, *^for Latin and Greek, both as a trader in that line and for philo- sophical reasons ; but if the choice were to be made between two alternatives, classical education and Scottish song, I would say at once — burn Homer, bum Aristotle, fling Thucydides into the sea, but let us by all means on our Scottish hills and by our Scottish streams have * Highland Mary,' ^ Auld Lang Syne,' and ' Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.' " In the last year of his life, to a corre- spondent who had sent him a Latin poem, he wrote : — " Why should young English- men and Scotsmen have their ears tuned to a strange music, which is no longer the natural organ of the expression of the highest culture of the age to which they belong? Why should not our form of The Scottish Nationalist, 209 expressing the beautiful be as closely con- nected with ourselves as the heather with the brae, the birch with the crag, and the gowan with the lea? Personally, I am not ashamed to say that I have through life got more healthy stimulus to the best part of my nature from half-a- dozen of Scottish popular songs than from all the volumes that I ever spurred my way through of Eoman and Hellenic minstrelsy." He had heard certain Scotch ladies ob- serve that it was " vulgar " to sing Scotch songs. We should like to have heard his reply. This is the answer he gave in a public lecture afterwards : — '^ Is it vulgar to be true to Nature, and to call a spade a spade P Is it vulgar to be patriotic, and to love the songs and the sentiments which came to us from our father's blood and with our mother's milk ? Is it vulgar to sing songs of native growth, as fresh, and bright, and strong as the purple heather on our Scottish hills — songs full of bone, and sap, and marrow, in the most musical dialect of the noble English tongue — in- stead of piping forth shallow sentiment- 14 210 Professor Blachie, alities to tickle the ears of prim girls and feckless fops in a big West-end drawing- room ? No ! No ! No ! I'll tell you what is vulgar : to pretend to be what you are not, and what God and Nature did not make you or intend you to be, by bedizen- ing yourselves with strange plumes bor- rowed from a distance. There is nothing more vulgar than to despise the language of the common people." Giving a pat on the back, a few years ago, to a Bailie and a Councillor who were moving the Edinburgh Police Band to play more national music, the Professor said : " In all parts of the kingdom I have never failed to find Scottish music charm the ear and stir the heart of a popular audience. Next to their quiet Sabbaths, and their personal study of the Bible, the Scottish people certainly possess no more powerful engine of the best moral culture than their rich inheritance of national song; and the most suicidal act they could commit against their noble nation- ality is to do anything that, either in the domain of school education or of public recreation, could be construed to imply a The Scottish Nationalist. 9M misprision or a neglect of this great national treasure. The unworthy fashion of subordinating our native Scottish song to every pretty French conceit or whiff of Metropolitan sentiment that may be blown •across the Border — against which I have not seldom had occasion to inveigh — is, I hope, confined to a small class of vain mothers, silly girls, shallow puppies, and other devotees of a spurious gentility in the West End of our large towns. The mass of the people is, I believe, thoroughly sound on this point; but should it unfor- tunately be otherwise, then let Edinburgh <3ease to put forward any claim to be called the capital of an independent kingdom, and have its glory in the praise of being, as the Rev. J. MacNeil wittily said, * the most East windy and the most West Endy ' •city of the Northern province of England called Scotland." In his latest years Professor Blackie found a new instrument for the salvation of his country from such a doom. It was early in 1886 that an Edinburgh citizen, Mr. Charles Waddie, started what soon became known as the Scottish Home Bule 212 Professor Blackie, movement. Every Scotsman and every thinking Englishman admits the incon- venience — ^to put it mildly — of the present legislative system, under which no la-' however local, can be made or alterev except by a Parliament mainly representing other localities and always choked with other business. By what plan, short of disunion, can the evil of centralisation be cured? Blackie was one of those who faced this question and sought an answer* He attended the meeting in St. Andrew's Square at which the Scottish Home Eule Association was formed. At the firs^ conference, held in Glasgow two yes later, he was elected Chairman of Com- mittee of the Association, and this post he held to the end, presiding not only at meetings in Scotland but over a con- ference in London itself. One of the last letters he wrote was one strongly commending the Home Eule Association and enclosing a double subscription for its treasury. Blackie had no rigid theory, to be uni- versally and unchangeably applied, though lie believed it to be ^^ desirable that as le ■PPPiPHMimi The Scottish Nationalist, 213 much local individuality as possible should be preserved in the component parts of a great empire — as much as was consistent with unity of action and subordination to «. central authority in all matters of general concern." The neglect of this, he «aw, produced a monotonous uniformity in the people, the characteristic trait of despotism . At first, indeed, the Professor was inclined to refuse to Ireland what he claimed for Scotland. Mr. Gladstone, he once said, was to be thanked for taking up the question, but not for the way in which he took it up. The process of showing in practice how good a thing local or national overnment was should begin, he thought, 5th " u, sober-minded, sensible nation like the Scotch ! " At another time he declared that he had nothing to do with Ireland — he did not know the Irish. He did know the Scotch, and he knew that they were fit for Home Eule and ought to have it. As for details, lie felt no call to be a maker of constitu- tions (except, perhaps, for Hellenic .societies !). Still, he had his preferences, and the plan he liked best was one first 214 Professor Blaclde, I hinted at about twelve years ago. If the present Scottish members of Pn-rliament and representative peers were to sit together in Edinburgh for the despatch of distinctiv^elv Sflnffieh business for six weeks or two months before their duties at Westminster began, the problem would be solved without any multiplication of legislators. Blackie came to admit that some such plan would have to be adopted for the western as well as the northern partner in the United Kingdom. He never allowed his dislike for Irish method® to modify his judgment of English methods in Ireland. Writing in 1884 to a correspondent in Montreal, he said ? " As to the French in Canada, no doubt the government of one race by another i» always a difficult problem ; but it has constantly to be done, and we must make the best of it. In Ireland John Bull ha» made not the best but the worst of it j and when the worst is once produced it is,, like a hereditary disease, very difficult,, sometimes impossible, to be cured." And in the following letter to Mr. Blackie the publisher, written only a fortnight "^ 1 The Scottish Nationalist, 215 before the end, he declared himself in favour of " Home Rule all round " :— (( (( 9 Douglas Crescent, Feb. 15, 1895. My Dear Sir, — Accept my best thanks for your last instalment of the History of the Scottish People. I am a strong advocate for the Union of the thre King- doms of the Empire, but this Union should be a genuine Union of the three peoples ; each with its own head — a Scottish Parlia- ment to meet in Edinburgh, an Irish Par- liament in Dublin, an Ecglish Parliament in London and a British Parliament there as well. This would be a bond fide Union, a brotherly CTnion, not a swallowing up of the smaller by the one great member, by a monstrous centralisation which is the destroyer of all variety : and variety is the wealth of the moral as well as of the physical world. — Ever yours, «J. S. Blackie.*' The Professor summed up his opinions on Scottish Nationality in one of his " Essays on Social Subjects," thus :— ^ " 1. Stamp in your souls the strong con- viction that, as matters now stand, there 1 216 Professor Blackie, is something rotten in the state of Scot- land-; and that^ unless a decided stand be made at the present moment, you are in great danger of losing your two most valuable possessions — ^your inheritance of a distinctive type of manhood from the past, and your estimation in the eye of Europe as a political factor of no vulgar significance. ** 2. Screw your middle schools and uni- versities up to such a level as that there shall be no excuse for any father of a hopeful Scottish son saying that he sends his son to England because he cannot find for him in Scotland the education of a gentleman. ^^3. Give your native Presbyterian Church services such graces and embellish- ments as may prevent any desertion to the Episcopacy from purely sesthetical motives. ^^4. Remove the double reproach of multitudinous babblement and insolent centralisation from the British Parliament, and let Scottish business be transacted in Edinburgh, either by a separate national Parliament for Scotland, in the fashion of the States' Parliaments in im i W i i M i— I I) Ths Scottish NaUonalist, 217 America, or, what I personally would much prefer, by a session of the Scottish members of the present Parliament of Oreat Britain, to be held for two months, or six weeks, as the case might require, in Edinburgh, for the desp'^tch of specially Scotch business, with an executive, in either case resident in the historical capital of Scotland, for the administra- tion of Scottish affairs/* xvin. POET AND VERSEMAKER. It was not only for their effect on slumber- ing patriotism that Blackie loved and praised his country's songs. He found in song at once the nourishment and the expression of his highest moral qualities j and what he had found he believed that others could find. In an address to his Edinburgh students he said: — "If you wish to be happy in this world there are only three things that can secure you of your aim - — the love of God, the love of truth, and the love of your fellow-men; and of this divine triad the best and most natural exponent, in my estimate, is neither a sermon, nor even a grand article in a quarterly review^ but 3'ast simply a good song.' » " The devil remains a stranger To breasts that teem with song/ Tf Poet and Versemaher, 219 says Blackie ; and he even assures us that " the devil carmot sing ! " " There are only three patent ways," he wrote in ' 1887, "to keep the devil at bay — a. prayer, a song, and hard work. By God's grace I use all the three largely, and so am by many accounted the happiest man in Edinburgh — an opinion which I hope is not altogether true, but has a good deal of truth in it." A severe musical critic would spy that Blackie could not sing, at any rate in his later years; but it is no less true that Blackie did sing, all the time and everywhere. Dr. Macgregor and he once lived for some time together in the Highlands. "His room was next to mine," says theminister. "He sang the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. I never knew a man who more habitually carried out the Apostle's injunction, ^ Eejoice in the Lord alway ; and again I say, Eejoice ! *■ His whole life was a song. He sang to himself all day, wherever he was, on the road or in the tramway car. He sang, like the birds, because he could not help it." There we have it. Though he T I 220 ; Professor Blackie, rigorously did one thing at a time — " Make clean work and leave no tags " was one of his mottoes — ^the hardest mental labour was punctuated by snatches of song. There was no inconsistency in that. He breathed in song. Sydney Dobell was walking in his garden once when Blackie, his guest, was writing indoors. Suddenly he heard the Professor's jovial voice at an upper window trolling forth : •* Maxwellton braes are lonnie Where early fa's the dew, A-nd 'twas there that " Then there was a long pause while the pen sped over the paper ; but at last a full stop came, and then " Annie Laurie Gi'ed me her promise true— j» Another silence, while the pen flew on ; then another line or two of Annie Laurie, and so on to the end of the chapter. He sang in private and he sang in public, and he always delighted his audi- •ence, which is more than can be said of all singers approved by the critics. In tJmgimmjgmamiim ■HiHHiHi 1 Poet and Versemaher, 221 a letter from his sister mention occurs of a visit she had just paid to her aunt. Miss Stodart, *hen ninety-eight j years of age. The old lady was ** quite bright and cheery, and said the Pro- \ fessor had been calling iu the after- | noon and had sung her a song and been in great glee," mere boy of seventy^ j three that he was. As for his public j performances, who that eve/ heard him lecture on Scottish Song will forget the musical illustrations. Their style, if not inimitable, was imitable only by the late David Kennedy, whom Blackie heard singing in church one Sunday and advised to adopt the career that took him singing the songs of Scotland round the world. "Who could forget the Professor's ^^ Kelvin Grove," ^^A man's a man for a' that," or ^'The Barrin' o* the Door " ? But the Professor was a writer as well as a singer of songs ; and that which he most wished to become popular may be given here in full. It was written early in the forties and appeared in his volume of "Lyrical Poems," published by Edmon- ^ 222 Professor Blachie. ston and Douglas in 1860 and now out of print : — THE SONG OF MRS. JENNY GEDDES. (Tune: "British Grenadiers") Some praise the fair Queen Mary, and some the good Queen Bess, And some the wise Aspasia, beloved by Pericles ; But o'er all the world's brave women, there's one that bears the rule, The valiant Jenny Geddes, that flung the three- legged stool. With a row-dow — at them now ! Jenny fling the stool ! 'Twas the twenty-third of July, in the sixteen- thirty-seven, On Sabbath mom from high St. Giles' the solemn peal was given : King Charles had sworn that Scottish men should pray by printed rule ; He sent a book, but never dreamt of danger from a stool. With a row-dow — yes, I trow ! There's danger in a stool ! The Council and the Judges, with ermined pomp elate. The Provost and the Bailies in gold and crimsoa fltate, Poet and Veraemaher, 223 Fair silken-vested ladies, grave Doctors of the school, Were there to please the King, and learn the virtue of a stool. With a row-dow — ^yes, I trow ! There's virtue in a stool ! The Bishop and the Dean came in wi' mickle gravity. Right smooth and sleek, but lordly pride was lurking in their e'e ; Their full lawn sleeves were blown and big, like seals in briny pool ; They bore a book, but little thought they soon should feel a stool. With a row-dow — ^yes, I trow ! They'll feel a three-legged stool ! The Dean he to the altar went, and, with a solemn look, He cast his eyes to heaven, and read the curious- printed book. In Jenny's heart the blood up-welled with bitter anguish full ; Sudden she started to her legs, and stoutly grasped the stool ! With a row-dow — at them now ! Firmly grasp the stool 1 As when a mountain wild-cat springs on a rabbit small, So Jenny on the Dean springs, with gush of holy gaU; / i 224 Professor Blachie, i: ** Wilt thou say the mass at my lug, thou Popish- puling fool F No ! no ! " she said, and at his head she flung the three-legged stool. With a row-dow — at them now ! Jenny fling the stool I A bump, a thump ! a smash, a crash I now gentle folks beware I Stool after stool, like rattling hail, came tirling through the air, With, Well done, Jenny ! Bravo, Jenny ! That's the proper tool ! When the Deil will out, and shows his snout, just meet him with a stool ! . With a row-dow — at them now ! There's nothing like a stool ! The Council and the Judges were smitten with strange fear, The ladies and the Bailies their seats did deftly clear ; The Bishop and the Dean went, in sorrow and in dool, And all the Popish flummery fled, when Jenny showed the stool ! With a row-dow— at them now ! Jenny show the stool ! And thus a mighty deed was done by Jenny's valiant hand, Black Prelacyand Popery she dravefrom Scottish land ; ■fi^^fpr' Poet and Yersemaker, 225 King Charles he was a shuffling knave, priest Laud a meddling fool, But Jenny was a woman wise, who beat them with a stool ! With a row-dow— yes, I trow, She conqueired by the stool ! The reader with half an imagination can picture to himself the venerable Pro- fessor, in the midst of a dramatic render- ing of this ballad, seizing the nearest chair, and hurling it along the platform with an aim worthy of Mrs. Jenny Geddes herself. In 1870, his German sympathies were roused into rhythmic force by the war with France, and he published a book on the "War Songs of the Germans, with Historical Illustrations of the Liberation War and the Rhine Boundary Question." With the prose part of the book we can have nothing to do here ; but we must dip into the verse and bring out a few lines, such as these from the translation of the Sword Song : — I in my sheath am ringing, I from my sheath am springing, "Wild, wild with battle glee ! 15 226 Professor Blachie. Or these, the opening lines of the " Waoht am Ehein " : — i\ \ ' A loud cry swells like thunder peal, Like roaring wave, like clashing steel — The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine ! Who'll come to watch the German Rhine P Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine : Brave hearts and true shall watch the Rhine I From heart to heart the quick thrill flies, And lightning leaps from countless eyes, Where each true German, sword in hand, Guards the old border of the land. Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine, Brave hearts and true shall watch the Rhine I A year before, the Professor had dedi- cated to the students of Edinburgh University a book of student songs called " Musa Burschicosa," the offspring of a pure spirit of enjoyment of life ; and in "The Scottish Students' Song Book/' published only six years ago, eight of the pieces, including a Latin version of " God Save the Queen,*' are by John St» » Blackie. "We must quote " <^"' two of his Doric, though ^ _ If may go. mimmimmmmmwtwm' Poet and Versemaker, 227 This is from ^^ Capped and Doctored and a' " : — I yince was a light-headed laddie, A dreamin' an' daunderin' loon, Just escaped from the rod o' my daddie And the skirts o* my mither's broun goun. But now I cut loftier capers An' the beer that I drink is na* sma*, When I see my ain name in the papers. Capped and doctored and a'. And this from the better-known " Saml Sumph " : — Sam'l Sumph cam' here for Greek. Ha, ha, the Greeking o't ! Frae Dunnet Head he cam' for Greek. Ha, ha, the Greeking o't ! Brains he had na unco' much. His schooling was a crazy crutch. But like the crab he had a clutch ; Ha, ha, the Greeking o't! Plucked twice, Sam'l made a pathetic appeal to the Professor, whose discipline melted under teia-rs and let the poor fellow through. Now behold. In the Kirk Assembly he Sits as big as big can be, Moderator Sam, D.D. — That's the crown o' the Greeking o't ! 228 Professor BlacTcie, '■■i The Professor wrote much, in many metres. His pen dropped into verse as naturally 8 s his voice into song ; and as he '^ piped more for pleasure than for fame " he disdained the chipping and changing and trimming and polishing carried on in some poetical workshops. Naturally, therefore, some of his verse lacks " distznction," and is deprived of its power over the imagination by the occa- sional cropping up of a phrase prosaic to the verge of commonplace. It may be urged that Blackie was too didactic to be a great poet. He himself said that " a poet even in modern times, when the great public contains every possible variety of small publics, can ill afford to be a preacher ; and if he carries his preaching against the vices of the age beyond a certain length he changes his genus and becomes, like Coleridge, a metaphysician, or, like Thomas Carlyle, a prophet." No temptation would have made Blackie a metaphysician ; but a prophet he was, and his message to the world was delivered in verse as often as in prose. The poetic element, however, was not always driven ^' Pqet and Versemaher. 229 out by the prophetic, or even enslaved and enfeebled by it. Some of bis verses, therefore, which go to illustrate his religious teaching in the next chapter might have been given here with equal fitness to show the variety of his poetic gifts. His earliest book of verse, published in 1867, was called " Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece." These lines may be taken as the envoi ; — Muse of old Hellas, wake again ! Thou werfc not born to die — A.nd mingle sweet the classic strain With Gothic minstrelsy. Though sobei' friends forbid the verse, My old Greek rhyme I will rehearse, Like a lone wandering bee On a hillside, that sips sweet dew From fragrant blooms of purple hue, And drones sweet minstrelsy. The modest lay be slow to blame, Piped more for pleasure than for fame : Music to harmless souls belongs — Cold worldly hearts are scant of songs. About half the book consisted of " other poems/' chosen from those '^ great screeds 230 Professor Blackie, of poetry " we hear of him writing under the influence of the mountain breezes when he had " shaken off the book-dust " of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In 1860, as we saw, came the " Lyrical Poems '* ; in 1869, Musa Burschicosa ; in 1870, the German War Songs ; in 1872, Lays of the Highlands and Islands; in 1876, ** Songs of Eeligion and Life," some of which were reprinted from earlier volumes; in 1877 the "Wise Men of Greece," already noticed; and in 1886 "Messis VitsB; or. Gleanings of Song from a Happy Life," dedicated, " in the love of the good, the beautiful, and the true," to the students of the Scottish Universities. In 1889 caaie ^'A Song of Heroes," in which he '' selects a sequence of the most notable names in European and West Asian history during more than 3,000 years, and gives a sketch of their lives, as the exponents of the significant ages to which they belong," — from Abra- ham, Alexander, Caesar and Paul, to Cromwell, who " seized the helm and gave it guidance with a right direct from God." Open any of these books at random, espe- Poet and Versemalcer, 231 cially the more miscellaneous volumes, and jou can hardly fail to be struck by the lyrical ease and the vigour of the lines. Manliness, and warm human sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, you will of course expect ; but you may be surprised, if you have not known him well, at his genius for entering into and expressing the most varied aspects of nature, wild and magnificent or dainty and serene. Blackie had his direct inspirations many and large. Even his adaptations and imitations are more in form than material, and the Blackie spirit glows all through them. Still, no account of his poetical works should go forth without a reference to the other poets who influenced him the most. Of great English writers, he tells us, Wordsworth held the most powerful sway over his early years. "From the day I became acquainted with Words- worth," he says,* " I regarded Byron only as a very sublime avatar of the devil, and would have nothing to do with him. With the years of riper manhood the • "Books Thab Have Influenced Me," in the " British Weekly." A 232 Professor Blackie, influence of Wordsworth passed away, because I had appropriated and turned into blood and bone all the nutriment he could give me. I now sought guidance from a man who could help me to achieve for what the Germans call the objective half of my nature what the Bible and Wordsworth had done for the subjective. I saw the necessity of getting out of myself and steering free of the besetting sin of thoughtful young men, viz., philo- sophising about life, instead of actually living. In this my need — as Shakespeare was still too big for me — what Deus ex machina could have come to my aid more effective than the sunny cheerfulness, strong healthy vitality. Catholic human sympathy, deep-rooted patriotism, fine pictorial eye, and rare historic furniture of Walter Scott? To the poetry of this greatest literary Scot, whom I soon learned to associate in -septhetical bonds with the sunny sobriety of Homer and the great Greeks, I owe in no small measure that close connection with the topography and the local hi^ ory of my country which appears in my poetical productions, and Y ?. Poet and Versemaker, 238 whicli, if these are destined in any smallest degree to live in the memoiy of my countrymen, will be the element that has most largely contributed to their vitality." After all, as the poet-professor Imew and said, " to live poetry is better than to v/rite it ; " and he did both. " A poetical life is just a life opposed to all sameness and all selfishness; eagerly seizing upon the good and beautiful from all quarters.'* "What live we but for this ? " he asked in one of his noblest sonnets, on the death of General Gordon : What live we but for this P Into the sour to breathe the soul of sweetness, The stunted growth to rear to fair ompletenesa, Drown sneers in smiles, kill hatred with a kiss, And to the sandy waste bequeath the fame That the grass grew behind us when we came. '!iia I XIX, THE GOOD, THE TEUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL. It has always been a marvel that a strictly orthodox country like Scotland should have developed a love and admira- tion so intense for a heretic, above all for a heretic militant, whose spear was for ever pricking orthodoxy between the ribs. To explain this, it is not enough to say that his genius, his charming personality, his patriotic achievements, were allowed to cover a multitude of metaphysical sins. "I remember," an old student says, '' a good old Highlander, one of the old school of rigid Calvinists, making the remark one afternoons 'Eh, sic a man, he's naether orthodox, nor heterodox, nor ony ither kind o' " dox," but jist himsel'.' " But being '^jist himsel' " would scarcely have averted the anger of the orthodox, if he had not, as sometimes milder heretics i /i Ths Good, True, and Beautiful. 235 I 4 ' have not, been able to make his nation feel the essential unity between the core of his religion and of theirs. No man ever had a more consuming abhorrence of shams, or was less hindered by conventional considerations from pub- licly opposing what he thought untrue. All the more significant, therefore, were those " foundations of belief " which he felt and declared to be solid under his feefc. There were things which he could not understand, could not even know ; but he did not make a fetish of agnosticism, persuading himself that facts as clear and powerful as any in human experience should be neglected as unknowable. "The irreligious man," in Blackie's judgment, ^' is an imperfect creation ; the irreligious woman is a monster." '* Reli- gion is as essential to human nature as poetry." " Atheists," he says in another place, '^ whether speculative or practical, are mostly crotchet-mongers and puzzle- brains ; fellows who spin silken ropes in which to strangle themselves. There is something that stands above all fingering, all microscopes, and all curiou« diagnosis. ■iMMiial 286 Professor Blackie, f\ •■ I ; Mi and that is simply LIFE; and life is simply energising Reason ; and energising Reason is only another name for God.'* In a *' Hymn for British Workmen " he wrote : — Time was when ye were not ; Through lightless depths forlorn The Eternal Father shot His ray, and ye were bom. Even Him praise ye, Whose quickening light Redeems from night All things that be ! At a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh five years ago a discussion arose on human evolution, and Professor Rutherford made some remark as to the possible production of thought by the evolution of molecular mechanism in the brain. Then Blackie rose. There were various kinds of nonsense, he remarked — metaphysical, theological, and scientific, and what had been talked at that meeting was scientific nonsense. Flourishing his stick and striding over to the offending physiologist, he exclaimed, " Evolution of everything out of nothing! It is utter I -■ i The Good, True, and Beautiful. 237 nonsense. Did you ever see a web without a weaver? Without God no Eutherford is possible, no Eoyal Society is possible." Long before, in 1866, he described him- self as "wielding the cudgel for old Plato against all materialists, utilitarians, French encyclopaedists, ^practical men,' and persons who have a retail trade in the tangible." But he had no quarrel vdth sciv ace, no desire to clip its wings : he only refused to " look for the good, the true, and the beautiful on the insides of worms and oysters." He did not trouble himself with meta- physical problems the solution of which, if solution could be found, would have no practical result. " The Bible is a practical book," he said, " and he who does not us© it practically had better not read it." Some poor brain had been puzzling over « the origin of evil." The origin of evil? said Blackie, — Evil exists that you may make it good ; Else had the saints on earth scant work to do ! What would you have P In Paradise, no doubt, Weeds grandly grew, and Adam plucked them out. 'I r I 1 288 Professor Blachie, t Close by our door is fruitful work to do ; Accept the task and own the work Divine : Sow, plant, or build, drain fields, or cleave the clod, But spend no time in arguing with God. The literary and theological problems so keenly discussed by Biblical critics he put aside with an equally contented mind. In a letter to his brother-in-law, who had been writing on " The Unity of Isaiah," Blackie said : — " I am a man of action, and must have terra firma to stand on, and therefore have systematically eschewed all slippery questions whether in philo- logical criticism* or theological dogma, which, however answered, can lead with me to no practical result, or, rather, from the character of my mental constitution, must end as they began — in doubt." He was not uninterested in the study of comparative religion, however, nor in- capable of forming an opinion in which common sense and learning were combined. At the foot of a letter to the same cor- respondent, asking information as to the religious beliefs of savage races, this post- script appears : — "Buddha certainly was • » < 1 • j ' The Good, True, and Beautiful, 239 a very sublime driveller. Nothing more ridiculous than virtue vs^hen it enters into a war with nature." The Professor's book called ^^Four Phases of Morals" is an elaborate com- parison, full of wisdom, of the Socratic, Aristotelian, Christian and Utilitarian systems. "VVe have heard his terse opinion of Utilitarianism. His conclusions on the subject of Christianity must be quoted. Christianity, he says, *^is essentially an ethical religion; other religions favour certain virtues, or give a certain sanction to all virtues; but Christianity is morality." It " is not a special training which pious persons are to go through in order to prepare themselves for a future world." " Neither, again, does the famous doctrine of St. Paul, that men are saved by faith, not by works, in any wise contradict the essentially ethical character of the faith which he preached. The works which in the Epistle to the Eomans he so uncon- ditionally denounces are works either of belf-conceit or of sacerdotal imposition." From the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the ^ "^ part of the New Testament, by i (( 240 Professor Blachie. the wajr, in which a formal definition of faith is given,** " it is plain to any child that faith is merely a religious synonym for what we in secular language call moral heroism — a heroism peculiarly marked as Christian only by the distinct recognition on the part of the actor that the moral law which he obeys is the accredited will of the Moral Governor whom he serves.'* As religion was the best of possessions, so he saw Christianity was the best of religions. But he was scrupulously fair to the religious men of non-Christian times. ^'1 hope,** he once wrote to a friend, **you will never allow yourself to speak slightingly of those noble heathens, Plato, Zeno, Socrates, and hundreds more. They were witnesses to the highest truths in a practical style from which many of our modem talking and sentimentalising evangelists might learn a great deal." Two of these noble heathen, along with a Christian apostle and a modem philo- sopher, supplied the mottoes with which the Professor covered the fly-leaf of an autograph book for the present writer in 1 The Good, True, and Beautiful, 241 1881. This is a reduced facsimile of the page :— The mottoes may be rendered thus :— From heaven comes all that makes for human excellence; from the gods come wise men, and men of mighty hand and eloquent speech. PiNDAB. 16 242 Professor BlacTcie. '%' It is by our work that we purchase all good things from the gods.— Epicharmos. All noble things are as difficult as they are rare. — Spinoza. " Hard as the heather, lasting as the fir," Gaelic Pro.verb. Speaking the truth in love. — Paul. In answer to a letter from his sister the Professor wrote : — " What you say about Psalm XXX. is true ; but not only there — everywhere in the Psalms we find piety coupled with a lusty and triumphant humanity. David was a complete MAN". Cur modern religionists are too often melancholy fragments. I prefer a jolly heathen to your puling lily-livered Chris- tians of a certain type, who count it a virtue to be always dreaming about the future world because they have not pith to live eifectually in the present Sande S cerates y or a pro nobis ! " It was in the daring form of a litany to that heathen saint that he flung out the sorrow of his soul for the unlovely narrow- ness of men who think themselves Christians. He saw the same fault in high Calvinist and high Sacerdotalist. Once i I f %- The Good, True, and Beautiful 243 he told a story of a Highland boy, in the neighbourhood of Dingwall, to whom a young lady was showing a series of small pictures representing human figures. A . grim and gigantic warrior, in the act of dealing a heavy blow with his club, caught * the boy's eye, and immediately he came out with the question: "Is this God?" " A more pregnant satire," said Blackie, ^' on the grim theology of the Caledonian Calvinists cannot be conceived. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected reproof ! " Having passed "the grim waste of a prickly scholastic theology," he was anxious to help others across. "Tests and orthodoxy," in his experience, "have done more harm to the growth of true Christian piety in this country than any- thing that I know." The test having been abolished in the case of professors, let it now be abolished in the case of ministers. "If it be manifestly through all the physical world a prime purpose in the mind of the Supreme Eeason to create as great a variety of differentiated indivi- duals as possible, under a common type. MHfti 244 Professor Blackie, w it cannot be according to His will that absolute identity, and with it monotony, should prevail in the moral world. The fact is that, if honestly carried out, as a sacerdotal pedant like Laud or a stiff old Calvinist like the late Dr. Begg would carry it out, the unqualified subscription would result in filling the Church with a motley troop of the most unthinking, servile, superficial, shallow, sophistical, and hypocritical persons that could be found in the country." While he criticised all the churches, not one would he utterlv condemn. ^' I love them all with a perfect love," he said; and he went to them all, or to a sufficient variety of them. He had the breadth of his mother, who often went to hear Methodist and other dissenting preachers, being dissatisfied with the Established ministrations. Her son " always regarded Methodism as a potent spur in the lazy flanks of John Bull," and thought it not entirely Jiisplaced even in the capital of Scotland, where we hear of him presiding at a Methodist meeting and writing a sonnet to the minister. He has been seen. ^^ '\ a The Good, True, and Beautiful, 245 for that matter, on the same platform with General Booth and his "hallelujah lasses." So far was he from being annoyed at the existence of Dissent, he approved of it on principle. Read this remarkable passage in his " Four Phases " : '^Priests are not known in the Church. The people only are the priep+hood ; each individual in the congregation has the value and the dignity of a priest. From this equality of personal dignity before God two remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially char': .ceristic of modem society — the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious sects. . . . The external unity after which some religious persons sigh existed naturally under heathenism, where the individual con- science was merged in the State, exists now also in Popish countries, where the same conscience is merged in the priest- hood ; but in the Christianity of the early Church, founded as it was on a direct appeal to the conscience of the individual sinner, such a purely external and mechanical idea could find no place. The right to exist at all as a Church estab- ^V \ 246 Professor Blackie, 1^ lished the right to dissent from other churches by asserting its own convictions when such assertion seemed necessary. . . . Christianity has thus become the great mother of moral individualism, and the many sects, which are so apt to annoy us with their petty jealousies, are, when more closely viewed, merely a true index to the intensity of our spiritual life.''' " Dissent from any dominant body, even though it may proceed from the exagger- ated importance given to a secondary matter, will always produce the good re- sult that the dominant body will thereby be stirred to greater activity and greater watchfulness; so that, in this view, we may lay it down as one of the great lesRons of history that the best form of church government is a strong establishment qualified by a strong dissent." * Not that he was blind to the advantages of unity. " Unity," as he said, ^^is the indispensable condition of all common action/' and he was scandalised, as others are, at the failure of Christian societies to act in common for the suppression of the * What does History Teach ? The Good, True, and Beautiful. 247 evils denounced by their common Leader. But why should common action be put off till amalgamation and uniformity were attained — supposing these to be desirable P ^' A harmony is achieved," he said, referring to the history of religion in Scotland since 1843, "in the common action of two divided forces that to the undivided unity was denied." ^ And writ- ing to a friend in the southern kingdom, he said: ^^I have never been able to understand why Churchmen and Dissen- ters should not live together like brethren, as only different varieties of the same species, each having its peculiar and in- communicable excellence." ^'Let the churches be different and love one another, and until they learn that they have not learnt, their A B C." One matter on which the Churches might agree to differ, he thought, was the form of church organisation. '*I am a good Presbyterian," he wrote in "Alma Mater" six years ago, ^^but have no quarrel with Episcopacy, or even Popery, as a mere form of government in the Church. * Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity. ■ "i I 248 Professor Blachie, I ilfr IS But if any man assert that one special form of clmrcli government, Popery, Pres- bytery, or Episcopacy, is of Divine institu- tion and of universal obligation, against such doctrine I protest, both as a reveren- tial student of the course of God's doings in Providence, and as a philologer trained to the just interpretation of historical writings." '^ The form of social existence which the early Church assumed was that which naturally belongs to a brotherly association, democratic ; . . . but all that the Apostles required was that all things should be done decently and in order." * *^Only in one point," he says in a private letter, ^^I can agree with the democratic theories of the hour, that if democracy is practicable anywhere it is in the Christian Church; because in that Church, or perhaps in the very idea of the Christian religion, there are principles and tendencies which go right in the teeth of * "Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity**; including also articles on the "Place of Women/* " The Scottish Covenanters/* " Wisdom/' and " David, King of Israel/' I » The Good, True, and Beautiful, 249 ' f that rebellious individualism and inor- ganic confusion and factious hostility which sooner or later drive democracy into its natural culmination of absolute despotism." Blackie's personal position in the matter of church fellowship was peculiar. " I support the Established Church in policy, but I attend the Free," was his own way of putting it. He was a strong opponent of disestablishment. In a letter written during the Irish Church controversy of 1868, he expressed his opinion that disestablish- ment would be '' extremely unwise " even in England, and " an unmixed evil in Scotland." In the same letter, however, he said : *^ I do not anticipate much harm from the contemplated overthrow of the Established Churches of this country." • When he came to live in Edinburgh in 1852 the Professor became a regular at- tendant at the St. John's Free Church, be- cause Dr. Guthrie was the minister — a man whom he coupled with another reverend nobleman, Norman Macleod : " Two men, the large human breadth, the sunny cheer- fulness, the strong good sense, and the PI III — ,._ ii„^.. 250 Professor BlacTcie, dignified grace of whose preaching will remain deeply engraven on every Scottish heart as long as Scotland is Scotland." The stricter State-Churchmen did not accept this excuse from the man they had supported for the Greek Chair; but he cared nothing for their cavillings. He ^^ could not see the difference between Free Kirk and State Kirk without a microscope." In later years the Professor generally attended the Free High Church, finding edification both in the public ministry and the private friendship of the poet-preacher, Dr. Walter C. Smith. If a preacher were earnest, Blackie could tolerate him; and any preacher blest with honesty and sense could be sure of a warm appreciation. No preach- ing, however wonderful, could satisfy him if it were not practical. What, he asked, would Christ say of our Slowness to love, and hot haste to be rich, Folly high-throned, &.nd wisdom in the ditch ? '>t What would he think of our '^gilded parades," and " sense conjured into non- sense in God's name"? ^'It is not by >>t The Good J True, and Beautiful. 251 acts of formal imputation of the righteous- ness of the Saviour that Christians are rendered worthy of eternal life," this prophet said in the last book he wrote ; " it is by living faith in a divinely com- missioned teacher, manifested in the career of a Christlike life of devotion to the cause of humanity and the offspring of a Divine Father.'* '"One thing is needful," he had said twenty years be- fore; "money is not needful; power is not needful ; cleverness is not need- ful ; fame is not needful ; liberty is not needful; even health is not the one thing needful; but character alone — a thoroughly cultivated will — is that which can truly save us; and if we are not saved in this sense we must certainly be rHmned."*'^ This is what he had in mind when he declared that " No educa- tion is complete of which Christianity is not an integral part." The heresies that fill the whole vision of some educationists were of quite secondary importance in Blackie's eyes. "Nothing is more cer- tain," he wrote in 1887, "than that the * Self-Culture. 1 252 Professor Blackie, 1 A' early confessors and martyrs never were called upon to commit themselves to any such doctrinal subtleties " as we find in the creeds; ^^and in the Epistles of the Apostles a man must be strangely blinded who does not see that the ^ heresies ' which they most sweepingly condemn are not defections from intellectual doctrine, but from a holy life. ** Creeds and confessions ? Well, I will confess An honest creed. Where'er I look abroad I see the living form and face of God, Which men call Nature ; all whose loveliness I garner in my soul with pious care ; And when I look within, in thoughtful hour, I feel a shaping presence and a power That makes me know the same great God is there. What more ? That were enough, had men been true To their best selves ; but, by base hist enticed, They fell : till God stretched forth His hand, and drew Them from the mire, by His own Son the Christ. Leave me to Him, in His bright face to see God's imaged will, from gloss and dogma free ! " * Among Biackie's heresies that of which he heard most — perhaps because other * lu " The Pall Mall Gazette.'* ' ] ■ lU" i.i ia.M J ' The Good, True, and Beautiful, 253 folk heard most of it — was his anti- Sabbatarianism. On one Sunday evening, eleven years ago, he ^ave a lecture in Glasgow on '*The Philosophy of Love." When he came to speak of the love songs of Scotland he waved prejudice aside and burst out with "Kelvin Grove" by way of illustration. A few days afterwards an anonymous artist sent him a sketch of himself, the Sabbath-breaking Professor, carried off on the back of Auld Homie. But while Blackie was no believer in rigid rules for the observance of Sabbath or any other day, he urged, as a practical man, that the day of rest should be used for quiet and steady thought as well as for genuine recreation. His own Sunday mornings he generally spent in studying the Bible, especially the Psalms and the New Testament, which few if any ministers knew more thoroughly. Later in the day he went to church, and this was no mere concession to conventionality. *^He is not a wise man," he said, " who does not devote at least one part of the Christian Sabbath to the serious work of moral self -review. Not a few severe criticisms have been IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MY-S) 1.0 I.I 1.25 «fiM !||M »£ i^ mil 2.2 Ui U£. 112.0 1.8 1-4 111.6 6' V] <^ /a v: ^ ,>^ o 7 M Photographic Sdences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (71fc) 872-4503 1 254 Professor Blackie. made by foreigners on what has been called the * bitter observance' of the Sunday by the Scotch, but these hasty critics ought to have reflected how much of the solidity, sobriety, and general re- liability of the Scottish character is owing to their serious and thoughtful observ- ance of these recurrent periods of sacred rest." ^ Even his love of beauty was a stumbling- block to many of his fellow-countrymen. If he had kept his sesthetical apostleship away from the kirk, well and good. But when he told the Scottish people to ex- press their religious feelings through beautiful services in beautiful churches, his doctrine seemed to savour of papistry. He once asked some Dingwall folks why they did not cultivate a few flowers around their church, and was told " The lust of the eye is dangerous." *^ If we are not to appreciate beauty," said he, " why did God Almighty make so many bonnie lasses 9 " " Giving a graceful dress to a good thing is surely a part of wisdom, inasmuch as it never can be consistent * Self-Culture. The Good, True, and Beautiful, 255 either with reason or love to present a good thing to the eye in a repulsive aspect. If mere outward beauty in itself is of little value, when accompanied with in- ward virtue it is always, as Aristotle says, a good introduction, and deserves where- ever possible to stand in the foreground.** An ugly dress, an ugly building, or any other blot on the face of town or country, roused the Professor's indignation. "In this world, everything which we see, or which we are, either is beautiful, or tends towards beauty, or has fallen away from beauty; a calculated tendency to, or normal aspiration after ugliness, is no part of the system of things to which we belong. Deformity is in no case the essen- tial type, but only the accidental variety, of created things."* Beautiful world! Though bigots condemn thee, My tongue finds no words For the graces that gem thee Beaming with sunny light, Boimtif ul ever. Streaming with gay delight, Full as a river ! * Discourses on Beauty. ■HI 256 Professor Blackie, Bright world ! Brave world ! Let cavillers blame thee. I bless thee and bend To the God who did frame thee ! * He loved beauty in every aspect, just as he loved religion in all the churches. Name the leaves on all the trees, Name the waves on all the seas, Name the notes of all the groves — Thus thou namest all my loves. I do love the stately dame And the sportive girl the same ; Every changeful phase between Blooming cheek and brow serene. Paris was a pedant fool. Meting beauty by a rule ; Pallas ? Juno ? Venus P — ^he Should have chosen all the three.f The public became acquainted with the Professor's doctrine of the beautiful chiefly in the form, of pungent sayings dropped in the course of lectures on that or any other subject; and the public laughed and clapped its hands. But anything like a complete summary of * Songs of Beligion and Life, t In Rogers's " Scottish Minstrel." The Good, True, and Beautiful 267 his views, always interesting, on this extremely interesting subject, must be sought in the book he published in 1858, ^^On Beauty: Three Discourses de- livered in the University of Edinburgh, with an exposition of the Doctrine of the Beautiful according to Plato.*' In this work he traced the British scepticism re- garding beauty to several causes : "1, The general irreligious and materialistic type of opinion dominant in this country during the last century, partly inherited from the court of Charles IT. and the low morality of the Cavaliers, and partly imported from France. 2. The character of the phUoso- pby of Locke, who had nothing of the ^sthetic element in his mental constitu- tion/' A third explanation specially concerned Scotland. "We had proclaimed a divorce,'' he said, "between religion and the fine arts, for no better reason than because their marriage had been cele- brated by the Pope." "We were, more- over, a very practical and utilitarian people. Our people were ignorant; our clergy were indifferent; our professors were cold ; our best men of culture lived 17 mtm feiiiiiiiM u 268 Professor BlacJde, under the freezing influence of the ' Edinburgh Review.' Thus Beauty was publicly butchered in the streets of the * Modern Athens' in the beginning of the eighteenth century, as heretics were wont to be burnt in Rome; and no man wept." The writer of such words and of such verses as we have just read naturally took a warm interest in the Chair of Fine Art established in his imiversity in 1879. Professor Baldwin Brown, in a public reference to this a few months ago, said that Blackie had lived to see some of the fruit of his labour, at any rate in the churches. And this brings us back from what, if the beautiful could be separated from the good and the true, would be a digression. In Blackie's healthy mind there was no such separation; he would allow no rupture of "the holy alliance between sweet sounds and a saintly life." With artistic exaggeration he declares, *' without any disparagement to Chalmers and other great masters of pulpit elo- quence, that no sermons ever preached so powerfully bring forth the fulness of I- \ The Good, True, and Beautiful. 259 devout emotion in the soul as the oratorios, anthems and hymns of our great musical composers." This feeling helped him to see good in « even the Puseyites," though These square caps Give their free right hand to the Pope — ^to us With grudging grace their left : men whose ^' genuflexions and grimaces " seemed to him but dry husks from which the juice was squeezed in bygone centuries. Writing many years ago from an English town, he says : — '^ I see nothing but zeal and propriety wherever I go ; and even the Puseyites, who are natural enemies to my free nature, show so much purity and truth that I cannot think a church ripe for destruction where so many various types of good stand forth. If the world can be saved by churches, established or dissenting, I think this country looks prosperous. But there are many things which churches cannot do ; and I confess I look for a new prophet who will write the economical, the philosophical, and the moral into one great whole, for the con- struction of which the materials are being f/ 260 Frofessor Blachie. i\ i now collected. However, the age is a, very good age, and the doctrine r >t J\ a bad doctrine, though it does not satisfy me. I can afford to live without having a perfectly correct theory of life." He had, what is far more to the purpose, two sources of inspiration: the Bible, " the book of my life," as he called it, and prayer, in which he engaged before every serious act of his life, '' not as a cold form, but as a fervid reality." These were ** extenuating circumstances " that few Scotsmen could set aside in judging John Stuart Blackie; and there was a third virtue which turned the scale in his favour with all but the dourest critics. A more striking proof of Blackie's catho- licity could hardly be conceived than his love for the Scottish Covenanters. One man, repelled by their gloomy creed and unlovely ways, might compel himself as an act of justice to admit their courage and stubborn consistency. Another, a hot partisan of the Covenant, might in the same way give a grudging recognition to the truths and beauties they trampled underfoot. Blackie had inherited Jacobite The Good, True, and Beautiful, 261 blood througli his Stuart ancestry and Cov- enanting blood through the Naismiths; and his enthusiasm was on both sides. We have heard his vehement condem- nation of the theological and aesthetical defects we inherit from these puritans. We must listen to his praise of their virtues, his bold defence of their, rudest methods, to his eager appreciation of the boons they conferred upon Scotland. Praise and blame came equally without stint and without partiality. With all his natural leaning towards the picturesque and anti-puritan side, he could declare that the true heroes in the great struggle between king and people were the Oovenanters and not the Cavaliers. The king lost his head— fools may whimper and whine ; But he lost it, believe me, by judgment divine. Our kings were the godly, the grey-plaided men, Who preached on the mountains and prayed in the glen. We met Mrs. Jenny Geddes in the last •chapter, A minister who once heard him fiing in her praise recalls the Professor's "-.^3»>«if -i.-jfci^«f-b.' **^■ail.'^^f^*?'.*•^ia.4^lL^*l*^''^ uT^^S^T". """»"• ""»" 262 Professor Blachie, epilogue: "She was quite right. The Pope himself would object to a religion being thrust down his throat I " A Pope with a sense of humour would at any rate enjoy that remark. There is no room here for a companion song to Jenny Geddes, " The Merry Ballad of Stock Geill." It is the story of a "papistical" image that set out on a procession through Edinburgh streets, but never came home again : " a merry gest that gave the Pope a shog/* when " we dashed his bones against the stones and his stump in flinders flew ! " There is one Covenanting ballad, however, in *^ Lyrical Poems " that must have a place here : — THE TWO MEEK MARGARETS. It fell on a day in the blooming month of May^ When the trees were greenly growing, That a captain grim went down to the brim O' the sea^ when the tide was flowing. Twa maidens he led, that captain grim, Wi' his red-coat loons behind him, Twa meek-faced maids, and he swai*e that he» In the salt sea-swell should bind them. The Ooody True, and BeautifuL 263 And a* the burgbers o£ Wigton town Game down full ead and cheerlesB, To see that ruthless captain drown Those maidens meek and fearless. O what had they done, these maidens meek, What crime all crimes ezoelling, That they should be staked on the ribbed sea-sand^ And drowned, where the tide was swelling P O wae*s me, wae ! but the truth I maun say ! Their crime was the crime of believing Not man, but God, when the last false Stuart His Popish plot was weaving. O spare them ! spare them ! thou captain grim I No ! No ! — to a stake he hath boimd them, Where the floods as they flow, and the waves as they grow, Shall soon be deepening round them. The one had threescore years and three ; Far out on the sand they bound her. Where the first dark flow of the waves as they grow- ls quickly swirling round her. The other was a maiden fresh and fair; More near to the land they bound her, That she might see by slow degree The grim waves creeping round her. O captain, spare that maiden grey, She's deep in the deepening water ! No, no — she's lifted her hand to pray, And the choking billow caught her ! 264 Professor Blackie. See, see, young maid, cried the captain grim. The wave shall soon ride o'er thee ! She's swamped in the brine, whose sin \va8 like thine; See that same fate befoi-e thee ! I see the Christ who hung on a tree When His life for sins He offered ; In one of His members, even He "With that meek maid hath suffered. captain, save that meek young maid ; She's a loyal farmer's daughter ! Well, well ! let her swear to good King James, And I'll hale her out of the water ! 1 will not swear to Popish James, But I pray for tho head of the nation, That he and all, both great and small. May know God's great salvation ! She spoke ; and lifted her hands to pray. And felt the greedy water. Deep and more deep, around her creep, Till the choking billow caught her. O Wigton, Wigton ! I'm wae to sing The truth o' this waesome story ; But God will sinners to judgment bring. And His saints shall reign in glory. With such horrors as this in his mind, who can wonder that Blackie's "Lines written at Magus Muir" became an ke The Good, True, and BeauU/ul. 265 apology foi the murderers of an arch- bishop : — Lament who will the surplice rent, And mitre trampled low ; I cannot think the blow misspent That felled our priestly foe. Who sent him here P A perjured king. His work P With churchman's art To bind young Freedom's mounting wing And crush a people's heart. # # So perish all who join the name Of Christ with tyranny I Prate not of law and lawyer's art ! When kingly sin is rife The law is in a people's heart That whets the needful knife. O Scotland ! O my country ! Thor. Through blood hast waded well ; JFrom glorious Bannockbum till now The tyrant hears his knell Bung from thy iron heart. And we. In lone rock-girdled glen. Or purple heath, erect and free, From harsh knife-bearing men Inherit peace. Lament who will The mitre trampled low — Not all are murderers who kill : The cause commends the blow. 266 Professor Blackie, A doubtful doctrine this, for easy times ; but the poet saw with the eyes of seventeenth-century Scotsmen, and felt the iron that had entered into their soul. As he put it in prose, writing to commend the project of a monument for Peden the Prophet, " There cannot be a doubt in the mind of any intelligent student of history that, as we owe our political independence to the valour and stout endurance of "Wallace and Bruce, so the rights of con- science were secured to us by the perse- vering efforts of the men who, from John Knox downwards, based our Scottish Pro- testantism, not on the ordinances of the monarch, but on the convictions of the people." The Peden Monument was inaugurated by the Professor on his visit to Cumnock in 1892, when he also made 9 pilgrimage to Richard Cameron's grave on the battlefield of Ayrsmoss, Nearly thirty years before he had been one of the chief speakers at the erection of an obelisk to mark the spot, in Sanquhar, where Cameron and his followers de- clared war against the Stuart dynasty in 1680. ap«l|M|iiWPil(«MI iM«{MW^ The Good, True, and Beautiful, 267 Far back in the story "we saw John Stuart Blackie, after mounting the pulpit stair, turn back without entering and come down again. This seems a con- venient place to say that he did stand in the pulpit after all, with his neck free from bands and his name from **the reverend." A volume of " Lay Sermons,'* published in 1881, he describes as origin- ating in a series of Sunday evening addresses which he gave to the Young Men's Association connected with Dr» Guthrie's congregation. The book con- tains, however, at least two discourses preached on Sunday evenings in St. David's Established Church, of which the Eev. Alexander Webster was minister. *'At a meeting of the Hellenic Club/*" Mr. Webster says, ^'Blackie made some kindly allusions to myself, and I in return said it was a great pity he was not a minister, for I was sure he could preach as well as most ministers. *Yes,' said he, *I think I could, and I don't mind trying in your church.' He did try, and his first sermon was on ^ The Politics of Christianity ' ; the second was on >l 268 Professor Blachie. ft ^ The Land Laws/ and a very racy discourse it was." His other subjects included " The •Creation," "The Jewish Sabbath," "Faith," "The Utilisation of Evil," '' The Dignity of Labour," " The Scottish •Covenanters," and ^^ Symbolism, Cere- monialism, Formalism, and the New Creature." From any or all of these might be quoted his now familiar views in bright and original setting ; but we must leave Blackie the Preacher. With Blackie the inspirer of preachers we have been dealing all along. Scotland has been often taught by him unawares through other lips. Here is one instance of a prompting more direct than that which came to many sermon-makers through his books. Some time ago a minister received from the Professor a ceries of texts, with a few " heads " and ^^versicles" to suggest the outline of possible sermons thereon. The texts themselves are very suggestive of the Professor's own way of thinking : — ^Judge not according to appearance, but judge a righteous judgment; Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low MMiii m ' , .LMiW The Good, True, and Beautiful. 269 estate ; " The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat " : When you are blamed as God blamed Adam, Blame yourself and not your madam ; « My brethren, be not many teachers; Praise the Lord with dance ; As a jewel of gold in a swine's mouth, so is a fair woman without discretion; Speaking evil of dignities ; Speaking the truth in Ioto ; Let every soul be subject to the higher powers ; Be not ye called Eabbi ! This account of Blackie as a teacher of religion cannot better be closed than by a prayer of his own — according to one who loved him much, " the sweetest and most pathetic thing he ever wrote " : — O for a heart from self set free, And doubt and fret and care, Light as a bird, instinct with glee. That fans the breezy air ! O for a mind whose virtue moulds All sensuous fair display, And, like a strong commander, holds A world of thoughts in sway ! ! ; ij w I 270 . Professor Blachie, O for an eye that's clear to see, A hand that waits on Fate, To pluck the ripe fruit from the tree. And never comes too late ! O for a life with firm- set root And breadth of leafy green. And flush of blooming wealth and fruit That glows with mellow sheen ! O for a deaf from sharp alarms And bitter memories free : A gentle death in Gk)d's own arms, Whose dear Son died for me ! I »M <( XX. SELF-CULT [JEE/' AND SOME OTHER BOOK£i. <( The pen always makes me serious/' said Blackie ; but it never made him dull. Few writ^ers have had the gift of treating at once so sunnily and so seriously important topics that are generally disfigured with gloom. Sir William Hamilton, who has been described as " knowing everything," wrote to Blackie in 1852, '' Your writings display, with much curious learning, remarkable originality and force." This judgment needs no discounting, though it was a testimonial. Blackie him- self said little of his literary pro- ductions; but his answer to a recent interviewer may be quoted: — «^0f my philological works the Horse Hellenicse and the ' Wise Men of Greece,' and my ^ Homer and the Iliad,' contain some of my best work; while in poetry .i MMii imiii iH. 272 Professor Blackie. the *Wise Men of Greece' and the 'Lays of the Highlands and Islands* seem to have pleased; but these things don't trouble me much ! " Most of his books have been already- mentioned and many of them laid under contribution in the telling of this story ; but several demand more notice. *^ Self- Culture " in particular refuses to be dis- missed in a summary fashion. Few of its companions had a very wide circle of readers ; but this book has run through twenty-four editions, not to speak of a shorthand version, in this country ; it has been well pirated in the United States; and it has been translated into French, German, Italian, Greek, — in fact almost every European language and I believe several others. The book was written as a holiday amusement in a summer month, and the Professor at first meant it for a trio of lectures to his students in Edinburgh. The students doubtless got most of its wisdom in the course of lectures on Greek literature; and the second thoughts of the author gained him a world-wide audience of students old and .L ft 8elf-CuUure/* and Other Booh. 273 young. The financial profit on this little book of ninety pages, the smallest of all his works, handsomely made up for the author's loss on his largest, the four- volume Homer. "The little book is really a wonder," the author wrote to a friend soon after its issue. ''Hath not Ood chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and the little books to take the breath out of the big ones ! " It was not for money he wrote, however. Excluding "Self-Culture" on the one hand and "Homer" on the other, the total sales of his books did not reach the cost of their produc- tion. He wrote, as he sang, because he must. He had a message to give, and he > 276 Professor Blachie, \ > I I " They tell me he's a great man," once said a caddie on St. Andrew's links, when Blackie was playing, *' but it takes a man with a great head to play at golf ! " This in parenthesis. The Professor resumes : '^In rainy weather, billiards is out of sight the best game. In comparison with this, cards are stupid, which at best, in whist, only exercise the memory. Chess can scarcely be called an amusement ; it is a study, and a severe brain exercise, which for a man of desultory mental activity may have a bracing virtue but to a systematic thinker can scarcely act as a relief." The game to which Blackie himself used to sit down when the day's work ended was backgammon. " To sip a cup of tea with Lucian or Aristophanes in one hand may be both pleasant and profitable ; but dinner is a more serious affair, and must be gone about with a devotion of the whole man." It should be " seasoned with agreeable conversation, but never mingled with severe cogitations or per- plexing problems." ''As for drink, I need not say that a glass of good beer or vidne is always <( 8elf 'Culture,*' and Other Books, 277 pleasant^ and in certain cases may even be necessary to stimulate digestion; but healthy young men can never require such stimulus ; and the more money that a poor Scotch student can spare from un- necessary and slippery luxuries^ such as drink and tobacco, the better. Honest water certainly has this merit, that it never made any man a sinner; and of whisky it may he said that, however bene- ficial it may be on a wet moor or on the top of a frosty Ben in the Highlands, when indulged in habitually it never made any man either fair or fat. He who abstains from it altogether will never die in a ditch, aad wiU always find a penny in his pocket to help himself and his friend in an emergency." This was as far as the Professor went in his later years as a temperance reformer. Forty-five years earlier his hostility to whisky was nothing short of fanatical, in his father's eyes, and this was one of the reasons why the young man was sent to Germany ; though Alexander Blackie himself had begun life with an aversion to drinking, and had acquired t n W 1 278 Professor Blackie, M the taste for wine as a social duty ! The Professor's will was of stubborn metal, in no danger from our drinking customs, and he did not always appreciate the magnitude of the danger to the average young man. ''Drinking songs," he says in his book on Highland literature, " are out of fashion nowadays, and perhaps with no great loss. It is difficult, however," he adds, " to conceive the typical Highlander without whisky. Like a German who does not drink beer, a Scotsman who takes no part in ecclesiastical politics, or an Englishman who does not read " The Times," he may be a very excellent person but cannot be accepted as a normal specimen of the type to which he belongs." That is the pity of it. Happily there has been a great change even in Scotland since the beginning of the century, when a minister would get drunk at a funeral. The book " Four Phases of Morals " was an expansion of four lectures de- livered in 1869 before the Royal In- (( Self-Culture,'* and Other Boohs. 279 Btitution in London^ and was dedicated to the president of that body, Sir Henry Holland. It has passed through two editions at home, but it has been of still greater use abroad. In Russia, for instance, it was translated soon after its first appearance, and was for many years very popular among students and such reading public as there is ; but its career was cut short by administrative order. Mr, Jaakoff Prelooker, formerly a State teacher in Odessa, has told the story. He was announced to lecture on "The Religion of Count Tolstoi** in Old Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, a couple of years ago ; and Professor Blackie, who had introduced and even entertained Prince Krapotkin in 1886, had readily con- sented to preside. The Russian began by saying he was particularly glad to meet the author of a book which had been condenmed to an auto-da-f4 by the same spirit that had driven him, the lecturer, out of his native land. Up sprang the chairman, caught the lecturer by his shoulders, and began to shake him, ex- claiming, "Dear me, dear me I What ,. : 280 Professor Blachie. book have they interdicted ? " It appeared that in 1886, '^when the reactionary policy of the late Tsar took a decided turn for the worse, it was found that the ' Four Phases of Morals ' were not based on Greek orthodox ethics and did lot even contain any reference to them. And so the poor book was suppressed by the censorship and condemned to an auto-da-fd along with the works of J. S. Mill," Blackie's old friend and antagonist, '' and a number of similar works. Apparently," Mr. Prelooker says, " the author of ^ Four Phases ' was neither aware of the popu- larity of his work in Russia nor of its final suppression there. >» Next to Self-Culture, Blackie's Life of Robert Burns has had a larger circulation than any of his other works. In a letter written at the end of 1887 the Professor says : ** I am just putting through the press a Life of Bums for the * Great "Writers ' series, which I hope will be found sympathetic and equitable, and free from the extremes of patriotic idol wor- ship and Pharisaic sourfacedness." This (( Self 'Culture,'* and Other Boohs, 281 was the only book Blackie ever wrote to order. ^*I was asked to do it," he told an interviewer^ last year, ** and at first I refused, for I can never do work to order. I have never done it. But then I thought a little, and I said to myself : There are two kinds of persons who may write that life — ^first, the blind hero-worshipper, who will write a useless blatant kind of work, and then another much worse person who will play the self-righteous moralist with Bums, and probably look at him through his own myopic lenses . I felt that I under- stood Bums, and consented, feeling that I could find the medium course." The poet, as the Professor once said, *' knew very well how to preach, but his practice was a most miserable performance." The biographer was careful to avoid an exaggeration of praise even when looking at Burns as a poet. Nothing, he said, could be a greater mistake than to imagine that Burns was the creator of the lyrical art of his country. "The most common Scottish song-book is studded over with songs of first-rate excellence * For the " English Illustrated Magazine." d II I 282 Professor Blackie, which derive no inspiration from Bums, and which Bums, with the loftiest flight of his genius, could not have surpassed; " * some of which, mdeed, he could not have equalled. In 1883, the year after his retirement from the University, Blackie returned to that study of German literature which had brought him his early fame, and which he had never altogether abandoned. He now published " The Wisdom of Goethe," a selection of passages from the poet's writings, translated, classified, and px'e- faced by an estimate of the poet's character. The editor's object was '^to impress on young men with all seriousness " and on authority which they would respect " that life, though a pleasant thing, is no joke ; and that, if they will go to sea without chart, compass, or pilot, they have a fair chance to be wrecked." The personal imperfections of the authority in question his Scottish admirer does not hide, though he does explain and extenuate. This * Preface to *• Minstrelsy of the Merse ; the Poets and Poetry of Berwickshire." 1893. T^ €( Self-Culture/' and Other Boohs. 283 '* manual of wise words for guidance in fruitful action and sound thinking" is dedicated " to the Eev. Walter Chalmers Smith, D.D., a large-hearted preacher, a generous theologian, and a healthy-minded poet,*' by *^ his old friend the editor." Blackie as a "Scotch reviewer" we have known in the early days, and we have seen him modestly thankful that he had not to go on magazine-writing for a liveli- hood. But he never deserted the maga- zines for long. They were a necessary channel of communication with the great public to whom the prophet was sent. The main stream of his message over- flowed from book and lecture, to form articles in the magazines, letters to the newspapers, and sonnets for both. Mr. Blackwood, in a farewell article last April, recalled the fact that John Stuart Blackie had been a contributor to the pages of " Maga " since 1832. He was ** the oldest contributor, the faithfullest friend, by whom the tradition of the ^ Maga ' of the beginning of the century was handed on to the present day." " He ■-i 284 Professor Blachie. I i^ would come in like a fresh breeze into the old Saloon, his voice coming before him, perhaps with a ' Hallo ! ' and stir of greeting — ^perhaps with an old song: anyhow and always the most agreeable interruption." ^^ Perhaps," Mr. Blackwood says, in a tone excusably doubtful, **it is a great deal better that we should have professors who never heard of Ambrose's — ^nay, that there should be no Ambrose's, no Noctes, no wild talk or laughter such as used to echo over half the world : but only tea- drinking and Greek plays, and things elegant and classical and adapted to the taste of a more refined generation." '' We liked something that could stand sturdily against the wind which, alas ! is too fond of Edinburgh — ^fronting the very East with a laugh and a shout, not blown off Southward with all its academic skirts blowing before it, as soon as the moment of relief comes." XXI. ENGLISH EXCURSIONS. 1 1 Blackie's career as a public lecturer dates from the first half of the century. The burst of platform activity that followed his release from class -room duties in 1882 was only the culmination of an old habit, restrained at first by diffidence and always by conflicting duties. Five years before he left Aberdeen we hear of him refusing an invitation to speak at the Watt festival in Dundee. " I might make a bad speech after all," he wrote. " A man should never travel seventy miles unless he is sure of making a good speech, and my speaking depends generally so much on the impulse of the moment that I cannot calculate on this." " The most telling things I do," he once remarked, " are acci- dental." Another invitation to Dundee next year was accepted, but he would not promise to speak about any particular i if li 286 Professor Blachie, I' ! ' '■■■ \ f: ^ If . i topic. " If I were to foreclose myself at present by fixing a subject, I might have cause to repent it afterwards," he said ; and he added, " I never expected you to pay my expenses, but as the professors of Marischal College are not remarkable for wealth, it were affectation in me to reject the offer when made." The time came when institutions could afford to offer his expenses and a good deal more, regardless of subjects. It came to be an understood thing that Blackie might do as he liked with his subject. If he lec- tured on education he was sure to enter- tain the audience with a dozen digressions on matters more or less closely related, such as Scottish song or the politics of a tiger. If he lectured on Scottish song, digres- sions on education were equally certain. It is a mistake to suppose that he never prepared his discourses. He would have the various ^* heads" scrawled across a sheet of foolscap, in his pocket if not in his hand ; and if the sudden digressions were more slashing the considered sen- tences were not less pungent and epigram- matic. Whatever he said, his way of ni English "Excursions, 287 saying it was unique. The one thing his audience knew they might expect was the unexpected ; and an element of personal risk always lent excitement to the occa- sion. If the Professor did not stop before a young lady as he strode up and down the platform^ and demand an answer to some question he had just thrown out, he would at least give the chairman a shaking or flourish a staff within an inch of his head. In England as well as in Scotland the Professor's lectures were in great demand. John Bull heard himself de- nounced as an insolent monster, and only cheered. Where Blackie went the air seemed to freshen and the clouds to lift. The dis- tinction of his presence, the kindly keenness of his tongue, redeemed any London draw- ing-room from the commonplace. Mr. Blackwood has this reminiscence : — ^^ We remember once his entrance into the large dim dining-room of the Deanery at West- minster, in the midst of a decorous party, faintly literary, in the days of Dean Stanley — who, as is well known, took Scotland under his protection generally— 288 Professor Blackie, -f : # where Blackie's sudden appearance was like a fresh breeze, the very atmosphere of the open day amid the subdued tones of the place." One of the Professor's London letters shows him in the more distant company of another Broad Churchman : — '^ We heard Maurice last Sunday at Lincoln's Inn — very beautiful aud pious, and harmoniously thoughtful, but not great or effective. There seems to be a kind of choking gas in the English Church which prevents even superior men from using the bellows of their lungs in a natural way." This reminds one of Blackie's eulogy upon the Scottish pulpit, in his famous speech at the Wallace Monument stone-laying. " In the English pulpit," he said, by way of contrast, " the natural vigour and power of sturdy John Bull seldom appears ; your Anglican preacher, in fact, does not preach — he reads from a paper, and that in as tame and toothless a style as possible, like some lady's dog in a drawing-room, so exceedingly well-bred that it can neither bark nor bite and is utterly useless as a watch. But in Scotland we preach with English Excursions, 280 » our whole hearts and from lusty lungs, as well as from a '* rich variety of literary talent." One of the friends whom Blackie always went to see in London was Thomas Carlyle. This paragraph occurs in a letter dated May 14, and written in 1874, but the Professor habitually left out the year : — " I paid a flying visit last night to the Chelsea prophet. I found him flash- ing about in his usual style of hilarious savagery and one-sided wisdom, and was fain to shelter myself against his emphatic denunciations of all modem ideas under the triple shield of Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Hegel. His hand shakes so now that he can write only in pencil. Otherwise he is quite well. To-morrow," adds the peripatetic Professor, **I leave for Oxford, Gloucester, Wales, and Dublin." Carlyle was one of the few men with whom Blackie found it hard to get a fair share of the conversation. One Sunday night he went to Chelsea resolved to have his say. ^^I contrived," he says in a published interview,* "by starting as • In "The Strand Magazine." 19 290 Professor Blackie, )1 ' "^ 80on as I got into the room^ to open the' conversation, and went on from topic to topic till they mounted to a dozen; but to none of my themes would my stout old friend give an assenting reply. At last in desperation I shouted out, * Very well, I think you've come to " The Ever- lasting No," so you and I can't agree.' Off I went ; but we remained good friends for all that." *'One night I shook him — ^yes, shook him. His poor wife used to sit there and never speak. I was in his room on this particular Sunday, and his wife particularly wanted to say something. But there was not the smallest chance. I got up, took hold of him, and giving him a good shaking, cried, ^ Let your wife speak, you monster ! ' ; but for all that he wouldn't." '^ He was hard-hearted and hated sinners. He called here " in Edinburgh ^' once, just when the great noise was going on about the convicts being underfed. He began talking about them. ' Puir fellows I Puir fellows ! ' he said ; ' give them brown soup and a footstool, and kick them to the devil.' " English Excursions, 291 It was to Carlyle that Blackie naturally inscribed the "War Songs of the Ger- mans." "Mj old and esteemed friend," the Professor wrote in his dedication, *' you and I have had many stiff battles about not a few things ; but in two points I have always felt that we are at one — in a stern love of justice and a hearty de- testation of all sickly sentiment;" and have arrived by independent roads at the same conclusion on the political relations of France and Germany, A letter written to his sister in 1864, describing a visit to Alfred Tennyson at Farringford, may be given with little abbreviation. "He is a big strong- built fellow," the Professor writes of the poet, "dark and sallow, more like a Spanish captain of privateers or an Italian brigand than like a hilarious John Bull blushing with health and activity and port wine; with a grand Ionian head and Herculean shoulders. In manners he is plain, simple, natural, and rather quiet. He is no match for me in play of tongue, and I presume a hundred small wits from town will dominate over IT 292 Trofeesor Blachie, him in this way; but what he says is significant, and he gives you an impres- sion of thorough honesty, thoughtfulness, and truthfulness. He has the common faults of the poetic temperament : that is, he is apt to be moody, and sometimes makes himself miserable with odioua trifles which a practical man would skip over. He has spent £10,000 (he ought ta be specially grateful to Heaven that being^ a poet he ever had it to spend) in buying- up the ground around him to prevent tasteless shopkeepers and Cockneys from blocking up his beautiful views. Still, he is sadly annoyed with the ungraceful boxes which smaF shopkeepers who have made a little money put up at his very gates — certainly the plainest little tasteless small piles of brick that I have ever seen, and peculiarly inappropriate to the green Isle of Wight and leafy Freshwater. His wife is a delicate and lovable but some- what frail flower; but his children are princes, with the mo&t gentlemanly grace of limb, the finest features, the most open expression and the grandest Apollo-like locks, which, however, imperious custom English Excursions, 293 at public schools mil certainly cause to «uffer speedy amputation. Hitherto they have been educated at home. I have nothing more to say except this — ^that Tennyson would have been a much happier man if he had some business in the world besides being a poet. He feeds too much on himself^ wants variety and action^ and is apt to waste time in fastidious trifling. Scott and Burns re- {)resent what appears to me a much more healthy and useful type of poetry — though of course I estimate Tennyson, in his peculiar line, very highly." Six yea>rs later, Blackie was in London «peaking at the anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, of which corporation he was a member ; and he was put up to propose a toast '^ coupled with the name of Tom Taylor." " Tom Taylor, and not Thomas Taylor, Esq.," observed the Pro- fessor. ''His name is known far and wide. Bat I am a poor uncultivated un-