contact with Ossian, and is launched into a sea of perplexities as to
the genuineness of Macpherson's translation. That fine poems should
have been composed in the Highlands so many centuries ago, and that
these should have existed through that immense period of time in the
memories and on the tongues of the common people, is sufficiently
startling. The Border Ballads are children in their bloom compared
with the hoary Ossianic legends and songs. On the other hand, the
theory that Macpherson, whose literary efforts when he did not
pretend to translate are extremely poor and meagre, should have, by
sheer force of imagination, created poems confessedly full of fine
things, with strong local colouring, not without a weird sense of
remoteness, with heroes shadowy as if seen through Celtic mists:
poems, too, which have been received by his countrymen as genuine,
which Dr Johnson scornfully abused, and which Dr Blair
enthusiastically praised; which have been translated into every
language in Europe; which Goethe and Napoleon admired; from which
Carlyle has drawn his "red son of the furnace," and many a memorable
sentence besides; and over which, for more than a hundred years now,
there has raged a critical and philological battle, with victory
inclining to neither side--that the poor Macpherson should have
created these poems is, if possible, more startling than their claim
of antiquity. If Macpherson created Ossian, he was an athlete who
made one surprising leap and was palsied ever afterwards; a marksman
who made a centre at his first shot, and who never afterwards could
hit the target. It is well enough known that the Highlanders, like
all half-civilised nations, had their legends and their minstrelsy;
that they were fond of reciting poems and runes; and that the person
who retained on his memory the greatest number of tales and songs
brightened the gatherings round the ancient peat-fires as your Sydney
Smith brightens the modern dinner. And it is astonishing how much
legendary material a single memory may retain. In illustration, Dr
Brown, in his "History of the Highlands," informs us that "the late
Captain John Macdonald of Breakish, a native of the Island of Skye,
declared upon oath, at the age of seventy-eight, that he could
repeat, when a boy between twelve and fifteen years of age, (about
the year 1740,) from one to two hundred Gaelic poems, differing in
length and in number of verses; and that he learned them from an old
man about eighty years of age, who sang them for years to his father
when he went to bed at night, and in the spring and winter before he
rose in the morning." The late Dr Stuart, minister of Luss, knew "an
old Highlander in the Isle of Skye, who repeated to him for three
successive days, and during several hours each day, without
hesitation, and with the utmost rapidity, many thousand lines of
ancient poetry, and would have continued his repetitions much longer
if the doctor had required him to do so." From such a raging torrent
of song the doctor doubtless fled for his life. Without a doubt
there was a vast quantity of poetic material existing in the islands.
But more than this, when Macpherson, at the request of Home, Blair,
and others, went to the Highlands to collect materials, he
undoubtedly received Gaelic MSS. Mr Farquharson, (Dr Brown tells
us,) Prefect of Studies at Douay College in France, was the possessor
of Gaelic MSS., and in 1766 he received a copy of Macpherson's
"Ossian," and Mr M'Gillivray, a student there at the time, saw them
(Macpherson's "Ossian" and Mr Farquharson's MSS.) frequently
collated, and heard the complaint that the translations fell very far
short of the energy and beauty of the originals; and the said Mr
M'Gillivray was convinced that the MSS. contained all the poems
translated by Macpherson, because he recollected very distinctly
having heard Mr Farquharson say, after having read the translations,
"that he had all these poems in his collection." Dr Johnson could
never talk of the matter calmly. "Show me the original manuscripts,"
he would roar. "Let Mr Macpherson deposit the manuscript in one of
the colleges at Aberdeen where there are people who can judge; and if
the professors certify the authenticity, then there will be an end of
the controversy." Macpherson, when his truthfulness was rudely
called in question, wrapped himself up in proud silence, and
disdained reply. At last, however, he submitted to the test which Dr
Johnson proposed. At a bookseller's shop he left for some months the
originals of his translations, intimating by public advertisement
that he had done so, and stating that all persons interested in the
matter might call and examine them. No one, however, called;
Macpherson's pride was hurt, and he became thereafter more
obstinately silent and uncommunicative than ever. There needed no
such mighty pother about the production of manuscripts. It might
have been seen at a glance that the Ossianic poems were not
forgeries--at all events that Macpherson did not forge them. Even in
the English translation, to a great extent, the sentiments, the
habits, the modes of thought described are entirely primeval; in
reading it, we seem to breathe the morning air of the world. The
personal existence of Ossian is, I suppose, as doubtful as the
personal existence of Homer; and if he ever lived, he is great, like
Homer, through his tributaries. Ossian drew into himself every
lyrical runnel, he augmented himself in every way, he drained
centuries of their songs; and living an oral and gipsy life, handed
down from generation to generation, without being committed to
writing and having their outlines determinately fixed, the authorship
of these songs becomes vested in a multitude, every reciter having
more or less to do with it. For centuries the floating legendary
material was reshaped, added to, and altered by the changing spirit
and emotion of the Celt. Reading the Ossianic fragments is like
visiting the skeleton of one of the South American cities; like
walking through the streets of disinterred Pompeii or Herculaneum.
These poems, if rude and formless, are touching and venerable as some
ruin on the waste, the names of whose builders are unknown: whose
towers and walls, although not erected in accordance with the lights
of modern architecture, affect the spirit and fire the imagination
far more than nobler and more recent piles; its chambers, now
roofless to the day, were ages ago tenanted by life and death, joy
and sorrow; its walls have been worn and rounded by time, its stones
channelled and fretted by the fierce tears of winter rains; on broken
arch and battlement every April for centuries has kindled a light of
desert flowers; and it stands muffled with ivies, bearded with
mosses, and stained with lichens by the suns of forgotten summers.
So these songs are in the original--strong, simple, picturesque in
decay; in Mr Macpherson's English they are hybrids and mongrels.
They resemble the Castle of Dunvegan, an amorphous mass of masonry of
every conceivable style of architecture, in which the ninth century
jostles the nineteenth.
In these poems not only do character and habit smack of the primeval
time, but there is extraordinary truth of local colouring. The Iliad
is roofed by the liquid softness of an Ionian sky. In the verse of
Chaucer there is eternal May and the smell of newly-blossomed English
hawthorn hedges. In Ossian, in like manner, the skies are cloudy,
there is a tumult of waves on the shore, the wind sings in the pine.
This truth of local colouring is a strong argument in proof of
authenticity. I for one will never believe that Macpherson was more
than a somewhat free translator. Despite Gibbon's sneer, I do
"indulge the supposition that Ossian lived and Fingal sung;" and,
more than this, it is my belief that these misty phantasmal Ossianic
fragments, with their car-borne heroes that come and go like clouds
on the wind, their frequent apparitions, the "stars dim-twinkling
through their forms," their maidens fair and pale as lunar rainbows,
are, in their own literary place, worthy of every recognition. If
you think these poems exaggerated, go out at Sligachan and see what
wild work the pencil of moonlight makes on a mass of shifting vapour.
Does _that_ seem nature or a madman's dream? Look at the billowy
clouds rolling off the brow of Blaavin, all golden and on fire with
the rising sun! Wordsworth's verse does not more completely mirror
the Lake Country than do the poems of Ossian the terrible scenery of
the Isles. Grim, and fierce, and dreary as the night-wind is the
strain, for not with rose and nightingale had the old bard to do; but
with the thistle waving on the ruin, the upright stones that mark the
burying-places of heroes, weeping female faces white as sea-foam in
the moon, the breeze mourning alone in the desert, the battles and
friendships of his far-off youth, and the flight of the "dark-brown
years." These poems are wonderful transcripts of Hebridean scenery.
They are as full of mists as the Hebridean glens themselves. Ossian
seeks his images in the vapoury wraiths. Take the following of two
chiefs parted by their king:--"They sink from their king on either
side, like two columns of morning mist when the sun rises between
them on his glittering rocks. Dark is their rolling on either side,
each towards its reedy pool." You cannot help admiring the image;
and I saw the misty circumstance this very morning when the kingly
sun struck the earth with his golden spear, and the cloven mists
rolled backwards to their pools like guilty things.
That a large body of poetical MSS. existed in the Highlands we know;
we know also that, when challenged to do so, Macpherson produced his
originals; and the question arises, Was Macpherson a competent and
faithful translator of these MSS.? Did he reproduce the original in
all its strength and sharpness? On the whole, perhaps Macpherson
translated the ancient Highland poems as faithfully as Pope
translated Homer, but his version is in many respects defective and
untrue. The English Ossian is Macpherson's, just as the most popular
English Iliad is Pope's. Macpherson was not a thoroughly-equipped
Gaelic scholar; his version is full of blunders and misapprehensions
of meaning, and he expressed himself in the fashionable poetic
verbiage of his day. You find echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope,
and Dryden, and these echoes give his whole performance a hybrid
aspect. It has a particoloured look; is a thing of odds and ends, of
shreds and patches; in it antiquity and his own day are incongruously
mixed--like Macbeth in a periwig, or a ruin decked out with new and
garish banners. Here is Macpherson's version of a portion of the
third book of Fingal:--
"Fingal beheld the son of Starno: he remembered Agandecca. For
Swaran with the tears of youth had mourned his white-bosomed sister.
He sent Ullin of Songs to bid him to the feast of shells. For
pleasant on Fingal's soul returned the memory of the first of his
loves!
"Ullin came with aged steps, and spoke to Starno's son. 'O thou that
dwellest afar, surrounded like a rock with thy waves! Come to the
feast of the king, and pass the day in rest. To-morrow let us fight,
O Swaran, and break the echoing shields.' 'To-day,' said Starno's
wrathful son, 'we break the echoing shields: to-morrow my feast shall
be spread; but Fingal shall lie on earth.' 'To-morrow let the feast
be spread,' said Fingal, with a smile. 'To-day, O my sons, we shall
break the echoing shields. Ossian, stand thou near my arm. Gaul,
lift thy terrible sword. Fergus, bend thy crooked yew. Throw,
Fillan, thy lance through heaven. Lift your shields like the
darkened moon. Be your spears the meteors of death. Follow me in
the path of my fame. Equal my deeds in battle.'
"As a hundred winds on Morven; as the streams of a hundred hills; as
clouds fly successive over heaven; as the dark ocean assails the
shore of the desert; so roaring, so vast, so terrible the armies
mixed on Lena's echoing heath. The groan of the people spread over
the hills; it was like the thunder of night when the clouds burst on
Cona, and a thousand ghosts shriek at once on the hollow wind.
Fingal rushed on in his strength, terrible as the spirit of Trenmore,
when in a whirlwind he comes to Morven to see the children of his
pride. The oaks resound on their mountains, and the rocks fall down
before him. Dimly seen as lightens the night, he strides largely
from hill to hill. Bloody was the hand of my father when he whirled
the gleam of his sword. He remembered the battles of his youth. The
field is wasted in the course.
"Ryno went on like a pillar of fire. Dark is the brow of Gaul.
Fergus rushed forward with feet of wind. Fillan, like the mist of
the hill. Ossian, like a rock, came down. I exulted in the strength
of the king. Many were the deaths of my arm! dismal the gleam of my
sword! My locks were not then so gray; nor trembled my hands with
age. My eyes were not closed in darkness; my feet failed not in the
race.
"Who can relate the deaths of the people, who the deeds of mighty
heroes, when Fingal, burning in his wrath, consumed the sons of
Lochlin? Groans swelled on groans from hill to hill, till night had
covered all. Pale, staring like a herd of deer, the sons of Lochlin
convene on Lena."
So writes Macpherson. I subjoin a more literal and faithful
rendering of the passage, in which, to some extent, may be tasted the
wild-honey flavour of the original:--
"Fingal descried the illustrious son of Starn,
And he remember'd the maiden of the snow:
When she fell, Swaran wept
For the young maid of brightest cheek.
"Ullin of songs (the bard) approach'd
To bid him to the feast upon the shore.
Sweet to the king of the great mountains
Was the remembrance of his first-loved maid.
"Ullin of the most aged step (the step of feeblest age) came nigh,
And thus address'd the son of Starn:
'Thou from the land afar, thou brave,
Like, in thy mail and thy arms,
To a rock in the midst of the billows,
Come to the banquet of the chiefs;
Pass the day of calm in feasting;
To-morrow ye shall break the shields
In the strife where play the spears.'
"'This very day,' said the son of Starn, 'this very day
I shall break in the hill the spear;
To-morrow thy king shall be low in the dust,
And Swaran and his braves shall banquet.'
"'To-morrow let the hero feast,'
Smiling said the king of Morven;
'To-day let us fight the battle in the hill,
And break the mighty shield.
Ossian, stand thou by my side;
Gall, thou great one, lift thy hand;
Fillan, throw thy matchless lance;
Lift your shields aloft
As the moon in shadow in the sky;
Be your spears as the herald of death.
Follow, follow me in my renown;
Be as hosts (as hundreds) in the conflict.'
"As a hundred winds in the oak of Morven;
As a hundred streams from the steep-sided mountain;
As clouds gathering thick and black;
As the great ocean pouring on the shore,
So broad, roaring, dark and fierce,
Met the braves, a-fire, on Lena.
The shout of the hosts on the shoulders (bones) of the mountains
Was as a torrent in a night of storm
When bursts the cloud on glenny Cona,
And a thousand ghosts are shrieking loud
On the viewless crooked wind of the cairns.
"Swiftly the king advanced in his might,
As the spirit of Trenmore, pitiless spectre,
When he comes in the whirl-blast of the billows
To Morven, the land of his loved sires.
The oak resounds on the mountain,
Before him falls the rock of the hills;
Through the lightning-flash the spirit is seen--
His great steps are from cairn to cairn.
"Bloody, I ween, was my sire in the field,
When he drew with might his sword;
The king remember'd his youth,
When he fought the combat of the glens.
"Ryno sped as the fire of the sky,
Gloomy and black was Gall, (wholly black;)
Fergus rush'd as the wind on the mountain;
Fillan advanced as the mist on the woods;
Ossian was as a pillar of rock in the combat.
My soul exulted in the king,
Many were the deaths and dismal
'Neath the lightning of my great sword in the strife.
"My locks were not then so gray,
Nor shook my hand with age.
The light of my eye was unquench'd,
And aye unwearied in travel was my foot.
"Who will tell of the deaths of the people?
Who the deeds of the mighty chiefs?
When kindled to wrath was the king;
Lochlin was consumed on the side of the mountain.
Sound on sound rose from the hosts,
Till fell on the waves the night.
Feeble, trembling, and pale as (hunted) deer,
Lochlin gather'd on heath-clad Lena."[2]
To English readers the sun of Ossian shines dimly through a mist of
verbiage. It is to be hoped that the mist will one day be
removed--it is the bounden duty of one of Ossian's learned countrymen
to remove it.
It is not to be supposed that the Ossianic legends are repeated often
now around the island peat-fires; but many are told resembling in
essentials those which Dr Dasent has translated to us from the Norse.
As the northern nations have a common flora, so they have a common
legendary literature. Supernaturalism belongs to their tales as the
aurora borealis belongs to their skies. [Sidenote: Skye legends.]
Those stories I have heard in Skye, and many others, springing from
the same roots, I have had related to me in the Lowlands and in
Ireland. They are full of witches and wizards; of great wild giants
crying out, "Hiv! Haw Hoagraich! It is a drink of thy blood that
quenches my thirst this night;" of wonderful castles with turrets and
banqueting halls; of magic spells, and the souls of men and women
dolefully imprisoned in shapes of beast and bird. As tales few of
them can be considered perfect; the supernatural element is strong in
many, but frequently it breaks down under some prosaic or ludicrous
circumstance: the spell exhales somehow, and you care not to read
further. Now and then a spiritual and ghastly imagination passes
into a revolting familiarity and destroys itself. In these stories
all times and conditions of life are curiously mixed, and this
mixture shows the passage of the story from tongue to tongue through
generations. If you discover on the bleak Skye shore a log of wood
with Indian carvings peeping through a crust of native barnacles, it
needs no prophet to see that it has crossed the Atlantic. Confining
your attention merely to Skye--to the place in which the log is
found--the Indian carvings are an anachronism; but there is no
anachronism when you arrive at the idea that the log belongs to
another continent, and that it has reached its final resting-place
through blowing winds and tossing waves. These old Highland stories,
beginning in antiquity, and quaintly ending with a touch of the
present, are lessons in the science of criticism. In a ballad the
presence of an anachronism, the cropping out of a comparatively
modern touch of manners or detail of dress, does not in the least
invalidate the claim of the ballad to antiquity--provided it can be
proved that before being committed to writing it had led an oral
existence. Every ballad existing in the popular memory takes the
colour of the periods through which it has lived, just as a stream
takes the colour of the different soils through which it flows. The
other year Mr Robert Chambers attempted to throw discredit on the
alleged antiquity of Sir Patrick Spens from the following verse:--
"Oh, laith, laith were our guid Scots lords
To weet their cork-heel'd shoon;
But lang ere a' the play was o'er,
They wat their heads abune,"--
cork-heeled shoes having been worn neither by the Scots lords, nor by
the lords of any other nation, so early as the reign of Alexander
III., at which period Sir Patrick Spens sailed on his disastrous
voyage. But the appearance of such a comparatively modern detail of
personal attire throws no discredit on the antiquity of the ballad,
because in its oral transmission each singer or reciter would
naturally equip the Scots lords in the particular kind of shoes which
the Scots lords wore in his own day. Anachronism of this kind proves
nothing, because such anachronism is involved in the very nature of
the case, and must occur in every old composition which is frequently
recited, and the terms of which have not been definitely fixed by
writing. In the old Highland stories to which I allude, the wildest
anachronisms are of the most frequent occurrence; with the most utter
scorn of historical accuracy all the periods are jumbled together;
they resemble the dance on the outside stage of a booth at a country
fair before the performances begin, in which the mailed crusader,
King Richard III., a barmaid, and a modern "swell" meet, and mingle,
and cross hands with the most perfect familiarity and absence from
surprise. And some of those violations of historical accuracy are
instructive enough, and throw some light on the cork-heeled shoes of
the Scots lords in the ballad. In one story a mermaiden and a
General in the British army are represented as in love with each
other and holding clandestine meetings. Here is an anachronism with
a vengeance, enough to make Mr Robert Chambers stare and gasp. How
would he compute the age of that story? Would he make it as old as
the mermaiden or as modern as the British General? Personally, I
have not the slightest doubt that the story is old, and that in its
original form it concerned itself with certain love passages between
a mermaiden and a great warrior. But the story lived for generations
as tradition, was told around the Skye peat-fires, and each relater
gave it something of his own, some touch drawn from contemporary
life. The mermaiden remains of course, for she is _sui generis_;
search nature and for her you can find no equivalent--you can't
translate her into anything else. With the warrior it is entirely
different; he loses spear and shield, and grows naturally into the
modern General with gilded spur, scarlet coat, and cocked hat with
plumes. The same sort of change, arising from the substitution of
modern for ancient details, of modern equivalents for ancient facts,
must go on in every song or narrative which is orally transmitted
from generation to generation.
Many of these stories, even when they are imperfect in themselves, or
resemble those told elsewhere, are curiously coloured by Celtic
scenery and pervaded by Celtic imagination. In listening to them,
one is specially impressed by a bare, desolate, woodless country; and
this impression is not produced by any formal statement of fact; it
arises partly from the paucity of actors in the stories, and partly
from the desert spaces over which the actors travel, and partly from
the number of carrion crows, and ravens, and malign hill-foxes which
they encounter in their journeyings. The "hoody," as the crow is
called, hops and flits and croaks through all the stories. His black
wing is seen everywhere. And it is the frequent appearance of these
beasts and birds, never familiar, never domesticated, always outside
the dwelling, and of evil omen when they fly or steal across the
path, which gives to the stories much of their weird and direful
character. The Celt has not yet subdued nature. He trembles before
the unknown powers. He cannot be sportive for the fear that is in
his heart. In his legends there is no merry Puck, no Ariel, no Robin
Goodfellow, no half-benevolent, half-malignant Brownie even. These
creatures live in imaginations more emancipated from fear. The mists
blind the Celt on his perilous mountain-side, the sea is smitten
white on his rocks, the wind bends and dwarfs his pine wood; and as
Nature is cruel to him, and as his light and heat are gathered from
the moor, and his most plenteous food from the whirlpool and the
foam, we need not be surprised that few are the gracious shapes that
haunt his fancy.
[1] This battle occupies the same place in early Scottish annals that
Trafalgar or Waterloo occupies in later British ones. It stands in
the dawn of Scottish history--resonant, melodious. Unhappily,
however, the truth must be told--the battle was a drawn one, neither
side being able to claim the victory. Professor Munch, in his notes
to "The Chronicle of Man and the Sudreys," gives the following
account of the combat, and of the negotiations that preceded it:--