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
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.