A Scottish author; born in Glasgow in July 1809; died in Edinburgh, March 2, 1895. He received his education in Edinburgh, Göttingen, Berlin, and Rome; was professor of Greek in Edinburgh University from 1852 till 1882, and continued to write and lecture till his death. He was one of the most important men of his day; promoted educational reform, and championed Scottish nationality. He advocated preserving the Gaelic language, and by his own efforts founded a Celtic chair in Edinburgh University. His books include translations from Greek and German; moral and religious and other philosophy; “Lays of the Highlands and Islands” (1872); “Self-Culture” (1874); “Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands” (1875); “Altavona; Fact and Fiction from my Life in the Highlands” (1882); “Wisdom of Goethe” (1883); “Life of Burns” (1888); and “Essays on Subjects of Moral and Social Interest” (1890).

Personal

  The influence of Blackie was for me a sunrise of the soul in admiration, wonder, sympathy, esteem, and love, and its colours were never fresher or brighter than at this hour.

  There was a notebook which appeared year after year in the class. It contained the Professor’s jokes of a former session, carefully classified by an admiring student. 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.

  The Professor welcomes all [at breakfast] 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 Xenophon. 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 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 entertainment, 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 in mind, to woo digestion on the shores of the Forth or the slopes of Arthur’s Seat.

  It was about twelve years ago that I first met Professor Blackie at the house of a mutual friend in London. We were having five-o’clock tea, when, to my astonishment, an elderly gentleman, with long white hair, handsome features, attired in a kind of blue-grey dressing-gown, with a straw helmet on his head, rushed in amongst us, humming a tune. His appearance was so eccentric that I was surprised when told that this was the famous Professor Blackie. I suppose that I stared rather rudely at his straw helmet, for he fixed his blue eyes upon me, and twirling a big walking-stick, suddenly exclaimed, “Ah, lassie, you are wondering why I have this headgear on. It is to protect my eyes from the fierce rays of the sun. I have been prowling about, basking in his warm rays.”… He seemed unable to keep still, paced to and fro like a restless spirit, with a cup of tea in one hand, and the inevitable stick in the other, reciting a poem of Burns’. I remember it was all so very Scotch that I could hardly understand a word of it…. A year or so after this visit Professor Blackie came to my studio in Cranley Gardens, and at my request gave me a sitting for a pastel sketch. He jumped on the dais or throne with the alacrity of a schoolboy—I drew him in profile—but it was impossible for him to keep still. Every feature moved, forehead, eyes, nose, and as for his mouth, it was never shut. When he was not gossiping, he was either singing or reciting passages in Greek, from his beloved Homer, or in German, from Goethe or Heine. He was a picturesque old man, and of a most mercurial temperament. I never met any one so restless, exuberant, almost gushing, and yet he struck me as being sincere, and most loyal to his many friends.

  My introduction to Blackie was away back in those mid-century days. I came from Germany after the session had opened, and applied for admission to his class, but asked for a short respite for the payment of my fee. This he readily granted, filled up my ticket and stuck it into the looking-glass in his retiring-room. Some weeks after, I followed him into his room to pay my debt. He looked over his list and assured me I had payed. I assured him to the contrary, and he protested, till I pointed out my ticket on his mantlepiece. Then, in the exuberance of his pleasure, he literally danced about the room, his gown streaming behind him, and explained that as he had settled his accounts for the year with Mrs. Blackie, here was a clear ten guineas of pocket money to spend as he might think best. Our weekly treat was the hour he devoted to reading us selections from his translation of Homer—a treat only excelled by Aytoun’s recitations of Scottish Ballads, in his lectures on that subject…. While inspiring us with his likes and dislikes, no professor had his class under more perfect control. A look or a gesture sufficed to arrest the slightest approach to unruliness, which was only too prevalent in other classes.

  We all know that the public seldom notice minute distinctions, and there are innumerable eyes that would never observe the difference between Blackie and Blaikie…. Of course our letters were continually going to the wrong house. Usually a glance showed the mistake…. He liked enjoyment and relaxation, like the theatre, and thought it wholesome. Strict Sabbatarianism seemed an unwholesome cramping of the soul. And sometimes he talked as if we Puritans disliked brightness and cheerfulness, and thought that if men were to be good they must be always grave and self-repressed…. Professor Blackie frequently stayed at my house when lecturing in Glasgow. He was always at his best when one had him alone.

  Blackie at home and Blackie abroad differed considerably. He was a compound of two individualities both wholesome and good, but not the same in manifestation. At home he was gentle, considerate, methodical, serious; only at table relaxing into discursive talk and occasional explosiveness. His domestic pleasantries were tranquil, and took the form of genial banter and of equally genial irony…. A student reading with the book in his left hand was called to order and bidden hold it in the other. He coloured and continued to read as before. The Professor was annoyed, and reprimanded him sharply. The class hissed at this, and the student held up the stump which was all that remained of his right arm. Then Blackie stepped down from his desk, and taking the young fellow in his arms, begged his pardon with tears in his eyes, and turning to the rest, he said, “I am glad that I have gentlemen to teach,” and went back to his desk in an outburst of applause. The men loved him, and if the more riotous spirits took advantage of his sympathetic boyishness, and sometimes turned order into rout, even the most ungovernable amongst them acknowledged at heart his patience and tolerance and indomitable pluck and manliness.

General

  His mind is of a quick, bold cast, and he has, at all times, the fearless courage of his convictions, in consequence of which virtue, he has become the most widely quoted of platform speakers. He can never possibly be dull or uninteresting in a book, or in debate, as he unites, in high perfection, the two popular qualities of humour and animation. As a poet, he is distinguished for sense, enthusiasm, and melody.

  It is to his short lyrics, his light, rollicking lays, that his popularity with his countrymen has been mainly due. La rime n’est pas riche, it may be said, and assuredly the author has been all too lax and copious a versifier. And it may be that his countless deliverances on religion, and science, and politics, and Scottish music, and manners—and who can say what besides?—have not invariably deepened the wisdom of nations. One may wish the writer had been less boisterously patriotic, less aggressively voluble, less inconsistently cocksure. One may wish that he had worked more in the spirit of an artist. But his hearty, bracing songs, so vigorous and unforced, so rich in jollity and sympathy with youth, so full of hearty love of the bens and braes and sea-lochs of the North, are unquestionably a possession which has enheartened and enlivened not a few. And of the works of how many cautious thinkers and laborious lyric artists can as much be said? After all there are moods in which rollicking, careless stanzas, merrily jingled, lusty in sentiment, and breathing of hill and sea, are more welcome than verses deeper in import and fastidiously chiselled, which fail, however, to exhilarate and arouse.

  Verse, if one may hazard a guess, has been with him rather a relaxation than a pursuit; but, whether in verse or prose, everything that he does is essentially sui generis. And, in Scotland at least, his appeal seldom fails of a response.

  The Professor wrote much in many metres. His pen dropped into verse as naturally as 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 “distinction,” and is deprived of its power over the imagination by the occasional cropping up of a phrase prosaic to the verge of commonplace…. This book [“Self-Culture”] has run through twenty-four editions, not to speak of a shorthand version, in this country…. 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 plain fact is—and it may as well be said firmly—that Blackie was not a great original poet. There was a certain marching music about his verses, as though they had been improvised to the tread of his own martial stride, and he had also a “fowth o’ rhymes” at his command; yet his poems were lacking in either that concentrated fervour or that highly refined polish which ought to mark the work of a successful and popular poet. Even in his later days, when some passing event incited him to send a sonnet, or a poem that defied classification, to the Scotsman, it was painfully evident that he was not even a passable rhymster. Crude, unformed, rugged lines were strung together by him and pitchforked at the public, as though anything that bore the name of Blackie was good enough for the “Bœotian herd.” It is a notable fact that great translators (with few exceptions) have never been great original poets; and Blackie was no exception…. It was neither by his “Æschylus” nor his “Homer,” laborious as these were, that Blackie became known to a very wide circle of readers. His little volume entitled “Self-Culture,” published first in 1873, and since re-issued almost annually, did more to bring him face to face with the great world that lies outside the Universities than his most scholastic works.

  His “Songs of Religion and Life” give him claims to a place in any volume devoted to the sacred poetry of his time.