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