Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon : The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism [1 ed.] 9780812202939, 9780812240092

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Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon

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Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism

Steve Newman

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newman, Steve, 1970Ballad collection, lyric, and the canon : the call of the popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism I Steve Newman. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Why there's no poetic justice in The beggar's opera : ballad, lyric, and the semiautonomy of culture - Scots songs in the Scottish Enlightenment : pastoral, progress, and the lyric split in Allan Ramsay, John Home, and Robert Burns Addressing the problem of a lyric history : collecting Shakespeare's songs/Shakespeare as song collector - Ballads and the problem of lyric violence in Blake and Wordsworth- Reading as remembering and the subject oflyric : child ballads, children's ballads, and the New Criticism. ISBN-13: 978-o-8122-4009-2 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: o-8122-4009-X (acid-free paper) 1. Ballads, English-Great Britain-History and criticism. 2. Ballads, ScotsScotland-History and criticism. 3. Ballads in literature. 4. Popular culture in literature. 5. English literature-History and criticism. 6. Criticism-Great Britain-History. 7· Criticism-United States-History. I. Title. PR507.N49 2007 821' .04409--dc22 2006051472

To Keely, my beloved

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Contents

Introduction

1

1

Why There's No Poetic Justice in The Beggar's Opera: Ballads, Lyric, and the Semiautonomy of Culture 15

2

Scots Songs in the Scottish Enlightenment: Pastoral, Progress, and the Lyric Split in Allan Ramsay, John Home, and Robert Burns 44

3

Addressing the Problem of a Lyric History: Collecting 97 Shakespeare's Songs/Shakespeare as Song Collector

4

Ballads and the Problem of Lyric Violence in Blake and Wordsworth 136

5

Reading as Remembering and the Subject of Lyric: Child Ballads, Children's Ballads, and the New Criticism 185 Notes

229

Bibliography Index

263

283

Acknowledgments

293

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[W]hen I enter any House in the Country ... I can't, for my Heart, leave a Room before I have thoroughly studied the Walls of it, and examined the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon them . ... My Reader will think I am not serious, when I acquaint him that the Piece I am going to speak of was the old Ballad of the Two Children in the Wood, which is one of the Darling Songs of the Common People, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their Age. -Joseph Addison, Spectator 85 Why do you make a book? Because my Hands can extend but a few score Inches from my Body; because my poverty keeps those Hands empty when my Heart aches to empty them . ... 0 but think only of the thoughts, feelings, radical Impulses that have been implanted in how many thousands of thousands by the little Ballad of the Children in the Wood! The Sphere of Alexander the great's Agency is trifling compared with it. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks But very early Cleanth had made a fundamental suggestion. After an introductory section ofgeneral discussion, we would get down to individual poems and start with narrative, including folk ballads. ... [O]ur whole effort was to show how the non-bookish poetry could lead straight to the bookish. -Robert Penn Warren, "Brooks and Warren," Humanities

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Introduction

Ballads run like a radioactive dye through elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond, illuminating the structures and workings of high culture. Authors happen across ballads on the walls of country houses and city streets, hear them bawled out in London and Edinburgh, and track them to cottages in pursuit of minstrelsy. They turn to ballads to answer the agonized question posed by Coleridge in the second epigraph I have chosen, "Why do you make a book?" And, as the first two epigraphs reveal, Addison and Coleridge, despite their many differences, are both drawn to the much reprinted ballad of"The Children in the Wood." While Addison's reader will think he is "not serious" and although Coleridge patronizingly refers to it as a "little ballad;' they both hear this "Darling Song of the Common People" calling to them. So their enthusiasm overcomes their embarrassment in breaching the boundary between high and low, an ambivalent response to the ballad's call that is representative of the phenomenon under study herethe incorporation of ballads into elite poetry and criticism from the English Restoration to the American New Criticism. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon analyzes how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform "literature" from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that becomes known as the English literary canon. This transformation lays the ground for the scholars and textbook authors who alter the canon by bringing it into the school, where the ballad is valued as the Urtext leading philologists and students from the "non-bookish" to "the bookish:' These are the words Robert Penn Warren uses to describe how he and Cleanth Brooks came to write their epoch-making primer in close reading, Understanding Poetry (1938), which proved so influential in the ensuing decades. There is a long and complex story of cultural change behind this phenomenon, uniting in their differences Mr. Spectator's coy confession,

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Introduction

Coleridge's altitudo, and Warren's reminiscence, and we can begin to tell that tale by way of a definition of the ballad from 1728 as a "song commonly sung up and down the streets." 1 For those attracted to the ballad, "commonly" signifies in two ways. The first is "common" as undistinguished or as nonelite; the second is "common" as universal. Under the sign of the first "common;' the ballad lacks the prestige of high genres, carrying with it the nosewrinkling savor of Grub Street. But this very lowness makes the ballad attractive to elite authors. Because ballads are merely "common;' elite authors are not intimidated by them; they feel freer to rewrite ballads, to show their poetic license to slum with a lower genre, and to make them object lessons in appreciating popular texts. Why they should be appreciated brings us to common-as-universal. Easily circulated and understood, the ballad avoids the bad exclusions of more courtly genres while retaining some of their valued characteristics. After 1660, the court gradually loses its centrality to a more diffuse network of print, and the court's rigid social hierarchy and aristocratic refinements come to seem increasingly unviable as a source of legitimate artistic practice. So authors begin to turn to the more horizontal and fluid discourse that many critics of our era call the public sphere. But in doing so they worry that the public sphere's conjoined and misshapen twin-consumer society-has made things too fluid. They are anxious that value has become a function solely of economic exchange, dissolving social ties and national traditions into self-interest and an uncritical celebration of the modern. And here, again, the ballad's common-ness makes it attractive, for it remains rooted in the history of Great Britain. Prior to the Restoration, the ballad had attracted a few passing favorable comments by Sir Philip Sidney and others, but these were far outnumbered by scornful dismissals. 2 So during this era the ballad, unlike Shakespeare and other elite authors, was valued for the first time, and its eighteenth-century reappraisal was also key in establishing the canon. (In fact, as we will see, Shakespeare's rising reputation had something to do with the ballad.) Yet, unlike the novel, another genre that "rises" in the eighteenth century, the ballad is credited with stronger ties to English tradition-for instance, when it is used as a native counterweight against the fripperies of Italian opera. The ballad also differs from the novel because it has stronger ties to an elite form-lyric. 3 Although we tend to associate the ballad with the objectivity attributed to folk narrative rather than the subjectivity attributed to lyric, those in Coleridge's day were quicker to remember the origins of lyric in the public music of the lyre, like the contemporary reviewer of Lyrical Bal-

Introduction

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lads who rhetorically asked:" [W]hat Ballads are not Lyrical?"4 More specifically, the ballad is classed as a lesser lyric, a designation that speaks to both ways in which it is "common." As a lesser lyric, the ballad does not burden the elite author as does the greater lyric of the ode or hymn with weighty matters of public ritual. As a lesser lyric, the ballad points to the roots of the genre, however individuated its speaker, in communal song. The ballad thereby embodies what I call the doubleness of lyric, its unusual blending of individual and communal language. The music of the ballad broadens its reach and intensifies its grasp on an audience, its refrain frequently drawing in those who hear it to participate in the singing, whether or not they already know the tune or the words. The power of the ballad to produce social solidarity is clearly marked by the authors in this study who devote significant energy to setting verse to music, like John Gay and Robert Burns. But even those who do not write songs for musical performance, like John Home and William Wordsworth, draw on the communal orientation intimated by the ballad's ontology as song. They see in it a basis for community that may be as lasting as poetry itself or as fugitive as the crowd that gathers for a moment around a ballad-monger in a city street, as broadly pitched as "all you who either hear or read" or as exclusive as those agitators privileged to know a Jacobite or Jacobin tune when they hear one. 5 So, called by the ballad's communal voice, elite authors engage in the phenomenon scholars have named the Ballad Revival, though, as many have pointed out, it is elite literature and not the traditional ballad itself that is "revived."6 Authors collect ballads not only into anthologies like Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany (1723-25) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) but also into their poems, plays, and essays. Collection is their way of accessing the ballad's collectivity, a way to take advantage of the ballad's circulation as a cheap commodity while framing it so that it remains tied to a common nationality. Constituting the ballad this way, authors begin to stage moments in which an elite mind is called through an encounter with popular song to know itself and its place in the nation. For instance, midcentury authors imagine Shakespeare himself as perfectly attuned to the call of the popular, capable of bringing the high into touch with the low without debasing the high or losing the rough energy of the low. A few decades later, we have lyrics like Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper;' in which a tourist happens upon a singer of popular song and is arrested by its power, modeling a response for solitary readers in the marketplace and, later, in elementary schools and graduate seminars.

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Introduction

By the time we reach the New Criticism, the ballad, though often explicitly contrasted with lyric, is also enshrined as the genre that initiates readers into lyric. Its terseness foregrounds poetic structure and stimulates "close reading"; its social character moves the student to consider the dynamic between the one and the many; its simplicity makes it a point of reference for more "developed" verse. This is the culmination of a dual narrative of personal and national development emergent in the Long Eighteenth Century in which the ballad gains definition as the favored text of childhood and the nation's early days. Set next to the value increasingly placed on individual innovation, the ballad's sturdy conventionality can be cast either as a reassuring permanence or as a sign of an imaginative poverty that echoes the material scarcity of the culture in which old songs are found. But however damned or praised or damned with faint praise, the ballad becomes a productively liminal genre, its strong meter and dramatic situation a baseline for the structure of the poem as integral artifact, its accessibility a model for the poem as social text. Having been cast as the first poem of childhood, learned from nurse or mother, and/or as a relic of the national past, it can then be recognized as an object of elite consciousness. If this stimulates a nostalgia often informed by a complacent scheme of personal and national development, it also enrolls ballads in a debate that continues to this day, over who has and has not been included in a supposed progression toward a more democratic society, an ideal so sorely unrealized in practice that many have naturally wondered whether "progress" is itself a suspect notion. My argument is both built on and designed to challenge many strains in recent criticism, including work on lyric, on genre, on the relationship of elite to popular culture, on the relationship between orality and print, and on the Ballad Revival itself. So a methodological preamble is in order.

Putting Lyric in Its Place: Genre and History It might be said that recent critics have been committed to putting lyric in its place, undercutting its claims for transcendence by grounding it in history. Supposedly seeking to escape the determinacies of the past and present through individual expression, lyric turns out to be very much tied to context. 7 Some critics trace the ideology of lyric transcendence as far back as Plato's metaphysics, with lyric serving as a monologue of the subject's wishful presence that invites poststructuralist exposes of its aporias in language

Introduction

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and being. 8 The rise of lyric has also been located in the Early Modern period, in the "pretty rooms" of sonnets built by the humanist or Protestant subject or the feints and faintings of the impassioned courtier. 9 But lyric as we have come to know it has been most frequently situated in the Romantic era. The poems of William Wordsworth and other canonical authors institute what Jerome McGann has labeled "the Romantic ideology;' which reveals that the "greater Romantic lyric" celebrated by M. H. Abrams is built upon sacrificing history and collective life on the altar of individual Imagination.10 That lyric is so closely identified with the literary as such is no accident, since it intensifies the mystifications of Literature as a timeless repository of individual genius and national spirit. Despite studies that have questioned this New Historicist position, it remains a touchstone of Romantic and post-Romantic criticism. If lyric is overheard rather than heard, as John Stuart Mill famously defines it, it has been overheard recently by those skeptical of its Romantic soliloquy. 11 But this solitary speaking is not intrinsic to lyric. As Theodor Adorno claims in "Lyric and Society;' "All individual lyric poetry is indeed grounded in a collective substratum." 12 For authentic "generality," according to Adorno, we must paradoxically turn to poets like Stefan George who "scorn every borrowing from the communal language" (163). George's dogged resistance to "the lonely process of reification" that taints the conventions of bourgeois lyric puts his poetry under such pressure that its "cult of elevation" is fissured by the authentically general forces that Adorno does acknowledge, "language's deepest being" and "the thought of a free humanity" (168-70). But if Adorno gives us a way to detect the utopian character of high lyric, he does so at the cost of reading "[t]he regard which romanticism had for folksong" as a "phantasmagoria;' as "cheap decorative imitations" that provide merely a "technical illusion of generality" on behalf of the bourgeois individual (169). Adopting a position ironically close to Jakob Grimm's famous (later notorious) pronouncement, das Volk dichtet (the folk makes the poem), Adorno holds that the automatic spirit of the collective ventriloquizes high lyric only in reaction to a strong commitment to an impossible aristocratic individuality. So the relationship he posits between "lyric" and "society" rules out the consciously critical view by poets and critics as the emergence of civil society and the civil subject becomes an object of analysis during the Long Eighteenth Century. Lyric's role in reflecting on civil society, past and present, has recently attracted some healthy attention. Clifford Siskin argues that identifying "lyric

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Introduction

with personal, subjective feeling" misses "the point.... The very act of writing in that form represented one's participation in a larger discursive project-Wordsworth's 'experiment'-in which lyrics effectively functioned as data in hypothetical narratives of knowledge linking past to present." 13 For Siskin, then, it is correct to see lyric emerging to become the essence of Literature, "encircling" other forms; 14 the mistake lies in reducing lyric to subjective affect, which, like Adorno's approach, overlooks the genre's work in constructing histories of civilization that begin with primitive lyric utterance and culminate in Romantic lyrics that measure the gap between past and present. Anne Janowitz, in another important contribution to criticism on Romantic lyric, would add that Romantic lyric was not only an act of knowledge that traced the history of civilization. It was also part of a political debate, one in which many plebeian poets participated: "The liberal self and the lyric self were twin births from and accompanying voices to a revolutionary idea of a democratic voice in the age of revolution. But out of this same matrix arose as well the notion of a collectivised popular sovereignty, which drew upon customary culture and its popular poetic forms, which were then marked and modified by the languages of interiority." 15 So the lyric individual and the citizen of the liberal nation-state were not in a simply antagonistic relationship to "collectivised popular sovereignty" but rather emerged out of a shared "idea of a democratic voice:' At the same time, "popular poetic forms" were inflected "by the languages of interiority:' But to understand the role of lyric in Siskin's historiographical account and Janowitz's dialogue between "the liberal self" and "popular sovereignty;' we need to start even earlier than Siskin's beginning point of 1700. Admittedly, this claim runs counter to the received wisdom on Restoration and eighteenth-century lyric. Many have seen it as a lyrical dry gulch. 16 Those who have called attention to its ample lyric resources have emphasized what John Sitter has memorably called its "literary loneliness;' positing a "lyric solitude;' a privately oriented "feminization;' or a "lyric negativity" that stands "in contradistinction to the subjects of public conversation." 17 Thus, despite the disfavor that "pre-Romanticism" has recently suffered, scholars nonetheless tend to position eighteenth-century lyric as a precursor to the solitude of Romantic lyric. As I argue in Chapters 2 and 3, a tendency to retreat into the self does exist within the lyric of this era, and a split within lyric emerges in the mid-eighteenth century, in which the individual speakers in poems like William Collins' "Ode on the Poetical Character" feel themselves isolated from both the great voices of the past and the community of the present. But

Introduction

7

this is only part of lyric's story. As Thomas Hurd argues in ''A Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry" (1766), although lyric has now become "the labor of the closet;' it maintains "a secret reference to the sense of hearing and to that acceptation which melodious sounds meet with in the recital of expressive words." 18 For Hurd, no man of the people, lyric retains a public orientation bound up in its musical qualities even if it has retreated to the "closet;' and many authors both before and after him do not accept the premise of lyric privacy, aiming instead to make its "reference" to the public more than "secret:' It is in pursuit of the lyric dialogue between "I" and "we" that I have focused on a set of authors that some may find unusual. While I do treat some of the poets on most current lists of eighteenth-century and Romantic lyric (Blake, Burns, Clare, Collins, Gray, Hemans, Wordsworth), many others are absent-Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith, and John Keats, to name a few. In their stead are relatively obscure poets like Thomas D'Urfey and Allan Ramsay (the latter, though, is more familiar to those who specialize in Scottish poetry). Then there are others, both well and little known, who are not primarily poets, like David Garrick, John Home, and Thomas Percy, as well as the various critics, scholars, textbook writers, and teachers discussed in the final chapter. Some of these choices can be attributed to the exigency of space; this does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of the relationship between ballad and lyric, let alone lyric as a whole. With world enough and time, I would have been happy to say something about John Dryden's or Aphra Behn's or Thomas Moore's use of popular song or to have carried my study forward to consider how W. B. Yeats or Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes or Paul Muldoon uses popular song to continue altering lyric, not to mention the likenesses between the English Ballad Revival and the incorporation of rap into current African American poetry. But my expertise does not extend that far, and neither does the indulgence of most readers (or publishers). So I have restricted myself to a particular series of cases in the British Long Eighteenth Century and to an analysis of the integration of ballads into the American school from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century that are representative of a still broader story of the how and the why of elite lyric's transformative encounter with popular song. My approach is informed by a few fundamental claims about genre. 19 The first is that genres cannot be properly understood in isolation; lyric is not only internally complicated by the ballad but is also comprehensible only within an overlapping array that includes pastoral and also nonpoetic genres

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Introduction

like the essay. But it is in these overlaps and internal divisions that we also see the limits of genre understood in terms of taxonomy. While taxonomy may allow us to name ballad as a subgenre of lyric, it tends to underplay the way that forms change, are changed by authors and change them in the writing, are altered by readers and alter them in the reading, are formed by history and form history in turn. My desire to capture the dynamism of form explains my defining the ballad as a "song commonly sung up and down the streets." There is value in listing the myriad subgenres of ballads in terms of their themes (ballads of tragic love, news ballads, religious ballads) or their specific rhetorical characteristics (dialogue, reported speech, narrative). 20 However, since I am primarily interested in showing how ballads are used by elite authors, I define the ballad broadly in terms of its performative situation (it is verse designed to be sung) and its common-ness, for these are the elements that make it most attractive for writers trying to figure out how to adapt to fundamental changes in the structure of elite literary production, circulation, and consumption. So I am in partial agreement with Fredric Jameson's assertion that history does not "cause" genre in any simple way but rather"shut[s] down a certain number of formal possibilities available before, and open[s] up determinate new ones, which may or may not ever be realized in artistic practice:'21 This is to say that, in contrast to a trend within historicism to oppose the fluid force of history and the hypostasizing force of genre, history is always already operating within genre, limiting and enlarging its artistic possibilities. This will be made clear in the "lyric split" discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, in which an anxiety among English and Scottish elites over modernity's effect on the status hierarchy moves them away from the demotic chorus of the ballad and toward restricting lyric to an evocative individual speech. But if historical change splits lyric, lyric also transforms the very preconditions for knowing history, and this is why my agreement with Jameson is only partial, since he tends to stress only the history-to-genre vector. We will see this feedback loop between form and history (though loop is perhaps too restrictive a figure) in the way that the ballad alters Enlightenment historiography, especially through its idea of pastoral (Chapter 2). Or in the way Percy and Joseph Ritson use the ballad to construct competing versions of what I call a "lyric history" (Chapter 3) that exploits gaps in the record to produce accounts of change and continuity. Or how Blake and Wordsworth react against what they feel is the "lyric violence" (Chapter 4) of prior modes of collection in order to envision a future that will preserve the interests of their

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9

readers. Or, finally, how ballads build a "lyric subject" (Chapter 5), a self, made by form, whose life-narrative is correlated with the narrative of the nation and of the species as a whole. For reasons of stylistic felicity, I have used lyric as an adjective in each of these phrases, but my overriding aim is to show that "form" is a verb as well as a noun and a transitive verb at that.

The Rise of Literature and the Problem of Poetic Justice In making these claims about form's relationship to history, I am mindful of the danger of formal allegory-in this case, of uncritically reading the lyric's recourse to the collective voice of the ballad as a homology for political vision, in which the "we" of the People stands against the atomizing forces of Capitalism, Individualism, or some other abstraction. Instead of seeing things in terms of these calcified and simplified conflicts, I aim to understand how genre is transformed by history and politics is mediated by genre. In doing so, I also aim to revise recent critiques of the rise of Literature in the eighteenth century, particularly as it bears on the relationship of elite to popular culture. According to these accounts, belles lettres separates itself from the sullying world of popular culture and the literary marketplace and clears a necessary space for the polite man (gender and status exclusive) whose calling card is aesthetic disinterest and who combines the taste of the aristocrat with the social mobility of the middle class. 22 The separations between low and high on which this revisionist criticism is based would seem to be complicated by the frequency with which elite eighteenth-century authors borrow from popular genres, ballads among them. But many critics have made a strong case that borrowing "from below" is done only on the borrowers' terms. For instance, John Guillory, in an incisive analysis of canon formation, reads Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads as examples of "covert pastoral:' Feeling marginalized by a middle-class Public coming into its own, Gray and Wordsworth simplify the social field into the binary of aristocrat and peasant and present themselves as aristocrats in peasant garb. 23 A similar skepticism toward elite appropriation of the popular has also marked recent studies of the Ballad Revival. Dave Harker's Fakesong reads all of the ballad collectors up to and including Thomas Percy as driven by a desire for patronage from the reactionary powers that be, a desire that "predis-

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Introduction

posed them to patronize or even to expropriate the products of workers' culture."24 Susan Stewart offers a subtler account in which the "scandals of the ballad" are motivated by a reaction against the "conditions of authorship in the literary culture of the late eighteenth century:'25 In its stead, minstrelsy seeks to put in place an organic and oral national culture that tries to paper over the aporias in language brought to light by print. In Katie Trumpener's magisterial and nuanced analysis, "bardic nationalism" pits those who seek to establish Anglocentric hegemony against those who fight for the cultural (and sometimes political) independence of the Gaelic periphery. 26 But while this debate continues well into the nineteenth century, with those more critical of empire prefiguring the postcolonial critique of the twentieth, the nostalgia exemplified by Walter Scott's historical novels gains the cultural upper hand and so the ballad becomes primarily a tool of imperialism. It is true that elite authors who shake hands with the ballad tend to keep it at arm's length, and so it would be dangerous to idealize their engagement with it, to forget the Bourdieuvian drive toward distinction in the field of cultural production. It would likewise be blind not to see that gender profoundly shapes the literature of the time. My hope is that I can add something to feminist understandings of patriarchy's role in forming and maintaining the canon by considering the importance of gender in the Scottish Enlightenment's imagination of song, William Wordsworth's struggles with the abject role of women in ballads, and the lack of respect accorded to Felicia Hemans's experiments with popular song. I hope, too, that my readings of Burns and Blake aid the project to clarify how plebeian authors dealt with prohibitions and constricting stereotypes in their attempt to publish their work. The systole of inclusion by way of the ballad cannot be divorced from the diastole of exclusion. But although I am indebted to these studies of the Ballad Revival, and of gender and class in the literature of the era, I have found that they ultimately cannot explain many elements of the phenomenon under study here. For many of those involved in the Ballad Revival, things are not as simple as a choice between base desires and the cool disinterest of aesthetic pleasure. Rather, they present the ballad as the catalyst of a profound interest, a strong call to feel its communal power, a passion mediated but not dissipated by a reflexive knowledge of self and history. Within this broader commonality are profound differences that can be seen only if we look earlier and more broadly than the midcentury cult of bard and minstrel that has been the typical starting point for work on the

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Ballad Revival. Consider Thomas D'Urfey and William Blake. D'Urfey, the foremost songwriter of the Restoration, employs the ballad in the wake of the English Civil War to imagine a nation in which the Stuart monarch reigns over a happy populace bound together by the customs of Merrie England in contrast to the grim leveling of the Whigs. A century later, Blake employs street songs to imagine an Albion of Dissenting prophets that would make D'Urfey shudder. Differences are equally sharp among writers of the same era-for instance, Joseph Ritson's fierce attack on the elitism of Thomas Percy's Reliques is driven by Ritson's republican views. There are also other, subtler differences. For some, the ballad acts as a way to manage historical change, as in Walter Scott's accommodation of nostalgia for traditional Scotland to the imperative to embrace modern Britain. But in the hands of Burns, Scots song becomes a hammer to smash the assumption of historical progress. Even in more conservative accounts we see the stress marks of conflict, especially in the sharp debates over gender roles and sexuality in the nation. For the literati of the Scottish Enlightenment, the martial heroism that limns the ballad becomes a way to answer the anxiety that modern politeness also risks a slip into effeminacy. It would be a mistake, though, simply to read off the differing politics of these authors from their adaptation of the ballad, naming this one as reactionary, that one as progressive. For one of the most important things that the Ballad Revival adds to our understanding of elite culture is the way politics gets mediated by elite culture, complicating recent positions on literature and the aesthetic. One way of illustrating this claim is to consider the role of print in our epigraphs from both Addison and Coleridge. To quote The Winter's Tale, a text I will be returning to repeatedly, they "love a ballad-inprint"-not because they "are true;' as Shakespeare's shepherds believe, but because they circulate widely. It is true that the raft of broadsides printed every year are not favored by antiquarians like Thomas Percy who prefer manuscript or black-letter, or philologists like Francis James Child who prize the supposedly "pure" oral ballads that record the evidence of a dwindling "folk:' 27 However the traditional ballad has been theorized, critics to this day routinely oppose it to the degradations associated with the broadside or stall ballad, described by Nick Groom in his groundbreaking study of Percy as "perpetually recycled patterns of bloody or salacious plots, treacly sentimental trash;' tainted with the pretensions and commercial motives of literary print culture. 28 Earlier scholars reacted to the fact that many traditional ballads doubtlessly originated as broadsides or at least passed through that state

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Introduction

at one point by attempting to excavate the traces of orality in the broadsides that survive (for instance, "incremental repetition") and rank them accordingly. This pursuit of pure orality has, in turn, become the object of critique of more recent studies, which uncover its lack of empirical evidence or its logocentric fantasies. But the dichotomy between orality and print does not obtain for Addison, Coleridge, and many other elite authors interested in the ballad (let alone for ballads themselves, which often pass in dizzying fashion back and forth between print and orality). Neither do all elite authors turn to the ballad retreating into a minstrel or bardic past from the public sphere of print culture as it emerges in the eighteenth century. When Coleridge favorably compares the ''Agency" of the "little ballad" to that of Alexander the Great, he imagines a public bound together by something other than the sword of the absolutist state that precedes it or of the Napoleonic and paranoid British states currently on the prowl (or the oral stylings of the bard), a public that might even be actuated by "radical impulses:' As defined by the ballad, that public can also take good advantage of the system of print, exploiting print's opportunities for contact and mitigating its impermanence and commodification. Against print's ephemerality, the ballad offers the possibility of permanence to Mr. Spectator, himself a creature of print. It binds together public and private, moving from street to cottage and then, thanks to Mr. Spectator's refined taste, moving back out to the more discriminating public that reads his essays. For his part, Coleridge turns to "Children" as an answer to his pained question as to why he publishes at all, drawing on Jean Paul's excuse for making a book-that it allows the author to exceed the "narrow circle oflove" circumscribed by his physical body, which allows him to "grasp so few good hands:' 29 Never one to leave a figure alone, Coleridge adds to this friendly reading community the specter of self-interest's grasping hands-"because my poverty keeps those Hands empty when my Heart aches to empty them"-as economic need has just forced him to sign with Longman to "make a book" of poems for a mere twenty pounds. 30 (Typically, he never fulfilled his part of the contract.) Poverty forces him to write for money, whatever his desire may be to "empty" the product of his hands and mind out of love for the public. These epigraphs reveal more than the limits of the print/oral dichotomy. Coleridge's revision of Paul and Mr. Spectator's more reticent gesture at the materiality of print show why it is important to understand the

Introduction

13

field of cultural production and the aesthetic mode of apprehension adjunct to it as semiautonomous, neither divorced from nor reducible to the state, church, or market. Coleridge acknowledges that he needs to make money but wants to do something more than that, to increase his agency and reach his readers' hearts. (We might also wonder if there isn't a conqueror's fantasy mixed in with Coleridge's wish.) If we do not see that elite culture is irreducible to the church, state, or market, we are bound to misunderstand Gay's attempt to find "poetic justice" beyond the cruelty of the gallows and the moral stupidity of opera in The Beggar's Opera (Chapter 1), Allan Ramsay's carving out a sphere for the Scottish literati outside of an Anglocentric state and the Scottish Presbyterian Church (Chapter 2), and David Garrick's replacement of the royal pageant with a singing parade of Shakespearean characters as representatives of the nation (Chapter 3). The need to preserve this semiautonomy is particularly important when discussing Romantic lyric (Chapter 4). By this point, ballad collection has a well-constituted history and itself becomes the object of reflection, and Wordsworth and Blake worry over its potential to evaporate the space between culture and politics. For within the electrified field of postRevolutionary discourse, authors come under pressure to turn the community of song into an unthinking chorus of unanimity, whether radical or reactionary. While some Romantic authors do use popular songs for directly political purposes (see Percy Shelley's "The Devil's Walk"), others turn them to different ends. When Wordsworth and Blake collect popular songs into their work, they guard against erasing the particulars of the culture from which those songs come, Blake against the making of Street Cries merely picturesque, Wordsworth against the sensational ballads of Gottfried August Burger, James Macpherson, and Walter Scott. This ethnographic care toward the object is matched by a concern not to coerce the reader into an unreflective nationalism. Without falling into a nai:ve account of subjective freedom or ignoring the nostalgia and elitism also bound up in the Romantic collection of the ballad, the following study seeks to present this care for local culture and readerly agency as a legacy bequeathed by the Ballad Revival to literary study as we now practice it. To track the fate of that Romantic legacy, my account concludes with an analysis of how the Ballad Revival shaped literary scholarship and pedagogy in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the rise of the New Criticism. Having been masculinized as a vocation by Scott, ballad collection becomes a proper endeavor for American philologists like Francis James

14

Introduction

Child and Francis Barton Gummere and for the teachers and textbook writers who incorporate and popularize their scholarship, including Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who are typically thought of as antagonistic to philology. For all of these authors, ballads become part of "the protoplasm of literature;' the favored texts for the student on the cusp of "the bookish:' Initiating the student into literary self-consciousness, they also bring him into touch with the roots of the nation, what Gummere calls many decades before Benedict Anderson "the imagined community;' and what Warren, appropriating a Native American vision of resistance to genocide, calls "the Ghost Dance."

* * * My goal has been to write a history of lyric and Literature that properly weighs the specificities of genre along with changes in sociopolitical structure and that does not assume too quickly the significance of the elite encounter with popular song. But the Ballad Revival also repeatedly raises an ethical problem that exceeds any history-the vexed relationship of poetry to justice. This is the issue I take up in the coda. From the start of the Ballad Revival, the ballad acts as an invaluable resource for dreaming of poetic justice in a democratic key, its communal strain saving elite lyric and elite theory from the solipsism recent accounts have laid at its doorstep. But as Gay points out as early as 1728, there is a persistent danger in mistaking the politics of the imaginary for an actually existing democracy. Popular song is not intrinsically progressive; it has no built-in politics. And while it is important not to dismiss poetic justice as "just poetry;' it is equally important not to forget the mediations that are inseparable from Literature as long as the cultural field remains structured by divisions between "high;' "middlebrow;' and "low" or the lecture hall and the street or "restricted" and "general" economies of production. To erase those mediations courts a facile notion of the relationship between culture and politics. Though we must dream the Ghost Dance if we wish one day to dance it, there is no short cut to it, however much we may want one.

Chapter 1

Why There's No Poetic Justice in The Beggar's Opera: Ballads, Lyric, and the Semiautonomy of Culture

To understand the work ballads do in The Beggar's Opera, it is best to approach them from the oblique angle provided by the conclusion. As Macheath moves toward the scaffold, his progress is stopped by an exchange between the Player and the Beggar who has putatively written the play:

Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don't intend that Macheath shall be really executed. Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.-To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice. 1 Poetic justice requires that a narrative end with the guilty punished and the virtuous rewarded. Yet when the Player protests that to hang Macheath would violate the rule that "an Opera must end happily;' the Beggar immediately gives in, commanding the "Rabble" to "cry a Reprieve;' while the Player consolingly adds, ''All this we must do, to comply with the Taste of the Town" (3.16.9-17). The Beggar agrees, but he also regrets the compromise he has been forced to make: "Had the Play remain'd, as I at first intended, it would have carried a most excellent Moral. 'Twould have shown that the lower Sort of People have their Vices in a degree as well as the Rich: And that they are punish'd for them" (22-26). So Gay suggests that his era is too corrupt to allow art the space even to dream of justice. The power of"the Town" allows it to demand the Beggar produce the comic ending it wants, poetic justice and aesthetic coherence be damned. The blame placed on "the Town" helps us to historicize the forces blocking "poetical justice:' When Thomas Rymer coins the term "poetic justice" in

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1677, the normative social referents of what he brings together-"poetic" (the

world of high art) and "justice" (the judicial system superintended by the state)-are in the midst of a separation. 2 Though Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, this does not stop the faltering of the Court as a center of political and cultural power and the concomitant rise of the City, with its more fluid systems of "Public Credit" and of literary production and consumption. 3 By the time Gay stages the failure of "poetical justice" fifty years after Rymer, the world of high art has drifted further from the Court. Accordingly, Macheath escapes hanging not by the grace of the king who is supposed to embody both the power of the state and cultivated taste but rather by the frivolous demands of "the Town." (Here, "the Town" means the fashionable people increasingly concentrated in the west of London-not part of the square-mile medieval "City" that is London's commercial heart, but a potent force within the City more broadly considered.) The conflict Gay stages between just art and a fallen world anticipates a reading of the play by John Brewer, one that exemplifies the critique of the aesthetic in recent eighteenth-century studies. According to Brewer, Gay seeks to expose the injustices of Walpole's England, and he does this on a formallevel by combining a variety of genres ranging from opera to Grub Street biographies of criminals in order to satirize the indiscriminate melding of a "heterogeneous world of high, low, and commercial art" that emerges in place of the Court. 4 Yet in the end Gay, like his Beggar, is victimized by the very materials of"commercial culture" that he imports, for they make it easier for merchandisers to turn his characters into playing cards and other trinkets blunting his political message. 5 So just as the Beggar's idea of poetic justice is vitiated by the absurd rules of the opera, the same fate befalls Gay's attempt at satire. Faced with a threat by "commercial culture" to their tenuous purchase on cultural capital, authors like Gay (an ex-linen-draper's apprentice from a once-powerful provincial family) who aspired to high status aimed to separate themselves from commerce in the name of a disinterested "justice" and "taste." But separation from the greasy till proves impossible: While poetic justice may appear to remove itself from the messiness of history in order to gain the moral high ground, that detachment is actually fueled by the contingencies of history, the same contingencies that undermine claims to aesthetic disinterest. But Gay has already thought of an answer to this critique. To begin seeing how, consider the Beggar's intended ending: If he had heroically stuck to his idea of poetic justice, his moral would have been far from "excellent:' It

Why There's No Poetic Justice

17

may be true that the poor are punished for the same sins that the rich commit with impunity, but that "is" makes for a bad "ought:' The Beggar's flawed moral could be read as yet another example of how art is being dominated by the ideological structures of an immoral world. But I will argue instead that the Beggar's moral stupidity indicates Gay's search for an alternative beyond capitulating to the Town's taste for operatic comedy or the Beggar's preference for the scaffold. Both of these spectacles offer a flawed relationship between art and politics: The scaffold subordinates art entirely to the power of an unjust state; conversely, opera absurdly divides art from justice, even as its powerful supporters profit from social inequities. The alternative Gay seeks depends upon the ballads that stand in place of the arias we expect in an opera, and understanding Gay's canny revaluation of the ballad will require excursions into the work of other collectors who influence him and who also show that "ballad" means more than one thing at this time. The Restoration playwright and songwriter Thomas D'Urfey uses the ballad and its attendant ironies to elevate himself as his era's most successful songwriter. But the risks of his reliance on the ballad are realized in the image others have of him as a stuttering poetaster, no matter how much he advertises himself as a "Poeta Lyricus;' heir to Horace and Anacreon and a welcome guest at Court from Charles II to George I. More influential in using ballads to re-establish a standard of politeness were the periodical essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. They present these songs as admirably simple in their emotions, intrinsically English, and favored by "the Common people." They are ideal objects for what Addison calls "the polite Imagination;' 6 giving "private Men" the opportunity to reflect on their nation's history and their own youthful pleasures, to know themselves as individuals by way of the communal. They are thus initiated into an aristocratic way of reading that avoids the excesses of a failing Court and the profit seeking and presentism of a purely commercial world. This optimism is challenged by Gay. Instead of framing the ballad within the refinements of the Addisonian essay (if one of the two authors of The Spectator can be said to be its stylistic model, it is Addison), Gay makes polite readers sympathize more directly with the whores and thieves who sing them. That act of sympathy challenges high-low distinctions by showing that the drive to see oneself as an individual-to "be particular;' in the words of the play-is found among persons of all classes. Gay gives the screw another turn by revealing that if the ballad grounds a model of subjectivity in which one can identify with others' emotions, it also ironically teaches that

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not only these characters but also we the audience are in part mere iterations of textual types, like "the maid in love" or the "dashing aristocrat." So Gay uses the lyric doubleness of the ballad-individual speech and communal song-to undermine the ruling classes' presumptuous monopoly on subjectivity. This flat/round model of subjectivity shapes Gay's vision of the relationship between a nascent field of high culture and the social order. By teaching that we are all equally vulnerable to seeing ourselves as individuals and are equally made by texts, the play critiques the invidious distinctions and cruelties that high art creates when it dances to the tune called by the powers that be. Gay departs both from D'Urfey's adherence to an outdated courtly model of culture and Addison and Steele's vision of personal and national progress. Instead, he salvages poetic justice, if only by negation, by tying it directly to the ballad. Because the ballad is so thoroughly common and commodified, it provides an experience of song that cannot be used by the audience to separate itself definitively from the "Rabble:' This allows The Beggar's Opera to survive the devouring force of "commercial culture;' preserving its democratizing energy while negating its inequitable luxuries. One of the most frequently produced plays of the eighteenth century, one of the two or three most often found in our current anthologies, and a favorite source for recent adaptations, it remains a powerful resource for raising questions about the very nature of taste. In other words, Gay's ballad opera may sell very well, but, defying the power of the market to pluck the fangs from satire, it does not quite sell out.

D'Urfey's Court Ballads to the Adonis of the Scaffold: A Brief History of "Nothing" To illustrate how Gay employs the ballad, a good place to start is Air 3, sung by Mrs. Peachum. The scene opens with her interrupting her husband's recitation of the names on "the Black-List:' This is the catalogue of criminals Peachum has decided to send to the gallows, since they bring him less money through stealing than the forty pounds he will receive for "peaching" on them according to the terms of the Highwayman Act of 1692. Mrs. Peachum is moved to interject because her husband has included in his fatal list "a favourite customer" of hers-"Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty" (1.3.28-29). She ascribes her reluc-

Why There's No Poetic Justice

19

tance to be involved with a "brave" man's hanging to her feminine sensibility, since women "think every Man handsome who is going to the Camp or the Gallows" (1.4.11-12). She elaborates on her claim by singing new verses set to the tune "Cold and Raw": If any Wench Venus's girdle wear, Though she be never so ugly; Lillys and Roses will quickly appear, And her Face look wond'rous smuggly. Beneath the left Ear so fit but a Cord, (A Rope so charming a Zone is!) The Youth in his Cart hath the Air of a Lord, And we cry, There dies an Adonis! (1.4.13-20)

Understanding how this song embodies Gay's revision of"poetic justice" requires an excursion through the prolific career of the author of "Cold and Raw:' Thomas D'Urfey. It will take us from the Royalist balladry of the 1640s to the unsettled world of the Restoration Court in order to return to Gay's even more motile era with a better sense of historical continuity and change. 7 First published in 1688, "Cold and Raw" tells of a Scotsman foiled in his attempt to purchase the "Barly" and with it the maidenhead of a beautiful farmer's daughter whose "Rosie cheeks and bonny Brow ... made my Mouth to water." 8 She knows better than to take up with a married man and tartly counsels him to "keep Purse for poor Spouse at home, I For some other shall have her Barly." The title of the broadside version notes that it is "much in request at Court:' which locates it within a tradition of elite pastoral balladry that extends back at least to the reign ofJames I and participates in what Leah Marcus has called a monarchical "politics of mirth:' 9 A prime example is Sir John Suckling's "Ballad Upon a Wedding" (1638): Awed by the magnificence of an aristocratic wedding, the rustic who speaks the poem nonetheless ends with the more democratic sentiment that once the glittering couple went to bed they did "no more, I Then thou and I have done before, I With Bridget and with Nell." 10 The conclusion suggests that we're all the same when the lights are out but puts that suggestion in the mouth of a speaker whose lack of sophistication makes his judgment suspect. So the song levels hierarchy from an authorial position that knows that such leveling is merely a game that should be played only by those at the top. This courtly ballad's transgressive play gets reinscribed in D'Urfey's first recorded publication. A translation entitled Zelinda: A French Romance

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Chapter 1

(1676), it ends with the last stanza of Suckling's "Ballad:' 11 By including this

balladic tailpiece, D'Urfey deflates the aristocratic stylings of French romance, and this deflation, as in Suckling's own poem, is exactly the kind of liberty due to a polite author like "T. D., Gent.;' as D'Urfey styles himself on the title page. 12 But there are also profound differences between Suckling's 1638 and D'Urfey's 1676. After the outbreak of the Civil War, courtiers slum by writing ballads not because they can, but because, as embattled partisans of the Crown, they must. Ballads in this era are used to battle the innovations of the Roundheads by forging an association between the Stuart cause and the beauty, unrestrained sexuality, and timeless rituals attributed to rural England. During the Restoration and afterward, this strategy continues to be deployed against the Whigs. 13 D'Urfey proves himself a master of this balladic vein in poems like the widely reprinted "The Winchester Wedding:' 14 Set to a tune appropriately entitled "The King's Jigg;' it paints a picture of rustic amours at Winchester, the site of Charles's planned (but characteristically unfinished) version of Versailles. At this place, the "Merry Monarch" planned to concretize his new power after triumphing in the Exclusion Crisis, a victory powered by a vision of traditional hierarchy shared by Court and Country and opposed by the mercantile powers and dissenters concentrated in the City. 15 D'Urfey's songs do more than illuminate the conflict between Royalist and Roundhead or Court and City. They show how D'Urfey exploits the ironies pervading the Restoration Court to look at the relationship between culture and political power. During the Restoration, Royalist poets built on the world-weary negations in verse written during the Interregnum, adding to it the exhaustion that came with the epicurean delights of the Court. This aristocratic fixation on oblivion is perhaps most familiar from Rochester's "Upon Nothing;' which ends by classing "Kings' promises" with "whores' vows" as things that "[f]low swiftly into Nothing." 16 This is a pose D'Urfey eagerly adopts. The epigraph to Zelinda is from Martial's Epigrams--"Nos haec novimus esse nihil"-which translates as "We know these things to be nothing." 17 The negated referent of "these things" is potentially triple: the people in the text, the people in the empirical world to whom the text refers, and the text itself. The last possibility is magnified by the double meaning of "we;' which combines the authorial "we" with a social "we" privileged to "know" better. However it is glossed, this gesture of negation belongs to the jaded and witty insider who pretends that he is playing a game. Recently, Rose Zimbardo has attempted to explain the ubiquity of

Why There's No Poetic Justice

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"nothing" in late seventeenth-century England by classing authors as either "deconstructive:' undermining all social order through playful deployments of"nothing" as a sign (for example, Rochester and the early Swift), or "constructive:' committed to mimeticism and moral instruction (for instance, Robert Boyle and John Dryden). 18 But by erasing the line separating political institutions from linguistic signs, Zimbardo's model simplifies the relationship between them and thus cannot account for songs penned by authors like D'Urfey who use the deconstructive "Nothing" for the constructive end of building allegiance to the social order. In other words, seeing aristocratic immorality or hypocrisy does not necessarily discourage people from aspiring to that status while defending the status quo. This is the motto of what Peter Sloterdijk means by "cynical reason": "They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it." 19 Perhaps the best illustration of this cynically constructive use of "nothing" can be found in the use D'Urfey makes of songs in A Fond Husband (1677), his most frequently revived play. 20 Early on, Sir Roger Petulant, "a jolly old Knight of the last Age:' declares that "when I was a Batchelor I delighted much in merry songs and Catches.... [A]nd when a dozen of us Royalists were met at the Miter under the Rose there, the Leveller went round, round, ifaith.-1 hold out still, Sir, as well as I can; and tho' I cannot sing my self, I keep those that can.-" (9). So here, songs are associated with the energetic Cavaliers of "the last Age:' but that age is set firmly in the past. D'Urfey takes his aggressive historicizing a step further in the character of Old Fumble, described in the dramatis personae as "a superannuated alderman, that dotes on Black Women." Deaf and almost blind, the only texts he can interpret correctly are, appropriately enough, old ballads. But when he begins to unpack the political codes buried in these songs, the other characters cannot stand to listen to him and leave the room: "But ifack,-1 think you mind me not.-Ha, Sir Roger,-Madam,-Sir Roger, Madam,-What, a vacuity?" (30 ). This "vacuity" suggests that Royalism may itself be exhausted; as Sir Roger's dissolute son argues, Fumble "has nothing ... no hearing, no smelling, no teeth, no strength, no-nothing" (18). It is as if the positive oblivion of Cavalier drinking songs when "the Leveller went round" (a transformation of Puritan leveling into Royalist fun) remains only as a crazed language machine, belching out nonsensical glosses on old hits, mixed with impotent attempts at seducing "Black Women:' So D'Urfey knows that these songs are "nothing" and yet are valuable because of their "nothing" -ness, for they harmonize well with the cynical cul-

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Chapter 1

tural poetics of the Restoration Court. For all of his knowing winks toward the gap between appearance and reality in Charles II's Court, D'Urfey writes songs that announce even in their titles their proximity to and support for the King. 21 Although the monarchy might be seen by some as "nothing" after the decapitation of Charles I and the fleshly follies of Charles II, this hardly stops D'Urfey and many others from circulating songs so that commoners could have access to them and so that, in the words of one editor, they would be "charm'd into Obedience" in the same way that Charles attempts to charm them with the King's Touch. 22 The generic slumming involved in writing ballads is ironically empowering for courtier as well as monarch, since it points to his insider knowledge of the liberties allowed at Court. That pretension to knowledge was particularly important for D'Urfey. He was apparently not of means sufficient to attend university or the Inns of Court, and there is some evidence that he was once a lowly scrivener's apprentice. 23 His ungentle origins seem even to have been inscribed on his body, for in addition to being considered grotesquely ugly, he suffered from a pronounced stutter, which barred him from the elegance of courtly conversation.24 He was, however, reported not to have stammered when singing (or swearing), 25 and the patronage he attracted by these abilities allowed him to reinvent himself. By adding an apostrophe to his name in 1683, he transformed it from plain "Durfey" to noble "D'Urfey;' which also encouraged readers to consider him a relative of Honore d'Urfe, the well-born author of the celebrated poem, L'Astree. 26 There is only the smallest pause between "Durfey" and "D'Urfey," but a great deal hangs upon it, a fitting diacritical mark for an author whose reputation depends on how he exploits the overlay of oral performance on print in his songs. As D'Urfey asserts in more than one of his collections, though some of his songs "may appear a little rough and unpolish'd in the Reading, the amends are made when they are Sung ... nor is it every one's Talent to confine Sense and smooth Verse to Notes, that quality of performing it well, being as particular as difficult." 27 Compared to other Restoration songwriters like Rochester, Aphra Behn, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden, D'Urfey is remarkable for the degree to which he explicitly yokes his authorial standing to the success of his songs. Dryden, for instance, saw music as a powerful complement but also a dangerous threat to the status and gendering of his verse. 28 D'Urfey, in contrast, calls attention to his ability to meld verse and tune. Even when he instances his attempts at higher subjects, like "The Essay in Defence of Verse;' he concedes that "it were better to employ the Inimitable Pen of Mr. Dryden than

Why There's No Poetic justice

23

any Poet of a meaner Class." 29 So if D'Urfey classes himself elsewhere with Horace, Catullus, and Anacreon, he does so on the basis of these "meaner" songs. He knows that his reputation depends less on his "Elegy on the Duke of Ormond" than on his drinking songs like "Joy to Great Caesar" (Charles II) and amorous songs like "Cold and Raw." Yoking the elevation of his own persona to his ability to set individual expressions of affect to familiar tunes, D'Urfey is happy to take advantage of the overlap of print and orality that structures lyric and the distribution systems of songbooks and broadsides that can circulate his songs, provided that as many of the titles as possible locate them as initially performed at Court. "Cold and Raw;' which is "much in request at Court;' spawns no fewer than three broadside sequels. 30 These songs underwrite his claim to the honorific "Thomas D'Urfey, Poeta Lyricus" that rings the portrait fronting the text for which he is best known, the sixvolume songbook Pills to Purge Melancholy. The verse below the portrait urges us to give D'Urfey's "Lyrick-Muse the Bayes" as we sing his "Tunefull Layes."

* * * But moving now toward Gay's use of D'Urfey we see that "the Bayes" do not rest comfortably on his brow. Excoriated from the 167os to the 1690s as a hack unable to live up to the aristocratic apostrophe he claims, by Gay's time he is more often pictured with affection mixed with derision; kin to his own Sir Roger Petulant, he becomes a relic of a past age whose songs remain old favorites. This is how he appears in "Saturday;' the last poem in Gay's The Shepherd's Week (1714), as the drunk and stammering ballad-singer Bowzybeus. Modeled on the Silenus of Virgil's Eclogue VI, he is made to enact a travesty of high lyric. Instead of Silenus' grand song of the world's creation, Bowzybeus discourses on "nature's laws;' such as the humble lore surrounding owls and puppies, and the enchanting knick knacks of Fairs and Shows. He ends with a long series of ballads that opens with an impassioned lament for "the Children in the Wood;' after which he falls down drunk. 31 The miscellany of ballads sung by Bowzybeus points to the changes in the elite cultural landscape between D'Urfey's moment and Gay's that require the reframing of the ballad. For D'Urfey, pieces like "Cold and Raw" are pastoral dalliances proper to the courtier who "knows these things to be nothing." But by Gay's time, these rustic games are staged not for the benefit of the Court but the even slipperier terrain of the City. In the mock preface

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to The Shepherd's Week, the author reveals to "the Courteous Reader:' that his tricked-up pastoral language is neither of the Court nor the Country and likens it instead to the building of a "London Mason;' designed to last only for the short duration of his lease. 32 Within the context of a planned obsolescence modeled on the City's ephemerality, what makes the poems attractive, Gay acknowledges, is a fantasy of the Country's timelessness that the audience knows to be a fantasy and yet finds charming anyway. In The Shepherd's Week, Gay argues that the stabilizing structure of the Court, however ironized, is now harder to locate. Or, as D'Urfey declares in one of his later works, London's new nexus of commerce and cash, epitomized in the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, has created a system of shamming that defies King Lear's dictum by showing that "nothing gets something every day:' 33 Gay's vision of rus in urbe is darker still by the time he writes The Beggar's Opera, which draws on D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy far more than on any other source. 34 Gay wrote The Beggar's Opera at the end of a long career of pursuing patronage with little success (not to mention losing a large sum to the "nothing" of the South Sea Bubble), or, at least, not the success he felt commensurate with his talents or aspirations for material comfort. Having written his Fables (1727) in an attempt to gain the support of the royal family, he was rewarded with an offer to be Gentleman-Usher to the twoyear-old Princess Louisa. He turned the post down and returned to the "mock" forms he had mastered throughout his career in texts like The Shepherd's Week. Having already explored the cityscape in Trivia (1716), he realized Swift's suggestion that he write a "Newgate Pastoral." 35 And if the primary scene for the literary market is now the City, The Beggar's Opera provides a rather dim view of the author's prospects there. Gay's authorial persona is referred to only as "Beggar;' and he reports that he originally wrote the piece "for the celebrating the Marriage of ]ames Chanter and Moll Lay, two most excellent Ballad-singers;' reduced to imitating the hackneyed formulas that "are in all your celebrated Operas" (Intro. 11. 14-18). Given this grim state of affairs, it is not surprising, then, that Gay uses the same epigraph from Martial that D'Urfey used in Zelinda: "We know these things to be nothing:'

* * * Having considered D'Urfey's tuneful career, we are now in a position to make sense of Gay's revision of"Cold and Raw" in Mrs. Peachum's song. Instead of

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D'Urfey's fresh young country girl, we have the soon-to-be-dead body of a criminal "Adonis." Instead of D'Urfey's male onlooker standing in for the desiring courtier, we have a thief-taker's wife who claims that her feminine sensibility is pained to see a handsome man strung up. These changes indicate how the stakes of"knowing these things to be nothing" have shifted, and how that shift, in turn, attests to Gay's new configuration of the relationship between politics and culture. Mrs. Peachum's sensitivity to the beautiful pathos of the scaffold reveals that she and her world cannot be definitively separated from the tasteful denizens of the Town. Her challenge to distinctions between high and low characters is recapitulated in the mock structure of the play as a whole, which in bringing together the elite spectacle of opera with the low scenes of Newgate and Tyburn aggressively asks what the difference is between them. In doing so, it shows that the "nothing" of spectacle lies even at the heart of the state's power. What excites the sensitive female spectator of Air 3 is not the innocence or native beauty of the desired object, as in D'Urfey's song, but rather the artificial sweetener of the noose. Bob Booty is guilty (especially if he is meant to stand for Walpole), but no more so than the Peachums themselves within the context of the play, and so it is hard to justify his being singled out for death. His impending execution, then, is one of many scenes throughout the play that anatomizes the cynical faith in authority that characterizes D'Urfey's songs. Public executions in the eighteenth century were a tool not for reducing crime so much as maintaining the hegemony of the state and a hierarchical social order. 36 Within the state-sponsored theater of Tyburn, "the people" enjoyed a "carnival;' 37 claiming their scripted role as spectators who consumed not only the image of the hanging itself but also its related texts-broadside ballads, criminal biographies, and the last speeches of the condemned, magically ready for sale before the final, fatal leap. Yet Mrs. Peachum's image of Tyburn Tree suggests that the intended effect of this ritual-awed submission to the state and the social order-is ironically haloed by the knowledge that this is merely a show. It's not just that the execution makes the object of the state's violence a heroic "Adonis"; it's that the opening metaphor of Venus's girdle shrinks the sublimity of state power to the beauty of feminine artifice. The metaphor simultaneously ratifies the magic of artifice while also recognizing it as artifice. Just as we know that the woman wearing Venus's girdle may be "never so ugly;' we know that the "youth in the cart" may have nothing to recommend him but the rope around his neck. Yet we are charmed anyway. Air 3 thus ties aesthetics to the

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machinery of the state but does so in a way that demystifies both. It teaches us that the state's majestic exertion of its monopoly on force is founded on "nothing" but a brutality that coerces its citizens into submission, channeling their fear for their own lives into a morbid fascination with the hanged bodies of others. But as is typical when applied to a system of "cynical reason;' this demystification offers only cold comfort, for it does not provide any obvious alternative to Mrs. Peachum's image of death as the mother of beauty. This is problematic because her mode of spectatorship seems a monstrous parody of the very aesthetic disinterest that Gay and other elite authors supposedly try to construct as a bulwark against what Brewer calls "commercial culture:' Booty's guilt or innocence is rendered as an object of disinterest by her representation of the scene, in which the onlooker cares only about the spectacle of his hanging. Its power seems to make even the acquisitive Mrs. Peachum pretend to forget about the 40l. her family will derive from the event. In contrast to D'Urfey's hapless traveler who simply fails to purchase the "barley" of the farmer's daughter, the spectator in Mrs. Peachum's song already seems to know that the object of her desire is beyond material possession. Indeed, it is the impossibility of having him (his neck is about to be snapped) that gives him "the air of a lord:' In other words, Mrs. Peachum's song produces within the play a particularly virulent strain of the "commercial culture" that Brewer sees as devouring it. For whatever ironic distance that Gay tries to adopt toward his materials is already prefigured and trumped by Mrs. Peachum's cruel aesthetic disinterest. The state is all too happy to gin up desire for more such spectacles, repeating the ritual that moves the condemned from Newgate to Tyburn as long as there are bodies. Mrs. Peachum's vision thus promises to undermine both justice and the poetic. Executions will continue to occur regardless of the guilt of the accused, driven in part by the desire for spectacular executions. That same demand for spectacle, in turn, pressures the Beggar-Author to bow to it, and The Beggar's Opera itself liberally exploits the scaffold's romance of crime and punishment. So Air 3 provides a very bleak way of reading Gay's revision of D'Urfey's "We know these things to be nothing." By transporting D'Urfey's ironies from the Court's pastoral ideal to Newgate, Gay expands the range of"these things" that are "nothing" to include everyone-whores and thieves, prime ministers, and the play's audience. In its way, The Beggar's Opera produces a critique even more total than the "universal Darkness" that concludes The

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Dunciad, especially since while Pope defends himself ferociously against the dunces, Gay dearly implicates himself through the figure of the Beggar as one of"these things" known to be "nothing." If, in D'Urfey's hands, the basic lyric strategy of bringing the ballad into the purview of elite texts is to create a community of knowers who ratify their high status by composing and singing ballads, Gay's revised ballads stretch the boundaries of that "we" to produce something like a universe of negation. Cold and raw indeed.

From Addison's "Common" Reader to Gay's Paradox of "Being Particular" A flicker of warmth is provided by Mrs. Peachum's daughter, Polly. She has fallen in love with and married the dashing Macheath, and when her parents realize that he could turn them in and thereby gain their estate through their daughter, they angrily demand that she obey her filial duties and peach on him first. Polly is horrified by the idea and pleads her case in Air 12, set to "Now ponder well, ye parents dear": Oh, ponder well! be not severe; So save a wretched Wife! For on the Rope that hangs my Dear Depends poor Polly's Life. (1.10.45-48) Polly refuses to submit to the iron law of self-interest that her parents invoke. Where Mrs. Peachum is painfully pleased to see Bob Booty hang in the distance in Air 3, her daughter insists on including herself in the tableau as a fellow sufferer, hoping that the pathos of her hypothetical death will move the hearts of her mother and father. Understanding how this song clarifies Gay's idea of poetic justice requires another, somewhat longer excursion through the source ballad, "The Children in the Wood" (hereafter, "Children"), an influential interpretation of it by Addison, and the larger project of which that interpretation is a part. First printed in 1595 and frequently reissued until the nineteenth century, "Children" urges "parents" to "ponder well ... these words which I will write:' 38 The tale that follows shows why they should: The uncle of two orphaned children seeks to gain their inheritance by hiring two ruffians to kill them. One of them, touched by their "pretty speeche;' refuses to perform the wicked deed, slays his partner, and tells the children to remain in the wood

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while he goes to get some food. But things end tragically: Wandering off, they do not see the man, who either abandons or loses track of them, and die of hunger in the wood, their corpses piously covered with leaves by "Robin redbreast:' Their uncle justly dies in debtor's prison, having lost all of his wealth and his own children, and the ballad ends with a warning to other guardians to do well by their charges or suffer the same fate. This bit of poetic justice is not mentioned by Joseph Addison when he discusses the ballad in Spectator 85. He focuses instead on the "tender Circumstances" of the parents' death scene, the "Innocence and Distress of the Children;' and the charity of the robin (363). It is these pathetic "Circumstances" that move Mr. Spectator to collect the ballad from the "walls" of a "Country House" and to liken it to a scene from one of Horace's Odes in which doves tenderly cover the speaker with leaves after he falls asleep "in a Desart wood" (361, 363). Similarly, in the two essays he writes a couple of weeks earlier on the ballad "Chevy Chase" (S 70 and 74), he dwells on its "moving" details, like Percy's generous lamentation over his fallen foe, Douglas, the roll-call of the dead, and the tears of the widows (303, 320, 321). These details underwrite the many comparisons he draws between the ballad and

The Aeneid. So Addison seems even more willing than D'Urfey and Gay to take these lesser lyrics seriously, putting them in the exalted company of the classical ode and the epic, though he repeatedly apologizes for the juxtaposition. Like D'Urfey and Gay, he also collects the ballad into a conceptual framework antagonistic to the ideal of poetic justice. In an essay published the month prior to those on "Chevy Chase" (S 40) he argues that by leading the audience to assume that the good will be rewarded and the guilty punished in this life, poetic justice blocks them from sympathizing fully with a virtuous character in distress. Addison elaborates on the salutary effects of denying poetic justice in a response to a counterblast by John Dennis (S 548). 39 To support his position, he cites a scene from The Aeneid that he has earlier quoted in the second essay on "Chevy Chase," in which "Riphoeus, the most just Man among the Trojans:' dies in the sacking of Troy (4:464). Addison does praise "Chevy Chase;' for being "founded upon some important Precept of Morality;' a wish that ''foul Debate I 'Twixt Noblemen may cease" (299). But for that "Precept" to have force, the horror of war must be fully pictured in the death of the virtuous, just as the pathos of "Children" depends upon the death of the innocent. Addison, then, shares with D'Urfey and Gay a generic elevation of the

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ballad and a skepticism toward "poetic justice." But where D'Urfey and Gay wrap the elevation of these "songs commonly sung" in the sharp ironies of "nothing;' Addison's uses the "common" to smooth out the elite relationship to the ballad. The ballad's simple touches are what make it "impossible for a Reader of common Humanity not to be affected" by this ballad, which is "one of the Darling Songs of the Common People, and has been the Delight of most Englishmen in some Part of their Age" (italics mine, 363, 362). The modifier "common" also appears prominently in Addison's two essays on "Chevy Chase;' the first of which begins: "When I travelled, I took a particular Delight in hearing the Songs and Fables that are come from Father to Son, and are most in vogue among the common People of the Countries through which I passed" (297). In these essays, Addison shifts the ballad from being the province of a social group paradoxically marked by its lack of distinction ("the Common People") to being a badge of honor for "reader[s] of Common humanity:' 40 Like Lord Dorset, Dryden and other men of unimpeachable taste reported to have relished ballads (363-64), these readers are perforce not merely "Common" but gifted with the judgment and imagination necessary to appreciate a text prized by "the Common people:' Addison's emphasis on the "Common" differentiates his idea of the transition to a commercial world from those of D'Urfey and Gay. In the essay just prior to the first on Chevy Chase, Mr. Spectator tells of a visit to the Royal Exchange, the heart of England's commercial economy. Casting his eye on the statues of kings and queens that literally and symbolically look down on the floor of the 'Change, he reports that he has "often fancied one of our old Kings standing in person": "In this Case, how would he be surprized to hear all the Languages of Europe spoken in this little post of his former Dominions, and to see so many private Men, who in his Time would have been the Vassals of some powerful Baron, Negotiating like Princes for greater Sums of Mony than were formerly to be met with in the Royal Treasury!" (296). Spectator 69 may seem like an uncritical endorsement of the 'Change as an institution that can supplant the Court as an anchor and model for representation. In keeping with the commercial Whiggism typically ascribed to Addison and Steele, the essayist can enjoy a joke at the monarch's expense, empowered by this image of a horizontal world of "private Men" who "knit Mankind together" through trade. But Addison and Steele are less concerned with the political struggles between Tory and Whig (both Tory Sir Roger de Coverley and Whiggish Sir Andrew Freeport get their say in the Spectator Club) than with representing and shaping a culture that, as Addison's image

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of a surprised monarch suggests, is increasingly separate from Court. In fact, they do not believe that the 'Change can shoulder the burden of legitimating polite culture, as illustrated by Isaac Bickerstaff's complaint in Tatler 43 (Steele): "It is wonderful to see how many Judges of these fine Things spring up every Day by the Rise of Stocks, and other elegant methods of abridging the Way to Learning and Criticism." 41 Merchants, then, should not assume that financial capital can be translated into cultural capital as they seek to occupy the role abandoned by those who by dint of their gentle blood have proper title to it. This is why the real hero of Spectator 69 is not the merchant but rather Mr. Spectator himself. He, too, is a "private" man; he does not hold the "public office or official position" that has as its emblem the "representative publicity" of the monarch's statue. 42 But like the statue looking down, he has a perspective on the floor of the 'Change not available to those in the midst of bargaining. Where merchants lack the breeding to speak with the king (and where the king would never condescend to speak with them), Mr. Spectator can converse with both. He is "infinitely delighted in mixing" with the merchants of various nationalities gathered at the 'Change (293), but he is also able to empathize with the king once he brings his statue to life. Here, he rehearses the position later adumbrated in his famous series on "The Pleasures of the Imagination"; as "a Man of polite Imagination;' he "can converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue" (S 411; 3:538). So even though he is a "private" man, his imagination is "polite;' fit for the best company. If we put Mr. Spectator as the "Man of polite Imagination" at the center of the periodical, the identity of the object he looks at seems to matter less than the posture he assumes toward it. Ballads, signboards, feminine fashions, and Paradise Lost, all are fodder for the "polite Imagination." Yet there is an underlying (socio)logic that makes the ballad a particularly attractive object for Mr. Spectator to collect. Immediately after reporting on his "Delight" in hearing "Songs and Fables;' Mr. Spectator frames that encounter with this generalization: "[I]t is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, that hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man" (297). The universal appeal of the ballad helps to reveal why the first essay on "Chevy Chase" comes immediately after the one on the glories of the 'Change. If the King's face once signified a public standard, whether through its political supremacy or through its metonymy of the Court as the center of

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politeness, the ballad provides an alternate standard of universality. Like "Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their Poems is understood" (297), the simple language and incidents of the ballad can appeal to all except those courtly, over-refined tastes Addison has recently critiqued in his essays on true and false wit (S 58-62).43 Moreover, unlike Homer and Virgil, the ballad can be appreciated directly by those who lack classical learning. Yet the ballad does not fall into the narrowness of the 'Change. The ballad's heroic language of sacrifice avoids both the private interests that drive trade and the commercial patois that makes it possible for merchants all over the world to communicate. The ballad's particularity is also valuable in this context, since the epic "precept" that Addison invokes at the start of Spectator 70 ties the poem to a specific nation. These ballads are venerable English texts, "the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their Age:' in contrast to the Babel of voices on the 'Change, not to mention the Francophilia of those afflicted with "false wit." So the ballad's value for the polite Imagination lies in its being nationally "common:' its sentiments and language enjoyed by all "Englishmen" wise enough to do so. 44 The stabilizing potential of the ballad extends further than this. While Gay likens Bowzybeus's songs in The Shepherd's Week to the perishable work of"a London Mason:' Addison uses the ballad to increase the perceived stability of print culture, of the subjects who read it, and the nation in which they dwell. In Mr. Spectator's preamble to his analysis of"Children:' he confesses that, just as "Mahometans" pick up any printed paper they see on the off chance that it contains part of"their Alcoran:' he "cannot forbear" doing the same (360-61). However, the objects he pursues are not the Words dictated to the Prophet but rather the more mundane texts produced by the English press, from "the Writings of a Prelate" to "the Essays of a Man of Quality:' In this new print culture, the works of "very celebrated Names" are constantly falling into undignified use, such as the victory odes reused as stuffing for firecrackers (361). But whatever happens to the high lyric of victory odes, consecrated to the state (or the writings of churchmen), the ballad endures, and its survival suggests that worthy texts do survive amid an ephemerality to which The Spectator is also subject. The silent Mr. Spectator declares in his first issue his intention to "Print my self out" (5). Having the discernment to preserve this ballad, The Spectator helps to secure its own place as a worthy text in an ongoing history of print. It is a history, we might note, that mutes speech and singing, such as the oral performance that according to D'Urfey vindicates his rough verse.

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In addition to solidifying a history of print, the ballad provides the raw material for the progress of the nation and the self that are key to the project of The Spectator. The polite reader adds to whatever "delight" he takes in the ballad itself a dual reflexive pleasure. First, he happily rediscovers a song that delighted him in "some Part" of his age. Second, he is pleased to know that "the common People;' who both represent and preserve the nation's past, also enjoy the song, although they seem to lack the reflexive joy that he takes. By revisiting this text, he gains access both to his own personal past and the national past, allowing him to mark the changes against the larger background of an assumed continuity. The ballad thereby makes individual subjectivity and the nation more coherent. But for the ballad to serve this grounding function it must be framed in a certain way. Mr. Spectator's decision not to quote from "Children" in order to save it from "Ridicule" is only the most obvious instance of what he excludes from this act of collection. 45 These exclusions come into sharper focus in Spectator 454 by Steele. This essay has rightly been anthologized as exemplifying The Spectator, 46 for it outlines with particular clarity the periodical's aim to take in a wide range of phenomena on Addison and Steele's terms. It opens with Mr. Spectator remembering a night in which he was kept awake by "a certain busy Inclination" that can be explained only by his desire to be "ever looking on new Objects with an endless Curiousity" (4:98). To "tire [his] Imagination" (4:98), he resolves to take a twenty-four-hour tour of London. At some point during the day, he decides to save money by walking instead of taking a coach. But his thrift ends up costing more than he bargained for. As Mr. Spectator stops to listen to a "new Ballad" at the corner of Warwick Street, a "Beggar who knew me" accosts him and demands six pence so that he will not "die in the Streets for want of Drink" (4:101). Once the beggar is joined by a "Mob" of his fellows, a frightened Mr. Spectator coughs up the money and then "sneak[s] off to a Coach;' separating himself from the street (4:101). The street ballad thus entices Mr. Spectator into a social situation that uncomfortably reverses his spectatorial privilege by making him the object of spectation, which he declares in the very first Spectator is "the greatest Pain I can suffer" (6). Like "Children;' this ballad is not quoted; unlike "Children;' it is not even given a name, let alone analyzed. It lacks the age that makes "Children" valuable, and whatever sentiments it might express would be a ploy to make the audience susceptible to the base desires of beggars and thieves.

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However, the cost exacted by this ballad is recuperated by the rhythm of The Spectator itself. Mr. Spectator continues his tour of London in the more inviting space of the Royal Exchange. Climbing to the second story, he glories in its profusion of commodities and pretty shopgirls, but, looking down on the floor of the 'Change, he again claims a superior position with a "Punn in Thought": "What Nonsense is all the Hurry of this World to those who are above it?" (4:102). Winking at his weakness for the "false wit" of a pun, he still means what he says. This delicate moment encapsulates not only the advantage Mr. Spectator claims over the hubbub of the 'Change but also the essayistic method that creates that advantage, his ability to put what sounds like proverbial wisdom ("What nonsense .. :') in a new context, individuated by Mr. Spectator's consciousness and offered to the collective of his readers. The subtle turnings of the periodical's prose give the reader a model of conversational discourse more controlled than the street ballad, less self-interested than the patois of the 'Change, and less aggressive than the witty exchanges of the Court. His style, moving between observation and precept and between mind and world, is designed to suit the new configuration of private and public that Addison puts forth in Spectator 10: "I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at TeaTables, and in Coffee-houses" (44). Now in the public position are the new institutions of early eighteenth-century culture, the clubs and coffeehouses, where "private Men" meet to converse, in contrast to the more exclusive institutions of reading closets and colleges. By elevating these lesser lyrics, making them the object of a polite consciousness and a polite essay, Addison reorients the doubleness of lyric as individual utterance and communal song to satisfy the demands of a world of coffeehouses, stock markets, and circulating print. He seeks to create an audience that prizes the pathos and durability of these songs over the snobbish delusions of "false wit" and simplistic demands for "poetic justice." Suffering with the noble Percy or the innocent children in the wood, his readers come to know themselves as subjects, as Englishmen, and as "reader[ s] of common Humanity:' As integrated into the essay, the ballad becomes a prime artifact for the "polite imagination:'

* * *

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With Addison's project now elucidated, we can return to Gay's take on "The Children in the Wood" in Air 12, to see how Polly's "Now ponder well" offers a counterpoint to the grim spectacle of scaffolds represented by her mother's "Cold and Raw." Gay's collection of ballads in The Beggar's Opera agrees with Addison's in many respects, drawing on the ballad's Englishness, familiarity, and simplicity, favorably juxtaposing it against the foreign excesses of Italian opera. And when Gay turns to "Children" in Air 12, he also focuses on the song's pathos. The suffering of the children is transferred to Polly, and where their speech is only reported as a "pretty prate and prattle;' Polly expresses her pains directly. Gay heightens the sentiment further by having her appeal not to the generalized parents addressed by the ballad but to her own mother and father. However, it is in this intensification of pathos that we can begin to see the ways in which Gay's model of "the common" differs from that of The Spectator. We can also see how it offers an alternative vision of "poetic justice" that revises the tableau of the scaffold offered by Mrs. Peachum in Air 3· The persona who encourages our appreciation of the ballad is not the urbane Mr. Spectator but rather the nai:ve Polly Peachum. Where Mr. Spectator refuses to quote "Children" out of concern for the "Ridicule" that might be heaped upon it, Gay represents the most vulnerable voice in the poem even more directly than "Children" itself, as Polly imagines herself fatally tied to the noose being prepared for her beloved. By setting the song at Tyburn, Gay also reminds us of his willingness to dive into the more sordid aspects of the urban landscape that Addison and Steele typically keep at a distance. Collecting the ballad into a ballad opera rather than an essay, Gay alters the structure of the elite encounter with popular song. While the reader of The Spectator views the ballad through the subtle tint of Mr. Spectator's lens, Gay offers a closer facsimile of immediate experience. Ballad opera realizes the etymology of "parody" with peculiar intensity; it is a par-odos, a song set aside another song. By having the characters sing new words to old tunes, with the old words a faint but discernible echo, he compacts the temporality of identifying with the pathos of the source ballad and perceiving the gap between Polly's touching naivete and our "knowing these things to be nothing." This greater immediacy extends to our perception of the communal element in Gay's lyric, especially when the play is performed rather than read. Most of those in Gay's initial audience would have recognized the tune to "The Children in the Wood;' but that knowledge remains in the background, the vehicle of Polly's appeal to her parents. Focusing less on Addisonian "Pre-

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cept;' Gay's work lies closer to the response to a ballad that might be heard "commonly sung up and down the Street." The greater proximity of the ballad in Gay's representation bears on how he imagines the subject formed by this encounter. That subject, in turn, challenges the Addisonian model of the "polite" reader who through the ballad locates himself in a personal and national narrative. Where the ballad characters in Addison lie at a greater distance from the essay's reader-the Percy of "Chevy Chase" is admirable but belongs to the feudal era, and the children are pitiable because they lack the reader's awareness-the characters in Gay aggressively claim to be like the polite men and ladies they emulate. This questions not only the social distinctions that determine who gets to be a subject in the fullest sense but also what a subject is and how he/she depends upon outside forces such as other people, character types, and texts. The key term for Gay's inquiry into the sources and boundaries of subjectivity is "particular;' and it appears directly after Air 12. Incredulous that her daughter has willingly bound herself to Macheath, Mrs. Peachum exclaims: "What, is the Fool in Love earnest then? I hate thee for being particular. ... Those cursed Play-books she reads have been her Ruin .... Away, hussy. Hang your Husband, and be dutiful" (italics mine, 1.10.61-71). According to one gloss, "being particular" means "either (a) confining yourself to one person, or (b) behaving oddly." 47 But this is not an either/or. In the predatory world of Newgate, Polly is behaving oddly by confining her love to Macheath. In so doing, she raises her mother's ire by fulfilling another definition of "particular" current in Gay's time and ours-setting herself up as someone "special:'48 In other words, Polly, by prizing another person too much and overestimating the value her beloved places on her, violates the law of personal exchangeability epitomized by Peachum's Black List, which declares no one worth more than forty pounds. Mrs. Peachum's charge that Polly gets these dangerous notions from "cursed Play-books;' further exposes "being particular" as a theatrical delusion, a mistaking of the romance of the stage for real life. These critiques, though they come from the mouth of Mrs. Peachum, cannot be easily dismissed. Macheath may pledge his undying love to Polly at the end of Act 1, where she touchingly notes that "in the Romance you lent me, none of the great Heroes were ever false" (1.13.15-17). But in Act 2 he cavorts with a posse of whores and continues to exploit his relationship with the jailor's daughter, Lucy Lockit, not to mention the four other "wives" who appear in Act 3, each with a babe in arms. It also turns out that Polly is not

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the only one afflicted with a vision of herself as "particular."49 After being betrayed by Jenny Diver and Suky Tawdry into Peachum's hands, Macheath hotly denounces all women as "Beasts, Jades, Jilts, Harpies, Furies, Whores"; but he is coolly informed by Peachum that "Your Case, Mr. Macheath, is not particular. The greatest Heroes have been ruin'd by Women" (2.5.3-6). Here, Peachum exposes Macheath's weakness for mythologizing himself, a nice turnabout on his ensnaring of Polly with the heroes of romance. More striking still is one of Lucy's remarks: "Love is so very whimsical in both Sexes, that it is impossible to be lasting.-But my Heart is particular, and contradicts my own Observation" (3.8.50-52). She suffers from a curious, naive version of"cynical reason"; she knows her belief that her love is the exception to the rule is delusional, but she just can't help herself. The case against "being particular" seems clinched by a final example. After Macheath is captured a second time and is hauled off to the Old Bailey to be tried and sentenced, Polly sends Filch, an enterprising young thief, to "bring me a particular Account of his Behaviour" (3.12.2). Polly's eagerness to know may be motivated by real concern, but there is a hint that she is also excited by the spectacle pictured by her mother in Air 3, as Macheath inches closer to the gallows. Here, "particular" is not the property of persons who defy the Peachums' system but rather part of an "account" in which persons are reduced to property, a thrilling image of a dashing criminal on his way to death. The suspicion that Polly in love is not so far from her parents' system has been planted in the audience's mind by an earlier scene, when Polly, after overhearing her parents' plot to turn in her beloved, exclaims, "Now I'm a Wretch, indeed.-Methinks I see him already in the Cart, sweeter and more lovely than the Nosegay in his Hand!" (1.12.1-3). "Now ponder well" exhibits the same self-dramatization. As James Boswell observes, there is something "ridiculous" in Polly's image of her poor self, metaphorically strangled by the same rope that hangs her lover. The artificiality of her passion is brought out by her charge to Filch to give a "particular" account; it reconstitutes her as more an observer of than a fellow sufferer in Macheath's death. But there is an obstacle to acceding to the Peachums' stance against "being particular." To do so would ignore how Gay uses the ballad to challenge those who would deny his characters the right to insist on their particularity. In other words, Mrs. Peachum isn't wrong to flatter herself with sensibility in Air 3 but rather to neglect how she sets herself up at that moment as "particular" (pleading for Bob Booty to be spared), which cuts against the corrosive implications of her own song. A similar logic character-

5°

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izes the medley of ten songs Macheath sings as his execution draws near. On one hand, it reveals him at his most laughable. As he moves from lamenting his fate to moping about having to leave his "pretty Hussies;' his courage depends upon alcohol, as in these two lines set to "Chevy Chase" (Air 61), turned to a much less noble end than Addison imagines: "But now again my Spirits sink; I I'll raise them high with Wine" (3-13.8-9). Indeed, the only thing that seems to hold him together in addition to drink is song itself. Just as Macheath can be seen as a recycled and debased figure patched together from romances and playbooks, a history of heroism repeated as farce, his bravery in this scene consists of scraps of songs stitched together. (To risk a musical pun, he's catch as catch can.) But the medley ends with the play's most telling critique of its world's dishonesty, a leveling anthem set to "Greensleeves" (Air 57) that transforms Tyburn Tree from a site of carnival to something like Calvary: Since Laws were made for ev'ry Degree, To curb Vice in others, as well as me, I wonder we han't better Company, Upon Tyburn Tree! But Gold from Law can take out the Sting; And if rich Men like us were to swing, 'Twou'd thin the Land, such Numbers to string Upon Tyburn Tree! (3.13.22-29)

Of course, Macheath's protest is deeply self-motivated, but that is to be expected. More significant is that at this moment, we are asked not only to sympathize with him but also to admire his insistent truth-telling in the face of death, rightly condemning social inequity and admitting that from the standpoint of "better company," his life is worth "nothing." It is not only the major characters who gain the privilege of a subjectivityeffect produced through song. Consider Air 46, rarely commented on but among the most remarkable in the play. Set to ''A shepherd kept sheep;' it is sung by one Mrs. Diana Trapes. Though she is a bawd and trafficker in stolen goods, the tune and the lyrics express a remarkably tender melancholy. Having called on Peachum and Lockit to flll her glass with liquor, she sings: In the Days of my Youth I could bill like a Dove, fa, la, la, &c. Like a Sparrow at all times was ready for Love, fa, la, la, &c. The Life of all Mortals in Kissing should pass, Lip to Lip while we're young-then the Lip to the Glass, fa, &c. (3.6.9-12)

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This is Mrs. Trapes's only song; she is a decidedly minor character whose only role in the plot is to tell Peachum and Lockit where Macheath is hiding. And yet, for this moment, the song allows her to have a past and thus a certain depth, as if she were an Addisonian reader dwelling on childish delights, though they are decidedly less innocent than "The Children in the Wood:' While her life may have been as lecherous as it is now bibulous, the tone is gentle and wistful, and the lovely "precept" that we should all spend our lives "in kissing" is allowed to linger for a moment before she returns to "business" and informs against Macheath, a little bit of treachery lubricated by kissing the glass instead of a Judas-like kissing of the lips. Again, the ability to be "particular" turns on lyric doubleness. For this is, after all, a drinking song, and the self whose integrity is gestured at here is paradoxically predicated upon the losing of the self in the ecstasy of sex or drink, formally echoed in the "fa la la" of a lesser lyric in which individual reminiscence alternates with drunken refrain.

The Ballad as a Form of Poetic Justice So what does Gay's "being particular" tell us about his idea of"poetic justice;' his vision of the relationship between art and politics in a postcourtly society? Early responses to the play help to answer this question. We might expect eighteenth-century audiences to have taken the out offered by the epigraph, dismissing these characters as "nothings" who make themselves ludicrous by acting like their social betters. But many of the actual responses show that the play made this face-saving act of discrimination difficult. Attacks against The Beggar's Opera were legion. For making thieves and whores the center of the play, especially the attractive characters of Polly and Macheath, and for not punishing them, Gay is accused of setting up the very worst models for emulation. Indeed, one critic managed fifty years later to blame Gay for actually contributing to an increase in crime.5 1 These attacks inspired defenses of the play as a justified satire on corruption, especially political corruption. In The Examiner, for instance, Swift argues that the play cannot be condemned for targeting "particular" persons (though here Swift is being ironic, happy as he is to see Walpole poked in the eye), and he defends the freedom of satire to attack political misdeeds of a more general sort. 52 Yet both Gay's attackers and his defenders miss his real target; they in-

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sist on reducing the poetical to justice, putting art directly in the service of the political. Swift's position is subtler, but it is revealing that Swift's use of "particular" in a political register-satirizing "particular" individuals-does not appear in the play itself. This is because Gay's real target is not political in the sense of directly attacking the crooks currently running things (though he is happy to take a swipe at "Bob Booty") or a more general critique of the state. Rather, he is more interested in considering the reciprocal effects between emergent political and economic regimes and a sphere of culture that is itself just emerging. Given this, Colley Cibber, of all people, is closer to the mark than Swift; Dunce though he is in Pope's eyes, he properly reads the epigraph as a key to Gay's "satire on the depravity of the judgment" of his audience. 53 The epigraph satirizes the audience's judgment by luring us to dismiss the characters as "nothing" while insisting that it's too late for us to emulate them, as moralistic critics of the play feared-since they are already versions of us. Boswell reports, in an unverifiable but plausible anecdote, that "Now ponder well" was decisive in moving the audience from puzzlement at to wild acclaim for Gay's strange hybrid. 54 If, as Boswell also observes, the image of Polly's hanging is "ridiculous;' we sympathize with her bid for "being particular" even as we laugh at her. If Mrs. Trapes' song is to have its full effect, we cannot simply write her off as a bawd who fancies herself a lady of fine feeling, and our scornful laughter is tempered with a shared sense of her yearning for her youth. Macheath is somehow both coward and hero. The point is not that these characters are both objectionable and attractive or that we are asked to choose between the heroism of"being particular" versus the ugliness of Peachumism. Rather, it is that the characters are both "flat" and "round;' both types and individuals; and our sympathies with them reveal that we are in the same situation. If "the self here ... is something of a mirage;' 55 it's a mirage we can't help believing in. After all, we believe in it for our selves all the time; under the sway of the ballad, we believe in others' fantasy of their selves as well. Gay draws us to sympathize with the characters who sing these songs, showing that our likenesses are much stronger than the differences between criminals and good people like us. Or, in the words of the epigraph, "we [should] know" that we are among "these things" represented in the play. More profoundly, if that is the word for the superficiality of the self that Gay exposes, the songs lead us to acknowledge that our own selves are not as integral or unique as we may think. In building his opera on ballads, Gay makes us aware that, we, too, are to some de-

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gree made of songs, of common snatches of music and verse that circulate around the streets. So if "we know" that these songs are "nothing;' we also know that "these things" help to construct who "we" are. 56 The play creates a space for the heretical ideas that, like highwaymen and prime ministers, we ourselves can't help but "be particular" and can't help but be shaped by the types and texts we encounter. 57 That space itself depends upon a semiautonomy of the aesthetic from the political, as Gay shows through his brilliant critique of the two spectacles he brings together at the play's end-the scaffold and the opera. Tyburn collapses any distance between the political and the aesthetic, firmly binding them together with the noose, and Air 3 has already exposed the bad effects of this reduction both for art and politics. The ending also exposes the hypocrisy of the converse position, the attempted separation of aesthetics from politics by "the Taste of the Town:' By demanding a happy ending to the opera "no matter how absurdly things are brought about;' the Town denies any relationship between opera and the rules that govern the empirical world. Gay contradicts this position by satirizing an elite order that has the power not only to decide how operas end but also the fates of thieves and whores represented in the play. Although the powerful personages repeatedly alluded to never actually appear, they are the ones, after all, who pull the strings at Tyburn. The satire is given another twist by the fact that, in freeing such an anarchic force as Macheath, "the Taste of the Town" is made to conflict with its political interests. Macheath, now freed, would be happy to make members of the Town "stand and deliver" when he encounters them on the road. If anything, the play satisfies the favor "the Rabble" shows a daring criminal. But any straightforward affirmation is qualified by Macheath's manifest flaws and the fact that the sympathy of "the Rabble" plays no role in saving him. Instead of offering a romance of transgression, Gay shows how political interests and aesthetic desires can be pried apart. He also aims to disable the strategies we use to forget our shared fate of "being particular:' We try to do this when we reduce all motives and actions to self-interest, as do the Peachums. Or when we punish only poor people, as does the scaffold. Or when we reproduce distinctions between high and low culture without considering what people may have in common, as does opera. As I have argued, the ballad is key to a diagnosis of this forgetting and the possibility of an alternative. In the revealing words of one of the play's initial critics, its danger depends on its depraved ideas being "set to easy tunes

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(which almost every body can remember);' and which thereby "makes the contagion spread wider:' 58 The "contagion" of the ballad underscores the universality of "being particular" through its formal doubling of individual expression and communal song. The ballad is also a productive "contagion" through its social reputation as a "nothing." By being so thoroughly cornmodified, it is commercially attractive and yet, because so cheap, cannot easily be turned into a luxury good that would help draw the distinctions that the play so relentlessly undermines. This is not to argue that Gay is committed to anything like democracy or to the abolition of the line between high and low culture. That would be an anachronism. Gay is unmistakably out to critique a system of literary production in which those who should support high art have been blinded by bad politics and bad taste. That we might confuse good and bad taste, high and low texts, or listening to ballads on the street and encountering them within the context of The Beggar's Opera, is a sign of the parlous state of the world. Moreover, the pleasures of the play depend in part on perceiving how it pokes fun at opera, Walpole, and aristocratic speech, a perception more likely to be made by elites. The knowledge of "high" life increases one's chances to be among the "we who know:' Yet inclusion in the club of"we who know" also requires a knowledge of the popular signifiers that refer to the underworld, from its pleasure garden of Hockley-in-the-Hole to its ironic renaming of the gallows as "the Tree:' Above all, it requires a knowledge of the songs that can be found in the streets. In this way, Gay insistently reroutes those pleasures of distinction bound up in being among the "we who know" back toward the commonplace. We might suggest that, driven by his disgust for the state of elite culture, Gay breaks through, despite his Tory posture, to a more egalitarian position.

* * * Gay is not alone in using the ballad to stage a supplernentarity between the individual and the typical. As his name implies, Mr. Spectator is both an individual (who presents his experiences in a particular way) and a type of person (a spectator), and he imagines his readers are the same, each corning to his essays as individual readers and yet also part of the "sets" he addresses in Spectator 10, such as "well regulated Families" other members of"the Fraternity of Spectators:' "the Blanks of Society" (who seem all type and no partie-

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ular), and "the female World" (44-46). Moreover, just as Mr. Spectator is literally made of text, he imagines his readers to be made by texts as well, not least of which are ballads and The Spectator. So Gay and Addison share a model of subjectivity as both flat and round; the ballad plays an integral role for bringing that model to light; and it emerges for both authors outside normative ideas of "poetic justice" that are coincident with the rise of culture as such and the aesthetic modes of apprehension that accompany it, like "the polite Imagination." The ground shared by Addison and Gay reveals the insufficiency of recent critiques of"the public sphere" and its supposed handmaiden, aesthetics, for the exclusions that attend its "bourgeois individualism:' 59 Neither author is committed to the "individual;' bourgeois or otherwise, who has attracted so much critical scrutiny during the past few decades. And if the critique of the aesthetic characteristic of recent eighteenth-century studies cannot account for what Addison and Gay share, neither can it adequately explain their differences, for it tends to dissolve those differences into sweeping terms like "consumption" and "counter-public:'60 To properly distinguish Addison from Gay, it is necessary to see that Addison's view of the subject as individual and as type is linked to a narrative of personal and national development. For him, the ballad is part of a crucial pedagogical project: It initiates a process of aesthetic reflection that coordinates personal ontogeny with national phylogeny, a parallel that we will see gain increasing importance in the coming chapters. The ballad is the unreflective delight "of the Common People and has been the Delight of most Englishmen in some Part of their Age;' allowing more sophisticated readers to measure the progress of their own tastes and that of the nation in general. The confidence behind this idea of development would seem smug amid the ironies of The Beggar's Opera. In this respect, Gay seems closer to D'Urfey the aspiring courtier, interested above all in public appearances, than to Mr. Spectator, subtly reflecting on his experience in an essay that aims to convey the semiprivate atmosphere of the Club. In a similar vein, the community Gay imagines is regulated not by the flexible but determinate rules of the polite dialogue itself exemplified by Addison's prose but rather by its response to the call of the ballad. The loci for such gatherings are not the coffeehouse and library but rather the tavern and "the Streets:' This community is more fugitive even than the one conjured by the periodical, often lasting no longer than the performance of the song, although the network of associations that make that community possible remain. But for Gay, unlike

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D'Urfey, there is no point even imagining a return to the Court; for better or worse, the move to the City, where the value of the subject fluctuates with the rise and fall of Credit and where the value of texts need not be ratified by a body of aristocrats, is irreversible. The Beggar's Opera thus revisits the image of the social world put forth by The Spectator but views them through a gimlet-eye. Gay's alternative vision of "poetic justice" offers a final reason to question the recent critique of the aesthetic as reactionary politics masquerading as apolitical discourse. It is true that Gay distances art from any necessary political effect. But this space is necessary in order to make visible the ontological and political implications of the "being particular" paradox. For a play like The Beggar's Opera offers the "nothing" of art as a precondition for a political transformation that may or may not occur. This is what survives Brewer's devouring marketplace for goods, which mistakenly thinks that it neutralizes The Beggar's Opera by transforming it into a soothing array of commodities but in fact circulates it as the bloodstream does a virus. Indeed, it is the commercial profitability of The Beggar's Opera that made it one of the eighteenth century's most successful plays, making possible the reappropriations of it by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Wole Soyinka, Vaclav Havel, Alan Ayckbourn, and, one has reason to hope, by authors in the twenty-first century. 61 Addison and Gay's overlapping but different modes of collecting popular culture remain vital in the coming decades. But to see how they continue to interact, we must now move from London to Edinburgh. Scottish authors, influenced by both Addison and Gay as well as by the particularities of Scottish history and Scots song, alter the shape of elite lyric. They refigure the relationship between communal song and the affect of the polite subject, conceptions of gender roles and national development, and the idea of belles lettres that is the forerunner of Literature as we have come to know it.

Chapter 2

Scots Songs in the Scottish Enlightenment: Pastoral, Progress, and the Lyric Split in Allan Ramsay, John Home, and Robert Burns

In the eighteenth century Scottish authors faced a crisis even more pressing than the one encountered by D'Urfey, Addison, and Gay. A century after losing its court with James VI's accession to the English throne, Scotland lost its parliament to the 1707 Act of Union, 1 and the Act also helped further displace Scots with English as the standard language of the polite. However, these losses did not move a majority of elite Lowland Scots to oppose the Union through outright rebellion; if many agreed with the eloquent objections raised by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun or those who upheld the claims of the Stuarts, they also hoped that the Union would remedy Scotland's economic backwardness, which they traced to its profound disadvantages under a binational system. For this and other reasons, including local alliances and a calculation of the odds, most elite Scots in the Lowlands did not take up arms in support of the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745. 2 Yet if the Scottish past was felt to be in some way insufficient, Jacobitism's post-1745 survival as a potent cultural force in Scotland is one sign that many Scots were also dissatisfied by the prospect of a British present and future that seemed almost certain to slight "North Britain." In response to this unappetizing sandwich of a backward past and an Anglocentric present and future, elite Scots after the Union keenly felt an imperative to reimagine what would bind their society together. How should they respond to a modernity that offered economic and cultural progress but also threatened an Anglocentric erasure of still-valued elements of Scottish culture? This national struggle gave urgency to a broader question asked by writers through-

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out Europe: How to preserve social virtue and unity in a modern world increasingly dominated by the atomizing force of commerce? The Scottish answer was the diverse set of ideas, texts, and institutions that we now call the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet although there have been many recent accounts of how the Scottish Enlightenment was molded by the particularities of its time and place, these studies have largely overlooked an element central to its ideas and cultural practices-the refurbishing and incorporation of popular Scots songs by Allan Ramsay (1684-1758), John Horne (1722-1808), and Robert Burns (1759-96). 3 By integrating popular songs into their works, Ramsay, Horne, and Burns shaped two of the Scottish Enlightenment's major contributions to Western thought-the intertwined theorizing of sympathy and historical progress. 4 Their incorporation of Scots songs also materially altered the Scottish cultural landscape, reaching a wider audience than the treatises and clubs of the literati that have been the focus of other cultural histories. Ramsay helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment as his era's most influential impresario, founding both a bookshop that served as a nerve center for literary Edinburgh and what appears to be the first circulating library in the United Kingdom. There one could purchase or borrow, among other texts, his songbook, The Tea- Table Miscellany (1723-37), which reached a fourteenth edition before his death, and his ballad opera, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), printed a remarkable 120 times before 1900. 5 Horne's Douglas (1756), based on the Scottish ballad "Gill Morrice;' sparked a controversy that was crucial in establishing a Scottish theater over the objections of the Kirk, a watershed in the consolidation of a secular elite culture in Scotland. The vernacular literature of that culture was profoundly altered by Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and the songs he supplied for The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and A Select Collection of Scottish Airs (1793-1818). These texts and institutions broadcast Scots songs, which illustrate the competing impulses toward universality and distinction-making in the Scottish Enlightenment. In pairing music with a human voice expressing strong sentiments, these songs are purported to make even the most primitive mind doubly susceptible to what Frances Hutcheson praises as the "contagion" of "sympathy."6 Their evocative force provides a solution to the cultural amnesia encouraged by the Union, drawing Scots together and also, perhaps, moving the English to acknowledge the value of Scottish culture. But if sympathy is theoretically open to all, it is linked to another of the Scottish Enlightenment's principles that tends to separate classes of people-the theorizing of

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progress. The Enlightenment's notions of development are markedly uneven, for even its limited idealizations of less advanced persons and cultures assume a split between the raw and the cooked. This is evident as Ramsay, Home, and Burns elaborate on an Addisonian narrative in which the sympathy elicited by the ballad's simplicity allows "the man of polite Imagination" to reflect on a dual personal and national improvement. The key term in the act of reflection triggered by these songs is pastoral, which in the conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment comes increasingly to refer not only to a literary genre or Christian service but also to a stage of society after savagery yet prior to commerce. 7 Ramsay, Home, and Burns heighten the association of Scots song with pastoral by casting the heroes of some of their most important works as ambitious young shepherds or peasant poets on the verge of social elevation. They also situate these songs in pastoral times and spaces outside of the elite metropole of the present. This highlights a tension between a pastoral sympathy theoretically available to all and those more enlightened persons and cultures who represent the leading edge of history. While everyone may enjoy Scots songs, the polite are generally understood to enjoy them differently, recognizing them as grounded in a past stage of society and/or selfhood. In this act of historical discrimination, they attest to their refined modernity as readers of pastoral and beneficiaries of the enterprise of song collection. What distinguishes these authors from each other is how they relate sympathy to social progress. For his part, Ramsay does his best to dissolve any tensions between the two. In The Gentle Shepherd, the tender feelings elicited by refurbished Scots songs, especially when sung by a favored shepherdess, initiate the shepherd into gentility while preserving what is valuable in Scottish culture. Home extends Ramsay's picture of social development in Douglas. His tragedy gives the literati a chance to exhibit their manly sympathy for past valor and their tender feelings for Douglas and his mother as the young shepherd dies before he can prove himself on the battlefield. But, in fact, Home's model of social change is more anxious than Ramsay's. Douglas's inability to pass into manhood allegorizes a persistent fear among elite Scots that refinement brings an irreparable loss of masculine virtue. If Ramsay imagines an easy passage from pastoral to commerce that preserves the value of the past-an ease that actually marks him as a precursor to the Scottish Enlightenment rather than a participant in it-Home suggests an insuperable gulf. This difference registers formally through a split in lyric. For Ramsay,

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the pairing of words and tune is integral to the sociable effect of the song. Home, in contrast, makes no explicit mention of the ballad on which the play is based, and in place of singing, his characters call out to personifications and the dead, identified by Hugh Blair and other members of the literati as the key tropes oflyric. 8 This is part of Home's strategy of elevating the humble vernacular of the ballad into the higher registers of the ode, thereby transforming his work into a bardic address to the nation as a whole. Yet the absence of song from the play is indicative of a narrowing of Home's audience, and he is uncertain whether even refined commercial men like himself possess the virtue to make proper use of this eloquence. This strain is exploited by the many reviews and ballads written against Douglas: They argue that it indulges in an emasculating excess of sympathy at the cost of narrative sense and that it substitutes elite self-regard for the demotic energy of the Scots song on which the play is based. Burns attempts to heal this split in lyric as he struggles throughout his career with the constricting title of"peasant poet:' In "To a Mountain-Daisy" he exposes the limits of pastoral modeled on Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; and in Love and Liberty he exploits the limits of pastoral as burlesque in the style of The Beggar's Opera. Faced with these generic dead ends, Burns turns to collecting traditional songs without pay or recognition. In these mostly unsigned pieces, which insist on the significance of the lesser lyric in a less flamboyant way, he separates his work from the burden of being a "heaven-taught ploughman" and argues for the value of sympathy unfreighted by invidious schemes of progress or decline. He does retain many elements of Scottish Enlightenment knowledge production, emphasizing the age and locality of these songs and aspiring to produce an exhaustive compendium of them. But his very commitment to collecting these songs wherever and however he comes across them in manuscript, print, or oral recitation is part of his challenge to the discriminations of polite taste. Through their range of emotions and attitudes, and their lyric mix of song and solitude, Burns's songs question the normative assumptions of Progress in order to offer a more radical version in which all who sympathize should have access to social mobility. The differences in the way these authors use Scots songs challenges the frequent diagnosis that the participants in the Scottish Enlightenment suffered from "national schizophrenia:' According to this account, elite Scots, succumbing to the Anglocentric pressure of the Union, came to view Scottish culture as embarrassingly quaint, freeing them to adopt polite and modern

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(that is, English) ways. 9 It is true that Ramsay, Home, and Burns are certainly affected by ideas of politeness that favored English over Scots and decorousness over the demotic. 10 Yet they are affected in different ways, calling into question the monolithic "Scotland" that often gets opposed to a monolithic "England" in "schizophrenic" accounts. 11 We can see the complexity of the English-Scottish relationship in the rising reputation of Burns's songs as the most celebrated artistic response to the crisis facing Scottish culture after the Union, enjoying an enduring if contested and often marginalized place in the English literary canon, while Home fades into obscurity and Ramsay's importance glimmers forth only intermittently. Nonetheless, Burns depends upon the Enlightenment ideas of sympathy and progress that he revises. More broadly, as I argue in the conclusion, English Literature as we know it is heavily indebted, if in other ways antagonistic, to the Scottish Enlightenment institution of belles lettres. Belles lettres, in turn, owes a debt, as does Burns, to Ramsay and Home. This is the complex legacy of the collection of Scots songs.

Ramsay: Shepherds Who Read and the Contagious Sympathy of Songs Although the songs in The Gentle Shepherd were integral to making it a hit, one element of its publication history suggests that Ramsay was ambivalent toward them. The version reprinted in his Poems omits the seventeen songs he added in 1729, leaving only the four in the 1725 original. 12 One explanation is provided by his son, the eminent painter Allan Ramsay the Younger. His father, long "a great admirer of Gay, especially for his ballads;' was "carried away by the torrent" of praise for The Beggar's Opera to add these songs, but when he tried to take his play back from the masses "it was too late. The public was already in possession of them; and as the number of singers is always greater than that of sound critics, the many editions since printed of that Pastoral have been almost uniformly in that vitiated taste. He comforted himself, however, with the thought that the contagion had not infected his second Volume in quarto, where the Gentle Shepherd is still to be found, in its original purity" (italics mine, STS 4:72-73). We have already seen in the initial response to The Beggar's Opera a concern for how the "contagion" of popular songs collapses the distance the elite author tries to gain from an undiscerning "public." Ramsay can console himself, though, with the still unsullied purity of "his second Volume in quarto;'

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thankfully too dear for the hoi polloi. But father and son would not necessarily have agreed on this count. In fact, Ramsay the Elder had no desire to reject the "public" or to make a neat division between "singers" and "sound critics." Like Gay and D'Urfey, Ramsay sought to join the ranks of the polite: After coming to Edinburgh in 1700 from the town of Lanarkshire, he established himself as a wigmaker and then opened a bookshop as early as 1718, which "the nobility and gentry" turned into "one of their favorite meeting places:' 13 That move into the "more liberal profession" of bookseller happened at the same time that he consolidated his reputation as a poet through publishing his own Scots songs, like "The Young Laird and Edinburgh Katy." 14 Often issued individually and then gathered into small collections appropriately titled Scots Songs (1718-20), they were probably the texts that led an early biographer to claim that "the women of Edinburgh were wont to send out their children, with a penny, to buy 'Ramsay's last piece: " 15 They also attracted the patronage of a higher audience since these songs formed the core of his first volume, Poems (1721), boasting many Scottish aristocrats and eminent professionals on its subscription list, not to mention Gay and Pope. It was only after his father's social striving that Ramsay the Younger could occupy a position from which he could sniff at the added songs to The Gentle Shepherd, akin to a second-generation immigrant embarrassed by his parents' unpolished accent. This anxiety makes the son overlook the fact that his father, despite his attraction to Gay's songs, is much closer in spirit and practice to Addison. Given his own social mobility and the breadth of his audience, Ramsay pere accordingly believes that "singers" and their audiences can be turned into "sound critics;' as Addison imagines they will be through The Spectator. To this end, Ramsay was happy to reprint all of the songs from The Gentle Shepherd as well as twenty-one songs from The Beggar's Opera in The Tea- Table

Miscellany. 16 Ramsay's use of popular song to clear space for himself and prepare the way for the Enlightenment is encapsulated in the last song in The Gentle Shepherd, one of the four present in the original version. Sir William Worthy has now revealed himself as a cavalier returned after the Restoration to claim his estate in the Pentland Hills, just outside of Edinburgh. He has also revealed that he is the father of Patie, who has been raised as a shepherd by Sir William's faithful servant, Symon. Patie's social elevation appears at first to jeopardize his love match with Peggy, since at this point she is also thought to be a mere shepherdess. But once it is disclosed that she is also from a good

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family (Sir William's niece, in fact), the pair is reunitedY With everything now resolved, Sir William commands that since "all's at Rights, who sings best let me hear" (5.2.230). Peggy replies: "When you demand, I readiest should obey: I I'll sing you ane, the newest that I ha'e" (5-2.231-32), and then sings "My Patie is a Lover Gay;' which ends: Let Lasses of a silly Mind Refuse what maist they're wanting; Since we for yielding were design'd, We chastly should be granting Then I'll comply, and marry Pate, And syne my Cockernonny He's free to touzel air or late, Where Corn-riggs are bonny. (italics reversed, 5.2.249-56) The tune listed in the text is "Corn-riggs are Bonny;' and while this is the name it comes to have thanks to the success of Ramsay's play, the music is actually taken from "Sawney Will Never Be My Love Again." 18 The author of the original lyrics of"Sawney" is none other than Thomas D'Urfey, and it has a typical touch of Royalist pastoral bawdry. 19 The "yielding" in Ramsay's song, however, comes only after Peggy marries Patie; only "syne" (then) can he toussle her as he wishes. When Ramsay revisits the Restoration, the unsettling ironies and sexual play of D'Urfey are absent. Peggy's song appears to be in the service of the "utterly orthodox values" of conventional pastoral sung to obey her uncle's command to celebrate that "all's at Rights." 20 But the fact that the song is Peggy's "newest" intimates that Ramsay's views are in fact less politically orthodox than D'Urfey's. Ramsay is a progressive, and another hint of the modernization that he seeks of pastoral and society as a whole comes in an earlier scene. Symon, the faithful servant who raises Patie, tells Sir William that whenever Patie "drives our sheep to Edinburgh Port;' he spends his meager wages buying the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Abraham Cowley as well as Scottish authors William Drummond ofHawthornden and William Stirling (3.4.69-77). When challenged by Symon over the worth of such reading, Patie declares these books allow him, a mere shepherd, to "crack [chat] with Kings" out in the countryside (3.4.81). Patie's curriculum mixes English and Scottish authors and, rejecting the more restrictive ideologies of the Civil War, also mixes the works of a Presbyterian divine (Stirling) with those of the English Royalist Cowley, since the former upheld Scottish independence and the latter remained "loyal to his

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King" (3.4·76). Patie's willingness to blend creeds and national literatures mirrors Ramsay's own catholic program of national improvement after the Union. On one hand, Patie reads Scottish authors and, like many of the other characters, speaks in Scots vernacular, true to the setting of the play in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh. This speaks to the play's reputation in the history of pastoral as setting a new standard for the realism recommended by Addison and Tickell in their pastoral "war" with Pope. 21 One early editor went so far as to claim that the shepherds of the area still recited the play from memory seventy-five years after its publication. 22 On the other hand, the brief appearance of the city and the books sold there show that Ramsay is willing to move beyond "local color;' to take pastoral mimeticism past both the "pleasing delusion" of rustic life that Addison recommends in Guardian 30 and the demystification of that delusion in urban eclogues like Swift's "Description of a City Shower" and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Saturday, the Small-Pox." Where Swift and Montagu integrate the sophisticated world that sponsors pastoral in order to expose its fantasy of the Country, Ramsay pictures the City as a crucial source of knowledge that helps make his shepherd gentle. Patie's bookbuying in the City also gestures at the new model of polite culture that Ramsay seeks to put in place of theological debate and in place of skirmishes between Jacobites and Hanoverians. Just as he includes the Royalist Cowley in Patie's reading list, Ramsay does draw on a resonant trove of Jacobite images and a rich tradition of Jacobite song during his career. 23 But Jacobitism had thus far proven incapable of delivering a military and political victory, and its typical social conservatism likely did not appeal to someone with Ramsay's aspirations. As for the Presbyterian Kirk, a native Scots institution that retains its power after the Union, Ramsay could appreciate the loyalty of a Stirling, but throughout his career he launches critiques against its self-righteousness and butts heads with its hostility toward secular culture. 24 By returning to the Restoration and to a time before the '15, Ramsay imagines a future anterior that corresponds with his own vision of Scottish history. If we were to project Patie into early modern pastoral, we would have nowhere to put him; he ranks below a disguised prince like Florizel in The Winter's Tale but above the rubes who uncritically consume Autolycus's ballads. While his gentle blood may be what steers him toward an activity beyond the ken of other shepherds, the books do make the man, the education he labors to acquire allowing him to converse with "kings:' He is a natural-

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ized figure of Ramsay's own mobility (an honest Autolycus?) mirroring his movement from country to city and his drive to improve himself. Of course, where Patie only buys and reads books, Ramsay writes, sells, and lends them. If Patie's course of reading sketches the outlines of the new Scottish culture that Ramsay helped found, Ramsay's most influential contribution to that culture are songs like the ones in The Gentle Shepherd. Peggy's promise to sing "the newest that I ha' e" reveals the logic by which the author seeks to revivify the tradition of Scots song, self-consciously carrying it from the past into the present. Ramsay argues that this tradition and, by extension, vernacular Scottish culture itself are worth saving. By placing these songs within a more fully realized geography, Ramsay gives more detail and dignity to the vague allusions by English songwriters to the less refined home of Moggys and Jockys. Though he is not the first to make claims for the value of Scottish culture, his decision to focus on modern Scots poetry, especially on a genre as unprestigious as Scots song, is unusual. He also insists that Scottish culture is not for Scottish ears alone, dedicating The Tea- Table Miscellany to "ilka lovely British lass" and taking pride in a correspondent's report that in America his songs have displaced opera (v, ix). Ramsay, then, does not suffer from "national schizophrenia:'25 Rather, he blends national pride with a canny marketing strategy designed to take advantage of the political and cultural realities of the Union, refining the balladic form favored by D'Urfey and Gay. The title of The Tea- Table Miscellany moves these songs from the more demotic space of the street to a space alongside The Spectator among "the tea-equipage" (S 10). Indeed, the middling and upper classes of Edinburgh started gathering around tea-tables during the 1710s; there, according to one participant, "the young and gay ... pulled to pieces the manners of those that differed from them; every thing was matter of conversation." 26 But conversation was not their only mode of discourse; as Henry Mackenzie remembers it, "the ladies of Edinburgh" also sang Scots songs "at tea and after supper." 27

* * * In elevating Scots songs to the tea-table, Ramsay lays the material groundwork for the Scottish Enlightenment. He also introduces Enlightenment structures of feeling and thinking by attaching a more differentiated historical schema to the Addisonian scenario of"the man of polite imagination" reflecting on his enjoyment of the ballad. The songs in The Tea- Table

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Miscellany are tagged with various letters, with "X" denoting songs for which the "authors [are] unknown; Z, old songs; Q, old songs with additions" (xiii). The rest of the letters indicate "new words by different hands;' most of them by Ramsay but others by unnamed "ingenious young gentlemen" (xiii, viii). For Ramsay, songs are Janus-faced, grounded in cultural memory but also subject to revision and renewal. A piece like Peggy's "Corn-riggs are Bonny;' in which new words are set to an old tune, moves the audience to think about the relationship between Scotland's traditional past and the world of teatables. By paying attention to the varying relationship of different songs to the past, Ramsay is a pioneer in presenting them as objects of elite knowledge within a narrative of national progress. The year after the first volume of The Tea- Table Miscellany, Ramsay publishes The Ever Green, Being a Collection of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 16oo, less successful than The TeaTable Miscellany, because less easily digested. Though attacked by later antiquaries and editors, The Ever Green, The Tea- Table Miscellany, and The Gentle Shepherd, are all important early attempts to conserve older vernacular literature within a rationalized scheme of knowledge. More than reflect progress, Scots songs manufacture it through the peculiar power of"lyrick" (the most populous class of poems in Ramsay's 1721 volume) to catalyze sympathy. In the preface to The Tea-Table Miscellany Ramsay admits that those who typically listen to Scottish tunes "are not judges of the fine flourishes of new musick imported from Italy;' which he calls "downright perfect" (vii-viii). But the problem with "perfect" music is that it excludes those not among the cognoscenti and requires no outside participation, rendering unnecessary both the poet's verse and the audience's engagement (viii). Scottish tunes, in contrast, are ideal catalysts of sociability, for by not demanding the connoisseur's ear, they encourage the audience to "join with in the chorus" that the poet provides (viii). So for every person who performs them, "fifty ... content themselves" to hear and sing songs they do not need to be taught, because they are simple and familiar (vii). This meeting of tune and verse engenders an "imagined community" and realizes that community in performance. The communal feeling built into Ramsay's theorization of lyric anticipates the Scottish Enlightenment's imperative to be sociable, exemplified by David Burne's declaration that "we can form no wish, which has not a reference to society:'28 In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1729), one of the earliest theorizations of sociability, Francis Hutcheson argues that whenever a human voice is heard in a song, "we shall be

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touched by it in a very sensible manner, and have Melancholy, Joy, Gravity, Thoughtfulness excited in us by a sort of Sympathy or Contagion. The same Connexion is observable between the very Air of a Tune and the Words expressing any Passion which we have heard it fitted to, so that they shall both recur to us together, though but one of them affects our Senses:'29 Here, pace Ramsay the Younger and the divine who sermonized against The Beggar's Opera, "contagion" is a good thing, and it helps song bring together two competing positions in recent philosophy, Locke's theory of association and the innate faculties that Shaftesbury posited to counter his ex-tutor's model of the mind. Along with catalyzing the innate power of sympathy through the human voice, song reminds those familiar with a tune of the "ideas" initially attached to the words set to it. Although Ramsay could not have read the Inquiry prior to the initial publication of The Tea- Table Miscellany, he shares with Hutcheson parallel sources (Ramsay's Addison and Hutcheson's Shaftesbury) and guiding ideas. In Ramsay's account in the preface to The Tea- Table Miscellany, Scots songs help generate society by drawing listeners in, by encouraging them to catch the contagion of the song's sentiments. Those sentiments are conveyed by the intrinsic power of Scots music via the inborn faculty of sympathy (Shaftesbury) and/or the audience's prior experience with a particular tune (Locke). So while Ramsay the Younger sees the contagion of the songs as a disease visited upon The Gentle Shepherd by "the vitiated taste" of the crowd, Hutcheson and Ramsay the Elder view that contagion as key to an involuntary and healthy exercise of sympathy. The finer points of this contagion can be seen in the opening poem of The Tea- Table Miscellany, "Bonny Christy" (1-2). 30 Readers are initiated into the collection with these lines: How sweetly smells the simmer green! Sweet taste the peach and cherry: Painting and order please our een, And claret makes us merry:

Ramsay continues in the same vein for six quatrains, as the lyric speaker details the beauties and virtues of his beloved and laments his inability to communicate his passions to her. "Dubious of [his] ain desert;' he must "smother" his sentiments. Then Ramsay suddenly alters rhetorical perspective: "Thus sang blate Edie by a burn, I His Christy did o'er-hear im:' Edie, who thinks himself alone, is overheard, and so Ramsay confirms that senti-

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ments are not merely private expressions: During Edie's lament, the audience has presumably become increasingly drawn by the contagion of sympathy to share his position and thus less conscious of its own position as an audience. This consciousness-that they are overhearing someone else's speech-is reawakened by the appearance of Bonny Christy. But by calling attention to the act of overhearing, Ramsay does not dispel the audience's absorption so much as supplement it, because Christy, who stands in for the audience at this moment, is also moved by what she hears: "She doughtna let her lover mourn I She spake her favour with a look:' The story ends happily, with Edie reflecting on the change in his fortunes ("Sic joys frae tears arising") and then stopping his song to kiss his beloved. This dramatic structure-the lover overheard by the beloved, who then intervenes-is exceedingly rare in pastoral and lyric more broadly. I have found only a couple of examples roughly contemporary with Ramsay and no matches prior to him. 31 There are, of course, countless songs featuring lovestruck shepherds bewailing their lot to the landscape or their sheep. But in none of them does the beloved overhear and respond to these laments. Not acknowledging the boundary that Mill later draws between poetry as overheard and eloquence as heard, Ramsay foregrounds the receptiveness of the audience and the transindividual status of emotion in lyric. So although Ramsay does not engage in the more rigorous and technical analyses that characterize, say, Hutcheson's response to Bernard de Mandeville, his songs are in tune with Scottish Enlightenment ideas of sociability. The structure of "Bonny Christy" anticipates the section of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Adam Smith elaborates on the spectator as a better judge of moral feeling and action than the actor when he claims that "sympathy ... does not arise so much from the view of the passion [as felt directly by the person seen], as from the situation which excites it." 32 While a boor may not be embarrassed by his discourtesy, we are, since we are sensitive to the social context even if he is not. 33 In the same vein, Bonny Christy the spectator turns out to be a better judge than Edie himself of what he is worth and whether he should share his sentiments. In this perspectival shift, then, "Bonny Christy" enacts the doubleness of Ramsay's idea of lyric, confirming the interplay of the individual and the social that the Scottish Enlightenment aims to produce. The lone speaker's affect is a means to sociability, while the vehicle that makes his declarations efficacious for the audience is a Scots song, the twinning of imperfect yet attractive music with verse that gives voice to powerful sentiments.

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* * * Ramsay's anticipation of the Scottish Enlightenment extends to the way that these songs imagine aesthetics, moral action, and the role of women in uniting the two. Speakers in prior Scots songs tend to follow D'Urfey's "Cold and Raw" in praising "Rosie Cheeks and bonny Brow" that make their "Mouth to water:' Edie, in contrast, begins his speech by moving from the pleasures of the "peach and cherry" to the more exalted and abstract pleasures of"Painting and order:' Again, it is as if Edie has also gone to town with Patie and purchased Hutcheson's Inquiry. The first half of the treatise is devoted to "the Beauty of Regularity, Order, [and] Harmony:' Against those who would ascribe taste solely to sense impressions and custom (Locke), Hutcheson argues that it is "an INTERNAL SENSE" (xiv). By praising the rather abstract beauty of "order;' the singer of"Bonny Christy" affirms this "internal sense." Then, like Hutcheson, Ramsay proceeds to another, higher sense-morality-by having the speaker set Bonny Christy above both the pleasures of painting and order and those of the peach and cherry. Edie's turn to his beloved may seem merely to include the female form in the gallery of the connoisseur's sensuous delights. But his gallantry is more accurately seen as consonant with Hutcheson's belief, later echoed by Lord Kames and others, that heterosexual love initiates men into a moral social order that radiates outward from the domestic sphere. Discussing the moral sacrifices required of fathers, Hutcheson argues that the physical beauty of a woman must hold out the promise of the "the greatest moral Pleasures;' or else "the meanest Prostitutes would please as much as any" (256). Thus it must be that "BEAUTY gives a favourable Presumption good moral Dispositions, and Acquaintance confirms this into a real Love or Esteem" (256). Beauty is not only an "internal sense;' like morality, but also a means by which the (male) subject becomes moral by properly reading the inner significance of outward (feminine) signs. The endpoint of that process, of course, is supposed to be the marriage that Peggy insists upon in a clever piece of stagecraft that accompanies the second song in the original version of The Gentle Shepherd, "By the Delicious Warmness of thy Mouth:' Responding to Patie's warning that maidens, like fruit, must not be allowed to overripen, Peggy falls into his arms, singing: Then dinna pu' me, gently thus I fa' Into my Patie's Arms, for good and a: But stint your Wishes to this kind Embrace; And mint nae farther til we've got the Grace. (2.4.112-15)

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Peggy awakens desire but defers it out of respect for social norms and makes it the engine of civilizing Patie. She prevents him from even considering the role of covert aristocrat urging a maid to gather her rosebuds, as in "Cold and Raw:' Women may be thought of as fruit, but ultimately they rank above the "peach" or anything else merely to be plucked and enjoyed in its "delicious warmness." For participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, learning these gender roles was part of a larger cultural development that culminated in the manners of a commercial society. Consider the play's first song, "Peggy, now the king's come;' sung by Peggy's nurse, Mause, and set to the Royalist and then Jacobite tune "Carle and the King Come:' In its original version the song includes the following lines: When yellow corn grows on the rigs And a gibbet's built to hang the Whigs 0 then we will dance Scottish jigs. 34

But Mause replaces the lyrics with lines that sing of Peggy's rightful place restored: "Nae mair the Hawkies shalt thou milk I But change the PlaidingCoat for Silk" (2.3.9-10). The new lyrics seem deeply conservative, since they celebrate the return of an aristocratic lady to "Silk;' as if the Interregnum had not happened at all. But setting a Jacobite tune to lyrics about dress in fact suggests an important historical change. Mause's song relocates the scene of history from the public one dominated by the battlefield and gibbet to one exemplified by female costume, an early moment in the Enlightenment expansion of history to include "manners" as well as the public deeds of public men. More specifically, her song registers that fundamental shift in gender roles attributed to the movement to commercial society by theorists as diverse as Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar. 35 If changes in the economy were understood to structure sexuality, the reverse was also found to be true: "The advancement of Manners keeps pace with the arts: but the State of Women, in all nations, reciprocally influences and is influenced by the progress of manners:' 36 The literati claimed that with the decline of chivalric possessiveness, women, who had been set on a pedestal but also cloistered, could take a more public role and so further civilize men: "Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men as well as their behavior refines apace:' 37 Commercial society turns the aggression of familial or chivalric warfare toward more sociable ends, gives more weight to

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affection in marriage, and places women in a position superior to that of "slaves" or "idols;' permitting them to be "friends and companions." 38 Mause's song on Peggy's dress reflects the more domesticated society that arises in part from this new relationship between men and women. One way for Peggy to fulfill this civilizing function is by singing. In the dedication to The Tea- Table Miscellany Ramsay tells "ilka lovely British lass" that the songs' "beauties will look sweet and fair, I Arising saftly through your throats" (v). Women play a similar role in "Bonny Christy;' when Edie conjures the beauty of his beloved as she sings: "If my Christy tunes her voice, I I'm rapt in admiration." Ramsay's use of the word admiration here figures the woman as a privileged object of aesthesis. No mere object of sexual desire, she elicits desire in order to redirect it for the good of polite society. The role of song in this affective economy returns us to where we began our discussion of Ramsay, his addition of seventeen songs to The Gentle Shepherd following the success of The Beggar's Opera. Fittingly, the first musical piece in the new version acknowledges the coordinate role played by gender and singing in Ramsay's design for Scottish culture: My Peggy sings sae saftly, When on my pipe I play, By a' the rest she is confest,By all the rest, that she sings best. ( STS 3:68) The song foreshadows Peggy's concluding piece, in which she sings "the newest that I ha'e." Although Patie cannot know it, his song makes her another Bonny Christy, one of the "lovely lasses" hailed in the dedication of The Tea- Table Miscellany who will enchant the eye and ear of the polite male listener when Ramsay's songs are ''Arising saftly through your throats:'

* * * In this recurrent image of the woman singing, Ramsay's revision of pastoral and lyric and his vision of post-Union Scottish culture clearly emerge. Peggy is the necessary complement to Sir William. As Thomas Crawford notes, Sir William first appears disguised as a fortune-teller, prophesizing the events to come. Embracing an emergent regime of agricultural improvement and political economy by pledging to reconstruct his old house and plant anew, he is "[t)he magical agent offairy-tale, the Warlock ... identified with the social class and the ethic of sober reason which will dominate the next hundred

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years, and therefore with the historic process itsel£:' 39 This formulation usefully identifies a double movement in which "the ethic of sober reason" at once displaces superstition and yet invests itself with the enchanting force of inevitability. Sir William is the aristocratic paterfamilias who presents a new order of improvement and rationalization as an outgrowth of the old. But there are limits to what this fortune-teller can see. Banning Patie's relationship with Peggy once he is told (wrongly, it turns out), that she is a mere peasant, he represents in part an archaic social order that mistakenly limits value to aristocratic blood. As Patie tells Peggy, if they are to be a genteel couple, they "must learn Modes, to Innocence unkend; I Affect atimes to like the things we hate" (4.2.179-80). Peggy's songs gesture instead at a more expansive definition of elite deportment centered on the tea-table and circulating more broadly in songbooks and single sheets. But if Sir William is overly invested in the antiquity of aristocratic bloodlines in national politics and the household, he undervalues antiquity in his vision of Scottish culture, planning to send his son to London and France for some needed polishing (4.2.54). Since Patie can learn fine sentiments at home, Peggy asks, why then must he go abroad (4.2.196-97)? In contrast, Peggy consciously places herself in a Scottish landscape where "Corn-riggs are bonny:' While Sir William's plan may look toward the "ethic of sober reason" that drives political economy, it is not this that excites Patie. Although he acknowledges his father's authority, it is Peggy who bewitches him and initiates him into a commercial society, based on sociability, sympathy, and the civilizing power of women. She does not do this by appealing directly to commercial values; rather, she transfers the value of the Scottish past from restrictive bloodlines to the more accessible form of Scots songs. This is Ramsay's take on "covert pastoral"; Patie and Peggy may be gentry in disguise, but their identity by blood is a retrospective justification of a mercantile ethos made necessary by the fact that Scotland is in a transitional moment between these two value systems. From this perspective, Ramsay's cultural nationalism represents more than a capitulation to English hegemony or a symptom of "national schizophrenia:' Scots songs become a source of value that expands an aristocratic hierarchy to include all who can learn to appreciate the merit of these songs in the proper way. They are a means for Ramsay to theorize and realize what will bind Scottish society together in the wake of the political depredations of the Union and after the wished-for eclipse of the orthodox Kirk. His songs thereby reveal the necessity when explaining the Scottish Enlightenment of

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moving beyond great men, universities, and clubs to consider Scottish "manners" more broadly. Since Ramsay's songs had a greater reach than these other institutions, they reveal the discursive network that made figures like Hume possible, such as the tea-tables at which Henry Mackenzie and other "men of feeling" of the next generation were educated. They also point to the constitutive role of popular song in the conceptual transition from a premodern Scotland dominated by the Kirk to the secular world of the literati. In Ramsay's songs we see one of the first instances of improvement rather than Providence as the engine of social change, as well as a celebration of the institution of companionate marriage that lies at improvement's core. Finally, by making Scottish culture a profitable export, these songs constitute one of the few instances in which the Union's commercial promise to Scotland was realized in the decades after 1707.

Home's Douglas: Preposterous Plots and the Absence of Song Like Ramsay, Home also wrote a play featuring a Scottish shepherd with high aspirations, and so it is not surprising that American publishers subtitled it "The Noble Shepherd;' as if it were a sequel to Ramsay's pastoral. 40 After failing to interest David Garrick in a tragedy set in classical times, Home turned to Scottish popular culture, possibly at the prodding of William Collins (see Chapter 3), writing a play based on the old Scottish ballad of"Gill Morrice." The illegitimate son of Lady Barnard and an unnamed earl, Gill Morrice sends his page to ask his mother to meet him in the "guid grene wod" where he dwells. 41 The page balks because Lady Barnard's husband, unaware of Gill Morrice's identity, is sure to find out about the meeting. But Gill Morrice insists, and the resentful page makes sure that Lord Barnard also hears the request. Fired with jealousy, Lord Barnard goes to the wood, decapitates Gill Morrice, and presents the severed head to his wife, who reveals that he has killed her son. The ballad ends with wife and husband mourning Gill Morrice's death and the husband chastising her for keeping her secret. Home makes this local tale national, turning Gill Morrice into the legitimate son of the Scottish hero, Douglas. Lady Randolph has kept her marriage secret, at first because the Douglases are the hereditary enemies of her family and then because after her husband's death in battle she married Lord Randolph to please her father. Home also significantly alters Gill Morrice's role, casting him as a pastoral hero. He comes on to the stage as Norval, sup-

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posedly a shepherd's son who has been inspired by tales of martial valor to fight against the invading Danes and who saves Lord Randolph from a band of ruffians. Lady Randolph then comes to realize that this is the son she thought had drowned as an infant, and they plan to make public his noble parentage. But before this can happen he arouses the enmity of the villain Glenalvon, already angered by Lady Randolph's rebuff of his advances. He leads Lord Randolph to believe that Norval and Lady Randolph are having an affair, and in a duel between Lord Randolph and Norval, Glenalvon sneaks up and mortally wounds the young man who, in turn, slays him. Douglas's death moves his mother to throw herself off a cliff, and a guilt-stricken Lord Randolph ends the play by seeking his own death in battle. So in contrast to Ramsay's comic love between Patie and Peggie, Home writes a tragedy based on a love between mother and son misread as erotic. This shift from marriage comedy to tragic family romance is indicative of a historical crisis that is bound up in a difference in how Home uses lyric. Despite being based on "Gill Morrice," Douglas includes no songs; indeed, the ballad is never mentioned at all. 42 Instead of song, Home relies on an impassioned verse studded with personifications and prosopopoeia. The opening soliloquy, spoken by Lady Randolph to her dead husband, is a good example: Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom Accords with my soul's sadness, and draws forth The voice of sorrow from my bursting heart, Farewel a while: I will not leave you long; For in your shades I deem some spirit dwells, Who from the chiding stream, or groaning oak, Still hears, and answers to MATILDA's moan. 0 DouGLAs! DouGLAS! ... Incapable of change, affection lies Buried, my DouGLAS, in thy bloody grave. (7-8)

These lines are redolent of the "literary loneliness" that John Sitter has influentially placed at the center of mid-eighteenth-century English poetry. But if we situate these lines within Scottish Enlightenment ideas of poetic figuration, they look less like a "flight from history" into solitude than an exercise in arousing the audience's sympathy. Here, Lady Randolph moves from prosopopoeia to apostrophe, from addressing "woods and wilds" as if they were alive to addressing Douglas as if he were still among the living. For Hutcheson, prosopopoeia is the most obvious sign of poetry's intimate rela-

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tionship to a "Sense of Morality ... antecedent to Instruction" and the calculation of private interest (261). By imagining that even rocks feel, poetry moves us to extend our sympathy even to inanimate objects. It thereby elevates the merely sensual pleasures of beautiful description by uniting it to the innate sympathy at the heart of morality (262-63). For Blair, prosopopoeia is the highest form of personification (above more common anthropomorphizing like "the crops are thirsty for rain"), and making the figure believable requires "a state of violent emotion:' 43 It is fitting that this figure should crop up in lyric, since it is the genre shaped most by the "bolder and more passionate strain" that inspires it. 44 By moving from the "woods and wilds" to Douglas, from an inhuman to a human figure, Lady Randolph reminds us of the sociable feelings that lyric can evoke even when the speaker seems most alone-indeed, as a result of that pathetic loneliness. Home takes this logic a step further by suggesting that, like Edie in Ramsay's "Bonny Christy;' the speaker is overheard within the text as well. Douglas the son later appears in response to her appeal to Douglas the father, and the result is that Lady Randolph, herself a static figure of grief"[i]ncapable of change;' is reanimated. The benevolent universe imagined by Hutcheson and his successors, anchored in the innate power of sympathy, is affirmed, at least for the moment. This tearful, personifying, and apostrophic verse anticipates the most influential poetry produced during the Scottish Enlightenment prior to Burns, the poems ascribed to Ossian. Eighteenth-century commentators on Ossian focused on "what Kames calls 'passionate personifications: or figures that evince the speaker's impetuous belief in the sympathy of external nature;' such as: "Ye rocks! hang over my head. Hear my voice, ye trees! as ye bend on the shaggy hill. My voice shall preserve the praise of him, the hope of the isles." 45 Like Lady Randolph, Macpherson's speaker calls out to the landscape, its melancholy matching his as he laments the now lost "hope of the isles." So it is appropriate that Home played a central role in getting Ossian's/Macpherson's verse published. Not long after Douglas was staged, he met Macpherson, who had in his possession some Gaelic poems, fragments of what the young Higllland tutor represented as a rich store of bardic poetry. Home encouraged Macpherson to translate these fragments and, thrilled with the result, enlisted the aid of his fellow literati to supervise their publication. 46 The extravagant figures of Home's and Macpherson's verse are more than an exercise in eliciting sympathy. Because tropes of this sort were supposed to be produced more easily by more primitive consciousnesses that be-

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lieved the natural world alive with spirits, apostrophe and the like carried a built-in archaism. Their presence in Home speaks to his project, announced in the prologue, of bringing history into the present. Just as his audience's fathers, "prodigal of life;' were willing to follow Douglas into battle, he hopes that their sons will be moved by a tale of Douglas: Listen attentive to the various tale, Mark if the author's kindred feelings fail; Sway'd by alternate hopes, alternate fears, He waits the test of your congenial tears. If they shall flow, back to the Muse he flies, And bids your heroes in succession rise; Collects the wand'ring warriors as they roam, DouGLAS assures them of a welcome-home. (italics reversed, vi)

"[C]ongenial tears" cement the play's act of conservative improvement. By turning a ballad into high tragedy, Home incorporates Scotland's past martial virtue into the sentimental present. If, like The Gentle Shepherd, Home's play aims to encourage its audience to develop, it also introduces a larger separation between past and present. There is no library for Norval to use; he instead learns warcraft from a former crusader who, having accidentally killed his brother, turned hermit and happened to make his home in Norval's neighborhood (45-46). The need to transfuse into the present the warlike spirit of the Scottish past was felt with particular keenness when Douglas was staged. In 1756, the House of Commons reintroduced the English Militia Bill as a response to a threatened French invasion, and much to the dismay of Scottish gentlemen, Scottish militias were not included out of fear in Westminster that this would encourage a resurgence of JacobitismY Underlining what Scotland had lost with the loss of its parliament, the issue was particularly explosive because the militia, conventionally opposed to standing armies, was the symbol of "independence" throughout the eighteenth century, heavily laden with civic humanist concerns over corruption. Roused by this insult to Scottish patriotism, the Select Society, an exclusive club that included Blair, Robertson, Ferguson, Smith, and Lord Kames, "debated the matter more than any single question from 1756 to 1762"; and members of the Select Society also helped to found the Poker Club, of which Home was a member, so named because it was established "to stir up the fire and spirit of the country." 48 In response to this and to the more general challenges to Scottish cul-

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ture after the Union, Home writes a play designed to make sensitive sons of Caledonia ennoble themselves by weeping over the sacrifices of their stoic fathers.49 The effect of these filial affections is indicated by the pun in the prologue's "kindred feelings;' which combines the author's personal devotion to his Scottish forefathers (his "feelings" are for his "kindred") with the social arc of feeling along with his audience. If their "congenial tears" match the author's "kindred feelings," he promises to continue his act of historic recollection, and other ghosts from the Scottish past will find a "welcomehome." Upholding his end after the Scottish audience responded with teary enthusiasm to Douglas, Home traveled in 1761 to the Highlands along with Macpherson on one of his Ossianic collecting missions. The trip was motivated in part by authorial self-interest; he was in search of "some of nature's gems to adorn Rivine;' the working title of his play The Fatal Discovery (1769), which he based on Macpherson's ninth fragment. 5°

* * * So, like Ramsay, Home aims to preserve Scottish culture in a commercial age dominated by England. But the prologue also hints at the differences in their visions of collection and the underlying complications of Scottish life after the Union. The final line of the prologue appears to contain a pun: Home the author will also be "welcomed home;' having returned to Scotland after wandering in the uncongenial precincts of the London theater and having come back to Scottish popular culture after tarrying in the more remote fields of classical antiquity. However, for the pun to work, the English standard must trump the Scottish vernacular; for a Scot would typically pronounce the patronymic spelled "Home" as "Hume." David Hume, so pained by Scotticisms that he attempted to erase them from beyond the grave, offered in his will to give his cousin John six dozen bottles of port if he were to sign his name John Hume. 51 Home refused that tempting deal, but Douglas is certainly as free of Scots as Hume would wish; the characters speak in correct English iambic pentameter, indicative of the new aspirations of the literati after Ramsay. By Home's era they were increasingly embarrassed by Scots. Blair, after praising The Gentle Shepherd as worthy of comparison with any other pastoral in any language, laments: "It is a great disadvantage to this beautiful poem, that it is written in the old rustic dialect of Scotland, which, in a short time, will probably be entirely obsolete, and not intelligible:' 52 Less charitably, Adam Smith grumbled that Ramsay's use of Scots signified that he

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did not "write like a gentleman."53 This new standard of gentility also seems ambivalent toward popular song. While Home does not express outright distaste for ballads along the lines of Allan Ramsay the Younger's disgust for the more popular, song-filled editions of The Gentle Shepherd, he excludes any mention of the play's balladic source. Many judged Home's effort at refinement a success; others saw it as a travesty. After Garrick rejected the play, Home's indignant friends had it staged in Edinburgh on December 14, 1756, to great acclaim, and in the preface to Four Dissertations David Hume praised his cousin for avoiding "the unhappy barbarism" of Shakespeare while retaining his "true theatric genius:'54 A more vernacular and nationalist version of this judgment was rendered by the anonymous Scotsman who reportedly proclaimed at the end of the first performance, "Whaur's your Wully Shakespeare noo?" English critics also hailed the play for its refining power. Thomas Gray declared that the play "retrieved the true language of the stage, lost these hundred years:' 55 Goldsmith lauded "the native innocence of the shepherd Norval;' for "it requires some art to dress the thoughts and phrases of the common people, without letting them swell into bombast, or sink into vulgarity." 56 Home's noble shepherd is a model pastoral figure, still grounded in his "common" upbringing but believably evidencing his noble blood. Yet Goldsmith's own review points to a conflict between this progressive vision of pastoral and the static narrative the play actually stages. He objects to "the unfolding of a material part of the plot in soliloquy; the preposterous distress of a married Lady for a former husband who had been dead near twenty years; [and] the want of incidents to raise that fluctuation of hope and fear, which interest us in the catastrophe:' 57 The play is "preposterous" because, as Garrick explained why he had rejected the play in a letter to Home's patron, the Earl of Bute, "the Story is rather told, than represented:' 58 Its declamatory style expresses passions prior to the believable motives and actions that should be their cause. 59 More than two centuries later, Nicholas Phillipson unwittingly echoes Goldsmith when he calls the sociopolitical desire that shapes the play "preposterous": "[C]elebrating the past with nostalgia and sentiment," it is a way for "modern provincials whose fortunes lay on the side of progress to alleviate any guilt ... at making a virtue out of adaptability:'60 As the etymology of"preposterous" indicates, Home wants to make the "pre-" into the "post-;' retaining the virtues of the past after the break that marks modernity. This mix of continuity and discontinuity may be characteristic of all history, but there is something in Home's idea of it that has

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proven unconvincing to many critics since its first staging, seeming to them a fantasy for resolving an historical crisis rather than a substantive engagement with it.

* * * To understand what is at stake in Home's silence toward the ballad and how it is related to the preposterousness of the play, we have to dig more deeply into its plot and into the gendered historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment. Again, Home hopes to use the temporal dislocation in the play to help solve the crisis of modernity: The play's tragedy will produce the audience's congenial tears, which attests to their affection for the play's manly virtues. Yet the transfer of virtue from father to son both within the play and without depends upon maternal affection, and this complicates matters. 61 Most critics, past and present, have acknowledged that Lady Randoph's expressions of maternal sentiment toward her son are key to the play's elevating force. 62 When she tremulously asks whether the baby recovered from the flood was alive, when she embraces her son after revealing she is his mother, and when she laments his premature death, she acts as the audience's primary object of sympathy. The model of history that informs this configuration of father, mother, and son and its associated fissures can both be seen in the play's attempt to explain its catastrophe. On one hand, Lady Randolph blames Fate, as when she declaims that she is "the object now, I On which Omnipotence displays itself, I Making a spectacle, a tale of me, I To awe its vassal, man" (71). But earlier she suggests that she may have had a chance to act differently. Addressing another personification, she laments to her servant Anna that she did not admit her marriage to her father: "Sincerity, I Thou first of virtues, let no mortal leave I Thy onward path! altho' the earth should gape, I And from the gulph of hell destruction cry" (14). The play provides some support for this explanation, since by not revealing the real cause behind her sadness and then by not proclaiming Norval her son, she makes it possible for Glenalvon to take advantage of Lord Randolph's ignorance. So does the blame lie with Lady Randolph's Insincerity or Fate? This is a false choice, for what drives this preposterous plot is something between fateful Omnipotence and an individual's decision to be sincere-the Scottish Enlightenment's sociological understanding of the relationship of history to gender and sexuality. While Ramsay sets his play in the more

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immediate past, Home looks back many centuries to a feudal world, and for the participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, committed to historical change and progress, this greater temporal difference makes more apparent differences between the earlier and later periods' views on gender. A daughter in a feudal society, Lady Randolph is bound to uphold family honor by swearing to her father "that I ne'er would I Wed one of DouGLAs' name" (14). These same historical conventions allow Glenalvon to easily make her the object of Lord Randolph's jealously. For jealousy, as Adam Smith observes, is the dominant formula in feudal societies, which possess the more cultivated sense of affection absent from primitive societies that simply treat women as slaves. 63 Yet, as Lady Randolph confesses to her servant Anna, her promise to her father never to marry a Douglas was "[a]n oath equivocal" (14). It was true in letter since she cannot marry Douglas again, but insincere in spirit, an insincerity that marks her as an "equivocal" figure in a larger sense, trapped between two epochs. The feudal world-order structured around family broils and violent sexual jealousy robs her of everything she cherishes. But she cannot enjoy the benefits of the era to come, which supposedly turns the aggression of family warfare to more sociable ends, accords more weight to affection in marriage, and, to repeat John Millar's phrasing in The Origin of The Distinction of Ranks, transforms women from "slaves" to "friends and companions:' Once made a "spectacle" of fate by the second loss of her son, her only option is the one consistent with her status in a feudal milieu that sees her as dispensable and obliged to uphold the family's honor. She commits suicide, irrefutable and terrible evidence of her maternal love. Lady Randolph's fate confirms the superiority of commercial society; her suffering helps to nurture the audience into polite sensibility and into an awareness that they occupy a less brutal world. But her suicide also reveals that the play is more than a confirmation of the gendered historiography of the literati. For Smith, Hume, and others also celebrated stoicism as a corrective to emotional excess, and in the suppressed fifth of Four Dissertations, Hume saw suicide as a paragon of masculine virtue. In other words, by committing suicide, Lady Randolph is covertly being a man about things; along with her historical position, her gender identity is likewise "equivocal:' As Anna earlier observes, adhering to sincerity in the face of"destruction" is difficult for "women's fearful kind" (14), and Lady Randolph's role as surreptitious man of virtue as well as man of feeling surfaces the moment before her suicide:

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.... A little while Was I a wife! a mother not so long! What am I now?-I know.-But I shall be That only whilst I please; for such a son And such a husband make a woman bold. (71)

Now denied the two most valued roles assigned to women during her time and hinting momentarily at some unspeakable identity ("What am I now? I know"), she channels the spirits of her son and husband to be "bold." Teaching the men in the audience how to adopt the feminine qualities of sympathy, she also helps them guard against the fear of effeminacy that accompanies the commercialization of masculine ethos. The pressure exerted by that fear torques Douglas's gender position into an equivocal position that complements his mother's. Glenalvon fumes that I'm told, has that alluring look, 'Twixt man and woman, which I have observ'd To charm the nicer and fantastic dames, Who are, like Lady RANDOLPH, full ofvirtue. 64 (42) NoRVAL,

Where Fate momentarily makes Lady Randolph into a man when she commits suicide, it denies Norval his manhood. He is instead an adolescent, a "gallant youth" (19) who very much wants to be a man but is prevented from becoming one. Expiring in his mother arms, he is left to lament his inability to die in battle like his fathers did (69), breaking the paternal chain that Home imagines in the prologue. Douglas's liminality is highlighted by the play's performance history: One reason archly adduced for Garrick's initial rejection of the play is that he was too old to star as Norval, and the best-known solution to this problem came in the 1804 London production, which starred the ambiguously gendered youth William Henry West Betty, alias "Master Betty:' 65 In a suggestive analysis of the Master Betty phenomenon, Julie Carlson argues that his sudden rise and fall "constitutes an important early chapter in the construction of youth" and should be seen as a "preview of the queerness of youth that would be codified and pathologized at the end of the nineteenth century."66 This queer construction of youth can be traced back to authors like Mackenzie, among others, who prized and worried over the previously undefined period of adolescence for its unaffected simplicity and its awakening sympathy for others.67 Adolescence was a condensation point for the Scottish

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Enlightenment's debate over the role of environment in personal development, and the uncertainty around it is embodied in NorvaliDouglas's androgyny and premature death. Caught between mother-love and other-love, he is the desideratum both of the "nicer and fantastic dames" and the "nicer and fantastic" men in the audience, the "alluring" embodiment of a would-be manly Scottish virtue. That Glenalvon ascribes this wish to women and can only name Norval as "['t]wixt man and woman" confirms that Glenalvon's masculinity is of the feudal, barbaric kind. But the bar against open same-sex desire (as opposed to the constructive power of homosocial feeling) means that the play cannot name its desire for Douglas. So the villain is left to gesture at this wish, and, Lady Randolph is left to mediate unsuccessfully "between men;' between the literati and the fated object of their desire. Unlike Patie, Norval does not cross over into manhood. He, like his mother, is sacrificed on the altar of pathos for the benefit of the modern Scotland that Home envisions. It makes sense, then, that the author declared upon seeing Master Betty perform Norval that "this is the first time I ever saw the part ... played; that is, according to my ideas of the character as at the time I conceived it, and as I wrote it:' 68

* * * This gender dynamic casts new light on why Home chose "Gill Morrice" as his source. There are many ballads with tragic Scottish heroes that would have provided ample opportunity for pathos, like "Johnie Armstrong" (Child 169) and "The Bonnie Earl of Murray" (Child 181). But "Gill Morrice" is unique in the youthful beauty and vulnerability of the title character. His "yellow lockes" figure into the earliest known versions of the poem, and when in a 1755 printing of the ballad Lord Barnard rides out to the "grene wod" to exact revenge on the man he thinks is cuckolding him, he exclaims to himself: "Nae wonder, nae wonder, Gill Morice I Than my lady loed thee well, I The fairest part of my body I Is blacker than thy heel" (10). 69 When Lord Barnard says this, Gill Morrice is combing his hair rather than readying himself for battle because he neither knows that Lord Barnard is there nor that he would have anything to fear from him. Instead, he wonders why "[m]y mother tarries lang" (10). Despite his youthful naivete, the fact that he is at least nominally a man and thus a threat to Lord Barnard's honor makes the jealous husband overcome his admiration and decapitate him despite his "great bewty" (10), which preserves the beauty of his face while doing terrible violence to his body.

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A separate collection of the ballad the year prior to the first staging of

Douglas reveals the dangers this beauty poses to masculinity. The advertisement to the 1755 "Gill Morrice" traces it back to a feminine sphere: "The following Poem, now first printed, the public owes to a LADY, who favour'd the printers with a copy, as it was carefully collected from the mouths of old women and nurses. It is not to be expected, that a Poem preserv'd only in this manner can either be correct or entire.... If any reader can render it more correct or complete, or can furnish the printers with any other old Fragments of the like kind, they will very much oblige them" (2). This is the earliest example I have found that highlights the recording of a ballad from oral performance, and it is significant that it was done by a woman apparently scrupulous enough to collect the ballad from more than one other woman. This femininity also bleeds into the verse itself, in the more "correct and complete" emendations that apparently materialize in response to the editor's call and which seem like late additions instead of original lyrics recovered: "His hair was like the threeds of gold, I Drawne frae Minervas loome: I His lipps like roses drapping dew, I His breath was a' perfume:' 70 Although Home is reported to have first encountered the ballad when it was "recited to him by a lady;' 71 he did not acknowledge the ballad's feminine provenance, and his play says nothing of rosy lips and perfumed breath. Merging the pacific Gill Morrice with the militant figure of Douglas, he transfers his attractions from his appearance to his youth, his modesty, and his bravery, as when Lord Randolph urges his deliverer to tell who he is: "(B]lush not, flower of modesty I As well as valour, to declare thy birth" (20). 72 But the transfer is incomplete. Glenalvon's characterization of his "charm;' which is a residue of his beauty in the broadside, belies the central role gender plays in Home's preposterous narrative of national virtue regained. These imperatives make Norval an ideal figure who, in the words of Adam Smith, "to all the soft, the amiable, and the gentle virtues, joins all the great, the awful, and the respectable." 73 According to Smith, that merging is nearly impossible: "(T]he social conditions most conducive to the sentimental stoic are virtually inconceivable" because a society that embraces the "soft virtue of humanity" leaves little opportunity for stoic hardiness, and conversely "the boisterous and stormy sky of war and faction" that encourages this faculty leaves no space for "the strongest suggestions of humanity:' 74 But a logical solution is not exactly what Home seeks. The proper response to the untimely death of this queer figure was, Mackenzie observes, "the tears of the audience, which the tender part of the drama drew forth un-

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sparinglY:' 75 The epilogue provides a revealing analogy for this valuable overflowing of pity's "sacred streams": And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, They leave behind them such a golden soil, That there the virtues without culture grow, There the sweet blossoms of affection blow. (italics reversed, 75)

"[V]irtues without culture"-a golden surplus produced by the natural actions of the heart-is the play's dearest fantasy. For this, Home appears willing even to suspend Scottish Enlightenment models of progress, which may yoke virtue to innate feelings but are also skeptical about value without cultivation. (Blair can explain the sensibility of Ossian only by recourse to the gentling institution of the bards.) 76 Home also appears willing to sacrifice the urbane detachment necessary to construct those philosophies ... and to critique preposterous plots. 77 But the simile cleverly slips in its own historical precondition: In order to be moved to tears, the audience already has to have the cultivation that the play is supposedly imparting to them; this is the circular logic of the pre/posterous. The epilogue thus assumes that the play has passed the "test" set in the Edinburgh prologue-it elicits "congenial tears"and that the author is consequently licensed to bid other Scottish heroes from other Scottish ballads to rise "in succession:'

* * * Home's attempt to transfer the valuable elements of the feudal past into the commercial present and to elevate the popular song of "Gill Morrice" into national tragedy did not go uncontested. The Critical Review is happy to agree with Hume when he admits that he "might be accused of partiality" for likening Home to Shakespeare.78 Picking up on the play's gender trouble, John Hawkesworth sneers that Lord Randolph's "Blush not, flower of modesty" "[i]s an odd expression from one man to another, and would be better addressed to one of the gentle sex" and then suggests that Home be "called the flower of Edinburgh's tragic writers; for, on this side of the Tweed, nothing more will, or ought to be allowed him." 79 A perversely floral figure, he is barred from praise by English critics. Many on Home's side of the Tweed were also ill disposed to award him the laurel, and not simply because of "national schizophrenia." Some of the pamphlets for and against him pivot on the vice or virtue of the stage, what

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we might expect given the split between the Kirk establishment and the literati, many of them Presbyterian divines. 80 But these exchanges do not fully capture the conflict between the competing visions of culture that Douglas brought to the surface. More instructive is "The Stage or the Pulpit: A Sermon Sung By the Reverend author of Douglas the first night he went to see his own play represented. To the tune of Gill Morrice." 81 The title of the ballad and its sequels posit two competing figures at the center of public culture, the corrupt stage and the holy pulpit. Yet it is a third cultural form-the ballad-that is the vehicle for this stinging critique on the vanity of Home and his fellow literati, as the author of"The Stage or the Pulpit" collects "Gill Morrice" in a way that disputes Home's elevation of it. A note to the word "sung" in the title contests Home's bid for Ciceronian civic virtue, facetiously observing that "Cicero, in like manner, sung all his orations, but whether to the tune of Gill Morice, or of Chevy Chase, is altogether uncertain." 82 This might be read as an insult to the ballad itself, but it seems more like an attempt to prick Home's pretensions. Just as he wishes to abandon the pulpit for the stage while denying that the stage might have corrupting effects, he aims to use a ballad to tell a heroic tale while disavowing the quotidian world that the ballad brings with it and without crediting the ballad anywhere in the play. 83 The author reintroduces this world by setting to the tune of "Gill Morrice" new words that promiscuously combine erudite footnotes on Cicero with indecorous sentiments such as this one likening Home's partisans in London and Edinburgh to a giant eunuch: "Of DouGLAS the supporters thus, I Colossus-like have fix'd him; I One leg stands here, another there, I But nothing is betwixt 'em." 84 Here, the author uses the ballad to emasculate the literati, an image of their worst fear. "The Stage or the Pulpit" is not alone in challenging Home by using the ballad to join what he and his supporters attempt to sunder. For instance, "The Seven Champions of the Stage" begins with a reprint of the 1755 "Gill Morrice" and is then followed by a satire set to the ballad's tune. 85 The anonymous author teasingly echoes the advertisement to the 1755 edition by dedicating the ballad to the unexalted figures of the "nurses and ballad singers" who preserved the song. Instead of Home's polite English pentameter, "The Seven Champions" is in broad Scots and in ballad measure. Other ballads use other tunes, such as "The Battle of the Ministers ... to the Tune of Down the Burn Davie;' "The First Night's Audience. To the tune of, A Cobler There Was;' and "The Apostle to the Theatre his Garland ... to the Tune of De'il Stick the Minister." While a few are straightforward attacks in

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standard English, the majority are more like "The Seven Champions;' playfully combining Scots and English and coupling learned allusions and bawdy insinuations. 86 For the authors of these ballads, the Scottish cultural nationalism that the literati try to inspire is not persuasive because they reject the version of Scottish culture that the literati put forth. Many do so on religious grounds, especially insofar as the play's bowing to Fate and embrace of suicide smack of the heterodoxy of Hume. 87 Against the vanguardism of the Moderates, they oppose the standards of a Kirk that remains a central institution for a great number of Scots of all ranks and thus a vital part of Scottish common culture. But at least as prominent in these briefs against Douglas is a broader attack on the improving elitism of the literati, as in the concluding stanza of "The Revolution;' which makes a smirking reference to the Select Society: "Tho' those bight the GENIUSES on us shou'd frown, I They indeed have thought proper to style themselves select:' 88 Against these self-crowned laureates, those who oppose Douglas offer their own version of Scottish culture that includes what Home excludes, the Scots language, ballad meter, and ballad tunes. It would be a mistake to see the conflict only as Home's antagonists present it. Though more pamphlets attacking him survive than those defending him, he did have his defenders, who wrote ballads such as "The Irish Parson's Advice" and "The Admonition: An Execrable New Ballad, to the Tune of The Times:' Moreover, as "The Stage or the Pulpit" suggests, the stage is a public alternative to the pulpit, and one that is available to anyone who can afford the price of admission. Unlike the Kirk, the theater does not bar those on the basis of belief and thus may be said to be more democratic. Many of the literati sought to expand polite culture beyond what they saw as the narrow parochialism of political and religious faction, and, looking to England, beyond anti-Scots prejudice. However, Home's critics are right to suggest that his vision of elite culture excludes the ballad as a "song commonly sung up and down the street." Consider the reaction of Home's close friend Alexander Carlyle when he heard that "all the town had seen the play, and that it would run no longer unless some sort of contrivance was fallen upon to make the lower orders of tradesmen and apprentices come to the playhouse." 89 To drum up business, he drew up an advertisement, ''A Full and True History of the Bloody Tragedy of Douglas, As it is Now to Be Seen Acting at the Theatre in the Canongate" and had it "cried about the streets next day, and filled the house for two

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nights more:' 90 A surviving copy of this broadside accords with Carlyle's title in emphasizing the violence of the plot over the tears it is supposed to draw from more refined eyes. (Those hooked by the advertisement would have had a good case for false advertising given how little of the promised action actually occurs onstage.) Carlyle affirms, then, that the primary audience for Douglas was the more fashionable set that called itself"the town"; the "lower orders" who also happened to live in Edinburgh are an afterthought. But this response also illustrates the limits of "the town:' Since Douglas could not fill up the theater indefinitely, for it to achieve the success its supporters thought it deserved, they had to find some way to tap into a broader market. So to hook "the lower orders" Carlyle felt it necessary to have the play "cried about the streets" and to emphasize the bloodiness of the story rather than its pathos. Not coincidentally, this strategy placed the "lower orders" in an historically primitive state of thirsting for bloodshed without weeping for its effects, lacking the "virtues without culture" yielded by the "golden soil" of Pity, and drawn into such an excellent drama only through a broadside "cried about the streets:' This early experiment in niche marketing shows how Douglas exemplifies the Scottish Enlightenment's vision of the cultural field at the start of its most dynamic era. While Home's play draws on popular culture, it does so from the distance demanded by "the town" for a work that aspires to high tragedy and national drama. Home replaces Scots vernacular with polite English, and the absorptive qualities of verse set to well-known tunes are replaced by the lyric mode we hear in Lady Randolph's opening apostrophe to "the wilds and woods:' Home's appeal to "the town" may appear as "preposterous" as the beggar's acquiescence to it in The Beggar's Opera. But, like Gay (the only thing they share), Home denies poetic justice in an attempt to carve out a space of elite culture with some autonomy from the Kirk and Westminster. Those who objected to Lady Randolph's suicide correctly sensed that for Home the cultural work performed by her death in affirming both stoic and sentimental virtue outweighs the objections that it departs from an orthodox view of the universe. 91 What trumps the ban against suicide is the sympathy evoked by it, which will teach "the town" how to be modern citizens of the United Kingdom while also teaching them to retain their Scottishness in a form acceptable to the polite. This is how Home revises pastoral as a literary genre and a stage in human development, and this is how he collects the ballad. But there are costs associated with his mode of collection. His muting of the ballad's communal voice reveals the play's elitism and preposterousness.

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Burns: From the Dead End of Pastoral Lyric to the Variorum of Song Robert Burns was no shepherd, and he was certainly not of gentle blood. When Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) made his reputation, he was seeking to disentangle himself from the same hardscrabble life of shortlease farming that his father had endured. But he seemed to his earliest readers to have walked directly out of the pages of pastoral, and, like Patie and Norval, he was made to embody the genre's fantasies and conflicts. As a result, his first reviewers studiously avoided mentioning the breadth of his reading. Although straitened by material circumstances, he was, like Patie, widely read, weaving Ramsay, Home, and Ossian into the Kilmarnock volume, prizing Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, lauding Smith's "sympathetic feeling:' and referring to Dugald Stewart, Addison, Gray, Milton, Pope, and Shakespeare in his poems and letters. 92 Despite this erudition, he was presented to the Scottish elite by Mackenzie's notorious phrase, a "Heaventaught ploughman" of "humble unlettered station:'93 Familiar with the pastorals of Theocritus, Virgil, Pope, and Ramsay, Burns was well aware that he faced the trap of the "natural genius" even before he published the Kilmarnock poems. 94 Indeed, many recent critics have shown how he cannily exploited the stereotype, acting as "a cultural broker ... between the plough and Hugh Blair:' or as a "smuggler" of rough "materials on board a refined vessel:' or as gifted with a "dooble tongue" that allows him to feign subservience while still speaking a resistant language "of the vulgate and the vulgar, of Scots, fucking, and song." 95 Seeing Burns as a double agent improves on a common approach that has simply opposed him to the Scottish Enlightenment literati-a partisan for the warm pleasures of the body against their frosty correctness, a sympathizer with Jacobitism and Jacobinism against their Whiggish complacency, a spokesman for the glories of Scottish language and culture against their selfhating Scotophobia. But even this more complex approach risks reinscribing "national schizophrenia:' in which the many poems of Burns in English or expressive of more orthodox sentiments are read as mere strategies, necessary accommodations to the powers that be. The stakes of properly situating Burns rise if we consider Jeffrey Skoblow's argument that the violence of Burns's initial reception by the literati is repeated by making him the object of literary scholarship, assimilating him to the world of calculation, consumption, and appropriation that he defies. 96 Like the market-driven readers of Brewer's The Beggar's Opera or like the benighted souls laboring in the

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shadow of the "Romantic Ideology;' we are condemned to misread the "unreadable" Burns. We thereby devour a poet who lies beyond our proper and proprietary textual tastes. This romance of resistance constructs a pathos machine-! must read Burns! I cannot!-that rivals the structures of Enlightenment sensibility accused of co-opting him. So how to acknowledge the elements of this ungentle farmer's poetry that question Scottish Enlightenment assumptions and institutions while not erasing his debt to them? My answer is to consider how his poems reimagine sympathy and progress. They do so, first, by revising pastoral, and second, by revising the split in lyric between the rarefied rhetoric of the characters in Douglas and the raucous, collective voice of the ballads that answered it. Where Home locates the value of pastoral only in an elevating purity that raises shepherd to national savior, Burns delineates how little the genre allows genuinely "low" characters, either the ploughman blocked from higher aspirations or the beggar who professes not to care about such things at all. And where Home favors lyric eloquence over song, Burns insists on joining the two.

* * * My starting points are two of his early pieces, Love and Liberty. A Cantata (written c.1785) and "To a Mountain-Daisy, On turning one down, with the Plough, in April-1786" (hereafter, "Daisy"). The diverging critical reputations of the poems may make them seem a strange pair. In Burns's lifetime, "Daisy" was celebrated and Love and Liberty (hereafter, Liberty) was anathematized by Blair and remained unpublished until three years after Burns's death; now, "Daisy" is not much liked while Liberty has long been celebrated as "a masterpiece:' 97 Nonetheless, they share an underlying logic: Both poems protest against the social structures that trap Burns in the role of the peasant poet, and both call into question the Scottish Enlightenment faith that an innate sympathy will lead to social progress. For while Burns believes in the innateness of sympathy, he lacks confidence that it will be properly recognized by the elites who formulate the theories and practices of the Scottish Enlightenment. Commenting on "Daisy" in a letter, Burns declared himself"a good deal pleased with some sentiments myself, as they are just the native querulous feelings of a heart which, as the elegantly melting Gray says, 'Melancholy has marked for her own'" (Letters 1:32). Burns's stylized reference to Elegy Writ-

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ten in a Country Churchyard helps to explain the changing critical estimation of the poem. To represent "the tender and the moral specimens" in the Kilmarnock volume, Mackenzie prints the whole of "Daisy" in his Lounger review and, singling out the "the lark in the 2nd stanza;' declares that "I have seldom met with an image more truly pastoral." 98 It is precisely the conventionality of the poem that has put it in bad odor with more recent readers, who tend to view it as a naked attempt to repeat the success of"To a Mouse," undermined by pandering to those who value above all else "the elegantly melting" and correct English. 99 Yet Burns's literary ambition is as real as any other feeling (if less attractive than love or lust or indignation at injustice), and "Daisy" is valuable because it powerfully inscribes what it means to be possessed with that aspiration when one suspects that one will be thought of as merely"a Heaven-taught ploughman." That is, Burns was painfully familiar with the figure whom "Melancholy marked ... for her own" in Gray's influential poem; he is the rural epitaphist trapped by pastoral immobility between two worlds. His ability to write makes him essential to preserving in the graveyard a record of an otherwise illiterate community. But his fellow peasants are too unsophisticated to value such literacy properly; and, with no way of making it to a more educated milieu, he is doomed to die unnoticed except by the sensitive tourist who happens across the churchyard. Gray rewrites the realistic pastoral of Ramsay but denies his comic vision of social improvement: Out of the tableau of the graveyard, Gray imagines an entire rural community, but even its most talented member is hemmed in by scarcity. Unlike Patie, he has no way to get to town; as Empson puts it, in his world there is no "carriere ouverte aux talents:' 100 Burns revises this pastoral dilemma by altering Gray's exploitation of the sympathy lyric generates through an individual speaker. Gray initially separates the figures of the neglected rustic poet and the sensitive touristspeaker, bringing them together only at the end, where the sophisticate imagines the epitaph that the gifted rustic would have written for himself. 101 In contrast, the two figures are fused from the start by Burns's lyric "I;' who "maun crush amang the stoure I Thy slender stem" and who we are encouraged to believe is the poet himself. The fusion of speaker and rustic in the farmer has a powerfully ironic effect. He must ("maun") plough the fields if he is to live, but this very labor forces him to destroy the beautiful object that he would rather praise and that is, among other things, a symbol of the poet he wishes to be. This distinguishes him from Gray's epitaphist, for only Burns's speaker must enact a figure of his own destruction as a poet (Gray's

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epitaphist is too consumed with melancholy to drive a plough), which he draws out in the stanza beginning, "Such is the fate of simple Bard" (37). But the very figures he uses to describe his situation reveal that that exclusion is social rather than, as Gray's poem imagines it, natural and inevitable. From the opening address to the flower, the speaker lavishly employs the prosopopoeia that Blair and Hutcheson see as poetically exemplary, stressing the beautiful singularity of this "tender form" in its "humble guise" (18, 28), with "guise:' signifying face and disguise, nicely reproducing the fiction behind the term prosopopoeia (Greek for "to make a face"). This culminates in a final trope, the last stanza's aggressive turn toward the reader, demanding his attention in order to flatten him with a concluding personification: Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, That fate is thine-no distant date; Stern Ruin's plough-share drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight, Shall be thy doom! (49-54)

The return of the literal plough as "Stern Ruin's plough-share" is the climax of Burns's revision of Gray's pastoral lyric. Where Elegy concludes by focusing on the peasant's difficult but unchangeable lot, Burns's final stanza singles out those with enough cultural capital to be reading the poem. While the peasant who drives an actual plough may have little agency, the peasant poet who drives the poem, including the metaphorical plough, has a bit more. He can at least call out to his readers on the heights and let them know that they should save some of their pity for themselves. The "noble rage" of the peasant, which Gray sublimes into melancholy acceptance, reemerges in Burns's concluding figure. 102 This is not to say that "Daisy" discards the sentimental response that more recent readers have found cloying. Indeed, the poem's success depends upon its audience being moved by the poet's eliciting (or exploiting) their sympathy, since this is what ratifies his gifts as a poet. But just as a sneer often lurks behind a courtier's smile, a frustrated grimace lies behind the downturned mouth, the "humble guise:' of Burns's peasant poet-clown. Unlike Ramsay, Burns finds little hope in this poem that sympathy will lead to social progress either generally or for him individually-whatever progress may occur in this world, the plough drives over everyone in the end. 103 If he exer-

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cises the privileged Scottish Enlightenment faculties of aesthetic response to beauty and sympathy for suffering, he has little faith it will improve his position. The social inequities that inform the stereotype of the peasant poet threaten to leave no place for him, and so he turns to the self-canceling figure of Ruin's plough. If he cannot be "raised" to the level of his readers, he will cut down all of the flowers and flatten History. Only the plough itself remains "elate" (elevated). This is how Burns revises the lonely lyric of Home, Ossian, and Gray, concentrating its focus on the isolated individual and the figurative language produced out of that isolation to point to the gap between his talents and his situation. If recent critics are right to detect in the poem a fivefinger exercise in sentimentality, they miss the significance of Burns's manipulation of these conventions. True, this is not the full-throated social protest found in many of his other poems; instead, it leaves nothing standing but the feeling that binds those who mourn the daisy, however blind they are to their complicity in the social conditions that ensure the flower's Ruin.

* * * This is not Burns's only response to his situation as a peasant poet. In Love and Liberty, he uses the technology of ballad collection and the formal properties of lyric-as-song to imagine an alternative to Ruin for the humble poet. The Scottish tradition of lyrics on vagabonds dates back at least to The Gabberlunzie Man (c. 1520), but it was strongly influenced by the English beggarsongs that made their way into The Tea-table Miscellany, which included "The Happy Beggars" (2.148-49), "Merry Beggars" (2.179-80) and, of course, the songs from The Beggar's Opera. 104 These pieces teach Burns a different way to revise pastoral. He, like Ramsay, brings his shepherds into town, but instead of going to a bookseller they go to a Mauchline pub called PoosieNansie's where they each get their musical say in between passages of thenarrator's indulgent but ironizing recitative. Although Burns is much closer to Gay than Ramsay or Home, there are salient differences between The Beggar's Opera and Burns's "Cantata:' Gay begins with the beggar-author and an actor, who set up the action and return only at the end. Burns's narrator has a more consistent presence but is also more distant from the world he pictures. He does not seem to be a beggar, and he speaks in broad Scots where they sing in a mix of Scots and English. Too, the narrator's words are themselves glossed by an unnamed editor in the opening tableau, who uses English unmixed with Scots:

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When lyart leaves bestrow the yird, Or wavering like the Bauckie bird, 1 Bedim cauld Boreas' blast; When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte, And infant Frosts begin to bite, In hoary cranreuch drest; Ae night at e'en a merry core 0' randie, gangrel bodies, In Poosie-Nansie's 2 held the splore, To drink their orra dudies. 1The

old Scotch name for the Bat. Hostess of a noted Caravansary in M--, well known to and much frequented by the lowest orders of Travellers and Pilgrims. 2The

Although the editor supplies only two more notes after this, they place the poem within an antiquarian frame lacking in Gay. Like "The Cotter's Saturday Night;' which was celebrated for its vivid detailing of rural life, and like "Halloween," which, in Burns's own words, presents "a striking part of the history of Human-nature, in its rude state;' Liberty makes its subjects the object of knowledge collection for the polite. Part of Burns's genius in Liberty is to use this frame to intensify the irony found in The Beggar's Opera, challenging the polite audience's assumed superiority. Allowed to sing for themselves, the beggars make an eloquent case for their worth. Like Gay's whores and thieves, these beggars are "particular"; they cannot help but see themselves as heroic individuals. Burns heightens this effect by excluding other voices aside from the narrator that might undercut the denizens of Poosie-Nansie's. There is no "Town" to insist the piece end one way or the other, and there are no Peachum-like characters to counter the self-idealizations of the beggars. When a figure for the author does appear, he, unlike Gay's acquiescent Beggar, takes an aggressive stance toward the polite world that excludes him in a song set to the tune "For a' that:' The thrumming repetition of the melody at the end of the second and fourth lines accents its oratorical force: I am a BARD of no regard, Wi' gentle folks an' a' that; But HoMER LIKE the glowran byke, Frae town to town I draw that. (208-n)

He may be dismissed by "gentle folks;' but, like Homer, he draws the attention of the staring crowd ("the glowran byke") as he moves from town to

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town. The irony is that his song absorbs the listeners outside Poosie-Nansie's into that crowd. Although Burns may call his singers' self-mythologizing into question, the text depends upon our buying into those images as they sing them. Or consider the pickpocket, "a raucle Carlin" (a coarse and clever old woman), who bewails the death of her "braw JoHN HIGHLANDMAN:' Holding "the lalland laws ... in scorn;' this new Macheath became a highwayman, and the two of them "liv'd like lords an' ladies gay" off the fruits of their robberies (89-104). Though transported for his crimes, he returned, and "ere the bud was on the tree, I Adown my cheeks the pearls ran, I Embracing my John Highlandman" (106-8). Caught and hanged, he leaves her a widow whose only "comfort" is a "hearty can" of drink. She combines the fixated love of Polly or Lucy with the regret of Mrs. Trapes, reduced from kissing lips to kissing the glass. She does fmd other consolation, however, after the tinker outbids the fiddler for her company by threatening to kill him and promising to support her: The Caird prevail'd-th'unblushing fair In his embraces sunk; Partly wi' LovE o'ercome sae sair, An' partly she was drunk: (181-84) She may use refined English diction to metamorphose her tears into "pearls;' but she is shrunk back into a "raucle Carlin" by the recitative, with its deflating "un" of "unblushing;' its brilliant syllepsis of "Partly wi' LovE" I ''An' partly she was drunk;' and its higher proportion of earthy Scots. Still, as she sings, we are drawn into the chorus of her lament as its melody soars into the upper register: "Sing hey my braw John Highlandman! I Sing ho my braw John Highlandman! I There's not a lad in a' the Ian' I Was match for my John Highlandman:' The distance that allows the narrator's ironic commentary also allows the overhearing that draws us into her situation. So if Burns concentrates lyric-in-solitude in "Daisy;' he spotlights the effect of lyric-as-song in Liberty, which repeatedly dramatizes its sociable power. The soldier's tale of how he lost his limbs in the king's service is met with applause, and the pickpocket's song calls forth sung offers of support from the fiddler and the tinker. This culminates in the concluding piece, which revisits one of the most enduring strains of lesser lyric, the anacreontic of D'Urfey's "Joy to Great Caesar" and Gay's "Fill ev'ry Glass:' Cast in the first-person plural ("See the smoking bowl before us"), it is the bard's re-

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sponse to an explicit call for a "BALLAD o' the best" out of his "PAcK" (242-45). Identifying ballads in print as a resource to crown their collective mirth in a ritual "AMEN" (277), the tavern dwellers join voices in the chorus to set their world definitively above the "gentle folks": A fig for those by law protected! LIBERTY's a glorious feast! Courts for Cowards were erected, Churches built to please the PRIEST. It is no wonder that Blair was horrified by Liberty, declaring it "licentious"

and "altogether unfit in my opinion for publication:' 105 The universe pictured in the last song, and indeed throughout the play, looks like a full-scale rejection of the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of cultivating their Hutchesonian "internal senses" of beauty and virtue in order to construct a more refined society and obeying their assigned gender roles, the beggars, men and women both, insist on their individual desires and despise social institutions. According to the bard, the sublimation of eros into disciplined gallantries and marriage proposals in Ramsay's songs is intolerably artificial: In raptures sweet this hour we meet, Wi' mutual love an' a' that;

But for how lang the FuE MAY STANG Let INCLINATION law that. (224-27) The dismissive vernacular of "an a' that" subjects monogamy to the "law" of "Inclination;' which trumps the institution of marriage and the overarching Scottish Enlightenment imperatives to shape one's speech and actions in order to please others and to judge oneself in light of the "impartial spectator" in the breast. If this is a Romantic celebration of Blakean "energy;' 106 then the play gives us Burns Unbound in happy contrast to Burns Ploughed Over. Rebounding from setbacks (lost limbs, hanged husbands, unfaithful lovers) to move on to the next drink or kiss, these characters, unlike the delicate MountainDaisy, will not be uprooted by events or social conventions. This is particularly true of the poet, who occupies a place of honor in their world and who gets two songs to the others' one. Defiantly pleased to be outside of authorized behavior and elite texts, the beggars have their own social code and their own culture of "budgets, bags, and wallets" ... and ballads. If anything, they

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pity the "gentle folks;' trapped by social conventions, and those beneath them but still within society proper, who struggle with Fate and Ruin. Against these determinisms, they enjoy the utopian freedom of the marginal. But if Burns enjoys this show of resistance, he has a more complex vision of the relationship between high and low than either the beggars or the literati. Liberty is in fact not simply the Scottish Enlightenment's negation, but rather its nightmare, a doppelganger haunting its attempt to draw bright lines between respectable and unrespectable life. After all, if the literati celebrate "virtues without culture" purported to be innate and if they can find models in shepherds, don't beggars possess those same virtues? Don't they confirm the Scottish Enlightenment dictum that passions are prior to reason?107 That same capacity to feel also places the beggars above a purely selfish existence that would view others only as tools for gratifying "Inclination" and make society impossible. At Poosie-Nansie's, the beggars attest to their attachment to something beyond the self-the soldier to the glories of battle, his companion to her "sodger laddie;' the pickpocket to her Highlandman. Moreover, they prove highly susceptible to the contagion of song, which moves them to share in each other's sufferings and triumphs. Compared to Douglas and Ramsay the Younger's disgust with the songs added to The Gentle Shepherd, the beggars are much more attuned to this vehicle for sociable feelings and would laugh at any code of politeness that would rule them out. Rather than being obedient objects of polite collection, they have songs and attitudes of their own that presume to reverse positions of specimen and collector. Yet if the literati have no "regard" for the similarities between themselves and the beggars, the converse is also true, and the stakes for Burns are intimated in a revealing textual metaphor in the final song: Life is all a VARIORUM We regard not how it goes; Let them cant about DECORUM, Who have character to lose. (270-73)

This mutual dis-"regard" marks the limits of Liberty as a solution to Burns's problematic engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment. The beggars may have good reason not to pay attention to life if imagined as an authorized edition with variants and learned commentary. For they lack "character" in it whether the word is understood to mean "reputation" or "an impression made by printing" or "a personage in a literary work:'

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Burns, however, does seek to have a "character" in the "Variorum." The conflict between his ambitions and those of the beggars is clearest in the final footnote, which glosses the narrator's description of the bard as a "wight of Homer's craft": "Homer is allowed to be the eldest Ballad singer on record" (1:205). On one hand, this note indicates agreement among character, narrator, and editor; they all grant that that the bard resembles Homer in some way, and Burns was not the first to picture Homer as a wandering songster who stitched ballads together to produce his epics. 108 But if Burns is interested in attracting the audience targeted by the footnote, he lacks the paradoxicalluxury of his tippling Homer to reject "gentle folks." If he claims in the preface to the Kilmarnock poems not to have written them "with a view to the press" (3:971), the footnotes belie this modesty. Designed to be read rather than sung, they are in English rather than Scots, Burns's acknowledgment that English is the language of critical authority for his imagined audience. It also underscores the gap he has to bridge between the world of beggary (one way of picturing his own social position) and the world of Mackenzie, Blair, and other "gentle folks." Burns needs to find some way of overcoming the character of the peasant poet, and Liberty will get him only so far. We can rephrase the limitation of the antagonism between beggars and gentle folks as a matter of lyric expression. However wide-ranging in theme and attitude, the need to make these characters embody a hard core philosophy of beggary, while it lends them a powerful tangibility, ultimately constricts their emotional range. Absent are a young woman's anxiety over being "ruined;' or the worry over the thousand other natural shocks that those living a more conventional life are heir to. Rejecting the burdens of a steady occupation and planning for the future, the beggars do not concern themselves with economic struggle, and to regret past actions would be a concession to the hypocrisies of polite codes of behavior. In other words, the major chords of "Daisy" are silenced, as are the reflection and abstraction generated by its recourse to the tropes of elite lyric. Leopold Damrosch is on to something when he asserts that "by working so brilliantly with lyric as song, Burns gave up the depth of lyric as reflection." 109 Although the dichotomy here is too stark, and "reflection" is not the sole province of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, Damrosch is right to raise the possibility that by intensifying the absorptive powers of lyric-as-song, Burns may discourage reflection. "Daisy" shows that reflection may lead to self-absorption of another kind, the obsessive, maudlin dirge of the sophisticate wallowing in the consciousness of his

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fine feelings. On the other hand, reflection may also enjoy a self-awareness absent from the lusty songs of the beggars. So "Daisy" and Liberty butt up against two questions: How to solve the problem of being a peasant poet, and how to take advantage of the resources of various forms of lyric without falling prey to their limitations? Burns doubts that he can imagine either a space for himself within these two lyric modes, the Man of Feeling in solitude or the singer celebrating "Inclination" with fellow hedonists.

Burns's Variorum in Action: "How lang and dreary" and "Cauld Kail" That doubt helps to explain why Burns's devotes the bulk of his poetic efforts after 1786 to a different variorum, revising traditional songs for James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's A Select Collection of Scottish Airs. Scott would later lament Burns's "constant waste of his fancy and power of verse in small and insignificant compositions;' and Burns himself acknowledges that he is willing to leave his plans for "large Poetic works" to that "great maker and marrer of projects-TIME" while the rush to produce the third volume of The Scots Musical Museum makes him "a consumpt for a great deal of idle metre:' 110 But the value of songs actually lies in their smallness. Songs free Burns from the weight of the more prestigious genres that he parodies in his orotund description of "TIME:' As lesser lyric, song will not bring him fame as the literati understand it, which comes through the heroic mastery of the Time-defying ode or epic or tragedy. But neither does he flaunt his opposition to elite literary norms as he has already done in the figure of the beggar-bard; he wishes instead to free himself from the embarrassing shadow cast by the figure of the peasant poet. Rather than openly attesting to his authorial independence, he represents himself as absorbed in collecting national songs that he is eager to get into print, a project ofloving patriotism. If song collection offers Burns a new way to position himself in elite culture, it also widens lyric possibilities. The personae in these songs, unlike the beggars of Liberty or the ploughman of"Daisy;' do not have to exemplify any particular ideology or social class, though they tend to be poor rather than wealthy. This makes available a remarkable range of situations, themes, passions, and attitudes, from tender claims of undying love to the bawdiest desires, from rousing political anthems to melancholy comments on poverty. Together, these multiple elements of Scots song-relative anonymity, na-

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tional specificity, and lyric range-ground Burns's larger revision of the Scottish Enlightenment. To a greater degree than Home and even Ramsay, Burns uses song to imagine the ideal of sociability, challenging the limits placed in theory or practice on who may experience its beneficial effects. Situating songs at the heart of a secular national culture, Burns values their promiscuity and commonality, which reflect the social totality and bind it together. In Burns's hands, Scottish songs become a perfect object of collection. They are rooted in the local by the particularities of place and pastoral landscape, as well as by the Scottishness of their tunes and dialect. But their "Simplicity" as individual songs and their multiplicity make them available to anyone who encounters them. Burns's method of constructing an alternative variorum can be seen in "How lang and dreary is the night;' in which a sleepless woman laments her lover's absence. By viewing this relatively undistinguished song in light of his other experiments with the tune and the verses, we can trace how he uses the resources of songwriting to revise the tenets of the Scottish Enlightenment. In a letter to Thomson, he describes the song's genesis: "I met with some such words in a Collection of songs somewhere, which I altered & enlarged; & to please you, & to suit your favorite air of'cauld kail' I have taken a stride or two across my room, & have arranged it anew.... I differ from your idea of the expression of the tune. -There is, to me, a great deal of quereuluous [sic] tenderness in it" (Letters 2:318). For Burns, songwriting is an everyday act of sociability, an attempt to balance his desire to please a friend with the demands of his own judgment. Having at some point encountered a dutch of verses that have stuck with him and that he has taken the liberty of altering, he now decides to set them to his correspondent's "favorite air." Because songs are destined for performance, Burns's body materializes to supplement the faculties of his mind; he walks about the room so that he can make sure that the words fit the rhythm of the tune. Having satisfied himself that they do, he sends the song on. However, his wish to please his editor does not come at the expense of his own taste; songs beget conversations about judgment. Whatever Thomson may think of"Cauld Kail in Aberdeen;' Burns believes that it has "a great deal of querulous tenderness;' and so his verses tell of a woman whose wish for her absent "Dearie" makes sleep impossible. We have seen the word "querulous" before in Burns's description of the speaker of"Daisy" who takes his cues from Gray's Elegy. But in order to be querulous, the speaker of "How lang and dreary" need not be an extraordinary creature like a peasant poet in the unusual situation of having uprooted a mountain-

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daisy. The tune itself provides sufficient setting for her mournful sentiments, which emerge from the common experience of being separated from one's lover. From the lyric situation of the poem to the act of setting it to music to the fact that Burns sends it on in a letter, there is a strong commitment to the that its mundanity does not quotidian in Burns's songwriting, but for lessen its claim on the audience's attention. This dailiness extends to Burns's history with the "Collection of songs" he reports having happened across in his letter to Thomson. It appears to be David Herd's important gathering of manuscripts, which Burns got a hold of while in Edinburgh from 1787 to 1788. He does not specify that this "Collection" is in manuscript rather than print, which may surprise those who assume the significance of that distinction, but the same letter to Thomson shows that this is in keeping with his omnivorous diet of sources. He credits one air to a local fiddler, and another to his mother; one set of verses is from The Edinburgh Herald, another from "a ci-devant Goddess of mine" (Agnes M'Lehose), and many others are of Burns's own making (Letters 2:316-20). It is not that Burns does not care where his songs come from; the value of a song derives in part from its sources, which ties it to a particular sector of Scottish culture (newspaper, fiddler) or to his own experience of it (his mother's singing). Rather, he is willing to allow that good songs can come from a variety of sources, which makes an implicit claim for the value of the everyday, stretching the boundaries of what is fit to enter into the formed world of art. "How lang and dreary" also illustrates Burns's revaluation of the quotidian through the multiple songs that it seeds. Instead of being the frozen artifact of a moment of high inspiration, songs mirror the change-in-repetition of daily life. The first version of"How lang and dreary" appeared in 1788 in the second volume of The Scots Musical Museum to "A Galick Air;' and the same fragments from Herd served as a template for "My Harry was a Gallant Gay;' which was also written during or shordy after Burns's Highland Tour of1787. Here is one of the fragments from Herd:

a

I ne'er can sleep a wink, Tho' ne'er so wet and weary, But ly and cry and think Upon my absent deary. When a' the lave's at rest, Or merry, blyth, and cheary, My heart's wi' greif opprest, I am dowie, dull and wearie. (Kinsley 3=1242)

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And here are the second and third verses from "My Harry;' minus the chorus: When a' the lave gae to their bed, I wander dowie up the glen; I set me down and greet my fill, And ay I wish him back again. 0 were some villains hangit high, And ilka body had their ain! Then I might see the joyfu' sight, My Highlan Harry back again. (9-16) Burns has taken the grieving and restless woman of Herd's manuscript and his own earlier version of "How lang" and has inserted her in a more politically charged context. Harry has apparently been banished in the aftermath of the' 45, like the John Highlandman of the "raucle carlin" in Liberty. But the situation is pared down. This highlandman does not seem to engage in thieving, this singer does not profit from her beloved's crimes, and there is no narrator to provide ironic commentary. Instead, the poem ends with a piercing cry for justice that emerges from her grief: "0 were some villains hangit high I And ilka body had their ain!" The phrase "ilka body had their ain'' has a multiple resonance. It imagines that the highlandman has his "ain" property and rights restored but also that the singer has her beloved's body restored to her, and the carnal embrace of those bodies is in fine balance with less sympathetic, lifeless bodies "hangit high:' In this song and others, like "Charlie's My Darling" and "0 Logan, Sweetly Didst Thou Glide"-the tune of which Burns also finds "querulous" (Letters 2:217)-Burns shows that his idea of lyric is flexible enough to frame state politics within the erotic. Building on the new prominence the Scottish Enlightenment gives to "manners;' Burns argues that affairs of the heart and affairs of state are often inextricable, and the former can serve as the vehicle for political opinions that the literati would dismiss as primitive. He revisits Herd's fragment to compose his well-known song, ''Ay waukin 0." Like "How lang," it says nothing of state politics, confining itself to the lover's yearning for her "dearie." But even in this more restricted thematic field, Burns inscribes subtle yet telling differences. The speaker of "How lang" from The Scots Musical Museum begins in the midst of her darkness, and she moves from the dreariness of the night to the happy days of her past, and back to the "heavy hours, I The joyless day, how dreary" (13-14). The repetition of each stanza's last two lines in performance, necessitated by the tune, gives it a dirgelike feel, ending with: "It was na sae ye glinted by, I When

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I was wi' my Dearie" (15-16). In contrast, "Ay waukin 0" begins in a summer landscape of colorful flowers and a river bursting its banks, a vitality that contrasts with the speaker's desolation. The proximity of the happy scene, along with the slowly rising tones of the chorus, bookended by the phrase ''Ay waukin o;' gives the song more of a dreamy than a dreary cast. "How lang" also marks another attempt by Burns to set verses to the tune "Cauld Kail in Aberdeen;' and his efforts with that melody cast more light on his revision of the Scottish Enlightenment through song. His relationship with "Cauld Kail" begins at the start of his song collecting. In his earliest surviving letter soliciting songs for The Scots Musical Museum, he asks James Hoy to supply a well-known version of the song written by his master, the 4th Duke of Gordon (1:164). But His Grace's D'Urfeyesque setting, like the others before it, does not match Burns's view of the tune as "querulous" in his first adaptation of it in "0 poortith cauld and restless love:' Where the Duke pictures a country dance barely veiled in double entendre, Burns's speaker complains in the chorus that "sae sweet a flower as love, I Depend on Fortune's shining:' His beloved "betray[s]" in the flashes of her blue eyes that she returns his "passion;' but she talks only of "Prudence" and "rank and fashion:' His poverty ("poortith") means he cannot provide her with what she wants, and "Prudence" is impossible when love is fired by beauty. So the speaker is left in the chorus to ask: "0 why should Fate sic pleasure have, I Life's dearest bands untwining?" (s-6), and he seems stuck in a situation not too unlike "Daisy;' in which a social conflict in values between the vulnerable and the powerful is recast as a matter of Fate. However, the structured freedom oflyric gives Burns the space to imagine an alternative outcome in the last stanza, though it is cast as an elegiac look back at a pastoral lost: How blest the wild-wood Indian's fate, He wooes his simple Dearie: The silly bogies, Wealth and State, Did never make them eerie. (21-24)

Thomson objects that Burns's verses have "too much of uneasy and cold reflection, for this Air, which is pleasing, and rather gay" (Kinsley 3:1422). He is right that the song is "uneasy"; the tune's lively rhythm coupled with the rising pitch of its second half, bring out the verses' frustration and anger. Thomson is also correct to use the word "reflection;' especially for the concluding stanza. There, the speaker moves outside of his situation to construct the image of the happy Indian, whose "Dearie" is as "simple" as he is. This is

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a thoroughly conventional appeal to the virtues of pastoral, before the Fall into prudence and fashion. But the final two lines add a subversive twist. Here, Burns shifts the object of collection from the primitive to the supposedly refined present. If he animates the "silly bogies" of country life in "Halloween" and "Tam o'Shanter" for the delectation of more sophisticated readers (though the joke is on them, too, in the sly"Tam"), these sophisticates are the ones who stand convicted of superstition in "0 poortith cauld;' enslaved to their idols of"Wealth and State:' The personifications of eighteenthcentury high lyric, with their built-in archaism, return to haunt the self-satisfied assumption that the move to a commercial world of prudence marks an improvement over the impulsiveness of the past. The speaker, though hemmed in by poverty, manages to combine a realistic knowledge of the challenges facing him with the freedom to question the social arrangements that limit him. He does not, like the beggars of Liberty, simply reject the system, but neither does he, like the speaker of"Daisy," appear to capitulate to it. Instead, he takes up the prerogative of the Scottish Enlightenment to insist on not denying a basic passion in order to please others. If he cannot act as he wishes, he retains the power to "curse ... silly coward man" for being a "slave" to the "warld's wealth" (8-n). A "reflection" of a more autobiographical kind appears in Burns's second go at "Cauld Kail" half a year later. Writing to Thomson about "Come Let me Take Thee to thy Breast;' he provides another revealing account of songwriting: "That Tune, Cauld kail in Aberdeen, is such a favorite of yours, that I once more roved out yesterevening for a gloaming-shot at the Muse[s]; when the Muse that presides o'er the shores of Nith, or rather my old Inspiring dearest Nymph, Coila, whispered me the following" (2:233). "Come, let me take" restages the conflict in "Poortith Cauld" between the "warld's wealth" and love but resolves it more happily. The beloved of this song returns his "transports" without reservation, and so the speaker celebrates the measureless worth of"a moment's pleasure;' which in the fullness of lyric time cements his pledge to be hers "for ever." But how does Burns know that this song has come from Coila, his name for his muse, the "tight, outlandish Hizzie" of his Kilmarnock poem "The Vision"? First, because "since [he] left Coila's native haunts;' no other poet has kept her company (2:333). His second reason for assigning the song to Coila is that its latter half is, excepting some small changes, from an earlier poem of his, "An' I'll kiss thee yet, yet." In this fanciful image, Burns again illustrates how the local can be collected into the vehicle of song, as the forlorn genius loci pursues her poet from Ayrshire to his current residence in

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Dumfries. Burns's agency as a songwriter allows him to collect his own poetic past into a new context, adding to his integrity as an artist while slipping the bonds of the peasant poet. While his mock-heroic tone in the letter to Thomson registers his awareness of how elites may view him, he does claim a "bardship" through the variorum of his songs. "Cauld Kail" gives us one last persona for Burns's variorum in the song "Gie the lass her Fairin':'lll Found in the fugitive collection of bawdy songs later titled The Merry Muses of Caledonia, it puts aside the tender exclamations of women grieving for their lovers. The speaker advises a "lad" to give "the lass" a gift, and in exchange she will give him sex. If he assaults her among the "creels" (or wicker baskets), she will "squeel" but will quiet down the more he penetrates her. The violence of the man "coup[ing) her o'er amang the creels" and her squeals (which, if sounds of pleasure, would presumably increase as they continue their lovemaking), make us doubt whether she is enjoying the "houghmagandie." We do not have to accept the disturbing sexual politics of "Gie the lass her Fairin'" to see it as an example of how Burns's songs challenge the Scottish Enlightenment from within. As many of his other songs attest, he does not rule out more polite ways of alluding to sex or more equitable imaginings of women's desires. But he also refuses to ignore that the "O"s of sensibility are often driven by the "ah"s of sexual desire, and that the faculties of mind celebrated by the literati are, as their own theories confess, rooted in the passions and the nerves. "Inclination" may not "law" everything, but it is a powerful force, and sex is one of the many implements Burns uses to break up and refertilize the arid ground of Scottish Enlightenment ideas of development. It is not that progress is impossible, just that the literati's vision of it is skewed. Even their admission that commerce may bring both decline and improvement is too simple and restrictive, for it imagines history as an arrow or a regular series of peaks and valleys. By insisting on sex as a powerful instinct, Burns opens up a utopian space that breaks with ideas of regular progress or decline. If, as he puts it in another song found in the Merry Muses, "[p]oor bodies hae naething but mowe;' rich bodies also have access to this most delicious act, though they stupidly distract themselves from its pleasures through their aggression, a premise that can lead to radical questions about the difference between classes as well as men and women. If the Duke of Brunswick had, like a poor peasant, stayed at home in bed with his wife ("Poor Bodies;' 9-12), he would not have unsuccessfully tried to conquer the French Republic, and he and the rest of the world would have been better off.

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* * * The power of sex to level hierarchy and reimagine history is only one of Burns's themes, though a favorite one, that reproduces the formal work of song. After his encounter with the literati in Edinburgh, he uses song to experiment with affect unfettered by the rules of pity, ironic inversion, and other structures of "improvement" that threaten to deform his work. He constructs a different kind of variorum reflected in the equalizing layout of the songbook. It's not that we can't discriminate between better and worse songs; his letters to Thomson show that he is not always pleased with his own efforts, let alone those of others. It is rather that by virtue of appearing in The Scots Musical Museum or A Select Collection of Scottish Airs, each of these songs gains equal status as an example of a genre valuable for aesthetic and national reasons. This also requires him to redescribe the standard of taste defended by the literati, since it does not rate song or Scots highly. Like the idea of progress, the faculty of judgment is also fair game, since it allows the literati to distinguish between the rude and the refined to their advantage. In the preface to the second volume of The Scots Musical Museum, he acknowledges that "Ignorance and Prejudice may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favorites of Nature's Judges-The Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit:' 112 Burns's apology echoes Blair's synthesis of Scottish Enlightenment aesthetics. Borrowing from Hutcheson, Addison, and others, Blair presents taste as "an internal sense of beauty" guided by "the common feelings of men:' 113 If not corrupted by perverse cultural formations like a licentious court, it is pleased more by simplicity than artificiality (25). Where Blair and Burns part company is over Blair's self-serving dictum that the model for "the common feelings of men" must not be primitive societies since they lack the "free discussion" and "science and philosophy" necessary to form a reliable standard of aesthetic judgment (25). Burns addresses this position in the fourth volume of The Scots Musical Museum (1792) when he answers critics who would complain "that this Publication contains pieces of inferior, or little value": "[T]he Editor answers, by referring to his plan. All our Songs cannot have equal merit. Besides, as the world have not yet agreed on any unerring balance, any undisputed standard, in matters of Taste, what to one person yields no manner of pleasure, may to another be a high enjoyment" (iii). For Blair, although there may be a diversity of tastes that leads people to favor different objects, there must be some standard (23). Otherwise, we would

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be forced to say that "the taste of Hottentot or a Laplander is as delicate and correct as that of a Longinus or an Addison" (22). Burns, who is less worried about elevating Hottentots than being likened to one, blithely dismisses the Scottish Enlightenment pursuit of an "undisputed standard, in matters of Taste" and instead empowers his readers to judge how they like individual songs. (A blow for democracy in the charged atmosphere of 1792.) His warrants for this move are the "well-known merit" of Scottish songs as a whole and the value of a series of volumes that aims to be "a Collection of every Scots Song extant;' however individual readers may disagree about specific songs. Song collection is Burns's response to Scotland's predicament after 1707 as well as his own predicament as a "peasant poet." Through the editorial apparatus of the songbook, he can refurbish the artifacts of Scottish culture for a present audience that extends beyond the borders of Scotland. Turning the marginality of lesser lyric to national strength, the songbook realizes the Scottish Enlightenment vision of a national culture held together by some sociable alternative to the dogma of the Kirk or the Anglocentric demands of the United Kingdom. But it also avoids the burden of politeness that limits expression according to the dictates of politeness (Ramsay) or silences ballads in the name of good taste (Home).

Conclusion: Scots Songs and English Lit It would come as no surprise to Burns that his wishes for his songs have fre-

quently been disrespected. The nature of the songbook-making enterprise required him to cede authority to the editors, and while Johnson was happy to defer to Burns, Thomson had great (and often misplaced) confidence in his own judgment. (This meant, for instance, that "Poortith Cauld" was not set to "Cauld Kail" in A Select Collection of Scottish Airs.) Then, throughout the nineteenth century, Burns's poems were subjected to bowdlerization and other forms of editorial violence as editors and commentators tender of their reputations and their readers' sensibilities regularized the spelling and substance of the texts and attacked or attempted to explain away Burns's sexual and political "excesses." The first dependable edition of Burns's works did not appear until1968, and Liam Mclllvanney argues that his central role in the radicalism of the 1790s continues to be obscured by a Burns Industry that treats his satires as lightweight exercises or views him as suffering from political confusion.l 14

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His reception has also been complicated by his use of Scots and his favoring of song. While recent criticism has prized diversity in the canon, its roots lie in a move toward linguistic standardization, a hangover from an Enlightenment fetish for correctness. And whether or not Scots and other dialects are included, English Lit is disseminated through books, which, notwithstanding recent challenges to the conventions of textual editing and the ontology of the text itself, remain oriented toward textual singularity and toward silent reading. This is not a welcoming context for the multiplicity and oral performativity of songs. Finally, there is a bias against songs as lacking, in Damrosch's phrase, "depth of lyric as reflection:' Songs, in contrast to the exquisite turns of mind in Tintern Abbey or "Easter, 1916" or "Diving into the Wreck;' seem slight; with the possible exception of those by Ben Jonson, Donne, and other "metaphysicals;' songs seem unrewarding objects for close reading and the successor methodologies that have maintained and transformed the canon. Yet however much Burns has been abused by editors and critics and sugared with kailyard sentimentality, and however problematic his status in the canon, he has long been a mainstay of the anthologies and syllabi that instituted English Lit as a school subject beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.115 His songs have been central to his reputation; in the extravagant phrase of one influential literary historian of the late nineteenth century, they are "the very flame-breath of his heart:' 116 In contrast, by the end of the nineteenth century, Ramsay had completed the journey begun in his son's generation from celebrity to curiosity, and Home was even more obscure. Ramsay's works were occasionally reprinted, and in histories of Scottish literature he was acknowledged as an early force in the Vernacular Revival although often attacked for his compromises to the polite and Anglicizing tastes of the literati. Douglas frequently found a place in anthologies of eighteenth-century plays as a precursor of Romantic drama. But Ramsay and Home did not make it into more general surveys of English Lit; nor are they likely to do so. What accounts for this difference in critical fortunes? Aesthetic value for one, and I hope it is clear from my analysis that I think Burns among the greatest poets of the last few centuries, and neither Douglas itself nor its current obscurity makes me weep "sacred streams." (Ramsay's work deserves more respect and more readers, but he is far from Burns's stature.) However, the fact that I and many others may judge Burns a better writer than Home and Ramsay is not sufficient to explain why they have or have not been accorded a place in the canon. I would argue instead that their varying canonical fate since the mid-nineteenth century is itself due in significant part to the

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complex legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Blair, Smith, and other influential Scottish rhetoricians were crucial to the establishment of literary study in Scotland, England, North America, and Australia, among other places.l 17 But inscribed within their elevation of studying vernacular literature was a tension around progress. Belles lettres was designed as an interlocking technology of personal and social improvement. By learning how to appreciate the finer points of fine writing, the individual would emerge ready to participate in polite society-to sympathize with others, to control his own desires in order to be agreeable, and to speak and write according to an elite linguistic standard that favored metropolitan English over the retrograde accents of Scots. These aims lay the ground for a conflict lately located by Ian Duncan between the "materialism, utilitarianism, and political economy" of Scottish Enlightenment belles lettres and what would come to be a dominant idea of "culture" as "anti-modernity" that can be traced back to Samuel Johnson and that crystallized in the work of Henry Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold. 118 This disagreement explains the strangeness to our eyes of the reading list recommended by Smith and Blair, in which "Chaucer, Spenser, and Ben Jonson recede into invisibility, Shakespeare finds himself vying for eminence with Sir William Temple and the Earl of Shaftesbury, and lodged at the very heart of the pedagogic canon are Addison and Swift:' 119 In belles letters, refinement trumps all other values, including the value of the national past. But, as we have seen in Ramsay, Home, and Burns, the Scottish Enlightenment was hardly uncritical in its embrace of modernity. Ossian was on its syllabus as well, and pastoral, even Newgate pastoral, always involves a fond glance backward. Collection, as we have seen, faces both ways: In its organization of past texts into modern taxonomies, it expresses a certain faith in the ideology of improvement, but in bringing the culture of the past, the local, and the popular to light, it also tends to raise authors' and readers' consciousness of the insufficiencies of the modern and universalizing culture of the Enlightenment. This is one of the ways that belles lettres served as an autocritical vehicle for inscribing values that question the assumptions of metropolitan elites. As this antimodern strain within belles letters gained influence over the course of the nineteenth century, Burns's strong attachment to Scottish locality and his rejection of "Prudence" and other commercial values made him more attractive, even if many Victorian critics toned down his radicalism and randiness. Conversely, in these changed conditions, Ramsay's willingness to gentle his Scottish sources and Home's banishment of the demotic for a sonorous and correct rhetoric lowered the value placed on their

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work. While I have excavated elements in their texts less secure about commercial modernity, the major impulse of their work is, after all, to celebrate it. In other words, their primitivism, although it prepares the ground for Burns, does not run deeply enough to satisfy the skepticism toward progress among those cultural authorities who increasingly imagine the canon-and especially poetry-as the Other of commercial society. Burns's more thorough absorption in popular song also helped to ensure his reputation within a sphere of a culture felt to be increasingly individualistic. If belles lettres presented itself as a successor to classical rhetoric, it does so, as many critics have recognized, in the knowledge that its audience is no longer that of the bard or preacher or orator. The basic situation of belles lettres is of an individual reader encountering a text, though perhaps supplemented by the classroom lecture or club meeting. The shift from orality to literacy may make for new and larger imagined communities, as we know from the Protestant Reformation, not to mention Coleridge's enthusiasm for "The Children in the Wood:' But it is precisely because belles lettres emphasized the discriminating taste of the reader over the author or text that it also seemed to be an indicator of the atomization of the body politic into a world of free agents. This felt decline in social cohesion contributed to the rising reputation of Burns's poetry, especially his songs. It is not only that the themes of his songs foreground, to a greater degree than Ramsay or Home, the universal power of sympathy looked to as a fortification against the selfishness of a commercial world. It is that by preserving the performative elements of song and its power to gather individuals into a chorus, he offers a formal model for realizing the effects of sympathy open to all who respond to its call. Whether or not Burns's songs are actually sung, whether or not the tunes they are set to are mentioned, they carry into print the collectivizing force of the oral and the doubleness of lyric as both individual speech and group song. They act against fragmentation and amnesia. So instead of dwelling on the absence of Burns's songs in the textbooks of English Lit or their presence as a Fall into the imperial fixities of print and the false equalities of exchange, it makes more sense to see them along the lines of The Beggar's Opera. That is, Burns's songs take advantage of the increased circulation of print and the cultural capital of an emergent literary canon to broadcast a radical vision of equality through feeling potential in the Enlightenment from the start. Although Burns's critics and editors may have served him ill in many ways, they also inscribed within the canon, wittingly or not, his durable revision of pastoral as a challenge to the norms of Progress.

Chapter 3

Addressing the Problem of a Lyric History: Collecting Shakespeare's Songs/ Shakespeare as Song Collector

In Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, Patie praises Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley without discriminating among them. By the 1740s many would have reckoned it an insult to list any other writer, including Jonson, alongside the author who would become "the Bard" during this era. Shakespeare's rising reputation was signaled by the dedication of his bust in Westminster Abbey in 1741, and it is on that monument that John Home, mortified by David Garrick's rejection of Agis, pencils these lines: Image of Shakespeare! To this place I come To ease my bursting bosom at thy tomb; For neither Greek nor Roman poet fired My fancy first, thee chiefly I admired; And day and night revolving still thy page, I hoped, like thee, to shake the British stage; But cold neglect is now my only mead, And heavy falls it on so proud a head. If powers above now listen to thy lyre, Charm them to grant, indulgent, my desire; Let petrefaction stop this falling tear, And fix my form for ever marble here. 1

Few authors in Home's era or since have been so frank in declaring their wish to be enshrined along with Shakespeare. Fewer still use iconoclasm as a vehicle for bardolatry: Wishing to be petrified, put beyond weeping and immortalized, Home defaces Shakespeare's bust in the act of begging for his favor. Yet in many ways Home's lines are representative of Shakespeare's canoniza-

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tion in the mid-eighteenth century. First, Home sets Shakespeare's power to inspire "the fancy" above that of classical authors, tacitly taking sides in ongoing critical conflicts over issues such as Shakespeare's violation of the dramatic unities and his mixture of comedy and tragedy. While Hume may praise Douglas for refining Shakespeare's "unhappy barbarism;' Home and an increasing number of others hold that neoclassical rules are trumped by Shakespeare's English creativity. Second, by identifying himself as a reader "revolving still thy page" rather than a theatrical spectator, Home points to the growing tide of editions and essays that canonizes Shakespeare. The intimacy of that reading, rooted in his childhood and still part of his days and nights, draws him closer to Shakespeare and fires his hope that he could move back from the page to the centralizing social power of the stage. Lastly, Home's lines are representative of Shakespeare's canonization in being predicated on his failure to turn this felt intimacy into authorial success and succession, a failure that moves him to pin his hopes on the "charm" of Shakespeare's "lyre." While the Anglocentric slant of the "British stage" played a role in Home's frustration, it was not only Scottish authors who rated their powers well below Shakespeare's. For many, he is the strong precursor who triggers elegiac reflections on the erosion of poetic inspiration, threatening to undermine the possibility of effective lyric in the present. And even if strong poetry could still be written, many authors were uncertain whether a contemporary audience, compromised by the laxities of print culture, could understand it. This is the double problem of what I will call lyric history. One way that mid-eighteenth-century authors attempt to bridge the double gap between themselves and Shakespeare and between themselves and their contemporary audience is by using the resources of lyric and ballad collection. The pages that follow track how this happens in the poems of William Collins (1743-50 ), in Garrick's adaptations of Shakespeare and his staging of the Jubilee (1755-69), in succeeding editions of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765-94), and in Joseph Ritson's sharp interrogation of Reliques and Shakespeare editions in his song collections (1783-95). The fate of Shakespeare's lyrics in the eighteenth century is an understudied topic. In the recently published Shakespeare's Songbook, Ross W. Duffin eschews eighteenth-century sources, primary and critical, and the few recent discussions of lyric in eighteenth-century Shakespearean criticism have tended to import either a pseudo-Romantic idea of lyric as expressive

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or an Adornian notion of it as "in a negative and critical relation to the public:'2 Yet while the strains of expressivism or alienated critique can be heard in the odes of Collins and Garrick (not to mention Home's lines on the bust), they both would have agreed with one of Garrick's fellow songwriters for the 1769 Jubilee, who, speaking of the public function of the bards, asserted that "every thing lyric is in its essence dramatic:' 3 In their pursuit of Shakespeare's glory, these authors exploit the doubleness of lyric, supplementing the powerful expressions of individuated Shakespearean character with the public pretensions of the ode and the communal appeal of song. These lyric experiments are shaped by a new direction in historizicing Shakespeare. 4 Although some eighteenth-century critics follow Dryden's lead in blaming Shakespeare's historical situation for many of his faults, an increasing number agree with Lewis Theobald that even his better qualities cannot be understood without thinking of him in terms of his era, a transitional age of "civilized superstition:' 5 While historicizing Shakespeare could make him seem the artifact of a strange time of "unhappy barbarism" (Hume's phrase), the bias of the project is toward a continuous national narrative. Standing at the heart of the United Kingdom's geography and history, Shakespeare becomes a test case for the history of culture as such in the ascent or decline of the nation. The heightened attention to Shakespeare's historical context transforms the well-worn opposition of Art and Nature in Shakespearean criticism. Many critics begin to see Shakespeare less as a naif who unthinkingly "warbles his native woodnotes wild" and more as a collector who artfully improves the customs of his times, and among those customary materials are the "scraps and stanzas of Old Ballads" that he uses for plots, intertextual references, and lines for his own songs. 6 Imagining Shakespeare as a collector allows Collins to transform him from an overpowering "Hand" to a reinscriber of popular superstitions who provides a model for modern poets. It allows Garrick to help improve the understanding of audiences who have had their judgment sapped by the "gentle muse" who "flutters in the Magazines." The technology of ballad collection allows Percy to portray Shakespeare as a pivotal figure in constructing a history oflyric: At the very moment that the ballads fall from minstrelsy into the hackwork of the press, Shakespeare preserves them and concentrates their power by using them for plots and songs while purifying them of their baser matter. These efforts go some distance toward solving the past/present gap in lyric history by increasing Shakespeare's resemblance to an eighteenth-century author.

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These authors also write their own "Shakespearean" songs, such as Collins's dirge for Fidele in Cymbeline and Percy's assemblage of Shakespearean ballad fragments into "The Friar of Orders Gray:' These pieces bring Shakespeare closer still to an eighteenth-century author by refining the rough edges of his songs into more coherent plots, more tempered emotions, and more polite behaviors. Conversely, they give eighteenth-century authors a covert opportunity to make themselves more like Shakespeare by adding their own contributions to his text. In other words, they protect themselves from being swallowed by Shakespeare's long shadow by appearing to retreat further into it. Garrick's Jubilee is the most spectacular instance of this, turning Shakespeare into the presiding deity of a pageant with Garrick as his vicegerent and replacing King and Court with a parade of literary characters and accompanying songbook that initiate all Britons into a proper understanding of their literary heritage. The success of this effort registers in the lonely protests of Ritson, who joins a fierce editorial scrutiny to an openly revolutionary politics. As the canon of English literature and its protocols of reading are consolidated toward the end of the century, Ritson denounces the gentrifying of Shakespeare and of ballads by those who occupy privileged spaces in Oxbridge, Edinburgh, and ecclesiastical livings. He replaces the proper character of Percy's "Friar" with a demotic "Jovial Tinker" and relocates the ballads Shakespeare borrows from the minstrels to "the common people." Unusually committed to preserving ballad tunes, which underscore the public nature of the ballad and make them available to the illiterate, Ritson tries to reorient lyric toward a more democratic idea of song. Yet whatever their differences, Percy and Ritson partake of the same process of canonization that installs Shakespeare as the figure who masterfully transforms popular culture into high art. It is an image that continues to govern our understanding of him: In Stephen Greenblatt's celebrated new biography, he argues that the 1575 celebration for Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth was a "primal scene" for young Shakespeare; he melds its pageantry and the performance of a play by some artisans from Coventry to create A Midsummer Night's Dream, which laughs at the mechanicals but also sympathetically takes in their rude energy.? But whatever Kenilworth may have meant to Shakespeare himself, it has long been a primal scene for Shakespearean critics who seek to explain, as Greenblatt phrases it in his subtitle, "How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare." And since that process of becoming Shakespeare happened as much in his eighteenth-century canonization

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as in his own life, it is fitting that the unprovable hypothesis that Shakespeare visited Kenilworth at all was first posited by Percy. 8 It is a rich moment in a narrative larger, even, than the Bard, speaking to the desires behind the emerging canon of English literature in which popular song plays an important if overlooked role.

Collins: Owning the Shakespearean Scene Collins seeks to join himself to Shakespeare's rising reputation early in his career. As Sir Thomas Hanmer's edition of Shakespeare's works was being readied for publication at Oxford in late 1743, Collins, a recent graduate of Magdalen College, published "An Epistle: Addrest to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespear's Works:' 9 Here, Collins presents Shakespeare as a vernacular Ancient. Overly refined critics like Ben Jonson may scorn him as an "unletter'd Bard;' but Collins argues that his "early Hand;' though "less artful" than that of Jonson and Corneille, is "unrivall'd" in portraying "our ruder Passions;' the "Historian's Truth;' and "the Manners" (55-78). Hanmer must collect and restore Shakespeare so that he can once again enjoy the high regard he deserves. This positions Shakespeare as the English analogue to the great figures of Greece and Rome who did not have to be "letter'd" and thus rule obeying because they form the basis of letters. They have the sublime license of original genius to set their own rules. There is, however, a kink in this narrative of restoration: The muse first visits ancient Greece and then jumps to Elizabethan England, but, unlike the guiding spirits of other "rising Art[s];' she never remains for long and never returns: "Yet ah! so bright her Morning's op'ning Ray, I In vain our Britain hop'd an equal Day!" (17-20, 51-52). This mournful assertion contrasts with the twinned narrative of progress in society and the fine arts assumed by authors like Addison and Ramsay. Instead of being able to incorporate old songs like Shakespeare's "Lays" (106) into the pleasures of an emerging commercial society with a gain in artistic potency and correctness, the lyric of the present is sundered from the past, and all that remains to poets now is an attempt to collect the past's reflected light. 10 The only progress is the poet's increasing self-consciousness that he has sadly come after the muse's reign in England. Understanding how Collins uses Shakespeare to respond to a predicament that Shakespeare reveals requires a brief consideration of the two most

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important words in Collins's lexicon, "scene" and "own:' "Scene" appears thirty times in his slim poetic corpus, a ubiquity that signals Collins's insecurity about what grounds poetry. 11 Ranging from the stage to the fairy land of the fancy to the cemeteries for British soldiers just killed in battle with the French, Collins insistently asks where the poet can stand. His provisional answer to the problem of "scene" is the ideal represented by "own;' which offers the possibility of a rapprochement with the strong forces of history and personified passions that haunt his poems. In "Ode to Evening;' he imagines that "Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip'd Health" will "own" Evening (50-51); the "sable Steeds" pulling the Fiend of Nature's chariot will "own" Mercy in the ode of that name (20, 22). In Collins, you hope to be owned by what you pretend to own, an act that is overtly a claim of allegiance but seems also to carry with it a double claim of possession, to possess and be possessed by. The hoped-for result of"own"ing these powers will be a stable "scene" for lyric in an age when the muse seems to have passed from England. We can see "scene" and "own" in action when "Hanmer" moves into a more intimate encounter with Shakespeare's genius. "Wak'd at his Call;' the speaker views his glories, beginning with the Histories and moving to the more charming pleasures of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (79-100 ). Subjugating himself even more completely than Home does in front of Shakespeare's bust, he begs Shakespeare to possess him: "0 more than all in pow'rful Genius blest, I Come, take thine Empire o'er the willing Breast!" (101-2). Here, Collins "owns" Shakespeare and so hopes to be owned by him. On one hand, the move highlights the poet's belatedness. By calling out to the prior lyric of Shakespeare's "Lays;' he emphasizes his role not as an inspired singer but rather as a responsive audience. Yet this move also gives him the opportunity to become the ground of his own poem; his "willing Breast" supplies the scene ("There") of the last two lines, the response of his "youthful Heart" necessary to register Shakespeare's power. His hope is that the rhetorical fullness oflyric time-the "0" of the ode and the act of owning-might be able to fill the gap in historical time. But the foundation for this prospective achievement is tenuous. The "Fires" of the "Sister Arts" are "drooping;' and the only accomplishment that the present can muster is the gathering of "Those Sibyl-leaves" of Shakespeare by editors like Hanmer (134, 137). While the task may be honorable, its limited value is ironically revealed in the poem's closing compliment. Seeking an analogue for Hanmer's efforts, Collins instances the collector of Homer's poetry, which "charm'd by Parts alone" until "some former Hanmer

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join'd" them (142, 145). But Collins can find no name for this prior editor except "former Hanmer" because his name is now lost. While Homer would not have survived without this earlier gatherer of the limbs of Osiris, his collector has fallen into obscurity (as Hanmer, whose edition was lightly regarded, also would). This does not bode well for those assisting in Shakespeare's resurrection, either the editors who order his "leaves" or the poets who would be inspired by them to build on Shakespeare's achievement. So "Hanmer" positions Shakespeare as a powerful figure from England's past, an "early Hand" that both beckons and threatens to crush those who follow.

* * * Perhaps to avoid the pain of contemplating Shakespeare's achievement as a belated reader, Collins approaches him from the inside in two other early poems, ''A Song from Shakespear's Cymbelyne;' which was first published along with "Hanmer;' and "Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare;' which remained unpublished until1788. A soothing counterpoint to the anxieties of "Hanmer;' they suspend the crisis of history through the revisions Collins makes in his Shakespearean sources. In "Cymbelyne" he replaces the brothers Guiderius and Arviragus lamenting Fidele (Imogen in disguise), with a single speaker witnessing a scene of public mourning at "fair Fidele's grassy Tomb:' "Borrowed" replaces Polonius, the object of the fragments of song sung by Ophelia, with "Young Damon;' a beloved pastoral singer. Both poems enact what Richard Feingold calls "covert lyricism;' a "double effort to give standing to the experience of inwardness by linking it, if only allusively, to an originally public mode ... and at the same time to resist the opportunities and obligations of public speech:' 12 Both speakers draw on the publicity of the drama as a form and on unusually public scenes within their sources. The funeral dirge in Cymbeline is strongly framed as a ritual, and the scandal of Ophelia's songs is that she makes so public the effects of her father's death at her beloved's hands. Collins draws on these texts to represent a charmed circle of communal song, a scene where the tragedy of history is avoided: There is no need for the individual speaker to jump from one "scene" to another or to "own" anything but the sadness of mourning, and poetry itself is replenished by the need to mourn the dead. Yet, conforming to Feingold's "covert lyricism;' the speaker stands more as an observer than a participant in the mourning, avoiding both the complications of community and the pain of isolation.

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Moving from the depleted present of the ode to Hanmer to the timeless fullness of song, Collins attempts to solve the problem of Shakespeare's priority. "Cymbelyne" is "from Shakespeare" as a painting may be called "after Tintoretto:' It is not like the questionable emendations that Hanmer notoriously offers in his edition, which do not stand apart as texts with their own logic. But, based largely on an already-existing song in the play, neither is "Cymbelyne" a complete innovation, like the songs and music that Davenant and Dryden added to The Tempest for The Enchanted Island (1670). "Borrowed" takes the logic of incorporation a step further. While the song in Cymbeline is whole and stately, Shakespeare dramatizes Ophelia's ruined psyche by having her sing mere fragments of songs written by other authors, though they remain anonymous. So it is not merely "the sentiments" that Collins has "borrowed from Shakespeare"; he has also borrowed Shakespeare's borrowings. Collins's songs, then, are lyric re-collections of Shakespeare, echoing his words and the sentiments attached to them but not merely echoing them. Like Ramsay's Scots songs, they are new-old poems that regularize and dignify their source. In Hamlet, Ophelia's fragmented snatches of verse are an irruption of an unruly popular culture that point not only to her derangement but also the corruption of the Danish Court: "Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me, I You promis'd me to wed: " 13 The disorderly energy of the scene attracted its share of criticism, and Collins's song marks its rehabilitation. While Jeremy Collier in 1698 had sharply attacked Shakespeare for making Ophelia "lewd" in these scenes, Sir Joshua Reynolds opined by 1765 that "no part of this play, in its representation on the stage, is more pathetic than this scene." 14 Although the pathos of Ophelia's distraction haunts the verse, Collins integrates her fragments into a more proper piece mourning the loss of one member of a unified and simple pastoral community. A similar refining informs "Cymbelyne;' in which Collins replaces the excessive grief of the brothers with "the generalizing decorums of Augustan eloquence:' 15 This may explain its appeal to Johnson, who inserts the following note after Shakespeare's original: "For the obsequies of Fidele, a song was written by my unhappy friend, Mr. William Collins of Chichester, a man of uncommon learning and abilities. I shall give it a place at the end in honour of his memory" (7:358). This Johnson does, and its gentling effect is underscored by his closing commentary, which comes just before Collins's song: "This Play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expence of much incongruity. To

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remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation" (403-4). "Cymbelyne" tacitly stands as a corrective to the "incongruity" of Cymbeline, excerpting one of its "pleasing scenes" while cleaning up its irregularities and avoiding the "imbecillity" of the story, its mix of anachronism and "impossibility" attributable in part to Shakespeare's living in a nation, as Johnson puts it, "yet struggling to emerge from barbarity'' (1:xxxii). On the other hand, the song preserves what other critics find increasingly attractive in Shakespeare's romances, "something so pleasingly romantic, and likewise truly British" about it, part of his reputation as a supreme representative and painter of British manners. 16 So, in these two songs, Shakespeare becomes an image of the popular doubly refracted. First, he engages in his own act of collecting old songs and framing the manners of ancient Britons. Next, his collections are re-collected in Collins's songs. It is fitting, then, that both songs rewrite Shakespeare in ballad meter and that both poems use material from the Ballad Revival, "Borrowed" from William Mallet's imitation ballad "William and Margaret;' and "Cymbelyne" from the redbreast of "The Children in the Wood" praised by Addison (13-16, 21-24). 17

* * * Through "Cymbelyne;' Collins does manage to be at least more memorable than Hanmer. The song was set to music by Thomas Arne in The Second Volume of Lyric Harmony (1746) and reprinted in this form in numerous songbooks and miscellanies. Thanks to Johnson, it also found a place in the Shakespearean corpus until the early twentieth century. 18 Yet however much Collins may have been pleased by his enshrinement in songbooks and editions of Shakespeare, it would not have satisfied his ambitions. Not ready to become the "poor Collins" of Johnsonian and Romantic myth, he does not remain in the subservient position of borrowing sentiments from Shakespearean songs. He ascends from lesser lyric to greater and from "covert" to overt lyricism in Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746). This move to greater lyric, however, does not moot Collins's central question: How can the modern lyric poet find a sustaining "scene"? In the Odes, the literary past continues to throw the present into the shade, most ex-

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plicitly in "Ode on the Poetical Character;' which complains that "Heav'n and Fancy, kindred Pow'rs, I Have now o'erturn'd th' inspiring Bow'rs, I Or curtain'd close such Scene from ev'ry future View" (74-76). The question of poetic ground is raised most insistently in the poem in which Shakespeare makes his sole appearance in "Ode to Fear:' It begins with "th'unreal Scene" of "the World unknown;' peopled with personifications like Danger and Vengeance, and then moves to the Greek stage, where Jocasta breaks "the silent Scene" by calling out to Oedipus and then to England via the "Visions old" of the "Bards" preserved in the popular beliefs of"Cottage-Maids" in the "Gobblins" reputed to rise on Halloween (40, 3, 54-63).1t is here that Collins slides associatively from popular superstition to Shakespeare: 0 Thou whose Spirit most possest The sacred Seat of Shakespear's Breast! Teach me but once like Him to feel His Cypress Wreath my Meed decree, And I, 0 Fear, will dwell with Thee! (64-65, 69-71)

Having been "possest" by Fear, Shakespeare possesses its power. If Fear will teach the speaker to feel like Shakespeare, he will become his successor as a tragic poet (crowned with cypress) and will agree to dwell with her. Collins again imagines "borrowing" Shakespeare's "sentiments;' but he does so in a poem that does not reproduce Shakespearean phrases or the form of the song. Instead, he uses the resources of the greater lyric to position Shakespeare as his own precursor, who is here put into a relatively passive position closer to the speaker's own: Rather than an "early Hand;' he is figured as a "breast" that serves as a vessel for Fear, just as the speakers in "Hanmer" and in this poem hope their breasts will be a vessel for Shakespeare.

* * * Collins increases Shakespeare's resemblance to himself in the last poem he came close to completing, written to his new friend John Home after his failure to sell Garrick on Agis. The poem is known both as "Ode to a Friend on his Return &c;' the title Collins gave it in the manuscript, and ''An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry;' the title conferred on it when first published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788). The two titles indicate Collins's

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new approach to the problem of "scene:' His own title emphasizes that the poem is an address from one friend to another, a shift from calling out to various personifications and great figures of the literary past. 19 In the more intimate space of the "social Name" (10 ), Collins can see whether the lyric self might be stabilized by the sociability theorized by Addison and Hutcheson. The published title, "An Ode on the Popular Superstitions;' highlights the activity that draws the two friends together, not just poetry in general but the act of mining the popular superstitions of a particular place, marking an unprecedented empirical specificity in Collins's work and a recourse to the encyclopedic impulse of eighteenth-century antiquarianism. His view of that remote place is strongly colored by his wish that the Highlands be "Fancy's Land;' where Home "need'st but take the Pencil to thy Hand I And Paint what all believe who own thy Genial Land" (italics mine, 19, 16-17). What is "own"ed shifts from a personification to the more fixed entity of place, but the logic remains the same. Although Home has failed in this attempt at crossing the border from Scotland to the English stage, he will be more successful if he sticks closer to his native ground, possessing it by being possessed by it. Reassuring his friend that he need not "blush that such false Themes [en]gage I Thy gentle mind;' Collins pictures Shakespeare himself as a prior collector of Highland superstitions: For not Alone they touch the Village Breast, But fill'd in Elder Time th' Historic page There Shakespeare's Self with every Garland crown'd In musing hour his Wayward Sisters found And with their terrors drest the magic Scene! [Fro]m them He sung, when mid his bold design Before the Scot afflicted and aghast [Th]e Shadowy Kings of Banquo's fated line Thro' the dark cave in gleamy Pageant past. (174-82)

By focusing on Shakespeare's use of witchcraft in Macbeth and more specifically on the spirits of Banquo's line, Collins deepens his image of Shakespeare as a collector. More specifically, he intervenes in a discussion that combines Shakespeare's historicity, his artistic self-consciousness, and his relationship to his audiences, both high and low. In the opening note to Johnson's first published essay of literary criticism, "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth" (1745), he asserts: ''A poet who should now make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment ... would be ban-

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ished from the theatre to the nursery, and condemned to write fairy tales instead of tragedies; but a survey of the notions that prevailed at the time when this play was written, will prove that Shakespeare was in no danger of such censures, since he only turned the system that was then universally admitted to his advantage, and was far from overburthening the credulity of his audience:'20 Johnson's fundamental claim, repeated in the Preface of 1765, is that Shakespeare must be understood as in part a product of his time. So while a drama based on "supernatural agents" would now be treated as child's play, it was accepted in his own era. But Shakespeare is more than merely an embodiment of the spirit (or spirits) of his age; he also "turn[s] the system ... to his advantage:' Johnson clarifies the remark by observing that although superstition "has in all ages and countries been credited by the common people;' it was also promoted by King James "in his dialogues of Daemonologie, written in the Scottish dialect, and published at Edinburgh. This book was, soon after his accession, reprinted at London, and as the ready way to gain K. James's favour was to flatter his speculations, the system of Daemonologie was immediately adopted by all who desired either to gain preferment or not to lose it" (3, s-6). Nobody's fool, Shakespeare "flatter[s]" the king's "speculations" by founding Macbeth "upon enchantment:' In the appearance of Banquo's successors, he flatters the king's lineage as well, since, as Theobald first observes, "the Family of the Stuarts are said to be the direct Descendants from Banquo:' 21 So the commentaries available to Collins on Macbeth tie Shakespeare to his era in ways that do not do him much credit. He is the conduit for "popular superstition" believed by high and low alike, and he cannily uses it to create an image of his time, casting James as the prophesized heir to Banquo and the uniter of Scotland and England. By staging history as prophecy, he also reveals that he is a sad product of the courtly literary system of his era, in which the drive for "preferment" distorted behavior and judgment. This is not to say, however, that Shakespeare did not also believe in witchcraft. Johnson bleakly observes that "the greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion;' and he is sure that "the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting" (6). There is very little here of Johnson's transcendent Shakespeare who "holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life" (Works 1:viii). Rather, the witches of Macbeth, particularly as Johnson reads them, situate Shakespeare at the

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negative poles of both "Nature" and ''Art." He is a mouthpiece for the popular credulity of his unenlightened times and the artfulness of a Court corrupted by the striving for patronage as well as the superstitious beliefs of a monarch who, writing in an uncouth "Scottish dialect;' wrongly fancied himself learned. Yet this was not the only reading of the play Collins may have known. In 1748, John Upton asserts that" [t] here is such a cast of antiquity, and something so horridly solemn in this infernal ceremony of the witches, that I never consider it without admiring our poet's improvement of every hint he receives from the ancients or moderns.... And when the kings appear we have a piece of machinery that neither the ancients nor the moderns can exceed:'22 Collins is closer to this position. While Johnson is embarrassed by the time-bound historical otherness of Macbeth's enchantments, Collins sees them as a model for current literary practice, an antidote to Home's "blush" at using these "false Themes:' Shakespeare, himself an expert reader of "th' Historic page;' uses the material he gathers to produce a "bold design;' and Macbeth appears less as a figure of murderous ambition than as a member of the audience "aghast" at the "gleamy Pageant." Collins's embrace of spectacle moves him away from Johnson and toward the many productions of Macbeth that, as a great fan of the theater, he would have seen on the stage. 23 However faithful these productions claimed to be to Shakespeare's text, they all retained "the Davenant-expanded witch scenes in Acts III and IV and ... a new scene of predictions, songs and dances in Act 11:' 24 These additions self-consciously display their status as superstition: Sometimes we dance in some old Mill, Upon the Hoppers, Stones, and Wheel. To some old Saw, or Bardish Rhime Where still the Mill-Clack does keep Time. 25

As a collector of popular materials, the Shakespeare who appears in "Friend" remains a powerful poet but no longer so unapproachable for the modern English author. The continuity of collection between Shakespeare and Home, if he follows Collins's friendly advice, takes precedence over the differences between them. The gap between the lyric power of the past and the poverty of the present can now be bridged, as the "magic scene" of Shakespeare's drama shifts to the double frame of the Ode: the scene of conversation between two literary friends that promises mutuality rather than subjugation, and the Scottish scene that conserves the power of the past.

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Within this dual context, the "Poetical Character" can visit the same nation twice because Collins has redefined that character to emphasize the way all authorial hands, even the strong hand of Shakespeare, do not inscribe ideas wholly of their own imagination but powerfully reinscribe commonly held beliefs and practices, like Spenser, "charm'd" by the "strange lays" of the Irish bards and even the artful Ben Jonson, who felt the power of the popular while visiting the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthronden (38-39> 212).

By following these examples, Home can more than compensate for his disappointment at Garrick's hands: Nor Thou, tho learn'd, his homelier thoughts neglect Let thy sweet Muse the rural faith sustain; These are the Themes of simple sure Effect That add New conquests to her boundless reign And fill with double force her heart commanding Strain. (31-35)

Collins promises Home a "double force" over the hearts of his listeners if he can assert his "own"ership over what is believed by "all who own" Scotland. This centripetal power is matched by a centrifugal integration of the lyric self that depends upon a pun on "Home" that I noted in the previous chapter and that Collins introduces in the first line: "H_ Thou return'st from Thames." By returning to Scotland, Home can become "homelier;' more like himself Rooting his individual lyric genius in his "home"land, he will gain the confidence to cross the border again and find success in literary London. Home, as we have seen, does follow Collins's advice in writing Douglas and even more closely in The Fatal Discovery, traveling to the Highlands with Macpherson to dig up Ossianic fragments. That Collins's pun depends on an English pronunciation of his friend's name as it appears in print signals that the primary beneficiary of this act of collection may be Collins himself. 26 In the last stanza, he imagines following Home up to Scotland: "All Hail Ye Scenes that oer my soul prevail. ... The Time shall come when I perhaps may tread I Your lowly Glens oerhung with spreading Broom" (204, 208-9). His imagined visit to Scotland, where he is once again possessed by a "Scene;' turns him into a ballad collector who will "crop from Tiviot's dale Each I And mourn on Yarrow Banks" (213-14), lines referring to "Chevy Chase;' and William Hamilton of Bangour's well-known imitation ballad, "The Braes of Yarrow." Like Shakespeare, who "drest the magic Scene" with the "Wayward Sisters;' Collins will "dress once more the

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faded bower" (211) of modern lyric by gathering flowers from the rich balladic terrain of Scotland. Preceded by Shakespeare and a friend traveling on native ground, he constructs an ode in which he imagines himself making a garland of Scots songs that will give him access to the refreshing power of the popular. In this way, Collins anticipates the co-opting of the term "bard" from the Celtic periphery after the Ossian controversy to produce an explicitly British but implicitly Anglocentric literature with Shakespeare at its apex as the Bard. 27 Just as Collins reports that Spenser was charmed by the Irish bards (his repressive role as a colonial official goes unmentioned) and Shakespeare was inspired by Highland superstition to produce Macbeth, so Collins, via a friend whose "social Name" is, happily for the English speaker, Home, will be able to collect the power of embodied by "Old Runic Bards" who still haunt this terrain (10, 41). He will consequently become the ruler of a new empire delineated by the "conquests" that the poem promises. Invigorated by these "Themes of simple sure effect;' Collins aims to overcome his own belatedness and to add the present audience to the muse's British "conquests:' That the poem remained unfinished and was unpublished until thirty years after his death suggests how stern was the challenge of writing poetry in his time, which fervently sought a dialogue with the lyric power of Shakespeare. That the poem appears to have turned Home toward Scottish sources, resulting in a play that moved some to compare him to Shakespeare, shows that, however much Collins failed to realize his aspirations, he had a good eye for what might address the problems oflyric history.

A Local Habitation and a Name: Garrick's Lyric Collection of Shakespeare When Thomas Gray published his Pindaric Odes in 1757, "The Bard" and "The Progress of Poesy;' they met with the reaction he expected and pretended to want, as many readers found them unintelligible. 28 Both of the problems of lyric history are at work here: His lack of confidence in making himself understood to readers in the present is matched by his uncertainty about his ability to access the power of the lyric past. He confesses in "The Progress of Poesy" that he has not been graced with Pindar's "ample pinion" (113-16), and he has the bard end his prophecy with the ascension of Elizabeth and Shakespeare, after which he plunges to his doom, as if he can see no great poetry after this. Garrick tries to soothe both worries over lyric in "To

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Mr. Gray, on the Publication of his Odes in 1757." 29 He argues that Gray is a Pindaric eagle; the problem is that "our weak dazzled eyes I Thy daring heights and brightness shun" (1-2). The cause of our debility is the print culture that has succeeded the world of the bard, where a decidedly feminine muse "sips her learning from Reviews" as if it were tea and "flutters in the Magazines" (5-8), combining the flimsiness of paper with emotional instability. To strengthen feeble readers, he urges Gray to continue sounding the strains of high lyric: With antient deeds our long chill'd bosoms fire, Those deeds which mark'd Eliza's reign! Make Britons Greeks again-then strike the lyre, And Pindar shall not sing in vain. (21-24)

After being published "very inaccurately" in "ye most Obscure corner" of the London Chronicle, as Garrick grumbles to Horace Walpole, the poem was republished by Walpole himself at Strawberry Hill, where Gray's Odes were also printed. 30 Walpole's vanity press may seem an unusual vehicle for Garrick, since we usually think of him playing to a much broader audience at Drury Lane. But his aims on stage were inseparable from his position as one of the most important antiquarians of his day, without whose collection of old plays "Johnson's and Steevens' editions ... could hardly have come into being:' 31 Garrick's success as an actor has been attributed to the appeal of his more expressive acting style over the stiff declamations of James Quin and his contemporaries, part of a broader valuation of interiority in elite English culture. But individuated speech, however passionate, requires some public structure to make it effective, a need sharpened by Garrick's desire to elevate the reputation of the stage. For these reasons, he linked his performances with the prestige of the English past, especially Shakespeare. This strategy of moving forward by looking back is captured in the hyperbolic request that Gray's poetry "Make Britons Greeks again." It is a wish to recapture the glory of"Eliza's reign;' to fit contemporary vernacular literature to a classical model of public virtue even in an age of "Magazines." But to see the Britons of Elizabeth's era as virtuous Greeks requires an act of historical revision that is itself informed by Garrick's desire to fit Shakespeare to the demands of elite culture in the mid-eighteenth century. As Michael Dobson has shown, Garrick positions himself as Hamlet to Shakespeare's Ghost, but in embodying the Bard as his son he transforms his father into a more respectable figure who con-

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forms to the values of the audience Garrick wishes to reach. 32 He fits Shakespeare to neoclassical canons of criticism without cramping him with pedantic rules.

* * * When Garrick wrote his poem to Gray, he had recently completed a series of adaptations. Choosing plays heavily steeped in old English custom and song and supplementing them with more songs, he sought to bring modern Britons into touch with Shakespeare's Elizabethan world. In 1755, he staged an operatic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (renamed The Fairies) and in 1756 he premiered both The Tempest, an Opera, in which Prospero is given ballad tunes to sing, and his redaction of The Winter's Tale, which he called Florizel and Perdita. 33 Of the three, only Florizel and Perdita enjoyed any success, 34 and it signals a noteworthy shift in the representation of Shakespeare as a figure of his time. A few decades earlier, The Winter's Tale was among the least performed of his plays, staged only once in London from 1701 to 1750. 35 1ts critical reputation was correspondingly low. Echoing Dryden's censure of the play, Pope doubted whether more than a few bits "were of his hand:' 36 This view was reversed a few decades later by Warburton, who argues that it "is written in the very spirit of its author." 37 Not long after, The Winter's Tale reclaimed its place on the London stage in Macnamara Morgan's 1754 adaptation The Sheep-Shearing: or, Florizel and Perdita. Garrick heightens the identification of The Winter's Tale with Shakespeare's "spirit" in his own Florizel and Perdita. 38 As Collins does in his songs, he makes Shakespeare more proper. But he does not, as Collins does, approach Shakespeare as a supplicant. Rather, he takes on the role of an innkeeper serving a Shakespearean dish, a familiarity earned through his long reputation as Shakespeare's favored actor. He explains that the original play had been "forsaken" due to its extravagant plot, which comprehends sixteen years in "five long acts;' and so that "no drop of that immortal man" be lost, Garrick has "confin'd and bottled" him for "your taste" by reducing the play's five acts to three (Poetical Works 1:142). The image is of Shakespeare's "spirit" distilled. By removing what is unpalatable to modern readers due to the lack of rules in Shakespeare's era, Garrick increases the purity of the play. Along with distilling the play, he also uses the metaphor of adding "Perry" to the "champaign" of Shakespeare, and Garrick's idea of what is suitable to add can be seen in the new song he writes for Perdita. In The Winter's

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Tale, the shepherds dance at the insistence of a "Clown" who wants entertainment.39 Garrick's presentation is more elaborately framed. Interrupting Perdita's tender words with Florizel, her foster father commands her to "leave for a while these private dalliances, and love-whisperings, clear up your pipes, and call, as custom is, our neighbours to your shearing" (21). She obeys and begins her song: Come, come, my good shepherds, our flocks we must shear; In your holy-day suits, with your lasses appear: The happiest of folk, are the guiltless and free, And who are so guiltless, so happy as we? (italics reversed, 21)

This moment may remind us of Peggy's song in answer to her father-in-law's command at the end of The Gentle Shepherd, and the play shares Ramsay's vision of progressive pastoral. "Garrick's prudish editing;' which rules out any idea of "'bedding without wedding; " and his focus on Leontes' redemption more as a father than a king transform the play's "Renaissance royalism" into "specifically private, contemporary versions of sympathy and domestic virtue." 40 This worldview is echoed in Perdita's distancing herself in her song from "the city dames" who are slaves to "mode and caprice;' voicing the play's assertion "that even the inequalities between rich and poor can be transcended by those citizens who share the infinitely rewardable virtues of selfcontrol, polite speech, love, and dutY:' 41 But if these values are "specifically private;' they are conveyed in a song explicitly presented in contrast to "private dalliances" and framed as "custom." By embedding the song in the pastoral landscape, Garrick alters the tension in Shakespeare's original between the shepherds' world and a competing version of the popular peddled by the wily Autolycus-the ballads he carries in his pack and sings. In Shakespeare's Tale, the Country is where the Court replenishes itself, where the shepherdess Perdita can be rediscovered as a princess and the two royal families can unite after the separation precipitated by Leontes' jealousy. Autolycus's songs, in contrast, import the exciting instability of the City into the hinterland; telling of giant fish and the racy romance of one man by two maids, they are eagerly snapped up by Mopsa, Dorcas, and the other peasants, who "love a ballad-in-print ... for then we are sure they are true:' Unlike these gullible consumers, who swallow lies peddled by a thieving trickster, Florizel and Perdita keep their distance, neither singing nor buying these songs. For its part, the audience combines the rustics' enjoyment of them with an aristocratic relishing of the rustics' naivete.

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Garrick retains Autolycus's songs, which increasingly attract commentary in the eighteenth century as artifacts of the popular culture of the past. 42 But he also gives the country folk a song of their own, and one which idealizes the simplicity of "the children of nature" to a degree not seen in Shakespeare. This kinder, gentler version of the popular condenses an image of Shakespeare as a powerful but not forbidding relic of England's past, and the song itself becomes a detachable artifact, realizing Garrick's vision of it and the many other songs he furnished for The Fairies and The Tempest. Though Johnson laughed at the song's sentimental preference for "the simple" and "poor;' it was reprinted in The London Magazine and Universal Magazine, and Arthur Murphy reports, '"The roses will bloom, when there's peace in the breast; was heard for a long time in every street of the metropolis:' 43 Though Theophilus Cibber attacked Garrick for having "mammoc'd [The Winter's Tale] into a droll;' Warburton, who had earlier defended the play as the quintessence of its author's "spirit;' praised Garrick "for giving an elegant form to a monstrous composition:' 44 Perdita's song is the most "elegant" moment in Garrick's adaptation, a lyric intervention that addresses the problem of lyric history by making Shakespeare's spirit more palatable to a refined eighteenthcentury audience while not losing touch with his roots in the popular. It even became a "song commonly sung up and down the Streets."

* * * In 1769, Garrick capped his Shakespearean collection project with the Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon. The event was predicated on the antiquarian logic that the best way to celebrate the Bard was to move temporarily from London, site of his dramatic triumphs and where Garrick currently presided, to his place of origin, where his genius, however universal, was putatively formed. But for the Jubilee to succeed artistically and financially, Garrick needed to find a way to make it compelling to the audience that attended it and to make the record of the event accessible to those who hadn't made the trip. His solution was to blend into the Jubilee an innovative mix of high and low lyric, respectively, ''An Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare at Stratford upon Avon" and the songs gathered in Shakespeare's Garland. Garrick spent much time on the songs in Shakespeare's Garland; they were "fundamental to his conception of the Jubilee" as an act of "communal singing." 45 They were facsimiles of ballads to be "sung up and down the Streets:' but for the express purpose of elevating the audience by providing it

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an exalted object of attention. See, for instance, this very literary stanza from "Warwickshire Lads;' the biggest hit in Shakespeare's Garland, performed for months afterward at Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Drury Lane, and repeatedly reprinted as a broadside: Old Ben, Thomas Otway, John Dryden, And half a score more we take pride in, Of famous Will Congreve, we boast too the skill, But the Will of all Wills, was Warwickshire Will, Warwickshire Will, Matchless still, For the Will of all Wills, was a Warwickshire Will. 46 (2:428) Nominally addressed to "Ye Warwickshire Lads and Lasses;' it presumes that they know who these great authors are and lets them know that (in contrast to Patie's reading list in The Gentle Shepherd) their "Warwickshire Will" Shakespeare outstrips them all. Like the Jubilee as a whole, the song stresses the locality of Warwickshire as a first move in ratifying Shakespeare's image as a grounded and yet portable figure of an English bard with universal powers. This move is recapitulated formally in the Garland; while its songs carry the flavor of the event, they are designed for circulation well beyond Shakespeare's home town. The move from the particular to the general is repeated in the Jubilee Ode. One of only two odes by Garrick, it begins with a confidence in accessing the past and affecting the present we do not see in Collins or Gray, a confidence rooted in Garrick's reputation for channeling Shakespeare's spirit for an appreciative audience: Do not your sympathetic hearts accord, To own the "bosom's lord?" 'Tis he! 'tis he!-that demi-god! Who Avon's flow'ry margin trod, While sportive Fancy round him flew, Where Nature led him by the hand, Instructed him in all she knew, And gave him absolute command! 'Tis he! 'tis he! "The god of our idolatry!" (1:57) These lines stress the "absolute command" of Shakespeare's solitary genius over the forces that shape him, and this individuality is reinforced by Gar-

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rick's unusual mode of performance. Instead of setting the entire ode to music, he "speak[s] that part ... which has usually been conveyed in recitative" (1:56), as in The Beggar's Opera. Yet the communal tones of the ode are not lost by being filtered through Garrick's powerful voice, and neither are Shakespeare's origins in Stratford. This can be seen in one of the airs that Garrick weaves into the ode. Reported to be the crowd's favorite and reprinted as a slip song, 47 it places less weight on Shakespeare's magical power than on the ground that nurtured him. Setting a trend followed by many other writers and painters, 48 Garrick imagines Shakespeare as a child: Thou soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream, Of things more than mortal, sweet Shakespeare would dream, The fairies by moon-light dance round his green bed, For hallow'd the turf is which pillow'd his head. (italics reversed, 1:68)

Ophelia's songs appear again. Here, the "grass-green turf" that marks the head of Polonius's grave becomes a pillow for the dreaming Shakespeare in a line repeated at the end of each stanza. Taking Collins's process of"owning" a step further, Garrick alters the signifier of Ophelia's distracted fall into popular song to a "hallow'd" sign of her author's relationship to his native ground that nurtures a genius the audience must sympathetically "own" as its "bosom's lord." If the inscription to the statue that Garrick erected at Stratford draws on A Midsummer Night's Dream to credit "the poet's eye" for giving "to airy nothing I A local habitation and a name;' 49 the banks of the Avon are the "local habitation" where young Shakespeare is instructed in popular lore, key to making his name on the London stage. Garrick further encourages his readers to see Shakespeare as a collector of popular culture by referring them in the advertisement to the Ode to Elizabeth Montagu's just-published An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare, the last of the twenty-nine authorities he cites (1:56). 50 Responding forcefully to the French critique of Shakespeare's barbarity, Montagu praises Shakespeare for elevating popular English beliefs without losing purchase on the animating force of tradition, which he converts from a mere "beldame" into a muse: "In the bold attempt to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a person ... [t]he genius of Shakespear informed him that poetic fable must rise above the simple tale of the nurse; therefore he adorns the beldame tradition with flowers gathered on classic ground, but still wisely suffering those simples of her native soil, to which the established superstition of her country has contributed a magic spell, to be predominant:' 51 The

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effect of his judicious adornment of the popular is to reach all audiences: "With all the powers of poetry he elevates a legendary tale, without carrying it beyond the limits of vulgar faith and tradition .... [I]t seizes the heart of the ignorant, and communicates an irresistible horror to the imagination of even the most informed spectator:' 52 Like Montagu, Garrick in the Ode recasts the historical particularity that Johnson sees as damaging to Shakespeare in Macbeth as the ground of his genius and his general appeal. Boswell says of the Jubilee Ode, "It was like an exhibition in Athens and Rome;' 53 suggesting that Garrick had fulfilled his own request that Gray "make Britons Greek again." But Garrick's simulation of"Eliza's reign" added to the oratory of classical "exhibition" a canny use of popular song and other antiquarian trappings, including the scheduled pageant of Shakespearean characters that was washed out by the rain that plagued the event. This is the multimedia show that Garrick took back with him to Drury Lane, reframing the Jubilee as The Jubilee. 54 Sensitive to the criticism that he had vulgarized Shakespeare for private gain, Garrick populates Stratford with rubes who think the Jubilee has to do with the controversial Jew Bill of 1753. But Garrick also gives his supposedly more knowledgeable London audience the pleasures of his popular Shakespeare: "Warwickshire Lads;' one of many songs included from Shakespeare's Garland, is performed by two ballad singers, played by Vernon and Dibdin, and the pageant of Shakespeare characters is staged to great applause (2:108-9, 115-21). The Jubilee was an enormous success, playing for ninety-two nights, and was one of the most frequently staged pieces of the next few decades. So, by framing popular song and spectacle with critical distance, Garrick fulfills his self-appointed role as an improver of the stage through a version of Shakespeare that emphasizes his creative ability to elevate the culture of the time and the place from which he hails. Garrick presents himself as merely repeating his great predecessor's transformation of the popular, conveying his spirit into a continuous lyric history anchored by songs set in Stratford.

A Man of Gothic Letters: Percy's Shakespeare Like Garrick, Percy brings Shakespeare and popular song together in order to address the tension between lyric and history. Like Collins, he has a sharp sense of a break with the poetic accomplishment of the past. We can see this in the full title of his collection: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting

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of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with Some Few of Later Date. 55 The possessive assurance of" our earlier Poets;' followed by the modest confidence of "Together with Some Few of later Date;' sutures past to present in this collection "Chiefly of the Lyric Kind;' as does Percy's description of his work as organized into "THREE VoLUMES, each of which contains an independent SERIES of poems ... showing the gradual improvements of the English language and poetry from the earliest stages down the present" (x). Yet this vision of improvement is embarrassed by the narrative of decline he tells in "An Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels:' His central claim is that"[t]he MINSTRELS seem to have been the genuine successors of the ancient Bards, who united the arts of Poetry and Music, and sung verses to the harp, their own composing" (xv). Welcome "at the houses of the great" (xvi), they lost this honored position in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign. A statute of that era grouped them with '"rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars; and [they] were adjudged to be punished as such. This act seems to have put an end to the profession, for after this time they are no longer mentioned" (xxi). How is it, then, that Elizabethan England, at the acme of English culture and power, was precisely when the minstrels, the prior bearers of English representational prestige, were "sinking into contempt and neglect" and finally criminalized by statute? The closest Percy comes to an explanation is to observe that "as the old Minstrels gradually wore out, a new race of balladwriters succeeded, an inferior sort of minor poets, who wrote narrative songs meerly for the press" (xxii). This story does not bode well for English culture since then; all that is left is "an inferior sort of minor poets" devoted to pleasing an undiscriminating print audience. Percy responds to this problematic decline in the "Ballads That Illustrate Shakespeare;' strategically positioned between the series that begins with "The Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chace" and the one that begins with "The More Modern Ballad of Chevy Chace:' Here is Percy's prefatory note: "Our great dramatic poet having occasionally quoted many ancient ballads, and even taken the plot of one, if not more, of his plays from among them, it was judged proper to preserve as many of these as could be recovered, and that they might be more easily found, to exhibit them in one collective view" (117-18). The engraving (fig. 1) helps to clarify his "collective view;' described by Percy in a letter to the Shakespearean scholar Richard Farmer as "Shakespear drawn in the attitude he is represented on his Monument in Westminster Abbey, listening to an ancient Minstrel who is playing on his harp, whilst

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Figure 1. Title page to "Ballads That IUustrate Shakespeare;' Thomas Percy, Reliques ofAncient English Poetry, 4th ed. (London, 1794), 1:127. Engraving by Samuel Wale. Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Figure 2. Monument to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, from The Works of Shakespear, in Six Volumes, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (1770). Courtesy of the Furness Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

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a boy standing by him is singing to it some old ditty ... On the altar ... a parcel of scrolls, in which the titles of different ballads are to be discernible:' 56 Although Percy's description suggests that he is following the pattern set by the monument of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey (fig. 2), his engraving alters it significantly. The bust in the Abbey pictures Shakespeare looking directly at the viewer, but absorbed in thought or inspiration. His chin rests on his right arm, propped on some untitled books on an altar, at the base of which are the faces of Elizabeth, Henry V, and Richard III; and the index finger of his left hand points to a scroll on which are inscribed (misquoted) lines from The Tempest. In Percy's engraving, Shakespeare no longer faces the viewer and instead of being lost in some unrepresented inspiration internal to him now turns toward a specified source, the performance of a minstrel's "old ditty" by a young boy. The untitled books underneath his arm in Westminster Abbey have also gained definition, replaced by scrolls on which ballads are inscribed: "Constant Susannah;' "Robin Hood;' and "Ballad of the Jew:' His right hand grasps a quill, and, with his own lines from The Tempest now absent and only ballads present, the engraving suggests that he is writing in air something directly inspired by them, an impression heightened by his left hand, its raised thumb and finger in a "Eureka" pose. Or, in an act of retrojection, the image suggests that Shakespeare is also somehow the author of the ballads that inspire him. Percy's engraving is a vivid example of supplementing the figure of Shakespeare-as-Prospero, a powerful father-magus who intones the lines on the Westminster Abbey bust, with Shakespeare-as-collector, inspired by an older popular culture that combined the refinement of minstrelsy with the popular appeal of the street ballad. Instead of an embarrassing decline, minstrelsy remains vital in Shakespeare's time, as evidenced by the boy singer who signifies both the art's relative youth in the history of literature and its fresh simplicity. Rather than falling into the clutches of the hacks who write for the press, its energy is transferred to Shakespeare's superior hand. Under his arm are not books but rather scrolls, a manuscript world also preserved by Shakespeare's quill-which writes plays that are performed on stage and frequently reprinted without ever devolving into "hackwork." Percy elaborates on Shakespeare-as-collector in his comments on the ballads in this series, which emphasize how he elevates them. While "Constant Susannah" may find a favored place under his arm, it is dismissed as a "so poor a performance;' that it is preserved only because it is quoted in Twelfth Night

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(187). Shakespeare also adds luster to "Geruntus the Jew of Venice" and "Titus Andronicus' Complaint:' Noting the differences between the ballads and The Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus, Percy argues that the ballads are prior to and to some degree the inspiration of these plays. His reason is that if Shakespeare had written the play first, "a meer copyist, such as we may suppose the ballad-maker to be, would hardly have given himself the trouble" to strip away so much of Shakespeare's genius (190). On the other hand, "an inventive Tragedian" would certainly have added to the ballads (203). In "A Song to the Lute in Musicke;' which appears in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare incorporates these songs in a metacommentary on other collectors, tweaking "those forced and unnatural explanations often given by us painful editors and expositors of ancient authors" (164)-note the "us;' which allows Percy to establish a rueful continuity with the pedants of the past.

* * * Shakespeare's role as conduit of popular culture and prior lyric is solidified in the essay attached to the Shakespearean series, "On the Origin of the English Stage:' In it, Percy is among the first to address how English drama progressed from the Mystery and Morality plays of the medieval era to the great productions of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. He also mounts one of the earliest defenses of the uniquely English subgenres of tragicomedy and History. When Percy comes to write his essay, he finds little to use from earlier historians of the stage like Charles Gildon, Robert Dodsley, and William Warburton. 57 He fills this gap by observing that although during the reign of Henry VII and the early years of Elizabeth there appeared a handful of "regular" tragedies and comedies (for instance, Gorboduc), "[t]he people however still retained a relish for their old Mysteries and Moralities;' and the "Histories ... resembled the old Mysteries in representing a series of historical events simply in the order of time in which they happened, without any regard to the three great unities" (126). Percy then cites the appearance of History in the table of contents of the First Folio and Polonius's naming of History among the genres played by the company that appears in Hamlet (127). These references show that the History emerges not because of an English disregard of the unities but rather as the result of a clearly defined and indigenous tradition. For this reason, we must approach the History only"by those principles according to which it was composed" if we do not want to fall into "a deal of impertinent criticism" (127).

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At this point, what the History has to do with ballads seems to be merely a matter of resemblance; like the Mysteries and Moralities, the ballads Shakespeare elevates are popular. But analogy for Percy is often the first step in constructing a continuous narrative that links the two terms analogized. He does this in his essay on minstrelsy when he asserts that because the ancestors of the Saxons were like the Danes and because the Danes revered their minstrels, the Saxons must have revered their minstrels as well (xv-xvi). He engineers a similar shift in the case of Shakespeare's songs via the entertainment staged for Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester at Killingworth in 1575. 58 Percy first turns to Killingworth (also known as Kenilworth) toward the end of the essay on minstrels, where, to support his claim that they "still sustained a character far superior to anything we can conceive at present of the singers of old ballads;' he quotes at length from Robert Laneham's description of the minstrel's appearance, focusing on his "fair flaggon chain;' his "scutcheon;' and other signs of his high status (xix-xx). While he does admit in a footnote that "this was not a REAL MINSTREL, but only one personating that character" (xx), he does not quote Laneham's prefatory observation that this was an intentional travesty of minstrelsy, an attempt "to move Mirth and Pastime" through the "ridiculous Device of an Ancient Minstrel and his Song." 59 (This is the kind of selective editing that made Percy the object of so much abuse by scholars in the nineteenth century.) He returns to Kenilworth in his revisions of the essay on the stage for the fourth edition of Reliques (1794), and it is there that he realizes the transfer of popular culture from minstrelsy to Shakespeare pictured in the engraving.60 He instances as a proto-History a play staged for Elizabeth by"certain men of Coventry ... the old Coventry play of Hock-Tuesday," which is significant because it was "entirely distinct from a religious Mystery" and even more so because it "had probably our young Shakespeare for a spectator, who was then in his twelfth year, and doubtless attended with all the inhabitants of the surrounding country at these 'Princely pleasures of Kenelworth; whence Stratford is only a few miles distant:' 61 Having turned possibly into "probably" and then "doubtless," Percy continues to fill in his version of how Shakespeare's "infant mind" was affected: "Indeed the dramatic cast of many parts of that superb entertainment which continued nineteen days, and was the most splendid of the kind ever attempted in this kingdom ... must have had a very great effect on a young imagination, whose dramatic powers were hereafter to astonish the world:' 62 So while other would-be historians of English drama attribute its Eliz-

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abethan rise to Shakespeare's "heaven-born genius," 63 Percy insists on a more grounded explanation, though it is just as wishful in its way. By imagining Shakespeare at Kenilworth, he situates him as a spectator whose "imagination" is transformed by the height of Elizabethan pageantry, including a rude History play performed by commoners and the stylings of an old Minstrel. Attaching lyric "genius" to a particular locus, he shows how Shakespeare metamorphoses those materials into the stuff of English history and literature, writing Histories to "instruct the people" who were "ignorant of history" (146). 64 By vindicating the History, Percy increases the coherence of the history of lyric he aims to construct. If Collins sees in Shakespeare a lyric intensity that throws contemporary poetry into the shade, Percy presents Shakespeare's Histories as the vehicle of a continuous English narrative. They represent that narrative's continuity in their subject matter and further it by becoming central to the canon of English literature. Percy, in turn, represents Shakespeare not by drama, History or otherwise, but in a set oflyrics that are integrated into the history of lyric put forth by Reliques, a "gradual improvement of the English language and poetry" illustrated by songs such as "Corydon's Farewell to Phillis;' "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and "King Leir and His Three Daughters." It is a history that offers an alternative to the fall of the ballad from elite minstrelsy to degraded popular broadsides, and it shows how Percy moves from an analogy between ballads and popular theater to a narrative in which songs tell the story he seeks to tell about Shakespeare's mastery of both.

* * * But if Shakespeare preserves and elevates the popular culture of the past, what of the eighteenth-century author who stands well on the other side of the print divide? Is he not left, as in Collins, in the sad and subordinate position of a Hanmer, a testament to a falling off in lyric power? No. While Percy prefers to translate and edit the works of others rather than attempt a great work of his own, he would not accept the premise of the question. For his career is founded on a belief in the man of taste's ability to produce discourse that negotiates the difficulties foregrounded by the anxiety over lyric decline. If Collins worries over the ability of the modern self to play the role of the poet, Percy is content to play with the materials out of which the poetic persona is constructed. He does not seem concerned that four of the six examples of English minstrels he cites are impersonators, including the one at Kenil-

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worth. In his letter to Farmer on the engraving, he says that he takes the image of the singer and harper in the Shakespeare engraving from "King Estmere;' yet in that poem, these two figures are actually the title character and his brother, who have adopted these disguises to penetrate the court of the king who has abducted his brother's lady. To coin a bad pun, Reliques repeatedly stages acts of im-Percy-nation, in which the minstrel becomes an opportunity for an act of historical dress-up. It is a game the editor knows well, having changed his own name from Piercy to Percy in order to increase his resemblance to the noble Percys of Northumberland who become his patrons-a gambit that, unlike Durfey's claiming of D'Urfey, proves successful. 65 Scene is as flexible as persona for Percy; it does not trigger the sort of anxiety we see in Collins. In the same letter to Farmer, he admits that he is unsure "where to place the scene: whether in a Gothic Hall: or on the foreground of a Stage or Theatre with scenical drapery behind them: Or in a Grove &c:' The series "&c:' suggests that where the scene occurs matters less than the provisional act of placing Shakespeare somewhere, and he opts in the engraving for a grove outside the walls of a noble house, a moment of inspiration Shakespeare will take back to the "scenical drapery" of the theater. Nor does the fragmentary nature of the surviving print record trouble Percy when he presents the ballads themselves. Because the archive is only a jumble of fragments from a once-unified minstrelsy, it is part of the collector's mission to imagine what those lines would really have sounded like when the minstrels sang them. This frees Percy to make emendations he sees fit, modernizing the spelling and other conventions in order to make them more acceptable to the man of taste (without erasing their attractive archaism) and altering the substance of the texts in order to produce "the absent archetypal source."66 We have already seen how Percy uses these editorial freedoms to construct his image of Shakespeare at Killingworth, but they are perhaps most clearly in evidence in the ballad that concludes the series, "The Friar of Orders Gray:' Here is how he justifies this cento of quotations: "Dispersed thro' Shakespeare's plays are innumerable little fragments of ancient ballads, the intire copies of which, could not be recovered. Many of these being of the most beautiful and pathetic simplicity, the Editor was tempted to select some of them, and with a few supplemental stanzas to connect them together and form them into a little TALE, which is here submitted to the Reader's candour."67 So these "pathetic" lyric fragments, embedded in Shakespeare's patchwork text, stimulate the modern reader to string them into a narrative

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of his own. Once again, Ophelia's songs act as a touchstone, as the friar responds to the lady's queries about her beloved: And how should I know your true love From many another one? 0 by his cockle hat, and staff, And by his sandal shoone.+ 0 lady, he is dead and gone! Lady, he is dead and gone! And at his head a green grass turfe, And at his heels a stone.

Here bore him barefac'd on his bier Six proper youths and tall ... (226-27)

As in Collins and Garrick, Ophelia's fragments and her distracted mind are regularized, but where Collins preserves the scene of mourning and Garrick transforms the turf of the grave into a pillow for young Shakespeare dreaming by the Avon, Percy sticks with his favorite scenario of imposture. For it turns out that the beloved young man is not dead but is rather standing before her, having been driven to holy orders by what seemed a love doomed to failure. Not yet having taken his vows, though, he remains available as a mate. The horrific tragedy of Hamlet is redeemed as sentimental comedy by an elegant reading that integrates lyric fragments into continuous narrative, supplemented by antiquarian research: The double dagger note to "shoone" refers the reader to Warburton's note on the "cockle hat;' staff, and sandals as "the distinguishing marks of a pilgrim:' One way to see Percy's mode of collection is as "an inversion of the conditions of authorship in the literary culture of the late eighteenth century;'68 as if he were trying to present himself as the favorite of a noble house rather than an author in a literary marketplace. But although he may have desired the patronage and associated glory of the Northumberland Percys, the tale he spins of minstrelsy does not simply"invert the conditions of authorship:' For the shift from minstrelsy into "inferior" products for the press is essential to an authorial role unthinkable outside of the modern literary system, the man of letters selecting an elegant narrative of British literary history out of the fragments left in the wake of this change. While Percy may dedicate Reliques to a woman who "can remark in every period the influence of some great progenitor" (vii), the preface focuses on the raft of sources that he draws on

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to assemble these volumes and the group of gentlemen who have encouraged him, from Johnson to William Shenstone to Thomas Warton to Garrick (though he makes no mention of the lower-brow Diceys, whose unmatched trove of broadsides he liberally used). Reliques thus presents itself as an officializing metacollection similar to the Shakespeare editions, culling from the prior efforts of collectors who recognized the fragments of a more valuable poetic corpus in oral performances they committed to manuscript and in broadsides that they happened across. He ends with the wish that "the NAMES of so many men of learning and character ... will serve as an amulet to guard him from every unfavourable censure, for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Ow BALLADS" (xiii-xiv). Although Percy may seek to play the minstrel, his concern for "unfavourable censure" and the "amulet" he hopes will ward it off attest to a literary system increasingly shaped by the reviews, where magical potency is attached not to the "sacred" bards but rather to the names of accomplished critics. Percy's aim is thus not to deny print culture by retreating to minstrelsy. Rather, he projects a history of print amenable to a salvage operation that maintains the aristocratic standard of taste set by men Percy cites at other places in Reliques as admirers of ballads, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden, the Earl of Dorset, and Addison. Percy stands as a model for the gentleman-scholar of leisure who manages to hide the "infinite labor" which the work must have required, "joining exquisite discernment to indefatigable industry:'69 Not aiming to be an inspired bard, he seeks the less ambitious role of the man of Gothic letters who through his "exquisite discernment" avoids the hobbyhorsical absorption in minutiae normally attributed to antiquarians. Though concerned about the reception that will be accorded his "parcel of Old Ballads" (xiv), Reliques avoids the anxieties that afflict Collins and others. The lyric past can be accessed by the present author, and he can find an audience for his labors. Percy's confidence is justified by the profound influence his act of historical conservation exerts on elite literary theory and practice. He also becomes a persistent presence in the growing corpus of Shakespeare editions and criticism that represents him as a collector of popular song.7°

Ritson and the New Politics of Song For many decades, Reliques went almost unchallenged in presenting the ballad as a key text in English literary history. Almost: From the 178os until his

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death in 1803, Joseph Ritson doggedly attacked Percy's image of the English minstrels as having a reputation above the vagabonds named in Elizabeth's statute. For Ritson, the problem posed by history to lyric is not a decline from the Elizabethan heights into the gutter of cheap print. Instead, the problem lies in the way that this history is constructed by those with an ideological interest in doing so. Appositely, the Shakespeare who emerges from his song collections and critiques of other scholars does not refine popular culture but rather enjoys its rude energies. The outlines and the stakes of Ritson's challenge to Percy and other men of Gothic letters can be seen most clearly in Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (1790). There, he argues that the supplanting of minstrels by broadside ballads is not to be lamented: "[T]he songs used by the ballad-singers ... were smooth and regular, were all printed, and, what was much more to their advantage, were generally united to a simple but pleasing melody, which was easily acquired, and any one could sing; whereas the Minstrels songs were without tune, and could not be performed, even by themselves, without the twang of a harp, or the scrape of a fiddle." 71 Unable to adapt to print and beyond easy acquisition or performance, the songs of the minstrels justly fall out of favor, and Ritson sets broadsides like "Children in the Wood" above traditional ballads like "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard." 72 While modern readers may be surprised at Ritson's preferences, 73 they are in keeping with his democratic views on lyric form. In A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), he laments that other collections, like Percy's, lack the tunes that accompany the verse, which are "so essentially requisite to perfect the idea which is, in strictness and propriety, annexed to the term SoNG" (1:xi). Although he confessed himself largely ignorant of music and music history, he nonetheless provided the tunes to his songs in the third volume, and is credited with preserving many traditional tunes not to be found elsewhere. Ritson prefers these tunes not only for textual fidelity but also because their simple melodies, which were only for "voice and song" (1:xii), make them more easily apprehensible than those set for instruments like the harpsichord or rough older ballads. He just wishes that all of those who can "sing, whistle or hum some favourite air" could "read and write what they can thus utter" (1:xi). This way, they could fully avail themselves of the doubleness of lyric, especially the communal element lost with the loss of music. Ritson rejects Percy's narrative of exclusive songs written by courtly minstrels that have degenerated into broadsides and the property of a forgetful common people, attributing the best Scots songs to

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"obscure or anonymous authors, of shepherds and milk maids, who actually felt the sensations they describe." 74 But Ritson does not put in its place a narrative that simply celebrates an increasing refinement. Instead, he celebrates print as a vehicle for circulating the songs more widely and enforcing a regularity that makes it easier for the populace to enjoy them. Not seeing any necessary antagonism between print and orality, he wishes only that the tunes were printed more often. His judgment on the quality of song also runs counter to a vision of decline (or improvement, for that matter). In A Select Collection, he identifies superlative songwriters in every era from Elizabeth on with the exception of the few decades prior to the recent usurpation of English songs by Italian ones (dxi-lxix). He praises the reign of Charles II as "the Augustan age of song;' and he also singles out D'Urfey and Gay as well as Collins's dirge for Cymbeline, Garrick's "Come Come My Good Shepherds," and even Percy's one song entirely of his own composition, "0 Nanny Wilt Thou Go with Me" (dxi, 2:152-53, 2:94-95, 1:219-20). While Percy may stigmatize Thomas Deloney, Richard Johnson, and Martin Parker as "inferior writers" for the press, Ritson credits them as the source of many of the earliest ballads (dix). Ritson's standard for lyrics is thus the accessibility of songs rather than the glories of the ode or minstrelsy in its grander conception. This position is recapitulated in his comments on Shakespeare's use of songs. In Ancient Songs, Ritson admits that many of Shakespeare's lyrics "have been already inserted in [Percy's] more refined collection" (lxvii). So what distinguishes Ritson's work from Reliques? He gives a clue when, after having praised Shakespeare for having "composed the most beautiful and excellent songs" ever written, he notes that he "takes every opportunity of discovering his attachment to these old and popular reliques;' quoting from the scene in Twelfth Night in which the Duke commands the Clown to sing "Come away death;' which, though "old and plain, I The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, I And the free maids that weave their thread with bones I Do use to chant it" (lxvi-lxvii). Ritson adds that the words of the song are "scarcely answerable to the eulogium; but united to the air, might have had all the effect upon the audience the author proposed" (lxvii). Shakespeare's lyrics are nothing special; it is the tune that matters, and this is certainly not Shakespeare's own. So although Ritson may print many of the same songs as Percy, he presents them differently. They evidence not Shakespeare's deft separation from popular culture in the act of collecting it or the limitations in his taste that result from his historical situation. Rather, they attest to Shake-

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speare's high regard for these songs, especially when twinned to music and sung by those on the margins, whether "spinsters" or "fools and lunatics" (lxvii). Ritson strengthens the association between Shakespeare, song, and marginality in his rewriting of Percy's "The Friar of Orders Gray" as "The Jovial Tinker." Though he reproduces verbatim Percy's head-note as well as his story of a woman asking her lover-in-disguise where her lover is, he replaces the more dignified friar with a tinker and slyly locates him in the minstrels's homeland, "the North Countrie." In addition, he shifts the chief intertext from Ophelia's pathetic songs to the devil-may-care songs of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, proudly advertising its ties to the broadside universe that Percy expels. Instead of the pageantry of the court or the ritual of the church, it offers the illicit pleasures of errancy outdoors that marks the decline of Percy's minstrels into sturdy beggars. Responding to the woman's lament for her lover, the tinker sings: But shall we go mourn for that, my dear? The pale moon shines by night: And, when we wander here and there, We then do go most right. (186) When arrested for vagabondage and put in "the stocks" for thievery, he will claim that his sack is filled merely with his tinker's tools (186). If Percy's friar has been living the chaste life of the novice, the Tinker's life is less orthodox. Since the young woman's lover has abandoned her for another, he counsels her to do the same in lines from All's Well that End's Well that puts cuckoldry ahead of marriage: For I the ballad will repeat, Which men full true shall find; Your marriage comes by destiny, Your cuckow sings by kind.- (186) As for the woman, she is less inclined than Percy's to fall upon her "true-loves grave" and "kiss the grass-green turf" before becoming a pilgrim. Instead, she declares her intention to cut her hair, turn her coat into a man's, and seek the world for her beloved. She also asserts that she "would not be a serving man, I To carry the cloak-bag still" (187), expressing her wish to escape gender and class hierarchies by referring to one of the best known of the "warrior-

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woman" ballads, The Famous Flower of Serving Men. Unlike The Winter's Tale and unlike Garrick's Florizel and Perdita, Ritson's broadside pastiche does not shift the focus to the disguised aristocrats of blood or sentiment and does not draw a distinction between the na"ive pleasures of the rustics in ballads and those who are supposedly better informed. Placed next to light songs from As You Like It and Cymbeline, "The Jovial Tinker" puts forth a Shakespeare not only available to everyone but also willing to cross the bounds of propriety.

* * * Although Burns had little taste for Ritson's love for unadorned reproductions of songs and Ritson did not think much of Burns as a songwriter or editor, 75 they share a vision of popular song that challenges the attitudes and protocols of polite ballad collection. After reading Ritson's ''A Historical Essay on Scotish Song;' which prefaces his Scotish Songs (1794), Burns gratefully reports to George Thomson that "it has nearly preoccupied the ground, & to much better purpose, on which I was to have built my system" (Letters 2:318). Both often replace more refined sentiments characteristic of Ramsay's adaptations and Percy's "Friar" with lustier ones they see as more consistent with their sources. They also contest the models of historical progress and/or decline that inform the work of Percy and other men of Gothic letters. Ritson's position is related to the revolutionary sympathies he shares with Burns. While the revolution referred to in Ritson's Ancient Songs is explicitly the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688-89, no book with revolution in the title published in 1790 could be innocent of the reference to the French Revolution. (Perhaps even more remarkable is the volume of Robin Hood ballads Ritson publishes in 1795, a difficult year to be celebrating an outlaw.) Well acquainted with William Godwin and other radicals, Ritson traveled to France in August of 1791 and reported himself delighted with how well informed "the common people" were on the events of the day.7 6 Writing to his friend the Irish antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker in September of 1794, in the midst of counter-Revolutionary reaction in England, he declares that what Walker calls "cursed French principles" "have also poisoned my mind:m He also argues that whatever violence has been committed by Irish supporters of the Revolution is far outstripped by the violence done against the Irish people by their rulers, and he prophesies that opposition to "a universal revolution ... will only serve to accelerate its progress:' 78 Ritson's revolutionary sympathies sharpen his longstanding sensitivity

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to the political role of songs. He apologizes to a friend that he cannot send on a copy of the revolutionary song (:a ira because "it is become high treason either to sing or whistle it;' and promising a correspondent who sends him a song that he will forward it to the radical journal Politics for the People.79 As late as October of 1798, he writes Walker that he does not like the Loyalist songs his friend has posted to him, claiming "that the Muses, seem more favourably disposed to the cause of rebellion;' though ruefully adding that "the gods" are not. 80 He is, not surprisingly, very fond of Jacobite songs; many of the twelve pieces from Burns in Scotish Songs (the most from any single author) are of this type. Ancient Songs ends with "The Belgick Boar. To the Tune of Chevy-Chase" (2:286-94), which laments the treachery suffered by James II, and with it, the fettering of English liberties by those supporting William III, the "boar" of the title. Republished in 1790, the Jacobitical subtext of the ballad now resonates with Jacobinical implications, and it concludes with a wish for "confusion" to his "foes:' who are also those who continue to support the royal house that usurped the Stuarts. "The Belgick Boar" is Ritson's version of a radical strategy of expressing revolutionary sentiments while guarding against prosecution by clothing them in the disguise of old events. 81 His is an activist antiquarianism.

* * * Jacobite songs are an outstanding example of an ages-old encoding of political messages in poems. New in the eighteenth century were the claims made on literary figures (rather than, say, kings or legislators) for political ends, with Shakespeare as the central example. Jonathan Bate traces "the political appropriation of Shakespeare outside the theatre" back to The Craftsman, which in the 1720s and 1730s used the Bard to articulate its Tory opposition to the Walpolean state. 82 From then on, Shakespeare is increasingly used as a political vehicle. After the Jubilee, for instance, the supporters of Garrick's friend the reformist agitator John Wilkes encourage Garrick to stage a festival about Runymede: "The Muse's course hath freedom for its ground: I Shakespeare in Magna Charta's to be found:' 83 The political battle over Shakespeare continues through the French Revolution and the radicalism of the 181os and 1820s. Although Shakespeare in large part comes to signify a majestic England hostile to revolutionary change, radicals also claim him, quoting his plays and parodying his scenes in support of their position. 84 But the battle over whether Shakespeare would have supported Paine or

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Burke actually has the potential to obscure the discursive transformation that makes that debate possible. When Garrick designs the pageant of Shakespearean characters for the Jubilee, he suggests that literature can serve as a synecdoche of the nation, standing in place of a royal progress (like Elizabeth's, which is the occasion for the pageant at Killingworth). While this new prestige and visibility may then make it easier for Shakespeare to be drafted for state politics, it also suggests the gathering influence of the process that we traced in the work of Gay, Addison, and Ramsay-the positing of literature and the fine arts in general as a semiautonomous sphere. The dynamic of this logic (the arts as separate from but assimilable to state politics) is threatened by the French Revolution. Because of the link between literacy and social power, because of the decisive role of the press in carrying on the ideological war, because of the totality of the perceived promise or threat of the Revolution, partisans on both sides develop a hair-trigger feel for the political implications of signs. So, in Ancient Songs, Ritson argues that the Parliament attempted in the reign of Henry VIII "to purge and cleanse the kingdom of all religious plays, interludes, rhymes, ballads and songs" because such texts are "too apt to enlighten the public mind and afford the people an opportunity of expressing their sentiments" (lxxx). Ritson, however, trains his scorn more frequently on Percy and the other men of Gothic letters than on parliaments past and present. Ritson's career as a critical gadfly begins with Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry (1782), where he skewers the "ignorance" and "indolence" of Thomas Warton and other men of Gothic letters made possible by their positions in the conservative institutions of the Anglican church and the universities. 85 Although Warton's "language" is admittedly "easy and elegant," that elegance is itself suspect, coming as it does from "a thorough-bred Oxonian tory-rory High-churchman" whose howlers in glossing old English words could have been avoided had he bothered to ask the "the lowest person in Trinity college, the porter, nay your old bed-maker" for help. 86 The next year, he lashes Warburton for his insistence that the word "mystery" not be applied to manual labor and argues that Christmas pageants, not Percy's courtly entertainments, contain "the true Origin of the English stage" despite the fact that they "were seldom committed to writing" because "composed by ignorant people:' 87 So Warton, Percy, and their allies are the heirs not of the work-a-day minstrels, whom they falsely elevate to a courtly position, but rather the "idle and good-for-nothing clergy." 88 Still, because of the elegance of their language "the purchaseers and peruseers of such a collection" are

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blinded to the fact that they "are deceive'd and impose'd upon; the pleasure they receive is derive'd from the idea of antiquity, which, in fact, is perfect illusion:'89 To counter this imposition on readers by those who illegitimately enjoy cultural authority, Ritson offers a skeptical plain speaking, an antirhetoricity shared by many radicals. He claims complete textual fidelity, whether to Shakespeare's plays or to anonymous broadsides, extending even to an orthography that, while not used by any other author, is supposedly truer to the spirit of the language. 90 Given this strategy, we might see Ritson as a practitioner of a crude form of cultural studies avant la lettre who understands literature as politics by other means. Falsely monopolized by elites with a conservative agenda, literature's meaning and ownership must be contested. But the reduction of the literary to the political is not the only reaction available, either to those of Ritson's era or ours. Indeed, whatever Ritson's political intentions, his work is increasingly held up as a model of editorial practice by a growing body of scholars dedicated to the investigation of English literature, most of whom recoil from both his ferocious impoliteness and his radical politics. How to understand the mediations of the literary in relation to the demands of the state is a central issue for the authors of the Romantic era. And, as we will see in the next chapter, the ballad continues to be a favored site for thinking through that relationship. Not only does it model a body politic organized along more democratic lines, it also provides a space to question the violence that can occur when all signification is in danger of being co-opted for political imperatives. Romantic ballad collection is the coming to greater selfconsciousness of what allows Home to write on the bust of Shakespeare, dreaming his elevation from devoted reader to dramatic rival by way of an old ballad.

Chapter 4

Ballads and the Problem of Lyric Violence in Blake and Wordsworth

Although the Preface to Lyrical Ballads has been raked over as thoroughly as any bit of prose in English, a passage that has attracted litde notice includes the single example of good poetry that Wordsworth actually cites. 1 It is from the redoubtable "Children in the Wood;' and it shows why understanding Romantic lyric and its relationship to politics and history require attention to the Ballad Revival: Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr. Johnson's Stanza is a fair specimen: "I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand:' Immediately under these lines I will place one of the most justly admired stanzas of the "Babes in the Wood": "These pretty Babes with hand in hand Went wandering up and down; But never more they saw the Man Approaching from the Town:' 2 Johnson's stanza, Wordsworth asserts, "is neither interesting in itself, nor can lead to any thing interesting;' since its "images neither originate in that sane state of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader" (1:154). Wordsworth does not explain why, if Johnson's stanza can have no effect, he is troubling himself about it. He simply declares that because its source is not "sane;' it must be uninteresting both in essence and effect. This makes it one of the "arbitrary" texts that "subjects" readers "to infinite caprices upon which no calculation whatever can be made" and vio-

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lates the "formal engagement" between poet and reader (1:144, 1:122). In other words, Johnson abuses the interests of his readers by giving them the uninteresting facsimile of a truly interesting work. This language of arbitrariness and interest echoes the explosive debates of the 1790s, and it raises the question of what alternative politics is generated by Wordsworth's "experimental" poetry. Recent accounts have answered that question by treating the Preface's critical edge skeptically. 3 Of course Wordsworth puts his poetry on the side of freedom against arbitrary rule; who would do otherwise? But by 18oo he is well into his apostasy. From reveling in the dawn of Revolutionary France and skewering the English ruling class in Adventures on Salisbury Plain, he has turned his back on radicalism. He supplants the "middle and lower classes of society" identified as a linguistic source in the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads with idealized rustics who speak "the real language of men:' and he opposes that "real language" to "frantic novels" and other mass-cultural debasements. This lays the ground for an aesthetic ideology in which the contingencies ofliteracy and economic upheaval are banished for a faith in Literature's power to reform middle-class readers eager to be reformed. 4 These critiques, however, have only a partial understanding of the context in which Romantic lyric articulates its claims, particularly in response to the call of the popular. Alan Liu, for instance, argues that what impedes Wordsworth from recognizing History's collective force is his commitment to the "I" of lyric, constructed out of a repeated encounter of personal Imagination with the nurturing and threatening force ofNature. 5 It is significant, then, that the ballad-with its collective orientation-is one of the few genres that Liu does not consider in his brilliant study; the only Wordsworthian text from "The Great Decade" missing from his pages is Lyrical Ballads; and one of the few histories he does not tell is that of the Ballad Revival. 6 For Wordsworth and other Romantic authors, the ballad, as transformed by the Ballad Revival, is a key to thinking History in complex ways.? In the case of the Preface, that history is slightly buried, since Wordsworth strategically leaves the real target of Johnson's stanza unmentioned; that is, Johnson uses "Children" to poke fun at Percy's long imitation ballad, The Hermit ofWarkworth (1771). 8 Wordsworth actually agrees with Johnson's estimation of Percy's Hermit: Tricked out in antiquarian tinsel, it is among the "deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse" that help to reduce the public to "a state of almost savage torpor" (1:128). 9 What Wordsworth objects to is the idea that a comparison with "Children in the Wood" is to Percy's detriment, rather

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than the other way around. Pretending to celebrate the ballad, Percy actually obscures it. And so Wordsworth replaces Percy's imitation with "Children;' reclaiming it as raw material for his own experimental poetry. Like Wordsworth, Blake not only participates in the Ballad Revival but also attempts to correct its excesses. By the 1780s, when Blake publishes his first texts and engraves Ritson's Select Collection of English Songs, the Ballad Revival has developed a history of its own sufficient to become what Michael McKeon, borrowing from Marx to describe the conflictual emergence of the novel in the 1740s, calls "a simple abstraction." 10 Looking back on decades of elite ballad collection, Blake and Wordsworth revisit the major issues discussed in the previous chapters. Both authors, for instance, recognize the affective power of popular song, and they use it to inquire into narratives of national and individual progress. But unlike prior ballad collectors, Wordsworth and Blake worry over the violence involved in collection. They wonder whether collecting popular songs into elite poems might somehow damage the songs or the cultures in which they are found, gending them into a false sentimentality that robs them of their power to alter perception (Blake) or replaying an imperial asymmetry in the meeting between the tourist and the native singer or speaker (Wordsworth). Their concern with the sources of the poem is animated by a concern for the agency of the reader who is supposed to be moved by it. Blake worries that they will trade their independence for the false superiority of pity, Wordsworth for the empty pleasures of sensationalism. Their sensitivity to the politics of collection shows that the self-conscious "I" typically placed at the heart of Romantic lyric often involves a consciousness of history's collective power. The difficult thing, however, is that this consciousness often registers as a recourse to organic tradition or religious revelation, which we have been taught, with some justification, to view with suspicion, as a Burkean reaction against the revolutionary energies of radical authors and working-class literacy, 11 a retreat from the dangerous mutability of human history to the soothing verities of natural ways, or, in the case of revelation, as a turn away from the here and now. But when Blake seeks refuge from "Satan's Watch-fiends;' and when Wordsworth looks to natural phenomena like sunlight and the wind as models of poetic value, they are not simply turning away from history to religious mysticism or mystified organicism. Rather, in an era when every sign seems like an occasion for a high-stakes political decoding that reveals what it really means and where the author's and reader's sympathies really lie ("Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin"), they

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try to preserve some space for reading outside a restrictive political calculus. Rather than quietism, it might be better understood as a form of resistance to the unfreedom of reducing reading to politics. The rigorous space for pleasure afforded by that resistance forms the core of the literary as High Romanticism conceives it and is the keynote of its response to the call of the popular.

Blake's Cries of London: Songs, Pity, and the Ethics of Reading Blake integrates into his earliest and latest poems the Cries of London, a centuries-old genre textualizing the songs of those hawking their wares in the city streetsP Here is one of his best-known citations of the Cries: When my mother died I was very young. And my father sold me while yet my tongue, Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. 13

Having been sold by his father to an unnamed master, he is forced to sell his labor every day to Londoners through his cry for custom ("Sweep sweep .. :'). Meanwhile, the understated "So" of "So your chimneys I sweep" reveals that we continue to be deaf to the "weep" embedded in his advertisement. Not only do we hire him to do our dirty work, we encourage him to view his lot as a natural outcome, the "When" of being sold into servitude that he innocently describes without a true sense of why. Blake increases our burden by returning to "So" at the poem's end. Echoing the command to "be a good boy" the sweep says, "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm." The primary target of that "all;' though the sweep does not know it, is we who read the poem, and there is a hint of menace in the "harm" promised if we fail in our duty. But what is our duty, exactly? Obligation is a vexed issue in Blake because of his antinomian theology and its refraction by the political upheavals of his era and by his chosen mode of artistic production. Granting each subject his or her own light of understanding, his antinomianism views the "Moral Law" of State Religion, with all of its Thou Shalts and especially Thou Shalt Nots, as a conspiracy cooked up by priests and the minions of Caesar. 14 In place of the Law's iron cage, Blake wishes for an alternative order of radical dissent in which "all the Lord's people were prophets." 15 This, however,

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raises another question: If prophecy requires the claim of divine inspiration, how can prophets make their prophecies known without imposing on the inviolable right of each audience member to judge whether a prophecy should be binding on her? A corollary question: How can a prophet broadcast his visions without compromising them by deferring to the sensibilities of his auditors, which dissenters like Blake see as warped by corrupt mental and material structures? In Blake, this battle over authority extends to a concern for preserving particularity within generality that ramifies all of his poetry and graphic work, the search for a bounding line that will not bind the particular elements with the manacles of uniformity, for a poetic voice that will not dissolve individual voices into a single hymn while still leaving open the possibility of communal song. 16 Collection of any kind is a fraught operation for Blake. The strong tension that antinomianism produces between individual and community informs ongoing debates over the political implications of Blake's work. Some, like Jerome McGann and Morris Eaves, present Blake's ideal as those "autonomous middle-class artist heroes who see the possibility of combining in themselves the aesthetic judgment of an elite and the technical skills of a working class:' 17 Stymied by the modern division of labor and by elite mores, Blake's individuality drives him to adopt the stance of a prophet in the wilderness, whose genius has been neglected by the "counterarts conspiracy" hatched by Sir Joshua Reynolds and his "Cunning Hired Knaves." Other critics connect Blake to the communal vision of a radical tradition that stretches back to the Ranters and Diggers of the 1640s, effloresces in the wake of the French Revolution, and extends forward to the Chartists and other proletarian troublemakers of the next century. 18 Saree Makdisi has recently taken the communitarian argument a step further by contrasting Blake with "hegemonic radicals" like Thomas Paine and John Thelwall. Where they base their agitation on the sovereign individual of Locke, Blake's ideas of labor, property, and subjectivity are inseparable from a community of saints.l 9 Blake's interest in popular songs, including the Cries of London, supports the image of him as a communitarian radical than a radical individualist. Yet granting that his orientation is toward fellowship with the public rather than retraction from it does not answer how he imagines our duty to other citizens. Hearing the "weep" in the chimney sweeper's cry, are we obligated to work for social change? To join the London Corresponding Society? To publish our protests in radical journals like Pigs Meat? Answering "yes"

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runs us up against some embarrassing facts. However radical Blake's views may have been, he did not leave any "documentary record of overt political engagement:' a lack which leads a recent scholar to warn against going any farther than "guess[ing]" that Blake was "a radical:' 20 Moreover, instead of publishing his works in an easily accessible form, he produces increasingly recondite, scarce, and expensive texts, culminating in Jerusalem (1804-20). One of the first plates of that work registers with great force the Blakean tugof-war between his desire to be heard and his resistance to altering his message to suit his audience. Even after decades of barely scratching out a living and suffering the neglect of his genius, he begins with a call "To the Public." Yet he then also violently mars this plate, erasing the words "love:' "friendship:' and "blessed" in connection with his audience, as if enraged by its indifference to his "Giant forms." 21 So Blake calls out to everyone but worries whether that call will violate the agency of his audience or will require him to compromise his own idea of truth because his audience has been made unfit to hear it by the deforming power of Church, State, Locke, and Newton. Given the pitfalls of prophecy, the Cries are appealing to Blake because they are an inspiring language of a social kind. They stimulate the listener in a way that avoids the what William Crisman in a study of Blake's early lyrics identifies as the self-absorption of "the rhapsode:' who seeks to overwhelm his listeners. 22 But neither do the Cries overwhelm the poetic self, compromising the prophet's own sense of judgment and giving him nothing to say on his own, a loss of subjectivity that Crisman associates with "the orade:' 23 In striking this balance, the Cries also provide a way to diagnose the maladies of the public while still providing some hope for a cure. Although they appear to limit dialogue to cash for goods and services, this does not exhaust their promise. Taking advantage of their familiarity, Blake pressures his readers not to feel duty bound to agitate directly on behalf of the sweep but rather to hear the genre of the Cry in a new key, to reflect on their typical and perhaps atrophied modes of response. This redescription of the Cries is part of what Jon Mee calls Blake's bricolage; like many other plebeian authors, he takes what he needs from British history, biblical criticism, and other sources to synthesize his transformative vision. 24 Among the objects that attracted him most powerfully were old songs: Scottish tunes were reported to have drawn tears from his eyes; Poetical Sketches is shot through with the genres, diction, and atmospherics of the Ballad Revival. 25 His commercial work also brought him into touch with the Ballad Revival: Appearing the same year as Poetical Sketches were the en-

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gravings he executed for Ritson's Select Collection, and in 1790 he engraved one of Hogarth's paintings from The Beggar's Opera. Yet unlike the majority of antiquarians who tended to focus on the bards and minstrels of the distant past, Blake saw the songs floating around the contemporary metropolis, like the Cries, as worthy for reuse in the present. This is consistent with his view of history. Because revelation may happen at any time and because the Bard sees "Present, Past, & Future" ("Introduction:' Experience 32:2), there is no easy separation of what was from what is and what will be. Tyburn becomes a druidic altar, and a voice in the street may be the harbinger of the apocalypse. Like Burns and Ritson, Blake does not adhere to the idea of Progress that structures the work of Ramsay, Home, and Percy or even the more radical necessitarian musings of William Godwin. While this is clearest in the later prophetic books, he presents history throughout his poetic career as a series of cycles, breaks, and falls rather than a neat slant or sine wave. Blake's attention to the Cries is also indicative of his desire for a democracy of discourse that would realize his historical vision. As Steven Goldsmith argues by way of Kant and Lyotard, Blake tries to reconcile the demands of the individual and the collective not through political action (say, organizing the Society of Constitutional Information or breaking looms) but rather an endless "Mental Fight" in which "independent acts of critical resistance meet one's duty to the nation:' 26 Street Cries are a prime genre for fostering that resistance since they are so easily available and so easily overheard and yet so easy to take for granted. The duty called for in Blake's use of the Cry is, then, nothing more or less than a duty to listen.

The Street Cry in the Early Works: How to HEAR The stakes of that listening can be seen in an early work in which a Cry appears, An Island in the Moon (c. 1782-85). In this strange text, characters with names like Mrs. Nannicantipot and Quid the Cynic (the latter identified by many commentators with Blake himself) have fractured and often misinformed discussions on everything from Voltaire to modern surgical techniques. Their conversations are punctuated by twenty-one songs that attest to Blake's connections to the Ballad Revival; among them are the D'Urfeyesque pastoral "As I walk'd forth one may morning:' an homage to Fielding's "Roast Beef of Old England:' and the only song that Blake did not

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write, the familiar broadside "This frog he would a-wooing ride." 27 By staging these song-filled conversations in the characters' houses, somewhere between the privacy of the reading closet and the publicity of oratory, Blake begins his career by reflecting on the state of the public sphere. A Street Cry reveals that that sphere of discourse is in dire need of repair. At a "merry making at the Philosophers' house;' two characters sing a brief duet in which Dr. Johnson threatens Scipio Africanus (rhymed with "anus") and is insulted by him in response. Then, in the midst of the company's laughter, another pair of voices breaks in from the outside: 1st Vo Want Matches 2d Vo Yes Yes Yes 1 Vo Want Matches 2dVoNo-1st Vo Want Matches 2d Vo Yes Yes Yes 1st Vo Want Matches 2dVoNo-Here was Great confusion & disorder Aradobo said that the boys in the street sing something very pritty & funny about London-O no, about Matches. Then Mrs Nannicantipot sung I cry my matches as far as Guild hall God bless the duke & his aldermen all. 28

By having the match-seller's Cry throw "the Philosophers' house" into "confusion & disorder;' Blake breathes new life into the artifacts of London in order to expose the complacencies of elite society. There is good evidence to suggest that the scene of An Island is modeled on the salon of Reverend A. S. and Harriet Mathew, where Blake was a frequent visitor and where he sang some of his own compositions, which were received "with profound silence and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit:'29 His talent encouraged the Mathews to help underwrite the publication of Poetical Sketches; but he soon separated himself from these polite gatherings due to his "unbending deportment, or what his adherents are pleased to call his manly firmness of opinion, which certainly was not at all times considered pleasing by every one." 30 We might then read the match-seller's Cry as an emblem of Blake's contentious relationship with the polite world throughout his career, from the Mathews' salon to his dealings later on with his would-be patron, William Hayley. Viewed as an artisan rather than an artist (an engraver rather than a

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painter), an unabashed enthusiast rather than a rational reformer, he is a misfit. Unwilling to bring his "deportment" into line with the expectations of his social betters, he uses the Cry to disrupt their talk but also shows the limits of that disruption. All the seller can do is ask if his goods are wanted, and the potential consumer, hearing only this solicitation and nothing of the hardships that the match-seller may face, can respond only "yes" or "no." Determined by the same dull round of a life-world reduced to buying and selling, the Cry is thus a very brief drama of social alienation, reprised with heedless self-interest by those inside the Philosophers' house. Mrs. Nannicantipot conveniently supplies the words of the Cry that Aradobo remembers, in which the match-sellers "bless the duke & his aldermen all:' Filtered through her drawing-room consciousness, the Cry is muted to a submissive prayer for the powerful. Yet this selective hearing does not mute the potential value of the Cry for the reader of An Island. Mrs. Nannicantipot may co-opt the voice of the match-sellers, but it is also true that she allows their voice to ventriloquize her, and when the match-seller sings that he hawks his goods "as far as Guild hall;' he suggests that his labor is hard and deserves acknowledgment. Although he may praise those who administer his life (and neglect his needs), he also weaves himself into the cityscape, claiming attention along with imposing structures like Guild Hall. The cry of the two voices moves its hearers outside the safer confines of the self and the Philosopher's house to encounter the song of the Other; that they choose to dull their own hearing does not mean that the reader of An Island will do the same. The promise and limits of the Cry are more apparent the next time Island presents voices calling out in the city. In the first of three songs later printed in Songs of Innocence, Obtuse Angle sings "Holy Thursday." Blake again plays the urban antiquarian, picturing the recently instituted London ritual of charity-school children giving thanks in the grand environs of St. Paul's Cathedral, led there by "the guardians of the poor" (11:22). While their song is not a Cry as normally defined (they do not sell anything and do not cry in the streets), it does not take much to hear it in that way since the Cries of London are often in Blake's works a sign of the unmet needs of the poor. But the singing does not stop there in An Island. "Holy Thursday" reminds Mrs. Nannicantipot of"my mother's song"-what appears in Songs of Innocence as "Nurse's Song"-in which the children ask the nurse for more time to play, she grants it, and they shout and laugh until "all the hills ecchoed" (11:42). She, in turn, is answered by Quid's rendition of what later becomes

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"The Little Boy Lost," which tells of a father who abandons his child in a "mire" (n:so ). The scene shows how Blake uses old songs to offer a mode of discourse that differs from the prosy conversation that is the norm of the public sphere. 31 Instead of having individuals exchanging views in turn (or talking past each other), songs encourage them to pass into a transindividual state in which the singer impersonates some other single voice or joins with others. In "Holy Thursday:' the charity-school children exceed the confines of St. Paul's to become a heavenly choir. They are described as having a "radiance all their own"; this separates them from the condescending distinction conferred upon them by their uniforms and by the cold attention of"the revrend men:' The children's singing, likened to "harmonious thunderings" in heaven (n:21), bursts the institutional frame of St. Paul's, which Blake associates with the tyranny and sterility of State Religion. The reception of the song is as important as the song itself. Although Obtuse Angle sings it to bring the gathering into "good humour:' the effect is a fifteen-minute silence, in which the party is presumably absorbing the meaning of the song. Then, Mrs. Nannicantipot moves from her present self into the memory of "my mother's song:' This grounds her song in her private experience, but she avoids self-absorption by attaching the song to her mother, locating its source outside herself and performing it to add to the group's discourse. Whether or not she realizes that it is a counterpoint to "Holy Thursday;' her song offers a Blakean contrary to the grim shepherding of "the revrend men." When the children ask for more time to play, the nurse grants it, and the children make the hills, a more congenial setting than St. Paul's, echo with their laughing and singing. This song, in turn, moves Quid to oppose this image of maternal care and innocent celebration with one of paternal neglect and a child's consequent distress in "Little Boy Lost:' This is an example of what Blake calls Mental Fight, a healthy struggle among viewpoints. But the Islanders cannot sustain this productive back-and-forth. After another silence, we have a silly song about a game of cricket in which one of the players bowls the ball into "a turd" (n:s8). This leads to a song straight from Vauxhall or one of the other pleasure gardens, an anthem of selfpitying self-absorption in which the singer asks to be left to her sorrows so that she can "fade away" and haunt her cruel lover with her shadow and ghostly voice (11:71-78). The scene culminates in a ballad on the Prince of Orange's triumph in the Glorious Revolution, with "the shout of his thousands

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fill[ing] his heart with reJOICmg & victory" (11:114). This concludes the singing of An Island by moving from Mental Fight to physical war (Prince William appears through "clouds of smoke;' with "Banners flying"), and from a polyphonous discourse to a triumphalist unanimity celebrating the violence of the state. Though the events are a century old, Prince William's heirs still rule England corruptly (see Ritson's "Belgick Boar"), and the particulars of the history matter less than the durable impulse toward hierarchy and univocality the song promotes. The cast of An Island can go only so far with the Cries.

* * * In Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), the Cries appear more insistently in the devastating chorus of"London:' Along with the Cry of the chimney sweeper, Blake includes those of the soldier and the prostitute, who like the chimney sweep are often represented in Street Cries. 32 Unlike the matchseller's Cry in An Island, these are not contained. Turning on the form's textualization of oral experience, Blake's desperate Londoners transform the city visually as well as aurally, leaving white marks on "the blackning Church;' blood on the "Palace walls;' and plagues on "the Marriage hearse" that will soon erupt in the signs of venereal disease (46:9-16). They also leave their mark on Blake's engraving; he inscribes the word HEAR vertically into the third stanza, where it must be actively read in order to be perceived in a new way (not just left to right, but also up and down). But, again, what should be our reaction? In "Holy Thursday;' Blake seems to add an obligation beyond listening to the Cries; the last line instructs us to "cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door" (19:12). So we might think that pity is the reaction called for, just as the engraving of "London" pictures a child leading an old man on crutches inside to shelter. When our eyes trail down to the text, we encounter the image of another child warming his hands at a fire, its smoke bleeding into the hard cobblestones of the street as if this image of pity owed its being to a Promethean imaginative energy that keeps the child warm in cold circumstances. Pity, according to one influential reading of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is "the transcendent force" in Blake, allowing us to acknowledge "that sense of the divine within the human central to antinomian thinking:' 33 Support for this position can be found in "The Divine Image;' a poem that in many editions of Songs comes directly before "Holy Thursday" and that praises Pity

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and its "human face" as one of the "virtues of delight" (18:10, 18:3).34 Here, we might connect the transindividual push of Blake's songs to the idea of sympathy central to our discussion of lyric in Chapter 2, the affect evoked by the contagion of the human voice that moves us to identify with Ramsay's shepherds and Home's Lady Randolph and Burns's beggars. Yet when Blake revisits the Cry in Songs of Experience, he undercuts pity. In "The Human Abstract;' the companion poem to "The Divine Image;' he specifically identifies pity as predicated upon inequality rather than a means to remedy it: "Pity would be no more, I If we did not make somebody Poor" (47:1-2). "The Human Abstract" comes directly after "London" in many copies of Experience, 35 and this stinging aphorism should make us wonder if pity is in fact one of the forces that keeps London in "mind-forg'd manacles:' Pity normally requires the inferiority of its object, allowing the pity-er to validate his virtuous heart while not having to recognize, let alone change, the social inequalities that typically make that feeling possible. 36 It is not that Blake simply rejects pity in the 1790s, as if Experience has won over InnocenceY But understood in terms of the ethics of response that Blake demands, pity can be a false gesture toward the Other that turns out to be only a rhapsody of the self. He would not have had to look far for examples of Cries that seek to evoke pity on the cheap. Consider the concluding stanza of "The Primrose Girl;' which appears in the 1794 songbook The Whim of the Day: If pity to virtue were ever allied, The tear of compassion ne'er yet was denied, Then pity poor Kate who plaintively cries, Come who'll buy primroses, who'll buy primroses, Who'll buy primroses, who'll buy, who'll buy. 38

In the same vein are "The Match Girl, Sung at Most Polite Societies" (1790), "Little Sally" (1796), "Come Buy my Water Cresses" (1793), and "The Poor Orphan Nosegay Girl" (1797). The sentimental opportunism of these songs is highlighted by the era's most successful graphic representation of Street Cries, Francis Wheatley's Cries of London. Exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1792 and 1795 and widely circulated in stipple prints from 1793 on, Wheatley's rosy-cheeked, rustic-garbed street sellers are there for the buyers' aesthetic pleasure. In "Do You Want any Matches" (fig. 3), the posture of the young woman is awkward, her left foot turned toward the doorway, but her right foot bent at a forty-five-degree angle and her head cast back across her

Figure J. Frances Wheatley, "Do You Have Any Matches?" (1795), engraved by A. Cardon, reprinted in W. Roberts, The Cries of London (London: The Connoisseur, 1924). Courtesy of the Furness Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

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body at the same trajectory. It is as if she has been stopped by a customeror someone who wants to paint her-rather than seeking customers out. Wheatley's painting acknowledges that we often seek to buy not matches but rather colorful glimpses of life in the street. In the advertisement for the deluxe set of engravings, he makes explicit this aestheticized anthropology: "In the civilized Countries of Europe, the prevalence of polite manners softens down the rough originality of feature, and produces a similarity very unfavourable to the picturesque. It is among the lower ranks of life we are to look for the strong traits of National Character ... [F]ew National Characters are more boldly marked than the lower order of people in the City of London." 39 Like Blake, Wheatley prizes the particularity of"the lower ranks" of London, but for very different reasons; all he wants of it are the easy pleasures of the picturesque or a charming sign of national character. Commenting recently on Wheatley, Sean Shesgreen contrasts his "sentimentalized" images with the more realistic work of Hogarth, Paul Sandby, and Thomas Rowlandson. 40 We might likewise set Blake's images and texts against these gauzy illusions, as when the Chimney Sweeper of Songs of Experience acidly comments on those who willfully mistake his "notes of woe" for happiness (37:8). Yet if demystification by mimetic realism were all Blake aimed for, we could not easily distinguish his work from a broadside ballad like "Little Joe, The Chimney Sweeper" that dates from Blake's era. 41 As in Blake, the audience is implicated: My littleness conduces Your chambers clean to keep, You seldom think what use is Poor Joe, the chimney sweep.

And, as in Blake, the thematics of black and white are used to question normative values; the refrain reads in part: Twixt me and gentle folk, sir, The diff'rence to be seen Is, they without a joke, sir, Do dirty work more clean. Sweep, sweep, soot 0.

The song ends with a rueful metacommentary on the exploitation of the Cries for aesthetic purposes, complaining that artists make their devils look

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like "poor Joe." But for Blake the wry acceptance of"Little Joe" (as well as the empiricism of Rowlandson) is limited by the ideology of "the senses five;' the blinkered world of Newton and Locke. For a similar reason, Blake would not be well disposed toward the one radical adaptation of the Cries that I have found. Entitled "What d'ye buy? What d'ye buy? What d'ye buy? Or, the German Pork Butcher;' it plays off of Burke's notorious labeling of his antagonists in the 1790s as "the swinish multitude."42 Impersonating a Prussian ruler offering up his poor citizens as "swine" to be sacrificed in various wars, it culminates in this chorus: "Gruntum! snorum! I In terrorum I Let us keep de shwine 0! I 'Twill shave from chip-chop, our thick wig-block I By de Guillotine 0!" While an amusing parody of those in power, it does not give us the voice of the hawker in the streets. Though Blake might enjoy the grotesqueness of the German Butcher, which would not be out of place in An Island in the Moon, the pity evoked by the Cries is for him not a ruse of the aesthetic to be solved by recourse to the current truths of domination. Rather, pity is a mode of response that can be falsified or hijacked by oppressive forces but can also serve as the first stage in a deeper understanding of the social totality. One familiar way of making this point is through the dialectic of Innocence and Experience. The innocent sweep, who pathetically hopes for an angel to set him free, lacks the healthy skepticism of his experienced coworker, who rightly accuses his society of "mak[ing] up a heaven of our misery" through its worship of"God & his Priest & King" (37=11-12). Yet it is also true that the innocent sweep is closer to a prophet as Blake defines him: "Every honest man is a Prophet, he utters his opinion both of private & public matters Thus If you go on So the result is So He never says such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. a Prophet is a Seer not an Arbitrary Dictator:'43 No ''Arbitrary Dictator;' the chimney sweeper merely suggests what will happen if "all do their duty;' but he does not seem aware that the "all" does not apply only to him, an ignorance favored by Tom Dacre's authoritarian angel. This would seem to make him a paradox, a prophet unconscious that he is prophesying. For his words to be recognized as prophecy, to be understood as a "public" as well as a "private" matter, readers must be able to perceive his innocence. Yet while his Cry may generate pathos and avoid the problem of an overpowering prophetic authority, the sweep remains unable to enunciate his own interests. Conversely, the embittered sweep and Little Joe know too much and thus too little; understandably caught up in their suffering and the pinched consolations of wit, the only heaven they can see is "made up," the

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cloud-cuckoo land projected by ideology. They lose their receptivity to the voices of others and, not coincidentally, to the transformative vision of freedom from chimney-coffins preserved by the innocent sweep, who gains access to utopia by listening to and then comforting the distressed "little Tom Dacre:' What experience knows is that songs pretending to be anthems of liberation may actually be songs of imposition; what it doesn't know is how to hear the truly liberating songs that may already be echoing in the streets.

Prophecy in the Streets and the Cry of the Bellman Hearing that song in the Cry of the city is a central project of the prophetic books that Blake engraves from the 1790s on. On the title pages of the earlier prophecies, like The Song of Los (1795), he inscribes "Lambeth;' the particular area of South London where he lived and worked; more than the place of publication, it is the de facto scene of the declamations, groans, and howls we hear as his various mythological personages set forth their visions and nightrnares. 44 The city and its sounds emerge more concretely in Milton (c.1804-18). 45 It is in Lambeth that Milton's spirit enters into the body of the speaker, and the prophet "Los listens to the Cry of the Poor Man: his Cloud I Over London in volume terrific, low bended in anger;' a prelude to the "Great Harvest & Vintage I of the Nations" promised in the poem's last line (21:4-14, 42:35-36, 43:1-2). Blake's idea of the city and the discourse pulsing through it are realized most fully in Jerusalem. The bard of Jerusalem "write[s] in South Molton Street what I both see and hear I In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets" (34:43-44). Viewed through the lens of his radical antiquarianism, the gallows at Tyburn become an altar of druidic sacrifice ( 62:34-35), and the cries that issue from them are the accumulated suffering of the millennia, as the Fall into Moral Law happens again and again. London's dangerous architecture and its associated soundscape recur in plate 84, as the child and old man from "London" are combined with the images of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey: I see London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets Of Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard The voice of Wandering Reuben ecchoes from street to street. (11-13) We appear not to have made any progress from the desperate situation of "London"; indeed, the spatio-temporal dimensions of the crisis have only in-

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creased. Yet London's streets are described as "opening;' and the prophecy ends with a stunning vision of a city escaping from the grips of experience to higher innocence, as the gap between London and Jerusalem disappears, and "the great City" joins a chorus of all the "Living Creatures of the Earth": ... They Cry Where is the covenant of Priam. the Moral Virtues of the Heathen Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel Of Albions Spectre the Patriarch Druid! (98:46-49) The ubi sunt of lost innocence is transformed into a festive "Cry" of revolutionary restoration, and this marks "the end of the Song I of Jerusalem" (emphasis mine, 99:6-7). But what happens to allow the redemption of the city's cries, and what does this tell us about the question with which we began, the duty of the reader? A first step in answering these questions is to look at Blake's adaptation of another Cry-the Cry of the bellman in the plates prefacing chapters two and four, titled "To the Jews" (plate 27) and "To the Christians" (plate 77). Both plates are indebted to a carol known as "The Bellman's Song;' which "seems to have derived from verses sung by the bellmen, or watchmen, who went round at night crying out the hours:' 46 In the first, Blake borrows from the carol's description of "fair Jerusalem" and its long measure, typical of many ballads and hymns: The fields from Islington to Marybone To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood: Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalems pillar stood. (20-23) In plate 77, he echoes "The Bellman's Song" more directly: "England! awake! awake! awake! I Jerusalem thy Sister calls!" (83-84). It makes sense that Blake would be attracted to the bellman's Cry, for it is the closest one to prophecy. Present in the earliest surviving edition of the Cries, the bellman calls the city to vigilance, telling the citizens to light their lanterns at the onset of darkness, both for their safety and others': "Mayds in Your smocks. I Look Well to your lock. I Your fire and your light:' 47 The bellman also, as Robert Herrick and others observe, blesses those who sleep and wishes mercy on the souls of those slated for execution. 48 Carrying a lantern

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to light the way, calling for others to light their own candles, and often speaking in religious terms, he was an attractive target for appropriation by pious versifiers in the seventeenth century, as in ''A New Ballad intituled: A Bellman for England, which Night and Day doth Staring in All Mens Hearing, Gods Vengeance is at Hand" (1620). The most interesting example comes from William Cowper, who drew on the bellman's Cry in one of the series of yearly poems he contributed to the Northampton Bill of Mortality at the request of the parish clerk. Here, the Cry is a voice that the audience ignores at its own peril: Where the Watchman in his round Nightly lifts his voice on high, None, accustomed to the sound, Wakes the sooner for his cry. 49 Cowper's speaker then proceeds to liken himself to a bellman, trying to awaken his readers to the inevitability of death and the judgment that follows. One reprinting of Cowper's poem gives it a title-"Verses for the Use of a Bellman"-that points to another element that makes the bellman attractive to Blake: Bellmen actually wrote verses of their own (or sang them as if they had written them). 5° At Christmas, they gave them "to each householder in his district ... and [they] expected from each in return some small gratuity."51 This practice is part of the unique status of the bellman/watchman in the Cries; he does not sell his wares directly. A poorly compensated servant of the magistracy, he offers his services free of charge to city dwellers, hoping that they will acknowledge his work with tips and on holidays. The low standard of their performances made them proverbial ("as bad as Bellman's verses"), the butt of jokes by elite authors as late as Walter Scott,52 but it is unlikely that Blake would have been so severe toward these plebeian versifiers. For these reasons, it is appropriate that the first plate of Jerusalem pictures Los, the personification of the prophet, arrayed like a London watchman and carrying a lantern. Unlike Wheatley's match-girl, Los is pictured in profile, looking through a doorway, inviting the audience to follow rather than consume him. Although "Bellman's verses" had a poor reputation, Blake gives to Los a magnificent "Song that he sings on his Watch;' asking Jerusalem, "Why wilt thou rend thyself apart & build an Earthly Kingdom I To reign in pride" (85:30-31). So in "the song of Jerusalem;' Blake re-presents the humble Cry of the bellman, a familiar artifact of London life and London texts and a target of scorn, as a call to redemption and wholeness. Blake also

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gives a twist to the tradition of seeing the bellman as a figure aiming to wake his listeners out of a spiritual sleep by positioning Los in antagonism to the official bellman. Where the watchmen of London are employed by the State, Los is "on a self-appointed guerilla mission to agitate"; 53 he seeks to counter "Satan's Watch-fiends" (39:1), who constantly sift the hours of the day and the expanses of the universe for any sign of resistance to the Moral Law.

* * * The figure of Los the prophetic watchman/bellman shows the resourcefulness of Blake's bricolage, his ability to transform what might strike others as the unpromising materials of everyday life. But the presence of "Satan's Watch-Fiends" also suggests the difficulty of telling true from false throughout Blake and his exquisite sensitivity to the coercions of system itself, of any global scheme of thought and action. There is a strong pulse of paranoia in Blake, offspring of a tradition of radical dissent and a post-Revolutionary repression in which one could be tried for sedition, as Blake was, for ejecting a boisterous soldier from one's garden. It puts him on his guard for Swelld & bloated General Forms, repugnant to the DivineHumanity, who is the Only General and Universal Form To which all Lineaments tend & seek with love & sympathy All broad & general principles belong to benevolence Who protects minute particulars, every one in their own identity. But here the affectionate touch of the tongue is closd in by deadly teeth And the soft smile of friendship & the open dawn of benevolence Becomes a net & a trap, & every energy is renderd cruel. (43=19-26)

The false doubling that exists in a world of merely "General Forms" is not limited to the affections of social life: ''A pretence of Art, to destroy Art! a pretence of Liberty I To destroy Liberty, a pretence of Religion to destroy Religion" (43:34-35). Instead of the "lovely mountains & the curtains of Jerusalem;' which are both plural and singular at once, Los sees in the wasted landscape of fallen Albion only a single "Cave;' "Rock;' and "Tree deadly and poisonous, unimaginative" (43:6o). Given the scope and multifariousness of false doubling, the ability to see the redeeming image of the "Human Form, Divine" does not come easily in Blake. The characters in his prophecies repeatedly fall into seductive habits of mind, from the most ancient forms of Moral Law to the newfangled worship

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of the senses called deism. This is why Los famously declares that he must "Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans" (10:20). However, the antinomian rule of the prophet demands that he not present his system as that of an ''Arbitrary Dictator:' He must instead offer a series of"If ... then"s that his audience is free to ignore. In other words, if Los cries out to Albion and its inhabitants, there must be no guarantee that they will do as his cry instructs. The freedom of action required by true prophecy is clearest in a sequence toward the end of chapter two, which puts us back into touch with the topos of pity and the vicissitudes of response in Blake's earlier work. At this point, Albion has fallen from "willing sacrifice of Self. to sacrifice of (miscall'd Enemies)" (28:20 ), the first step in constructing a repressive society based on Moral Law and sexual jealousy. He is now in thrall to his own "Spectre:' who "is the Great Selfhood I Satan" (33:17-18). Although the splitting into self and specter would seem to undermine selfishness, since it makes clear that the ontology of the subject is not whole and autonomous, it has the opposite effect. Like the split subject in Lacan's mirror stage who must unite himself to enter into the conventional world of the Symbolic, Albion denies his multiplicity to remain whole in the fallen world. In this dire situation, we hear another desperate cry in the city; "[t]he Shuttles of death sing in the sky to Islington & Pancrass I Round Marybone to Tyburns River" (41:8-9) while Albion's malady of spectral self-division and self-righteousness spreads to his "families:' the twenty-eight cities and towns of Britain. Caught up in "self condemnation;' their "Spectres ragd within": Drinking the shuddering fears & loves of Albion's Families Destroying by selfish affections the things that they most admire Drinking & eating. & pitying & weeping, as at a trajic scene. The soul drinks murder & revenge, & applauds its own holiness. (41:25-30)

The twenty-eight reprise Albion's ruse of subjectivity. Appearing to be possessed by pity, a going out of the self toward the Other, they risk nothing, enjoying the pain they witness while presenting their actions as holy. This theatricalized pity is part of an ''Aristotelian catharsis" that Blake rejects "because it restores the individual self to a sense of wholeness that can only be temporary, and does nothing about the relationships among individuals." 54 Under these conditions, as Blake phrases it in an earlier prophecy, "pity is become a trade" and a sadistic pleasure, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem are like the "pitying Angel [who] lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs:'55

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Paralyzed by pity, Albion's friends pray for divine intervention, which Los rejects on antinomian grounds: "Why stand we here trembling around I Calling on God for help; and not ourselves in whom God dwells" (43=11-12). But Los' call is misinterpreted. Instead of comforting him through words, Albion's friends attempt to do so by compelling him to accept Los's prophecy: With one accord in love sublime, & as on Cherubs wings They Albion surround with kindest violence to bear him back Against his will thro Los's Gate to Eden. (44:1-3)

Their love may be well intentioned, but violence, however kind, violates the rule that "the Will must not be bended" (44:18), and the effect is disastrous: They bow to a "Religion" of "love & jealousy immingled;' delegate their prophetic power to Los, and then Strucken with Albions disease they become what they behold; They assimilate with Albion in pity & compassion; Their Emanations return not: their Spectres rage in the Deep. (44:32-34)

Albion's friends seem ideally responsive, as "they become what they behold;' an intensification of Collins' "own"ing. Yet this strongest form of consumption consumes them, further reifying their identities as split beings and increasing the darkness of their world. Inspired by the malign oracle of false pity, they lose themselves. In the plates that draw on "The Bellman's Song" (27 and 77) Blake offers a different response to the problem of recognizing prophecy. "The Fields from Islington to Marybone" is a microcosm of Jerusalem, moving from "Innocence to Experience to Redemption.'' 56 The "meadows green" of London/Jerusalem become the site of "Satans Synagogue;' in which victims "groan'd aloud on London Stone" and "Tyburn's brook" (43, 52-53). After describing Jerusalem's glory and fall for many stanzas in the third person, the speaker, who turns out to be Albion, manages to see the remnants of "the Human Form, Divine;' and he addresses it directly: "0 Jesus still the Form was thine" (79). The second-person pronoun pulls the speaker closer to the "I" who reclaims his specter and declaims the final vision of Jerusalem. After observing from a distance, he admits that he is a part of the fallen world that he beholds; Islington, Marybone, and Tyburn are literally part of him. But he does not merely "become what he beholds" because he refuses to repeat the sins of accusing others while exonerating himself and compelling them to re-

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pent. Redemption comes when the speaker admits that he is guilty of slaying Jesus "in my dark self-righteous pride" and then turns his attention to "the spectre of Albion": "I here reclaim thee as my own I My Selthood! Satan! armd in gold" (94-95). Empowered by his insight into his self-division, he denounces the "Patriarchal pride" that this "Selthood" nurtures, which rates one's "own house & family" above "all the World." In place of this hierarchical and narrowly private worldview, he concludes with a vision of public mutuality: In my Exchanges every Land Shall walk, & mine in every Land, Mutual shall build Jerusalem: Both heart in heart & hand in hand. (104-7)

The verse on plate 77 follows a similar pattern. It begins with an unnamed speaker watching the contraction of "the Sun ... into an orb;' "the Moon into a globe" and "Man himself shrunk up I Into a little root a fathom long" (57-58). Having asked "a Watcher & a Holy-One" what it means, he is told these are the effects of"the Wheel of Religion" (59-60). To arrest its momentum, this relative of a watchman/bellman exhorts him to imitate Jesus' program of "self-denial" and not, like a Pharisee, to "smite with terror & with punishments I Those that are sick" (70-77). It is only after listening to another's voice, like the Innocent sweeper does, and refusing to "curse" those he addresses that he can call, bellman-like, on England to "awake!" from "the sleep of death," and to once again "[r]eceive the Lamb of God to dwell I In Englands green & pleasant bowers." The speakers imitate Jesus as Albion does at the end of Jerusalem when his specter casts a shadow on him and Christ: ''Albion stood in terror: not for himself but for his Friend I Divine, & Self was lost in the contemplation of faith" (96:30-31). This is how we get to the crowning song of redemption. Along the way, we are also initiated into another of Blake's methods for avoiding bad generalization and false universals, his prosodic variation. It is designed to represent the fluctuations of human voice, both the metrical heterogeneity of a single character's utterances and the diversity of the characters who speak. He announces this program on plate 3, where he rejects the "Monotonous Cadence" used by Milton and Shakespeare, "derived from the modern bondage" of rhyme, for a freer prosody appropriate to "a true Orator" (3:36-41). In keeping with Blake's ideal of the "true Orator" (3:41), Jerusalem is an experimental oratorio, in which he aims to reproduce the ef-

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feet of characters singing in "minute particulars" but all sharing the same stage. Since "everything that lives is holy;' as Blake repeatedly insists, even the destructive characters have a chance to sing within the "song of Jerusalem": "And thus the Warriors cry. in the hot day of Victory, in Songs I Look: the beautiful Daughter of Albion sits naked upon the Stone I Her panting Victim beside her: her heart is drunk with blood" ( 68:11-13). According everyone a singing part, from bloodthirsty warriors to Los in the Song of the Watch to Albion in "The Fields from Islington to Marybone;' Blake aims for a general state of affairs that respects particulars and is thus truly universal. While the "song of Jerusalem" ends, the concluding vision suggests not the braying unanimity for William of Orange at the end of An Island in the Moon but rather endless discourse, with the "Four Living Creatures" who represent all life "convers[ing] together in Visionary forms dramatic" (98:28). That they converse together raises the question of whether Blake could imagine a similar effect in conversational prose. But he refers to the poem in the end as "the song of Jerusalem;' not "the conversation;' and one reason why may be that while conversation in prose can easily be a ruse of the self (see An Island), the "cadences & number" of verse place it more firmly in a transindividual domain. Songs are public in intention and tend to be held in common, and Cries are a particularly attractive type of song. They are sung by the humblest citizens (so all can be prophets) and encountered by everyone (so the Word is available to all). This is especially apparent in the Cries that Blake integrates into his texts throughout his career. When he adapts the Bellman's Cry to address "the Jews;' he must have known it highly unlikely that any of the fifteen thousand Jews then residing in England would read one of the only six instances of plate 27 that he engraved before his death. But he addresses them anyway, and this returns us a final time to the problem of duty in his work. On one hand, it shows the breadth of his vision of Albion; though the Jews are pariahs in the England of his time, Blake addresses them as "the true Christians" (27:108) because of their humility. Of course, he does this largely to wake his primary audience, Christians, from their unearned superiority and dogmatic slumber. Antagonistic to the sacrificial logic of his time and ours that excludes some form of the Other and then calls what remains Universal, he launches a brief against the false inclusivity of the public sphere. Judged on these terms, it seems plausible to view him as the heir of the Ranters. Like those who turned the Bellman's cry to a call to godliness in the seventeenth century, he re-collects it to call his readers to their duty to engage

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in a revolutionary "Mental Fight." Yet unlike Winstanley or the other radical pamphleteers 'Of the seventeenth century or Blake's own time, he does not seek access to a print technology that would allow him to call everyone to their public duty. We may chalk this up to circumstances not of his making, the "counter-arts conspiracy" that kept him poor and unknown. But I would suggest that what ultimately matters for Blake is not the fact of circulation but rather the labor of putting forth his vision, the precious result of a vigilance that lies beyond the panoptic power of the "Watch-fiends." Steven Goldsmith trenchantly observes that "Blake did not live in 1650, and one difference made by his modernity was that, with the simultaneous development of a public sphere and a discourse of the aesthetic, it offered an alternative mode of enthusiasm." In that alternative mode, critical judgment comes to feel as if it were an action, and one that fulfills "one's duty to the nation," as one "makes the future possible" through responses that are recorded and addressed to the public. 57 A main vehicle of Blake's response is another phenomenon that intervenes between 1650 and his era, the theory and practice of collecting artifacts that includes the Ballad Revival. Clued into the songs circulating around the streets of London and recently made the object of antiquarian interest, he integrates them into his own verse. When these Cries are heard or read, what is demanded of us is that we listen to them as fully as possible. To demand less is to court the false comforts of mere pity; to demand more is to risk the coercions that Blake is committed to avoiding. He arrives at this position through responding to the call of the popular as he hears it in the Cries, calling back out to the Public, whether or not it ever hears him.

Wordsworthian "Interest": Highland Girls, German Ballads, and English Tourists Wordsworth, too, worries about how to produce literary texts that demand something of readers without coercing them. As we have seen in the Preface, he attempts to distinguish between "interesting" poems, like "The Children in the Wood;' and those that abuse readerly interests, like Johnson's parody. Writing to Coleridge from Goslar, Germany in January of 1799, Wordsworth gives another example of an "interesting" poem, Peter Bell: "The third part I think interesting a praise which I give myself with more pleasure as I know that in general I can lay little claim to it:' 58 How has Wordsworth changed the

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third part of Peter Bell to make it "interesting"? A good candidate is a scene in which Peter gazes back to see a "miserable vision" of himself and his sixth wife, a young, pregnant Highland girl dying of heartbreak over his sinful ways: Close by a brake of flowering furze He sees himself as plain as day He sees himself, a man in figure Even like himself, nor less nor bigger Not five yards from the broad high-way. And stretch'd beneath the furze he sees The Highland girl-it is no otherAnd hears her crying as she cried The very moment that she died, My mother! oh! my mother! The sweat pours down from Peter's face So grievous is his hearts contrition With agony his eye-balls ache While he beholds by the furze-brake This miserable vision. 59

Although Peter Bell does not end up making its way into Lyrical Ballads,60 this scene captures how Wordsworth redefines both lyric and ballad to stimulate the kind of interest he seeks. Here, Peter literally looks back on himself, with Wordsworth comically elongating the moment, "a man in figure I Just like himself, nor less nor bigger:' In playing around with the figurativeness of Peter's past self, Wordsworth parodies the "spots of time" that he is just beginning to develop for The Prelude, a poem he began at the same time he was revising Peter Bell. In a move reminiscent of Gay, he shows that even the shallowest character deserves a long poem that explores his unguessed-of depths. Indeed, in the thudding beat and the pronounced rhymes of its modified ballad stanza, Peter Bell is closer than The Prelude to Wordsworth's early life in one crucial respect. In one of his first poems, properly titled by later editors "A Ballad;' he draws on elite ballad imitations to tell of the death of Mary, "the fairest maid of Esthwaite's vale;' betrayed by a local boy who happens to be named William. By looking back on the suffering he has wrought, Peter holds up for examination Wordsworth's own early experiments in ballads of village tragedy.

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Just as Blake departs from prior collections of the Cries of London, Wordsworth is by his German trip beginning to doubt the salutary effects of the Ballad Revival, especially the strain of German imitations it spawned. Reliques found an enthusiastic audience in Germany, and the poems it inspired made their way back to England. They exerted a powerful effect on Rime of theAncyent Marinere, the first poem in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads; readers "would have immediately recognized [it] as fashionably 'romantic' in the German style:'61 Many critics have interpreted Peter Bell as a response to the Rime; dissatisfied with the supernatural mysteries that drive Coleridge's tale, Wordsworth tells of a sinner redeemed by a humanizing imagination. 62 However, Wordsworth does not mention Coleridge's poem in his letters from Goslar. Instead, he signals his doubts about the supernatural ballad through a direct attack on one of the chief German balladeers, Gottfried August Biirger, whose "Lass of Fair Wone" was among the sources for "The Thorn" and whose Gedichte Wordsworth purchased in Hamburg, along with an edition of Percy's Reliques. 63 In a passage from the same letter in which he calls the third part of Peter Bell "interesting;' he complains that Burger's work lacks "manners connected with the permanent objects of nature ... pictures [that] must interest when the original shall cease to exist" (255). Since Biirger offers only the "Tra ra la" of his galloping and onomatopoeic verse, Wordsworth reports that "once I have laid the book down;' remembers only "a hurry of pleasure" but "few distinct forms" or "delicate or minute feelings" (234-35). This figuration of reading as a masturbatory indulgence anticipates the well-known passage in the 18oo Preface in which Wordsworth denounces the "deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse" that pander to the British reading public's "degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation" (1:128 and 130 ). 64 Although he does not share Blake's global disposition against system and generality, Wordsworth, too, is concerned with doppelgangers, "pretences of Art" that actually undermine it. Wordsworth's attitude toward Germanized ballads seems to fit the accusation that he gets to present his poems as health food when they in fact have been heavily spiked with sugar. Many have questioned his attempt to erect a hygienic barrier between himself and sensationalistic poetry, noting the centrality in his poems of the suffering woman who transmits her pain to a male onlooker. 65 The "Thorn" -like cry and image of the Highland girl affirms this gendered model of sensationalistic poetry. Seeing her, Peter's "eye-balls ache;' as if he misreads his own experience as mere sensation. He is captivated by the Medusa-like force of the woman in pain, a link in a chain reaction that

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extends outward to the readers of Peter Bell. They are drawn in by the Highland girl's cry, its extrasemantic force increased by the redundancy of the description ("crying as she cried"), the momentum of the meter, the pull of its rhymes. But if Wordsworth exploits these fantasies, he does so in an attempt to make his readers recognize their absorptive power. This is, after all, a poem that begins its "Tale" with Peter threatening to beat an ass for refusing to move because it is fixated on its master's drowned body (156-6o). The eccentricity of this opening evokes objections from the audience embedded in the poem, the rustic neighbors who stand in contrast to the urbanized masses nearly despaired of in the Preface: "My dearest Sir" cried Mistress Swan You've got at once into the middle And little Bess with accents sweeter Cried "Oh! dear Sir! but who is Peter

The Squire cried "Sure as Paradise Was lost to us by Adam's sinning We all are wandering in a wood And therefore Sir I wish you would Begin at the beginning. (161-70)

However, the fault may lie as much with the audience as the teller. In other words, the Squire infantilizes himself, turning himself into a child in the wood in the very act of insisting upon his rights as an auditor. His mistake is not to insist on them but rather in insisting that they be preserved through an orthodox plot. In the terms Wordsworth uses in the Preface, the Squire places "incidents" (the hallmark of Burger's verse), over "feeling;' abandoning his own agency as a reader, preferring the familiarity of "pre-established codes of decision" over "experiments" that will stimulate readerly interest. To convey this message, Wordsworth has the narrator, after initially complying with his neighbors' demands, refuse to proceed in a straight line. Later circling back to Peter's beating of the ass, he lavishes twenty stanzas on it. Indeed, in the earliest surviving manuscript, Wordsworth spends double the lines on this brutal scene, and the draft trails off just before it is resolved by Peter's discovery as to why the ass refuses to move. The difficulty Wordsworth initially experienced in getting past this moment suggests that he, too, was captivated by its extravagant violence, a beating echoed by the

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pulse of the poem's strong meter. That captivation is then transferred to the members of the audience, who, if they do not adopt a critical distance, are left in the abject position of children subject to an "arbitrary" narrator. To play off of Freud, "An Ass is Being Beaten" in this poem, and that beating is inextricable from the writing and then the reading of the poem. 66 It is a "Tale" of a tail subjected to violence. Peter is the primary object of the poem's lessoning, which turns him from unfeeling rogue into "a good and honest man" (1505). The readers are similarly instructed by being made witness to his transformation. What saves the poem from garden variety sadomasochism is the way it takes advantage of the theatricality of the sadomasochistic and foregrounds its own mechanism. It winks at the excesses borrowed from the Germanized ballad that it disenchants in hopes of reenchanting it in a way that preserves the interests of the reader. Peter Bell seeks to purify the Ballad Revival through parodying it. While Peter may be captivated by the sight of his own shadow, the audience is moved toward a less absorbed position by solecisms like "eye-balls" and doggerel rhymes ("figure"/"bigger"). A similar deflation also occurs on the level of genre, as the epic tones that in Tintern Abbey or The Prelude tell of sublime encounters with Nature are replaced by the humbler cadences of a ballad relating how a ne'er-do-well potter is shocked by a glimpse of his own ghost. The poem is not simply laughing at Peter's pain or even laughing and sympathizing at the same time. Rather, the verse keeps the audience guessing about whether or not they should laugh, more like the "mock" structure of early eighteenth-century poetry than anything else we find in Wordsworth. 67 This is what Peter cannot see when he reads the Highland girl scene; he identifies so strongly with his past self that, unlike the persona in The Prelude, he cannot perceive the difference between the past and present "I" on which that identification is predicated. When Peter betrayed the Highland girl, he did not feel remorse; now, in the act of recollection, all he can do is feel it. In contrast, the audience has the opportunity to perceive this discontinuity and then incorporate it into a tale of spiritual reformation while not losing sight of the fictitiousness of this lyric self, however necessary that fiction feels. This is how a lyrical ballad is designed to work. It may use the absorptive power of the ballad in its meter and its narrative, and the mode of reading it seeks is not purely voluntaristic; but it provides a space for reflection on these reactions. It relies on fostering that favorite Wordsworthian category-habit-which dwells in the borderland between will and reflex, disci-

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plining readers to learn how to enlarge their own agency, putting them into touch with permanently interesting structures missed by Burger's ballads.

The Limits of the Erotic and the Familial in "Lucy Gray" and Michael If Wordsworth critiques the Ballad Revival by parodying rhetorical excess in

Peter Bell, he takes the opposite tack in another poem he composed at Goslar, "Lucy Gray." 68 This, too, is a ghost story about a girl, but it is designed to refuse the sensationalism represented by the Highland girl's cry. For Wordsworth, this strategy is part of his response to a persistent problem that he discovers in Germany, the will's tendency either to colonize what it encounters, which he often represents as a pursuit of a sexual object, or to submit to it, which he repeatedly pictures as a submission to the will of the Father. His desire to find some third position beyond the structures of erotic and filial affect lends the ballad new significance. He labors to restore its status as a poetic commonplace and in doing so protect the reader's interests from manipulation by the automatic responses that other forms aim to stimulate. Or, in Blake's terms, he seeks that paradoxical state in which the self agrees to be possessed by some other force but does not, in doing so, lose its agency. The debt "Lucy Gray" owes to the Ballad Revival is signaled by its stanzaic form (balladic short measure) and by the stanza that echoes the same quatrain of"The Children in the Wood" quoted in the Preface: "These pretty babes with hand in hand .. :' Here, Lucy is sent by her father to guide her mother through an approaching snowstorm and runs into trouble: The storm came on before its time, She wander'd up and down, And many a hill did Lucy climb But never reach'd the Town. (29-32)

Unlike the corpses of the two children, sheltered in the original ballad by the decorous robin redbreast, Lucy's body is never recovered. Her parents' search for her is stymied when her footprints disappear in the middle of a snowy bridge, and when she reappears in neighborhood lore, she has been transfigured into something rich and strange: 0' er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind;

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And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. (61-64)

It is an eerie image, but also one designed to block the reader's lurid impulses. To say that she averts her face would not be quite right, since she seems blithely unaware that anyone might ever look at her. (She could be called self-absorbed, except for the fact that she does not have a self.) An asocial apparition, she refuses voyeuristic pleasure, which depends upon the excitement that the object of vision could turn to acknowledge or expose the onlooker's desire or reveal her own. Lucy Gray consequently obstructs the excitement that sets in motion the romance plot that so frequently haunts ballads, Wordsworth's included. Her turning away also blocks a possible outcome of this eroticization, the unspeakable horror that results from seeing the ravaged face of the woman wronged who appears in an earlier ballad and who, like the Highland girl, cries out: "I did not speak-1 saw her face, I Her face it was enough for me" ("The Thorn;' 199-200). Lucy Gray's facelessness puts her further outside the tragic love plot than even the elusive figures of the other "Lucy" lyrics, which are also in ballad measure. Although she comes close to a figure devoid of erotic signification in ''A slumber did my spirit seal;' these poems are still oriented toward the love lyric and its erotic desires in a way that "Lucy Gray" is not. Even the young girl of "Three years she grew in sun and shower;' who, like Lucy Gray, is killed by Nature, is referred to as "my Lucy" near the poem's end (italics mine, 37). Lucy Gray, in contrast, lies beyond the appropriations of individual desire. Her detachment carries through to her "solitary song I That whistles in the wind:' Barely audible, it seems redundant; if it "whistles in the wind;' it also whistles like the wind. This figuration could be taken as another example of Wordsworth's pantheistic fantasy in which human signs are relocated from the instability of culture to the permanence of Nature-hedgerows barely hedgerows, leech gatherers indistinguishable from stones, young girls rolled round in earth's diurnal course, a "real language of men" rooted in the soil. But we can instead read the seeming redundancy of Lucy Gray's song (and these other signs) as an effect of Wordsworth's suspicious critique of the culture of his time; in a world in which ballads and every other genre are exploited to undermine the reader's interests, one of the only alternative forms poetic value can take is as a double of natural phenomena. No one can claim ownership of the wind, and it has no designs on those it breezes by. Similar figures of redundant value crop up in other verse written

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around this time. The opening lines of the first fragments of The Prelude, composed in Goslar, asks, "[W) as it for this I That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved I To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song;' a passage that hears the river doubling the balladic source of the nurse's song, and on the verso side of the same page are lines from what would be "the glad preamble" of the 1805 Prelude, praising "a mild creative breeze" that, inspiring others, "becomes I A tempest a redundant energy." 69 The same redundancy appears in Michael, where Luke's "[f]eelings and emanations" please his father as "[l]ight to the sun, and music to the wind" (210-11). Although Michael would seem to have little to do with "Lucy Gray" or ballads more generally, it has been recently presented as a response to Coleridge's ballad Christabel, a successor to the Rime-Peter Bell contest, countering Coleridge's supernatural strangeness with a domestic tale grounded in the landscape.7° But despite this attempted exorcism, Michael remains haunted, not just by the ghost of its title character who loses possession of his land or by Christabel, but also by a fragment named by later editors "Ballad Michael:' In it, Wordsworth imagines that his tale has already been "carved on a stone" by two local shepherds, a "pastoral ballad" that is now "sung far and near" (16-20). Their version of Michael's story is much less reverent than the august poem that crowns the 18oo edition of Lyrical Ballads, suggesting that some kind of sexual dalliance is to blame for his fall. So at the same time that Wordsworth writes Michael, he conjures a ghostly balladic double that threatens to undermine his tale of virtuous country life by appealing to the pleasures of the flesh. 71 Familial bonds would seem to provide an alternative to the perverse erotics of the supernatural ballad or the salacious verse of"Ballad Michael:' But Michael also helps us to see why the family is an insufficient model for protecting readerly interest. The poem does open with the speaker hoping for a paternal relationship to his audience, the "youthful Poets, who among these Hills I Will be my second Self when I am gone" (37-38 ). Michael thus seems designed to turn its readers into the poet's children-doubles; drawn in by this pastoral tale, they will absorb themselves in the poet's interest in having his identity preserved. But while Wordsworth may see fathers in a kindlier light than Blake, the failure of the father-son dyad in the poem suggests that there is a difference between the poem and the family as structures for producing value. That difference has recently been presented by Marjorie Levinson and others as a parasitism that reveals a materialist scandal behind Wordsworthian "interest." 72 Although he may try to exempt himself from the com-

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modifying world of capitalism, Wordsworth's material indebtedness requires him to practice a "spiritual economics" in which he exploits the unalienated life-world and language of Michael to generate cognitive interest for his sophisticated readers and monetary interest for his pocketbook. But even prior to Michael's capitalist catastrophe, his pastoral world is hardly perfect as a template for a healthy "formal engagement" between poet and reader. Like a reader in thrall, Luke never gets to speak even before Michael's debt goes bad; afterward, at the sheepfold, the only sound he is reported to make is a sob (368), and he is then ventriloquized by his father, who declares: "I knew that thou could'st never have a wish I To leave me, Luke-thou has been bound to me I Only by links of love" (410-12). At this moment, Michael forgets that the "feelings and emanations" that bring him joy are the effect of Luke's own boyish agency, which add "light to the sun, and music to the wind:' The liabilities of Michael's patriarchal model are intimated when, in the midst of his address at the sheepfold in which he seeks to bind Luke to the Name of the Father, he admits that he has forgotten his "purposes" (414). We recall that in the Preface, Wordsworth stakes everything on having "a purpose"; without it, he has no "right to the name of a Poet" (1:126). In Michael, he puts that claim to the test not only in the title character's faltering but also the claims of the narrator who directs the poem to his "second selves:' Michael's unquestionable authority allows him to be arbitrary, however noble his intentions may appear; and Luke's escape from that situation, while the overt values of the poem may describe it as a painful fall into sin, also points up the need for some alternative to the family if poems are to preserve the reader's interest. For the reader, unlike Luke, is not under the poet's management. This is a crucial difference splitting the analogy the poem sets up (Michael:Luke::speaker:audience), and it is why the speaker is anxious early on that the reader accept the gift of his tale; he must choose to understand it as not"a waste of words" (131-32), as a poem in his interest. The limits of the family as a model of poetic interest are likewise present in "Lucy Gray." It would be perverse to blame the father for sending Lucy to ensure her mother's safety, yet the image provided after the father makes his request is revealing: At this the Father raised his hook And snapp'd a faggot-band; He plied his work, and Lucy took The lantern in her hand. (21-24)

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The cutting of the "faggot-band" prefigures the splitting apart of his family: The father is so intent on chopping wood to provide for his household (a humbler version of Michael's titanic labors) that he is ignorant of the risk of sending his daughter out in such conditions (like sending Luke to the city). His actions, though, signify not a moral failure but rather a necessary ignorance of what the audience knows from the opening stanza, that "the sweet face of Lucy Gray I Will never more be seen." This is to say that the tale has not a moral, as we see in "The Children in the Wood" (parents, be careful whom you trust; guardians, be careful how you treat your charges), so much as a structural necessity: The family fails because it has no structure like a "formal engagement" to regulate the affect among its members and to mitigate the imposition of the parents' will on the child, and so Nature must break that family tie to transform Lucy into a figure for something else. Whether or not Lucy wants to go, she must because her father has ordered it. Viewed this way, her name takes on an added significance. While "Gray" may be the name given by her father, it seems more apt as a description of her ontological state after the snowstorm takes her. She inhabits a gray space between life and death, and in this form is transferred from the circumscribed sphere of her family to local legend to the object of a lyrical ballad that deflects the desires of the Germanized ballad. Wordsworth's concern for imposing on others finds its most extreme expression in another fragment of The Prelude drafted in Goslar, in which the speaker declares that he "would not strike a flower I As many a man will strike his horse:' worrying that he might injure what he loves "from the wantonness in which we play I With things we love, or from a freak of thought:' 73 Wordsworth knows that such purity of thought and action is impossible; other lines in this fragment are incorporated into "Nutting;' which tells of a wanton assault on a "virgin scene" in order to get some hazelnuts. But the speaker is guilt stricken by his actions, an index of his quest for some way of training the will to acknowledge the rights of others, a sensitivity that extends as far as personified trees. Even a young girl tending a lamb in another lyrical ballad is cast as a conflict between her desire to see to all of its material needs and the animal's wish not to be tied up, however lovingly. When the speaker of"The Pet-Lamb" repeats to himself the girl's song to the creature, he begins to wonder if only half of"the ballad" was hers (61-64), since he is affected so strongly by her song that he has made his own poem to represent it. He then decides that she is the majority owner, since the power of her expression is such that he "almost receiv'd her heart into my own" (65-68).

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While the lines stress the force of her words as a claim to ownership, the "almost" is significant. It inserts a minimal space between observer and observed that prevents him either from being dominated by her words or co-opting them. The commitment to making that space lends the ballad new significance in Wordsworth's experimental poetry; he labors to restore its position, dislocated into uncanniness by the Ballad Revival, as a poetic commonplace, an accessible and affecting genre that does not fall into the merely sensational. The clearest figure for the poetry he seeks is Lucy Gray herself. Footprints in the snow are a delicate enough index of presence; now, it seems as if she would leave no footprint at all as "she trips along" without impediment. It does not take much to see her footfalls, either visible on the snow or in the bounding of her ghostly feet, as a figure for poetic feet that counters the too heavy "tra ra la" of Burger and other supernatural ballads. Wordsworth wishes for a lyric step as light and yet as consequential as Lucy's tripping along, constructed in part from an old ballad that in Coleridge's words has moved "thousands of thousands:'

Complicating Collection on the Scottish Tour "Ballad" is not a term in the classes of poems that Wordsworth introduces in Poems (1815) and tinkers with until his death in 1850, such as "Poems of the Imagination;' "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection;' and "Poems of Childhood:' But ballads do play a central role in his first experiments with this taxonomy in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), which includes classes like "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty;' "Moods of My Own Mind;' and "Poems Written During a Tour Made in Scotland." 74 The last of these, which I will refer to as the Scottish sequence, is among the first of Wordsworth's many poetic tours, and it focuses attention on his continuing search for a lyric that can move readers without violating their interests. It is also the group of poems in which the Ballad Revival plays the most prominent role. The sequence opens with "Rob Roy's Grave;' which likens Rob Roy to Robin Hood, "the English ballad singer's joy;' and it closes with "Yarrow Unvisited;' which in its epigraph cites Hamilton's "Braes of Yarrow" and other ballads set on its banks. In Poems, the reader encounters the Scottish sequence after "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty" and before "Moods of My Own Mind;' an appropriate ordering because it occupies a lyric middle ground between the choral im-

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pulse of the former and the solitude of the latter. Where in the "Sonnets;' the speaker stands for England as a whole, often moving without pause from "I" to "we;' he knows that he is not in his native land in the Scottish sequence, a knowledge that singles him out. On the other hand, the fact that he is encountering a landscape with its own history and society also grounds him more than in the "Moods" that follow. There, he "wander[s] lonely as a cloud"; in Scotland, his progress is guided by the grooves that history has carved in the landscape, which make him conscious of what he does not fully know, more eager to find some shared structure of meaning but also more cautious of his steps. This cautiousness emerges most clearly in the best-known poem from the Scottish sequence, "The Solitary Reaper:' After being inspired by the power of the reaper's song to liken it to the song of the Arabian nightingale and then the cuckoo in the Hebrides, it is as if the mention of the Hebrides, the only Scottish place-name in the poem, jogs the speaker into recalling that he does not understand the Gaelic words of her song, and he asks: "Will no one tell me what she sings?" (17). That question is predicated on the perception of a linguistic divide between English and Gaelic that itself betokens a long and bloody colonial history. If in the "Sonnets;' Wordsworth rallies his audience in the face of a threatened invasion by Napoleon by declaring, "We must be free or die, who speak the tongue I That Shakespeare spake;' 75 he is made aware in the Highlands that not every British citizen speaks Shakespeare's tongue. He needs help in translating the Reaper's song. Here and in other poems in the sequence, he turns to the ballad as a translation device. The ballad is woven into the first four lines of each stanza of "The Solitary Reaper;' and the speaker surmises that her song is of one of two types well represented in the Ballad Revival, "battles long ago;' featured in the minstrelsy of Percy and his followers, or "[f]amiliar matter of today" that is the stuff of the village tragedy (19-22). Having made sense of the Reaper's "theme;' the speaker sets it aside and places a temporal frame around the experience: "Whate' er the theme, the Maiden sang I As if her song could have no ending" (25-26). Her strange song now intelligible, the tourist is now able to collect it and move on to the next site in the tour: "I listen'd till I had my fill ... The music in my heart I bore, I Long after it was heard no more" (29, 31-32). One could read the poem as a "poetic colonization" that turns her song into a something "deliciously foreign" and yet "comfortably assimilable." 76 The problem with this reading is that it misses the literary-historical context

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that makes his "Behold" an act of remarkable sensitivity. Dating back to Addison's passing allusion to the "Songs and Fables passed from Father to Son" in Spectator 70, there is little concern among ballad collectors that they have to worry over the details of the versions they come across, especially when recited by a member of the lower classes. But in Wordsworth the tourist and the poet who records his experience is committed to stepping carefully to preserve her singing, sign of a community that makes her solitary rather than alienated. A similar point can be made if we consider the source of this scene. The Wordsworths did not actually see a solitary reaper during their tour but rather read of one in a notebook of another Scottish tour written by William's friend, the Reverend Thomas Wilkinson: "[H] er strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more:>77 Wilkinson does not perceive his ignorance of Gaelic as a problem, and the fact that Wordsworth does is an index of the complexity with which the poem approaches the possibility of community. The "lyric problem" that animates the Scottish sequence is "how to sing of this spot and also leave it unviolated:' 78 That problem is part of a broader concern in Wordsworth for how poems group objects together, including poems themselves. Writing to his friend and patron Lady Beaumont just before Poems is published, Wordsworth rightly predicts that his critics will scorn the many short poems as "trivial things." 79 He responds that he has not lost his sense of purpose, that he remains vigilant in not imposing on his reader's interests. But if the reader cannot see the point of a single poem on a flower, she should view these groupings "collectively": the "Moods" "fix the attention upon a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent" (147). To defend this claim, he focuses on a poem in which the speaker picks one ship out of a flotilla, which illustrates a "law of thought": "[T]he mind can have no rest among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual" (148). One would assume that this "law of thought" requires him to view his series of experiences in Scotland as a whole or to take one experience as representative of the whole. But, unlike ships, the Highlanders talk back, and they do so in ways that contest easy set-making. Wordsworth must therefore alter the collector's "law of thought" if he is not going to do violence to these poetic souvenirs in the act of extracting them. Challenged by the native speaker of "Stepping Westward" to explain why he is walking in that direc-

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tion, he must gain from her a "spiritual right I To travel through that region bright" (13-16). Only then can the tour proceed. The poems produced out of the encounter between native and tourist are concerned with the relationship between the poet and the solitary readers who constitute "the Public" toward which Wordsworth anxiously directs Poems. Wordsworth is not willing to concede that his "Moods" are mere whim, but by prefacing "Moods" with poems that bring in experiences more grounded in history, he acknowledges that his mind does not stand alone. Alternatively, by following the "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty" with the Scottish sequence, he looks to complicate a nationalism that might violate the interests of his readers through the coercions of patriotism. As we will see shortly, he is not as enlightened as we are (and who could be?) about the dangers of nationalism and colonialism, but he is more aware of them than prior and contemporaneous authors.

Revising Macpherson and Scott: "Glen-Almain" and "Rob Roy's Grave" We can see Wordsworth's heightened awareness of the Ballad Revival's dangers in another pair of poems in the Scottish sequence that explicitly calls attention to the Ballad Revival, "Rob Roy's Grave" and "Glen-Almain; or, the Narrow Glen:' In both, an English traveler is halted at the grave of an important figure from Highland lore. In "Glen-Almain;' it is Ossian, the third-century Gaelic bard who is reputed to be buried in this place. There is a dissonance, however, between the hush of the ravine and the "stormy" voice of the bard supposedly buried there. This disharmony contrasts significantly with the "overflowing" sound and "vale profound" of "The Solitary Reaper" and makes the speaker question whether the legend is "a groundless creed" (18). It turns out, however, that the problem is not with Highland culture as such but with how it has been misrepresented by modern collectors. "GlenAlmain" was composed in 1805, the same year that two major studies exposed the liberties Macpherson had taken with his Highland sources, 80 amplifying the doubts about his 'editing' that had dogged his work since its publication. In this context, the poem's doubts about whether Ossian is buried in this particular glen resonate with the more troubling question as to whether the bard ever existed. Wordsworth's response is to separate local myth from its distortion by elite literature: Macpherson's desire for fame has literally made him overstep his bounds, producing a figure who has no relationship to the local

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culture he supposedly celebrates. 81 To counter this dislocating ambition, Wordsworth salvages the beliefs of Highland culture: What matters it? I blame them not Whose Fancy in this lonely Spot Was moved; and in this way express'd Their notion of it's perfect rest. (19-22)

The speaker of"Glen-Almain" moves backward toward an originary and authentic linguistic moment Wordsworth ties to the epitaph. In his later Essays Upon Epitaphs (1810), he claims that even the most primitive nations mark the burial places of their dead, and " [a) s soon as nations had learned the use of letters, epitaphs were inscribed upon these monuments" (Prose 2:50). In the case of"Glen-Almain;' that impulse is validated by the way in which the legend is rooted in a proper relationship between the Highland community, its landscape, and language. The tourist's realization that this "narrow glen" turns the mind toward mortality not only reflects the deathlike silence of the place but also confirms the topographical pun previously embedded-a "narrow glen" is Nature's version of a grave. Somehow, this spot has always said "death:' In this way, the Highlanders place their language beyond the corruptions of Macpherson's exploitative imagination and forge a relationship with the rhetorical basis of all language: "The separation that is here I Is of the grave; and of austere I And happy feelings of the dead" (27-29). "The separation that is here": Lines like this help to explain why Wordsworth has proven so congenial to poststructuralist critics, positing a signifying play of presence and absence generated by the blank "of the grave:' But if there is a mortal gap at the heart of language, Wordsworth, rightly or wrongly, has confidence in the epitaph's ability to bridge that gap. Where death might seem to obliterate sense, let alone cultural continuity, the Highlanders' epitaph restores it. The "happy feelings of the dead" can be read either to mean that the living have feelings toward them or feel their presence or even that the dead still feel. The epitaph does the same work for the tourist, allowing him to cross from his particular reflections into the circle of communal acknowledgment. Having begun with a false conception of what Ossian's grave should sound like that he derives from elite literary imposture, he sheds this distortion to participate in local custom, which he affirms in the final lines: "And therefore, was it rightly said I That Ossian, last of all his race! I Lies buried in this lonely place" (30-32). Given the scandalous circumstances of the Ossian phenomenon, Wordsworth buries him within the tradition he fails to honor in

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his elite incarnation and reclaims this ground for English (not Gaelic) poetry. This is the "austere" language that Wordsworth recommends to his readers as they continue on the tour, free of the bloviations of the Ballad Revival and productive of community. "Rob Roy's Grave" has a more respectable target-Walter Scott, who had recited The Lay of The Last Minstrel to the Wordsworths during their 1803 tour. By this time, Scott was already known as Great Britain's foremost ballad collector, having published Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802 to an acclaim that positioned him as the heir of Percy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Scott's project is "the careful containment of rupture;' 82 shoring up the Enlightenment's sociological model of progress from Scottish feudality to British commerce. He manages the unruly energies of historical change by adding artifactual heft and layers of mediation to his representation of "the customs and manners" of the Border, which lies on the cusp of both national and temporal change. His ballad-collecting "Border Raids" are reflected in the profusion of antiquarian glosses that embed the ballads in a particular past and renders them intelligible to a modern reader. In The Lay of The Last Minstrel, the minstrel's tale is itself framed; looking back in the 1690s to a more minstrel-friendly past, he is a surrogate for the author's and reader's acts of historical reconstruction. So, when Wordsworth's speaker opens the Scottish sequence inspired by Rob Roy's grave to "chaunt" a ballad, he reenacts Scott's method of using a tangible fragment of the past to craft a song for a modern British audience. Yet things do not go as planned, for the past, once awakened, refuses to behave, challenging Scott's pacifying historiography. In The Lay of The Last Minstrel, a thirteenth-centurywizard who happens to be named Walter Scott, perfectly preserved in his tomb, awakens to set everything right, defeating the designs of the Goblin Page who has stolen his magical book. So one uncanny figure, a figure for authorial control and order, trumps another, a figure for the necessary but also disruptive mobility of the "page:' But in Wordsworth's poem when Rob Roy answers to the conjuring "chaunt" of the English tourist, playing a ballad-singer, he delivers a "moral code" that would make Robespierre and Napoleon blush, declaring that "[o)f old things all are over old" and that he will "frame I A world of other stuff" by making "Kings ... Obedient to my breath" (85-92). Raised from the dead, Rob Roy voices the seditious sentiments that Dorothy Wordsworth sympathetically hears among the Highlanders as a result of their anger at the Clearances and other colonial strictures: "They spoke much of the oppressions endured by the Highlanders further up, of the absolute impossibility of their living in any

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comfort, and of the cruelty of laying so many restraints on emigration .... In talking of the French and the present times, their language was what most people would call ]acobinical." 83 In "Rob Roy's Grave:' the speaker is less like the masterly Michael Scott than the Sorcerer's Apprentice, unable to control the Jacobinical spirit he has conjured. Under the pressure of the Revolutionary aftermath, historical sequence is scrambled, and the speaker cannot decide whether Rob Roy "came an age too late;' as the clan system began to be squeezed out by the modern British state, or "an age too soon;' now that the law of the sword is threatening to return in Napoleon's grasp (61-68). The speaker breaks the spell only when he remembers that he is casting it (97-109). Reminding himself that he is standing at Rob Roy's grave, he recalls that the outlaw is dead and that the ballad he chants is really an epitaph. Here, the epitaph marks the death not only of Rob Roy but of the clan culture of which he was a part; on the other hand, it gives the English tourist access to that culture, recapitulating the structure of the tour as a whole. Having banished the bogeyman of Jacobinism, he can now reintegrate Rob Roy into a British narrative of liberty. Returning from imperial dreams to "Loch Veol's Heights" and "Loch Lomond's Braes;' the first place-names in the poem, the speaker observes that the Highlanders revere Rob Roy as "the poor Man's stay I The poor man's heart" (109-10), and when they hear his name, their faces still "kindle:' Coming directly after the "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty" and written in the context of the "Jacobinical" sentiments that Dorothy hears in the Highlands, the poem imaginatively overcomes the cultural divide between the Highlands and England. On its face, the conclusion of "Rob Roy's Grave" looks forward to the Waverley novels, in which Jacobitism and other historical anachronisms are flirted with and then dissipated as a way of modeling the inevitability of the Revolution's defeat and the triumph of normal progress. Simultaneously, the local loyalties rooted deeply in Scotland's past, can, like the soldiers in the Highland Watch, be channeled into allegiance to the British state. Yet if Wordsworth appears to end up at a similar place, he gets there by a different route, guided by his concern for readerly interest that is expressed as a questioning of the impulse to produce the effect of history. As he tells Scott rather bluntly, he does not much like "the matter and manner" of his poetry. 84 The bluff balladeer takes for granted that the past can simply be mined for its exciting bits, and he quickly finds himself in over his head when a personification of the past refuses to know his place, a cautionary tale about the seductions of the Ballad Revival, both its historicist assuredness and its re-

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Hance on the glitter of antiquarian artifacts and the sensationalism of German ballads. Like Wordsworth, Scott's interest in the ballad was quickened by Burger-a translation of "Lenore" fired his desire to be a poet-but Scott never rounds critically upon that fascination. In a letter to Wordsworth, he writes that his "reason" for writing The Lay has been to "expe[l] from my brain the Fiend of Chivalry" that has been with him since infancy" and that "I believe such verse will be generally found interesting because enthusiastic:' 85 The two authors clearly have different ideas about what makes poems "interesting." By Wordsworth's lights, Scott abuses the reader's interests by relying only on the "enthusiasm" generated by a history-effect, expelling the "Fiend of Chivalry" from his brain only to have it inhabit the brains of others. While Scott may take loving care in preserving Border Ballads, the aims of his enterprise, particularly in his longer poems, are not ones that Wordsworth respects.

The Return of Burns and the Highland Girl But if Wordsworth is a more sensitive collector than Macpherson and more skeptical of the easy pleasures of narrative than Scott, two other poems in the Scottish sequence mark the limits of his vision. The first is "Address to the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father's Grave. (August 14th, 1803)." Written in Burns's favorite stanzaic form, Standard Habbie, it admonishes his sons to avoid the intemperate "Wit" that led to their father's embarrassments and early grave, a minatory position he amplifies in A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816). Since Hazlitt first mocked Wordsworth for elevating "his own wisdom and purity" at the expense of Burns, critics have detected in Wordsworth's moralizing an aggression against a father-poet and a defensive reaction against "the difference of Scotland which Wordsworth seeks both to deny and to absorb:' 86 If so, this Oedipal aggression and imperial absorption causes Wordsworth some indigestion, for he at the same time writes a poem that challenges the superior attitude of the ''Address." Entitled "Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns," it begins with the speaker feeling Burns's ghost in unsettling proximity: "I shiver, Spirit fierce and bold, I At thought of what I now behold!" (1-2). The next stanza tries to explain this shivering: And have I, then, thy bones so near, And Thou forbidden to appear! As if it were thyself that's here I shrink with pain;

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And both my wishes and my fear Alike are vain. (7-12) The logic here is knotted: Although Burns's "bones" are very near, Burns himself is not present. And yet this absence somehow makes him feel as if Burns were there and this, in turn, makes him "shrink with pain:' It is not clear why Burns's presence would pain him in the same way as Burns's absence. Perhaps he is made melancholy by the thought of the pain Burns endured at the hands of others and through his own faults. Or perhaps the rivalry is making the speaker feel guilty. The last two lines of the stanza keep both readings open: ''And both my wishes and my fear I Alike are vain:' Does Wordsworth wish that Burns were alive? Or does he fear that his predecessor remains alive, or, at least, undead? In the third stanza, he tries to banish this uncanny feeling by repeating the strategy of"Glen-Almain:' This is "no place I Of pain and sorrow, but of grace; I Of shelter, and of silent peace:' So he has no cause to "tremble:' But the difference between the insubstantial phantom of Macpherson's Ossian and Burns's more tangible ghost unsettles the poem's attempt at resolution. The poem ends, "Grasp'd is he now in that embrace I For which he pray'd;' and a note refers the reader to Burns's "Ode to Ruin:' Burns, then, gets his wish, but this is hardly consoling. What "grace" is there in his falling victim to the "cold embrace" of Ruin? It is as if Burns's own words have commandeered the orthodox sentiments of his elegist, denying the sanguine ending that he seeks. Wordsworth's decision to cancel the poem shortly before sending the manuscript for Poems off to his publisher confirms the limits of his reading of Burns. For as we have seen, the figure of Ruin is for Burns not just the force that flattens nai:ve persons such as himself, making him the object of sentimental pathos. The opening of "To Ruin"-"All hail! inexorable lord"-is a selfconscious riff on Milton's Satanic "Hail horrors!" just as Burns self-consciously manipulates personification in the plough of Ruin in "To a Mountain-Daisy:' Wordsworth follows the Edinburgh literati in treating Burns as if he were a "heav'n-taught ploughman'' rather than someone deploying the role of the peasant poet. In Resolution and Independence, also in the Poems of 1807, Burns appears as he "who walk'd in glory and in joy I Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side" (45-46). Here, Wordsworth classes himself with Burns among the "[w]e Poets" who decline from hopes in youth to "despondency and madness" (48-49). Feeling himself also to be an outsider, Wordsworth sympathizes with Burns and honors his gift. But he does not seem to imagine that Burns, re-

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stricted here to a figure of poetic sincerity, might visit ironic twists on elite poetic tropes. The only complications Burns presents are moral; he is too naive for knowing interventions into the codes of high literary history. The difficulties that arise when Wordsworth's desire to simplify Scotland meets his desire to preserve it in his poems are also apparent in "To a Highland Girl (at Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond):' The title character seems to be precisely the symbol of national virtue that Wordsworth seeks: Remote from men, Thou does not need The embarrass'd look of shy distress, And maidenly shamefacedness: Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a Mountaineer. (27-31)

Perfectly in tune with her surroundings and "remote" from modern corruptions, she also "speak[s] the tongue that Shakespeare spake" enchantingly, according to Dorothy: "I think I never heard the English language sound more sweetly from the mouth of the elder of these girls, while she stood at the gate answering our inquiries, her face flushed with the rain; her pronunciation was clear and distinct: without difficulty, yet slow, like that of a foreign speech" (109). In William's poem, the unusual gait of her speech only increases her attractiveness: With no restraint, but such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts, that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech: A bondage sweetly brook'd, a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life! So have I, not unmoved in mind, Seen birds of tempest-loving kind, Thus beating up against the wind. (36-44)

But there is a difference in the Wordsworths' descriptions that undermines this happy tableau. Dorothy reports that she speaks "without difficulty" (if slowly) while William interprets that slowness as the sign of difficulty, of a conflict between the speed of her thoughts and her limited command of English. It appears that this constraint only heightens her pleasure and her desirability to the tourist. She brooks the "bondage" "sweetly;' and the animation that her "restraint" lends to her "gestures" moves the speaker to imagine that

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she loves the "tempest" caused by the rudimentary state of her English. Yet this view is built upon an eroticized fantasy of domination-the Highland girl's bondage gives her pleasure and the English tourist enjoys her enjoymentthat is in turn founded on the gap between the language of the colonizer and colonized. Though her remoteness from men is supposed to render "maidenly shamefacedness" unnecessary, her proximity to schools insisting that she speak English, and, more to the point, her proximity to a male tourist who speaks English, are sufficient to produce an effect very much like a blush. 87 In contrast to the innocence of the flush raised by the rain in Dorothy's account, a maiden blushes when she realizes that she is the object of desire, a recognition that requires some sort of sexual knowledge on her part. 88 Coleridge unwittingly betrays the eroticism of this encounter when he refers to "that delicious poem on the Highland Girl;' and so does Dorothy when she likens this Highland girl to the one in Peter Bell. 89 In other words, "To a Highland Girl" revisits the conflict over the Ballad Revival at the heart of Peter Bell and complicates it with the issues bound up in touring the Highlands in 1803. Having happened upon a site that uncannily repeats an already uncanny scene from his own work, how is Wordsworth to respond? On one hand, it is necessary for the tourist in the poem to enter into some relationship with the Highland girl since she represents the figure of British purity that he seeks. On the other, he must not be a Peter Bell. Of course, there is no threat of his actually marrying her and carrying her away. But the encounter does threaten to support the claim that tourism and especially the collection of souvenirs enacts a symbolic violence that mirrors the violence of colonialism. The Highland girl's reaction to her "bondage" can be read as the flip side of the disconcerting stares that the tourists evoke from some of the other Highlanders, which Dorothy once attributes to "sheer rudeness" and another time to their not knowing English. 90 These difficulties structure the stanza that follows the fantasy triggered by the Highland girl's labored English, which I quote in full: What hand but would a garland cull For thee who art so beautiful? 0 happy pleasure! here to dwell Beside thee in some heathy dell; Adopt your homely ways and dress, A Shepherd, thou a Shepherdess! But I could frame a wish for thee More like a grave reality:

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Thou are to me but as a wave Of the wild sea; and I would have Some claim upon thee, if I could, Though but of common neighbourhood. What joy to hear thee, and to see! Thy elder Brother I would be, Thy Father, any thing to thee! (45-59)

Here, the tourist casts the relationship between her and his "not unmov'd mind" into a pastoral register, but this only brings the problem of his desire to the surface and touches off a series of attempts to distance himself from it. From his earliest poems, Wordsworth knows that the culling of a garland is a conventional sign of a deflowering that carries tragic consequences; back in 1787, it is William's plucking of a rose in ''A Ballad" that Margaret retrospectively takes as a sign of her doom. Bracketing this village tragedy in "Highland Girl;' the speaker abruptly turns to another "wish." Acknowledging the linguistic and cultural gap between them, he wishes only for" [s] orne claim upon" her, even if it would mean merely relocating to her "neighbourhood:' But this more modest "claim" still does not divest the scene of its unsettling erotic resonances and the tragedy threatened by it. There is a disturbing play on words in "grave reality" (yet another grave in Scotland, along with those of Ossian, Rob Roy, and Burns?), and it is carried through in the likening of the Girl to a "wave I Of the wild sea:' The remoteness of an object, as Wordsworth writes in the sonnet he instances to Lady Beaumont in defense of Poems, is no barrier to eroticizing it: "This Ship was nought to me, nor I to her, I Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look" (9-10). Indeed, this remoteness can often be a stimulus to erotic desire, which is exactly the scenario in the text that Wordsworth draws on for his image of the pastoral maiden as a "wave:' This is another citation of the sheepshearing scene in The Winter's Tale, in which Florizel declares to Perdita that "when you do dance, I wish you I A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do I Nothing but that" (4.4.140-42). Florizel's words are at odds with his desires, since he cannot keep Perdita as an object of pure aesthesis and marry her at the same time, and by echoing these lines the speaker seems again to have painted himself into a corner. The Highland girl is not as mobile as Perdita, an aristocrat in disguise who must be restored to her station for the play to end properly. She must retain her locality if she is to maintain her value, and the English "bondage" that she "sweetly brooks" only calls attention to that requirement for fixity. The speaker ends the stanza with a different approach to "common

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neighborhood:' If pastoral romance is impossible then perhaps he can imagine himself as part of her family, taking up the patriarchal position of "Father" or "elder Brother." But this hope must be cast in the subjunctive because it, too, is untenable. The speaker is not of this place, and Gaelic, not English, is, as Dorothy phrases it elsewhere, "the language spoken in the family" (90). Even if he were able to cross this divide, doing so would raise the problem of familial ownership that we saw in "Lucy Gray" and Michael. The strain of these two attractive but unviable options, erotic and familial bonds, registers in the verse of "To a Highland Girl." The lines, already short, start breaking in half-"Thou art to me but as a wave I Of the wild sea; and I would have I Some claim upon thee" (emphasis mine)-and the stanza ends with a triple rhyme on long "e" in which the "sea" of her remoteness becomes the "see" of the tourist's gaze. Grasping for any role that would bring him into touch with the Highland girl without falling into a sensational and tragic ballad plot, he ends with the pregnant unspecificity of "any thing to thee:' The tourist's response is perhaps the only one he can imagine at this point; he turns from addressing the Highland girl and thanks the guiding spirit of the tour itself: Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place. Joy have I had; and going hence I bear away my recompence. In spots like these it is we prize Our Memory, feel that she hath eyes. (60-65)

He spends the rest of the stanza convincing himself that he is not "loth ... to part" from her, that the ability of the mind to collect a spot of time and place is a sufficient simulation. In fact, this simulation is better than the real thing, for it guarantees that this Highland girl will not suffer the same fate as the Highland girl in Peter Bell, the Maid of Buttermere, Martha Ray, Poor Susan, and the many other women who haunt Wordsworth's poems, killed, driven mad, or abandoned "to public vice" by men less scrupulous than the tourist in this poem. He concludes with the hopeful surmise that his Memory will allow him to "behold" this genius loci for the rest of his days (72-76). 91 It is here that we can see another limit in Wordsworth's vision of collection analogous to his inability to see Burns as more than a "heav'n-taught ploughman." The Highland girl prefigures a native who must be something more than merely a "delicious" object of the tourist's gaze. She is in fact a

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promising candidate to be a speaker of "the tongue that Shakespeare spake" and perhaps even a reader of Poems. Still, the combined legacies of colonial violence, the tragic romantic plots of the ballad, and Wordsworth's masculinism block him from casting her in these roles. He can instead only leave the scene hoping that she will remain unadulterated in her enthusiasm and then return to that same scene years later, repeating the same wish. Having sought to purify the Ballad Revival through parody, Wordsworth finds that the Highland girl disturbs any stable resolution of the issues she raises, producing instead an anxious figure of a tourist who hopes for "common neighbourhood" but worries that the costs of achieving this commonality will defeat its wished-for effects. It is an exemplary lyric of Wordsworthian surmise, both in its awareness of the colonizing power of the imagination and in its inability to imagine the girl as subject rather than object of that anxiety. 92 Wordsworth's struggle to represent Scotland in lyric did not stop with the poems published in 1807. In the iteration of the Scottish sequence found in the 1845 Poems, he includes a revised version of "At the Grave of Burns:' "Thoughts Suggested the Day Following;' and then a revision of"To the Sons of Burns." Having left "Yarrow Unvisited;' he does make the trip in "Yarrow Visited" and repeats it in "Yarrow Revisited." Apparently uncomfortable with the consumerism implied in "I listen'd till I had my fill" in "The Solitary Reaper;' he revised the line in the 1820 version to "I listen'd motionless and still:' Although the speaker ends "To a Highland Girl" assuring himself that she will remain the same, Wordsworth is less sure when he reconsiders her in "The Three Cottage Girls;' a station in the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 182o": "Have they, who nursed the blossom, seen I No breach of promise in the fruit?" 93 The multiplicity of these poems attest to the productive power of collection rather than some actual faltering in the course of the Tour. Still, by repeatedly staging these uncertain encounters with the Scottish landscape, by doggedly returning to the banks of Yarrow and Burns's grave, by worrying over the fate of the Highland girl, Wordsworth aims to produce collections of poems that challenge the facile pleasures of the Ballad Revival. As early as his 1798-99 trip to Germany, Wordsworth critiques poems that require the reader to submit to "arbitrary" conventions, conventions that conspire with a paranoid and coercive state and a wider media system to reduce British citizens to "an almost savage torpor:' In the following decade, he adds to this a mode of poetic collection that elaborates a vision of a body politic in which each reader is free to traverse the space between private and public while bound to acknowledge the prerogatives of tradition. This proj-

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ect, however, requires that he repeatedly address a lingering problem, similar to the one faced by Blake in representing the "Human Form Divine": Is it possible to simulate the affective charge produced by family, region, and nation without subjecting readers to the very coercions he wants to avoid? Within the Scottish sequence, that difficulty registers in the possibility that the poetic tourist may be just another English colonizer, reprising on a national stage the role of balladic villain and thus catalyzing the all-too-easy network of identifications and desires Wordsworth associates with the Ballad Revival.

Romantic Lyric at the Schoolhouse Door Wordsworth does not, in the end, succeed in freeing himself from that problem. It might be said that what gives his poetry its power is exactly his grappling with this difficulty, the way it continues to be haunted by the traumas of historical change. But I am leery of the abracadabra that would turn both his political failures and his insights into the source of his poetic success, as if he could not have seen things another way and still have been properly haunted by the pains of colonization of the Highlands and the inequities suffered by Burns prior to his untimely death. While the aim of this chapter has been to show how two important practitioners of Romantic lyric take in the historical and the social by way of their revision of the Ballad Revival, this does not erase Wordsworth's blind spots vis-a-vis class (his view of Burns) and gender (his view of the Highland girl). We might say that what Wordsworth lacks is the more total critique of power that we see in Blake, and, with it, the social redemption that we see at the end of Jerusalem. But since analyses of Wordsworth's political limitations have been well pursued by others (and Blake has properly not been exempt from similar critiques), our attention might be more profitably directed to the legacies of Blakean and Wordsworthian lyric. One way to do that would be to consider what the next generation of Romantic lyric poets does with popular song, either to show literary influence or simply to chart alternatives. It is tempting, for instance, to spend time unpacking some of John Clare's songs, who, especially in texts like his ludic version of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, profoundly rethinks the relationship between lyric speaker and popular culture.94 It is even more tempting to dive into the works of Felicia Hemans. Of the British writers of her era, she was the most deeply and widely read in the burgeoning archive of popular song and associated critical materials, a prolific and commercially successful writer of song lyrics (unlike

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Wordsworth and Blake).95 She was also committed to according women a greater role in the songs of the nation: In The Abencerrage (1819) and The Siege of Valencia (1823), Spanish songs are initially part of her self-presentation as a bard of masculine heroism, with Spain as bearer of both the chivalry of the past and the collective spirit of a would-be liberal state. 96 Yet in The Forest Sanctuary (1825), Records of Woman (1828), and National Lyrics and Songs for Music (1834), she amplifies strains in her work that question the alliance between popular lyric, the dutiful woman, and the blood-soaked battlefield.97 But the exigencies of space require that we move now to another topic if we are to understand more fully the legacy of the Romantic response to the call of the popular. That is, we need to consider the institution that emerges to foster and administer this lyric consciousness-the school (although Hemans plays a role here, too). It is prefigured by the great Romantic topos of the child that recurs in these poems. Songs of Innocence and of Experience presents itself as a book for children, routing its incisive questions of readerly agency through the figure of the child, vulnerable to the barbarism of the adult world but also gifted with a wisdom lacking in many adults. Wordsworth was happy to see his work adapted for schoolchildren,98 and we can catch an echo of"To a Highland Girl" in the beginning of"Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (1815): "With the young of both sexes, Poetry is, like love, a passion; but for much of the greater part of those who have been proud of its power over their minds, a necessity soon arises of breaking the pleasing bondage" (emphasis mine, Prose 3:62). So it appears that while the Highland girl seems ineducable because her maturation can mean only a fall, the "bondage" of English language that she "sweetly brook[s]" is structurally analogous to the "pleasing bondage" of poetry that Wordsworth wishes not to disenchant but to cultivate into a "study" (3:62). The question for those interested in how Literature emerges as an institution is then how the representation of poetry as the material for fashioning the self and nation is assimilated into the school. This is the prime site for the re-collection of the Romantic collection of the ballad, the emerging networks of texts, pedagogies, and forms of literary scholarship that come to structure literary study from grade school to graduate school. As poems like "The Tyger" and "Lucy Gray" enter into school curricula, and as the ballad collections of Percy, Ritson, and Scott help beget philology and the theories that succeed it, the interrelationship of the ballad and high lyric gets situated at the heart of what we have come to call the English canon. Tracking this transformation is the task of the final chapter.

Chapter 5

Reading as Remembering and the Subject of Lyric: Child Ballads, Children's Ballads, and the New Criticism

Three years before writing ''America the Beautiful;' Katharine Lee Bates published a collection of ballads for use in schools. 1 Drawing her epigraph from "The Solitary Reaper" ("The plaintive numbers flow .. :'), she immediately locates her textbook within a Romantic tradition of ballad collection. Less inclined than I have been to draw differences between Wordsworth and Scott, she then quotes Scott's memory of his first encounter with Percy's Reliques: All the morning long he lay reading the book beneath a huge platanus-tree in his aunt's garden. "The summer day sped onward so fast:' he says, "that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes, nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm:' (xix-xx)

"To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing": As we will see, this is a model of how the ballad operates in the literary scholarship and the school curricula of the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. On one level, Scott merely records the happy surprise of reading something already familiar to him, increasing his sense of coherence between his past and present self. But the edenic confines of the aunt's garden and his glance at the "sharp appetite" of adolescence tip us off that a primal

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scene is being recalled here, one that carries with it forms of identity broader than merely personal experience. First, vocation: Ballads offer Scott a vision of his own vocation when he recalls "the delight" with which "I saw pieces of the same kind which had amused my childhood, and still continued in secret the Delilahs of my imagination, considered as the subject of sober research, grave commentary, and apt illustration, by an editor who shewed his poetical genius was capable of emulating the best qualities of what his pious labour preserved."2 In other words, Percy shows Scott how he can free himself from a shameful mental life arrested in the "legendary lore" first encountered in the nursery and which has since blossomed into the overripe threat of a blinding/castrating Delilah. At stake in elevating Delilah into the "subject of sober research" is Scott's sense of professional calling, as he later phrases the crisis: "I became sensible that the time was come when I must either buckle myself resolutely to the 'toil by day, the lamp by night; renouncing all the Delilahs of my imagination, or bid adieu to the profession of the law." 3 The scenario reads like one from Scott's own novels, though instead of a choice between two royal houses (the romance of the Stuart past versus the realism of the Hanoverian present), he must choose between the illicit but powerful pleasures of boyhood songs and the obligations of adulthood. And, as with his Waverley heroes, Scott stages such a moment of choice only in order to refuse the dichotomy it would seek to impose. Where History is personified for Edward Waverley by the dangerous Bonnie Prince Charlie, young Walter Scott gets the less perilous figure of Thomas Percy. Percy shows him that "Delilahs" need not be abandoned outright but can be repackaged as proper objects of polite reading for "the lovers and admirers of poetry" who wish for "a glimpse of the national Muse in her cradle:' 4 Rather than the siren song of a Delilah, ballads offer the "babbling [of] the earliest attempts at the formation of the tuneful sounds with which [the national Muse] was afterwards to charm posterity." 5 Conversely, Scott need not give up the aspiring lawyer's code of "toil by day, the lamp by night;' instead applying its model of ceaseless labor to "the fair trade of manufacturing modern antiques;' thereby becoming a legend of literary industry, "The Wizard of the North:' 6 The ballad thus becomes suitable for earliest hearing and reading and for later study, a renewable resource that underpins a literary career. Percy teaches Scott to make a transition akin to the one Wordsworth wishes for in the "Essay, Supplementary;' moving from the "pleasing bondage" exerted by the Delilahs of his imagination to a more refined taste for these texts and a "voluntary power" over them sufficient to awe his "schoolfellows" when he

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recites them, sign of his later mastery of the bookbuying public. (The experience also turns him into a saver of money and a purchaser of texts, another sign of his maturation.) Scott, then, stands as a paradigm of what I will call the "lyric subject;' a self constructed over time by its experience with songs. 7 In addition to appearing in Bates's collection, his encounter with Percy is featured in elementary texts like Cyr's Fourth Reader (1899) and in an edition of Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1909) intended for high school and college students, which follows this with the moment of his death, as "he steadied himself by repeating the noble Otterburn: 'My wound is deep, I fain would sleep I Nae mair I'll fighting see; I Gae lay me in the bracken bush I That grows on yonder lee.' "8 His exemplary life thus begins and ends with ballads, and they help him to die master of himself rather than at the mercy of his "Delilahs.'' In achieving this mastery, he also tells the tale of "the national muse" as she emerges from infancy; indeed, it is this narrative that lends his life narrative a calling beyond merely personal desires. The reception of Felicia Hemans illustrates the masculinist bent of this pedagogy. Until quite recently, she was remembered neither as a gifted and learned refurbisher of national traditions nor a critical reviser of them. In the school texts of the nineteenth century, she is portrayed as the presiding deity of the domestic affections and a model for aspiring wives and mothers, and her most frequently selected pieces, like "Casabianca;' are also taken to celebrate national sacrifice.9 The clearest example can be found in The Hemans Reader for Female Schools (1847), one of the only readers I have found named after a single author. 10 The editor explains that the volume is "a tribute of respect and admiration to one, whose writings [are] purely and distinctly feminine;' a view clarified by Lydia Howard Sigourney in the same volume: "The genius of Mrs. Hemans was as pure and feminine in its impulses, as in its outpourings.''11 As the nineteenth century wears on, she appears almost exclusively in readers for elementary schools, and even there she is subjected to backhanded compliments like this: "She wrote many sweet things, but never took high rank as a poetical writer.'' 12 She is much scarcer in texts geared toward high school and college students. One of the many redactions of Thomas B. Shaw's Outlines of English Literature (1882) predicted that the "greater part" of her work "will soon be forgotten.'' 13 She does not appear even in the Female Authors section of Henry Reed's English Literature, from Chaucer to Tennyson (1855) or, decades later, in William Allan Neilson's and Ashley Thorndike's A History of English Literature (1920 ).

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* * * Scott's exemplarity to Bates and others as someone who through the ballad matures into a lyric subject raises a topic that, to this point, would have been premature to treat at length: the relationship of ballads to the growth of the self. Although the phenomenon dates at least from Addison's presentation of "Children in the Wood" as a favorite of the nursery, and although the ballad is among the texts singled out in the Romantic era as ideal for children, an antidote to the purported excesses of rationalist pedagogy, 14 two factors make this discussion suitable only now: First, I have disarticulated the ballad's relation to the making normative of the self in order to challenge the tendentious assumption that eighteenth-century and Romantic authors were committed to projecting an integral and national subject modeled on the lyric "I." Instead, I have focused on problems in this normativizing tale, highlighting instead subjects both flat and round (Gay), adolescents who do not survive (Home), histories that do not progress (Burns), other histories based on imposture (Percy), and critiques of collection as violent (Blake and Wordsworth). Second, I would claim that the effects of the maturing self are best seen only after the consolidation of"English Literature" as a formal subject of inquiry. I have traced that discipline's preconditions through the formation of a semiautonomous sphere of elite culture (Chapter 1), the Scottish Enlightenment's influential theories of historical development, with some attention toward the later reception of Burns into the school (Chapter 2), the canonization of key authors like Shakespeare (Chapter 3), and the hermeneutics of the Romantic encounter with the popular (Chapter 4). But these are preconditions. English Literature takes something like its current shape only with its emergence as a subject in elementary and secondary schools and as a field of instruction and research in colleges and universities. This is not to say that the rise of English Literature in schools settles the contests over the relationship between elite and popular culture, the shape of national history, or the relationship of the individual to society. Many of the responses by scholars and pedagogues to the call of the popular retain the critical edge first sharpened by authors like Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth, who question received ideas about the justice of the nation-state and the idea of historical development on which the nation-state is constructed. But these responses are delimited by the central rationale of the school, which is to educate students to become informed citizens of the nation-state, however much disagreement there may be over how best to bring them to that position.

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That the nation here is the United States may seem odd, since ballads would seem to be an unpromising genre for forming an American identity. It is true that starting in the early twentieth century, indigenous popular songs like cowboy ballads and Negro spirituals become the frequent object of collection, part of a native culture to rival the storied terrain of Scott's Borders or Percy's Killingworth. 15 But the great preponderance of ballads that make their way into American textbooks and scholarship after Reconstruction are from the British Isles, and the versions found in America are typically ranked as degraded traces of British originals. Thus, Katharine Lee Bates, no stranger to American anthems, saw no problem with collecting British ballads, and this is because not all versions of American identity depended on native songs or myths. 16 One of those versions looks to produce scholars and broadly cultured men (itself an uneasy pairing) to rival Scott and other European men of letters, giving the lie to the claim that America lacks refinementP Chief among these cultured American scholars was Francis James Child, "our first American authority on ballad-lore" (Bates xxi). He provided a model for Bates herself; her Ballad Book served as the M.A. thesis that made it possible for her to direct graduate work at Wellesley. 18 Another version of American identity is indicated by Bates's reference to "[o]ur own Anglo-Saxon ancestors" (ix), a racialized view in which being American means having Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic or northern European blood, in contrast to those of African, Asian, Jewish, or southern European descent. Here, the ballad becomes part of a racial memory; through the magic of metaphor and pseudoscience, these songs jog the child to "remember" his or her racial past. But ballads are not always tied to this more exclusive model of nationhood. One of the legacies often linked to the Teutonic past by philologists is a primitive democracy bequeathed to America through what one of Child's students, Francis Barton Gummere, calls "the cadent feet" of "the imagined community;' surviving in the lyric qualities of the ballad. This communal function, which has no necessary ethnic/racial component, is also prized by adherents of the "culture-epoch theory" ubiquitous in turn-of-the-century education in which the child recapitulates the development of the human race in toto. Helping the student to pass from "the world's childhood" into "the epic phase" of adolescence, the ballad becomes part of a curriculum that is American by virtue of the agency it democratically attributes to the individual imagination, honoring the child's "experience" and expanding his or her imaginative repertoire. These elements-"the imagined community" and

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"experience"-also play a corresponding role in the New Critical work of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Despite the New Criticism's reputed antagonism toward philology, popular culture and "the affective fallacies" of readers, Brooks and Warren echo elements of these prior approaches when they accord the ballad a pivotal place in their textbooks and in Warren's dream of an America renewed by "the Ghost Dance." The ballad's collection by elite authors sheds light on various visions of America that may be at odds conceptually but nonetheless are blended together historically. It also raises for us questions about what part, if any, lyric has to play in establishing poetic justice, in envisioning a more equitable social order that could honor the needs of the many and the individual.

Philology, Professionalism, and "The Imagined Community": Child and Gummere The emergence of philology in the latter half of the nineteenth century consolidated the place of the ballad in the curriculum of English literature. More broadly, philology reveals how the school system in post-Civil War America hoped to put students in touch with both popular culture and elite poetry so as to make them fit readers and fit citizens. These claims may seem to load philology with more than it can bear if we assent to the picture painted by recent scholarship. 19 Armed with Grimm's Law of Consonant Shifts and other elements of linguistic science, philologists rejected the perceived sloppiness of belletristic appreciators. But in bidding to ground English curricula and scholarship in a rigorous, empirical method, philology contracted the broader aims of preceding approaches. Lost in the emphasis on word usage and Anglo-Saxon prosody were the putative goals of belles lettres, "a public moral consciousness and ... the production of model citizens." 20 Philologists also discarded the organic metaphors of their Romantic forefathers that united language, soul, and society. With that, they also set aside an older philological vision of a "total view of civilization" that would energize the public with an understanding of their place within the general development of all human society or, more troublingly, an Indo-European but Eurocentric ''Aryan brotherhood." 21 In place of these more public-minded goals (however disturbing their ideologies), "scientific" philologists installed a narrow professional aim of legitimating and perpetuating their own studies. So, for example, when they insisted that

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slang was worthy of analysis, they did so not to encourage a "democratic idiom" but rather to bolster their own claims for expertise against belletrists who were unscientifically committed to purifying the language of their students.22 But it is a mistake to overstate the separation of scientific from Romantic philology, for the former does use the ballad to articulate broad alternatives to the perceived fragmentation of American society after the carnage of the Civil War and the industrial dislocation, acquisitiveness, and stratification of the Gilded Age.23 We can see the seeds of this effort in Francis James Child's 1846 Class Oration at Harvard. 24 At this point, he had not yet traveled to Berlin and Gottingen to immerse himself in Germanic philology, though it began to make its way into American campuses in the 184os. 25 But healready had a clear sense of how his life would be organized and how it would figure into the life of the nation. Lamenting that for so many, the child is not "father of the man" (3), he declares he will stay true to this Wordsworthian dictum by acknowledging two obligations imparted to him by his college. First, he will honor his literary education, which has introduced him and his schoolmates to "the best of books, English books" as well as the best of foreign literature (6). Second, in contrast to the "swarm of essayists & bardlings ... [who] sigh away in vapid sensibility" or "enshroud commonplaces in a factitious mysticism" (7), he will make himself useful to his nation by following a profession. More specifically, he will become a member of what should be known as the "fourth profession" alongside law, medicine, and the clergy-teaching (9-10). Invoking Thomas Arnold, famous headmaster of Rugby (better known in the coming decades as the father of Matthew Arnold), he praises "the school-master" as a force for making others "honorable & useful." 26 These schoolmasters promise to impart a needed "grace and symmetry to republican life, which now, by reason of its harshness & angularity, is sometimes repulsive to refined minds" (16-17). By opposing "harshness & angularity" to "grace and symmetry;' Child addresses the conflict between Thomas Arnold's goal of educative refinement (goals shared by his son's later preachment of culture as "sweetness and light") and an image of the United States that had clung persistently to it since its founding. 27 While it might be united by the political compact of the Constitution, this was not enough to bind it together in a way that would encourage the participation of "refined minds:' Indeed, its democratic character and sheer lack of historical tradition actively discouraged refinement: It was antagonistic to the very idea of hierarchy on which refinement was pred-

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icated and expressed its leveling energy by placing the individual's striving for material gain over any commitment to social needs. 28 The solution to this problem, Child makes clear, is not to produce undisciplined "sighs" of "vapid sensibility" and "factitious mysticism;' by which he seems to mean the works of Emerson and the other transcendentalists publishing in The Dial and congregating at Brook Farm. 29 He turns instead to the more genteel and disciplined model offered by Thomas Arnold. A reviewer of Arnold's biography asks: "Shall we ever have such schools as this in our country?" 30 No, he answers, as long as Americans insist on educating their young men on the cheap, sacrificing the breadth and depth of a liberal education for a trade-oriented training that ensured that students will neither go into debt nor rely on charity. He admits that "we are a peculiar people,-a democratic people" (404), which may make Americans averse to recommending an education beyond the means of the many. But since there is no getting around the expense of time and money required by a liberal education the response to this problem must be to give scholarships to promising poor children, whatever "public opinion" may say (403). This position matches Arnold's: A strong proponent of the 1832 Reform Bill, he urged that students previously excluded from a liberal education also be given access to it. 31 Otherwise, they will not know how to properly fulfill the "general calling" as citizens that is now extended to them through the Reform Bill. Child, the son of a sailmaker who was able to attend Harvard thanks to a wealthy benefactor, predictably finds this approach congenial. For him, a profession is a disciplined and specific calling, but one that radiates outward to counter the social fragmentation and vulgarity of"republican life;' in contrast to the false freedom and weightless generality of Emersonian oracles. We can see, too, in "bardlings" and "sigh away" and "vapid sensibility" a preemptive strike against those who would critique refinement as effeminizing; he is quick to claim that he and his fellow graduates have not been "pampered into a dyspepsia for the sterling meat which our fathers ate" (6). His embrace of a profession gives his own life a valuable continuity, allowing him to look back on his own development from "child" to "man;' a maturity and manliness that makes proper use of habits inculcated while a child and that compensates for any visionary gleam lost to the maturation of the lyric subject. Given this intertwining model of professional and national life, it is apt that the great monument of Child's career is a collection of ballads, for they

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offer him a chance to give American readers access to rough but ennobling texts. Although he did not live to write an introduction to crown The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98), his view of the enterprise is revealed in a contribution to johnson's New Universal Cyclopedia (1875), published as he was in the process of assembling the definitive version of his collection. 32 For him, the ballad is popular not in the sense of belonging to the lower classes but rather shared by high and low as part of a feudal world, prior to "the art of printing;' the Reformation, and "the intrusion of cold reflection into a world of sense and fancy" (98, 61). As a result of this shift, the ballad has long since been "abandoned to an uncultivated or not over-cultivated class" (59), and thus becomes by default "popular" in the more restricted sense. But the ballad retains its links to the premodern and universal. Although he demurs from Grimm's paradigm of das Volk dichtet-Child believes that individual poets, not the folk en masse, wrote ballads-it is still the case that in the ballad, "the author counts for nothing;' and its essence is "the absence of subjectivity and of self-consciousness" (59). The theorization of the ballad as feudal underwrites the assumption in Child's collection that there are neither more nor less than 305 authentic English and Scottish popular ballads. Anything else is a variant of the 305 or not truly popular. But if this means that making popular ballads is a "closed account;' as is often claimed by philologists, this only adds to the importance of those whose profession is to collect these scarce survivals. We can see this at the end of the essay, where Child reinscribes his model of ballads in history. Explaining how individual ballads change over time, he does not blame the peasantry, as others do, for deforming the ballads in their transmission and instead concerns himself with two other culprits. First, there is "the professional ballad-singer or minstrel;' who "to please the audience before him, will alter, omit, or add, without scruple;' in contrast to the slow transformations caused when "language drifts insensibly from ancient forms;' as in the shift from alliterative to rhymed verse (66). The minstrel is succeeded by "the modern editor, whose so-called improvements are more to be feared than the mischances of a thousand years" (66). So here are two professionals whose narrow focus on the polite audiences of the day moves them to falsify the ballads. They make it harder to detect in the ballad what is based on the "permanent and universal in the heart of man" (59). The more faithful professional will thus make it his business to uncover these universal roots, not for mere antiquarian interest but in order that ballads may from "time to time serve, as [they] notoriously did in England and Germany a hundred

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years ago, to recall a literature from false and artificial courses to nature and truth" (59), a sentiment that further illustrates the debt of scientific philology to Romanticism. From this standpoint, print is preserver as well as destroyer, because it places the ballad "beyond the danger of perishing" (59), and so reprinting them in a scrupulous edition is a public service. Recovered in collections that clarify their various histories in a way that those absorbed in composing and reciting them never could and discussed in improving volumes like Johnson's New Universal Cyclopedia, ballads play a role in adding "grace and symmetry" to American life while avoiding "false and artificial courses:' The professional who preserves them and who comments on them reconnects his audience with the "permanent and universal." Unlike Collins's Hanmer, their names will be sure to be remembered, and, humble servants of their lyric vocation, they do not need to edit Shakespeare, let alone Virgil, to enter their names into posterity.

* * * Child twice hints at another way that ballads can maintain the life of the nation-through the school. Charlemagne, he observes, "made them one of the subjects of school instruction;' though the clergy later extirpated them and all other "popular poetry" because they were "heathen" (6o). And the Serbians, the only "race" residing in Europe "that has not outlived the ballad era;' teach their songs to the young through recitation (65). Child himself devoted relatively little attention to teaching ballads, at least in the sense of offering classes on them, as he did for years on Shakespeare and Anglo-Saxon; the only record of his doing so is a graduate seminar he taught in his last two years at Harvard. 33 But he did work with many students individually, and they, in turn, helped frame his scholarship as it made its way into college and secondary-school textbooks. Of those students, the one who most influentially ties the ballad to the lyric subject and the school is Francis Barton Gummere. His own tale of initiation into high literature is instructive, helping to frame how he envisions the ballad as a corrective to the current life of the nation. According to a story that he used to tell while headmaster at the Swain Free School (1882-87), his father Samuel, then the president of Haverford College, came across him when he was "10 or 12 years old, curled up on a sofa, avidly reading a 'dime novel'":

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"Francis;' he said, "let's go into the library and find something more interesting:' In the library where formerly Francis had trod softly and guardedly, the father took down J. Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, called the boy's attention to its binding, paper, and print-much easier on the eyes than the slovenly job in the boy's hand. The father wrote Francis Barton Gummere on the flyleaf. He told his son to put the book on his own book shelf when he'd finished reading it; then, sweeping his hands over a section of his library, the father said that the boy could thereafter take any book from that quarter, and after he had read it, bring it to have his name inscribed on it. That day saw the start of an invaluable collection of novels, English ballads, controversial treatises on the origins of English poetry, and allied subjects. 34

In this anecdote the maturation of the self is made to depend on not only reading texts but reading the right ones and claiming them as one's own. To inscribe one's signature into a "dime novel" would make no sense, since it would tie the self to a perishable commodity that deserves to perish. But a novel by Cooper is worthy of attaching one's name to it. Like Wordsworth in the Preface, Gummere's father is committed to supplanting the stimulations of mass culture with something more "interesting"; like young Sir Walter Scott from his Delilahs, young Francis is diverted from the slovenly dangers of wasting time prone on the sofa with a "dime novel" by being given a similar but worthier object to absorb his attention. In this way, Francis will also prove himself fit to inherit his father's name and his library (which turn out to be versions of the same thing), an act of paternal transmission underscored by the playfully antiquarian inscription on the son's own diary, signed by both of them: "This booke belongeth to Frank B. Gummere by righte of purchase and ye givinge it to hime bye his fa there in ye year of 1868 ye first monthe and ye 17th daye of ye monthe." 35 (Both purchase and paternal gift seem necessary to establish ownership.) What's odd about this childhood lesson is that it departs in many particulars from the influential scholarship Gummere actually goes on to produce. In this way, his father's intervention points to the role of the school in shaping the lyric subject, since these differences have a good deal to do with two of Gummere's teachers. Where his encounter with his father's library instructs him to claim individual ownership of a book, his own work on the ballad famously (or notoriously) emphasizes the oral and especially the communal.36 Indeed, the ballad occupies a third category apart both from the mass-produced "dime novel" and the elite art of Cooper (at least, elite by the time that young Gummere reads it)-the "popular." For Gummere, the ballad is "popular" not merely because it is conserved or recited by "the people" but rather because it is created by them; the ballad valuably retains the traces

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of the lyric origins of poetry-the "[i]mprovization of verses in a singing, dancing throng:' 37 There may be an "I" in the ballad, but it is "extrinsic, perfunctory, not personal in a real sense" (66). To see these communal origins, we must "renounce every aesthetic surprise of form and phrase" (324) celebrated by "the poetry of art" and instead concentrate on the constants of ballad structure. These structural elements include the refrain, the "dramatic situation" that results from a chorus directly imitating a single, striking event, and what Gummere in an enduring contribution to ballad criticism calls "incremental repetition," in which lines or stanzas are repeated with small but significant changes, creating the "leaping and lingering effect" of the ballad (71-134). He acknowledges that no actual ballad exhibits these characteristics in anything like a pure state, but he argues that this is due to "the epic process;' whereby over time the people add to the "dramatic situation" a back story, plot, character traits, and motives (79-85). At the end of the process, a ballad may be put into print, but it remains distinct from literate poetry, which is a creature of the "library" (133). But Gummere, too, is a creature of"a library;' an English professor with a high profile as a scholar. We might read his pursuit of the primitive as an Oedipal compensation, smuggling the world of the "festal throng" into the refined surroundings his father teaches him to occupy. It is a rebellion against gentility that also happily saves him from having to leave his study to engage with the popular culture of his present. In his magnum opus, The Beginnings of Poetry (1901), he strongly insists that communal poetry is "under modern conditions a closed account;' and so the "sorry stuff of the streets;' created after the separation of the classes, cannot be thought of as "communal."38 Gummere's denigration of current popular culture is cognate with the exclusions woven into his seemingly communal politics. As Michael J. Bell has written, Gummere's nationalism leaves "little room for the actual people who do the daily dirty work of American political life ... and even less room for the waves of new immigrants and northbound southern African-Americans whose migrations seemed to threaten the qualities that made America great." 39 These are fair criticisms, and Gummere's unwillingness to let the messy facts of popular culture get in the way of a beautiful theory is one reason why few accounts from the last century of literary studies have been as thoroughly exploded as his wishful idea of communal composition by "a dancing throng." But however much his theory is the fantasy of an armchair primitivist, his opposition between the popular-communal and the individualartistic is more sophisticated and less reactionary than it may first appear. For

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although ballad-making is for him "a closed account," its poetic materials and associated worldview do remain available to the present, and he claims that they are necessary to the maintenance of democracy in an increasingly antidemocratic era. For instance, Gummere concludes The Beginnings of Poetry by arguing that history alternates between communal and individualistic periods, and even in these periods, it is a matter of degree rather than kind-even the individualistic Quakers had strong communal institutions (461-62). Moreover, history is not simply a pendulum; it is a dialectic that yields "a steady advance ... [A]t each fresh occasion on which the individual isolates himself from society, he takes with him the accumulated force that society, by its main function, has stored up from traditions of the past;' and he returns to give society the insights bequeathed by his solitude (465). Poetry works the same way, and it has the advantage of foregrounding its preservation of the past through form: "[W] hat lies behind the rhythm, that gives it such a place in poetry ... appeals through the measures to the cadent feet, and so through the cadent feet to that consent of sympathy which is perhaps the noblest thing in all human life" (466). The irreplaceable value of "cadent feet" in generating the "consent of sympathy" brings us to a final way that Gummere departs from his father's intervention in his reading practices. Where his father moves him from one prose text to another, Gummere's work focuses exclusively on poetry, which he makes central to his theorization of history as at once progressive and conservative. We might say that his embrace of oral poetry and historical dialectic reflects a switch from his biological father to a pair of pedagogical father figures, Thomas Chase and Francis James Child, and through their teaching to a view of how poetry and philology might preserve American democracy. In 1885, he writes Chase, professor of English and his father's successor as president of Haverford, in response to the news that his just published first book, A Handbook of Poetics, has been adopted at his alma mater. Gummere credits Chase for having "planted" the seeds that Child then "watered" by making Gummere "understand that the first mission of poetry [is] to be poetry. I can never forget that: it connected Horace's Odes & Homer's Hexameter and Shakespeare's humanity by golden chains-and how many classrooms do their best to break or at least tarnish that chain:' 40 Praising rather than explaining, Gummere does not clarify what he means by this self-reflexive "mission" of poetry to be poetry but the links in the "golden chains" suggest that poetic genre and verse form (hexameters and odes) play a part in it. Nei-

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ther does he describe the other, chain-tarnishing missions ascribed to poetry by bad teachers, but we can surmise that they would ignore the formal specificity of poetry by reducing it to its themes, or, conversely, would reduce the elements of poetic form to rote exercises in scansion or recitation that did not attend to what the form signifies. Instead, poetry properly studied would reveal another of the "seeds" planted by Chase, who in his classroom lecture on "The Lake Poets" declared: "I believe in human progress; I believe that the good providence of God is leading the race of man by slow but constant steps to loftier heights of excellence ... And I trace this progress in literature, as well as in every other department of human activity." 41 He also would have heard from Chase a strong rejection of an "incompatibility-as some have alleged-between republican institutions & high intellectual culture:' 42 So Gummere graduated from Haverford instilled with a firm idea of "human progress;' of the role of poetic form in embodying that progress, and of the compatibility, to echo the terms that Child hopes to reconcile in his 1846 oration, of"republican life" with "the grace and symmetry" of"refined minds:' Once at Harvard, he came under Child's tutelage and plunged into the primitive poetry that would become his life's work. He adopts his mentor's beliefs that "the author counts for nothing" in this poetry, that it lacks "subjectivity and self-consciousness;' and that they evidence a society at an earlier state of development. But where Child locates the ballad in a structured feudal culture, Gummere insists that it carries the traces of a more primitive "dancing throng." Fixing the ballad in the immemorial past is crucial to his theorization of progress and poetry's place within it that he derives in part from Chase. It is a progressive view of history that makes him much more inclined than Child to make pronouncements on the politics of his own day, including the obligation of professionals to maintain "republican life:' For the "cadent feet" resonant in poetic rhythm are not merely important for prosody: The "consent of sympathy" on which that rhythm is predicated is the fundamental act of democracy, since by consenting to feel and dance along with the whole, the individuals who form the throng strike the social contract, that elusive moment relentlessly sought and theorized since Hobbes and enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. Gummere articulates this belief most fully in his last published work, a collection of lectures entitled Democracy and Poetry (1911). 43 There, he surveys the current state of European and especially American society and finds things at a desperate pass. He faults authors as diverse as Hardy, Tennyson, Lowell, and William James for betraying democracy by either emphasizing

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the "I" at the expense of the "we" or by giving up on the idea of"progress ... the keyword of democracy" (10). By undermining the individual's willingness to sacrifice self-interest for the progress of the whole, they threaten "the supreme function of the imagined community" that constituted the nation (17, 68). If the phrase "imagined community;' which Gummere uses frequently (38, 67), rings a bell with those familiar with Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism, it should do so for more than adventitious reasons. As it would be for Anderson, the nation for Gummere depends more on an ongoing act of mind requiring the participation of the citizenry than on the institutions of the state, like the legislature and the army. But where Anderson sees "printcapitalism" as providing an experience of national "simultaneity" that he likens to the singing of an anthem, 44 Gummere locates a disjunction between orality and print that threatens the "imagined community." It is not that print necessarily cuts the community off from the binding energy of the dancing throng; even Herder, "the apostle of popular verse" acknowledges the possibilities of print to encourage "the invisible commerce of minds and hearts:' 45 It is rather that the individualizing tendencies of print help make it possible for a growing detachment from the world of "cadent feet." If Gummere has a vision of progress through dialectic that he borrows from Chase and Hegel, he is more anxious than they are about its prospects. Because progress requires the will of those who belong to "the imagined community;' he is unsure that the forward dialectic of history will continue, that individuals will become increasingly self-aware of the need to preserve the wisdom of the communal and to add their own insights to this gathering lore. Poets like Tennyson and philosophers like James now emphasize the "great man" over the group to a degree that threatens to derail the historical spiral upward through communal and individual phases. Recognizing the true origins and ontology of the ballad would be doubly significant in countering this trend. By homing in on the choral lament and incremental repetition in a ballad like "The Bonnie Earl of Murray" (173), we would understand the pulse of community in all poetry and would also reverse a departure from this insight since it was first discovered in the Romantic era. For at the same time that philosophers like Herder were discovering folksong and writing the "very gospel of the democratic movement" in his dedicatory verses to Stimmen der Volker (76), figures like Coleridge and Wordsworth were turning apostate in the wake of the French Revolution's failure. Echoing Percy Shelley and Hazlitt and adhering to a now-favored

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reading of Romanticism, Gummere charges that although many Romantics began as authentic democrats, they followed Wordsworth in "the stupendous and egotistic toryism of the Prelude" and Coleridge in France: An Ode, which "makes one think of Stuart Mill's odd definition of poetry as a 'soliloquy overheard"' (9). 46 So individualist definitions of lyric and individualist, antidemocratic politics go hand in hand. Since the Romantic era, this antidemocratic turn has gained momentum, and "the main burden of recantation has fallen upon academic ranks, and the tragic sight of sights is the recanting scholar;' who has turned his back on what Romantic philology taught about "the original German freeman" and his communal poetry (49, 54). But in the last lecture, Gummere reaffirms his belief that poetry retains the power to sound "the democratic note of enthusiasm and faith" (320). And, as he writes a few years earlier, the core of poetry is preserved best in lyric; while epic and dramatic poetry have turned increasingly into the prose of the novel and drama, lyric remains the "citadel" of poetry, "flexible and progressive still, welcoming the new individual idea while it retains the old sympathy, the old cadence, form and phrases:' 47 This is the element of lyric missed by Wordsworth's Prelude and Mill's theory, which cut off the lyric subject from the "cadent feet" of the throng. As we wait for a poet who will restring the democratizing lyre, we must content ourselves with scholars who can make evident the communal substrate of poetry. For Gummere, not surprisingly, the paragon is Child. In a reminiscence published in 1909, Gummere identifies him "as a leader of the first rank" in the "army of intellectual progress" in America. 48 But he refused to put himself "on parade" like "that most pestiferous of all pests, the common or American platform-man" (421-22). Gummere's target here is most likely the "verbal critics" who from the 186os charged the philologists with abandoning broad, humane learning for the jargon of specialty.49 The philologists' typical response can be seen in the distinction Gummere draws between those distracted by the parade and those in "competent quarters" who know the value of Child's work (421). Like Child's sighing "essayists and bardlings;' these drum majors have no real profession. In happy contrast, Child, although he "never got the ear of the multitude;' made it so "that throughout the length and breadth of this land there is not a class in the higher English studies which is free from debt to him" (425). This is the consolation of the scholar who writes his name on the books he owns and the books he writes, that he will steer people back to the "imagined community"

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not through the vulgarity of the "platform" but through the concentrated attention afforded by the classroom. This is the sound, balladic foundation that will lead students toward what Child terms their "general calling" and will lead the nation toward reconnecting with a democratic idea of the imagined community.

"The Protoplasm of Literature": From Philology to the Pedagogy of Experience Although one would not want to underestimate the influence Child's collection has exerted on folk singers and their audiences, it is in the school that Child and other philologists have had their greatest impact. Starting in the 188os, their work was integrated into school curricula and textbooks. Gummere's Handbook of Poetics was widely adopted, reaching a third edition in five years, and on the first page students are introduced to his grounding beliefs that "the three arts,-poetry, music, dancing-were once united as a single art" and that meter, a sign of this affiliation with primitive music and dance, was definitional of poetry. 50 While Child did not trouble himself with making his collection accessible to students, this may have been an effect of his dying before it was completed. The person who saw the last volume into print, George Lyman Kittredge, did ensure that it found a wider audience. He succeeded his mentor as professor of English at Harvard and was the figure most responsible for consolidating the study of folklore there. His most influential statement on the ballads, though, was written not for a learned journal but rather for a widely circulating one-volume edition of Child's great work published in the Cambridge Poets series (1904), part of the burgeoning Educational Department of the Riverside Press at Houghton Mifflin. There, he defines the genre as a tale "telling itself, without the instrumentality of a conscious speaker:' 51 When he comes to explain how this genre came about, he features Gummere's theory of communal composition. Like Gummere himself, he admits that no extant ballad was composed this way, since this form of composition "is a very simple matter and its products are infinitely crude" (xix). Still, though more circumspect than Gummere, he argues that the ballad's use of refrain, commonplaces, and incremental repetition all support the claim that the roots of "ballad technique" lie in the misty lyric past of"the singing and dancing throng" (xxii). A founding member of the MLA, Gummere followed Kittredge as pres-

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ident of the organization in 1905. This is one sign of their influence; another is the penetration of their view of the ballads beyond the texts that they themselves wrote. College histories of literature and anthologies prior to the turn of the twentieth century only briefly mention ballads, assigning them to the minstrels rather than the community and placing them in the forgettable era between Chaucer and Spenser. 52 Then, in the same year as Kittredge's edition of Child, William Dallam Armes of the University of California published a selection of thirty-five ballads and songs largely from Child in which he lauds Kittredge's edition and Gummere's The Beginnings of Poetry as "books that should be owned, read, and reread by every teacher of literature:'53 Gummere's communalism is also acknowledged in broader surveys of poetry and English literature. They may mention Louise Pound's devastating objections to Gummere's theory, but they argue that nonetheless ballads agree with Lincoln's ringing formulation of American identity in the Gettysburg Address; they are "poetry of the people, by the people, and for the people" and thus "truly democratic poetry:' 54 These are poems fit for young Americans, future citizens of a democratic nation. The influence of this take on the ballads as well as the changes rung on it to broaden its appeal further can be seen in the lecture notes for a class first taught at Yale by Henry Seidel Canby in the Autumn of 1914. 55 In the next decade Canby would leave the academy and become a driving force in the establishment of middlebrow culture as founding editor of The Saturday Review of Literature and chairman of the editorial board of the Book-of-theMonth Club. 56 His middlebrow vision can already be seen in his 1914 class, which presents the ballad as accessible and yet ennobling and relies on literary scholarship but also resists its specializing tendency. His mission is made more urgent by the onset of World War I, which, according to Canby, "wrecked the ivory tower into which many of us retired" and made the faculty anxious about their role in national life. 57 When he teaches his course on the ballads, he is searching for some way to justify the academic enterprise at a time of profound uncertainty for his students and their teachers. In the opening lecture, Canby adheres to Gummere's account of the ballad, defining it as "communal in origin" and in expression and calling attention to the refrain, the commonplace, and incremental repetition. He also honors the ballad as "the most democratic of poetry" and draws, as Gummere does, a distinction between the activity of the community in earlier times and their passivity now. 58 Given our passivity, we yearn for what ballads can provide: "Leading (on this side of the Atlantic) soft safe lives, we like

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to be knocked around a bit-or to see others knocked around. So with the ballads-after personal, egoistic lit. we like to get our teeth into simple, primitive, communal expression." As the prospects for war grow, Canby makes the case to his students that the ballads will give them the toughness they need, a masculinizing and elevating fiber akin to what Scott found in Percy. The scene of the dead knight in "The Twa Corbies" may be like that of a Belgian soldier in the trenches, but if we were to write on it, we "would never be so objective as the corbies. They are the ev[ olutionary] forces using protoplasm to make more protoplasm." Like Gummere, he draws on the language of evolutionary biology to describe the ballad as a formative substance in the development of literature. 59 The ballad also provides an invaluable perspective on suffering that his students require, moving them to "pity" at "the bare facts of waste" but also steeling them to the carnage of war. This is the protoplasmic stuff young Americans need amidst the softening environment of commercial prosperity; on the other hand, by teaching them how to feel, the ballad also acts as a bulwark against the "unscrupulous pursuit by the individual of power for himself" that Canby identified as the flip side of elite American society. 60 But if Canby agrees with Gummere's image of the ballad as democratic, communal, and objective, he also makes the primitive/modern and high/low barriers more permeable. Immediately after likening the ballad to the songs of savage tribes, he argues it is not a dosed account by pointing to the "cowpuncher [and] negro ballads recently collected" by John A. Lomax and others, which root these songs in an American soil. (Canby's reference shows that he is current with ballad scholarship, since Lomax's first collection, Cowboy Songs, and Other Frontier Ballads had been published only a few years earlier.) Analogues to the ballads are not only to be found on the range and in the Black Belt. He also cites the accounts of the most recent Yale-Harvard crew race, and he observes "the modern short story" privileges emotion over action just as the lyric "ballad of situation" that predates the epic. "The taste for ballads;' Canby asserts, "is like the taste for football;' a sophisticated yearning for the "simple" and "primitive:' While Gummere holds out hope that the ballads might reignite a vision of "the imagined community" in a selfish age, he is unwilling to draw analogies between the popular ballad and the debased culture of the present. 61 Canby, in contrast, dearly thinks the short story and college life are both worthy of critical attention, having published two books on the former and in the process of writing College Sons and

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College Fathers (1915). To speak of "a taste for football," he says, is not oxymoronic. His approach to the ballad reflects his view of the discipline as a whole. In an essay in The Yale Review published as he was teaching his class on the ballads, he considers the state of "this new profession" of teaching English, which had come into its own since Child's mention of teaching as "the fourth profession" in 1846, thanks in significant part to Child's own efforts. 62 Canby, though, was not a scholar in Child's mold. After setting out three types of professors, "the gossips, the inspirationists, [and] the scientists," he recommends "the middle-of-the-road men, whose ambition it is to teach neither anecdote, nor things in general, nor mere facts;' but to combine all of these approaches to fulfill his prime duty-to "teach his students how to read" (125, 129). By "read;' Canby means a general competency in interpretation that would, for example, enable the student to know what "honour" means for Shakespeare and how the "exuberance of the Renaissance" animates the speeches ofHotspur (122). With philosophy failing to make itself understood to nonspecialists, and with ethics, morality, and the social implications of science left unstudied by a busy world, English teachers must take on these educative tasks with the goal of empowering students to "read lightly, easily, intelligently" (123). This will also be the aim of The Saturday Review of Literature and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Given Canby's eclectic and genteel approach, the ballad makes sense as an object of pedagogy. Its embeddedness in a primitive and communal world requires students to make some use of recent philological research to elucidate its social milieu and poetic structures. But the simplicity and sincerity of the ballads means that students will not be overburdened by philological method on their middle-of-the-road way to "interpretation:' Nowhere in his lectures does he mention the textual variants or pan-European folklore at the scholarly heart of Child's collection. Learning something about the historical background of the battle of Otterburn will be sufficient to see how its heroic values contain the same "kernel" as Hotspur's "time of life" speech. Through "The Twa Corbies" they will gain a pitying and yet clear-eyed vantage on the "bare facts of waste" characteristic of trench warfare, as World War I slides into unprecedented savagery. As a form of popular culture, the ballad invites analogies to football, crew races, short stories, and other elements of the daily life of the Yale undergraduate, which, if hardly resembling the lives of the average American, seems closer to that world than to the one occupied by the professoriate in its dreamy moment before World War I.

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* * * Canby's approach to the ballad is part of a move from the 1890s to the 1930s toward gearing literature more toward the experience of students. "Experience" in this context was not restricted to prior events in students' lives or the texts they had already heard or read; it was not assumed that they had encountered ballads before, as young Walter Scott did. But neither does the ballad's value depend on a category as broad as any experience that literature gives to students through its ability to mimic "sensory and social experiences;' "imaginings;' and "feelings;' though this is at the heart of the purpose ascribed to literary study. 63 Rather, the ballad is placed somewhere between the directly experienced and the limitless field of vicarious experience by way of an operative analogy; the ballad is understood to be particularly well suited to developing the mental capacities of schoolchildren because those capacities are frequently likened to the more primitive civilization in which the ballads were initially composed and preserved. This "culture-epoch" theory had a significant impact on G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and other educational reformers, who folded it into their various models of childhood development or constructed alternative views of how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. 64 Since the faculties of children changed over time, it was necessary to gear the curriculum, in terms of method and content, toward those changes; and the ballad was frequently cited as a model text in furthering their development. The prominence of the ballad in experiential pedagogy may seem surprising in light of the break in pedagogical theory between professors like Gummere and the proponents of experience, a shift presented by the latter as one from college-centered to child-centered schooling. Gummere and Kittredge were both members of the English subcommittee of the National Education Association's Committee of Ten, whose 1894 report helped establish English as a discipline in elementary and secondary schools. That Committee was one of the chief targets of educational reformers because of its diktats on which texts were to be studied prior to college and how they were to be read. 65 Fittingly, Gummere's recommendations for elementary and secondary education are innocent of "child study" and other rivals to the humanist model of culture he embraced. 66 But the history of education, like all histories, moves not in a neat series of steps but rather by conflict, accretion, and accommodation. For practical reasons, high schools remained responsive to the demands made by colleges, and many teachers, during their time

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in college, would have been exposed to Child's discoveries and Gummere's theories along with the new child-centered pedagogy. Moreover, philology, itself rooted in Romantic paradigms of development, had an impact on progressive curricula, both through the prestige it lent to the ballads as texts worthy of classroom discussion and through its broader models of civilizational development. We can see the layering of these ideas in an 1892 essay written by Horace Scudder during his editorship of The Atlantic Monthly. Drawing on his authority as the past editor of the influential Riverside Magazine for Young People (1867-70) and the author of widely read children's books, he argues that the introduction of students to literature must follow "the process of development from the known to the unknown:' 67 Thus, the child is moved from the words he knows how to speak to writing and reading those words and then encountering these words on a blackboard or represented by concrete objects to printed matter, allowing him to make sense by using "the eye alone" (383). After these steps comes a "final and immense transition-the transition from colloquial to literary form," from the language he has heard at home to what "lie [s] beyond the immediate reach of his experience" (384). It is here that Scudder argues that primers and graded readers should be rid of the substandard pieces written solely for them and instead be filled with time-tested works. Using a biological term we have seen before, he particularly recommends "the protoplasm of literature"-"folk lore and legends" (387). The "matter" of this "protoplasm," if its simple form is preserved by the makers of schoolbooks, "appeals to the first wondering expressions of the child's mind" (387) and is thus an ideal tool for moving him from the "colloquial" to the "literary." The change that Scudder recommends was already well under way (thanks in part to his editorship of The Riverside Magazine). Specially manufactured works did not disappear from readers, but beginning in the late nineteenth century, there was an increase in fairy tales, myths, and other folkloric genres. 68 Traditional ballads began to appear in much greater numbers in high-school textbooks, 69 and the 188os set a new standard in the United States for works designed to introduce children to the legends of Europe, not intended exclusively for schools but often recommended in guides for teachers, such as James Baldwin's The Story of Siegfried (1882), Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), and Sidney Lanier's Boy's series. After The Boy's King Arthur (1880) and The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), Lanier puts together The Boy's Percy: Being Old Ballads of War, Adventure and Love from

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Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques ofAncient English Poetry. Together with an Appendix Containing Two Ballads from the Original Percy Folio MS (1882). The full title gives a sense of Lanier's aim to unite new discoveries in philologythe Folio MS. had first been published not too many years prior thanks in significant part to the efforts of"our own Professor Child's efforts," as Lanier refers to him-with an appeal to the rough-and-ready sensibilities of American boys.7° With the scruples of modern scholars as a necessary antidote to Percy's editorial sins (so even a piece like "The Friar of Orders Grey" can be included without fear of misleading the boyish reader), The Boy's Percy will steer its audience to "be manful in necessary fight, fair in trade, loyal in love, generous to the poor, tender in the household, prudent in living, plain in speech, merry upon occasion, simple in behavior and honest in all things." 71 As with the philological scholarship in which it was rooted, the texts that brought legends to American youth during this era often had a nativist and racialist bent. Baldwin, for instance, prefaces The Story of Siegfried with the claim that "the purest and grandest are those which we have received from our northern ancestors. They are particularly interesting to us; because they are what our fathers once believed, and because they are ours by right of inheritance." 72 However, the developmental model that made literary"protoplasm" a pedagogue's favorite was not limited to Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon racialism. For this more exclusive stance was itself a variant of the "ontogenyphylogeny" paradigm of education featured prominently in the work of figures like Dewey who were less committed to preserving the purity of Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic America. As J, Rose Colby, one of Dewey's disciples, phrases it in her guide to teaching literature, "a human being to-day, if he is to live the full measure possible to him, must in his little span compass the significant experience of the race:' 73 The definite article before "race" and the generality of "human being" suggests a category larger than Aryan or Negro. To ensure the proper functioning of this micro-/macro-relationship, Colby recommends that the teacher include "Sir Patrick Spens" and other ballads. 74 In this way, too, "literature" and "life" will be connected in "the school;' the outcome promised by the title of her book. In the 1890s and early 1900s, this argument is made repeatedly in textbooks and guides to teaching literature. In a claim hovering between exclusion and universality, Katharine Lee Bates asserts that ballads "belong ... to the youth of our literature, to the youth of our English race, and hence appeal[] with especial fascination to the youth of the human heart:' 75 After surveying the history of their collection, she sets out a wide range of possible classroom uses of the ballad, in-

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eluding research into comparative folklore, the structure of ballads, and their spirit of "democracY:' 76 Percival Chubb, a prominent educational reformer who also ascribes to the phylogeny/ontogeny model, recommends the ballad for ten- to thirteen-year-olds, who are in "an epic phase"; their mental world still resembles "the world's childhood" but they are beginning to move toward more "modern heroes." 77 To nurture them at this moment, he argues for more attention to "anonymous folk balladry" and hopes that a canon of ballads specifically for the "schoolboy" will be established, an effort in which The Boy's Percy will "be of some service." 78 Another guide to children's literature by Orton Lowe, an educational administrator and editor of Grimm's Tales and The Arabian Nights, locates the ballad in a similar position. In his recommendations on teaching lyric, nursery rhymes provide the first "point of contact between the home life and the altogether new life of the school;' and ballads should follow directly afterward, an encounter that will prepare students for reading them in secondary school.19 By the 1920s, the ballad was firmly ensconced in primary and secondary curricula, prominently featured, for instance, in "the most successful collection" for high schools in the 1920s and 1930s, Literature and Life. 80 As the "Life" of the title suggests, the series partakes in the centralizing of the student's experience understood in terms of a developmental model. Although it integrates many of the texts prescribed for college entrance exams, it presents literature not "as a subject in which facts are to be collected and memorized, but as an instrument through which the student may enter and enjoy the spiritual heritage stored up for him in books:' 81 For literature to become part of the student's developing life, "you" must either avail "yourself" of the "experiences" that literature brings you and thus "raise you and your descendants to a higher scale ofliving.... Or you may live the life of an animal" (2). To steer the student away from such an unfortunate devolutionary choice, the editors offer a series of texts. The first volume begins with "The World of Adventure;' but "there is nothing serious" here; these stories from Jack London and 0. Henry are of a piece with the tales "you have been making ever since you read with amazement Jack Horner's exploits with the Christmas Pie" (3). Akin to young Francis Gummere's dime novels, they revisit the preepic phase in Chubb and the nursery-rhyme world of Lowe, and it is then time to carry the student forward into "serious" texts, which arrive with the unit "Legend and History." This is where the ballads appear. Adhering to Gummere's view of composition, the editors imagine the making of "Sir Patrick Spens": Moved by the horror of the story, one person after another

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"adds his bit;' and their verses are then set to a simple tune. 82 The singing is crucial: As a "form of lyric poetry;' the ballad is designed to be sung, perhaps with a "rhythmic motion akin to the dance" (238). This leads to a definition of the ballad that takes its cues from Kittredge: ''A ballad is a tale telling itself in song" (238). To get this point across, one teaching guide recommends the recitation of "Baby Lon;' with individual students reading the various parts and the entire class speaking the refrain, for it "actually reproduces the communal genesis of the ballad" and explains the function of its peculiar formal qualities. 83 Emerging as a topic within teaching of lyric poetry in school, the ballad becomes an instrument for making the American lyric subject. It carries students from "the colloquial" to "the literary" while preserving a sense of community. It teaches poetic form while remaining relevant to the student's "experience:' Whether English, Scottish, or American, the ballad allows students to "participate vicariously in the mental growth of our ancestors" and instructs them in the invigorating code of values they will need in the modern world. 84 Even young American women in a profoundly patriarchal culture could profit from the ballad (though without openly challenging that culture's presuppositions): Katharine Lee Bates, after all, must have imagined that her students at Wellesley would read her textbook, and at Bryn Mawr, William Allan Neilson, later president of Smith College, uses the "tough and vigorous" poetry of the ballad to drive out effete "appreciations of Ruskin and Pater" foisted on the students by an important female instructor. 85 Louise Pound, Gummere's great antagonist, herself became president of the MLA. The ballad, as its enthusiasts say, becomes in the classroom "a poetry of the people, by the people, and for the people"-a claim we must temper with the reminder that very far from all the people were welcome in those classrooms in an age of misogyny, Jim Crow, anti-immigrant sentiment and structural inequities that kept many of the poor from the schoolhouse.

The "Dramatic Situation": Ballads, Experience, Philology, and The New Criticism We are now finally in a position to appreciate fully the last of the epigraphs to this book, in which Robert Penn Warren identifies Cleanth Brooks's suggestion to include ballads as "fundamental" to the New Criticism's most influential text, Understanding Poetry (1938). 86 Brooks's suggestion certainly

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left its mark: Ten ballads appear in the opening pages of Understanding Poetry, four of which are treated to the kind of dose reading that made the text famous, and two others, "Jesse James" and "Frankie and Johnny;' are also discussed at length. Only Shakespeare is accorded more poems, and no named author, not even Shakespeare, elicits more than two dose readings. The presence of so many ballads is extraordinary, given the received wisdom on the New Criticism. The New Critics, we have been told, tend to find their favorite objects of analysis in the difficulties of elite poetry, from the well-wrought urns of Donne and Keats to the modernist icons of Yeats and Eliot. While the anonymity of ballads makes them good candidates for avoiding "the intentional fallacy;' their simplicity would seem to lack the selfconscious verbal complexity and the rich ironies prized most by the New Critics. Their love of difficulty is symptomatic of an assumed bias against anything that smacks of the popular. The New Critical version of Modernism and the canon as a whole is distinctly high; Edgar Lee Masters and Joyce Kilmer need not apply. 87 How, then, do ballads make the cut, and especially "Frankie and Johnny" which is not one of the "pure" ballads of long-ago England and Scotland or even the more recent but still heroic American ballads of the cowboys or John Henry but rather the tale of an African American prostitute shooting her lover in 1899, a song that had already found a place in the mass culture of sheet music and swing albums? 88 The marked presence of ballads in Understanding Poetry may make us suspect that we have to alter our understanding of the New Criticism, including our sense of just what was new about it. Our suspicion that it may be more indebted to prior approaches than often thought rises when we detect echoes in Brooks and Warren's discussion of the ballad of both the pedagogy of experience and the philological scholarship toward which the New Criticism is supposed to be antipathetic. Commenting on "Jesse James" and "Frankie and Johnny;' which Brooks and Warren juxtapose with Frost's "Out, Out;' they argue that the selectivity with which ballads tell their stories is pivotal in establishing that "the poem is itself an experience" (32). Reading a poem, they say, is more like going to a football game than hearing a report of it on the radio (33). On one hand, this claim makes sense as a way to prevent some mistakes Brooks and Warren identify in the introduction. If the poem is a thing "itself;' it cannot be reduced to the author's intention or the historical context or an object of "message hunting;' which misapprehends the poem as a sermon in meter. But by repeatedly calling the poem an "experience;' they seem to court another mistake they discuss, of treating the poem

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as "pure realization" (14-16), of muddying the difference between drinking wine and Keats's representation of it in Ode to a Nightingale. 89 This dissolves the poem's form in the bath of the reader's impressions, precisely what the New Criticism is supposed to object to in experiential pedagogy. 90 Nonetheless, when Brooks and Warren define "structure" by way of "The Wife of Usher's Well;' they say it is "based on an appeal to the reader's feelings" (45). It's not immediately clear how this is not an example of the notorious "affective fallacy;' and if we meld this commentary with Warren's later reminiscence, the rationale for teaching the ballad in Understanding Poetry is hard to distinguish from the one given by the partisans of experience. Ballads help move the student from "the non-bookish" to "the bookish;' a phrase reminiscent of Scudder's pairing of"the colloquial" to "the literary." As Literature and Life ranks the ballad above 0. Henry in encouraging the reader's participation, Warren differentiates it from the folk tale because its significant gaps require "the hearer's imagination" to "get involved in the ballad itself." 91 The ballad's formal peculiarity is the efficient cause for embracing the "experience" that the poem provides, moving the lyric subject along the path to literacy as the ballad "leap[s] ... from peak to peak."92 The presence of philology in Understanding Poetry is subtler than that of the pedagogy of experience, but it is critical in revealing how Brooks and Warren transform both of these prior understandings of the ballad. As for Gummere, the key is poetic form, and the key term is "dramatic situation:' In the introduction, Brooks and Warren argue that "all poetry, including even short lyrics or descriptive pieces, involves a dramatic organization" (23), and the fourth edition of Understanding Poetry (1976) changes the title of the first section, where the ballads appear, from "Narrative Poems" to "Dramatic Situation:' A ballad like "Johnie Armstrong" owes its "interest" not to the story it tells-the event is of"no historical importance"-but rather to how it tells it: "The method, further, is dramatic in that much of the action is presented through dialogue and not indirectly by description" (36-37). Treating poems as dramas is crucial to the New Criticism, because it underwrites the foundational claim that poems do not, like science and philosophy, aim directly to make true or false statements about the world but rather to "embody" them in concrete situations, giving them their particular character as experience. 93 So when we are trying to understand, say, the famous conclusion of Ode on a Grecian Urn, we must think of "Truth is beauty, beauty truth" not as a naked generalization but a line "put in the mouth of a particular character" and thus to be judged solely on whether it obeys the

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"principle.... of dramatic propriety:'94 Conforming to the "total context of the poem" (154), the urn's concluding speech shows that that poems provide their own contexts. The urn is a good historian despite lacking "names, dates, and special circumstances" (164), and Keats's Ode is a good poem because of that same lack, properly concerned to offer the reader a concrete and dramatic experience of truth and beauty rather than worrying over "extrinsic" details. In Understanding Poetry, the ballad becomes the chosen vehicle for introducing students to this essential point. "The Wife of Usher's Well" is "typical of poetry in general" by giving us a concrete dramatization over abstract statement, and its "structure" is formed by a desire to have the reader experience these concrete details (43-45), such as the suspense generated by its leaping and lingering. It is not as if Gummere held a monopoly on the term "dramatic situation:' There is, however, strong evidence that Brooks and Warren do derive their idea of the dramatic situation from Gummere, and tracing that transaction clarifies what is new and what is not about the New Criticism's ideas of poetic form, of the relationship between elite and popular culture, and of the lyric subject. To make this link, we have to follow Brooks to Exeter College, Oxford, where he arrived in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar. To be at Oxford at this time was not to be at Cambridge, where I. A. Richards was pioneering the practical criticism that would stimulate much New Critical thought. Rather, for Brooks, it meant writing a thesis under the eminent historicist David Nichol Smith, an edition of the letters between Richard Farmer and Thomas Percy; the thesis would lead to Brooks's general editorship of The Percy Letters, published over the course of his long life. The enterprise reveals the depth of Brooks's knowledge of the Ballad Revival, itself heavily shaped by philology, but what clinches the link between Brooks and Gummere is an essay he wrote on the Popular Ballad either for a tutorial or an exam in fifteenth-century literature. 95 It is prefaced by pages of notes on Gummere's The Popular Ballad, which furnishes Brooks with all of his essay's central points-the ballad's composition by "the dancing throng" (which accounts for its lack of individual sentiment), incremental repetition, commonplaces, and other "lyric qualities;' as well as its degeneration once in the hands of the minstrels, who move away from "the rude drama of Edward and the Cruel Brother:' At the end of the essay, we can see the first formulation of the New Critical credo of dramatic propriety: "At its best the folk ballad presents the essence of a dramatic situation with hard vigorous detail, and with little regard for careful explanation and interpretation. The dramatic frame is

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enough; but (again at its best) these details are vivid enough to invest the framework with all the explanation necessary" (emphasis mine). But when this view makes its way into Understanding Poetry along with many of the same ballads cited in the essay, it is not prefaced by the account of communal composition at the heart of Gummere's theory (often found, as we have seen, in other college textbooks). Instead, the dramatic situation becomes a way to preserve the structure, the formal quiddity of the poem, while acknowledging that that structure is designed to simulate experience. While it "appeals to the reader's feelings:' that appeal is the effect of the poem-as-form. So what Gummere conjectures as social and causal-the community's affective reaction to an event-becomes in Brooks and Warren an effect for the individual. If a reader is not moved by the picture of the mother in "The Wife of Usher's Well" hovering over her three sons as they sleep, that is his loss. For this is how the poem should affect him, even if he is not conscious of how it does this (the point of analysis is to bring this operation to light) and even if the poet did not intend it. This is how the ballad puts the form in formalism, highlighting the dramatic situation that makes it possible as an experience, one that, unlike the sense impressions that the ballad itself simulates, can be repeated through reading and subjected to analysis. The dramatic situation adds backbone to the perceived squishiness of experiential pedagogy by inserting an invariant formal spine. But in doing so it also seems to rigidify its political energy. For progressive educators, focusing on experience was essential because it made literature and the rest of the curriculum responsive to the needs of children as future citizens of a democratic society, nurturing the freedoms and responsibilities that role entails. As Louise Rosenblatt puts it in an influential book published the same year as Understanding Poetry, the exploration that literary experience allows gives the student insight into the ways of life "from which he is free to choose" and "develop[s] the kind of imagination most needed in a democracy-the ability to understand the personality and needs of others and to envisage the possible effect of our own actions upon the lives of others:'96 Brooks and Warren do argue in their preface that poetry "has a basis in common human interests" (25), but this is more a rhetorical flourish than an elaborated argument. They do not explain how focusing the student on the structure of narrative or imagery or meter will either increase her agency or fit her to consider the needs of others. The absence of the latter is even more noticeable in the absence of Gummere's "dancing throng:' which provide the "ca-

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dent feet" that sound out the democratic spirit and provide a rationale for studying ballads in the first place. Many have argued that this lack of politics is, of course, a politics. While the New Critics may have started in the 1930s as Agrarians decrying the dislocations wrought by capitalism and instrumental reason, New Criticism as it gets enshrined in English classrooms and academic journals either loses its (re)-activist politics or it simply realizes its conservatism while shedding its contrarian energies. 97 The logical end of this approach can be seen in a series of lectures by Warren published as Democracy and Poetry (1975). It is unlikely that Warren knew of Gummere's book of the same name, but it is useful to juxtapose them, since poetry for Warren is not a direct effect of and model for community but a "'made thing' [that] stands as a vital emblem of the integrity of the self, whether the thing is a folk ballad or a high tragedY:' 98 While this individualism would seem to be at odds with a conservative, Eliotic ideal of community the New Critics supposedly embrace, it can be read as the flip side of it, the recusant standing heroically against a fallen culture, secularized and gentled into a paragon for the privileged subjects of the English classroom. Here we see the political effects of lyric as Mill has it and Gummere rejects it, with the isolate self of his liberal individualism put paid by a conservative canon secured by New Critical pedagogy, elevating rightleaning poets like T. S. Eliot over progressive "popular modernists" like Carl Sandburg, and isolating poetry (and students) from either political engagement or the taint of mass culture. But as I have argued throughout this study, this sort of ideology critique is complicated by the elite collection of the ballad. It is not only that we should be cautious of blaming the New Critics for a split between mass and elite beyond their control or overlooking their role in introducing an expanded, post-GI Bill undergraduate student body to difficult poems otherwise thought to be beyond their ken. 99 It is that, as Douglas Mao has pointed out, the New Critical emphasis on the poem as object shares with the Frankfurt School "an anxiety ... grounded in a profound mistrust of the transformations of life occurring in the age of the commodity." 100 When Warren makes his claim for the poem as model for the subject, he is under the plausible impression that his argument supports rather than undermines democracy. For he opposes the individuality of poem and self not to community as such but against the commodification of selves by modern American society and its adjunct, "popularized art ... art as mere commodity" (86). From this standpoint, what separates Brooks and Warren from Gummere and the ped-

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agogues of experience is not the presence of the social world and popular culture in the latter and their mystified absence in the former. Rather, they differ over where they place the emphasis in the allegories of poetic form that they construct. For Gummere, the ultimate criterion of a poem or a reading of it is its acknowledgment of the community--or, as he says, "what is bad in art is really anti-social:' 101 For Brooks and Warren, the individual poem is above all a structure in which the individual reader can learn how to find his or her proper self. In other words, for Gummere, lyric form is the effect of the community; for Brooks and Warren, form is the effect of the poem, which in turn affects (and more strongly, effects) the self who experiences it. Yet just as Gummere believes in a dialectic between the individual and communal, Brooks and Warren do not simply neglect either the poetry or the politics of the group. The familiar distinction they draw between "the popular" and "the popularized" is dubious, but their idea of "the popular" is broader than we might expect. They spend no time moralizing about the content or low origins of"Frankie and Johnny" or reveling in its ghetto exoticism.102 That inclusiveness is more pronounced in the anthology and critical history they edited along with R. W. B. Lewis, American Literature: The Makers and the Making (1973), in which Warren selected and enthusiastically commented upon not only traditional ballads, Native American chants, "Frankie and Johnny" and "Jesse James" but also Wobbly songs, the works of Woody Guthrie, and especially the blues from Jelly Roll Morton to Bessie Smith to Robert Johnson, even mentioning a remake by the Rolling Stones. 103 Melding the harmony of the spiritual and the antiphony of the work song with the individual expressiveness of the holler, the blues is a "unique and powerful" genre of poetry and "much of the poetry recognized as 'literature: white or black, seems tepid beside it" (2:2759). Democracy and Poetry also clarifies Brooks and Warren's intent behind placing popular verse in textbooks. There, Warren acknowledges that democracy "should glorify the 'common man: " but he observes that there are two contradictory senses of"common" (78-90 ). One is associated with the Christian soul, a potentiality that needs constant shaping, while the other assumes that that commonality unmodified is already ideal, self-sufficient. This opposition rewrites the split in the common we have seen all along in the elite appropriation of the ballad between common-as-universal and common-as-impolite, yoking them both to the standard of the developing lyric subject. The latter, common-as-impolite, is internalized as a slothful self-sufficiency, the sort of right-wing populism that fascinates and repels the

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author of All the King's Men ("Every Man a King"). The former includes the fundamental revaluing of the common as a starting point for subjects in the public sphere, as raw material in need of dedicated labor. Poetry is an essential tool in this self-fashioning because it offers "a sovereign antidote for passivity;' demanding "participation" and "imaginative enactment" (89) rather than the slack-jawed surrender evoked by "popularized" art. As it does for Gummere and the advocates of experience, the ballad initiates students into lyric subjectivity. Stimulating in its reticence and its minimal poetic structure, it is the gateway to the more refined pleasures of "the bookish" like tone and imagery, culminating in Ode on a Grecian Urn. That progress, in turn, helps create the student who moves from section I to section VII of Under-

standing Poetry. Of course, selves get made by poems in Gummere as well. Like the enraptured crowd of Plato's Ion, they join the "dancing throng." Brooks and Warren, in contrast, emphasize understanding over rapture, redescribing the elided moment that Gummere calls the "consent of sympathy;' the mystical moment where the social contract is struck. Brooks and Warren produce this central missing link of social contract theory as something chosen. In other words, the lyric subject, in Brooks and Warren, is the liberal subject, ready to take on the burdens of citizenship and to actively fight for his or her individual rights against the depredations of the state and the market. But the strong presence of the ballad in their work reminds us that the liberal subject is never too far from the communal strain of lyric.

* * * It may not have escaped the reader that I have shifted emphasis from Brooks

to Warren. Part of the reason, admittedly, is that Warren proves more receptive to popular culture than Brooks over the course of their careers. 104 But it would be a mistake to separate the pair too much when it comes to the ballad. In addition to suggesting to Warren that they begin their textbook with ballads, Brooks also steers his friend toward the genre as a way of grounding his own poetry, an influential reimagining of "the imagined community" of America in the mid-twentieth century and beyond as well as a powerful example of poetic practice that amplifies and complicates poetic theory. If by day at Oxford Brooks took notes on Gummere, he enlivened "many an evening" for Warren with "an angelic rendition" of "Frankie and Johnny;' 105 reminding the two Americans of their roots in popular song. Warren also

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credits Brooks with "a special influence ... in turning me back to certain elements of my boyhood world, its people, ballads, and tales:' 106 Like Sir Walter Scott encountering the "Delilahs of my Imagination" transformed by Thomas Percy into "the subject of sober research;' Warren uses Brooks's "influence" to recover and elevate his "boyhood world." Thanks in part to Brooks, the ballad becomes a formative "experience" for Warren in three ways: In addition to the tale it tells so "concretely;' it also carries a memory of his personal past and the life-world of which he and the ballad are a part. We can see these interwoven narratives in two of Warren's most important poems, The Ballad of Billie Potts (1943) and Brother to Dragons (1953). Based on a tale told to Warren by his great-aunt, Billie Potts tells of an unscrupulous but successful young man who returns from the West to his parents' house in "the land between the rivers;' which is the ballad's refrain, an eighteenth-century Kentucky shrouded in myth. Although home, Billie does not reveal his identity, and this proves to be his undoing, for his parents specialize in killing wealthy guests who stay at their inn. Warren tells the story with the unsentimental eye, simple diction, and heavy rhyme of the folk ballad, but he also weaves in a parenthetical commentary that alternates between blank verse, free verse, and rhymed couplets and reflects on the story in more ornate and emotionally charged language. The commentary individuates the reader by addressing him in the second person, and by emphasizing his exteriority to the scene: "(There was a beginning but you cannot see it, I There will be an ending but you cannot see it. I They will not turn their faces to you though you call ... )." 107 So, if we hear the entrancing call of the ballad, it does not hear us. In yoking together "the non-bookish" and "the bookish;' lyric as communal song and individual speech, Warren questions whether these two worlds are commensurable. 108 If this reveals a respect for the integrity of popular verse that, as we saw in the previous chapter, is a legacy of Romanticism, Warren, in bifurcating the poem between folk and sophisticated perspectives, asks even more pointedly than "The Solitary Reaper" whether they can be contained in a single mind or a single work. Yet as the poem continues Warren brings the "you" closer to the tale, as if he were enacting the absorptive qualities attributed to the ballad. It turns out that you, like Billie, have come home. That home is not specified, and your motives seem different. Billie returns to flaunt his success; you return because modern life has proven alienating, despite the temporary pleasures of financial success and love affairs: "You came back. I For there is no place like home" (318-25, 332-33). The echo of The Wizard of Oz is typical of the

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parenthetical speaker's archness, but the upshot of this desire to return proves deadly serious. In what seems like the poem's best candidate for its originating "dramatic situation;' Billie leans down to get a drink from the spring and sees his reflection, at which point his father kills him: And there is the spring as black as ink, And one star in it caught though a chink Of the leaves that hang down in the dark of the trees, And the star is there but it does not wink. And Little Billie gets down on his knees And props his hands in the same old place To sup the water at his ease; And the star is gone but there is his face. "Just help yoreself;' Big Billie said; Then set the hatchet in his head. (359-68) Directly after this, you reprise Billie's motion, moving further into the action of the ballad, kneeling down and seeing "[t]he darkling gleam of your face little less than the water dark;' The ballad confirms that the lyric subject is a difficult project rather than an entity to be assumed. As you move from place to place, you try to shore up your selthood by looking into the river "[t]o drink not of the stream but of your deep identity;' and you assume that though "(t]he name and the face are always new, ... they are you" (222, 237-38). Your end will probably not be as bloody as Billie's, but the membrane between his story and yours turns out to be more permeable than it appears in the separation of tale and parentheses. The "you'' who returns is, of course, legible as Warren himself; guided by Brooks's "special influence;' he has reconnoitered with a story from his childhood in an apparent effort to get into touch with his past. The result, though, is not a sanguine tale of homecoming, an Agrarian fantasia, but rather a sanguinary violence that splits the self. It is recapitulated formally by the tension between the balladic tale and the artful commentary. They may end up meeting in the fateful reflection in the river, a double reflection, really, since you look into the water just as Billie looks into the spring. But self and reflection are not identical, and the difference points to the dependence of the self on things outside of it, including the ballad. As the poem makes grimly clear, you, like Billie, cannot simply "help yoreself:' The image of the self as autonomous and whole, born of"the implacable thirst of self" (219) turns out to be a wearying and narcissistic delusion, and you return home in hopes of healing the split in your subjectivity. Once there, however, things are not so simple.

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The river is the necessary surface for the self to be visible but also indifferent to the particularity of who looks in it, like the star that looks down upon you. The rivers in the poem take their name from a broader landscape, like "Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio;' and that landscape has its "own beginning and its end" (227, 225). Likewise, the balladic sections in the poem are geared toward action and description, not motive and internal struggle. So if The Ballad of Billie Potts conforms to the idea in Democracy and Poetry that the poem is a model of the self, this ballad also conforms to the New Critical preference for the paradoxes that emerge from the poem as "dramatic situation:' The ballad defies our desire to apprehend it as a set of propositions and steers us toward a scenario in which the experience of Billie Potts becomes a version of our own, a scenario informed by Warren's return to his ancestral ground and the stories that reside there. We cannot have the integral self we want but we cannot stop searching for it; we cannot enter fully into the folk world of the ballad but we cannot stop wanting that, either. The implications of the return to the ballad for the lyric subject and the imagined community of America are made clear in Brother to Dragons, a drama in verse that revolves around the brutal murder of a slave named George by Thomas Jefferson's nephews, Lilburne and Isham Lewis. Speaking to Jefferson early in the poem, a character with the author's initials RPW reports that he originally tried to write a ballad based on this tale, beginning with the dramatic situation of the two brothers drinking by a "sagging fire" after the death of their mother, which helps to precipitate the catastrophe. But he discovered that ... the form Was not adequate: the facile imitation Of a folk simplicity would never serve, For the beauty of that simplicity is only That the action is always and perfectly self-contained, And it is an image that comes as its own perfect explanation In shock or sweetness to the innocent heart. But first, our hearts are scarcely innocent, And any pleasure we take in the folk simplicity Is a pleasure of snobbish superiority or neurotic yearning. And second, the action here is not explained By anything in the action. It is explained, If explainable at all, by our most murderous Complicities, and our sad virtue, too. 109

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To write this story as a ballad "[w]ould be like shoveling a peck of red-hot coals I In a croker sack to tote them down the road ... No, the form was not adequate to the material" (44). No longer innocent, our pleasure "in the folk simplicity" is the effect of snobbery or neurosis. This is a powerful claim and one that agrees with recent critiques of the elite interest in the popular. But if true, how can Brooks and Warren justify the continued inclusion of ballads in the editions of Understanding Poetry that appear in 1960 and 1976 and in American Literature: The Makers and the Making? For by this account ballads belong to a truly prelapsarian world cut off from fallen readers. While it may be plausible to imagine elementary schoolchildren as innocent, it's a stretch for the college students reading the textbooks that Brooks and Warren write. Moreover, while a "self-contained" poem is a dream of the New Criticism, the explanation must be supplied by exegesis; if it "comes as its own perfect explanation;' it's unclear what job would be left for the critic. So the description of the ballad here is either mere hyperbole, outright contradiction, or something that requires more explanation. There is a touch of hyperbole here, and no logical explanation can account entirely for how Warren seeks to overcome this impasse. But he does offer a solution of sorts, and the way through begins with a recognition of our complicity in George's murder. As the murderers' mother Lucy says and RPW confirms, we are guilty of denying that we have murder in our own hearts, that her children are anything like us (191, 214). This act of confession points to the enormously productive role guilt plays in Warren's work. As Michael Szalay has recently argued, Warren repeatedly rehearses the dramatic situation of Freud's Totem and Taboo, in which civilization is founded on the primal guilt of a set of brothers who have risen up to kill their repressive father in a vain attempt to enjoy the pleasures he restricts to himself. 110 This is apparent in "Billie Potts;' where "you" must "ask forgiveness and the patrimony of your crime; I I And kneel in the untutored night as to demand I What gift-oh, father, father-from that dissevering hand?" (391-93). The "dis-" or "the dissevering hand" is a negation that does not in fact negate, leaving keen the edge of the father's murderous "gift:' The son's crime is not revealed, but we might surmise that it is the Original Sin that haunts so much of Warren's work, which he often represents by way of Oedipal conflict. Here, the father kills the son, expiating the primal guilt of the son's aggression against the father. This is represented by the "birthmark" that Billie's parents do not see until after his death, the same mark, the last lines of the poems assert, you also have by virtue (or vice) of being born, which is "your name"

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and "your luck" (510-13). We are all marked by an Original Sin that we must pay for. Jefferson is mired in this realization of human fallibility in Brother to Dragons. He now finds it impossible to overlook the ugly violence bred in the human bone, but he cannot reconcile himself to it. Responding to RPW's claim "the form was not adequate to the material;' he reveals how high the stakes are in finding an adequate form: JEFFERSON: It never is. There is no form to hold Reality and its insufferable intransigence. I know. I know, for once I tried to contrive A form I thought fit to hold the purity of man's hope. But I did not understand the nature of things. (44)

As the ballad is the wrong form for telling this story (for telling any story to which modern guilt and neurosis is attached), The Declaration of Independence proves inadequate to "hold I Reality:' George's murder makes Jefferson reject the Enlightenment belief that people are pure, sufficient as they were born, and need only be stripped of the deformities of a corrupt civilization. So the nation is built on a shaky foundation that he and the other Founding Fathers provided, a mistake reverberating into the present as Americans in 1953 continue to struggle with the same violent forces that killed George. It is the "white bone through the black flesh;' a flesh burnt by "the hot coals of the human definition" (44). We are a long way from the sureties of Bates's ''America the Beautiful" and her confident collection of the ballad, following the pattern set by Walter Scott's encounter with Percy. Scott uses the ballad to get a developmental lyric subject while in Warren we have a pessimism about the very possibility of such a development. Both the lyric subject and the imagined community are in peril. Until the end of the poem, Jefferson finds the situation hopeless. No form is capable of picturing the horror of the human condition, an intransigence that mocks his life's work and his dream of the Republic. But this is not Warren's view of the matter. The poem, after all, does have a form, and it is one in which Jefferson is only one speaking character. This polyphony is what makes it possible for Jefferson to change his mind: He is swayed by Lucy into accepting the fallenness of being human, acknowledging his likeness to his nephews; this is a precondition for recovering his dream of the Republic (193-94).It is only after this that George finally gets to speak (though he gets

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only three lines) and is addressed as "[m]y son" by Jefferson. This rapport between "white bone" and "black flesh" then leads Jefferson to his last speech in which he distinguishes, as Warren will later do in Democracy and Poetry, between the error of adhering to the self as it is commonly found rather than creating the self by "strik[ing] the steel of wrath on the stone of guilt" (195). This act of self-creation reveals "[h]ow all creation validates itself" and redeems Jefferson's vision of the United States. That dream is centered for him in the "gleaming West:' toward which he sent his ill-fated cousin Meriwether Lewis, who appears in the poem as a spirit accusing his surrogate father Jefferson of not preparing him for the treachery of civilized men once he returned (182). Having acknowledged the darkness woven into the human soul, Jefferson can now imagine the West remade, and he does so by appropriating the Native American ritual of the Ghost Dance, which, as Warren remarks in a note, emerged "in the last paroxysm of resistance and despair" (227). Herded onto reservations, the Ghost Dancers imagined themselves floating above as a new layer of earth and grass buried their white oppressors. Jefferson imagines a "grander Ghost Dance" that restores the lyric subject and the imagined community: "Dance into morning past the morning star, I And dance the heart by which we have lived and died" (195). In the 1979 version of the poem, versions of these lines are spoken by Lewis and then sung back to him by a chorus of all the characters, underlining the communality of the vision. 111 The doubleness of lyric becomes a means to redemption. This is a striking reversal of the poem's opening terms. Warren begins by having RPW tell us that we are barred from the ballad by our modern selfconsciousness, and that the murderous action of the poem is explicable not by itself, as in the ballad, but by our "complicities:' But once we recognize that complicity, we gain access to a more innocent world represented by a popular genre analogous to the ballad, the Native American Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance returns us to the "cadent feet" of Gummere's primitive ballad-making community, but the difference is that Warren injects the guilt mechanism of Freud's "primal throng." In the poem's concluding lines, RPW repeats the credo that makes this ecstasy depend upon a "recognition I Of the common lot of our kind": The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence. The recognition of necessity is the beginning of freedom. The recognition of the direction of fulfillment is the death of the self, And the death of the self is the beginning of selthood. 112 (214-15)

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If this is reminiscent of Gummere, it is also reminiscent of Blake, a selfannihilation that redeems the self, a passage through the pain of Experience that leads to a Higher Innocence. The Romanticism surprisingly at the heart of this poem by a New Critic (however we may want to differentiate the politics of Warren and Blake) is also expressed in its treatment of the ballad. By refusing "a facile imitation;' Warren commits to not violating the integrity of the ballad out of an unexamined desire for its pleasures, as Wordsworth passes quietly by the Solitary Reaper, as Blake questions the appropriation of Street Cries. Access to the ballad must be earned. This rules out snobbishness because it places the ballad on par with high lyric as conventionally defined; but the neurosis generated by our alienation from the Ghost Dance cannot be so easily ignored. It must be worked through. Having worked through it himself, RPW can leave the site of this historical trauma and return to his father, who dozes in the car (nothing like the threatening father of Billie Potts), and tells him that they can "go home" (216). This pattern is repeated in Warren's own life. He may not, like Scott, have died with a ballad on his lips, but it is perhaps more fitting that his death was marked by Brooks's singing of none other than "Frankie and Johnny:' At a memorial dinner for Warren at Vanderbilt, Brooks spoke of his "love of popular music and his amusement whenever he heard the inimitable Brooks's rendition of one of America's great folk songs:' 113 Those gathered around the table then prevailed upon him to sing it: "Cleanth pushed his chair back from the table and sat straight, without even touching his back to the back of the chair. He then began to sing in the most proper angelic voice: 'Frankie and Johnny were lovers .. : " 114 This funeral verse, a song of illicit sex and the death it leads to sung in an angelic voice, clinches tile ballad as tile genre necessary to Brooks-and-Warren, the remarkable dyad so prominent in tile twentieth century's middle decades. The ballad initiates tile young readers of Understanding Poetry not into guilt as such (they are always already guilty) but into a consciousness of it tllat Freud calls civilization. The lyric subject may not have chosen to be born into sin, but tllat is tile "common lot;' and knowing now of his situation, he must take up tile burden of "understanding poetry." That is to be accomplished not by recourse to historical context or biography or pure feeling, since, like tile sinful individuals tllat tile poem models, tile poem cannot be understood or properly valued by tllese schema. Instead (and tllis is what is new about the New Criticism), Brooks and Warren take tile philological structure of the dramatic situation and subtract Gummere's primitivist scenario, since this would risk preempting the

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self-fashioning work of understanding by putting sociology in its place. It would mean "understanding primitives;' in which the lyric self would be consumed by the community, rather than "understanding poetry" as a technology for constructing the self. Instead, they rename the absorptive power of the dramatic situation as something that gives the reader an "experience;' which encourages him not to paraphrase the poem in terms of its ideas but to analyze the formal structures that make possible its simulation of sense impressions and feelings. This labor is never truly accomplished, because however knowledgeable the student becomes, his guilt is never actually erased, and here is where they part company with Blakean apocalypse. After Jefferson's vision of the Ghost Dance, RPW reminds us of those like George "who could not end in joy" (196). Understanding, as Spenser says, is endless work because the self can never be perfected. This severe model of Bildung is where the politics of Brooks and Warren's pedagogy ultimately resides. It produces a self who is not a commodity on the market but rather one who exists in dramatic situations with others, and the fates of all are linked, as America's future depends upon the acknowledgment of the butchery of George the slave. This is the limit of its vision of community, though; its commitment to Original Sin stands in contrast to the more liberating aims of experience pedagogy, which seeks to free "the adolescent reader ... from the neurotic fears and the obsessions of guilt that often accompany the feeling that somehow he is unique and queer:' 115 It also conflicts with the de-repression that was the hallmark of the radical movements on campus and off that emerged in the 1960s while the New Criticism consolidated its place in literary scholarship and English classrooms, the same political turmoil that helped eclipse the New Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s in theory, however much literary classrooms are still indebted to close reading in practice. It is not that Brooks and Warren exclude the popular as such or that they refuse to imagine how poetry might connect to the social world. It is that the lyric subject made through poetry can properly participate in the Ghost Dance of the nation only through the difficult, guilt-racked, and patriarchal work of understanding poetry. What carries this wounded lyric subject across the threshold to "bookish" self-knowledge is the ballad.

Coda: Poetic Justice Revisited In Democracy and Poetry, Gummere repeatedly claims that the most sacred value of "the imagined community" is "poetic justice." This, he says, is "the

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supreme gift of democracy to literature;' and he distinguishes it from the mere feeling preached by Rousseau, which sets up the French Revolution to fail by not subjecting individuals to the law of the group (76-81). While sympathy may move the individual to sing along with the throng, once the contract is struck it obliges the participants to bow to the dictates of justice, and primitive poetry models this relationship for the culture from which it springs. This is why tragedy is the keynote of popular ballads, for while unfortunate for the individuals in the text, their individual sacrifice often brings good to the community represented in the ballad and re-created by it (82). It appears, then, that we have reversed field in the nearly two centuries between The Beggar's Opera and Gummere's last work. Gay uses the ballad to critique poetic justice; in the context of a corrupt political order and elite culture, it would be a farce to insist on punishing the guilty on stage, especially when only small-time robbers are to suffer the noose. Gummere, in contrast, sees poetic justice as literature's saving grace and the watchword of democracy. There are two basic ways to read this change. The first holds that Gummere lived in a more democratic time that enjoyed an egalitarian polity and culture unknown to Gay. If Gay had lived in this era, he would have had less reason to object to the idea of poetic justice, since there would not have been any hypocrisy involved in demanding that art live up to the virtue cultivated by society. The second responds more skeptically. One might grant that in 1911 the average (white male) person in the United States or Great Britain had more freedom than in 1728 to participate politically and had more freedom from the impositions of the state. One might grant further that cultural elitism had declined somewhat thanks to, among other factors, the profound changes in the circulation of artworks in these nations, including everything from cheap printing to the founding of public museums. Still, it was not long after Gummere's lectures that the idea of submitting oneself to the dictates of "the imagined community" was exploded in the trench warfare of World War I that Canby describes, and the remainder of the twentieth century is a long, bloody object lesson in the dangers of dulce et decorum est and the totalitarian states that often demand such sacrifices. In the face of such violence and ongoing social inequities, it is dangerous to subject art directly to the demands of "the imagined community;' to insist on a patriotic message like ''America the Beautiful:' Poetry must retain a critical character, spurring its audience to question the ideologies of the time and to dream alternatives to them. Of course, one could quarrel with the premise that art need say anything

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political, whatever its ideology. But as we have already seen, even the "dramatic situation" of the New Critics does not, in the end, limit the poem to itself; Brother to Dragons ends with a wishful vision of the Ghost Dance to redeem the imagined community of the United States from its founding in racial division and violence, a violence that remains with us. The question, then, is not whether lyric has political implications but what those implications are and what they should be, and the stakes in answering this question are also revealed by the Ghost Dance. There is something troubling about Warren's using a belief emerging out of the Native American response to genocide in order to revivify a dream of the American West that helped make that genocide possible. It involves an erasure of historical specificity akin to the way he collapses historically specific debates over remedying segregation into a Freudian-cum-Christian narrative in which the violence of White supremacy seems less a problem to be remedied by the state and than a sad fact of civilization for which everyone bears the burden. 116 The point here is not to insist that poetry never look more broadly than a tightly delimited field so that the finest grains of history come clear, as if the only way Warren could have passed a political smell test would have been to represent both the 1811 murder of George and the South of 1953 as they "actually" were. That way lies the grim totalitarianism of the Soviet Dance of the Tractors and also cuts us off from the generalizations we need if any idea of human value is to be defended. Rather, Warren's Ghost Dance, in its beauty and its disturbing appropriation, should remind us that the utopian images cast by lyric ultimately need to answer the question: Whose interests are served by this dream? As a great poet once wrote, in dreams begin responsibility. In the end, the issue can be framed as the relationship between political and poetic representation, between "justice" and the "poetic:' That difficult pairing has been powerfully presented by Allen Grossman as a conflict between "radical humanism" and "aesthetic humanism:' 117 If we grant that the privilege of elite representation was long monopolized by king and aristocrat, then one solution to this inequity in representation is to expand that privilege as far as possible. ''Aesthetic humanism," which emerges with the bourgeoisie, attempts this by co-opting the aristocratic standard, with the understanding that that image now stands for all, a "human image in human scale" (302). That expansion, however, has retained a residual sacrifice modeled on the akedah or the Passion of Christ in which some higher power is acknowledged as the source of eidetic privilege. Meanwhile, groups like women and the working class have all too often remained invisible, sacrificed

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without eidetic or material compensation. This is to say that aesthetic humanism only pretends to universality. Whether or not it is of or by the people, it fails to be for them. Radical humanism seeks to remedy the injustice of aesthetic humanism by demanding "an immanent communalism in which eidetic privilege is universally and equally possessed" (301), requiring no sacrifice. However, Grossman argues that there is a problem with radical humanism as well: In the Western traditions of poetics and politics, we lack a persuasive model for recognizing the value of all persons without losing the individuality understood to give value to that image in the first place. This leads to paradox: "If the 'human form divine' is the hostage or dependency of a defunctive aristocratic civilization, then the overthrow of that civilization, the breaking of the dead hand, is mandated. If the 'human form divine' is a pure contingency of that same aristocratic civilization, then the aims and the means of revolution are mutually contradictory, knotted together as mutually exclusive terms of an insoluble historical paradox" (304). That is, by attacking the indefensible privileges of aristocracy, we leave ourselves no way to represent the majesty of the human form. That paradox looks insoluble only if we accede to Grossman's second "if' We might instead invoke, as do Blake and Whitman and many more recent poets, an account of the "human form divine" that is independent entirely of "aristocratic civilization." Alternatively, we might follow "post-human" thinkers who argue that it's time to jettison individual subjectivity altogether as our central term of value and offer in its stead "the cyborg" or a "democratic subject position" or some other mode of collectivity. But even if we contest the terms of the problem as Grossman theorizes it, he does indicate how significant the break would be if we responded fully to the imperative that he himself then invokes: "But there must be an aesthetics of participation, as there is now an aesthetics of distance" (304). This study has argued that a lyric resource for discovering that "aesthetics of participation" has existed from the start in lyric's communal strain, the shared structures of language and prosody and genre of which the ballad is a strong and persistent example. Yet I make no assumptions about the necessary political significance of any particular instance where the ballad is incorporated into elite lyric, which struggles to balance the discernible image modeled by the individual with the legitimacy of the group and its sympathetic consent. My goal here has been more modest, to provide an analysis of one important element in how the English literary canon came to be and

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what that tells us about the value of what we read, write about, and teach. We must avoid the temptation, still found with startling frequency in "postMarxist" critique, to think of popular culture as necessarily emancipatory and to assume that its inclusion within elite texts or institutions is politically progressive. For every liberatory anthem like "We Shall Overcome" or progressive group like the Roots, there is a "Horst-Wessel-Lied" or a racist skinhead band like RaHoWa. 118 Then there are the complex appropriations and reappropriations of songs like "Born in the U.S.A:' and "This Land Is Your Land." It has moreover been a central claim of this study that the elite encounter with these songs has always been mediated and will continue to be as long as the cultural field is structured by the divisions that remain even in an era of hyperlinked networks and narrowcasting. To miss those mediations risks a reductive critique of the aesthetic both in elite circles and in popular ones. It also risks conflating the praxis of political agency with "a politics of the Imaginary;' which conveniently collapses the difference between the signifier's motility and political power. For a' that, I will venture the claim that the responses of elite lyric to "songs commonly sung up and down the street" show that the canon has been vectored toward enlarging access to elite culture. It even, in the responses of Blake and the progressive pedagogues of experience, imagines a society where sacrifice of the Other may no longer be necessary to make everyone's face visible. Whether that promise has been kept and, more momentously, will be kept are among the many questions beyond the scope of this study. I am content for the moment if I have helped to clarify how the possibility of that promise has emerged through elite responses to the enduring call of the popular.

Notes

Introduction 1. Qtd. in Edmond McAdoo Gagey, Ballad Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 4· 2. A healthy sample of this abuse can be found in the appendix to Natascha Wiirzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ), 253-84. 3· G. Gabrielle Starr provides a nuanced account of the interplay between the community and the inwardness generated by the crossing of the lyric and the novel in Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 4· Unsigned review of Lyrical Ballads, The British Critic 17 (February 1801): 13m. 5· ''All you that either hear or read" can be found in a song from Thomas D'Urfey, The Two Queens of Brentford, in New Operas (London, 1721), 58. My understanding of the ballad is indebted to Wiirzbach; Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); and especially to Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (1989; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6. Albert B. Friedman makes this observation in what remains a useful literaryhistorical study, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence ofPopular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 8-10. I discuss many of the same authors (Burns, Macpherson, Scott, and Wordsworth) as does Peter T. Murphy in his elegant Poetry as an Art and Occupation in Great Britain, 176o-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and, like him, I am interested in the role of poetic form. For better or worse, the scope of my inquiry is wider and more invested in delineating the relationship between literature and other institutions. 7· For a survey of recent criticism on lyric, see Mark Jeffreys, "Lyric Poetry and the Resistance to History;' in New Definitions ofLyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture, ed. Mark Jeffreys (New York: Garland, 1998), ix-xxiv. See also Jeffreys's "Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics;' PMLA no, no. 2 (March 1995): 196-205, although his account is symptomatic of recent criticism in ignoring lyric between the Renaissance and Romanticism. 8. Relying on Romantic and Modernist lyric, Paul de Man exposes the fictions of lyric "voice" in "The Rhetoric of Temporality;' first printed in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969 ), 173-209. For a recent elaboration of this approach, see Pr6spero Saiz, "Decon-

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struction and the Lyric;' in From Ode to Anthem: Problems of Lyric Poetry, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 193-249· 9. See Thomas M. Greene, "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self;' Studies in English Literature, 150D-1900 10, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 325-48 and, in a different key, Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's 'Perjur'd Eye;" Representations 7 (Summer 1984): 69-71, 77-78. For a brilliant redescription of the Early Modern lyric self as the product of a dialectical relationship between lyric's "fictional" and "ritual" modes, see Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 10. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); seeM. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric;' in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 201-29. n. "What Is Poetry?" in John Stuart Mill: Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 56. For another influential contraction of poetry, see Mikhail Bakhtin's tendentious opposition of it to the heteroglossia of the novel in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 286-88. 12. Theodor W. Adorno, "Lyric Poetry and Society;' trans. Bruce Mayo, in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Mackay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 163. 13. Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 136. For a classicist's critique of the shrinkage of choral lyric to Erlebnislyrik, see W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 176--95. 14. Siskin, 132. 15. Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Can1bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12. For a similarly illuminating account, see Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), 8-32. 16. As Marshall Brown puts it, the conventional wisdom is that "there was no lyric poetry in the eighteenth century worth speaking of' "Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric;' ELH 66, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 373n. 17. The phrases cited are from John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-EighteenthCentury England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Douglas Lane Patey, ''Aesthetics and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century;' Studies in English Literature 33, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 6oo; Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 184; and Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 131,135. In contrast, Richard Feingold preserves the doubleness of eighteenth-century lyric as private and public in Moralized Song: The Character of Augustan Lyricism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

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18. Thomas Hurd, ''A Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry;' in EighteenthCentury Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), 2:864. 19. For an elaboration of these claims, see Group Phi, "Doing Genre" (under consideration at Ramitan). 20. For a remarkably thorough effort of this sort, see the chart in Wiirzbach, 224-25. 21. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 148. 22. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 80-124. 23. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 124-33. A classic study that considers "the withdrawal of the upper classes" from popular culture and then its rediscovery by eighteenth-century authors is Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), esp. 3-22. 24. Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British "Folksong" from 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 13. 25 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991; repr., Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 113. But see also her more general account of lyric eidos in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) in which she challenges both deconstructive and historicist accounts of lyric (38-55). 26. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 67-100. 27. See Johann Gottfried Herder, "Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker;' in Sitmtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan, 2nd ed. (1891; repr., New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1967), 159-208. 28. Nick Groom, The Making of Percy's "Reliques" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999 ), 22. 29. The text from Jean Paul can be found in Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), vol. 3, pt. 2, entry 4082. 30. Oswald Doughty, Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 362.

Chapter 1 1. The Beggar's Opera, in John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 2:63; 3.16.1-4. Further citations in text by act, scene, and line; italics are reversed throughout except in cases where I have italicized key words, which I have indicated. 2. For an overview of poetic justice, see Scott Cutler Shershow, '"Higlety, Piglety,

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Right or Wrong': Providence and Poetic Justice in Rymer, Dryden and Tate;' Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 15, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 17-26. 3· On the decline of Court and the rise of the City, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3-18, and R. 0. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). For a rich account of Gay's inquiry into culture as an emergent historical category, see Dianne Dugaw, "Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). Like many other critics of The Beggar's Opera, I am indebted to William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; repr., New York: New Directions, 1974), 195-250. More specifically, I aim to consider ideas of cultural value essential to the articulation of class rather than class directly (Empson's "cult of Independence"). 4· Brewer, 428. 5· Ibid., 448-49. 6. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:538. Unless otherwise noted, citations are from volume 1. 7. The history of"Cold and Raw" can be found in Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 687-92. 8. "The Farmer's Daughter: A Song;' in Wit and Mirth: Or, Pills to Purge Melancholy, ed. Thomas D'Urfey (1719-20; repr., New York: Folklore Library Publishers, 1959 ), 1:167-68. 9. "The Northern Ditty; Or, The Scotch-man Out-witted by the Country Damsel;' in The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. J. Woodfall Ebsworth (1869-99; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 7:233; Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvel~ and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8. 10. Hugh Maclean, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 269. n. Thomas D'Urfey, Zelinda: An Excellent New Romance (London, 1676), Early En-

glish Books Online. 12. For Charles II's debt in the 1670s to the spectacles of the French court, see Andrew W. Walkling, "Court, Culture, and Politics in Restoration England: Charles II, James II, and the Performance of Baroque Monarchy" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1997), 4· On pastorality at the French court, see Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 56-67. 13. Alexander Brame, Rump, or, An Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times by the Most Eminent Wits from Anno 1639 to Anno 1661 (London, 1662), 142-44, Early English Books Online. 14. "The Winchester Wedding;' in Several New Songs by Tho. Durfey; Set to as Many New Tunes by the Best Masters in Music (London, 1684), 2-3, Early English Books On-

line. 15. On Charles II's "Church and King" appeal to the conservative forces in the Country, see J. R. Jones, Charles II: Royal Politician (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987). 16. On absence in the poetry of the Interregnum, see Nigel Smith, Literature and

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Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 308-17. 17. Martial, Epigrams XIII.2.8, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 175. 18. Rose A. Zimbardo, At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). 19. Cited in Slavoj ZiZek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (New York: Verso, 1995), 29-33. 20. Thomas D'Urfey, A Fond Husband: Or, The Plotting Sisters (London, 1677), Early English Books Online. In Thomas Durfey and Restoration Drama: The Work of a Forgotten Writer (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2ooo), John McVeagh lists twenty-two possible and twenty-one certain revivals of the play between 1677 and 1744 (160-63). 21. For instance, "A Scotch Song made to the Irish JrGG, and sung to the King at Whitehall;' in Choice New Songs, Never Before Printed Set to Several New Tunes by the Best Masters of Music (London, 1684), 14-16, Early English Books Online. 22. From A Choice Collection of 180 Loyal Songs, qtd. in Friedman, 14. On Charles II's attempt to manipulate his image in pageants, see Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 5-22. 23. Cyrus Lawrence Day, introduction to The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey, ed. Cyrus Lawrence Day (1933; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 5· 24. Ibid., 6. 25. Ibid. 26. To further encourage this link, D'Urfey prints on the title pages of Several New Songs and Choice New Songs what he wishes us to take as the d'Urfe family crest. 27. Thomas D'Urfey, Preface to New Poems, Consisting of Satyrs, Elegies, and Odes. ... (London, 1690 ), unpag., Early English Books Online. 28. James Anderson Winn, "When Beauty Fires the Blood": Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 111-16, 176-82. 29. Preface to New Poems, italics reversed. 30. The three sequels can be found in Ebsworth, ed., 7:234-37. 31. John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:120-22. 32. Ibid., 1:92. 33. D'Urfey, The Two Queens of Brentford, 14. As this passage suggests, D'Urfey is less mired in the past than his post-1688 reputation would suggest. In addition to striking at the frauds of the new commercial economy, D'Urfey also satirizes the new prominence of the city in Collin's Walk through London and Westminster a Poem in Burlesque (London, 1690 ), Early English Books Online, and, anticipating The Gentleman's Journal by two years and The Tatler by twenty, writes a short-lived journal, Momus Ridens; or, Comical Remarks on the Public Reports (1690-91). 34· Thirty-seven of the sixty-eight airs in The Beggar's Opera are from the six volumes of Pills, and ten of them are D'Urfey's own compositions. 35. "Sweet William's Farewell;' "The Poor Shepherd;' and "Molly Mog" are among poems by Gay that reappear as broadsides (Poetry and Prose 2:596, 615, 618). 36. Michael Denning notes that this is a surprising point of agreement in E. P.

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Thompson's and Michel Foucault's account of the scaffold in "Beggars and Thieves;' in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera," ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), no-n. 37. Ibid., m. 38. "The Most Lamentable and Deplorable History of the Two Children in the Wood" (London, 1700). "Children" appears in the catalogues of Charles Brown and Thomas Norris (1712), William Dicey (1754), and Samual Harward (1760-75), reproduced in Robert S. Thomson, "The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and Its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1974), apps. B-D. The endurance of"Children" into the nineteenth century is confirmed by a mention of it in Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint (New York: Penguin, 1995), 28o-81. This happens to be one allusion to popular song in the nineteenth-century novel that does not appear in C. M. Jackson-Houlston's useful

Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-century Realist Prose (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 39. John Dennis, "To the Spectator, Upon his Paper on the 16th of April;' in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 2:18-22. 40. That Addison gave some thought to the phrase "Reader of common Humanity" is indicated by his preference for it over "a good-natured Reader" in the octavo reprint of 1712 (Bond 1:363n). 41. The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:307. 42. On the double privacy of the self and the domestic, see Jurgen Habermas, The

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), 28-31. 43· Friedman, 87-91. 44. D'Urfey's songs serve the same function as ballads in Addison and Steele. In Tatler 1, Steele lauds his "peculiar Talent in the lyric Way of Writing;' placing D'Urfey outside the classical canon while still valuing him as an English original who outstrips the weak songs of Italian opera (1:20 ). Addison likewise sets D'Urfey above opera in his first contribution to The Guardian (no. 67), and honors his songs not as the political pieces they initially were but as the "Delight of the most Polite Companies and Conversations." The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1964), 254. 45. Among the attacks on Addison's ballad essays is William Wagstaffe, A Comment Upon the History ofTom Thumb, in Parodies of Ballad Criticism, 1711-1787, ed. William K. Wimsatt (17n; repr., Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library, 1957). 46. Spectator 454 is reprinted in Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 129-33. 47· Bryan Loughrey and T. 0. Treadwell, eds., The Beggar's Opera (New York, 1986), 62. 48. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "particular," http://shelob.ocis. temple.edu:2124 (accessed June 28, 2003). 49· These two uses of particular are also commented on by Fredric V. Bogel, The

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Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 143-44. 50. Booth, 116. 51. Sir John Hawkins, "On the Dangerous Tendency of The Beggar's Opera," Universal Magazine (January 1777), 48, in ''A Portfolio Containing Cuttings, etc. Related to John Gay and His Writings;' Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 52. Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer, no. 3, ed. James Woolley (1729; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 61-65. 53· Cibber is cited in a life of Gay printed as a supplement to The Universal Magazine (1764), 344 and preserved in "Portfolio;' Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Another contemporary response that focuses on culture rather than state politics is Thievery a-la-mode, reprinted in Contexts 1: The Beggar's Opera, ed. J. V. Guerinot and Rodney D. Jilg (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976), 125-41. 54· Booth, 116. 55· Ibid., 124. 56. The oscillation between particularity and typicality deployed by Gay provides a fine example of what Steven Knapp sees (ahistorically) as definitive of "literary interest" in Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 138. 57· Gay's flat-round subjects complicate Lisa A. Freeman's useful stress on the flat in Character's Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 58. This is a transcript of Dr. Thomas Herring's sermon against The Beggar's Opera, from a collection attributed to William Dunscombe, reprinted in The Gentleman's Magazine, December 1773 ("Portfolio;' Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University). 59· Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 9-10. 6o. For an overview of the move toward consumption as a central category of eighteenth-century studies, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Coming up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective;' in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19-39. Since elite writers during this era for the most part excluded certain groups, especially women, from the public sphere by stigmatizing them as prone to irrational drives like the drive to consume, recent critics argue that consumption by these groups should be valorized as one of a constellation of subcultures or "counterpublics;' including "nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women's publics, and working-class publics:' Erin Mackie, Market a la Mode : Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the "Tatler" and the "Spectator" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 23; she extracts this series of counter-publics from Nancy Fraser. Simon Frith critiques within cultural studies a similar tendency to "look for the redeeming features of commodity culture in the act of consumption" by certain "marginal" groups. "The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Defending Popular Culture from the Populists;' Diacritics 21, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 103. For a trenchant analysis of the

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questions begged by the term "counterpublic;' see Orrin N.C. Wang, "Romancing the Counter-Public Sphere: A Response to Romanticism and Its Publics;' Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 579-88. 61. On Brecht and Weill, Havel, and Ayckbourn, see Dugaw, "Deep Play;' 31-51. On Soyinka, see Clement Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 93-101.

Chapter 2 1. For a recent overview of Scotland at this time, see Roger L. Emerson, "Scottish Cultural Change, 1660-1710, and the Union of 1707;' in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 121-44. 2. I have found the following particularly useful on Scottish Jacobitism: Jeremy Black and Eveline Cruickshanks, eds., The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988) and Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991) and Inventing andResisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). 3. In The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Ramsay and Home are mentioned only once and Burns not at all. For a judicious overview of historians' neglect of the cultural history of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Richard B. Sher, "Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Place of Book History;' in The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. Paul Wood (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 99-112. Literary scholars have been more interested in tracing the relationship between Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and the wider cultural sphere, notably in: Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000 ); Thomas Crawford, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1979); Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985); and Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 4· For a broader analysis of lyric emotion as "transinidividual;' see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies ofEmotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, Cali£: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3-7, 13-16, and Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 74-96. 5· The count for printings of The Gentle Shepherd is given by Burns Martin, A Bib-

liography of the Writings ofAllan Ramsay, Records of the Glasgow Bibliographical Society 10 (1931): 6n.

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6. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 2nd ed. (1726; repr., Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Elibron Classics, 2002), 84-85. 7. In Smith's well-known "Four-Stage Theory of Development;' which influenced John Millar, Dugald Stewart, and others, the "Age of Shepherds" comes after "the Age of Hunters" and before "the Age of Agriculture." In Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1982), 14. 8. For prosopopoeia in Ossian as an attempt to reconcile classical eloquence and modern politeness, see Potkay, 189-225. 9. David Daiches uses the phrase "national schizophrenia" at the beginning of Robert Burns (New York: Rinehart, 1950 ), and develops this point of view in The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth Century Experience (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). See also Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 229-33. 10. For Addison's influence on the Scottish Enlightenment, see Nicholas Phillipson, "Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture;' Scotland and England: 1286-1815, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 233-35· n. Some recent challenges to the schizophrenic model: T. Crawford, Society and the Lyric, 9-14; Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 9-33; Pittock, Invention; and Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6-14. 12. Quotations from The Gentle Shepherd are from the version in the 1728 Poems, reprinted as vol. 2 of The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. Burns Martin and John W. Oliver, 6 vols., (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Scottish Text Society, 1945-74). This and other texts from The Works are hereafter cited in text as STS, for Scottish Text Society, followed by volume and page. 13. Nicholas Phillipson, "Culture and Society in the Eighteenth Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment;' in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 2:439. 14. Alexander Fraser :rytler, "Remarks on the Genius and Writings of Allan Ramsay;' in The Poems ofAllan Ramsay (London, 18oo ), 1:lxi. 15. George Chalmers, "Life of the Author;' in The Poems ofAllan Ramsay (London, 18oo), 1:xv. 16. Allan Ramsay, The Tea- Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, Reprinted from the Fourteenth Edition, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1871), 1:209-20, 2:228-36. All further citations are from vol. 1. 17. "The reduction of the scope of incest at the Reformation [to the guidelines supplied by Leviticus 18] meant that first cousins could legally marry:' Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Sexuality and Social Control: Scotland, 1660-1780 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), Son. 18. For a history of the song, see Simpson, 632-35. 19. "Sawney Will Never Be My Love Again" can be found in Thomas D'Urfey, The Virtuous Wife (London, 168o), 30, Early English Books Online. 20. T. Crawford, Society and the Lyric, 93.

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Notes to Pages 51-57

21. For some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century views of The Gentle Shepherd as a charmingly realistic pastoral, see J. E. Congleton, Theories ofPastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1798 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952), 125-26, 136, 142-43· 22. Tytler, 1:cliii. 23. For an early anti-Union and perhaps Jacobitical strain in Ramsay, see his participation in The Easy Club (1712-15), though it was also a rule that two to three Spectators be read at each meeting (STS 5:7-8,34, 49). 24. One of Ramsay's first poems, ''An Elegy on John Cowper, Kirk-Treasurers Man;' satirizes greed in the Kirk. Robert Wodrow, an Edinburgh divine, complained that Ramsay's library imported "all the villainous profane and obscene bookes and playes printed at London" and encouraged servants and gentlemen to read the same obscenities (STS, 4:28-29). Ramsay's nascent theater was shut down at the insistence of orthodox clergymen, armed with the 1737 Licensing Act's injunction against staging plays outside London. 25. Daiches labels him a "seeker after polish and good breeding" (Paradox, 28). 26. Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 218. 27. Daiches, Paradox, 31. 28. Qtd. in Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 69. 29. An Inquiry, 84-85, italics removed. The text appears in a list of books sent in 1729 or 1730 by Ramsay to John Clerk (STS 4:187). 30. This poem opens the collection from its first publication; see The Tea- Table Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1723), 1-3. 31. The closest match is ''An Answer to Love's the Cause of My Mourning;' in A Collection of Old Ballads and Songs, Chiefly Scottish; Printed at Edinburgh (c. 1710-12), compiled by James Maidment and preserved in the Houghton Library, quoted by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. Neither are there examples in John Barrell and John Bull, eds., A Book of English Pastoral Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Crawford notes a similar structure in Ramsay's "The Lasso' Livingston" (Society and the Lyric, 6o). 32. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 12. Ian Duncan observes that Smith's investment in the "impartial spectator in the breast" moves him to favor texts in which the author "places a figure within the scene as the reader's mirror or proxy:' "Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, and the Institutions of English;' in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. Robert Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 47· 33. Smith, Theory, 12. 34· James Kinsley, ed., Burns, Poems and Songs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), P334· Hereafter cited in text as Kinsley; pagination is continuous in the th~ee volumes. 35· J. G. A. Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers;' in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping ofPolitical Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 242.

Notes to Pages 57-65

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36. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames (Edinburgh, 1807), 2:113 37· David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts;' in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1987), 271. 38. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 4th ed. (1806; repr., Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990), 86. 39· T. Crawford, Society and the Lyric, 93. 40. See Douglas: Or, the Noble Shepherd: a Tragedy (Philadelphia, 1818). 41. Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the surviving text closest to the composition of Douglas, "Gill Morice, An Ancient Scottish Poem. Second Edition;' (Glasgow, 1755), 10. 42. Citations are from The Plays ofJohn Home, ed. James S. Malek (New York: Garland, 1980). Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore and George Lillo's The London Merchant, the two best-known eighteenth-century tragedies based on ballads prior to Douglas, both explicitly mention their balladic source in their prologues. 43. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Philadelphia, 1866), 167. 44· Ibid., 443· 45· Potkay, 209; James Macpherson, Fragments ofAncient Poetry (Edinburgh, 1760 ), 18. 46. Fiona Stafford, introduction to The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), xii. 47. Home is one of the figures featured in John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1985), 60-97. 48. Nicholas Phillipson, "The Scottish Enlightenment;' in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuhis Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 33· 49· Ellison, 53-58. so. George F. Thomas, "Lord Bute, John Home, and Ossian: Two Letters:' Modern Language Review 51 (1956): 74-75. 51. Henry Mackenzie, Account of the Life of Mr John Home, in The Works of John Home (Edinburgh, 1822), 1:163. 52. Blair, Lectures, 442. See Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in EighteenthCentury British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 4· 53· Smith's words come from a remembrance of him published in 1791, qtd. in J. C. Bryce, ed., Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 230. 54· David Hume, Four Dissertations (London, 1757), v-vi. 55· Qtd. in Alice Gipson, John Home: A Study of His Life and Works (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1916), so. 56. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:12. 57. Ibid., 1:11. 58. The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:246. 59· See a similar critique from one of Hume's correspondents in J. H. Burton, ed., Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume (London, 1849 ), 224. 60. Phillipson, "Scottish Enlightenment;' 34·

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Notes to Pages 66-71

61. Fredric V. Bogel emphasizes the play's skepticism toward recovering its own masculine heroic ideals in Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 101-8. 62. In "Douglas's Mother;' Susan Staves looks into the play's "spectacles of maternal feeling" and the history of reactions to it. Brandeis Essays in Literature, ed. John Hazel Smith (Waltham, Mass.: Department of English and American Literature, Brandeis University, 1983), 51-67. 63. Jane Rendall, The Origins of The Scottish Enlightenment (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), 167. 64. In a note on this passage, Richard B. Sher observes that Norval embodies both masculine (heroic) and feminine (sentimental) virtue. '"The Favourite of the Favourite': John Home, Bute, and the Politics of Patriotic Poetry;' Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation, ed. Karl W. Schweizer (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), 209. Sher's essay is also valuable for documenting the pitch of homosocial affection that Home expressed and inspired (188-89). 65. Gipson, 18. The portraits of Norval in the nineteenth century suggest that casting an adolescent in his role became standard practice. See the picture by John Opie, reproduced in Julie A. Carlson's article, "Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism;' The South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 577· 66. Carlson, 579-80. 67. John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 72-94. 68. Qtd. in Carlson, 602. 69. The "yellow lockes" and "siluer combe" can be found in the A-text of Child 83, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882--98), 2:265, which is taken from Thomas Percy's Folio MS. 70. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1767), 3:94, lines 109-12. 71. Mackenzie, Account, 1:91. 72. In an annotated copy of Douglas (Edinburgh, 1798) at the Princeton University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Home repeatedly stresses that Norval must deliver his lines modestly (29-31, 34). Douglas, 1798, Theatre Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, published with permission of the Princeton University Library. 73· Qtd. in Dafydd Moore, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson's "The Poems of Ossian": Myth, Genre, and Cultural Change (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), 119-20. 74· Ibid., 120. 75. Mackenzie, Account 1:38. 76. Hugh Blair, "A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal;' in The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Philadelphia, 1790 ), 427-31. 77· See this representative passage from Hume's "Of Commerce": "Every judgment or conclusion, with them ["the common People"] is particular. They cannot enlarge

Notes to Pages 71-75

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their view to those universal propositions, which comprehend under them an infinite number of individuals, and include a whole science in a single theorem" (Essays, 254). 78. Unsigned review of Douglas, Critical Review 3 (1757): 258. 79· John Hawkesworth, "A Letter to Mr. David Hume" (London, 1757), 9, 10. So. See John Witherspoon, ''A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage" (Glasgow, 1757), the reply by Adam Ferguson, "The Morality of Stage Plays Seriously Considered" (Edinburgh, 1757 ), and the counterstroke by Rev[ erend] Harper, "Some Serious Remarks on a late pamphlet, entituled The morality of stage-plays seriously considered.: In a letter to a lady" (Edinburgh, 1757). 81. "The Stage or the Pulpit" (Edinburgh, 1757). 82. Ibid., 1. 83. See this footnote to "The First Night's Audience" (Edinburgh, 1757): "The critics observe, though others can not find it out, that Gil Morice, an old Scottish song, is the foundation of the tragedy, from whence the author has taken his fable" (italics mine). 84. "The Stage or the Pulpit;' 2. 85. "The Seven Champions of the Stage: In Imitation of Gill Morrice" (Edinburgh, 1757). 86. All were apparently printed in 1757 in Edinburgh. 87. For reactions against the suicide in Edinburgh, see Roger Lonsdale, "Thomas Gray, David Hume, and John Home's Douglas:' in Re-constructing the Book, ed. Maureen Bell et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 61. 88. "The Revolution, to the Tune of A Cobler There Was" (Edinburgh, 1757), 4· 89. Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle (Edinburgh, 186o), 314. 90. Alexander Carlyle, ''A Full and True History of the Bloody Tragedy of Douglas, as it is now to be seen acting at the theatre in the Canongate" (Edinburgh?, 1756?), quoted by permission of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 91. The Critical Review complains that the ending "is scarce reconcileable with poetical justice" ( 265). 92. Bums quotes from Douglas as an epigraph to "The Lament;' cites Ossian's term of art "duan" in "The Vision;' and praises Ramsay's "genius" in the Kilmarnock preface (Kinsley 3:971). Mackenzie is praised in The Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd ed., ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson and G. Ross Roy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 1:141, Smith in "Letter to J_s T_ _t, Gl_nc_r;' and Stewart in "The Vision:' For a partial list of authors specifically mentioned by Bums, see John Robotham, "The Reading of Robert Bums:' Critical Essays on Robert Burns, ed. Carol McGuirk (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 281--97. 93· Donald A. Low, ed., Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 70 (italics mine). 94· In an uncompleted poem from 1784-85, Burns rejects "Maro's catches" and Pope's "Heathen tatters" as the heirs to Theocritus for "honest Allan" Ramsay (Kinsley 1:192). 95· R. Crawford, Devolving, 88-89; Murphy, 55; Jeffrey Skoblow, Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 123. 96. Skoblow, 169-70.

242

Notes to Pages 76-94

97· Low, ed., 7· 98. Ibid., 82. 99· "The daisy poem is artificial, second-rate, perhaps even insincere, whereas 'To a Mouse' is charged with a genuine, intense emotion:' Thomas Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), 164. 100. Empson, 4· 101. One could read the speaker as the rural epitaphist throughout-but, if so, he adopts the persona of an educated visitor, as we see in the line, "The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep;' rather than "Our rude forefathers." However we read the poem, Gray seems interested in producing a split between a more sophisticated and naive voice so that he can also forge a likeness between the two as marginal poet figures. 102. Helen Maria Williams, well attuned to radical sentiments, picks up on this angry strain in "Sonnet On Reading the Poem on the Mountain Daisy by Mr. Burns;' in Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1823), 205. 103. The poem "embodies a tragically irreconcilable sense that the great Enlightenment impulse toward the recognition of all human worth will not lead to a just, fearless democratic society." The Canongate Burns, ed. Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2001), 1:116. 104. Burns also mentions one of the songs from The Beggar's Opera in a letter (Robotham, 286). 105. Low, ed., 82. 106. T. Crawford, Society and the Lyric, 202. 107. As Carol McGuirk pithily puts it: ''Abounding grace is replaced by abundant spirits, but not to feel means damnation" (26). 108. Kinsley cites A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25) and Ramsay for prior instances of Homer as a ballad singer (3:1159). 109. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., "Burns, Blake, and the Recovery of Lyric;' Studies in Romanticism 21, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 655. no. Low, ed., 206; Letters 1:319. 111. The song is classed as "Dubia" by Kinsley (3:906) since there is no holographic authority, but it is in keeping with Burns's bawdy pieces. 112. James Johnson, ed., The Scots Musical Museum (1853; repr., Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1962), 2:iii. The reprint preserves the pagination of the 1853 edition. 113. Blair, Lectures, 23-24. 114. Liam Mclllvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 3-7. 115. Thomas B. Shaw, Shaw's New History of English Literature, ed. Truman J. Backus (New York, 1882), calls Burns "[t]he greatest poet that Scotland has produced" (181) and accords him as many pages as Wordsworth. He is also featured in readers for younger students, like Ellen M. Cyr's The Cyr Readers, Arranged by Grades (Boston: Ginn, 1901), where he is one of only three authors given an extensive biography (7:175-80). Questions on Burns appear in the College Entrance Examination Board's exam in English in 1909, 1910, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1921, and 1925. Winifred Quincey Norton, comp., Entrance English Questions Set by the College Entrance Examination Board, 1901-36, 3rd ed. (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1937 ). For a discussion of why Burns has

Notes to Pages 94-101

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been slighted by Romanticist criticism and textbooks since the 196os, see Murray G. H. Pittock, "Robert Burns and British Poetry:' Proceedings of the British Academy 121 (2003): 191-211. 116. Alfred H. Welsh, Development of English Literature and Language, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1883), 2:233. "But his great achievement was his song-writing:' William Allan Neilson and Ashley Thorndike, History of English Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 262. Burns is well represented with eleven poems in Francis T. Palgrave's The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (London, 1875), ten of which are songs. 117. R. Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention; Franklin E. Court, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 118. Duncan, 42-43. 119. Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205.

Chapter 3 1. Mackenzie, Account, 1:35. Whether Home actually wrote these lines on the bust is a matter of conjecture, but others shared a similar impulse: "An Inscription wrote with a Black Lead Pencil, on the Blank Scroll on Shakespear's MONUMENT" (1741), in Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145-46. 2. Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare's Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); Kramnick, 136. For the so-called Romantic position, see Linda R. Payne, "Garrick's Incidental Lyrics;' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 165-81. A good alternative is provided by Earl R. Wasserman in Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947), 153-91. 3. Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage (London, 1800 ), 2:387. 4. Where Dobson provides a broader survey, Margreta de Grazia focuses on Edmond Malone as the key figure in historicizing and individuating Shakespeare in Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 94-131. Jack Lynch makes a strong case for Johnson as a historicist critic in The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40-45. 5. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry (London, 1774-81), 3:497. 6. William Warburton, ed., The Works ofShakespear (London, 1747), 2:437. 7. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 42-53. More recent inquiries into Shakespeare's relationship to popular culture begin with Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Pop-

ular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 8. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

244

Notes to Pages 101-108

1991), 94· Percy's Killingworth scenario is approvingly cited in The Shakspeare Vocal Album (London, 1864), i; and in W. J. Rolfe, Shakespeare the Boy (New York, 1896), 12-14, among many other nineteenth-century biographies. Killingworth is also the object of speculation in Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-94 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 22. 9· Hereafter, "Hanmer:' All quotations from Collins are from The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 10. Collins's belatedness is a recurrent interest of many "Yale School" critics, among them Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Geoffrey H. Hartman, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and Paul H. Fry, in The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980 ). The backlash against poststructuralist theory in the 1980s saw a related questioning of the "anxious" Collins by, among others, Richard Wendorf, Collins and EighteenthCentury English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). I would split the difference between these accounts: While Collins may not have been a proleptic and thus abortive pre-Romantic, this does not erase the anxieties that Bloom et al. identify. On the other hand, those anxieties should not be reduced to an Oedipal plot where Milton plays the Father and are instead, as I argue, more specific to Collins's typical position as a man of letters unsure for specific historical reasons about his relationship to the past or a present audience. n. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 165. 12. Feingold, n (italics removed). 13. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4-5-62-63. 14. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974-81), 2:87; Samuel Johnson, ed., The Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1765), 8:sig Lbr. 15. Feingold, 15. 16. William Hawkins in Vickers, ed., 4:18-19. Hawkins similarly stresses the popular context when he changes the line after the dirge from "We have done our obsequies'' to "These are our rural obsequies" in his adaptation of Cymbeline (London, 1759), 57· 17. These links are made in Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith (New York: Longman Group, 1976), 405, 402. 18. Horace Howard Furness, ed., The Tragedie of Cymbeline (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1913), 49o-91. 19. On friendship in Collins as evidence against the anxious poet of poststructuralist criticism, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, "The Eighteenth-Century Collins;' in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 88. 20. Samuel Johnson, "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth;' in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), 7:3.

Notes to Pages 108-114

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21. Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 5:443-44. 22. Vickers, ed., 3:294. 23. Wendorf and Ryskamp, ed., xvi. 24. Bernice W. Kliman, Macbeth (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 19. 25. Shakespeare, Macbeth: A Tragedy As It is Now Acted at the New Theatre of Edinburgh (1731; repr., London: Cornmarket Press, 1969), 30. In 1757, two Edinburgh play-

bills for Macbeth advertised the inclusion of Scottish music and historically accurate Scottish dress (Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University). This precedes Charles Macklin's 1773 "Old Caledonian" production, which Rebecca Rogers claims is the first dramatization of the play's "national characteristics:' "Macbeth's National Identity;' in Shakespeare and Scotland, ed. Willy Maley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 108. 26. Howard Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 352; Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 217. 27. This case is made in Robert Crawford, "The Bard: Ossian, Burns, and the Shaping of Shakespeare;' in Shakespeare and Scotland, ed. Willy Maley (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 124-40. 28. Lonsdale, ed., 158. 29. David Garrick, The Poetical Works (London, 1785), 2:511-12 (pagination is continuous in the two volumes). 30. Garrick, Letters, 1:269. 31. George Winchester Stone, Jr., "David Garrick's Significance in the History of Shakespearean Criticism;' PMLA 45, no. 2 (March 1950 ): 185. 32. Dobson, 165-84. 33· J. C. Smith used "ballad tunes" for Prospero. Randy Neighbarger, An Outward Show: Music for Shakespeare on the London Stage, 1660-1830 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 142. 34. Charles Beecher Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701-18oo: A Record of Performances in London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-57), records from 1750-1800 only 11 performances of The Fairies out of 64 for versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and 6 of Garrick's The Tempest out of 168, while Florizel and Perdita became the most frequently performed version for ilie rest of ilie century (2:717-18). 35· Hogan reports that no acting versions of The Winter's Tale were published before 1750 and that there were only fourteen performances of it, all in 1741-42 (1:457-58). 36. Alexander Pope, "The Preface of the Editor;' in The Works of Shakespear in Six Volumes (London, 1725), 1:xx. 37· Warburton, ed., 3:277. 38. David Garrick, The Winter's Tale, or Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral, Altered from Shakespeare (1758; repr., London, 1785). 39· William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 4.4.166-67. 40. Dobson, 190.

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Notes to Pages 114-124

41. Ibid., 194. 42. See, for instance, George Steevens's comment on Autolycus's ballads that "all dying speeches, confessions, narratives of murders, executions, &c. seem to have been written in verse:' In Edmond Malone, ed., Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare in Ten Volumes (1790; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 4:213. 43. See Dennis Bartholomeusz, The Winter's Tale in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 34· 44. Theophilus Cibber, Gibber's Two Dissertations on the Theatres (London, 1756), 1:36; James Boaden, ed., The Private Correspondence of David Garrick (London, 1831-32), 1:88. 45. Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 152. In a letter to William Eaves, Mayor of Stratford, who asks about the next year's festivities, Garrick advises: "There should be always proper Songs introduc'd at ye Table, & join'd with ye Hearts & voices of all ye Company in a feeling Enthusiastick Chorus" (Letters, 2:728). 46. Single sheets of the song, with and without music, were published in 1770 and 1790 (the latter a conjectural dating in the English Short Title Catalogue). 47. Deelman, 220; the English Short Title Catalogue records a slip-song tentatively dated 1775, and two chapbook versions from the same decade. 48. For Shakespeare as a child, see William Linley, A Lyric Ode on the Fairies Aerial Beings, and Witches of Shakespeare (London, 1776), 6-8; Joseph Warton, The Enthusiast (1744), in Vickers, ed., 3:121; and George Romney, "Infant Shakespeare Attended by the Passions;' The Gallery of Illustrations for Shakespeare's Dramatic Works Originally Projected and Published by John Boydell (Philadelphia, 1874). 49· Garrick, Letters, 2:654. 50. Kramnick, 235. 51. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (London, 1769), 140-41; see also 137 and 198. 52. Ibid., 196-97. 53· Qtd. in Deelman, 221. 54· The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 2:97-126. 55. All citations are from vol. 1. 56. Cleanth Brooks, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1946), 62. 57· Gildon's ''An Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage, in Greece, Rome, and England" (1710) was reprinted in Pope's edition of Shakespeare, 7:i-lii. Robert Dodsley's A Select Collection of Old English Plays (London, 1744) seems to be the first that positions the Moralities as a later improvement on the Mysteries (1:xiii). In a 1764 letter to Evan Evans, Percy criticizes Warburton's comments on Mysteries and tragicomedy. Aneirin Lewis, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 72. 58. Percy thought of publishing a collection of pieces on Kenilworth in 1762 (PercyFarmer, 16-17). 59· Robert Laneham, A Letter, Wherein Part of the Entertainment untoo the Queenz

Notes to Pages 124-133

247

Majesty, at Killingwoorth Castl in Warwick Sheer, in this Soomerz Progrest 1575, iz Signified (1575; repr., London, 1784), 49. I have regularized Laneham's spelling. 6o. Percy's interest in this essay is reflected in its separate publication in 1793 as An Essay on the Origin of the English Stage, Particularly on the Historical Plays of Shakespeare. 61. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 4th ed. (London, 1794), 1:141-43· 62. Ibid., 1:143· 63. Thomas Wilkes [Samuel Derrick], A General View of the Stage (London, 1769), 208. 64. Malone, 2:31. 65. On Piercy/Percy's name change, see Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy: ScholarCleric in the Age of Johnson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 3· 66. Groom, 131. 67. Reliques, 225, italics reversed. 68. Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 113. 69. John Pinkerton, "Dissertation on the Comic Ballad;' in Select Scotish Ballads (London, 1783), 2:xl; Critical Review 19 (1765): 119. 70. For Percy's contribution to Shakespearean criticism, see Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies: Commentators from Rowe (1709) to Boswell-Malone (1821) (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1986), 39-43. 71. Joseph Ritson, Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (London, 1790 ), xvii. 72. Joseph Ritson, A Select Collection of English Songs (London, 1783), 1:xxxvi; Ritson's attraction to popular print texts is also reflected in the garlands he compiles, including The Northumberland Garland (Newcasde, 1793). 73· Friedman, 219-20. 74· Joseph Ritson, Scotish Songs, 1:lxxix. 75· Burns, Letters 2:318; Ritson, Scotish Songs (London, 1794), I:lxxv. 76. Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1938 ), 1:145-46 77· Letter of September 13,1794, Joseph Ritson Collection, General Collection, Heinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2). 78. Ibid. 79. Bronson, 1:150; Joseph Frank, ed., The Letters of Joseph Ritson, Esq. (London, 1833), qo. So. Letter of October 13, 1798, Joseph Ritson Collection, General Collection, Heinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 81. See "1694;' in Michael Scrivener, ed., Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 77-78. 82. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64-79. 83. "To David Garrick, Esq.;' The London Chronicle, October 26-28, 1769, 412. 84. Bate, 61-104. See William Hazlitt, "Coriolanus" and "Mr. Coleridge's Lectures;' in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930-34), 4:214-21, 19:207-8.

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Notes to Pages 134-137

85. Joseph Ritson, Observations on the Three First Volumes of the "History of English Poetry" in a Familiar Letter to the Author (London, 1782), 47· 86. Ritson, Observations, 47, 12, 23. 87. Joseph Ritson, Remarks, Critical and Illustrative on the Texts and Notes of the Last Edition of Shakespeare (1783; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1973), 39, 38. 88. Joseph Ritson, Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancei!s (London, 1802), 1:ccxvii. 89. Ibid., 1:cxli. 90. In a letter from France, Ritson says that English spelling will be reformed when the revolution comes (Bronson, 145).

Chapter 4 1. One noteworthy exception is Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in which Celeste Langan

attributes Wordsworth's reaction to Johnson's stanza to the fact that it "parodies not only Romantic form, but also content (its matter): the encounter on a public road between the bourgeois and the beggar" (18). 2. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:152, 154. 3. See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 202-27 and Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 136-47. 4· Or, as Thomas Pfau incisively argues, Wordsworth makes the ballad "yield 'interest' for a national culture;' encouraging his readers to "develop more 'valid' literary meanings" by teaching them to subsume "the melodramatic, superstitious and Gothic excesses of the 1790s ballad" within a more reflexive mode of reading.

Wordsworth's Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 224, 225. Pfau's central example is also a revision of Biirger, Wordsworth's rewriting of "Der wilde Jager" in "Hart-Leap Well." He extends his analysis of the Wordsworthian ballad to consider Romantic lyric more broadly in Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 193-225. Although I have found useful his subtle presentation of Wordsworth's revision of the ballad, I focus more on the empirical conditions of Wordsworth's life and career, on the problem of authenticity posed by the Ballad Revival, on the challenge to the unity of the nation posed by Scotland, and finally on the actual curricula of the school that we both agree is the telos of the Ballad Revival. Seconding Pfau's warning against modes of historicism that erase or downplay the utopian power of Romantic lyric (Moods 25, 219), I also place more emphasis on the demotic and democratic implications of Wordsworth's revision of the ballad. 5. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 12. The lyric paradigm that Liu aims to revise is most forcefully expressed in Geoffrey Hartman's foundational Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; New

Notes to Pages 137-139

249

Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1971). Like so many others, I borrow from Hartman's notion of lyric "surmise;' which he illustrates through a reading of "The Solitary Reaper" (3-25). 6. Liu gives a brief explanation for omitting Lyrical Ballads (360). 7· Contrast Liu's claim that Wordsworth exhibits only a "barely emergent awareness" of his historicity that emerges after 1802, when he begins to root lyric in the triune ground of People, Church, and, above all, Nation, securing a vision of "a single native society ... speaking the same way about common events" (382). As I argue in my analysis of Wordsworth's 1803 tour of Scotland, his vision of Great Britain is more complex than this and the ballad is crucial to that complexity. 8. Piqued by praise for the "Classical Simplicity" of Percy's ballad "in three fits;' Johnson extemporized these lines after declaring that he could "speak such poetry extempore for seven Years together, If I could find Hearers dull enough to attend to me" (B. Davis, 181-82). 9· Wordsworth remarks in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (1815), that when Percy "appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of the Hermit of Warkworth, a diction scarcely in any one of its features distinguishable from the vague, the glossy, and unfeeling language of his day" (Prose J:?5-6). 10. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 16oo-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 17-22. n. The strongest account of this position remains James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 12. I follow Sean Shesgreen in capitalizing Cries and Cry to distinguish the cries as delivered by tradespeople from the representation of them in ballads and engravings, although it's possible that the cries actually heard in the street borrowed from these texts. See Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). According to Martha W. England, "The most popular specialty act" on the mid-eighteenth-century stage was "Edward Shuter's 'Cries of London:" "The Satiric Blake: Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?" Bulletin of the New York Public Library 73 (1969): 457. 13. "The Chimney Sweeper;' 12:1-4. Unless otherwise noted, the edition cited for Songs ofInnocence and ofExperience is Copy R, all but one plate printed in 1795. I have used this copy because it was arranged in the mid-1790s, when Blake, according to my hypothesis, began to view Pity more skeptically, and because its juxtaposition of a few key plates help illustrate my argument. All Illuminated Texts are cited by plate, as assigned by Erdman, and, and by line, as provided by The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, http://www.blakearchive.org. 14. In addition to E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1983), see Jeanne Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 12-47. 15. Preface to Milton, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 96. 16. In a passage from A Descriptive Catalogue (1809), Blake declares, "The great and

250

Notes to Pages 140-147

golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art" (Erdman, ed., 550). Blake's critique of generality is most explicit in his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Erdman, ed., 635-62). 17. Morris Eaves, qtd. in Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 172. 18. For Blake's place within the resurgence of enthusiasm in the 1790s, see Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 20-73. 19. Makdisi, 54-77. 20. David Worrall, "Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture;' in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999 ), 207. 21. Jerusalem 3:5. All quotations from Jerusalem from Copy E (1821), which can be found in the Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org). 22. William Crisman, "Songs Named 'Song; and the Bind of Self-Conscious Lyricism in Blake;' ELH 61, no. 3 (Fall1994): 628. 23. Ibid. 24. Mee, 1-8. 25. Blake's sensitivity to Scottish songs is quoted from a contemporary account in B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1980), 3. 26. Steven Goldsmith, "Blake's Agitation;' The South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 783. 27. Friedman, 265. Martha England makes a strong case for Samuel Foote's "Tea in the Haymarket" as a model for An Island; see note 12. 28. William Blake, An Island in the Moon: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with The Institute of Traditional Science, 1987), 9:19-31. Further citations by chapter and line. 29. G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 74· 30. Ibid., 96. 31. On the superiority of song to conversation in An Island, see Paul Youngquist, Madness and Blake's Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 62-63. 32. Sean Shesgreen, personal communication, March 20, 2006. 33· Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment : Blake's "Songs" and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 219. 34. "Holy Thursday" follows "The Divine Image" in Copies P and Q of Songs of Innocence and Copies F, R-U, W-Z, andAA of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. See G. E. Bentley, Jr., ed., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 376-78. 35· This is the order in Copies R, T-Z, and AA of the combined Songs (Bentley, Jr., ed., 379-80). 36. For a related radical critique of sensibility, see Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997), 36-37, 45, 79.

Notes to Pages 147-160

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37· See his color print, "Pity" (c. 1795), in the Yale Center for British Art; it appears to illustrate the lines in which Pity helps to convict Macbeth for murdering Duncan (1.7.21-25). 38. The Whim of the Day for 1794, Containing An Entertaining Selection of the Choic-

est and Most Approved Songs, now Singing at the Theatres Royal, the Anacreontic Society, the Beef Steak Club and Other Convivial and Polite Assemblies (London, 1794), 35. 39. W. Roberts, The Cries of London (London: The Connoisseur, 1924), 13. 40. Shesgreen, 119. 41. John Holloway and Joan Black, eds., Later English Broadside Ballads (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 1:157-58. 42. "What d'ye buy? ..." Politics for the People 2, no. 13 (1795): 207-8. 43. Erdman, ed., 617. I have removed the line breaks in this bit of marginalia. 44. For a survey of the sounds of London, see Stuart Peterfreund, "The Din of the City in Blake's Prophetic Books," ELH 64, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 99-130. 45. All quotations from Milton from Copy C (1811), which can be found in the Blake krchive (http://www.blakearchive.org). 46. Ian Bradley, ed., The Penguin Book of Carols (New York: Penguin, 1999), 331; Morton Paley notes the link to this carol in The Continuing City: William Blake's "Jerusalem" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 73-74. 47· The ballad is reproduced in Shesgreen, 20. A chatty antiquarian sketch of the history of the bellman/watchman in the Cries is provided by Charles Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 2nd ed. (1884; repr., Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969), 46-55. 48. Hindley, 51. 49. William Cowper, "Verses Subjoined to the Bill of Mortality for the Town of Northampton, 1790;' in The Poems of William Cowper, Vol. III: 1785-18oo, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 72. 50. "Verses for the Use of a Bellman" is the title given to it by the Quaker author Job Scott in Some Reflections in Verse (London, 1791), 10-11. 51. Hindley, 51. 52. In Walter Scott's Rob Roy, Mr. Osbaldistone heaps scorn on his son Frank's verses by saying that "the bellman writes better lines" (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 16. 53· S. Goldsmith, 756. 54· Morton Paley, ed., Jerusalem: Or the Vision of the Giant Albion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 195n., referencing David Punter. 55. America: A Prophecy, Copy A, 13:13-16; from the Blake Archive (http://www. blakearchive.org). 56. Paley elaborates on S. Foster Damon's scheme of the poem in City, 73-8. 57· S. Goldsmith, 790. 58. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, 2nd ed., Ernest De Selincourt, rev. ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 256. 59. These lines are taken from the transcriptions of MS. 2, lines 1296-1310, in Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 437· Because the only surviving pre-Goslar draft (MS. 1) trails off long before the third part, it is impossible to determine with certainty whether or not the vision of the Highland girl

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Notes to Pages 160-169

appeared in the poem before the Goslar revisions. But the idea that this passage was written in Goslar is strongly supported by the fact that the lines that set up this scene are absent from what remains of MS. 1-Peter's travels in Scotland (corresponding to MS. 2 186-95) and the disclosure of his polygamy (MS. 2 246-50 ). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from MS. 2. 6o. See Jordan, ed., 5-6 for speculations on why the poem was not included in Lyrical Ballads either in 1798 or 18oo. 61. Steven E. Jones, "'Supernatural, or at Least Romantic': The Ancient Mariner and Parody," Romanticism on the Net 15 (1999), http://users.ox.ac.uk/-scato385/ sejstc.html. 62. For two useful readings of Peter Bell through the lens of The Ancient Mariner, see Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 262-72; Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 109-41. 63. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth's Reading, 1770-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21, 111. 64. Burger's poetry fits nicely into Wordsworth's image of Germany as a bad reflection of England-poor imitations of English gardens, and suspiciousness toward outsiders that matches England's post-Revolutionary paranoia (Early Years 230). 65. Adela Pinch, "Female Chatter: Meter, Masochism and the Lyrical Ballads;' ELH 55, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 835-52. See also Karen Swann, "Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage;' PMLA 106, no. 1 (January 1991): 83-95 and David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 18-49, 69-99. 66. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "A Poem Is Being Written," Representations 17 (Winter 1987): llD-43· 67. The undernoticed parodic strain in this poem is discussed in Mark Jones, "Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth's Pastoral;' PMLA 108, no. 5 (October 1993): 1098-1113. 68. Citations are from "Lyrical Ballads," And Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 69. The Prelude, 1798-99, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 115, 117. 70. Susan Eilenberg, Strange Powers of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 87-107. 71. For readings that stress the subversive in Michael, see Mark Jones, "Double Economics" and Reeve Parker, "Finishing Off'Michael': Poetic and Critical Enclosures;' Diacritics 17, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 53-64. 72. Marjorie Levinson, "Spiritual Economics: A Reading of Michael," in Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58-79. See also Michael Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet's Contract (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 31-60. 73· Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1798-99, 77· 74· William Wordsworth, "Poems, in Two Volumes" and Other Poems, 18oo-o7, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). Hereafter referred to as

Notes to Pages 170-179

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Poems. There has been little scholarship on either Wordsworth's mode of collection in Poems or on the Scottish sequence in particular. Two exceptions worth mentioning: Stuart Curran, "Multum in Parvo: Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807,'' in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 236-53; Peter Manning Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 241-72. 75. The lines are from "It is not to be thought that the Flood,'' the sixteenth of the "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty:' 76. Davis, 133, 135. 77. Thomas Wilkinson, Tours to the British Mountains (London, 1824), 12. 78. Murphy, 217. 79· The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years-Part I, 1806-u, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 145-46. So. In addition to the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, edited by Henry Mackenzie, Malcolm Laing's The Poems of Ossian appeared in 1805. It obsessively listed any echo he could find in Macpherson's poems from Shakespeare, Milton, and other predecessors. 81. The accusation that Macpherson has imperial intentions that put him out of synch with his native landscape is made explicit in the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" when Wordsworth scornfully quotes Lucien Bonaparte's high opinion of Macpherson as evidence of the latter's "epic Ambition" (Prose 3:78). 82. Murphy, 167. 83. Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, ed. Carol Kyros Walker (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 99. 84. Middle Years, 264. 85. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 17B7-180J, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932), 240. 86. "On Burns, and the Old English Ballads,'' in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 2:283-86; Davis, 133. 87. On the linguistic colonization of the Highlands, including the schools run by the Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, see Victor Edward Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of Linguistic and Cultural Conflict in Scotland, Wales and Ireland from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983). 88. As Mary Jacobus has ably pointed out, the blush is the sign of signification out of control in Wordsworth, of the cosmetics of prostitutes and their degenerate urban world. Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on "The Prelude" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 210-25. 89. Early Years, 448n.3; Recollections 109. 90. Recollections 97, 90. 91. For Wordsworth's fear of playing the seducer to the Maid of Buttermere in The Prelude, see Betsy Bolton, "Romancing the Stone: 'Perdita' Robinson in Wordsworth's London,'' ELH 64, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 732.

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Notes to Pages 181-184

92. For a searching and balanced critique of how the conventional representation of woman -as-muse in "The Solitary Reaper" is troubled "in part by class and national identity, in part by a particular performance of gender in the subjectivity of the poem;' see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "Marble Paper: Toward a Feminist 'History of Poetry;" Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 65, no. 1 (March 2004): 108-28. 93. Wordsworth adds these lines in a manuscript revision of his 1832 Poems for publication in 1836. See Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 182o-45, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 386n. 94· In "Child Harold;' Clare impersonates Byron's sublime persona in an attempt to negate the sublime, to find a lyric position that somehow does not leave mark on the world in the act of enjoying it: "The life of labour is a rural song I That hurts no cause" (lines 6-7) and the embedded song beginning "The flood comes oer the meadow leas:' The best-known formulation of this position is the "untroubling, and untroubled" self wished for in "I Am"; for a creepier version, see the non-recognition that results from the journey into oblivion in Clare's ''An Invite to Etenity," his revision of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love:' Thanks to Rich Gienopie, Anna Peak, and especially Patrick Farrell for reading these poems with me. Citations from Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). For Clare's knowledge of ballads, see Bridget Keegan, "Broadsides, Ballads and Books: The Landscape of Cultural Literacy in John Clare's The Village Minstrel;' The John Clare Society Journal15 (1996): n-18. 95· For instance, "The Captive Knight" was advertised as reaching a seventieth edition. Paula Feldman, ed., "Records of Woman," with other Poems, by Felicia Hemans (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999 ), 194n. 96. See the song at the end of The Abencerrage (3.567-620 ), which memorializes the heroism of Zayda, who proves that "Woman too can die" for her political ideals (2.318) and "The Cid's Battle Song" in The Siege of Valencia, performed by Ximena to rally the restive populace ofValencia against the Moors (6.193-224). All citations from Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan Wolfson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 97· See "Rio Verde" in The Forest Sanctuary (2-494-502), sung by a dying mother to her young son, which in this context signifies an intolerable loss of the maternal in the midst of a long lyric poem of masculine self-discovery. "The Indian Woman's Death Song" in Records of Woman suggests that mothers, if damaged too much by patriarchy, deserve understanding and perhaps even admiration for singing their children unto death. On Hemans's use of folksong to transform death into "meaningfullife" for the nation, see Gary Kelly, "Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, and the State;' in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Julie Melnyk and Nanora Sweet (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 201. 98. See Ernest De Selincourt, ed., Alan G. Hill, rev. ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years: Part 11821-28 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 597-98; and Joseph Hine, ed., Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq., Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons (London, 1831).

Notes to Pages 185-188

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Chapter 5 1. Katharine Lee Bates, Ballad Book (1890; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1966). 2. John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 29. 3· Walter Scott, "Introduction and Notes to

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1830 );'in The Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 50. On Scott's co-opting of feminine literary production, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). 4· Walter Scott, "Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry;' in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1932), q. 5· Ibid. 6. Walter Scott, "Essay on Imitations of the Popular Ballad;' Minstrelsy, 4:13. 7· The clearest example of this phenomenon in Scott's novels can be found in Guy Mannering (1815). Having returned to his ancestral home after being kidnapped, Harry Bertram reads his family coat of arms and then remembers an old ballad that "I could sing ... from one end to another when I was a boy;' a ballad he repeated to himself in order to preserve his links to his childhood; it was probably taught to him by the gypsy Meg Merrilies, who sang him "sangs of the auld barons and their bloody wars:' Guy Mannering, ed. P. D. Garside (London: Penguin, 2003), 247, 328. Yet despite his obsessive attachment to the song, he can now remember only the tune, and so he plays it on his flageolet. This triggers "the corresponding associations of a damsel ... engaged in bleaching linen" who sings the words in response, and this moves the villain who has stolen his birthright to exclaim to himself, "The devil take all ballads, and ballad-makers, and ballad-singers!" (248). For Scott's recourse to poetry as a technology for fixing the self in protoracial terms, a project he later abandons, see John D. Kerkering, The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35-67. 8. R. Adelaide Witham, ed., English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston: RiversideHoughton Mifflin, 1937), vi-vii. The story is also told in ]. Logie Robertson, A History of English Literature for Secondary Schools (New York, 1894), 279. 9· The pedagogical afterlife of "Casabianca" is discussed in Catherine Robson, "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History;' PMLA 120, no. 1 (January 2005): 148-62. 10. T. S. Pinneo, ed., The Hemans Reader for Female Schools (New York, 1847), 5· There are collections of Wordsworth for schools, one I have already cited, but The Hemans Reader is unusual in that there are many pieces in it not by Hemans, as if she is as much a presiding (domestic) spirit as author. n. Ibid., 5, 79· 12. Sheldon and Co's Fourth School Reader (New York, 1882), 176. 13. Shaw, 317. 14. This is not to say that the rationalist/imaginative dichotomy is adequate to describing the debates over pedagogy in the Romantic era. See Alan Richardson, Liter-

256

Notes to Pages 189-192

ature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 59-64. 15. For a history of the collection of African American song, see Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 467-90 and Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The opening of each chapter of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903) exemplifies the doubleness of lyric as I have described it, with the music from the communal sorrow songs and the verse usually articulating a more individuated voice. 16. For an analytical history of nativism, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 17. The conflict between the nativist "Young America" movement and the more cosmopolitan and Anglophilic Knickerbockers has recently been traced in Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18. Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed: The Story of Katharine Lee Bates (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 51-52. 19. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 67-72; Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990 ), 148-75; John Guillory, "Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines;' in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29-36. 20. Court, 167. 21. Graff, Professing, 69. 22. Cmiel, 150-61. 23. Michael J. Bell, '"No Borders to the Ballad Maker's Art': Francis James Child and the Politics of the People;' Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (October 1988 ): 304. 24. Francis James Child, Class Oration, 1846, in Papers, bMS Am 1922 (494), Houghton Library, Harvard University, quoted by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 25. Cmiel, 107. 26. In this passage, Child cites Lord Brougham's well-known remark on Arnold, "The schoolmaster is abroad:' On the influence of Thomas Arnold in the United States, see Henry Warren Torrey, review of The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold, D. D., North American Review 62, no. 130 (January 1846): 165, American Peri-

odical Series Online. 27. Alexis de Tocqueville addresses this issue in volume 2, part 1, chapter 9 and volume 2, part 3, chapter 14 of Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 428-33 and 578-81. 28. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 68-69. 29. For one of many complaints about the vagueness and mystifications of Emerson and transcendentalism generally, see the review of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays:

Notes to Pages 192-201

257

Second Series, The American Whig Review 1, no. 3 (March 1845): 237, Cornell Making of America, http:/ /cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/. 30. Francis Wayland, review of The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., The North American Review 59, no. 125 (October 1844): 402, Cornell Making of America, http:/ /cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa. 31. Thomas Arnold, "Education of the Middle Classes;' in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold, D. D. (1845; repr., Westmead: Gregg International, 1971), 232. 32. Francis James Child, "Ballad Poetry (1875);' in Anglo-American Ballad Study: A Folklore Casebook, ed. Dianne Dugaw (New York: Garland, 1995), 58-67. 33. Jo McMurtry, English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic Discipline (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1985), 109. 34· Eudora Alden Philip, "Swain Free School IV:' The Alden Letters No. 79 (January 1952): 542, Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa., Quaker Collection, Collection no. 950. 35. Francis Barton Gummere, Diary, Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa., Quaker Collection, Collection no. 1148. 36. We can see his early attraction to ballad collection in the group of songs by Scott he contributes to a Haverford songbook he assembled in 1869. Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa., Quaker Collection, Collection no. 910H includes songs from Rokeby, Marmion, Lady of the Lake, and Guy Mannering. 37. Francis Barton Gummere, The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 22. 38. Francis Barton Gummere, The Beginnings of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1901), 164-72. 39. Michael J. Bell, "To Realize the Imagined Community: Francis Barton Gummere and the Politics of Democracy;' in Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, ed. Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 65-66. 40. Letter of October 22, 1885 from Francis Barton Gummere to Thomas Chase, Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa., Quaker Collection, Collection no. 965 41. "The Lake Poets;' Thomas Chase Papers, Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa., Quaker Collection, Collection no. 965. 42. Chase, 4· 43· Francis Barton Gummere, Democracy and Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). 44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 145. 45. Gummere, Popular Ballad, 18. 46. Chase also notes this change in Wordsworth but phrases it less harshly, from "radical" to "Liberal Tory" ("The Lake Poets;' 59-60 ). 47. Francis Barton Gummere, "Originality and Convention in Literature;' Quarterly Review 204 (1906): 44· 48. Francis Barton Gummere, ''A Day With Professor Child;' The Atlantic Monthly 103 (1909): 421. 49· Cmiel, 148-75. 50. Francis Barton Gummere, Handbook of Poetics, 3rd ed. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1890 ), 1.

258

Notes to Pages 201-206

51. George Lyman Kittredge, introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads Edited from the Collection of Francis ]ames Child, ed. George Lyman Kittredge and Helen Child Sargent (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1904), xi. 52. See Reed, 154; J. H. Gilmore, English Literature (New York, 1883), 19; Henry A. Beers, From Chaucer to Tennyson: English Literature in Eight Chapters (New York, 1890), 41. 53· William Dallam Armes, ed., Old English Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1904), vii. 54· Jay B. Hubbell and John Owen Beaty, An Introduction to Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 237; Louis Untermeyer and Carter Davidson, Poetry, Its Appreciation and Enjoyment (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 383. "Of the people, by the people, and for the people" is repeated in Mary Kathryn Morrow, ''A Study of Ballads in Representative Anthologies of Senior High School Level from 1849 to 1941" (M.Ed. thesis, University of Texas, 1943), 22. Louise Pound makes her case against Gummere, among other places, in Poetic Origins and the Ballad (New York: Macmillan, 1921). For a guide to the "ballad wars" and other moments in the history of folksong scholarship, see Donald Knight Wilgus, Anglo-American Folklore Scholarship Since 1898 (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959). 55. Henry Seidel Canby, "Ballads;' Henry Seidel Canby Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, unpaginated. 56. See Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 110-23, and Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 263-79. 57. Henry Seidel Canby, American Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 252. 58. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, 345. 59· Gummere calls repetition the "protoplasm" of the ballad (ibid., 84). 6o. Canby, American Memoir, 169. 61. Gummere was disgusted by the teaching of Katherine Anne Green's 1878 bestselling detective novel The Leavenworth Case in literature classes (Poetry and Democracy, 31m). 62. Henry Seidel Canby, "Teaching English," The Yale Review, n.s. 4, no. 1 (October 1914): n8. 63. W. Wilbur Hatfield, An Experience Curriculum in English (New York: D. Appleton, 1935), 17. 64. Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 44-46. 65. Ibid., 12-16; Arthur N. Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), 47-61. 66. See Francis Barton Gummere, "English in Secondary Schools;' School and College 1, no.1 (1892): 84-88. 67. Horace E. Scudder, "The Primer and Literature;' The Atlantic Monthly 70, no. 419 (September 1892): 383. 68. In Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), John A. Nietz reproduces a chart from a 1930 study that claims to represent the changes in the

Notes to Pages 206-210

259

content of 1,370 readers from 1775 to 1826 (52-53). Nietz doubts how closely the author could have studied such a large number of texts but agrees that is roughly representative. "Myth" and "folklore" appear only with the 1875-1915 grouping and fairy stories and fables greatly increase tlleir share. 69. Morrow, 40. 70. Sidney Lanier, The Boy's Percy (New York, 1882), xviii. For Lanier's interest in professional philology, see his critique of tlle "verbal critic" Richard Grant White in "The Physics of Music" (1875 ), in The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. P. F. Baum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 2:251-65. 71. Lanier, Boy's Percy, xxi-xxii, xxx-xxxi. Contrast this manliness and scholarly purity with the rationale given by the unnamed "lady" who produces the earliest redaction of Percy I have found for children-that certain sections are indecent. Ancient

Ballads; Selected from Percy's Collection: with Explanatory Notes, Taken from Different Authors, For the Use and Entertainment of Young Persons (London, 1807). 72. James Baldwin, The Story of Siegfried (New York, 1882), x. 73· J, Rose Colby, Literature and Life in School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 4· 74· Ibid., 88. 75· Bates, iii. 76. Ibid., xx, xxiii-xxvi.

77. Percival Chubb, The Teaching of English in the Elementary and the Secondary School (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 124. 78. Ibid., 131. 79. Orton Lowe, Literature for Children (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 24-26. So. Applebee, 129. 81. Edwin Almiron Greenlaw et al., Literature and Life-Book One, rev. ed. (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1933), iii. 82. William H. Elson, Christine Keck, and Edwin Greenlaw, Junior High School Literature: Book Three-Literature and Life (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1922), 237. 83. Virginia Judith Craig, The Teaching of High School English (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), 87. 84. Hatfield, 47· 85. Margaret Farrand Thorp, Neilson of Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 78. 86. Cleanth Brooks, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (New York: H. Holt, 1938). 87. Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 208-10; Craig S. Ab-

bott, "Modern American Poetry: Anthologies, Classrooms, and Canons;' College Literature 17, nos. 2-3 (1990): 217-19. For a recent response to these critiques that undermines its useful points by erasing conflicts within New Criticism and ignoring the likenesses between Understanding Poetry and other textbooks, see Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 88. By the publication of Understanding Poetry, "Frankie and Johnny" had been recorded by King Oliver (1929), printed as a "bar-room classic" (1920), and set to a

260

Notes to Pages 210-215

foxtrot recorded by Bunny Berrigan (1937). The year 1938 also saw the production of Jerome Morross's ballet, "The Scandalous Life of Frankie and Johnny:' 89. On the category of "experience" and its relation to the "concrete universal" in the New Criticism, see Knapp, Literary Interests, 60-79, and Art Berman, From the

New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 27-32. 90. Applebee, 162-63. 91. Robert Penn Warren, "Brooks and Warren;' Humanities 6, no. 2 (April1985): 2. 92. Ibid. 93. In Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970 ), Gerald Graff underscores the importance of drama in "antipropositional poetics" generally and in Brooks's work in particular (15-16, 94-103). 94. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 154. 95. Cleanth Brooks, "Student Notebooks, Fifteenth Century;' Cleanth Brooks Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Brooks's debt to philology is also reflected in his first book, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1935), which aggressively tries to tie Southern dialect to European roots rather than African American invention. 96. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938), 263. 97. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 6; Graff, Professing, 149-50. 98. Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 75· 99. Douglas Mao, "The New Critics and the Text-Object;' ELH 63, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 248. 100. Ibid., 235. 101. The Popular Ballad, 323. 102. For one exoticization, see John Huston, Frankie and Johnny (1930; repr., New York: B. Blom, 1968), with illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, which includes Huston's play of that title as well as the original and other variants of the ballad; this is the same John Huston who would go on to fame as a director. Contrast Sophomore Poetry Manual, the precursor of An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry, which poses these questions in reference to "Frankie and Johnny": "1) Can poetry grow out of the present rather than merely the past? and (2) Can poetry deal with sordid materials, can it use the subject matter of the backstreets of an American city, rnaterial which we are inclined to associate with newspaper headlines rather than with poetry?" (7). Cleanth Brooks Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 103. Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, American Literature: The Makers and the Making (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). For Warren's role in the anthology, see R. W. B. Lewis, "Warren's Long Visit to American Literature;' The Yale Review 70, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 568-91.

Notes to Pages 216-228

261

104. For Brooks's dim view of modern popular culture, see The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 3· 105. Mark Royden Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 61. 106. Warren, "Brooks and Warren;' 3. 107. Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems, ed. John Burt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), lines 79-81. 108. For readings that address this bifurcation, see William Bedford Clark, "A Meditation on Folk-History: The Dramatic Structure of Robert Penn Warren's The Ballad of Billie Potts:' American Literature 49, no. 4 (January 1978): 635-45 and John Burt, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 84-91. 109. Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (New York: Random House, 1953), 43· 110. Michael Szalay, "All the King's Men; or, the Primal Crime;' The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (Fall2oo2): 345-70. 111. Robert Penn Warren, Brothers to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, a New Version (New York: Random House, 1979), 119-20. 112. It is unclear how these highly didactic lines would have their meaning altered by thinking of them as part of a "dramatic situation," but my intent here is not to convict Warren of inconsistency but rather to understand what he thinks he is doing. 113. Winchell, 438-39. 114. Ibid., 439· 115. Rosenblatt, 264. 116. Szalay, 347· 117. Allen Grossman, Summa Lyrica: Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics, in The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 300-304. n8. In his critique of the wishfulness of "post-Marxist" cultural criticism, John Prow reminds us that "populism has no inherently socialist form;' despite Ernesto Laclau's claim that "[i]n so far as 'popular traditions' represent the ideological crystallization of resistance to oppression in general, that is, to the very form of the State, they will be longer lasting than class ideologies." Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 76n.

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 5 Addison, Joseph, 51. See also Spectator, The "Address to the Sons of Burns" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Adorno, Theodor W., 5 aesthetic: aesthetic (dis)interest, 9, 10, 16, 235n46; "aesthetic humanism" and "aesthetics of participation" (Grossman), 226-27; in Blake, 159; critique of, 2, 16, 42-43, 150; in Gay, 16, 26; women as objects in, 58. See also canon/Literature Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 235n6o America a Prophecy (Blake), 155 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 199 Applebee, Arthur N., 208 Arne, Thomas, 105 Arnold, Matthew, 95 Arnold, Thomas, 191-92 "Baby Lon" (Child 14), 209 Backscheider, Paula R., 233n22 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 230nu ballad: broadside vs. minstrel and traditional, 11; as children's text, 4, 188; collection of, 3; and colonialism, 10; as "common;' 2, 8, 92, 215; communal authorship of, 195-96, 201-2, 208-9; critical abuse of, 229n2; definition of, 2, 8; as democratic, 202; as form in New Criticism, 213; Jacobin, 3, 132-33; Jacobite, 3, 132; as lesser lyric, 2-3; as "nothing;' 41; and novel, 2; as oral and print text, 11-12, 70, 96, 193, 199; as performed text, 8, 32, 34-35, 96, 129, 209; and poetic justice, 14, 18, 40-41; as "protoplasm of literature;' 14, 203, 206; trade in, 234n38. See also Child, Francis James; cultureepoch theory; Gummere, Francis Barton; lyric; poetic justice; songs "Ballad, X' (Wordsworth), 160, 180 Ballad of Billie Potts, The (Warren), 217-20;

Oedipal plot in, 220; paradoxes in, 219; split between ballad and commentary in, 217-18 ballad opera, 34 Ballad Revival: and "bardic nationalism" (Trumpener), 10, 14-15; as exploitation, 9-10; irony of, 3; as object of reflection, 138, 161, 175; as "scandal" (Stewart), 10 "Ballads That Illustrate Shakespeare" (Percy): ballads as sources of plays in, 123; engraving of Shakespeare in, 119-22; "Friar of Orders Gray" as a Shakespearean song in, 126-28 Bate, Jonathan, 133 Bates, Katharine Lee: "America the Beautiful;' 185, 221; Ballad Book, 185, 189, 207-8, 209,221 Beggar's Opera, The (Gay), 15-43,74, 96; Air 3 ("Cold and Raw"), 18-19, 24-27, 34, 36; Air 12 ("Now ponder well"), 27, 34-36, 39; Air 46 ("A Shepherd Kept Sheep"), 37; Air 57 ("Greensleeves"), 37; alternative to opera and scaffold in, 17, 40; ballads and poetic justice in, 40-41; "being particular" in, 17, 35-37; the City in, 24, 43; compared to The Spectator, 34-35; eighteenth-century responses to, 38-39; epigraph from Martial in, 24, 39; poetic justice in, 13, 15-17, 26; as satire on audience's judgment, 39, 235n53; subjectivity in, 18, 35-37, 39; theorization of culture in, 13; twentieth-century adaptations of, 43. See also Gay, John Behn, Aphra, 22 Bell, Michael J., 196 Berman, Art, 26on89 Blair, Hugh: on figures in lyric, 62, 78; rejection of Love and Liberty, 82; on Scots in The Gentle Shepherd, 64; on sensibility in Ossian, 71; on taste, 92--93 Blake, William, 139-59; antinomianism of,

284

Index

139, 156; attraction to Street Cries, 141; and the Ballad Revival, 142; as bricoleur, 141, 154; the City in, 151; as communitarian, 140, 158-59; duty in, 139, 140, 142, 158-59; as individualist, 140; limits of experience/realism in, 149-51; particularity in, 140, 154, 249-50016; patrons and, 143; pity as a form of violence in, 138, 142, 146-47, 150, 155-56; prophecy in, 11, 140, 141, 150; and religious enthusiasm, 250018; Ritson's Select Collection engraved by, 138, 142; songs in, 143, 145, 158; as urban antiquarian, 142, 144; view of history in, 142. See also individual works; Street Cries Bloom, Harold, 244010 Bogel, Fredric V., 234-35n49, 240n61 "Bonnie Earl of Murray, The" (Child 181), 69 Booth, Mark W., 229n5 Boswell, James, 36, 39, n8 Boy's Percy, The (Lanier), 206-7,208 Boyle, Robert, 21 "Braes of Yarrow, The" (Hamilton), no, 169 Brewer, John, 16, 26, 43, 75 Brooks, Cleanth: editor of Percy Letters, 212; interest in philology, 260n95; on Ode on a Grecian Urn as a "drama;' 211-12; recommends ballads to Warren, 216-17; sings "Frankie and Johnny" to/for Warren, 216, 223; uses Gummere, 212-13 Brother to Dragons (Warren), 219-22; appropriation of Ghost Dance in, 222, 226; ballads as innocent in, 220; compared to Blake's "self-annihilation;' 223; "dramatic situation" of, 219; failure of American dream in, 221; failure of form in, 221; guilt in, 221; Oedipal plot in, 220; race in, 221 Brown, Marshall, 230016 Burger, Gottfried August, 13, 161, 169, 176 Burke, Peter, 231n23 Burns, Robert, 75-96; ambition as author, 77, 84; breadth of reading, 75; canonical status of, 93-96; critiques Progress, n, 47, 76, 78, 91, 95-96; as double agent, 75; idea of taste questioned by, 47, 92-93; lyric split in, 76, 79, 84-85; "Ode to Ruin;' 177; pastoral revised by, 76; as "peasant poet;' 10, 47, 77-79, 93; and Scottish Enlightenment, 47, 76, 79, 90, 91, 92; in textbooks, 242-43n115; "To a Mouse;' 77; view of Ritson, 132. See also Burns's songs and song collections;

canon/Literature; Love and Liberty; "To a Mountain Daisy" Burns's songs and song collections, 85-93; anonymity of, 85; as autobiography, 91; "Ay Waukin o;' 88-89; body in, 86, 88; bowdlerization of, 93; Burns's absorption in, 85; collectivity in, 96; diversity of sources for, 87; "Gie the lass her Fairin'," 91; history of manners in, 88; "How lang and dreary," 86-87; and the local, 90; lyric range of, 85; "My Harry was a Gallant Gay;' 87-88; "0 Poortith Cauld;' 89-90; the quotidian in, 87; sexuality in, 91; sociability in, 86; Thomson as editor of, 93; use of print in, 96; as vehicle of Scottish culture, 85, 93 Canby, Henry Seidel: ballad as ideal object of reading in, 204; ballad course in 1914, 202-4; on English as a discipline, 204; Gummere's definition of ballad in, 203; and middlebrow culture, 202, 204; on World War I and the academy, 202 canon/Literature: anti-modernity vs. refinement in, 95-96; Burns in, 93-96; and class, 9; critique of, 9; and distinction, 10; English bias of, 94; and gender, 10; mediation of politics in, 11; as an object of consumption, 235n6o; preconditions of, 188; and school, 1; and textual fixity, 94; transformation of, 1. See also aesthetic; schools, textbooks, and universities Carlson, Julie, 68 Carlyle, Alexander, 73-74 Chalmers, George, 49 Chartier, Roger, 232012 "Chevy Chase;' 28, 110 Child, Francis James, 191-94; attacks Emersonians, 192; as ballad collector, 192-93; ballads and education in, 194; ballads as feudal, oral, and objective, 193; Class Oration at Harvard, 191-92; criticizes editors and minstrels, 193; humble origins of, 192; prefers oral ballad, 11; on teaching as profession, 191; as vocational ideal, 13-14, 189 "Children in the Wood, The;' 1, 23, 27-28, 105, 129, 136-38, 164, 234n38. See also Gay, John; Spectator, The; Wordsworth, William Christensen, Jerome, 236n3 Chubb, Percival, 208 Cibber, Colley, 39

Index Cibber, Theophilus, 115 Clare, John, 183, 254n94 Cmiel, Kenneth, 191 Colby, J, Rose, 207 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: and "The Children in the Wood;' 1-2, 11-12; motive for authorship, 12; on orality and print, 11-12; on "To a Highland Girt;' 179 collection: in Addison, 30; and collective, 3; danger of, in Blake, 140, 145; as historical bridge, 95, 119; and Wordsworth as tourist, 17D-72, 179, 181-82

Collection of Old Ballads and Songs, Chiefly Scottish, A, 238n31 College Entrance Examination Board, 242n115 Collier, Jeremy, 104 Collins, William, 101-11; belatedness in, 101, 102-3, 244TI10; co-opts bard, 111; "covert lyricism" (Feingold) in, 103; ''An Epistle: Addrest to Sir Thomas Hanmer;' 101-3, 194; friendship in, 244n19; greater lyric in, 105-6; logic of imitating Shakespeare in, 104; "Ode on the Poetical Character;' 6, 106; "Ode to Evening;' 102; "Ode to a Friend on his Return &c." ("Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands"), 106-11; "Ode to Fear;' 106; "Ode to Mercy;' 102;

"own" and "scene" in, 102, 107; socia-

bility in, 107; ''A Song from Shakespeare's Cymbelyne;' 103-5; "Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare:' 103-5 Court, 16, 23, 30. See also Restoration Court Court, Franklin E., 190 Cowper, William, 153 Craig, Cairns, 237n11 Craig, Virginia Judith, 209 Crawford, Robert, 75, 236n3 Crawford, Thomas, 50, 58-59, 82, 236n3, 237n11, 238n31 Cries of London. See Street Cries Crisman, William, 141 culture as field: French Revolution as threat to, 134-35, 138-39; as semiautonomous, 13, 40, 42-43, 45, 134-35. See also aesthetic; canon/Literature culture-epoch theory: analogy between child and primitive, 205; ballad's role in, 189, 207-9;defined,205;racein,207 Curran, Stuart, 253n74 Cyr, Ellen M., 242n115

285

Daiches, David, 237n9 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr., 84, 94 Davis, Leith, 170, 176, 237n11 Deelman, Christian, 115 de Grazia, Margreta, 243n4 de Man, Paul, 229n8 Democracy and Poetry (Gummere), 198-2oo; antidemocratic strain criticized in, 198-99; ballad as key to social contract in, 198; and "the imagined community;' 14, 199, 200, 224-25; Mill's idea oflyric rejected in, 200; and poetic justice, 224-25; Romantic apostasy critiqued in, 199 Democracy and Poetry (Warren): artwork as emblem of the individual in, 214; double meaning of"common" in, 215; critique of commodification in, 214-15 Denning, Michael, 233-34n36 Dennis, John, 28 Dewey, John, 205 Dibdin, Charles, 99 Dickens, Charles, 234n38 Dobson, Michael, 112, 114 Dodsley, Robert, 123 Douglas (Home), 6o-74; androgyny and gender in, 67-71, 24onn61-64; attack on effeminacy of, 73; attack on suicide in, 73; ballads attacking, 71-73; elitism in, 72-74; "Gill Morrice" revised in, 6o, 70; lyric as historical bridge in, 63; marketed "to lower orders:' 73; "Master Betty" as title character, 68-69; modesty in, 240n72; motherhood in, 66; as pastoral, 6o, 65, 74; personification in, 61-63; plot as "preposterous;' 65; poetic justice absent in, 74; praise for, 65; same-sex desire in, 69; Scots vernacular absent in, 64; Scottish nationalism in, 6o, 63-64, 65; songs absent in, 47, 61, 64, 73; sympathy and progress at odds in, 46; tears sought from audience in, 7o-71. See also Garrick, David; Hume, David; lyric split; Scottish Enlightenment "dramatic situation": Brooks's debt to Gummere for, 212-13; in Gummere, 196; importance in New Criticism, 211-12; and the individual in Understanding Poetry, 213, 224 Dryden, John, 7, 21, 22,99 Du Bois, W. E. B., 256n15 Duffin, Ross W., 98

286

Index

Dugaw, Dianne, 229n5, 232n3 Duncan, Ian, 95, 238n32 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 254n92 d'Urfe, Honore, 22 D'Urfey, Thomas, 18-24; adds apostrophe to name, 22; aspirations of, 17; attacks on, 23; "Cold and Raw," 19, 24-26; at Court, 22; de-politicized, 234n44; "Essay in Defence of Verse," 23-24; family background, 22; as figure of national past, 234ll44; on financial bubbles of 1720s, 24, 233n33; A Fond Husband, 21; obscurity of, 7; Pills to Purge Melancholy, 23, 24; as Royalist, 11; uses orality and print, 23, 31, 229n5; "The Winchester Wedding;' 20; Zelinda and epigraph from Martial, 2o-21 Eaves, Morris, 140 "Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Ellison, Julie, 236n4 Empson, William, 77, 232n3 Enchanted Island, The (Davenant and Dryden),104 "Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels, An" (Percy): decline of minstrels in, 119; fall into print, 119; impersonation of minstrels in, 125-26; Killingworth in, 124. See also Percy, Thomas Essays Upon Epitaphs (Wordsworth), 173 "Experience:' See schools, textbooks, and universities; Understanding Poetry "Famous Flower of Serving Men, The;' 131 Farmer, Richard, 119, 126 Feingold, Richard, 103-4, 230n17 Ferguson, Adam, 57 Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 44 Florizel and Perdita (Garrick), 113-15; Autolycus's songs in, 114; as distillation of Shakespeare, 115; Perdita's song in, 114-15; revision of Shakespearean pastoral in, 114 Foucault, Michel, 233-34ll36 "Frankie and Johnny;' 210, 216, 259-6on88, 260lll02 Freeman, Lisa A., 235n57 Friedman, Albert B., 3 Frith, Simon, 235n6o Prow, John, 26m118 Fry, Paul H., 244n.1o

Garrick, David, m-18; acting style of, 112; adaptations of Shakespeare, 113-15; encourages Gray to write more odes, 111-12; on feminization of print culture, 112; rejects Douglas, 65. See also Florizel and

Perdita; Jubilee, The Gay, John, 15-43; The Shepherd's Week, 23-24, 31; social aspirations of, 16, 24; Trivia, 24. See also Beggar's Opera, The genre: danger of formal allegory, 9; danger of seeing in isolation, 7; inflection of/by history, 8-9; limits of taxonomy, 8; as verb, 9 Gentle Shepherd, The (Ramsay), 48-52, 56-60; aesthetics and gender in, 56-59; allegory of historical change, 49, 52; compared to D'Urfey's songs, so; compared to The Winter's Tale, 51; criticized for use of Scots, 64-65; cultural nationalism in, 52, 59-60; economic improvement in, 58-59; English and Scottish authors in, 50-51; in history of pastoral, 51, 77; Jacobitism in, 57; reading in, so-52, 97; songs added in 1729, 48, 58 George, Stefan, 5 Ghost Dance. See Brother to Dragons Gildon, Charles, 123 "Gill Morrice": beauty of title character, 69-70; collection by "a lady," 70; emendation of, 70; plot of, 60. See also Douglas Glen, Heather, 146 "Glen-Almain" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence

Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (Palgrave), 243n116 Goldsmith, Oliver, 65 Goldsmith, Steven, 142, 159 Graff, Gerald, 190 Gray, Thomas: Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard, 9, 76-78, 242mo1; praises Douglas, 65; reception of Odes (1757), m Greenblatt, Stephen, 100-101 Greene, Roland, 230n9 Grimm, Jakob, 5, 193 Groom, Nick, 11 Grossman, Allen, 226-27 Guillory, John, 9 Gummere, Francis Barton, 194-201; communal authorship of ballad, 195-96; compared to Scott, 195, 257n36; criticizes

Index current scholarship, 299; critique of his communal theory, 196; denigrates current popular culture, 196; dialectical view of history, 197; initiation into proper reading, 194; lyric as poetic "citadel" in, 200; as MLA president, 201-2; poetic rhythm in, 197; primitivism of ballad, 198. See also Democracy and Poetry Habermas, Jiirgen, 234n42 Hall, G. Stanley, 205 Harker, Dave, 10 Hartman, Geoffrey, 244n10, 248-49n5 Hatfield, W. Wilbur, 205, 209 Hawes, Clement, 236n61 Hawkesworth, John, 71 Hawkins, William, 105, 244m6 Hazlitt, William Henry, 176, 199 Hemans, Felicia: commercial success as songwriter, 183-84; gender roles in Spanish songs of, 184, 254nn96-97; and The Hemans Reader for Female Schools, 187; knowledge of Ballad Revival materials, 183-84; questions nationalism, 184; reception of, 10, 187 Herd, David, 87-88 Herrick, Robert, 152 Highwayman Act (1692), 18 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 56, 57 Home, John, 60-74; advice from Collins to, no; appeals to Shakespeare, 97-98, 135; canonical status of, 94, 95-96; English pronunciation of name, 64, no; helps get Ossian published, 62; praises Master Betty, 69; travels to Highlands with Macpherson, 64. See also Douglas Homer, So, 84, 102-3 Hume, David: defends suicide, 67; discourages Scotticisms, 64; gender and history in, 57; imperative to be sociable in, 53; rates Douglas higher than Shakespeare, 65 Hurd, Thomas, 7 Huston, John, 26omo2 Hutcheson, Frances: aesthetics and morality as innate faculties in, 56-57; on personification in lyric, 61-62, 78; on sympathy and song, 45, 53-54

Island in the Moon, An (Blake): Ballad Revival in, 142; "Holy Thursday" (Inno-

287

cence), 144, 145; "The Little Boy Lost" (Innocence), 145; match-seller's Cry in, 143-44; "Nurse's Song" (Innocence), 144; unanimity in, 146 Jackson-Houlton, C. M., 234ll38 Jacobus, Mary, 253n88 Jameson, Fredric, 8 Jane Shore (Rowe), 239n42 Janowitz, Anne, 6 Jerusalem (Blake), 151-58; Bellman's Cry in, 152-54, 156-57; contrasted with Wheatley, 153; the Fall in, 151, 154-56; image from "London" in, 151; prosody of, 157-58; sacrifice in, 151, 158; splitting of self in, 155-57; "To the Christians" (Plate 77), 152, 156-57; "To the Jews" (Plate 27), 152, 156-58; "To the Public" (Plate 3), 141, 157 "Jesse James:' 210 "Johnie Armstrong" (Child 169), 69, 211 Johnson, Samuel: criticizes Cymbeline, 104; criticizes Garrick's song in Florizel and Perdita, us; criticizes Macbeth, 107-8; as historicist critic, 108-9, 243n3; vs. improvement of Scottish Enlightenment, 95; parodies The Hermit ofWarkworth (Percy), 136-38 Jones, Mark, 252n67, 252n71 Jones, Steven E., 161 Jonson, Ben, no Jubilee, The (Garrick), n5-18; ballad singers in stage version of, n8; dedicatory ode in, 115-17; greater and lesser lyric in, ns; pageant of characters in, 13, n8; Shakespeare as child in, n7; Shakespeare's Garland, 115-16 Kerkering, John D., 255n7 Killingworth (Kenilworth), 100-101. See also "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, The"; Shakespeare, William Kittredge, George Lyman, 201 Knapp, Steven, 235n56, 26on89 Kramnick, Jonathan, 6, 99 Lacan, Jacques, 155 Langan, Celeste, 248m Levinson, Marjorie, 166 Lewis, R. W. B., 215 Licensing Act (1737), 238n24

288

Index

Literature and Life (Greenlaw), 208-9 "Little Joe, The Chimney Sweeper," 149-50 Liu, Alan, 137-38, 249n7 Locke, John, 54 Lockhart, John Gibson, 186 Lomax, John A., 203 London Merchant, The (Lillo), 239n42 Love and Liberty (Burns), 79-85; as act of collection, So; beggars' viewpoint limited in, 83; compared to The Beggar's Opera, 79-81; lyric-as-song in, So-82, 84-85; as rejection or revision of Scottish Enlightenment, 82-83; reputation of, 76; revision of pastoral in, 79; use of English and Scots in, 79, 81,84 "Lucy Gray'' (Wordsworth), 165-68; compared to "Children in the Wood;' 164, 168; compared to oilier Lucy poems, 165; compared to "The Thorn;' 165; danger of family in, 167-68; as figure for poetry, 169; gray as ontological state, 168; redundancy in, 165; refusal of voyeurism in, 165; in textbooks, 184 Lynch, Jack, 243n4 lyric: and apostrophe, 47; Classical 230n13; Early Modern, 230n9; as experiment in history of civilization, 6; as figure of the literary, 5; and generality (Adorno), 5; historicist critique of, 4-5; lesser and greater, 3, 28, 38, 105; and liberal self, 6; as mode of history, 8; and novel, 229n3, 230n11; as overheard (Mill), 5; and personification, 47, 61-62; and popular sovereignty, 6; reputation of eighteenth-century lyric, 6; as "transindividual;' 236n4. See also lyric doubleness; lyric history; lyric split; lyric subject; lyric violence Lyrical Ballads. See individual poems; Preface; Wordswort!I, William lyric doubleness, 3, 18, 33, 38, 41, 55, 99, 129, 200 lyric history: Collins's response to, m; Garrick's confidence in, 115-16; Gray's crisis in, m; Percy's facility with, 125, 127-28; problem defined, 98 lyric split: in Burns, 77-79, 81-82; causes of, 6, 8, 46; in Home, 61-63, 72-74; in Warren, 217-19 lyric subject: complications in Long Eighteenth Century, 188; crisis of, in Brother to

Dragons, 221; in "culture-epoch theory;' 205-9; defined, 187; in Scott's encounter wit!I Percy, 185-86; in Understanding Poetry, 215-16, 218, 223-24 lyric violence: Blake and, 145-46, 149-50; causes of, 138; Warren and, 223; Wordsworth and, 171

Macbeth: Davenant version of, 109; eighteent!I-century debate over, 107--9; as Scottish play, 243n25 Mackenzie, Henry: on Burns, 75, 77; on Douglas, 7o-71; on Scots songs, 52 Mackie, Erin, 235n6o Macpherson, James (Ossian): personification in, 62; Wordsworth's critique of, 13, 172-74. See also Home, John Makdisi, Saree, 140 Manning, Peter, 253n74 Mao, Douglas, 214 Marcus, Leal!, 19 Martial, 20, 24, 39 McDowell, Paula, 235n59 McGann, Jerome, 5, 140 McGuirk, Carol, 236n3 Mclllvaney, Liam, 93 McKeon, Michael, 138 Mee, Jon, 141 Merry Muses of Caledonia, The. See Burns's songs and song collections Michael (Wordsworth): haunted by "BalladMichael;' 166; limits of family in, 166-67; parodic strain in, 252n67, 252n71; as response to Christabel, 166; "spiritual economics" (Levinson) in, 166-67 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 55, 200 Milton (Blake), 151 Millar, John, 57-58, 67 Montagu, Elizabeth, 117-18 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 51 Murphy, Arthur, 115 Murphy, Peter T., 75, 171, 174, 229n6 national identity: American, 189-94, 196, 202-3,207,209,213-16,219-22,224,226, 256n17; in Blake, 142, 145-46, 149, 151-52, 158-59; English, from the Restoration to the 1720s, 3, 20, 22, 29-31, 34; in Hemans, 183-84; in Scott, 186, 252n7; Scottish, 44-45,47-48,51-53,58-65,73,85,93;and

Index Shakespeare, 99, 105, 110-13, 117-18, 119, 123, 133-34; in Wordsworth, 137, 138, 161, 169-76,177-83 Neilson, William Allan, 209 New Criticism: antagonism to philology in, 190; antagonism to popular culture in, 190, 210; "experience" in, 26on89; love of difficulty in, 210; politics of poetry in, 226; as reactionary, 214 Newman, Henry Cardinal, 95 "nothing": beautiful/sublime and, 25; and "cynical reason;' 21, 26, 36; as figure of commercial economy, 24; and knowingness, 25, 27; monarchy as, 22; as precondition for political change, 43; in the Restoration, 20-21; spectacle of state power as, 25, 26; value of, 21-22. See also D'Urfey, Thomas; Gay, John; Martial "On the Origin of the English Stage" (Percy): on History as genre in, 123-25; Shakespeare at Kenilworth in, 101, 124 ontogeny and phylogeny, 42, 205. See also culture-epoch theory orality and print, 11-12, 23, 31 Ossian. See Macpherson, James Paley, Morton, 155 Parker, Reeve, 252n71 pastoral: and ballad, 19; Burns and, 75-79; "covert" (Guillory), 9, 59; and literacy, 50-51; representation of women in, so, 57; and Scots songs, 46; and the Scottish Enlightenment, 8, 46; "war" over realism in, 51; Wordsworth and, 166-67 Patey, Douglas Lane, 6 Paul, Jean, 12 Percy, Thomas, 118-29; analogy in, 124; changes name from Piercy, 126; as collector of ballads, 3, 11, 126; Hermit ofWarkworth, 137-38; history of print in, 128; as Man of Gothic Letters, 125-28; Reliques as meta-collection, 128; "scene" as flexible in, 126; in Shakespeare canon, 128. See also "Ballads That Illustrate Shakespeare"; "Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels, An"; lyric history; "On the Origin of the English Stage" Peter Bell (Wordsworth), 159-63; and "A Ballad," 160; compared to The Beggar's Opera,

289

160; compared to The Prelude, 160, 163; composition of, 16o-6m59; as critique of Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 161; critique of sensationalism in, 162; as "interesting;' 159-60; as mock epic, 163; as parody of Ballad Revival, 163; as response to Biirger, 161-62; revisited in "To a Highland Girl;' 179; self-reflection in, 159; violence in, 162-63 "Pet-Lamb, The" (Wordsworth), 168-69 Pfau, Thomas, 248n3 Phillipson, Nicholas, 49, 63, 65, 237n10 philology, 19o-91, 205-6 Pinch, Adela, 236n4 Pinkerton, John, 128 Pittock, Murray G. H., 236n2, 237n11, 242n115 Poems, in Two Volumes (Wordsworth): grouping in, 171, 180, 252-53n74; "Moods of My Own Mind;' 169-70; Resolution and Independence, 177-78; "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty;' 169-70 Poetical Sketches (Blake), 141 poetic justice, 13, 14, 224-28; coined, 15-16; compared in Gay and Gummere, 225; place of interests in, 226; "radical humanism" (Grossman) and, 227; role of the "post-human" in, 227. See also Democracy and Poetry (Gummere); Gay, John; Grossman, Allen; Spectator, The Pope, Alexander, 26-27 Potkay, Adam, 62, 236n3, 237n8 Pound, Louise, 202, 209 popular, the call of the, 1, 3, 10, 42, 159 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth): critique of Johnson and Percy in, 136-38; critique of sensationalist reading, 161; "purpose" in, 167 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 114, 166, 168 Progress: critique of, 42; vision of, 4, 32, 42, 197, 198. See also individual authors; Scottish Enlightenment public sphere, 2, 42, 143, 235-36n6o Punter, David, 155 Pyle, Howard, 206 Ramsay, Allan, 48-60; canonical status of, 7, 94, 95-96; as collector of ballads, 3, 13; compared to Addison and Gay, 49; conflicts with the Scottish Kirk, 13, 51, 59-60, 238n24; The Ever Green, 53; and Jacobitism,

290

Index

51, 238n23; lyric as vehicle for sympathy in, 53-55; Poems (1721), 49; Scots Songs, 49; social aspirations of, 49; sympathy and progress in, 46, 78. See also Gentle Shep-

herd, The; Tea- Table Miscellany, The Reliques ofAncient English Poetry. See "Ballads That Illustrate Shakespeare"; "Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels, An"; "On the Origin of the English Stage"; Percy, Thomas Resolution and Independence (Wordsworth). See Poems, in Two Volumes Restoration Court: alignment with Country vs. City, 20; Charles II's manipulation of image in, 232n22; French influence on, 232m2; as space of irony and exhaustion, 20, 21. See also "nothing" Reynolds, Joshua, 104 Ritson, Joseph, 128-35; attacks Warton, 134; commitment to textual fidelity in, 135; critique of Percy in, 11, 129, 130-32, 134; democratic view of lyric in, 129; estimation of Burns in, 132; favors broadside ballad, 129; Jacobitical and Jacobinical views of, 132-33; on Scots songs, 130, 132; on Shakespeare's songs, 130-31 "Rob Roy's Grave" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Rochester, 2nd earl of, John Wilmot, 20, 21 Rosenblatt, Louise, 213, 225 Ross, Trevor, 6 Rymer, Thomas, 15 Schools, textbooks, and universities (U.S.): American ballads in, 189, 203; ballads as "democratic" in, 202, 258n54; ballads for female and male students in, 209; British ballads in, 189; Committee of Ten and, 205; communal composition of ballads in, 208-9; effect of philology on, 201-6; folk genres increase in, 206-7, 258-59n68; Hemans slighted in, 187; and nation-state, 199; and Romantic lyric, 183-84; Scott as model in, 187; shift to "experience" in, 205--9, 213. See also Canby, Henry Seidel; canon/Literature; national identity Scotland: and Act of Union, 44; anti-Gaelic effort in Higiiland schools in, 179; controversy over theater in, 71-73; debate over Militia Bill of 1756 in, 63; Jacobitism as

cultural force in, 44; "national schizophrenia" as model in, 47-48, 59, 75, 237n9, 237n11; polite culture in the 1710s in, 52; Select Society in, 63, 73· See also national identity Scots Musical Museum, The (Burns). See Burns's songs and song collections Scots songs: associationism vs. innate ideas in, 54; Blake affected by, 141; and historical progress, 53; influence on Scottish Enlightenment by, 45, 59-60; as response to the Union of 1707, 45. See also Burns, Robert; Home, John; Ramsay, Allan; Ritson, Joseph Scott, Walter: attracted to Burger, 176; ballad collecting as vocation of, 186-87; first encounters Percy's Reliques, 185; Guy Mannering and the lyric subject, 255n7; and historiography, 174; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 174, 176; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 174; masculinization of authorship in, 13, 186; and nostalgia in, 11, 13. See also Scottish sequence Scottish Enlightenment: adolescence in, 68-69; aesthetics in, 56; anxiety over effeminacy in, u, 68; belles lettres in, 48, 95--96; cultural history of, 236n3; elite culture in, 74; gender and manners in, 56-57, 66-69; lyric in, 61-62; negative view of Scots language in, 64-65; progress in, 45, 59, 71, 78, 95; stoicism in, 67; sympathy in, 45, 53-55, 59 Scottish sequence (Wordsworth), 169-84; "Address to the Sons of Burns;' 176; aggression toward Burns, 176-77; ballads as translation device in, 170; colonization in, 170, 179-83; critique of Macpherson in, 172-74; critique of Scott in, 174-76; "Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns;' 176-77; epitaphs as translation device in, 173-74, 175; "Glen-Almain;' 172-74; linguistic divide in, 170-71, 178-79, 181; placement of, in Poems, in Two Volumes, 170, 172; revised in later volumes, 182; "Rob Roy's Grave;' 169, 174-76; and Scottish tour of 1803, 174-75; sensitivity of collection in, 171, 179-83; "The Solitary Reaper;' 3, 170-71, 172, 185, 217; "Stepping Westward;' 171-72; "To a Highland Girl;' 178-83; The Winter's Tale in, 18o; "Yarrow Unvisited;' 169

Index Scudder, Horace E., 206

Select Collection of Scottish Songs, A (Burns). See Burns's songs and song collections Shaftesbury, 3rd earl of, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 54 Shakespeare, William: and the ballad, 2-3; bust of, 97; beyond neoclassical rules, 98, 101, 123; canonization/textualization of, 98; as collector of popular culture, 3, 99, 109-10, 117-18, 122, 125; as cultural symbol, 133-34; eighteenth-century views on Cymbeline, 104-5; eighteenth-century views on Macbeth, 109; historicizing of, 99; in history of English culture, 99; imitations of songs, 69, 100; Kenilworth as primal scene for, 10o-101; Ophelia's songs in, 104, 117, 127; as overpowering, 98; as political symbol, 133; as Prospero, 123; songs in, 98. See

also individual eigheenth-century authors and works; national identity; Winter's Tale, The Shaw, Thomas B., 242n115 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 199 Sher, Richard B., 236n3, 240n64 Shesgreen, Sean, 149, 249m2 Sidney, Philip, 2 Sigourney, Lydia Howard, 187 "Sir Patrick Spens" (Child 58), 207,208 Siskin, Clifford, 5-6 Sitter, John, 6, 61 Skoblow, Jeffrey, 75-76 Sloterdijk, Peter, 21 Smith, Adam: commercial society and gender in, 57; dislikes Scots vernacular, 64-65; martial vs. sympathetic feelings, 70; spectator as judge in, 55 Smith, Nigel, 232-33m6 "Solitary Reaper, The" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Song of Los, The (Blake), 151 songs: African American, 256m5; as "contagion," 41, 45, 48-49, 54, 147; as ill-suited to conventional canonicity, 94; no intrinsic politics in, 14, 227-28, 26m118; reconciles associationism and innate faculties, 54. See also ballad; individual authors Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Blake), 146-51; "The Chimney Sweeper" (Experience), 150; "The Chimney Sweeper" (Innocence), 139, 15o-51; Cries in "London;' 146;

291

Cry in, 139; "The Divine Image;' 146; "Holy Thursday" (Innocence), 146; "The Human Abstract;' 146; image of "London;' 146, 151. See also Island in the Moon, An Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 244m9 Spenser, Edmund, 110, 111 Spectator, The, 28-33; on the ballad as "common;' 29, 30; on "Chevy Chase;' 28, 3o-31; on "The Children in the Wood;' 1-2, 11-12, 28; cultural capital in The Tatler and, 30; essay as frame in, 33; exclusion of street culture in, 32; on false wit, 31; and orality and print, 11-12, 31, 42; "The Pleasures of the Imagination" in, 17, 30; progress of nation and self in, 32; redefining the public in, 33, 52; rejects poetic justice, 28, 42; on the Royal Exchange, 29-30, 33 Starr, G. Gabrielle, 229n3 Staves, Susan, 240n62 Steele, Richard. See Spectator, The "Stepping Westward" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Stewart, Susan, 10, 127, 231n25 Stone, George Winchester, Jr., 112 Story of Siegfried, The (Baldwin), 206, 207 Street Cries: ballads modeled on, 147-50; Bellman's Cry, 152-54; bellmen as authors, 153; defined, 139; as social genre, 141. See also Blake, William; Island in the Moon,

An; Jerusalem; Songs of Innocence and of Experience Suckling, John, 19-20 Swift, Jonathan, 21, 38-39, 51 Szalay, Michael, 220

Tea-Table Miscellany, The (Ramsay), 52-56; aesthetics and gender in, 56; English audience for, 52; "lyrick" in, 53; and sociability, 53-55; songs from The Beggar's Opera in, 49; and The Spectator, 52; spectator's role in, 54-55; taxonomy of songs in, 53; women as singers in, 58 Terry, Richard, 95 Thompson, E. P., 233-34n36 Theobald, Lewis, 99, 108 Tickell, Thomas, 51 "To a Highland Girl" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence "To a Mountain Daisy" (Burns): figuration in, 78-79, 177; as lyric-in-solitude, 79, 84;

292

Index

reputation of, 76; as revision of Gray's Elegy, 76-79 "Town, The;' 15-16, 40, 73-74 Trumpener, Katie, 10 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 49

Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren): "affective fallacy" in, 211; ballads as "experience" in 210-11; ballads make form present in, 213; ballads prominent in, 210; contrasted with liberatory education, 224; "experience" in, 211; no moralizing about popular culture in, 215, 26omo2; philology in, 211; social orientation muted in, 213-15. See also Brooks, Cleanth; "dramatic situation"; New Criticism; Warren, Robert Penn United States: need for refinement in, 189, 191; race in, 189, 221-22; the West as mythic space for, 222. See also national identity Upton, John, 109 Waller, Edmund, 22 Walker, Joseph Cooper, 132-33 Walkling, Andrew W., 232m2 Walpole, Horace, 112 Walpole, Robert, 25 Wang, Orrin N. C., 235-36n6o Warburton, William, 113, 115, 123, 127, 134 Warren, Robert Penn: ballads as a gateway to lyric in, 1-2; ballads distinguished from folk tale by, 211; and Ghost Dance, 14; praise for the blues in American Literature, 215. See also Ballad of Billie Potts, The; Brother to Dragons; Democracy and Poetry; Understanding Poetry Warton, Thomas, 134 Welsh, Alfred H., 116

Wendorf, Richard, 244n10 Wheatley, Francis, 147-49 "Wife of Usher's Well, The" (Child 79), 211, 212,213 Wilkes, John, 133 "William and Margaret" (Mallet), 104 Williams, Helen Maria, 242n102 Winter's Tale, The (Shakespeare): Autolycus's ballads in, 114, 131; eighteenth-century views on, 113, 115; as pastoral, 51, 114, 180. See also Florizel and Perdita Wordsworth, Dorothy, 174-75, 178, 181 Wordsworth, William, 159-83; apostasy of, 137; Ballad Revival in, 175-76, 182, 248n3; ballads as commonplace in, 3, 169; ballads as lyric in, 3, 163-64; classification of poems in, 169; collection as violence in, 170-72; the erotic as dangerous in, 164-65, 179, 253n88, 253n9o; family as dangerous in, 166-68, 180-81; in Germany, 161; historicist critique of, 137, 166; interest of readers in, 136-37, 159, 163-64, 167, 169, 172, 175-76, 182-83; poetry as "pleasing bondage" in, 184, 186; post -structuralist critics attracted to, 173; redundancy in, 165-66; representation of women in, 10, 161-62, 181-82, 254n92; sensationalism in, 13, 18, 161-62; will as violent in, 164, 168-69. See also individual titles; Scottish sequence Worrall, David, 141 Wiirzbach, Natascha, 229n2, 229n5 "Yarrow Unvisited" (Wordsworth). See Scottish sequence Yeats, William Butler, 7 Zimbardo, Rose A., 2o-21

Acknowledgments

Whatever else writing this book has taught me, it has taught me how many reasons I have to be grateful. During a sojourn at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I found intellectual fellowship with Julia Garrett and John Price, among many others. Now, at Temple University, I have been gifted with excellent and supportive colleagues like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Eli Goldblatt, Shannon Miller, Lyn Tribble, Sue Wells (a wonderful chair), and especially Dan O'Hara. Colleagues at other institutions have also been remarkably generous in responding to my work. I had the good fortune early on to benefit from the wise counsel of Allen Grossman and from the invaluable guidance of Jerome Christensen and Ronald Paulson. Thanks to Marshall Brown, who was crucial to this project in its first stages, and to Janet Sorensen and Sean Shesgreen for sensitive readings. The support of Carol McGuirk, one of Burns's finest readers, has meant more than she may know. I am grateful to the Ballads Group at Rutgers, particularly to Paula McDowell. I owe much to the Philadelphia Works in Progress Group, especially Scott Black, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Kristen Poole, Kathy Rowe, Lauren Shohet, and Julian Yates; Group Phi has taught me a great deal about the relationship of history to form. The scrupulous eye of Jack Kerkering has aided this entire manuscript almost as much as my life has been enriched by his menschlichkeit. I am grateful to Temple for giving me a semester's study leave and two summer fellowships; to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, which, along with the Houghton Library, awarded me a W. Jackson Bate Fellowship; and to the Beinecke Library, which gave me a James M. Osborn Fellowship in English Literature and History. Thanks, too, to the rare books

294

Acknowledgments

staffs at the Beinecke, the Houghton (including the Harvard Theatre Collection), Cornell, Haverford, and especially Penn, gracious with their time and permissions. The crack circulation staff at Temple also deserves my thanks. Working with the University of Pennsylvania Press has been a pleasure. To have had Anne Janowitz and Murray Pittock as readers was a lucky thing indeed (and thanks to them for later revealing themselves at my request). All authors should be so fortunate as to find an editor endowed with as much good sense and decency as Jerry Singerman. Thanks, too, to Mariana Martinez and Erica Ginsburg. It is a cliche that you cannot choose your family. But if I could, I would choose exactly the family I have. Thanks to my father-in-law, Patrick McCarthy, for bringing his expert mind and good heart to the manuscript; to my grandmother, Jean Jacobson, for her encouragement; and to my brother, Loren Newman, for his courage. Most of all, thanks to my mother, Rebeca Newman, who always boosts my spirits, and my father, Ronald Newman, who is a first-rate editor as well as one of my best friends; they have given me support and love beyond imagining. As I was finishing this manuscript, I was blessed to have my daughter, Talia Rose Newman, come into the world, and the final revisions were punctuated by her laughing appearances at the door of my study. For her sake, I won't read to her out of this particular book, but I do promise to sing ballads to her now and again. Finally, my deepest thanks to my wife, Keely McCarthy, who has lived with this book as long as I have and has borne it with more patience, faith, and grace than I could ever have mustered. She has lent her considerable intelligence to reading the whole thing many times; what's more, she has kept me together in every sense and made me whole. This book is for her. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as "The Value of Nothing: Ballads in The Beggar's Opera:' The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (Summer 2004): 265-83, reprinted by permission of Texas Tech University Press. Chapter 2 contains revised material initially published as "The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: 'Lyrick' Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment;' Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Fall2002): 277-314, reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.