"What?" roared Blackie. "D'ye think I'd preach the Gospel for money? I 'll preach it for nothing if ye 'll come and listen!"
Sometimes they said he was a droll person who went about Scotland cracking jokes. And I have heard them say that he "played too much to the gallery." But the men who said those things liked their sermons delivered by long-faced folk, and wanted their lectures peppered with piety. They had their suspicions of laughter. Blackie bubbled over with good spirits. Others might make the public sigh and weep; he knew that it is better to make them laugh; that if you make them "feel good" they will like you well enough to listen to what you have to say and think about it. As for "playing to the gallery" one has only to recall Blackie's life-long admonitions to Democracy in order to see the error of that assumption.
The best word-picture of John Stuart Blackie was unknown to the public at the time of which I write. It was unknown even to Blackie himself at that time. It was written by one of his pupils, Robert W. Barbour, a brilliant and scholarly man. His "Letters, Poems, and Pensées" appeared subsequently in a volume edited by Professor Drummond, a memorial volume circulated privately. It was with Professor Drummond's permission that I published, years ago, an extract from one of Barbour's letters. Barbour, when it was written, was in charge of a school somewhere in the Highlands. One day his old master, Blackie, came up from Edinburgh for a blow of the mountain air and a visit to Barbour, who thus described the occasion:
"Then follow minutes of Elysium, were life only the Academy, and the world made for students and Professors! I hear Professor Blackie talk of foreign travel, of the pictures it gives to hang forever in one's after-study; and as the brave old snowy head falls back against the claret of the sofa, he brings me out, one by one, the pictures—Rome, Florence, Milan, Gottingen—latest hung therein.
"After dinner the Professor and I have an hour and a half's stroll to the school, while I drink in the delightful desultoriness of his talk, and try to stop just when he does—which is not always easy; for you cannot tell why this crystus should seize his fancy, or that 'potentilla' interrupt his thought. But it only breaks to flower forth again more beautiful, as he talks first of Italy, its grace we lack so in Scotland, its lack of sternness we could so well supply; its few great hearts alive and active, its multitudes asleep and slow; then of its new literature; then the political parties; then what poets should do now, not to be so sundered from their time as Browning (who walked these roads), nor so bound to the mere accident of rhyme. Let poets write short, sympathetic lives of men; let them write history, not stories.
"And so we come to the school where the Professor has half an hour of cross-questioning the best scholar, to the advantage of the whole school; and such happy definitions, and such funny 'pokes' with the mind and the walking-stick, and such instructive similes and amusing information. They are rather annoyed when I tell them how great a man my master is. Then they sing to him in good Scotch to his heart's desire....
"At last he rises, and asking them something in a Gaelic too good, or bad, or both (or rather book-born), to be understanded of them, he breaks into a beautiful Gaelic lament, while the whole little audience stands open-mouthed, eyed, and eared, and hardly recovers to whisper 'Good-bye, sir', ere he and I are out into the air again.
"I apologise for having given him such little work for so long, and he hums out something in German, which he breaks half sternly to say: 'There are four things a man must love—children, flowers, woman,' and, must I say it? 'wine.' He went on to tell me how hateful and horrible a nature Napoleon's always had seemed to him. Napoleon said: 'I love nothing, I love not woman, I love not dice, I love not wine, I love not politics.'