The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment has received considerable, one might even say exuberant, attention in recent years. Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London: Fourth Estate, 2002) is only one of several writings on this subject that show how strongly the claims for Scotland's intellectual eminence have been articulated. A different story is told about the subsequent fate of the life of the mind in Scotland, a story characterized by terms such as decline, provincialism, and mediocrity. Wisely, Stuart Wallace declines to account for the demise of the Scottish Enlightenment, but his biography of John Stuart Blackie (1809–95) amply illustrates many of the developments that affected intellectual life and national identity in nineteenth-century Scotland. Blackie appears as an “intellectual gadfly” (7) whose “slapdash” scholarship (206) provided ample proof of the sad state of the Scottish intellect; his carefully crafted appearance—long white hair, felt hat, and plaid—marked him out as one who relied excessively on his status as a Scottish personality. Nonetheless, Wallace shows Blackie as a reformer who conveyed serious messages; during his career as professor of humanity at Marischal College (1841–52) and Greek at Edinburgh (1852–82), he seized the opportunity to become one of the best-known Scottish public intellectuals of his day. Although his name is little noticed nowadays, he deserves to be rediscovered by a judicious biographer.

“Up and be doing! Busy, busy! Ever cheerful and vigorous. Up and be doing!” (141): Blackie's exhortation to himself could have earned him a place in the pages of his Scottish contemporary, Samuel Smiles. His list of published writings, lectures, and speeches is impressive (over eight pages in the bibliography of this book), and his range of interests was daunting in its width and ebullience if not always in its depth. Three of them were of special importance: university reform, German culture, and a host of issues pertaining to Scottish national identity.

As a teacher, Blackie could inspire and enthuse, but his lecturing lacked self-discipline. Students who attended his rowdy classes in the hope of learning Greek must have been exasperated by his digressions into themes such as “The Church and the Theatre” (205). Nonetheless, his contributions to important reforms affecting university pedagogy and administration were important and timely. He first attracted public notice on his appointment to the Marischal chair when he publicly condemned the declaration of religious orthodoxy that was enjoined by law. Ever the modernizer, he wished to see more chairs established to cater for modern subjects in a wider curriculum. His teaching was based on the belief that languages, even dead ones, should be taught in a spoken and sung form. He opposed the system of university entry in Scotland that allowed ill-prepared youths to join his classes at “the unripe age of fifteen or sixteen” (223). Students (he pressed for the inclusion of women) should typically commence their studies at the age of eighteen after their fitness had been attested by an examination board.

Like Thomas Carlyle on whom he modeled himself in important respects, Blackie was one of several important Scots who turned to Germany for an answer to many of the problems of the day. Some of the most valuable parts of this biography are descriptions of German intellectual life and its influence on Blackie's generation. As a young man (1825–30) he attended German universities at a time when they were rising to a position of intellectual preeminence in Europe. Several of the university reforms he canvased were based on German models, and his general culture, including his religious ideas, was powerfully influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen. But, as the years went by, it was the “healthy,” “masculine,” and “national” (89) characteristics of German life that cast their spell. One of the highlights of his later life was witnessing the triumphant German army parading through the streets of Berlin in 1871.

Blackie's predilection for Germany ministered to his other great passion, his love of his native land. Scots, he believed, had much in common with Germans. They should learn from German universities instead of turning, as so many of them were doing, to Oxford, that center of “Toryism,” “Puseyism,” and the “bastard pronunciation” of Greek (144, 186). Critical though he was of many aspects of Scottish life and learning, Blackie offered himself as the embodiment of Scottishness at a time when there was a reaction against centralizing tendencies based on London. He was to be found at great national mise-en-scènes such as the inauguration of the Wallace monument; he was instrumental in setting up the first Celtic chair in a Scottish university, and he crusaded for crofters’ rights in the Highlands. Blackie's stance on Home Rule serves as a reminder of the multilayered characteristics of that most contentious of issues; he was an exponent of Home Rule for Scotland but not for Ireland, a refinement that elicited some encouragement from Joseph Chamberlain. He exemplified what recent historians have called Unionist Nationalism, the assertion of Scotland's distinctive status within the United Kingdom.

This biography makes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on modern Scotland. The paragraphs are often mercilessly long, and there is a startling reference to Prince Albert as “recently deceased” in 1872 (270), but the research is careful, and the judgments on Blackie's life and importance are compellingly expressed. Wallace has reinforced the lesson that the history of Scottish culture and national identity in this era amounted to something more than skirmishes between anglicizers and inward-looking patriots. Blackie was one of several important Scots who sought inspiration from the larger world of Europe.