Now we come to one who, with all his faults, was not only a real, but a
great poet. The events of his life need not detain us long. He was born
at Kingussie, Inverness-shire, in 1738, and educated at Aberdeen. At
twenty he published a very juvenile production in verse, called 'The
Highlandman: a Heroic Poem, in six cantos.' He taught for some time the
school of Ruthven, near his native place, and became afterwards tutor
in the family of Graham of Balgowan. While attending a scion of this
family--afterwards Lord Lynedoch--at Moffat Wells, Macpherson became
acquainted with Home, the author of 'Douglas,' and shewed to him some
fragments of Gaelic poetry, translated by himself. Home was delighted
with these specimens, and the consequence was, that our poet, under the
patronage of Home, Blair, Adam Fergusson, and Dr Carlyle, (the once
famous 'Jupiter Carlyle,' minister of Inveresk--called 'Jupiter' because
he used to sit to sculptors for their statues of 'Father Jove,' and
declared by Sir Walter Scott to have been the 'grandest demigod he ever
saw,') published, in a small volume of sixty pages, his 'Fragments of
Ancient Poetry, translated from the Gaelic or Erse language.' This
_brochure_ became popular, and Macpherson was provided with a purse to
go to the Highlands to collect additional pieces. The result was, in
1762, 'Fingal: an Epic Poem;' and, in the next year, 'Temora,' another
epic poem. Their sale was prodigious, and the effect not equalled till,
twenty-four years later, the poems of Burns appeared. He realised £1200
by these productions. In 1764 he accompanied Governor Johnston to
Pensacola as his secretary, but quarrelled with him, and returned to
London. Here he became a professional pamphleteer, always taking the
ministerial side, and diversifying these labours by publishing a
translation of Homer, in the style of his Ossian, which, as Coleridge
says of another production, was 'damned unanimously.' Our readers are
familiar with his row with Dr Johnson, who, when threatened with
personal chastisement for his obstinate and fierce incredulity in the
matter of Ossian, thus wrote the author:--
'To Mr JAMES MACPHERSON.
'I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me
I shall do the best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself, the law
shall do for me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I
think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.
'What would you have me to retract? I thought your book an imposture. I
think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to
the public, which I dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities,
since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I hear of your morals
inclines me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you
shall prove. You may print this if you will.
'SAM. JOHNSON.'
Nothing daunted by this, and a hundred other similar rebuffs; Macpherson,
like Mallett before him, but with twenty times his abilities, pursued
his peculiar course. He was appointed agent for the Nabob of Arcot,
and became M.P. for Carnelford. In this way he speedily accumulated a
handsome fortune, and in 1789, while still a youngish man, he retired to
his native parish, where he bought the estate of Raitts, and founded a
splendid villa, called Belleville, where, in ease and affluence, he spent
his remaining days. Surviving Johnson, his ablest opponent, by twelve
years, he died on the 17th of February 1796, in the full view of Ossian's
country. One of his daughters became his heir, and another was the first
wife of Sir David Brewster. Macpherson in his will ordered that his body
should be buried in Westminster Abbey, and left a sum of money to erect a
monument to him near Belleville. He lies, accordingly, in Poets' Corner,
and a marble obelisk to his memory may be seen near Kingussie, in the
centre of some trees.
There is nothing new that is true, or true that is new, to be said about
the questions connected with Ossian's Poems. That Macpherson is the sole
author is a theory now as generally abandoned as the other, which held
that he was simply a free translator of the old bard. To the real
fragments of Ossian, which he found in the Highlands, he acted very much
as he did to the ancient property of Raitts, in his own native parish.
This he purchased in its crude state, and beautified into a mountain
paradise. He changed, however, its name into Belleville, and it had been
better if he had behaved in a similar way with the poems, and published
them as, with some little groundwork from another, the veritable writings
of James Macpherson, Esq. The ablest opponent of his living reputation
was, as we said, Johnson; and the ablest enemy of his posthumous fame has
been Macaulay. We are at a loss to understand _his_ animosity to the
author of Ossian. Were the Macphersons and Macaulays ever at feud, and
did the historian lose his great-great-grandmother in some onslaught made
on the Hebrides by the progenitors of the pseudo-Ossian? Macpherson as
a man we respect not, and we are persuaded that the greater part of
Ossian's Poems can be traced no further than his teeming brain. Nor are
we careful to defend his poetry from the common charges of monotony,
affectation, and fustian. But we deem Macaulay grossly unjust in his
treatment of Macpherson's genius and its results, and can fortify our
judgment by that of Sir Walter Scott and Professor Wilson, two men as far
superior to the historian in knowledge of the Highlands and of Highland
song, and in genuine poetic taste, as they were confessedly in original
imagination. The former says, 'Macpherson was certainly a man of high
talents, and his poetic powers are honourable to his country.' Wilson, in
an admirable paper in _Blackwood_ for November 1839, while admitting many
faults in Ossian, eloquently proclaims the presence in his strains of
much of the purest, most pathetic, and most sublime poetry, instancing
the 'Address to the Sun' as equal to anything in Homer or Milton. Both
these great writers have paid Macpherson a higher compliment still,--they
have imitated him, and the speeches of Allan Macaulay (a far greater
genius than his namesake), Ranald MacEagh, and Elspeth MacTavish, in the
'Waverley Novels,' and such, articles by Christopher North as 'Cottages,'
'Hints for the Holidays,' and a 'Glance at Selby's Ornithology,' are all
coloured by familiarity and fellow-feeling with Ossian's style. Best of
all, the Highlanders as a nation have accepted Ossian as their bard; he
is as much the poet of Morven as Burns of Coila, and it is as hopeless to
dislodge the one from the Highland as the other from the Lowland heart.
The true way to learn to appreciate Ossian's poetry is not to hurry, as
Macaulay seems to have done, in a steamer from Glasgow to Oban, and
thence to Ballachulish, and thence through Glencoe, (mistaking a fine
lake for a 'sullen pool' on his way, and ignoring altogether its peculiar
features of grandeur,) and thence to Inverness or Edinburgh; but it is to
live for years--as Macpherson did while writing Ossian, and Wilson also
did to some extent--under the shadow of the mountains,--to wander through
lonely moors amidst drenching mists and rains,--to hold trysts with
thunder-storms on the summit of savage hills,--to bathe after nightfall
in dreary tarns,--to lie over the ledge and dip one's fingers in the
spray of cataracts,--to plough a solitary path into the heart of forests,
and to sleep and dream for hours amidst their sunless glades,--to meet
on twilight hills 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, wilder desolations, and giddier descents;--experience
somewhat like this is necessary to form a true 'Child of the Mist,' and
to give the full capacity for sharing in or appreciating the shadowy,
solitary, pensive, and magnificent spirit which tabernacles in Ossian's
poetry.
Never, at least, can we forget how, in our boyhood, while feeling, but
quite unable to express, the emotions which were suggested by the bold
shapes of mountains resting against the stars, mirrored from below in
lakes and wild torrents, and quaking sometimes in concert with the
quaking couch of the half-slumbering earthquake, the poems of Ossian
served to give our thoughts an expression which they could not otherwise
have found--how they at once strengthened and consolidated enthusiasm,
and are now regarded with feelings which, wreathed around earliest
memories and the strongest fibres of the heart, no criticism can ever
weaken or destroy.