London Days Part 7

"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.

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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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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. {91} 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 G.o.d'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!"

"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!"

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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 a.s.sumption.

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 Pensees"

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 {93} 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 mult.i.tudes 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....

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"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.'

"Then the hill came, and with the hill our thoughts could not help climbing. Was I licensed? No, not ordained yet, of course. Would I preach the splendid possibilities in man, to sink to the beasts which perish, or to rise to heaven itself? He did not deny that the heart was deceitful and desperately wicked, but should we not call on men to realise for what they were made.... No man understands others, he said, who does not leave himself more behind, and go and sit by others, wherever they may be.

"He could not say what Greek one should read who had few books and less time. 'No, read only where the heart runs; read nothing except that about which you are pa.s.sionate...' So I got no lists of authors or works. 'Read where you are {95} thinking; don't read where you are not feeling.' This and much more on war, churches, architecture, youth and new opinions in theology, and materialism (he had read some of the latter; he could n't for the life of him remember it) and philosophy.

"He talked," continues Barbour, "and I treasured up. But most on the three tongues, and what was work for poets. Then came afternoon tea and raillery between him and my mother. Then they packed into the pony phaeton--my professor a perfect picture, his broad leghorn bright with a flower, scarlet of seedum, fringed by golden yew, and the ladies a good background."

So you see, it was the same John Stuart Blackie years and years before.

"Do stay to tea, man!" he urged, when I said I must be going, that there would be just time to catch such-and-such a train for Glasgow where an appointment was to be kept.

"Ah, then punctuality's the word. Be late and be nothing." He came down to the front door with me, his leghorn flapping, his sash-ends trailing on the stairs. There were volcanic salutations to portraits which we had missed when going up. I said good-bye to the Grand Old Man of Scotland.

"Good-bye," said he, "and dinna forget--Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Apostle Paul--my heroes!"

In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as he stood in the open doorway, singing, and gazing towards the Corstorphine Hill.

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CHAPTER VIII

LORD KELVIN

He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in green morocco. It would be five minutes before the carriage started, and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on his overcoat. Another man, almost any other, would have idled while the five minutes pa.s.sed, and most men, especially busy men, would have fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready. But Lord Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and never lost it in idling. Having five minutes he would solve a problem, so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always carried it, and sat on the stair and worked.

He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the youngest of his students. They say that a man is as old as his arteries. The saying might have originated with him, if it ever occurred to him that he had arteries. But I am not sure that the customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was driven by {97} his dynamic mind. Like all great teachers he was ever learning. But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for he was only ten years old when he entered the university! And he was thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that age. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy, and he held that professorship for the rest of his life!

Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced his superior. He was born in 1824, he died in 1908. It was my privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life. A kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined. He was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of life than that. Scottish he was, though born in Ireland. And his fame was a.s.sociated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the psalmist allots to the life of a man.

When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, probably, he had often outlined before, the plan of a boy's education. "By the age of twelve," said he, "a boy should have learned to write his own language with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of French, should be able to {98} translate Latin and easy Greek authors, and should have some acquaintance with German. Having learned the meaning of words, a boy should study Logic. I never found that the small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some knowledge of Natural Philosophy." Some knowledge of it! There, indeed, was modesty. For who had more knowledge of natural philosophy, or so much, as Lord Kelvin?

Is it necessary to say that he was not born to baronies? Surely, that much all readers may be presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark.

But if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, nothing would be more futile than to omit the subject's nose on the presumption that the public knew he had one. William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two brothers. The elder brother was James, and he became famous as a professor of engineering.

He died, however, some fifteen years before his brother. James was named for his father, and that James, the father, was born on a farm near Ballynahinch, County Down. His Scotch ancestors had planted themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

That farmer's boy had a huge hunger for knowledge. When he was eleven or twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher to aid him, the principles of the sundial, so that he could make dials for any lat.i.tude. Also, from books which he contrived to get, he learned the elements of mathematics. By and by he began teaching in a little school. He taught in the summers, and in {99} the winters he studied at Glasgow University, continuing to do so for five years, and then he was appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Inst.i.tute of Belfast.

When his son William had reached the age of eight, the scholarly parent was appointed to the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow University, a position he held for twenty years. His scientific attainments were high, and his cla.s.sical scholarship was distinguished.

He educated his sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each to the university. Lord Kelvin said to me once, when we were talking of those early days: "I had a great father."

The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through the grounds of Glasgow University. When Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William Thomson (she had knighted him many years before that) he chose for his t.i.tle the name of the little stream by whose side he had spent his fruitful and ill.u.s.trious life. His had been a life of labour, but it had been congenial labour. He had contributed vastly to the sum of human knowledge; he had invented useful things, to the amazement of pedantic men who think that science should remain with scientific persons and never be applied to the wants of the world; at least, not applied by the scientific discoverer of the principles or things. But with all his theories he was a practical man, and he prospered. That day when he sat on the stair for five minutes, and concentrated the training of sixty years upon the page of a notebook, we went to White's.

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Once upon a time there was a White, a James White, who, in Glasgow, made instruments of precision which found their way all over the world.

And so he became the maker of various things that Sir William Thomson, afterward Lord Kelvin, had invented. When White died, or retired, or possibly before that, Kelvin acquired his business and establishment and continued the manufacture of instruments of precision, the establishment being conducted under White's name, as before, and as possibly it may be to this day. Anyhow, we went to White's, where Lord Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed me, among other things, his "Siphon Recorder" which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling to the non-technical mind. I asked him what it did. The technical descriptions I had read were rather baffling. His answer was: "The electric current in an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very weak and weary. This reaches out from the sh.o.r.e, and helps it along, and writes down what it says." It was for this invention that he was knighted in 1866. He had connected the hemispheres.

He was one of the courageous and hopeful band that laid and worked the first Atlantic cables. Submarine telegraphy had been first employed in 1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel between Dover and Calais. But the scientific camps were divided in opinion about the practicability of working across thousands of miles of ocean-bed. One faction declared it "beyond the resources of human skill." Robert Stephenson said the project could end only in failure. Of course, the {101} moneyed men were timid. Most of them were more than timid; they were scared. Faraday had found that the transmission of signals by submarine cable, on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not instantaneous. "The line leaked," said the financial men, "and most of the electricity that was pumped into it spilled into the sea. This does not occur on land lines," they said; "we will not invest."

William Thomson discovered and formulated "the law which governs the r.e.t.a.r.dation of electrical signals in submarine lines." Whitehouse found that with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second and a half for transmission. Thomson's law showed that on a line long enough to connect Ireland with Newfoundland the transmission of a signal would require six seconds. This meant a dismally limited service. Only a few words could be cabled in an hour. The croakers were pleased. The men whose habit it is to say "I told you so" were joyous. The financiers would use their capital for other purposes.

But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and William Thomson found the way to utilize his own law to make success out of what had seemed to others to be defeat. He invented the "Siphon Recorder." Then the cable was laid under the Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's instruments sent and received this message:

"Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men."

Two weeks later the cable broke. The world jeered and lost faith, according to its habit. Some {102} called the cable undertaking "a swindle", some "a hoax", some a silly toy. These were thoughtful critics. Eight years pa.s.sed, eight years of effort to make and submerge a cable that would endure. In 1866 the difficulties were overcome. The world congratulated itself and the men who had worked the "miracle." Lord Kelvin told me the story as if it had been a little affair of the day before. "There has been so much to think of since then," said he, "and there is so much more to be done!

Harnessing Niagara is one thing." The men who plan things and do them were already planning for that, and as in the cable project, they called in Lord Kelvin to help.

"How far can we transmit electricity for power and lighting purposes?"

they asked.