The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts, by John Robert Scott

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Title: Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts

Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 45, 1954

Author: John Robert Scott

Release Date: March 19, 2013 [eBook #42371]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISSERTATION ON THE PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS***

E-text prepared by
Tor Martin Kristiansen, Nicole Henn-Kneif, Joseph Cooper,
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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

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

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