Part 1

Transcriber's note:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

The Augustan Reprint Society

JOHN ROBERT SCOTT

DISSERTATION ON THE PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS

With an Introduction by Roy Harvey Pearce

Publication Number 45

Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1954

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GENERAL EDITORS

RICHARD C. BOYS, _University of Michigan_ RALPH COHEN, _University of California, Los Angeles_ VINTON A. DEARING, _University of California, Los Angeles_ LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL, _Clark Memorial Library_

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_

ADVISORY EDITORS

EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_ BENJAMIN BOYCE, _Duke University_ LOUIS BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_ JOHN BUTT, _King's College, University of Durham_ JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_ ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_ EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ LOUIS A. LANDA, _Princeton University_ SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_ ERNEST C. MOSSNER, _University of Texas_ JAMES SUTHERLAND, _University College, London_ H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

EDNA C. DAVIS, _Clark Memorial Library_

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INTRODUCTION

Scott's "Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts" embodies what we can now see as a final development in his century's deep concern to understand why what it so often admitted was the greatest art had somehow not been forthcoming in what it as often claimed was the greatest century. The "Dissertation" is in no way an original work; rather--and this is its primary value for us--its author takes a belief which his culture has given him and, like others before him, tries to clarify one of its implications. The belief is in the idea of a universal progress marred, if it in the end can be said to be marred, only by an esthetic primitivism; the implication is that that esthetic primitivism can be not only comprehended but surmounted. Scott accepts the century's commonplace that art of power and significance has been necessarily produced only in societies markedly simpler than his own; and he accepts too the fact (for such it was when men believed in it and judged according to the principles generated by it) that in all forms of culture excepting art, his own richly complex society has produced something far surpassing anything produced in the "simpler" society of classical Greece or of the Italian Renaissance. Scott's uniqueness is that, unlike those of his predecessors who had worked with the same belief, he does not try to establish an historical rationale for this _status quo_. He goes so far as to envisage--perhaps it would be truer to his state of mind to say posit--an enlightened modern society which will at once remain what it is and yet so change itself as to make possible the production of major art.

The main interest for us in the "Dissertation," then, lies in Scott's notions of the kind of society needed to produce major art, and beyond that, in what is entailed in holding fast to that notion, developing it into a doctrine, and even hoping to make it a reality in his own time. He outlines the doctrine in great detail, simply by describing what he takes to be the sociocultural situation of the classical Greek artist (and incidentally, that of the artist of the Italian Renaissance). He chooses to write almost entirely of the fine arts (for him in this case, sculpture), although he conceives, as the student of his age would expect him to, that what holds for the fine arts will also hold for poetry. In the immediacy of appeal of sculpture, he finds a quality which, when its working and expression are analysed, will let him see just how the artist and his work have been ideally related to the society in which they have flourished.

Scott's description of the artist and his place in Greek society is one which, in general, is familiar to students of eighteenth-century critical theory. Equally familiar is his concern to establish the fact that, as he puts it, "the connate temper of the times" made possible the production of great art. He sees Greek art as being authentically marked by the "rich raciness of the native soil." And he sees Greek society as in all departments making the work of the artist possible. In small, free, uncentralized states; in states where art has a public, memorial function; in states where, because so many games and rituals are performed naked, the artist is always directly and overwhelmingly aware of the possibility of beauty in the human body--in such states, owing to such "natural causes," art must necessarily flourish. Above all, art is of the people and their artists as they form a vital community; it is not borrowed; it is fresh and original. Finally, such a cultural situation, and therefore such an art, is found obviously to be lacking in his own time.

Now this argument, carried up to this point, had been more or less held to by many critics and literary theorists before Scott.[1] True enough, they had mainly concerned themselves with poetry; yet they found the source of major poetry to be ultimately in a nakedness of language--made possible by what was taken to be the simplicity, spontaneity, and cohesion of Greek life--comparable to Scott's notion of nakedness of body. They differ from Scott in this: that almost uniformly, so far as my reading goes, all had been willing to admit that there was absolutely no hope for comparable artistic achievement in their own time; that such art could be produced only in simpler, earlier societies than their own; that, indeed, a characteristic of a mature society was that it had grown up beyond the young, crude, exuberant stage in which conditions were ideal for the cultivation of the esthetic sensibilities. The ideal time for the production of major art, they tended to conclude, was at that point in the history of a society when it was moving from the savage into the civilized. They were thus not absolute esthetic primitivists; but they were concerned nonetheless to tie art to its primitive origins, as for the most part they were concerned equally to celebrate their triumph over the limitations of such origins. So, to take one example, Thomas Blackwell, meditating Homer's achievement in his _Enquiry_, had written in 1735 that it does not "seem to be given to one and the same Kingdom, to be thoroughly civilized, and afford proper Subjects for Poetry"; and in the same work he later declared that he hoped "_That we may never be a proper Subject of an Heroic Poem_." Only by being a "Subject" for a heroic poem could the poet write one; for only then would he have available to him the living language--and thus the techniques--adequately to express that "Subject." This was to be a dominant refrain--matched, to be sure, by a counter-refrain, treatment of which is not immediately relevant here[2]--through the century. A significant number of critics and literary theorists would be willing to resign themselves to having a lesser art, if such resignation would mean that they could adequately celebrate the enlightened achievements of their own century. They worked out a method of historical analysis whereby they might construct "conjectural histories" of civilization which would allow them to place poetry and the fine arts in the long line of the evolution of culture toward their own time and to demonstrate, moreover, that even as the arts had come early, so philosophy, proper religion, the sciences, and all the highest forms of civilization had come late. Thus they could announce triumphantly that if they had lost something, they had gained much more.

But still the greatness of the art which they did not have moved and attracted them. Their work is perhaps a measure of their attempts to rationalize out of existence a longing for the art which they felt their time was not giving them. Perhaps that is why Scott, in the 1790's--his mind, so it seems to us, not only informed but made by the critical formulae of his time--tried to face squarely up to the fact that somehow greet art had to be made possible for even his enlightened century. Yet his mind was so simple and simplifying that he thought that merely by denying his predecessors carefully worked out conjecture of the necessary connection between an "early" society and great art, he could prove that such was possible in his time. For the artist envisaged in the "Dissertation" is still, in spite of his obvious attempts to have it otherwise, the artist as conceived of by Blackwell and the rest of Scott's predecessors. Scott glories in the civilized achievements of his own age, yet somehow hopes that the same "liberal public encouragement" that obtained in Greece will come again and make for such labor, pains, and study as will create in England art as great as Greece's. Such a condition, he feels, is not impossible; yet he says nothing of the kind of social structure and character which he has already shown to be requisite to the development of "liberal public encouragement." The argument, such as it is, is left hanging. That is to say, there is no evidence in the essay that Scott could really think through to the possibility of the major artist's being immediately present in an eighteenth-century society re-made, so far as its artistic life was concerned, in a primitivistic pattern. He remains purely a theoretical possibility in Scott's scheme of things, as does the society in which he might flourish.

Likewise, in the other essays[3] which Scott collected and published along with the "Dissertation," there is no evidence that he really understood what was involved in taking the stand he did. In the most interesting of these pieces, "An Essay on the Influence of Taste on Morals," he denies the existence of a Hutchesonian moral sense, absolutely separates esthetic taste from morals, holds that art will have an influence toward immorality unless it is kept in check with a moral system properly inculcated by revealed religion. What he is entirely unaware of is the possible radical implications of such a separation of art and morality. As in the "Dissertation," he accepts a conventional notion and is satisfied to push it as far as he can, never exploring its possible ambiguities.

The ambiguities are those, of course, which led to that transformation of critical theory and artistic practice which we associate with the romantic movement. In this light, it is interesting to note that just fourteen years after the first publication of the "Dissertation" William Hazlitt could take a stand almost identical in gross characteristics with that of Scott and the others--this in his "Why the Arts are Not Progressive."[4] For Hazlitt, because "the arts unlike the sciences and the forms of high civilization in general hold immediate communication with nature," they develop best soon after their "birth" and thrive "in a state of society which [is], in other respects, comparatively barbarous." He goes so far as to instance Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, Ariosto, Raphael, Titian, Michaelangelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio. In all its extremity, in its inclusive view of what constitutes a barbarous society and its peculiar cultural virtues, this is but the conventional doctrine of Scott and all those who came before him. But it is, in Hazlitt, transformed into a statement, not, as in Scott's predecessors, of a rationale for the weakness of art in their time, nor, as in Scott himself, of a dimly espoused hope of art in his time. It becomes a frank, "sympathetic" statement of a fact of life which, when granted, will enable men to enjoy and comprehend great art of all ages. The doctrine is focussed on the work of art, not on the culture which lacks it; it has been crucially transformed from a historical into a heuristic principle. Scott's "Dissertation" embodies the doctrine just before its transformation--a neoclassical strain, we can say, just before it had became a romantic strain. Scott almost takes his stand with Hazlitt; but he is not quite there. And not being quite there, he is a whole world away.

Roy Harvey Pearce Ohio State University

NOTES

[Footnote 1: Among the works that I have seen which specifically develop this argument are: Thomas Blackwell, _An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer_ (1735); Richard Hurd, _The Third [Elizabethan] Dialogue_ (1759) and _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_ (1762); John Ogilvie, "An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients," in _Poems on Several Subjects_ (1762); John Brown, _A Dissertation of the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music_ (1763) and a shorter version of the _Dissertation, The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry_ (1764); Hugh Blair, _A Critical Dissertation on the Poems_ of Ossian (1763); William Duff, _An Essay on Original Genius_ (1767); Robert Wood, _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_ (1767, enlarged version 1769); Thomas Pownall, _A Treatise on the Study of Antiquities_ (1782). Such a list, however, if it were to indicate the scope and ramifications of the argument would have to be expanded to include more general eighteenth-century studies of the evolution of cultural forms; for the argument on the nature of art and its relation to "primitive" societies is part of a larger one centering on the whole idea of progress. Treatment of the whole subject has never been fully integrated into a study of the nature (or natures) of eighteenth-century criticism and critical theory--although a start has been made on study of it in and of itself. The basic treatment remains Lois Whitney's _Primitivism and the Idea of Progress_ (Baltimore, 1934) and her two essays "English Primitivistic Theories of Epic Origins," _MP_, XXI (1924), 337-378 and "Thomas Blackwell, a Disciple of Shaftesbury," _PQ_, _V_ (1926), 196-211. These are to be considerably qualified in their general, sociological orientation by Gladys Bryson's _Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century_ (Princeton, 1945). They are further to be qualified in their literary-critical orientation by my "The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Primitivists: Some Reconsiderations," _ELH_, XII (1945), 203-220, which is in turn somewhat expanded upon and generalized in the appendix to Ernest Tuveson's _Millenium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress_ (Berkeley, 1949).]

[Footnote 2: See, for example, Donald Foerster, "Scottish Primitivism and the Historical Approach," _PQ_, XXIX (1950), 307-323.]

[Footnote 3: The essay was republished in 1804 as part of Scott's _Dissertations, Essays, and Parallels_. These pieces range from college premium compositions of the 1770's to the "Dissertation" of 1800.]

[Footnote 4: The essay is handily available in W. J. Bate's anthology, _Criticism: The Major Texts_ (New York, 1952), pp. 292-295.]

DISSERTATIONS, Essays, AND PARALLELS.

BY _JOHN ROBERT SCOTT, D. D._

LONDON: _Printed by T. Bensley, Bolt Court_,

AND SOLD BY J. JOHNSON, 72, ST. PAUL'S CHURCH YARD; AND MESS. C. & R. BALDWIN, NEW BRIDGE STREET, BLACKFRIARS.

1804.

CONTENTS.

PAGE. A Dissertation on the Influence of Religion on Civil Society 1

A Dissertation on the Expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and the Protestants from France and the Low Countries 33

A Dissertation on the first Peopling of America 75

A Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts 125

A Dissertation on National Population 181

An Essay on Writing History 219

An Essay on the Question, Was Eloquence beneficial to Athens? 245

An Essay on the Influence of Taste on Morals 269

Comparison between William III, of England and Henry IV, of France 303

Comparison of Cardinal Ximenes and Cardinal Richelieu 323

Comparison between Augustus Cæsar and Lewis XIV 343

Comparison of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham 361

PREFACE.

Most of the following compositions were written several years ago, when the Author was a student in the distinguished University of Dublin; whose acknowledged excellence in classical literature, and in every branch of scientific learning, needs not the celebration of his feeble praise: and by it the first and second Dissertations, and one of the Essays, were honoured with the first literary rewards in the power of that learned body to bestow. Written at first with an honest desire of acquiring fair reputation by praise-worthy exertions, they are now submitted to the public eye from a wish to contribute to the liberal amusement, and perhaps to the improvement, of the minds of his fellow-creatures; with all the natural anxieties of an author addressing a public, to whom he is little known; but without any unmanly dread or humiliating deprecation of just and candid criticism. Should they drop still-born from the press, as it may be has been the fate of as meritorious compositions, the author (as becomes him) will submit without murmuring to the general verdict. Should they, on the contrary, be graced with a favourable reception, he shall deem himself honoured by such notice; and will endeavour to render some larger works of his, shortly to be submitted to the same respectable tribunal, as worthy as his abilities will permit of its approving judgment.

Gloucester Street, Queen Square, 1804.

DISSERTATION ON THE _PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS_.

(Published in 1800.)

TO BENJAMIN WEST, ESQ. PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY,

WHOSE TALENTS DIGNIFY, AND WHOSE MANNERS ORNAMENT HIS ELEVATED SITUATION AS HEAD OF THAT HONOURABLE AND USEFUL INSTITUTION,

THE FOLLOWING DISSERTATION ON

THE PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS

IS DEDICATED, WITH SINCERE RESPECT AND ALL DUE DEFERENCE, BY HIS OBLIGED AND FAITHFUL HUMBLE SERVANT,

_JOHN ROBERT SCOTT_.

28, Gloucester Street, Queen Square, April, 1800.

A DISSERTATION, &c.

The natural feelings of man, when he enters into society with his fellow-creatures, first induce him to improve by the means thence acquired the arts necessary to his existence and well-being: whose want he every day felt in his separate and detached state, and for whose melioration he has just reason to hope from the union of combined force, and from the co-operation of confederated talents. Presst incessantly by the demands for the sustenance of animal life, to supply them plentifully is not only his first care, but also that of the community with which he has associated, if it is even one degree removed from the savage state: and hence, in this early period of growing civilization, the tending of flocks and the tilling of fields, Pasturage and Agriculture, are deemed not only necessary but honourable occupations; the simplicity of untutored man ever leading him to estimate that to be most laudable which he finds to be most useful. These being advanced to a certain degree of excellence, which, though far inferior to what they are obviously capable of attaining, is yet sufficient not only for the comfortable but for the indulgent enjoyment of life, new desires arise, new wants spring up; and their gratification is pursued with an eagerness correspondent to the novelty of their origin, and the untried force of their impression. The cravings of our animal nature being amply provided for by the ingenuity of the inhabitants, by the fertility of the soil, or by the conjoint operation of both, the imagination begins in the luxuriance of abundance to picture to itself new sources of delight, and spurning, not without some contempt, the mere provision for existence, to fancy ideal pleasures, and to search out with anxious care and laboured pains those objects which may gratify them. And man, finding himself possessed of more than a sufficiency to supply all his wants, is willingly inclined to impart some share of that redundance to those who will contribute to his convenience and satisfaction; to those who will render his comforts at all times more comfortable, who will relieve the languors of his lassitude, and fill up the vacuities of his leisure with amusement. As there always were some to whom labour had no charms, other more agreeable means of acquiring support were quickly sought out, and the inventive powers of the mind were stretched to form those imagined pleasures whose want was felt, and whose reward was ready.