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COPYRIGHT 2007 Boston University
"I MUST CONGRATULATE YOU ON THE ENGRAVING OF BUCHANNAN," JOHN Murray wrote to William Blackwood, after seeing the title-page of Blackwood's new monthly magazine. (1) The name that Murray misspelled was George Buchanan's, whose bearded visage would stare from the title-page of Blackwood's and still stares from his mortuary stele in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. Buchanan was a leading sixteenth-century Scots Humanist and Protestant reformer: a Latin scholar of continental reputation whose students included Montaigne, Queen Mary and King James VI of Scotland; a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and Keeper of Scotland's Privy Seal; a Latin polemicist, historian and poet. George Buchanan would be Blackwood's face in more than one sense. The cultural values and activities that he represented--his Scottish patriotism, his Protestant Christian classicism, his polemics against a dominant ideology--would be basic to early Blackwood's search for Scottish roots and Scottish identities. (2)
In "Observations on the Writings of George Buchanan," the lead-article of Blackwood's June 1818 number, the anonymous observer lamented "the decay of classical learning in Scotland" and Scottish ignorance of "those authors whose works, in every other part of civilized Europe, are venerated and studied as the best fountains of philosophy, and the only perfect models of taste." (3) It was not always so. In the 16th century Buchanan, John Leslie, Thomas Craig of Riccarton and other Scots Humanists had cultivated classical literature, established intellectual contact and exchange with European centers of learning, and encouraged new learned institutions in their native country. "Under the patronage of the royal race of Stuart," wrote Patrick Fraser Tytler, Blackwood's antiquarian-in-waiting, "the cultivation of letters had been encouraged by the example, and rewarded by the munificence, of a line of Kings." (4) Although Scotland then lost direct royal patronage of its courtly poetry and music when James VI of Scotland traveled south with his Court to become James I of England and Scotland, Scotland's Calvinist concern with education and the country's learned professions yet were able to produce individual men of classical learning and broad intellectual interests, whose accomplishments--theological, legal, mathematical--became apparent when the Restoration of 1660 brought a temporary easing of political tension. (5)
When the Duke of York, soon to become King James II, served in Scotland as High Commissioner, he patronized those Scottish professionals whose sympathies were royalist and Episcopalian, men whose ideals of learning and public activity were consciously rooted in the Renaissance tradition of Humanist scholarship. Prominent among them were Sir Robert Sibbald--physician, antiquarian, botanist, and moving spirit in the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh; Sir George Mackenzie--the poet, antiquarian, and lawyer who codified Scotland's criminal law and laid plans for the Faculty of Advocates' Library; Archibald Pitcairne--physician, anti-Presbyterian satirist, and champion of medical reform; and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik--patron of the arts and agricultural improvement, an enthusiastic antiquarian, classicist, geologist, astronomer and chemist. The Humanist-Jacobite-Episcopalian sympathies of Sibbald, Mackenzie, Clerk of Penicuik, and Pitcairne were transmitted in turn to the early eighteenth-century editors and printers, Thomas Ruddiman and Robert Freebairn. After graduating from King's College, Aberdeen, where the Jacobite-Episcopalian culture of the north-east of Scotland was strong, Ruddiman came to Edinburgh at Pitcairne's encouragement, developed his scholarly and editorial skills as librarian of the Faculty of Advocates' Library, and joined with the printer Robert Freebairn in an attempt to revive a Humanist Scoto-Latin culture that would recognize Scottish writers of the past while encouraging the adoption of Latin as modern Scotland's international literary voice. (6)
The cultural program of Ruddiman and Freebairn, the Scottish classicism that Blackwood's could admire without thoroughly endorsing for the early nineteenth century, was equally unsuited to Scotland's eighteenth-century needs. Now part of Great Britain through the Act of Union of 1707, ambitious Scotsmen had chosen to compete within Britain's literary culture through cultivation of the English language. English replaced Latin as the language in which the subjects of the Arts curriculum at Scottish universities were taught. After the Jacobite uprising of 1715 had undermined the status of Jacobite-Episcopalian scholars, several generations of Whig-Presbyterian, eventually Hanoverian thinkers came to dominate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish intellectual and literary life. A close-knit social and professional group of moderate Presbyterian clergy, lay professors, lawyers, urban administrators, and landed gentry with urban connections--men such as Francis Hutcheson, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and Dugald Stewart--they were committed to the rational exploration and ordering of the common human and specifically Scottish experience. Their private friendships, institutional agendas, and philosophical debates were the core of what now is called the Scottish Enlightenment. (7)
Most of the enlightened Scottish literati included a teleological element in their studies of human physical and psychological faculties, a belief that the phenomena of human experience are clear evidence of divine design. Teleological thinking was part of Scotland's Calvinist heritage and consistent with the scientific arguments advanced by influential members of Scotland's scientific community. Socially central but philosophically eccentric, David Hume was a notorious exception. Hume's analysis of causal inference, his subjectivistic moral theory, and his discussion of the soul and personal identity threatened both natural theology and contemporary Christianity. Blackwood's writers, especially John Gibson Lockhart, recognized what many philosophic Scotsmen tried to deny, that Hume had been the most significant British thinker of the eighteenth century: "This man, by the penetrating and convulsive influence of his scepticism, determined the future condition of English philosophy. Since his time nothing more has been attempted than to erect all sorts of bulwarks against the practical influence of this destructive scepticism: and to maintain, by various substitutes and aids, the pile of moral principles uncorrupted and entire." (8)
Among the substitutes and aids offered by Scotsmen were the sympathy of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the common sense of Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). For Lockhart neither was sufficient to withstand the corrosion of Hume's skepticism: "Common sense is poor when compared with certain knowledge,--and moral feeling is a...
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