Abstract

Though Walter Scott was, after Byron, the most widely read and influential British writer of the Romantic period, his relationship to the Romantic movement has never been clearly defined. Modern revisionist critics of his historical novels have suggested that Scott's view of the past was a mixture of Romantic and Enlightenment attitudes, of sympathy or nostalgia and rationalism or progressivism. This mixture, they argued, amounted to a makeshift historicism: Scott's residual Enlightenment tendencies compelled him to recognize the obsolescence of past cultures, while his Romantic tendencies allowed him to appreciate their "validity." Thus Scott has been called a "part-time" Romantic, a Romantic "in the style of Herder." Yet this supposed historicism has proved difficult to reconcile with Scott's Augustan affirmation of the historical uniformity of human nature. ;This impasse can be avoided only if we cease to insist that Scott's understanding of history have some Romantic component. Scott, in fact, can be understood completely as the product of a certain kind of Enlightenment context--the academic culture of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh, in which he moved as a student and young lawyer. Scott's view of history is derived from the so-called "philosophical" historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, a group including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and even David Hume. These historians followed a course at odds with both the ahistoricism of the continental Enlightenment and the historicism of Herder and his followers. While insisting on the historical uniformity of human nature, they were deeply interested in the effects of material circumstances on cultural institutions and modes of thought. As disciples of Montesquieu, they also brought a strongly sociological approach to the study of history. This emphasis on the social, atypical of Enlightenment thought, led to a kind of cultural criticism remote from the Enlightenment mainstream. Even Adam Smith, for example, felt that the individualism of modern commercial society had been a problematic development, since unchecked individualism might ultimately undermine the social cohesion necessary to all human flourishing. With Adam Ferguson, he therefore embraced the classical republican ideal of "civic virtue." Scott was thus the inheritor of a rationalist, progressive philosophy of history, but one with well-defined reservations about progress and modernity.