"IT's an ill bird that befouls its own nest." And this is the first
count of the indictment we bring against Lord Macaulay for his treatment
of Ossian. Macpherson was a Highlandman, and Ossian's Poems were the
glory of the Highlands; Macaulay was sprung from a Highland family, and
as a Highlandman, even had his estimate of Ossian been lower than it
was, he should have, in the name of patriotism, kept it to himself. But
great as was Macaulay's enthusiasm, scarce a ray of it was ever
permitted to rest on the Highland hills; and glowing as his eloquence,
it had no colours and no favours to spare for the _natale solum_ of his
sires. Unlike Sir Walter Scott, it can never be said of him that he
shall, after columns and statues have perished,--
A mightier monument command--
The mountains of his native land.
There are scattered sneers at Ossian's Poems throughout Macaulay's
Essays, notably in his papers on Dryden and Dr Johnson. In the latter of
these he says:--"The contempt he (Dr J.) felt for the trash of
Macpherson was indeed just, but it was, we suspect, just by chance. He
despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius to
admire it. He despised it not because it was essentially common-place,
but because it had a superficial air of originality." And in his History
of England occur the following words:--"The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic
usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully
neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the
learned from the moment when the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began
to disappear. So strong was this impulse that where the Highlands were
concerned men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence,
and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit.
Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance
have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been
published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in
company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were
pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old, and were gravely classed
with the Iliad. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who
fabricated these forgeries," &c., &c. Our first objection to these
criticisms is their undue strength and decidedness of language, which
proclaims prejudice and _animus_ on the part of the writer. Macaulay
here speaks like a heated haranguer or Parliamentary partizan, not like
an historian or a critic. Hood says--"It is difficult to swear in a
whisper"; and surely it is more difficult still to criticise in a
bellow. This indeed points to what is Macaulay's main defect as a
thinker and writer. He is essentially a dogmatist. He "does not allow
for the wind." "Mark you his absolute _shall_," as was said of
Coriolanus. No doubt his dogmatism, as was also that of Dr Johnson, is
backed by immense knowledge and a powerful intellect, but it remains
dogmatism still. In oratory excessive emphasis often carries all before
it, but it is different in writing--there it is sure to provoke
opposition and to defeat its own object. Had he spoken of Macpherson's
stilted style, or his imperfect taste, few would have contradicted him,
but the word "trash" startles and exasperates, and it does so because it
is unjust; it is too slump and too summary. Had he said that critics had
exaggerated Macpherson's merits, this too had been permitted to pass,
but when he declared them in his writings to be entirely "without
merit," he insults the public which once read them so greedily, and
those great men too who have enthusiastically admired and
discriminatingly praised them. Macpherson's connection with these Poems
has a mystery about it, and he was probably to blame, but every one
feels the words, "the impostor who fabricated these forgeries," to be
much too strong, and is disposed, in the resistance and reaction of
feeling produced, to become so far Macpherson's friend and so far
Macaulay's foe. We regret this seeming strength, but real infirmity, of
Macaulay's mode of writing--not merely because it has hurt his credit as
a critic of Ossian, but because it has injured materially his influence
as an historian of England. The public are not disposed, with all their
admiration of talents and eloquence, to pardon in an historian faults of
boyish petulance, prejudice, and small personal or political
prepossessions, which they would readily forgive in an orator. Macaulay
himself, we think, somewhere speaking of Fox's history, says that many
parts of it sound as if they were thundered from the Opposition Benches
at one or two in the morning, and mentions this as a defect in the book.
The same objection applies to many parts of his own history. His
sweeping character of Macpherson is precisely such a hot hand-grenade as
he might in an excited mood have hurled in Parliament against some
Celtic M.P. from Aberdeen or Thurso whose zeal had outrun his
discretion.
Macaulay, it will be noticed, admits that Ossian's Poems were admired by
men of taste and of genius. But it never seems to have occurred to him
that this fact should have made him pause and reconsider his opinions
ere he expressed them in such a broad and trenchant style. Hugh Miller
speaks of a critic of the day from whose verdicts when he found himself
to differ, he immediately began to re-examine the grounds of his own.
This is a very high compliment to a single writer; but Macaulay on the
Ossian question has a multitude of the first intellects of modern times
against him. The author of the History of England is a great name, but
not so great as Napoleon the First, Goethe, and Sir Walter Scott, nor is
he greater than Professor Wilson and William Hazlitt; and yet all these
great spirits were more or less devoted admirers of the blind Bard of
Morven. Napoleon carried Ossian in his travelling carriage; he had it
with him at Lodi and Marengo, and the style of his bulletins--full of
faults, but full too of martial and poetic fire--is coloured more by
Ossian than by Corneille or Voltaire. Goethe makes Homer and Ossian the
two companions of Werter's solitude, and represents him as saying, "You
should see how foolish I look in company when her name is mentioned,
particularly when I am asked plainly how I like her. How I like her! I
detest the phrase. What sort of creature must he be who merely liked
Charlotte; whose whole heart and senses were not entirely absorbed by
her. Like her! Some one lately asked me how I liked Ossian." This it may
be said is the language of a young lover, but all men are at one time
young lovers, and it is high praise and no more than the truth to say
that all young lovers love, or did love, Ossian's Poems. _This is true
fame._ Sir Walter Scott says that Macpherson's rare powers were an
honour to his country; and in his Legend of Montrose and Highland Widow,
his own style is deeply dyed by the Ossianic element, and sounds here
like the proud soft voice of the full-bloomed mountain heather in the
breeze, and there like that of the evergreen pine raving in the tempest.
Professor Wilson, in his "Cottages" and his "Glance at Selby's
Ornithology," is still more decidedly Celtic in his mode of writing;
and, in his paper in Blackwood for November 1839, "Have you read
Ossian?" he has bestowed some generous, though measured praise, on his
writings. He says, for instance--"Macpherson had a feeling of the
beautiful, and this has infused the finest poetry into many of his
descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the
mountains, and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical
genius of Wordsworth, and was inferior far in the perceptive, the
reflective, and the imaginative faculties, still he could _see_, and
_feel_, and _paint_ too, in water colours and on air canvass, and is one
of the Masters." Hear next Wilson's great rival in criticism, Hazlitt.
They were, on many points bitter enemies, on two they were always at
one--Wordsworth and Ossian! "Ossian is a feeling and a name that can
never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first
vigour and lustihood, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He
lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one
impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets--namely,
the sense of privation--the loss of all things, of friends, of good
name, of country--he is even without God in the world. He converses only
with the spirits of the departed, with the motionless and silent clouds.
The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head, the fox peeps out
of the ruined tower, the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale,
and the strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of
other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in
the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer
was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another
blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that
feeling which makes him so often complain--'Roll on, ye dark brown year,
ye bring no joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says
Wilson, "frequently in his Letters expresses his wonder and delight in
the beautiful and glorious inspirations of the Son of the Mist." Even
Malcolm Laing--Macpherson's most inveterate foe--who edited Ossian for
the sole purpose of revenge, exposure, and posthumous dissection, is
compelled to say that "Macpherson's genius is equal to that of any poet
of his day, except perhaps Gray."
In another place (Bards of the Bible--'Jeremiah') we have thus spoken of
Ossian:--"We are reminded [by Jeremiah] of the 'Harp of Selma,' and of
blind Ossian sitting amid the evening sunshine of the Highland valley,
and in tremulous, yet aspiring notes, telling to his small silent and
weeping circle, the tale of--
"Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
"It has become fashionable (through Macaulay chiefly) to abuse the
Poems of Ossian; but, admitting their forgery as well as faultiness,
they seem to us in their _better passages_ to approach more nearly than
any English prose to the force, vividness, and patriarchial simplicity
and tenderness of the Old Testament style. Lifting up, like a curtain,
the mist of the past, they show us a world, unique and intensely
poetical, peopled by heroes, bards, maidens, and ghosts, who are
separated by their mist and their mountains from all countries and ages
but their own. It is a great picture, painted on clouds instead of
canvass, and invested with colours as gorgeous as its shades are dark.
Its pathos has a wild sobbing in it, an AEolean tremulousness of tone,
like the wail of spirits. And than Ossian himself, the last of his race,
answering the plaints of the wilderness, the plover's shriek, the hiss
of the homeless stream, the bee in the heather bloom, the rustle of the
birch above his head, the roar of the cataract behind, in a voice of
kindred freedom and kindred melancholy, conversing less with the little
men around him than with the giant spirits of his fathers, we have few
finer figures in the whole compass of poetry. Ossian is a ruder
"Robber," a more meretricious "Seasons," like them a work of prodigal
beauties and more prodigal faults, and partly through both, has
impressed the world."
Dr Johnson's opposition to Ossian is easily explained by his aversion to
Scotland, by his detestation of what he deemed a fraud, by his dislike
for what he heard was Macpherson's private character, and by his
prejudice against all unrhymed poetry, whether it was blank verse or
rhythmical prose. And yet, his own prose was rhythmical, and often as
tumid as the worst bombast in Macpherson. He was too, on the whole, an
artificial writer, while the best parts of Ossian are natural. He
allowed himself therefore to see distinctly and to characterise severely
the bad things in the book--where it sunk into the bathos or soared into
the falsetto,--but ignored its beauties, and was obstinately blind to
those passages where it rose into real sublimity or melted into
melodious pathos.
Macaulay has, in various of his papers, shewn a fine sympathy with
original genius. He has done so notably in his always able and always
generous estimate of Edmund Burke, and still more in what he says of
Shelley and of John Bunyan. It was his noble panegyric on the former
that first awakened the "late remorse of love" and admiration for that
abused and outraged Shade. And it was his article on Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress which gave it--popular as it had been among religionists--a
classical place in our literature, and that dared to compare the genius
of its author with that of Shakespere and of Milton. But he has failed
to do justice to Ossian, partly from some early prejudice at its author
and his country, and partly from want of a proper early Ossianic
training. To appreciate Ossian's poetry, the best way is to live for
years under the shadow of the Grampians, to wander through lonely moors,
amidst drenching mist and rain, to hold _trystes_ with thunderstorms on
the summit of savage hills, to bathe in sullen tarns after nightfall, to
lean over the ledge and dip one's naked feet in the spray of cataracts,
to plough a solitary path into the heart of forests, and to sleep and
dream for hours amidst the sunless glades, on twilight hills to meet the
apparition of the winter moon rising over snowy wastes, to descend by
her ghastly light precipices where the eagles are sleeping, and
returning home to be haunted by night visions of mightier mountains,
wider desolations, and giddier descents. A portion of this experience is
necessary to constitute a true "Child of the Mist"; and he that has had
most of it--and that was Christopher North--was best fitted to
appreciate the shadowy, solitary, and pensively sublime spirit which
tabernacles in Ossian's poetry. Of this Macaulay had little or nothing,
and, therefore, although no man knew the Highlands in their manners,
customs, and history better, he has utterly failed as a critic on
Highland Poetry.
We might add to the names of those authors who appreciated Ossian, Lord
Byron, who imitates him in his "Hours of Idleness"; and are forced to
include among his detractors, Lord Brougham, who, in his review of these
early efforts, says clumsily, that he won't criticise it lest he should
be attacking Macpherson himself, with whose own "stuff" he was but
imperfectly acquainted, to which Lord Byron rejoins, that (alluding to
Lord Byron being a minor) he would have said a much cleverer and severer
thing had he quoted Dr Johnson's sarcasm, that "many men, many women,
and many _children_ could write as well as Ossian."
We venture, in fine, to predict that dear to every Scottish heart shall
for ever remain these beautiful fragments of Celtic verse--verse, we
scruple not to say, containing in the Combat of Fingal with the Spirit
of Loda, and in the Address to the Sun--two of the loftiest strains of
poetic genius, vieing with, surpassing "all Greek, all Roman fame." And
in spite of Brougham's sneer, and Johnson's criticisms, and the more
insolent attacks of Macaulay, Scotchmen both Highland and Lowland will
continue to hear in the monotony of the strain, the voice of the
tempest, and the roar of the mountain torrent, in its abruptness they
will see the beetling crag and the shaggy summit of the bleak Highland
hill, in its obscurity and loud and tumid sounds, they will recognize
the hollows of the deep glens and the mists which shroud the cataracts,
in its happier and nobler measures, they will welcome notes of poetry
worthy of the murmur of their lochs and the waving of their solemn
forests, and never will they see Ben-Nevis looking down over his clouds
or Loch Lomond basking amidst her sunny braes, or in grim Glencoe listen
to the Cona singing her lonely and everlasting dirge beneath Ossian's
Cave, which gashes the breast of the cliff above it, without remembering
the glorious Shade from whose evanishing lips Macpherson has extracted
the wild music of his mountain song.