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24 - The Scottish Enlightenment
- from THEMES AND MOVEMENTS
- Edited by H. B. Nisbet, University of Cambridge, Claude Rawson, Yale University, Connecticut
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 13 November 1997, pp 546-559
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Summary
‘Among the ancients’, wrote Robert Eden Scott, the first Professor of Moral Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, ‘Criticism was chiefly cultivated as an art, and consisted rather in practical rules than in scientific investigation: it is to the Moderns, and those too of a very late date, that we owe a philosophical investigation of that science of Rhetoric, and an analysis of those faculties of the mind, upon which peculiar effects are produced, by literary composition, in its various kinds.’ ‘Philosophical investigation’ was the occupation of Scottish academics, ministers and lawyers in the heyday of the Enlightenment. It was rooted in the Scottish system of higher education, and it flowered in the concern for professional status, communal interests and national identity which evolved from the religious, political and cultural events of the recent past.
A strong sense of changing times, embodied in the Act of Union in 1707, of the superior refinement and politeness of metropolitian society, and of the need for efficiency in communication and consensus not only between countries but among regions (forcing to the periphery the issue of the large Gaelic-speaking population), determined the priorities of inquirers pursuing those ‘inner formative forces’ which for Cassirer distinguished the mind of the Enlightenment. Forces such as feeling, sympathy and taste, inherent in the writings of Shaftesbury and his popularizer Addison and grafted on to the stock of humanist speculation congenial to the religious temper of Scotland were expanded by Francis Hutcheson in the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (17Z5). These found their way into the critical principles of Smith, Hume and their contemporaries.
5 - Boswell as critic
- Edited by Greg Clingham
- Introduction by David Daiches
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- Book:
- New Light on Boswell
- Published online:
- 28 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 27 June 1991, pp 72-86
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Summary
Few eighteenth-century literary figures are more congenial to the twentieth than Boswell. Had he lived today it can hardly be doubted that he would have excelled in the art of the interview. His alertness to the strategy of the situation, his sensitivity to the potentialities of his own role, are unrivalled. He is as happy interviewing a porter at the door of a cockfight (“I have great pleasure in conversing with the lower part of mankind, who have very curious ideas”) as interrogating General Paoli, Rousseau, or Voltaire, and he is fully aware of the value his public will assign to each. His wish is for fame and money: in his time the pursuits of literature and criticism might seem to offer unrivalled opportunities for both.
Boswell's criticism, however, is not that of the professional, but the amateur. Unlike Johnson, who was responsible to booksellers, to his public, to the tradition of authors and critics whose values he interpreted for his own times in the “common pursuit of true judgement,” Boswell chose as his models the fashionable and the successful. The instincts of the journalist seem to dissipate his recorded literary interests into the occasional sensitive response or commonsense observation. Even in the series of papers he wrote for the London Magazine he discusses only four specifically literary topics: Periodicals, Authorship and Revision, Criticism, and Diaries. It is hardly surprising that, although on occasion he may seem to challenge Johnson to advantage in specific critical judgements – notably on Fielding, for example – there has been little attention paid to criticism as one of Boswell's strengths {Life, II, 175).