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In the spring of 1832 John
Blackie established himself in Edinburgh, and began to read for the Scottish
Bar. His lodgings were in Lauriston during the first year of his legal
studies, but later he removed to more convenient quarters in Dublin Street.
His wooing of the legal muse was both distasteful and unsuccessful in the
preliminary stages. He found Bell and Erskine the driest and least
intelligible of reading. Gifted and brilliant, his head a very beehive of
ambitious fancies, theories, and reforms in active competition with
sentiment, and all clamorous for articulate expression, he felt stupefied in
the presence of the stereotyped and ancient Themis. To persevere at all
needed a courage stimulated by intervals of dalliance with the more
attractive Muses. But he made manful efforts, and sought admission into a
lawyer's office, that he might the better conquer the dull terminology of
the law.
The gentleman who helped him
through the perplexities of bonds and bills was a Mr Alexander, a Writer to
the Signet, well versed in their dreary details. His first valuable lesson
was to reduce his pupil to a salutary sense of his own ignorance. This
incident is told in the "Notes" :-
I remember shortly after
I entered his office he brought me in a bundle of law papers, and
ordered me to read them and give a legal opinion on the merits of the
case. I did so with great speed, took my view with decision, and on
being asked, gave a distinct deliverance that the law of the case was
quite clear—there could not possibly he two opinions on the point." This
was exactly the kind of answer that he expected, so, looking me sharply
in the face, lie said "Mr Blackie, whenever I hear a young advocate
declare that there is no difficulty in the case, I have no difficulty in
declaring that he knows nothing about his business."
This plain speaking was most
wholesome for the head a little turned by attainments and speculations which
were unusual in the Edinburgh of that time, and which gained for him not
merely a very marked social success, but also the auguries of experienced
seniors that he would achieve a distinguished career. So he set himself to
work to copy papers and to learn slowly and painfully the alphabet of legal
lore. His letters home
during the three years which belong to this stage speak to his repugnance
for the study of law; and one written to Mr Anderson of Banchory in the
autumn of 1832 gave that wise friend some reason to fear that his
perseverance would give way. Mr Anderson wrote on November 5 :-
I sincerely hope the knot
is tied, which will never be loosed, unless by what you would call an
inevitable fate— I, Providence—so that it may not be said in your
biography (and I doubt not, if you adhere to the pursuit of knowledge
and wisdom, you will yet have a biographer). In 1832 he resolved upon
devoting himself to law as a profession, but soon gave up the pursuit."
You may yet be the Lord Advocate, and I—grown stiff with age—may be your
humble suitor for a Hebrew Professorship in Aberdeen or St Andrews. But
without joke, I am glad you have fixed upon what opens to you a career
of honourable and useful employment. You will experience, I doubt not,
that man fulfils the conditions of a happy existence only when actively
employed in the duties of life. And, my dear sir, supposing you attain
every worldly object upon which the powers of humanity are fitted to
exercise themselves, still, believe me, there would exist an aching void
which only the supernatural, the perfect and the infinite, God and
heaven, could fill. Though I scarce expect that you and I should be at
one on religious subjects, yet I cannot help expressing my great anxiety
that on the creed, scanty as it may be, which you allow, you should lay
fast hold. "Keep it, for it is thy life."
In the few letters which
remain of this time, John Blackie can scarcely be said to have gratified the
passion of his family for details. Even the pleasant social life to which
his evenings were devoted is dismissed with mere dates and addresses; but we
gather from this meagre record that he dined out nearly every evening, and
that amongst his hosts were Sir William Hamilton, Professor Wilson, Mr
Blackwood, Mr Wyld, Mr Bell, and other citizens of note. In a letter to his
sister Christina he describes in turn a bevy of her special friends in
Edinburgh, emphasising their graces and gifts as they appear to him, and his
criticisms indicate his decided preference for a calm and stately deportment
in women rather than for lively and varied manners. He was still very
sensitive to feminine charm, but fluttered from one attractive lady to
another, comparing all with his ideal and even with the half-forgotten
Clotilda at Rome, and finding all short of perfection.
We come on the traces of genial suppers with his
fellow-students for the Bar, when rousing talk and song sped the hours to
midnight, and when all who could contributed their own humours, declaimed or
sung. For one of these occasions he prepared his "Give a Fee," and sang it
to the tune of "Buy a Broom," with a great consensus of mind and voice in
the ringing chorus. It is too long for full quotation, but the first stanza
may be given:- "O
listen, ye bankers and merchants and doctors all;
O listen, ye old wealthy nabobs, to me;
O listen, ye bishops and deans and tithe-proctors all,
And give to a poor starving lawyer a fee.
Give a fee, give a fee, give a fee;
And give to a poor starving lawyer a fee.
Chorus. O my first fee, my first fee, my first
fee;
O when wilt thou tinkle so sweet to my ear?
Months I wait, years I wait,
But all in vain I wait;
O my dear first fee, when wilt thou appear?"
But in spite of the acceptance which he enjoyed
in Edinburgh at one of its most brilliant social epochs, when its claims to
be called the Modern Athens rested far more on its attitude towards art and
literature, on the oratory of its platforms and the sparkling talk of its
dinner-tables, than on the buildings which imitate remotely the perfect
structures of the ancient capital of Greece, he was deeply dissatisfied with
his life and its issues. In a letter to his sister written early in 1833 he
says:-
I have been lately very
much discontented with myself and the superficial halfness of my own
attainments. I feel, too, a great disproportion between my ideas of what
should be done and what I am doing. I hope this crisis will soon be
over. I have made an irrevocable vow to do nothing by halves, and I long
with an unquenchable longing to escape from my present state of
intellectual minority.
It was a crisis common to all
honest men, who, having realities in view and not mere seeming, are
discountenanced again and again, when they make up their accounts, to find
that fractions and not integers are the stuff of which the sum of their best
efforts is composed. The integer is reached at last, but seldom shows itself
wholly in the life which ends by fulfilling it. The fractions are for us,
the integers go into the keeping of God, who makes the just spirit perfect.
The great effort of the year 1833 was the
translation of Goethe's 'Faust.' John Blackie spent much of his leisure in
the Advocates' Library, consulting old books on the black art, and making
extracts from them for the notes appended to his translation. Sir William
Hamilton, Professor Wilson, and the poet "Delta" took helpful interest in
the work, and directed his attention to earlier renderings of the great
romantic tragedy by Leveson Gower, by Hayward, and by Syrne. He revised his
own translation, carefully comparing it with these, but retaining the
robuster forms into which 'his mind moulded the scenes meant to be plainly
expressed. He was less, occupied with finding verbal equivalents for the
parts than with offering a fresh and living presentment of the whole. In the
Preface he stated the principle on which he translated the poem :-
The great principle on
which the excellence of a poetical translation depends seems to be, that
it should not be a mere transposing, but a recasting of the original. On
this principle it has been my first and chief endeavour to make my
translation spirited,—to seize, if possible, the very soul and living
power of the German, rather than to give a careful and anxious
transcription of every individual line or every minute expression.
His researches in the
Advocates' Library gave him a store of material concerning the historical
basis of Faust,' of which he made good use in the introduction, appending to
his explanatory remarks a sketch of the plan and the moral of Goethe's
masterpiece, and giving his reasons for confining the translation to the
First Part. He considered that the Second Part, or sequel, instead of being
necessary for the harmonious development of the first, was a disturbing and
incongruous afterthought, and infringed upon the unity and deep significance
of the drama.
The translation, accompanied
by notes and preliminary remarks, was placed in Messrs Black- wood's hands
towards the end of the year, and appeared in print in the February of 1834.
Its success, as a piece of excellent literary
work, was marked. It had faults of style, and occasionally failed in
accuracy of rendering. Acting upon his principle of recasting the original,
he had omitted here and there a phrase; had given some essentially German
thought a form suited to home circulation, but inadequate to its character;
had failed perhaps to find an English equivalent for some sturdy and
foreshortened utterance, and had weakened it in elongation. But it must be
remembered that English was the language which he had studied least, and
that his very mode of thought was German, since to the Germans he owed the
development of his power of independent thinking, —a process which, before
he went to Gottingen, was a mere confused brooding over the empirical dicta
of others. Criticism he
received in plenty from friends, who, enamoured of Byron, revolted against
Goethe's calm presentment of the conflict between good and evil in man, and
of the paradoxes which it involved, preferring Byron's revolt, not against
evil, but against suffering - a revolt to which his impassioned verse lends
a lurid splendour blinding and baleful to this day. But these friends were
not critical of his work, but jealous of his preference for Faust to
Manfred, and all agreed in praising the spirit and impressiveness of his
translation. Of its truthfulness few of these friendly critics were in a
position to judge, but he received a letter from Thomas Carlyle, who had
already given to the world his 'Life. of Schiller,' and whose deep knowledge
of German literature made the words of appreciation with which he endorsed
John Blackie's translation of virtue to seal its worth. This letter is too
interesting to omit :-
CRAIGENPUTTOCK, 28th April
1834. MY DEAR
SIR,—I must no longer delay to thank you for the welcome present of your
'Faust,' the more welcome from your kind manner of bestowing it. I have
been so busy that time for a patient comparison with the original would
never yet offer itself; meanwhile, in look- ing over your book many
spirited passages have struck me; and as yet only one error: the vague
couplet, Die Gegenwart von einen braven Knaben; in which it is much
easier to sV that you and others are wrong than who or what is right. I
advised Hayward to make it in his second edition: "The present time by
(in the hands of) a fellow of ability," but that also only satisfies me
on the ground that with Goethe himself rhyme would sometimes have its
way. For rhymes the
rudder are of verses,
With which like ships they steer their courses.
The newspapers, I perceive, acknowledge your
merits and endeavours in a hearty style; which is all one can expect of
criticism at present. Let us hope your labours in the German vineyard,
which has much lack of honest hands, are but beginning yet, and will
lead you to richer and richer results.
Of your Preface and prose notes I can speak
deliberately and in terms of great commendation. There is a spirit of
openness, of free recognition and appropriation, which I love much,
which I reckon far more precious than any specialty of talent or
acquired skill, inasmuch as that is the root of all talent and all
skill. Keep an "open sense," an eye for the "Offlne Geheimniss," which
so few discern ! With this much is possible, without it as good as
nothing. For the
rest, that I must dissent from you somewhat both in regard to the First
and the Second Part of 'Faust' is but a small matter. We agree in
spirit; this itself is an agreement to let each take his own way in
details. Could you but have as much tolerance for me in this new heresy,
which I, alas! feel growing upon me of late years, that 'Faust' is
intrinsically but a small poem, perhaps the smallest of Goethe's main
works; recommending itself to the sorrow-struck, sceptical feeling of
these times, but for Time at large of very limited value! Such, I
profess not without reluctance, is the sentiment that has long breathed
in me; moreover, of the two I find considerably more meaning in the
Second Part! Favete linguis. At the same time I can well enter into your
enthusiasm, and again read 'Faust' along with you like a new Apocalypse,
for in that way I read it once already. Ten years hence you shall tell
me how it is. We
are leaving this boggy Patmos, and getting under way for London. It will
give me true pleasure to hear of you; to hear that you advance
successfully in all kinds of well-doing. There is no young literary man
about Edinburgh from whom more is to be expected. When you come
southward, you will see us? Do not fail if you would please us.—AV, ith
the heartiest good wishes and thanks, I remain always, my dear sir,
faithfully yours,
THOMAS CARLYLE.
It appears from this letter
that John Blackie had already made the acquaintance of Mr and Mrs Carlyle,
and we gather from his correspondence with Mr Jonathan Bell that during
their stay in Edinburgh in 1833 he had spent more than one evening with
them. This translation
of 'Faust' took its place as the best and most truthful rendering of the
poem hitherto made public, but later it was superseded by Sir Theodore
Martin's version, which John Blackie himself considered better than his own.
George Henry Lewes, however, ranked the earlier translation highly, and used
it in the passages from 'Faust' which he quoted in his 'Life of Goethe.' He
says: "I shall generally follow Blackie's translation. Of the poetical
translations it is the best and closest I have seen, and it has valuable
notes." His absorption
with Goethe's poem, and with the researches necessary for its elucidation,
brought about an inevitable access of fatigue and temporary distaste to the
whole subject, and we find that he turned for a time to a poet of very
different temper, to regain from him that equilibrium of mind and spirit,
maintained on the one hand by a wide and generous outlook upon life, on the
other by stern reflection and self-examination. This poet was William
Wordsworth, and for some years John Blackie found his pure and introspective
teaching of power to aid his own study of the forces which he found within
himself, and which it was a main endeavour to marshal in practicable order
for active service. The language, too, of the Lake poet impressed him with
its chosen and delicate fitness, and in view of his need of English
influences, he sought to learn from it all that it could yield of help. But
the difference between the disciple and the teacher was too great, for,
coupled with the tendency to introspection which lie had in common with
Wordsworth, John Blackie had an imperious impulse to know and be known of
his fellow-men. He says in the "Notes":—
As richness and variety
of life opened upon me, I found that the great laker, though the first
of moral teachers among his own green hills, was narrow and one-sided,
and infected strongly with that moral egoism that no persons can escape
who live mainly from within, and who can see nothing in nature or art
without impressing on it their own engrossing idiosyncrasy. Wordsworth
was too much of a preacher for my idea of a wise poet; he sympathised
with man rather than with men. He never could get quit of himself and
his own philosophical position. For this reason, after a while, I was
obliged to discard him, as I had ever found my greatest improvement to
arise from a thorough going out of my natural groove, and receiving into
my life as much as possible of the lives and characters of others.
During the first half of 1834
he set himself with desperate industry to the study of law. It was the last
year of the three for which his father had made provision, and the crisis
was rapidly approaching which should set him face to face with that ruthless
but most wholesome test of worth, the capacity to earn his daily bread. He
was determined, when the probationary years were at an end, to stand the
test, but he knew by this time that Law would hardly prove for him a fount
of perennial supply. This conviction was no fruit of idleness, for he left
nothing undone which could commend him to the notice of his seniors, or
could fit and polish his powers.
We find him in this year a member of the
Speculative and Juridical Societies, which form the nursing-grounds of
Scottish oratory, forensic and political. The free controversy of the
Speculative, whose members are chiefly young lawyers in training for their
profession, invigorates and concentrates both thought and utterance, and has
given to many a public speaker the valuable lessons of reserve and emphasis
which made his speeches weighty in later life. About 1834 a group of
youthful stalwarts pitted minds and lungs against each other in lively
rhetorical contest. They were men destined to fill the highest seats of law
and learning in Scotland, and some of them to achieve a wider fame than
belonged to Bar and Bench at home.
William Aytoun, John Gordon, Edward Hors- man,
James Moncreiff, and Archibald Campbell Swinton were the leaders of this
group. The two first belonged to the little court of wits and poets over
which Christopher North so royally presided. They were soon to become his
sons-in-law, and were well inoculated with all his enthusiasms, real and
robust as well as purely romantic. They brought into the arena not only the
caustic and somewhat reckless humour of their circle, but also its wealth of
allusion and play of wit, its grace of impromptu eloquence, that
indescribable quality mingled of romance and good sense, which was its
cachet. Of the two, Gordon was the more finished orator, and his wit was
less sarcastic than that of Aytoun, who spoke seldom, but gave evidence when
he did so of powers which his diffidence restrained from reaching their
proper distinction. These two formed the formidable section of the audience
for a new and untried speaker; but there were other men less varied mentally
and less original, but careful and clear as speakers, and less inclined,
because perhaps less able, to swoop down upon the blunders and inadequacies
of their opponents. Such were Moncreiff and Swinton. Moncreiff had
considerable weight in the Speculative, having mastered the manner of public
speaking so far that his appearances were always successful, and in later
lif, when Lord Advocate, speaking with effect and dignity in the House of
Commons. John Blackie
felt the difficulty of taking a worthy place amongst these practised
debaters; but he had not joined the Society for the mere purpose of gracing
its benches, so on the very first night of his membership he rose, in a
fever of shyness and impulse, to take part in the proceedings. No survival
of the matter discussed remains, and we only know that his contribution was
rather a torrent of nervous sentences than a well-weighed speech. But he
felt that if he sat dumb on the first night, he would remain dumb for the
rest of his membership, and so in duty to himself he spoke. We can well
imagine the rapid utterance, the fresh phrasing, the quaint epithets, the
laugh and gesture of "German Blackie" as he was called, but we can also
imagine the stir which his appearance provoked, and the promise of a new and
rousing element to quicken the mettle of established debaters.
There seems to be some reason for believing that
his sense of justice at this time took offence at the Edinburgh Whigs, for
Jeffrey's notorious review on Wordsworth exposed the party to a ridicule
which some of its members heartily deserved. The deep interest with which he
was reading the poet led John Blackie to resent the article, which, like the
burning of the Epliesian temple, has immortalised its perpetrator. And we
learn from his correspondence that Liberal friends reproached him with a
temporary relapse. But all that was brilliant in Scotland then was produced
by Tories, or was connected with men who professed to be Tories, perhaps
less on political than on romantic grounds. The quickest-witted people in
Edinburgh, and the most attractive to a young man bent on mental
development, made profession of a quasi -medieval Toryism, which served them
as a treasure-trove of poetical material. Their attitude was mainly
sentimental, but it became heroic when Whigs pretended to bludgeon a poet
whom their prose-drugged senses could not discern, and whom the Tory poets
hailed with reverence and delight. It was entirely natural that John Blackie
should recoil from the Whigs of the 'Edinburgh Review.' But it does credit
to one of those Whigs, James Moncreiff, that he should have overlooked the
petulance of this recoil, and should have given the new speaker courage by
kindly words of praise on the occasion of this first speech.
The Juridical Society was less to his mind. Here
the members were, with a few notable exceptions, mere lawyers, whose dry,
cool, unimpassioned treatment of subjects exclusively legal fatigued a mind
too fervidly human to find any attraction whatever in punctilio and terms of
law. Here he learned that of all men there he was the least adapted to the
profession of the Bar. Its "terms of process" were hieroglyphics to which he
had no key. The other members of the Juridical spoke them glibly, and glibly
apprehended them, found them humorous at times, found depths in them and
subtilties which graced their speeches and won applause, —a marvel to John
Blackie, for whom their habit of mind was impossible, and to whose ears
their speeches were very tedium. The one exception, the Saul amongst these
legal prophets, was Henry Glassford Bell. Of him Professor Blackie wrote
long afterwards:-
Besides his literary and
popular powers, he had a wonderful sagacity, a capacity for law work and
for social enjoyment equally large, a natural eye for business in a man
of such remarkable imaginative power quite uncommon.
But although he realised with
sincere disappointment the antipathy of his mind to the work which had
become his first duty, he wrestled bravely with its difficulties, pored over
its textbooks, interleaving them for notes, and shouted aloud its abhorred
formulas, as in happier days he had shouted the sounding anathemas of Cicero
and the patriotic diatribes of Demosthenes. When his books dealt with the
broad uses of law and with its larger organisation, he grasped their
contents eagerly: but the numberless details, which seem to be excrescences
rather than organic parts; the vast and grotesque vocabulary; the labyrinth
of vexatious punctilio; the prehistoric deposit which forms the substratum
of Scots Law,—these provoked and repulsed him. Nevertheless he worked well
enough to pass the various stages guarded by examination, and to be admitted
as a member of the Faculty of Advocates on July 1, 1834.
From this time for five years he mixed with his
fellows in the Parliament House, and was often the centre of one of its
liveliest groups. But he held only two briefs during these years, and he had
frequent occasion to sing "Give a Fee" with rueful emphasis as they passed.
The last year of his allowance expired with
1834, and left him carolling in vain. He was determined to make no appeal to
his father's generosity, on which he had already drawn sufficiently. It
became him to make good his promises, and he was eager and able to do so.
From 1835 he supported himself, and if he found it hard to do so, he endured
his difficulties gladly. The success of his translation of 'Faust' gave him
access to the pages of 'Blackvood's Magazine' and of the 'Foreign Quarterly
Review.' Both periodicals were willing to accept what he was most ready to
offer, articles introducing and reviewing the works of German writers.
In 1835 he wrote for 'Blackvood's Magazine' a
paper on Jean Paul Richter, including many well-translated quotations and a
version of the "Legend of the Lorelei"; for the 'Foreign Quarterly Review,'
a paper on Meuzel's 'German Literature,' and one on Goethe's 'Correspondence
with Zelter and Bettina Brentano.' These, with some columns written for
journals of secondary importance, brought him £97 for the year 1835, a sum
nearly equivalent to his allowance. But the following years, although
yielding sufficient money to pay his wants, fell short of this sum, and he
was often painfully confronted with the rude fact that the world pays better
the dull but essential labour employed in its material wellbeing than the
exercise of fresh and willing powers for its mental advance.
In 1836 John Blackie contributed to the 'Foreign
Quarterly Review' a paper on Prince Pückler's 'New Tour,' and one on
Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,' and wrote other reviews of which it
is unnecessary now to recover the traces.
He kept himself afloat with good-humoured
courage, and played his part cheerily, as became a philosopher and a student
of Greek. It is evident from the titles of some of his articles that he had
resumed the study of Greek, which his reading for the Bar had interrupted.
The fit of Wordsworthian fervour had passed away, and Goethe had resumed his
ascendancy over a nature in which the latent possibilities were too varied
to be long subjected to the empire of an influence more isolating than
enlarging. He returned to Goethe with relief, recognising in him the working
of that Hellenism which he was learning to appreciate at first hand, the
large tolerance, the appreciation of "all things lovely and of good report,"
the moderation iii judgment and in action, the making for "equipoise of
soul." The Greek and
Goethian "equipoise" was scarcely attainable by John Stuart Blackie, who was
bound to colour every new result of his ethical education with fervent
piety. His nature contained elements capable, indeed, of reaching
"equipoise," but rather through the "Learn of me" of his Greek Testament
than through the irresponsible development of the Greeks, or the elaborate
self-culture of their German imitators. Still, in some things he achieved a
conscious resemblance to his models, never perfect because it was marred by
feelings which they did not possess, whose workings counteracted his
tranquillity. He donned a panoply of calm against "the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune," but had no gift of native invulnerability.
We do not know much of his life during these two
years. His lodgings were in York Place or Dublin Street, and he entertained
his friends to supper now and again. His gift of versifying was often called
upon to distinguish, by appropriate squib or lyric, some festal gathering,
and a handful of such songs remains, sung in their day to good old Scottish
tunes. "A Song of Good
Fellows" commemorates the Juridical Society in the Session from 1834 to
1835, and is a humorous roll - call of its members. it begins:-
I'll sing you a song of no ancient date,
A good song of mighty good fellows,
With good hammering heads and good thundering hands,
And lungs like a good blowing bellows.
I'll sing you a song of good honest members
And presidents of a Society
That is famed for its learning, its wit, and its taste,
And for everything good but sobriety.
We can imagine the laughter which the neat
portraits drew from all; and the singer did not spare himself:-
Then B—keye, strange jumble of nonsense and
sense,
A thing half a song, half a sermon
I believe, that the fellow is made of good stuff
But his noddle is muddled with German.
Our wits he'd fain daze with his big foreign phrase,
His cant of "immutable reason,"
To bray like an ass, while for gods they would pass,
With your German savans is no treason.
A drinking-song levelled at the professions—
medicine, law, theology, learning—expresses an epicurean contempt for their
futility, and celebrates the superior philosophy of ''wine, woman, and
song." A graver ditty
invites to "Sociality and Activity" on more temperate grounds, and this is a
lyric of sufficient beauty to be quoted fully :-
The world drives on and we drive with it,
And none its course may stay;
When the swarm alights, we must hive with it,
And with it we must away.
In vain does son of man conceive
His single self so great;
No act of mortal can deceive
The measured chart of Fate.
Then away, away, adown the stream
With others let us go,
With friendly heart to share with them
Their cup of weal or woe.
When shines the sun, when falls the rain,
The cotter wends his plough;
When blows the wind, when rolls the main,
The sailor bends his prow.
The heart is glad, the heart is sad,
As time and chance allow
And happy never will he be
Who is not happy now.
Then away, away, &c. In
vain, in vain we cast our eye
Into the dreary void;
What was, what is to be, God veils
From ken of human pride.
He gave thine eye to see His light,
He gave thy blood to flow,
He gave thy hand to work with might
The work of life below.
Then away, away, &c. 'Tis
now a race, 'tis now a march,
Now quick, and now 'tis slow;
'Tis now a proud triumphal arch,
And now a cottage low.
But still and still it drives along,
And none its course may stay;
Where the swarm alights, we must hive with it
And with it we must away.
Then away, away, &c.
Amongst his frequent companions about this time were his cousin Robert Wyld
and a member of the Juridical Society, Robert Horn, who afterwards became
Dean of Faculty. Dr Wyld records the little supper-parties in Dublin Street,
where a "rizzared haddie" and a tumbler of toddy formed the time-honoured
fare; for these were the days when Edinburgh still dined at four o'clock and
supped lightly at nine, putting a kindly hospitality within the reach of
all. They were the days, moreover, when guests brought with them the will to
enjoy, and when neither host nor guest was so overpowered by the needless
needs of a modern dinner that the courses stifled the talk. The memory of
those suppers, when a dish of oysters and a haddock prefaced the steaming
kettle and the ladles, still lingers in Edinburgh; but wealth, alas! has
elected to migrate to its crescents and terraces, and to pile its dull
fashions like a tumulus upon the old picturesque hospitality. Men came to
talk, not to eat, and much excellent thinking had its apotheosis in acute or
humorous give and take while the toddy-ladle made its guarded journey from
rummer to glass. It
must have been in the summer of 1836 that John Blackie and Robert Wyld made
a pedestrian tour along the south shore of the Firth of Forth, by Tantallon
Castle to Berwick, up the valley of the Tweed to Kelso, and home by St
Boswells, Minto, Galashiels, and Dalkeith. The tour was uneventful, their
pockets were thinly lined, and they had to give up the Bass Rock in face of
the greedy demands of the fishermen at Canty Bay; they breakfasted with Dr
Aitken at Minto Manse, and made thence for Galashiels. By that time John
Blackie's shoes struck work and had to be given up. Their combined funds
were a mere remnant to be husbanded for bread and cheese. A new pair of
shoes was impossible, so Robert Wyld surrendered his slippers, some sizes
too big for his slender cousin, who shuffled along the coach-road to
Dalkeith sombrely preoccupied by the effort to keep them on.
Another excursion in the following year
introduced him to Bannockburn. His friend Robert Horn accompanied him this
time. Mr Horn's home lay about three miles from Falkirk, and made a pleasant
stage to which the travellers could return from their patriotic wanderings
in its neighbourhood.
They left Edinburgh on the 21st of July, taking the coach through Linlithgow
to Carron- vale, and visiting the iron-works two miles down the stream,
whose bordering of pale willows re- minded John Blackie of the sad-coloured
olive- yards of Italy. From Carronvale they made daily excursions to the
various places hallowed by the memory of William Wallace, the hero of the
little scholar at Mel-son's Academy, Graeme's tomb at Falkirk, Torwood
Forest where Wallace lurked for shelter and vantage- ground, the remnants of
Bruce's castle on a low wooded hill five miles north of Carronvale.
Bannockburn and Stirling were got by heart. From Stirling the friends went
forward on July 26, by the winding Forth, up the Teith, through
Blair-Drummond to Doune. Here they halted, and came in for a campaigning
speech by Mr Fox Maule to the electors of IDoune. They visited the castle,
and set out for Dunblane, stopping at the "salmon cruive" on the Allan to
make a note of its construction. Rain greeted them at Dunblane, and followed
them as they wandered to the "'Bikes," to Blairlogie and Tillicoultry, but
did not greatly spoil their enjoyment of the wooded Ochils.
They reserved the ascent of Ben Cleugh, the
highest Ochil, for the following day, when the rain ceased. The hill, which
rises just north of Tillicoultry, has a height of 2500 feet, but is not
difficult to climb. Mist clung to its top, but parted as they climbed, and
they gazed over its riven wreaths to the sunlight landscape below. They
returned to Tillicoultry, and made their way to Kinross and to Turfhills,
where they found rest and hospitality. On the last day of July the excursion
ended, and they went back to Edinburgh by Dunferrnline and the steamer.
This walking tour is worthy of the foregoing
detail, because it was noted by John Stuart Blackie in later life as having
roused to a very marked degree the stirrings of his nature, which were
sacred to Scottish influences and to Scottish associations. If Germany made
a conquest of his mind, his heart belonged then and always to Scotland, and
German thinking was vivified, illumined, and rectified by Scottish feeling.
The short diary which he kept of the ten days'
movements includes no mention of his companions, but it seems certain that
another young advocate, to be afterwards well known as the kindly and
humorous Sheriff Logan, joined the friends before they left Carronvale.
They seem to have made a geological survey of
the valleys and hill-ranges which they traversed, and every feature has its
appropriate comment, basalt, trap, and sandstone, every volcanic hollow on
the hills, every winding of the sauntering Forth, the springs upon the
Ochils, the lines of their billowy slopes.
Another friend of those years was Mr Theodore
Martin, who records of John Blackie that his life of strenuous industry, of
genial and grateful temper, and of stainless purity, made him a model and
example for his comrades in the struggle. |
