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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 ofUnion,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 ofa 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- Scots Songs 45 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 ofpopular Scots songs byAllan 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 ofother 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 ofScottish 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 ] Project MUSE...

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