On Beauty: Three Discourses Delivered in the University of Edinburgh:With an Exposition of the Doctrine of the Beautiful According to Plato

by John Stuart Blackie

Overview

HEGEL said to a friend who was watching by his deathbed, "I have no one who can explain me to the world except yourself, and even you do not understand me." We are far from applying the left-handed compliment of the apostle of absolute idealism to Professor Blackie. But, touching the exposition of Platonism to this somewhat unsentimental generation, the ghost of the great Athenian idealist might appropriately address our author in the former part of the saying. Whether, in its contact with "our German brethren," it has, in its wanderings from brain to brain, caught enough of humour to fit it for the use of the latter part, it is not for us to guess. Whether the "Spirit of Plato" is worth listening to, and whether his philosophy will becomingly graft on the Scottish stock, are questions to be dealt with on the merits. Our persuasion is that we need Plato, and especially Professor Blackie's exposition of his views, both in our colleges and in our academies of art. And if Ethics and Psychology are to be only academically discussed, the one will be much the better of his genial sunny thoughts on the good; and the other would get benefit by direct, full, and warm sympathy with his views of the beautiful, the noble. We cordially thank Professor Blackie for setting our minds astir on these matters, and for his dashing and thoroughly able Discourses on Beauty. Tie brushes aside long accepted theories of the Beautiful, like so many cob-webs, and guides us straight towards those great thoughts which underlie the visible and the apparent. And, no doubt, as Wordsworth puts it—

"When deeply drinking in the soul of things,
We shall be wise perforce.''

Frank, generous, enthusiastic, a man with broad flesh and blood sympathies, richly endowed with intellectual gifts, having a memory stored with the products of ancient and modern thought, gifted with a fine taste, and withal, possessing poetical genius more than second-rate, no one is entitled to speak with more authority on Beauty than Professor Blackie, and no one is so well fitted as he to smash the alleged "contemptible commodious theory" of Jeffrey, and to win thinkers to the views of Plato.

–The North British Review, Volume 28

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781663514653
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	06/08/2020
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

John Stuart Blackie (1809 – 895) was a Scottish scholar and man of letters. Blackie was a Radical and Scottish nationalist in politics, of a fearlessly independent type; possessed of great conversational powers and general versatility, his picturesque eccentricity made him one of the characters of the Edinburgh of the day, and a well-known figure as be went about in his plaid, worn shepherd-wise, over one shoulder and under the other, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and carrying a big stick. In the 1880s and 1890s, he lectured at Oxford on the pronunciation of Greek, and corresponded on the subject with William Hardie. In May 1893, he gave his last lecture at Oxford, but afterwards admitted defeat, stating: "It is utterly in vain here to talk reasonably in the matter of Latin or Greek pronunciation: they are case-hardened in ignorance, prejudice and pedantry"