Ossian
In 1760 appeared the first installment of MacPherson's "Ossian."[1]
Among those who received it with the greatest curiosity and delight was
Gray, who had recently been helping Mason with criticisms on his
"Caractacus," published in 1759. From a letter to Walpole (June 1760) it
would seem that the latter had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as
yet unprinted "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by Sir David
Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to Percy. "I am so charmed,"
wrote Gray, "with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help
giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them; and should
wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea
of the language, the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything known of
the author or authors; and of what antiquity are they supposed to be? Is
there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?"
In a letter to Shonehewer (June 29,) he writes: "I have received another
Scotch packet with a third specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild
imagination."[2] And in the month following he writes to Wharton: "If
you have seen Stonehewer, he has probably told you of my old Scotch
(rather Irish) poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said to be
translations (literal and in prose) from the _Erse_ tongue, done by one
MacPherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a
collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity;
but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I
was so struck, so _extasié_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into
Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a
man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about
this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern
reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among
Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were
unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet
not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed
him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made
was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the
Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were
invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other
hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he
should be able to translate them so admirably."
On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse fragments have been
published five weeks ago in Scotland, though he had not received his copy
till the last week. "I continue to think them genuine, though my reasons
for believing the contrary are rather stronger than ever." David Hume,
who afterward became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray,
assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands,
and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all
memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with
that of the general public, to which the Ossianic question is even yet a
puzzle. "I remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems,
tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world.
Whether they are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman,
either case is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._"
We are more concerned here with the impression which MacPherson's books,
taking them just as they stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than
with the history of the controversy to which they gave rise, and which is
still unsettled after more than a century and a quarter of discussion.
Nevertheless, as this controversy began immediately upon their
publication, and had reference not only to the authenticity of the
Ossianic poems, but also to their literary value; it cannot be altogether
ignored in this account. The principal facts upon which it turned may be
given in a nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the tragedy of
"Douglas," who had become interested in the subject of Gaelic poetry, met
in Dumfriesshire a young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who was
traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Balgowan. MacPherson had in
his possession a number of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts
of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the
Highlands. He translated two of these for Home, who was so much struck
with them that he sent or showed copies to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of
Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh. At the solicitation of Dr.
Blair and Mr. Home, MacPherson was prevailed upon to make further
translations from the materials in his hands; and these, to the number of
sixteen, were published in the "Fragments" already mentioned, with a
preface of eight pages by Blair. They attracted so much attention in
Edinburgh that a subscription was started, to send the compiler through
the Highlands in search of more Gaelic poetry.
The result of the researches was "Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six
Books: Together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of
Fingal. Translated from the Gaelic language by James MacPherson,"
London, 1762; together with "Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem in Eight
Books," etc., etc., London, 1763. MacPherson asserted that he had made
his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or Oisin, the son of
Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief renowned in Irish and Scottish song
and popular legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of the
western Highlands, and head of the ancient warlike clan or race of the
Feinne or Fenians. Tradition placed him in the third century and
connected him with the battle of Gabhra, fought in 281. His son,
Ossian, the warrior-bard, survived all his kindred. Blind and old,
seated in his empty hall, or the cave of the rock; alone save for the
white-armed Malvina, bride of his dead son, Oscar, he struck the harp and
sang the memories of his youth: "a tale of the times of old."
MacPherson translated--or composed--his "Ossian" in an exclamatory,
abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling somewhat the English of Isaiah and
others of the books of the prophets. The manners described were heroic,
the state of society primitive. The properties were few and simple; the
cars of the heroes, their spears, helmets, and blue shields; the harp,
the shells from which they drank in the hall, etc. Conventional compound
epithets abound, as in Homer: the "dark-bosomed" ships, the "car-borne"
heroes, the "white-armed" maids, the "long-bounding" dogs of the chase.
The scenery is that of the western Highlands; and the solemn monotonous
rhythm of MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone of his
descriptions, filling the mind with images of vague sublimity and
desolation: the mountain torrent, the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on
the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the
thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the
windy heath, the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded
Gormal. It was noticed that there was no mention of the wolf, common in
ancient Caledonia; nor of the thrush or lark or any singing bird; nor of
the salmon of the sealochs, so often referred to in modern Gaelic poetry.
But the deer, the swan, the boar, eagle, and raven occur repeatedly.
But a passage or two will exhibit the language and imagery of the whole
better than pages of description. "I have seen the walls of Balclutha,
but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls, and the
voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed
from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its
lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the
windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is
the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise the
song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but
fallen before us; for, one day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the
hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a
few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty
court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield."[3] "They rose rustling
like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them from the shore. Their
sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a
stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the
morn. As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so, gloomy,
dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's[4] echoing woods. Tall as
the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King.[5] His shining
shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world
is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the
beam. Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks. A
blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin
appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores
unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6]
The authenticity of the "Fragments" of 1760 had not passed without
question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted,
were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down
through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed--at least in
part--to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there
ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most
truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for
Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the
Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and
even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which
gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches
his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered
Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious
mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of
Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers:
"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."
"Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "owned he was now in a scene of as wild
nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate
observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson:
'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look
at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one
side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense.
Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'"
Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he
denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he
thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he
answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he
exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would
_abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts,
he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition
as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly _a
priori_. He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people,
incapable of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as "Fingal"
and "Temora," could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of
mouth. As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have,
there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old.
It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson was wrong on all these
points. To say nothing of the Homeric poems, the ancient Finns,
Scandinavians, and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they
produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen Lied. The Kalewala,
a poem of 22, 793 lines--as long as the Iliad--was transmitted orally
from a remote antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic
manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh,
varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is,
_e.g._, the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story
of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in
MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book,"
a manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregory of Lismore, Argyleshire,
between 1512 and 1529, containing 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of
which is attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is identical in
substance with the first book of MacPherson's "Temora;" although Mr.
Campbell says, "There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can
identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic."[9]
Other objections to the authenticity of MacPherson's translations rested
upon internal evidence, upon their characteristics of thought and style.
It was alleged that the "peculiar tone of sentimental grandeur and
melancholy" which distinguishes them, is false to the spirit of all known
early poetry, and is a modern note. In particular, it was argued,
MacPherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and sublime in nature.
Professor William R. Sullivan, a high authority on Celtic literature,
says that in the genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry
belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and ascribed to Oisin, there
is much detail in descriptions of arms, accouterments, and articles of
indoor use and ornament, but very little in descriptions of outward
nature.[10] On the other hand, the late Principal Shairp regards this
"sadness of tone in describing nature" as a strong proof of authenticity.
"Two facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the genuineness of
the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with which it reflects the
melancholy aspects of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with which
it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense of
his people's destiny. I need no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is
a native formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the Gaelic
race."[11] And he quotes, in support of his view, a well-known passage
from Matthew Arnold's "Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the
prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this
Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in
the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am
not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what
is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please;
strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which,
on the strength of MacPherson's 'Ossian,' she may have stolen from that
_vetus et major Scotia_--Ireland; I make no objection. But there will
still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic
genius in it; and which has the proud distinction of having brought this
soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe,
and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Lora, and
Selma with its silent halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and
when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose
any one of the better passages in MacPherson's 'Ossian,' and you can see,
even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and of power such
a strain must have been in the eighteenth century."
But from this same kind of internal evidence, Wordsworth draws just the
opposite conclusion. "The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an
impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. It traveled southward,
where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its
course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.[12]. . . Open
this far-famed book! I have done so at random, and the beginning of the
epic poem 'Temora,' in eight books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of
Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake
their dusky heads in the breeze. Gray torrents pour their noisy streams.
Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course
of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear
supports the king: the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his
soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be
born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have
felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under
the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the
imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing
defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it
is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner
defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will
always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the
characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a
dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there
depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which
MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much as these pretended treasures of
antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the
literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught
from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has
ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their
first appearance. . . This incapability to amalgamate with the
literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the
book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to
demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in
this respect, the effect of MacPherson's publication with the 'Reliques'
of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions."
Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human
actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora."
They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely
shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's
alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; and it must be
confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these
writings, and the undeniable beauty of single passages, they have
damnable iteration. The burden of their song is a burden in every sense.
Mr. Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent adversaries, who
published "Notes and Illustrations to Ossian" in 1805, essayed to show,
by a minute analysis of the language, that the whole thing was a
fabrication, made up from Homer, Milton, the English Bible, and other
sources. Thus he compared MacPherson's "Like the darkened moon when she
moves, a dim circle, through heaven, and dreadful change is expected by
men," with Milton's
"Or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."
Laing's method proves too much and might be applied with like results to
almost any literary work. And, in general, it is hazardous to draw hard
and fast conclusions from internal evidence of the sort just reviewed.
Taken altogether, these objections do leave a strong bias upon the mind,
and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian,"
as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that
whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been
thoroughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was put before the
public. But remembering Beowulf and the Norse mythology, one might
hesitate to say that the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always
insensible to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melancholy is a
Celtic monopoly.
The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case was his refusal or neglect
to produce his originals. The testimony of those who helped him in
collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of
some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and
partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged
persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report
of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is
too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to
the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, _i.e._,
he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he
manipulated them--and to what extent--by piecing fragments together,
lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy
did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts,
and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the
manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He
advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them
if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the _Literary
Journal_ of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had
lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14]
But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that
Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous
critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts
were to be seen; or that--being ignorant of Gaelic--it would have helped
them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent
conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to
it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the
purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, _e.g._, Dr. Johnson
was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of
the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and
Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from
old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them--and I believe him to have
none--are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if
they exist, but they were never shown. _De non existentibus et non
apparentibus eadem est ratio._" And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a
dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really
translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson
deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there
are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their
authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he
does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to
doubt."
Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the
gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were
finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But
these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were
ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he
left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing
them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the
publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to
the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half
century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These,
however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found,
or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the
Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his
amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to
transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible,
which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent
accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any
further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known,
for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original
collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time
in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell
thinks that under this double process of distillation--a copy by
MacPherson and then a copy by Ross--"the ancient form of the language, if
it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of
Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern
rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an
alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and
meaning, and a substitution of whole words."
But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its
spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a
translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This
question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still
disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,'
published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which
purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior.
It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance
which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as
something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation
from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18]
then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call
'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own
knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole
matter--in 1862--is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the
beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or
earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into
more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and
that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published
the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press;
published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what
he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no
other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had
come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic
text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson
and that "he and other translators afterward worked at it and made a
Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies according to the translator's skill
and knowledge of Gaelic."[21] On the other hand, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr.
Archibald Clerk, are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the
English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted the Highland Society's
text in 1870,[22] with a literal translation of his own on alternate
pages and MacPherson's English at the foot of the page, believes
implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the Gaelic originals.
"MacPherson," he writes, "got much from manuscripts and much from oral
recitation. It is most probable that he has given the minor poems
exactly as he found them. He may have made considerable changes in the
larger ones in giving them their present form; although I do not believe
that he, or any of his assistants, added much even in the way of
connecting links between the various episodes."
To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson's English with
Mr. Clerk's, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a
translation from the former. The reflection in a mirror cannot be more
distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be
trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than
MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is
general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a
meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, _e.g._, the closing
passage of the second "Duan," or book, of "Fingal."
"An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at
the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the
mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."--_MacPherson_.
"A ruthless arrow found his breast.
His sleep is by thy side, Galbina,
Where wrestles the wind with ocean.
The sailor sees their graves as one,
When rising on the ridge of the waves."
--_Clerk_
But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom
is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no
hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which
is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is
actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says:
"The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed
evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of
sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior
word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23]
It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is
the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the
characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no
previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there
existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales,
and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But
no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in
MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious
character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the
ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names
belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and
undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of
MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's
text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of
Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's,
1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free
translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787)
under the title "Sean Dàna," Smith frankly took liberties with his
originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he
made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase
rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were
really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his
own editorial labors.[24]
Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to
"amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some
qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a
formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of
explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation
from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the
verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work
upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the
ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian
and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was
practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its
beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for
it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had
never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the
idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly
becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses.
Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English
mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them.
And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's
prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm
with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were
received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of
over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the
heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a
dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly
here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and
the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar
manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited
well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a
mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily
gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and
natural sentiment."
The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful.
Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except
Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after
the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding
to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793),
which contains two verse imitations of the same, as _ecce signum_:
"How long will ye round me be swelling,
O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea?
Not always in caves was my dwelling,
Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26]
In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge
undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and
Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla--An
Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of
clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His
voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . .
Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several
pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of
thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was
not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would
abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a
number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon:
"Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a
composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and
one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not
catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from
"Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the
white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown
wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments
be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . .
Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning
star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an
evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the
valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the
dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the
wind in the tempest."
In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved
Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained,
although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in
the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has
two Ossianic lines in quotation points--
"Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?"
Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland
scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue
Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But
the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was
manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with
that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to
swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm
und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give
full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation
when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we
encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom,
the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet
from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to
suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as
the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs.
"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine
Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him
I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds
and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our
noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the
roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from
cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken
maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the
warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I
trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and
explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but
their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking
beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and
gone recurs to the hero's mind--deeds of times when he gloried in the
approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale
orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and
illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his
countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness
sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the
cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the traveler who is
sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening
bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb,
but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend,
that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my
sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and
pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I
might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28]
In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined
upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender
passage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone
on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and
loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the
shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is
interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of
their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of
those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric
rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul."
It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was
Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and
of the primeval forest. Here is a passage from his "Génie du
Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose
tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something
grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the
traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs,
vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild
heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded
with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves
to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable
crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long
grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures
you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will
those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of
Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler.
Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary
country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the
harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced
by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber,
the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the
valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the
gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again."
In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the
mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a
share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more
remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic
mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended
with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a
consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe
to the ocean in "Childe Harold"--
"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"--
Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest
above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed
_locus classicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning,
"O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30]
or the description of the storm in the Jura:
"And this is in the night: Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30]
Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr.
Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the
Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than
might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay
on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative
Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic
of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and
there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which
such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point,
indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency
part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Götzism"[32]
_i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as
sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which
"Werther" gave utterance, and has associations with works of a very
different kind, such as the fictions of Richardson and Sterne. In
England, Scott became the foremost representative of "Götzism," and Byron
of "Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes of "Manfred," "Childe
Harold," and "The Corsair" were the latest results of the "Il Penseroso"
literature, and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened a
reaction.
Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in England are the
numerous experiments at versifying MacPherson's prose. These were not
over-successful and only a few of them require mention here. The Rev.
John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, "attempted" "Carthon," "The Death of
Cuthullin" and "Darthula" in heroic couplets, in 1769; and "Fingal" in
1771. In the preface to his "Fingal," he maintained that there was no
reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's
"Ossian." "Fingal"--which seems to have been the favorite--was again
turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the
attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the
originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author
quotes Dr. Blair's _dictum_ that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil
"in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native
majesty of passion." National pride enlisted most of the Scotch scholars
on the affirmative side of the question, and made the authenticity of
Ossian almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were merely
respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be guessed from a half dozen
lines:
"When Moran, one commissioned to explore
The distant seas, came running from the shore
And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships
Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps.
Innumerable foes the land invade,
And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'"
Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost
in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer
could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of
the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done
into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional
ballad stanzas, thus:
"But many a fair shall melt with woe
At thy soft strain in future days,
And many a manly bosom glow,
Congenial to thy lofty lays."
These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814
"Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a
variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed
the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the
form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six
Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33]
The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from
a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met
at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another
to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each
ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The
whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of
reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection.
Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray
had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural
poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym
for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all
doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had
disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously
capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he
became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem,
that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a
letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs.
Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of
shells in her feather dressing-room."
The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He
was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish,
and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and
carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A
resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the
grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In
Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into
hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many
imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen
der Völker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay
"Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" written in 1773. Schiller was
one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards";
and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German
literary history as _Bardengebrüll_. MacPherson's personal history need
not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as
secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a government
pamphleteer, writing against Junius and in favor of taxing the American
colonies. He was appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in
Parliament for the borough of Camelford, and built a handsome Italian
villa in his native parish; died in 1796, leaving a large fortune, and
was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to
render the "Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was overwhelmed
with ridicule, and probably did much to increase the growing disbelief in
the genuineness of "Fingal" and "Temora."
[1] "Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland,
and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edinburgh, MDCCLX. 70
pp.
[2] This was sent him by MacPherson and was a passage not given in the
"Fragments."
[3] From "Carthon."
[4] Scandinavia
[5] An unconscious hexameter.
[6] From "Fingal" book ii.
[7] See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his "Poems of Ossian
in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 2
vols., Edinburgh, 1870.
[8] This story as been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyce's
poem of "Deirdrè," Boston, 1876.
[9] See "Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in Scotland,
chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872.
Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and published at
Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas MacLauchlan, with a learned
introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene.
[10] Article on "Celtic Literature" in the "Encyclopedia Britannica."
[11] "Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (American
Edition).
[12] Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads."
Taine says that Ossian "with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made
the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names
for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers_."--_English Literature_, Vol.
II. p. 220 (American Edition).
[13] The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of poems, which
they had been able to obtain, contained often the substance, and
sometimes the "literal expression (the _ipsissima verba_)" of passages
given by MacPherson. "But," continues the "Report," "the Committee has
not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the
poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to
supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did
not find; and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the
original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents,
by refining the language: in short, by changing what he considered as too
simple or too rude for a modern ear."
[14] "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See _ante_, p. 313.
[15] Clerk.
[16] "The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal
Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published
under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., London,
1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems
by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbé Cesarotti (translated). Four hundred
and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the alleged original of the
seventh book of "Temora," had been published with that epic in 1763.
[17] "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Edinburgh,
1862. Vol. IV. P. 156.
[18] He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of MacPherson's
helpers. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands."
[19] "Fragments," etc.
[20] Seventh book of "Temora." See _ante_, p. 321.
[21] "Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii.
[22] See _ante_, p. 313, note.
[23] "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "Celtic Literature."
[24] For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" question,
see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems,"
1868; and an article on "Ossian" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, XXIV. 113-25.
[25] "The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of
itself."
[26] "The Complaint of Ninathoma."
[27] For some MS. Notes of Byron in a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps'
"English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54.
[28] "Sorrows of Werther," Letter lxviii.
[29] "Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii. chapter vii. part iv.
[30] "Childe Harold," canto iii.
[31] The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog
Luath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to
"Cath-Loda" in the notes on "The Vision," show that Burns knew his Ossian.
[32] From Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen."
[33] See "Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. pp.
87-96.
[34] See _ante_, p. 117.
[35] There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810: by
Lacaussade in 1842; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 1801.
[36] See Perry's "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417.
[37] One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He was
born at Schärding, Bavaria, in 1729.