|
IN these days of advanced
criticism, a renewed and vigorous attack upon the poems of Ossian was of
course to be expected. As an example, the remarkable declaration recently
hazarded by a learned philologist in our Highland capital may be quoted,
“that Macpherson is as truly the author of ‘ Ossian ’ as Milton is of ‘
Paradise Lost.’ ” 1 But the people of Badenoch, where Macpherson lived and
died, have hitherto imbibed, as with their mother’s milk, the belief that
“Fingal lived and that Ossian sang,” and that Macpherson was simply a
somewhat free translator. We have verdicts in abundance confirming that
belief, not only from many of the most famous men of “ light and leading” of
bygone times, but also from the most distinguished Celtic scholars of our
own time, two of whom have gone over to the majority only within the last
few years. One of these was the accomplished and venerated Dr Clerk of
Kilmallie, whose able ‘ Dissertation,’ published in 1870, at the instance of
the Marquis of Bute, contains an admirable summary of the whole Ossianic
question. The other was Dr Mac-Lauchlan of Edinburgh, one of the leading
Gaelic scholars of last generation, and acknowledged as practically arbiter
in matters of Gaelic literature and scholarship.
“The fact is,” says Dr MacLauchlan, “that while Macpherson found several
ancient MSS. containing pieces of Ossianic poetry, the poems never existed
to any great extent save among the oral recitations of the people. They were
floating fragments, as were probably the poems of Homer, for many long years
before they were committed to writing. Tradition is quite capable of
preserving such fragmentary compositions. Last year (1856) one thousand
lines of different pieces of Ossianic poetry were taken down from the lips
of an old woman (a Janet Sutherland) in Caithness by Mr James Cumming, a
student in the New College of Edinburgh. The writer has a copy of these in
his possession; and nothing is more remarkable than their coincidence with
the fragments in the Dean of Lis-more’s MS., taken down 330 years before. It
affords a complete reply to all the objections urged against the poetry of
Ossian, founded on the impossibility of such compositions being handed down
for any length of time by mere tradition. In the absence of writing, it is
hard to say what the human memory is capable of accomplishing. It has no
doubt its limits; but we are in modern times without data from which to
conclude definitely how far these limits may extend, and this without
detriment to what has been said regarding ‘Fingal.’ After all this, however,
Macpherson was undoubtedly more than the mere editor of these poems. He
exercised an amount of discretion which perhaps served to lay him open to
the charges to which he became afterwards exposed, and which rendered it
difficult for his friends to defend either Ossian or himself. He pieced
together the floating fragments which he gathered throughout the
Highlands—interspersed them to some extent with his own compositions—changed
names, when that suited his purpose, and expunged portions that were
inconsistent with his favourite theories. He took liberties, which, however,
other editors have taken to at least as large an extent, without being
loaded with the obloquy which was heaped on Macpherson ; for it is true
that, notwithstanding all Macpherson did as an editor, we have in these
poems numerous and extensive remains of genuine Ossianic poetry; and
certainly the spirit of the whole is that of Ossian, and not of Macpherson.
The whole works are of the true type of the ancient heroic poetry of the
Scottish Highlands.”
Here is Dr MacLauchlan’s final testimony, as given by him eighteen years
later:—
“From all that has been written on the subject of these ancient Gaelic poems
of Ossian, it is perfectly clear that Ossian himself is no creation of James
Macpherson. His name has been familiar to the people both of the Highlands
and Ireland for a thousand years and more. Oisian an deigh na Feinn (‘
Ossian after the Fingalians ’) has been a proverbial saying among them for
numberless generations. Nor did Macpherson invent Ossian’s poems. There were
poems reputed to be Ossian’s in the Highlands for centuries before he was
born, and poems, too, which for poetic power and interest are unsurpassed,
which speak home to the heart of every man who can sympathise with popular
poetry marked by the richest felicities of diction, and which entitles them
justly to all the commendations bestowed upon the poems edited by
Macpherson.”
The late Alexander Smith—himself no mean poet—speaks eloquently to the same
effect.
“Wandering,” he says, “up and down the Western Islands, one is brought into
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 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 repetition 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 song; 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 channeled 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 ! AVordsworth’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.”
In the introduction to his well-known ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands,’
the late Mr J. F. Campbell of Islay says :—
“I believe that there were poems of very old date, of which a few fragments
still exist in Scotland as pure traditions. That these related to Celtic
worthies who were popular heroes before the Celts came from Ireland, and
answer to Arthur and his knights elsewhere. That the same personages have
figured in poems composed, or altered, or improved, or spoilt by bards who
lived in Scotland, and by Irish bards of all periods; and that these
personages have been mythical heroes amongst Celts from the earliest of
times. That ‘the poems’ were orally collected by Macpherson, and by men
before him, by Dr Smith, by the committee of the Highland Society, and by
others, and that the printed Gaelic is old poetry, mended and patched, and
pieced together, and altered, but on the whole a genuine work. . . . Those
who would study ‘the controversy’ will find plenty of discussion ; but the
report of the Highland Society appears to settle the question on evidence. I
cannot do better than quote from Johnson’s ‘Poets’ the opinion of a great
author, who was a great translator, who, in speaking of his own work, says:
‘What must the world think . . . after such a judgment passed by so great a
critic, the world who decides so often, and who examines so seldom; the
world who, even in matters of literature, is almost always the slave of
authority? Who will suspect that so much learning should mistake, that so
much accuracy should be misled, or that so much candour should be biassed?
... I think that no translation ought to be the ground of criticism, because
no man ought to be condemned upon another man’s explanation of his meaning.’
“And to that quotation,” Mr Campbell continues, “let me add this manuscript
note, which I found in a copy of the Report of the Highland Society on the
poems of Ossian, which I purchased in December 1859, and which came from the
library of Colonel Hamilton Smith at Plymouth: ‘The Rev. Dr Campbell, of
Half-way Tree, Lisuana, in Jamaica, often repeated to me, in the year 1799,
1801, and 1802, parts of Ossian in Gaelic; and assured me that he had
possessed a manuscript, long the property of his family, in which Gaelic
poems, and in particular whole pieces of Ossian’s compositions, were
contained. This he took out with him on his first voyage to the West Indies
in 1780, when his ship was captured by a boat from the Santissima Trinidata,
flagship of the whole Spanish fleet; and he, together with all the other
passengers, lost nearly the whole of their baggage, among which was the
volume in question. In 1814, when I was on the staff of General Sir Thomas
Graham, now Lord Lyndoch, I understood that Mr Macpherson had been at one
time his tutor, and therefore I asked his opinion respecting the
authenticity of the Poems. His lordship replied that he never had any doubts
on the subject, he having seen in Mr Macpherson’s possession several
manuscripts in the Gaelic language, and heard him speak of them repeatedly;
he told me some stronger particulars, which I cannot now note down, for the
conversation took place during the action of our winter campaign. Charles
Hamn. Smith, Lt.-Col.’
“The colonel had the reputation of being a great antiquary, and had a
valuable library. James Macpherson, a ‘modest young man, who was master of
Greek and Latin,’ was ‘procured’ to be a preceptor to ‘the boy Tommy,’ who
was afterwards Lord Lyndoch (according to a letter in a book printed for
private circulation). As it appears to me, those who are ignorant of Gaelic,
and nowadays maintain that ‘Macpherson composed Ossian’s Poems,’ are like
critics who, being ignorant of Greek, should maintain that Pope wrote the ‘
Odyssey,’ and was the father of Homer; or, being ignorant of English, should
declare that Tennyson was the father of King Arthur and all his knights,
because he has published one of many poems which treat of them. It was
different when Highlanders were ‘rebels,’ and it was petty treason to deny
that they were savages.
“A glance at ‘Johnson’s Tour in the Hebrides’ will show the feeling of the
day. He heard Gaelic songs in plenty, but would not believe in Gaelic poems.
He appreciated the kindness and hospitality with which he was treated; he
praised the politeness of all ranks, and yet maintained that their language
was ‘the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express,
and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood.’ He
could see no beauty in the mountains, which men now flock to see. He saw no
fish in fording northern rivers, and explains how the winter torrents sweep
them away; the stags were ‘perhaps not bigger than our fallow-deer’; the
waves were not larger than those on the coast of Sussex; and yet, though the
Doctor would not believe in Gaelic poems, he did believe that peat grew as
it was cut, and that the vegetable part of it probably caused a glowing
redness in the earth, of which it is mainly composed; and he came away
willing to believe in the second-sight, though not quite convinced.”
Here is the conclusion arrived at by the late Mr John Campbell Shairp—the
distinguished Principal of the University of St Andrews, and Professor of
Poetry in the University of Oxford—after a prolonged study of the question
:—
“The longer I have studied the question, the more I have been convinced that
Macpherson was a translator, not an author; that he found and did not create
his materials; that all the more important part of his Ossian is ancient,
and had long existed in the Highlands ; and that at the time he undertook
his collection the Highlands were a quarry, out of which many more Ossianic
blocks and fragments might have been dug.”
Macpherson never professed to be more than a translator, and it is no
disparagement to his literary fame to state, as Professor Blackie
does—quoting from the evidence of one of the ablest Celtic scholars of
Macpherson’s time—that “according no less to the express testimony of
competent persons than to the ex facie probabilities of the case, he could
no more have written a poem like one of Ossian’s than he could have composed
the Prophecies of Isaiah or created the Isle of Skye! ” Let us listen also
to the testimony of such a fair and unprejudiced critic as the accomplished
authoress of the ‘Letters from the Mountains,’ whose good sense and judgment
have been universally admitted. Mrs Grant speaks of the translator from
personal knowledge; she was a near neighbour of, and on intimate terms with,
Lachlan Macpherson of Strathmashie, who accompanied the translator on his
tour throughout the Highlands collecting the Ossianic fragments, and
assisted him so much in his translations ; she was fully conversant with all
the circumstances under which these translations were published to the world
; and here is what one so well qualified to judge says in a letter written
to one of her daughters on 4th August 1805, nine years after the
translator’s death :—
“I forgive the Reviewers like a Christian for what they say of myself, but
feel as revengeful as a Malay for what they say of the Highlanders; for
their silly and absurd attempt to prove the fair-haired Fingal and his
tuneful son nonentities, includes an accusation of deceit and folly against
the whole people. Arrogant scribes that they are, to talk so decidedly of
the question, of all others, perhaps, which they are least qualified to
determine! They are doubtless clever, but intoxicated with applause and
self-opinion. Why should they wish to diminish the honour their country
derives from the most exalted heroism, adorned by the most affecting poetry
that ever existed? They disprove their own assertion; for had Ossian’s
poetry been the shadow of a shade, a mere imaginary imitation of what, if it
ever did exist, had been long lost in the clouds of remote antiquity, it
would be utterly impossible that it should communicate to all Europe the
powerful impulse they are forced to acknowledge. An author describing a
fictitious character may make us weep and tremble, but then he is impressed
by some real one with the image he conveys to us. The double deception of a
feigned poet celebrating a feigned hero could never have power to reach the
heart. Chatterton, the tattered theme of all these sceptics with whom they
are sure to begin and end, had powers of mind far superior to those of James
Macpherson; and what emotion except that of wonder was ever produced by his
poetry? Whoever agitates, exalts, or deeply affects the mind, must first
feel himself. Now no man was ever an enthusiast in the very act of knavery.
Do the Reviewers know so little of human nature as to suppose a man’s mind
to expand with generous and tender sentiments at the very instant he is
shrinking with the consciousness of deliberate baseness?”
Here are a few of the testimonies obtained by the Highland Society, who
investigated the whole subject:—
1. Sir John Macpherson, Lauriston, February 4, 1760:—
“I do myself the pleasure of presenting you with a few specimens of Ossian
in his native dress. . . . The three pieces which I have selected had each a
particular title to regard. . . . ‘The Address to the Evening Star ’ claimed
attention on account of its inimitable beauty and harmonious versification.
The original of this piece suffered even in the hands of Mr Macpherson,
though he has shown himself inferior to no translator. The copy or edition
which he had of this poem is very different from mine; I imagine it will, in
that respect, be agreeable to Mr Percy. The gentleman who gave it me copied
it from an old MS., which Mr Macpherson had no access to before his ‘Fingal’
came abroad.”
2. Lachlan Macpherson of Strathmashie, October 22, 1763 :—
“In the year 1760 I had the pleasure of accompanying my friend Mr Macpherson
during some part of his journey in search of the poems of Ossian through the
Highlands. I assisted him in collecting them, and took down from oral
tradition, and transcribed from old manuscripts, by far the greatest part of
those pieces he has published. Since the publication, I have carefully
compared the translation with the copies of the originals in my hands, and
find it amazingly literal, even in such a degree as to preserve in some
measure the cadence of the Gaelic versification.”
3. Rev. John Macpherson, D.D., of Sleat, November 27, 1763 :—
“I have in obedience to your request made inquiry for all the persons around
me who were able to rehearse from memory any parts of the poems by Mr
Macpherson, and have made them to rehearse in my hearing the several
fragments or detached pieces of those poems which they were able to repeat.
This done, I compared with great care the pieces rehearsed by them with Mr
Macpherson’s translation. These pieces or fragments are: the description of
Cuchullin’s chariot (Fingal, book i. p. 11). The rehearsers are John
Macdonald of Breakish in Strath, Isle of Skye, gentleman; Martin Macllivray,
tenant in Slate; and Allan Macaskle, farmer in Glenelg.”
4. Lieutenant Duncan MacNicol, late of 88th Regiment, Sockrock, in Glenurchy,
January 1764:—
“I have been at some pains in examining several in this country about
Ossian’s poems, and have found out as follows : Fingal, B. iii. p. 45—‘
Oscar, I was young like thee when lovely Faineasollis,’ &c., to the end of
the third book; Fingal, B. iv. p. 50—‘Eight were the heroes of Ossian,’ &c.,
mostly word for word to p. 58, or the end of the fourth book; and an array
of further passages, among which is one beginning, ‘Then Gaul and Ossian sat
on the green banks of Lubar’—a passage Laing asserted to be an imitation by
Macpherson of the 137th Psalm.”
5. Rev. Donald Macleod, Glenelg, to Dr Blair, March 26, 1764:—
“It was in my house that Mr Macpherson got the description of Cuchullin’s
horses and car in book i. p. 2 from Allan MacCaskie, schoolmaster, and Rory
Macleod, both of this glen. He has not taken in the whole of the
description; and his translation of it (spirited and pretty as it appears,
so far as it goes) falls so far short of the original in the picture it
exhibits of Cuchullin’s horses and car, that in none of his translations is
the inequality of Macpherson’s genius to that of Ossian so very
conspicuous.”
In a letter to Dr Blair, dated October 2, 1764, Lord Auchinleck remarks:—
(In Ossian) “When a hero finds death approaching he calls to prepare his
deer’s horn—a passage which I did not understand for a good time after
‘Fingal’ was published, but then came to get it fully explained
accidentally. You must know that in Badenoch, near the church of Alvie, on
the highway-side, are a number of tumuli. Nobody had ever taken notice of
these as artificial till Macpherson Benchar [Banchor], a very sensible man,
under an apprehension of their being artificial, caused to cut up two of
them, and found human bones in them, and at right angles with them a
red-deer’s horn above them. These burials plainly have been before
Christianity, for the corpse lay in the direction of north and south, not in
that of east and west. . . . ‘ Fingal ’ was published before any of these
tumuli were opened.”
The testimony of the late Rev. Dr Hately Waddell of Glasgow— long so well
known as the editor and biographer of Burns, and more recently as the author
of ‘ Ossian and the Clyde ’—is still more emphatic in the same direction. In
an able lecture delivered by him at Inverness on’ 24th January 1877,
vindicating the authenticity of Ossian as represented in Macpherson’s
translation, Dr Waddell, after stating that he did not presume either to
criticise or explain the Gaelic edition of 1807, goes on to inquire whether
anything had been proved against Macpherson to invalidate his own
declaration that the poems of Ossian were translated by him from an
original, or rather from several originals, in the Scottish Gaelic language,
in his hands ? Was he previously known to be a liar? Had he ever been guilty
of fraud? Had he ever done anything dishonest? Had he ever imposed upon his
friends, upon his patrons, upon the public? Had he done anything of a sort
to forfeit his claims to their confidence, or to destroy his claims to
respect and honour as a student of divinity, and an aspirant to the
functions of the Church? Nothing we know, or ever heard of. His worst crime
was poverty, and one of the most honourable actions of his life was to
requite in old age, by the offer of payment an hundredfold, the unknown
obligations of friendship that had been conferred upon him in his youth.
Why, then, should this man be suspected or accused of a long, intricate, and
difficult series of unblushing impostures on the world before the age of
twenty-four? Because he was ambitious? But he was not more ambitious than
Burke or Canning, Brougham or Disraeli—who have never been accused of
literary fraud or falsehood. Because other young men—like Chatterton, for
example—have made attempts of the kind to impose upon the public? But
Chatterton at that date was only a child. He might afterwards, indeed, have
emulated Macpherson, but Macpherson could not possibly have emulated him.
Besides, the very essence of Chatterton’s imposture was the production of
forged documents, whereas the most serious charge against Macpherson was
that he did not produce a document at all. Is it because in earlier youth he
had attempted poetry of his own? Then the sort of poetry he so attempted
affords the most conclusive evidence that he could never have been the
author of what subsequently appeared. Is it because he afterwards enjoyed
political patronage, and obtained a Government appointment, where he
accumulated a fortune ? In this he was no worse than any other political
aspirant of his day ; but even if he had been, Ossian was published long
before. Is it because he threatened retaliation by violence, when he was
denounced as a ruffian and a cheat ? Any man of spirit in the circumstances,
much more any Highland man, would have done the same. Is it because he
refused to produce his MS. when demanded ? That question comes nearer to the
point. But he did produce it, and left it with his publishers for a
twelvemonth to be inspected by his accusers, who had neither the courtesy,
courage, nor common-sense to look at it. . . . And is James Macpherson to be
eternally defamed with fraud and forgery because lexicographers and critics
who did not understand the subject, and will not so much as condescend to
look at it, persist in so defaming him? It seems incredible as a mere
question of honour, of honesty, of common-sense, much more incredible as a
question of fact, when the issues which depend upon it are considered.”
Rev. Mr Waddell’s testimony.
Under the same head, Dr Waddell further inquired
“Why then should these extraordinary productions be looked upon as frauds,
if there was nothing in the translator’s previous life to suggest it?
Because the style was too lofty? the characters too grand? the events too
wonderful? the morals too pure? the history too sublime? the achievements
too heroic? the incidents too romantic? the sentiments too tender? the
pathos too touching? the pictures of life too splendid? the revelations of
humanity too profound? For what? for whom? for when? For types of a race
that defied and defeated the Romans? For a poet who spoke with authority in
the ear of kings? For a period of transition between native civilisation on
the brink of ruin, and foreign civilisation itself on the verge of decay ?
Between the opposite extremes and representatives of two antagonistic
worlds? Too lofty, grand, wonderful, and pure? too sublime, too heroic, too
romantic, too tender, too touching, too splendid, too profound?— for an era
like this, and for men like these? Yet not too lofty, grand, wonderful,
pure, sublime, heroic, romantic, tender, touching, splendid, or profound for
a young student of divinity, who must not only have concocted and composed
the whole of it in fragments, and interwoven, dovetailed, and jointed it
together by mere words and syllables not hitherto detected for a hundred
years, and apparently not known to himself; who must have borrowed his style
by assiduous labour, according to Laing, from eighty-eight different
authors, and manufactured twenty-two epic poems out of 966 words or
phrases—certain of these poems containing three, six, and eight books; and
who finally located his heroes and localised his scenes on this haphazard
process so exactly, that the very footsteps of the one and the outlines of
the other may be traced and identified at this hour, scores and hundreds of
miles distant from the regions and localities where he fancied them; who did
not know the rocks, the rivers, or the mountains, the lakes or seas, the
islands or the continents, the regions or the airts, the very points of the
compass, to which his own supposed forgeries related! The supposition is
impossible, incredible, absurd—impossible alike in fancy or in philosophy,
in forgery or in fate. Such a concurrence of falsehood with fact, beyond the
knowledge of a liar himself, is inconceivable. No necromancer on earth could
have accomplished it, much less a poor student of divinity.”
In one of a series of able and interesting articles, recently published in
the ‘ Scotsman,’ Mr Donald MacKinnon, the Professor of the Celtic Languages
and Literature in the University of Edinburgh, says :—
“Outside of Gaeldom few people knew or cared much whether Highlanders did or
did not possess a literature. As a rule, the Lowland Scot has ever shown
little interest in any views or ideas that his Celtic neighbour might hold.
The Register of the Privy Council and other public documents record the
various shifts resorted to by the central Government from time to time in
dealing with refractory clans, the favourite device being to arm a
neighbouring chief with legal powers * to murder and to ravish ’ at
pleasure, and so perpetuate clan feuds to all time. Regarding the beliefs,
the language and the literature of the people, little or nothing was noted.
Still, the names of the Gaelic heroes occasionally reached southern ears.
Dunbar more than once refers to them, not always in complimentary terms.
Only two are mentioned by name, Fionn and Goll. The former is Fingal with
Barbour, as afterwards with Macpherson ; elsewhere he is Fyn, Fyn MacCoul (Fionn
mac Cumhaill, ‘ Fionn, son of Cumhall ’). The two are usually spoken of as
warriors or giants. Gavin Douglas makes the heroes ‘ gods in Ireland as they
say’; Dean Munro makes Fynan King in Man; and according to Boece, many tales
and poems were told about Fyn MacCoul. But it was only five years before
Macpherson wrote that the first serious attempt was made to place the claims
and merits of Gaelic literature before English readers. The honour of doing
so belongs to Jerome Stone, a native of Scoonie in Fife, and a pure Saxon—a
man who, as he says himself, was ‘ equally a stranger in blood to the
descendants of Simon Breck and the subjects of Cadwallader.’ Stone went to
teach in Dunkeld Academy at the age of twenty-four, fresh from St Andrews.
The young schoolmaster had, among many gifts and graces, a great facility
for acquiring languages. He studied Gaelic, highly appreciated the
literature, and made a collection of Ossianic ballads and modern lyric
poetry. Six months before his death, in November 1755, Stone wrote to the
editor of the ‘Scots Magazine’ that ‘there are compositions in it [Gaelic]
which for sublimity of sentiment, nervousness of expression, and
high-spirited metaphor, are hardly to be equalled among the chief
productions of the most cultivated nations; ’and subsequently sent as a
specimen a translation, or rather paraphrase, of one of the ballads of the
Cuchullin epoch, that known in Gaelic literature as ‘Fraoch,’ but entitled
by Stone ‘Albin and Mey.’ This promising scholar and litterateur died of
fever in the following summer at the early age of thirty. Macpherson was
eighteen at the time, serving in secret, as he says himself, his
apprenticeship to the Muses, and may well have had his attention directed to
the heroic literature of his country by Jerome Stone; but in the din and
tumult that followed, the enthusiastic and scholarly schoolmaster of Dunkeld
was forgotten. And so the Ossianic literature that lay buried in Gaelic MS.,
or floated through the brains of Highland peasants, was unknown to print,
Gaelic or English. James Macpherson had thus the great advantage of breaking
new ground.
“Nowadays we can only imagine the feelings with which the Highland people
were regarded by their southern neighbours in 1760. The storm of the ’45 had
burst and passed; but still the waves of prejudice ran high. Many Lowlanders
embraced the cause of the Stuarts, and about half the clans abstained from
doing so. Jacobite sentiment, though not so widespread as in the north, took
deep root in many districts in the south of Scotland, and as matter of fact,
the best Jacobite songs are not in Gaelic, but in Scotch. But it was the
Highland people, loyal and disloyal alike, that had alone to endure for many
a day thereafter all the hatred and scorn which Saxon Philistinism could
command. And when the political trespasses were forgotten, or atoned for by
the valour of Highland soldiers, these feelings were transferred to the
domain of art and letters. It was bad enough that a few thousands of
unkempt, half-naked savages should set the empire by the ears, and even
shake the throne itself; but that the hungry redshank should dare to have a
civilisation, a knowledge of letters, poetry of a high order of excellence,
dating back many centuries before ever a Norman set foot in the land, and
even before the Saxon emerged from barbarism—such presumption was
intolerable, and not to be endured for a moment. We live in other and
happier days. The burning questions of religion and politics never sharply
divided the two peoples in this country; and in blood we are pretty mixed,
north and south. And yet it is with more or less of a grudge that a
knowledge of art or letters is allowed to the Celt by some among us still.
You may produce your few relics recovered from the wreck of the past—your
crosses, your tombstones, your brooches, your books and bells; but the art
of these, their ornamentation and decoration, even their language, may,
according to some writers, be anything you please other than Celtic. Dr
Jamieson would compass sea and land in search of an origin for a word of
respectable associations rather than allow that it was borrowed from Gaelic
into Scottish. A member of a learned profession and of several learned
societies, British and Continental, printed the following sentences in 1889
: ‘It is gravely related of the German philologer Zeuss, who, to add to the
marvel, never set foot on Irish soil, that he reconstructed the ancient
Irish or Celtic tongue from the literary remains of a thousand years ago,
which he met with in the continent of Europe. Such feats of human ingenuity
are no doubt very wonderful. It would, however, be satisfactory to know that
the MSS. found by the learned German were, in point of fact, the survivals
of an early Celtic speech, and not merely the residuum of the more archaic
dialects of the ancient Gothic. We know that the Goths had a literature. We
do not know that the Celts had any literary remains.’ And is it not to
theories of education inherited from the Goths, tempered, perhaps, by an
academic indifference to the needs of what are considered at best but a mere
handful of illiterate peasants, we owe the fact that while a million of
public money is expended annually on the elementary education of Scottish
children, and thirty thousand on the training of suitable teachers for them,
Gaelic-speaking young men and women are practically shut out of the trained
branch of the teaching profession, and Gaelic-speaking children are in
consequence deprived of the greatest boon that could at the present time be
offered to them—the inestimable blessing of an intelligent education.”
To the keen, sensitive nature of the translator—so characteristic of the
descendants of the old historical parson of Kingussie—the insolent
criticisms to which he was subjected, and the sneers and bristly fury of
bearish critics, “gnarled through and through with stiff English prejudice,”
like the redoubtable Dr Johnson, must have been galling in the extreme. The
distinguished philosopher, Sir David Brewster, who married one of
Macpherson’s daughters, had access to and examined all the manuscripts and
papers left by the translator at Belleville. In the ‘ Home Life ’ of Sir
David by his gifted daughter, Mrs Gordon, published in 1869, there are
several interesting allusions to the Ossianic controversy. Speaking of the
private belief of her father and the Mac-phersons, Mrs Gordon says :—
“They never had a moment's doubt as to the complete and entire authenticity
of the Poems. The originals, they were fully persuaded, had been received by
Mr Macpherson in most cases by oral tradition, and in others from MSS. which
had been written down two or three centuries before from the old Highland
lairds whose predecessors had sung them long before such innovations as pen,
ink, and paper were known among the Celts.”
Matthew Arnold, in speaking of the vein of “piercing regret and passion”
running through Celtic poetry, characterises Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ as “a
famous book,” which “ carried in the last century this vein like a flood of
lava through Europe.”
“Strip Scotland if you like,” says that distinguished critic, “of every
feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of Macpherson’s ‘ Ossian,’
she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the
Ossianic poetry, 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 genius of the nations of modern Europe, and
enriched all our poetry by it: Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, 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 power such a strain must have been
to the eighteenth century: ‘1 have seen the walls of Balclatha, but they
were desolate. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the
wall waved round her head. 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. Let the blast
of the desert come; we shall be renowned in our day.’
“All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out
is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate
penetrating accent of the Gaelic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the
English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully,
and he quotes a long passage in his ‘Werther.’”
“More,” says Mr Eyre-Todd, in the introduction already referred to, “than
two thousand years ago in Athens, Peisistratus gathered and pieced together
the fragments of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ Does it seem impossible that
the same office should fall to be done in the eighteenth century for a Homer
of the north? History, doubtless, has but repeated itself in the storm of
adverse criticism which burst upon the restorer of the Celtic bard; and only
when the din of wordy battle has died away will be heard the numbers of this
last-found lord of song. The merit of the poems themselves, as poetry, may
safely be left to take care of itself. Long ago the songs of Ossian earned a
place for themselves in the literature of every European language—an Italian
version, it is said, being the constant companion 'and inspiration of the
First Napoleon. England alone has refused to admit the claims of the Celtic
bard, and that at the bidding of Dr Johnson—a good and great man indeed, but
one who, knowing nothing of the subject, dogmatically imposed his prejudices
upon the literary mind of his country, denying, like certain Pharisees of
old, that any good thing could come out of Nazareth. . . .
“As exact material for history, the value of the poems of Ossian, like the
value of all early poetry, must remain difficult to decide. It can never be
absolutely proved that events happened on the plains of Troy, or among the
hills of Morven, exactly as Homer and as Ossian had described them—though it
must be confessed that Ossian, as an eyewitness, corroborated in many
details by history, tradition, and antiquities, appears entitled to the
greater credence. But for another and probably more important kind of truth,
the work of both bards may be considered absolutely reliable. The ‘Iliad ’
and the Ossianic poems present a general but genuine picture of the
civilisation in the countries and at the time in which they were composed.
“After all, the chief assurance of immortality for these ‘ tales of the
times of old ’ must rest upon their own sublimity and beauty. There may long
be those who doubt the existence of Ossian; but none will deny that in these
pages are to be found passages unsurpassed in majesty and hardly equalled in
tenderness. What could there be more full of pathos than Ossian’s frequent
address to Malvina, the betrothed of his dead son Oscar, and the companion
of his own old age? And what in literature is nobler than the bard’s
apostrophe to the splendours of heaven, or his lament at the tombs of
heroes?—‘ Weep, thou father of Morar ! weep; but thy son heareth thee not.
Deep is the sleep of the dead ; low their pillow of dust. No more shall he
hear thy voice, no more awake at thy call. When shall it be morn in the
grave to bid the slumberer awake? Farewell, thou bravest of men.’— (Songs of
Selma.)
“Ossian is not the only bard whose glory appears a marvel to these latter
days. Out of the dim past, booming like the surge of ocean, still rolls many
a billow of primeval song. The Vedic hymns float onward yet down a stream of
time whose ripples have been centuries. The world still listens awed to the
chants of the prophets of ancient Israel. And still from the storied isles
of Greece reverberates the long roll of the Tale of Troy divine. Does it
seem more strange that the echoes of a heroic age should be lingering yet
among the fastnesses of the Caledonian Hills?” |
