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Chapter 5 Reading as Remembering and the Subject ofLyric: 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 186 Chapter 5 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 ofadulthood. 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 ofthe 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...

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