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a n n w i e r da row l a n d confronting the contradictions of popular literary culture: “books of this description are condemned by the grave, and despised by the fastidious; but their leaves are seldom found unopened, and they occupy the parlour and the dressing-room while productions of higher name are often gathering dust upon the shelf.”21 Often in these years, the reading and writing of novels were discussed and critiqued as a question of national taste and morals, if not of high or serious literature Hugh Blair devotes a chapter of Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to “Fictitious History,” that “species of composition in prose, which comprehends a very numerous, though, in general, a very insignificant class of writings, known by the name of Romances and Novels.” Blair justifies his attention to such “insignificant” writings by quoting Andrew Fletcher on national ballads: “Mr Fletcher of Salton, in one of his Tracts, quotes it as the saying of a wise man, that give him the making of all the ballads of a nation, he would allow any one that pleased to make their laws.”22 Novels, Blair suggests, have replaced ballads in shaping “the morals and taste of a nation.” Barbauld echoes this point almost verbatim in the conclusion to her essay: Some perhaps may think that too much importance has been already given to a subject so frivolous, but a discriminating taste is no where more called for than with regard to a species of books which every body reads It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, “Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.” Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems?23 The “ballads of a nation” stand as a privileged site of “popular literature” for the Romantics: they establish the popular as primitive, national, original, and representative of the people Novels, on the other hand, evoke the more troubling aspects of the popular, that of an alienated, artificial, and mass culture By replacing ballads with novels as the current national form, both Blair and Barbauld make strong claims for the authenticity and importance of the novel It becomes the literary form that most directly reflects and influences the manners of the current stage of society Enlightenment and Romantic histories of language and literature treated poetry as the original and most ancient form of writing and literature, the natural expression of primitive social states Other social stages favored other literary forms: prose, for example, was an advanced development “It is always late before prose and its beauties come to be cultivated,” writes Adam Smith in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.24 According to Smith’s influential stadial theory, prose is the preferred style of modern commercial or capitalist society – “No one ever made a Bargain in verse,” 124 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
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