He led the way to the entrance hall whose walls were hung with paintings, engravings, photographs, old prints. A bust of "Christopher North" occupied a pedestal at the foot of the stairs. "And there's Nolly," sang the Professor, pointing to an oil likeness of Cromwell. We would take a step or two, and then pause to look at a portrait, while my energetic host threw out an explanatory phrase whimsically abbreviating the names of the men he liked best. "Tom," said he, "Tom Carlyle, a tyrannical genius who did a lot of good in a hard way. Bobbie," and he stopped before a portrait of Burns, "Bobbie was a ploughman, but the artist here made him a dandy, and he never was that." We must have stopped twenty times on the first flight of stairs, and at each pause the old man would shoot a remark. At the drawing-room door he paused again, exclaiming: "Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Apostle Paul—these are my heroes!"
The drawing-room was a national, or rather an international portrait gallery in little. We began with a line of faces at one end of which was Goethe, at the other end Bunsen. There were portraits everywhere, on the walls, in the chairs, on the tables; some of them rested on the floor. Sir Henry Irving as Becket had a chair. Blackie stopped in front of him. "That's a man who has done a great work," said he. "The people require amusement, and Irving has amused them nobly. Ah, you see Mary Anderson over there. A marvellous sweet woman. Scott's next to her on that wall, now. Ah, no, I never saw him. I wish I had known him. 'Green grow the rushes, O!' Here are some preachers—Chalmers, John Knox, Guthrie, Norman Macleod, Cardinal Manning. Ye 'll think it a queer assortment, maybe, John Knox and Manning. Well, the five o' them were men, man, men!"
"Dear, dear, who has done this thing?" he cried, as if startled. We stood before an easel which held a portrait of himself. An engraving of Gladstone stood beneath, on the floor. "Wrong! It's the wrong order," said he. "We must change it. Down goes Blackie; up goes Gladdy. He belongs above me." He suited the action to the word and shifted the portraits.
Presently we marched up another flight of stairs to his study, which consisted of three connecting rooms lined with books. "This is where I live," he said. "Seven thousand volumes hereabout. See the Greek here, here, everywhere. Man, man, Greek is the only living bridge between the present and the past!"
Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from Athens, he continued, "Some folks call Greek a dead language. Poor souls! They don't know any better. These things should interest you. They are fresh from Athens; not a week old." And then he read aloud from them, a bit of politics, an advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if to show that one touch of shopping makes the whole world kin. "But no heroes, man, no heroes! There's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Apostle Paul!"
We sat awhile in the study, and Blackie "surveyed mankind from China to Peru" in lightning flashes. He always left one panting behind, breathless, trying to keep pace with his rushing thoughts. He had done that sort of thing all his teaching life, and that was why men said they learned but little Greek from him, but absorbed streams of wisdom. They would say that when teaching, he never stuck to his text. The best you could do was quietly to watch and listen, remember and apply. After all, that was what he wanted men to do—to learn to teach themselves.
There are men, very distinguished men, who are much more easily described than John Stuart Blackie. What he said of the portrait painter is equally true of the portrait writer. I might borrow his own phrase and say that there was the preacher, there was the teacher, the patriot, the man of merry soul; and there was the Blackie of odd moments who was all these in one, as I saw him, with straw hat, blue dressing-robe, and trailing red sash. If I picture him as I saw him then, going about the house in his queer gear and genially nicknaming great folk in the intervals of snatches of song, you are not to think of him as merely an eccentric and entertaining old gentleman. He was very much at his ease, and he made me feel happily so. He was natural man without a pose, without an affectation. He never posed. He did not care what others thought or said about him, what he cared for was what they thought and said about his subject, whatever that might be—country, or religion, or song—and it all led to manliness. "Be a man! Be God's man!" That was the burden of his teaching, preaching, writing, scholarship, philosophy, religion. He wrought great things for the manhood of Scotland.
I remember his coming to Glasgow one night while I visited there. He lectured for some society of young men. His theme was Love. When he had finished, a minister jumped up and shouted this invitation:
"Put that into a sermon, sir, and come and preach it to us next Sabbath. A guinea and a bed!"