'Genuine poetry...like gold'

‘Genuine poetry … like gold’ Howard Gaskill In his generally welcoming if slightly sceptical review of Nick Groom’s The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature, John Mullan writes: First there was James Macpherson. A Scottish schoolmaster who collected manuscripts and transcribed traditional songs, he creatively reconstructed the oral compositions of a Gaelic bard called Ossian, dubbed ‘the Homer of Scotland’ by Voltaire. With the encouragement of several gullible leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, he supplied ‘translations’ of Ossian’s doomy, heroic epics: dying warriors, keening women, the wind over the hills. They were revered throughout Europe.

Macpherson’s trick was to give readers only the echo of some primitive ‘original’, to which they could never have direct access. […] Ossian was the convenient figment of a culture that thought itself so polished as to have lost poetic inspiration.

Does Groom really want us to admire Macpherson’s fabrications? Sometimes, as when endorsing William Blake’s celebration of the ancient bard, it seems so. Yet Blake was influenced all for the worse by Ossian’s repetitious and portentous cadences. Groom quotes enough for the reader to see that what was interesting was not the writing but the fashion for it. […] Groom passionately believes that Chatterton’s forgeries should be ‘read as literature’ and […] exaggerates Chatterton’s neglect by posterity. In fact, ‘the marvellous Boy’ has survived unmasking rather successfully.

Once you know that there is no original behind Macpherson’s ‘translations’, they dwindle into bathos. (Mullan, 2002) The majority of eighteenth-century literary scholars would almost certainly still regard this as fair comment.

And that is an indication that, for all the impressive evidence of a critical reawakening of interest in James Macpherson and his Ossianic poetry over the last two decades, particularly in the English-speaking world (for which see Dafydd Moore’s essay in this volume), any suggestion of a general rehabilitation would be premature. Disdain for the perpetrator of the hoax, and amused condescension towards the gullible dupes who fell for it, tend to be as deeply entrenched as

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knowledge of the work and its reception remains shallow. The relationship of Ossian to authentic Highland tradition (Thomson 1952; Meek 1991) is either ignored or underplayed, as is the active involvement of Enlightenment figures such as Hugh Blair and Adam Ferguson (a Gaelic speaker) in the delivery of the final product (Sher 1985; Gaskill 1986, 1988). Enthusiasm for the poetry itself is assumed to be contingent on belief in its total authenticity as ancient third-century epic, despite the fact that many admirers (for example, Herder or Cesarotti) had a shrewd notion of Macpherson’s creative procedure with his genuine sources, and converted sceptics such as Byron or Chateaubriand could remain sensitive to its appeal. Malcolm Laing, who spent a decade or more engaged in a laborious debunking exercise culminating in his two-volume edition of Ossian, or rather, The Poetical Works of James Macpherson, Esq., credited the latter with ‘a genius for poetry far superior […] perhaps to any contemporary poet, Gray excepted’ (Laing 1805, 2: 263). Nor was the continuing popularity of the work in Britain initially dented by attacks on the authenticity, however well founded they might appear to be. As George Chalmers, the London-based historian and antiquarian, writes to Laing’s publisher on 17 July 1805: Pray, does anybody at Edinburgh trouble himself about Ossian except Mr Laing?

Except the Bible and Shakespeare, there is not any book that sells better than Ossian.

This sale seems to me to arise from the intrinsic merit of the book, and not from talk about it. (Constable 1873, 1: 4; Stafford 1988, 171) Moreover, whatever view they might take of its status as ‘translation’, Anglophone readers continued to find intrinsic merit in the Ossianic poetry throughout the nineteenth century, and these included judges of the calibre of Hazlitt, Poe, Tennyson and Whitman, not to mention Matthew Arnold. Nowadays, however, without

its ever being properly argued, the literary worthlessness of Macpherson’s work is all too often taken as read, and the poems themselves left unread.

They may safely be dismissed on the basis of secondhand quotation.1 Once one knows there is no ‘original’ behind them, they ‘dwindle into bathos’.

Leaving aside the question of precisely what one knows, how one comes to know it, and by what strange processes this extraneously acquired knowledge can change the poetic value of the text on the page, the judgement is unduly harsh. The line chosen by Arnold as the epigraph for his On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) – ‘they came forth to war, but they always fell’ (PO, 314) – aptly sums up for him the fate of the Celt, that ‘colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world’ who ‘dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him’. One might have legitimate reservations about Arnold’s extremely influential but Ossianically skewed view of the Celtic peoples and their culture.2 Nevertheless, he had a fine sensitivity to the note of genuine pathos, the ‘vein of piercing’ regret which runs through Macpherson’s work (Arnold 1867, 152-54). It is as well to remember that what was being perpetrated on the Scottish Gael in the wake of Culloden (1746) would now satisfy the UN criteria for genocide. Macpherson was 10 years old at the time of the fateful battle and witness of the bloody aftermath (Stafford 1988, 18). Whatever his subsequent apparent ambivalence towards Highland culture and society, it is difficult to believe that he could have regarded its looming extirpation with equanimity.

The apprehension of the death of his people lends a keen edge to the poetry, which makes it much more than a mere manifestation of modish melancholy and marshmallow mawkishness. The figure of the geriatric bard Ossian with one foot in the grave, the last of his race, a sad ‘pitiful worn-out rag of an old man’, was inherited by Macpherson from authentic Gaelic tradition.3 And he makes of him an even more poignant avatar of mutability, transience and decay.

Hazlitt – for whom Ossian ranked alongside Homer, the Bible and Dante as one of the ‘principal works of poetry in the world’ (Hazlitt 1930, 15) – remarks of Macpherson’s bard: ‘There is one impression that he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country – he is even without God in the world.’ As Fiona Stafford observes, Hazlitt was by no means dull, yet he rated Ossian amongst the very best (1988, 1). And this in 1818, over half-a-century after the sensational first appearance of the poetry. Even the problematic authenticity can be seen to contribute to his appeal: If it were indeed possible to show that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, in confirmation of that feeling

which makes him so often complain, ‘Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!’ (Hazlitt 1930, 18; cf. PO, 170) Though popular appreciation of Ossian was no peculiar short-lived fad, lasting as it demonstrably did for the best part of a century-and-a-half both at home and abroad, it is clear that the rolling years have not been particularly kind to his reputation. Yet if the reader is prepared to hazard a first-hand encounter with the work itself, he might find rather more to interest him than the puzzle of why and how people could possibly have liked such sorry stuff in the first place. Viewed dispassionately as a literary text of the 1760s, it can be seen as in some ways radically innovative, sharing much in common with the contemporaneous Tristram Shandy (Keymer 1998).

‘The experimental nature of Macpherson’s engagement with epic, his interest in the narrator, and the creation of a complex prose narrative built up from stories within stories, begins to seem exciting and ground-breaking, rather than merely false to a pure original.’ (Stafford in PO, xvii)4 The distancing effects can indeed be vertiginous. We are constantly aware of the narrating Ossian’s present whilst he tells of a past which itself often includes the recapitulation of past events; lament within lament within lament, even invoking the future in terms of an anticipated act of remembrance. Further reflexive layers are created by the editorial apparatus – in addition to prefaces and dissertations, there is a built-in running commentary at the bottom of the page (and sometimes very near the top as well in the case of the more voluminous notes).5 The necessity for the latter can be emphasised by the odd reference to the defective nature of the miraculously surviving sources, and possibly a series of asterisks inserted at a gripping point in the narrative (cf. PO, 275-76, 308-10). And of course Macpherson’s literary career really begins with the production of skilfully contrived, peculiarly selfcontained ‘Fragments’.6 A further prominent protoRomantic feature, already evident in the Fragments, and one which was immediately noted with approval

by French critics, is the mixing of the genres, the combination of epic narrative with dramatic dialogue, elegiac lament and hymnic lyric. (Van Tieghem 1917, 1: 157)7 And this presented in a language which, as was evident even in many of the early translations, hovers between prose and verse.8 It is also a language which, when intoned (as it should be), can still entrance with its insistent rhythms. Apart from its prosodic qualities, it is remarkably effective in evoking the northern landscape as a powerful

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living force of terrible bleakness and awesome beauty.

Macpherson’s achievement here is eloquently captured by the eminent geologist Sir Archibald Geikie: The grandeur and gloom of the Highland mountains, the spectral mists that sweep round the crags, the roar of the torrents, the gleam of the sunlight on moor and lake, the wail of the breeze among the cairns of the dead, the unspeakable sadness that seems to brood over the landscape whether the sky be clear or clouded – these features of West Highland scenery were first revealed by Macpherson to the modern world. This revelation quickened the change of feeling, already begun, in regard to the prevailing horror of mountain scenery. It brought before men’s eyes some of the fascination of the mountain-world, more especially in regard to the atmospheric effects that play so large a part in its landscape. It showed the titanic forces of storm and tempest in full activity […] Never before or since have the endless changes of sky and atmosphere been more powerfully portrayed. (Geikie 1905, 115-17; Moore 1925, 376) The Ossianic landscape was, as Van Tieghem says, ‘une révélation pour l’Europe’ (a revelation for Europe) (1917, 1:47). Here was something rather different from flowery pastures and waving harvests. It was rude, savage, wild and uncultivated nature, and, like the race of heroes and heroines it was thought to have produced, sombre and sublime. As Macpherson’s mentor Hugh Blair remarks: The grass of the rock, the flower of the heath, the thistle with its beard, are the chief ornaments of his landscapes. […] The events recorded, are all serious and grave; the scenery throughout, wild and Romantic.

The extended heath by the sea shore; the mountain shaded with mist; the torrent rushing through a solitary valley; the scattered oaks, and the tombs of warriors overgrown with moss; all produce a solemn attention in the mind, and prepare it for great and extraordinary events. (PO, 353-54, 356) The constituent elements of this natural world are few, the repertoire upon which Ossian draws for his comparisons quite narrowly circumscribed. According to Blair’s catalogue: the sun, the moon, and the stars, clouds and meteors, lightning and thunder, seas and whales, rivers, torrents, winds, ice, rain, snow, dews, mist, fire and smoke, trees and forests, heath and grass and flowers, rocks and mountains.

Yet even when used for

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the purposes of the Ossianic simile, the landscape tends to become an end in itself, owing to the extended nature of these similes, together with the absence of syntactic subordination (they can stretch over several main clauses and separate sentences).

And it is perhaps not so much a question of sympathetic imagery which serves to integrate the landscape into the action, but rather that the landscape often is the action, dwarfing the merely human into pale parasitic insignificance. It does not merely echo the desolate mood of the characters, but it is the characters themselves who are a reflection of the landscape, this even being expressed in their names which, which according to Macpherson’s occasionally fanciful etymologies, can mean such things as ‘thunder’ (Torman), a ‘sun-beam’ (Degrena), the ‘brightness of a sun-beam’ (Dersagrena), ‘rage of the waves’ (Erragon), the ‘mournful sound of the waves’ (Cu-thona), the ‘murmur of waves’ (Carthon), the ‘virgin of the wave’ (Oi-thona), ‘soft air’ (Minona); even Ossian himself, with whose name Macpherson can do nothing, is addressed ‘poetically’ as ‘the voice of Cona’ (Glencoe). The geographical names too, even when they represent a readily identifiable location, tend to resolve into meanings such as ‘island of whales’, ‘island of waves’, ‘stream of the hill’, ‘silent stream’, ‘shallow river’, ‘sequestered vale’, ‘marshy plain’. This reinforces the impression of topographical vagueness. What Macpherson continually evokes is a certain type of landscape with a limited number of stock features, rather than particular settings. It could be recognised virtually anywhere in the Highlands and Islands by the Continental tourist of the nineteenth century, whereas Scott would oblige him to make pilgrimages to the Trossachs. This lack of specificity, the absence of local colour in the Ossianic landscape actually proved to be a positive advantage for its European reception. As Van Tieghem points out, the very vagueness made for easy identification and assimilation (1924, 281). The Swiss respond to a landscape of mountains and lakes; Alfieri is reminded of Sweden, as indeed are the Swedes who can of course add sea and coast to the list of resemblances; the Pole Brodzi?ski sees the spirits of his ancestors rising into Ossianic clouds above the Carpathians (see Nina Taylor-Terlecka’s essay). Heath, moor, storms, mist and dank autumnal decay are not confined to Scotland, though before the appearance of Ossian few had thought to be moved by such things.

If Macpherson’s Ossian considerably enhanced the poetic appeal of rugged mountains and turbulent seas, amongst of his most striking innovations were the lyrical apostrophes to various heavenly bodies. The addresses to the sun in ‘Carthon’ and ‘Carric-thura’ proved to be extremely popular and were

endlessly anthologised in many languages. There were precedents here of course, and Macpherson himself points out the resemblance to Milton, if not to Thompson (PO, 447, n. 48). But as for the moon, Van Tieghem credits Ossian with effectively introducing it into modern poetry (1924, 280). He is referring in particular to the celebration of the ‘daughter of heaven’ at the beginning of ‘Darthula’ where Macpherson proves himself a worthy precursor of Leopardi (Montiel 1969, 393). One of the most effective examples of sidereal poetry is the invocation of the evening star which opens the ‘Songs of Selma’ and which must have provided many with their first taste of Ossian (it is the point at which Goethe’s Werther begins reading to Lotte). Interestingly enough, it also provides a demonstration of how the genuine lyrical beauty Macpherson is capable of achieving need not get lost in translation, at least in competent hands. His ‘Star of the descending night! …’is brilliantly reflected in Cesarotti’s ‘Stella maggior della cadente notte …’

(1763), Goethe’s ‘Stern der dämmernden Nacht …’

(1774) and de Musset’s ‘Pale étoile du soir ...’ (‘Le Saule’, 1832).

[This essay is excerpted by kind permission of his publishers, Thoemmes Continuum, from Howard Gaskill’s introduction to the new publication The Reception of Ossian in Europe, which he edited and which appears this month, December 2004. Some of the material has already appeared in an article for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature in 1994 (21: 643-78).]

Footnotes 1. As for the ‘enough’ (Mullan) quoted by Groom, I count three inset citations, plus a single-sentence chapter motto. With the exception of a brief passage from ‘Fingal’, these are all taken from the Fragments of Ancient Poetry. The only substantial quotation (Groom 115-16) consists of the whole of the second ‘Fragment’, which together with the first makes up the Shilric and Vinvela episode later incorporated into ‘Carric-thura’ (PO, 158-60). Some might judge this on ‘its intrinsic merits’ as rather fine prose poetry, and it certainly appealed to Denis Diderot whose translation went on sale in Paris within six months of the appearance of the original Fragments in June 1760 (Heurtematte 1990).

2. Important for W. B. Yeats, for instance, whose poem ‘The Rose of Battle’ (1892) was originally entitled ‘They went forth to the Battle, but they always fell’ (Watson 1998, 216) and who seems to have derived his famous ‘terrible beauty’ from a note to Macpherson’s ‘Temora’ (PO, 497, n. 17; cf. also 143, 242, 276, 527, n.16).

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3. Cf. Ross (1939, 37): ‘Feeble tonight is the strength of my hands; there is not on earth my fellow in years; it is no wonder that I am sad, a pitiful worn-out rag of an old man.’ The Book of the Dean of Lismore, compiled in Perthshire in the early part of the sixteenth century, is one of the most important written sources of heroic Gaelic lays, a number of which, including the one from which this quotation is taken, are ascribed to the legendary Oisean. We owe its survival to James Macpherson.

4. Katie Trumpener, in her excellent chapter ‘The End of an Auld Sang’ (1997, 67-127), also makes fine observations on the ways in which late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British and Irish novels come to ‘absorb many of the Poems of Ossian’s distinctive structural features’ (115).

5. It should perhaps be admitted that the 1996 edition (PO), based on Macpherson’s Works of Ossian of 1765, distorts the original reading experience by placing the notes at the end for what seemed at the time to be sound practical reasons. There is an observable tendency, encouraged by Macpherson himself in the extensively revised Poems of Ossian of 1773, for later English and translated editions to cut back the annotations. On the other hand, further editorial layers of them may well be added: this is very much the case with Malcolm Laing’s in 1805, Cesarotti’s Italian of 1763 and particularly Michael Denis’s of 1768-69 in which he joins his own observations to those of both Macpherson and Cesarotti.

The effect can be reminiscent of Trumpener’s account of Thomas Amory’s Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756 and 1766): ‘Narrative episodes are repeatedly overshadowed by the huge (and frequently digressive) editorial apparatus suspended beneath them; at many points the novelistic narrative becomes quite literally attenuated, slowly snaking its way along, a sentence or two per page, while beneath it, two distinct layers of footnotes occupy the bulk of the page’. (Trumpener 1997, 106) 6. For a recent contribution on the ‘fragment’, which gives due consideration to Macpherson, see the excellent opening chapter of Constantine and Porter, ‘Centaur-songs: Romanticism and broken forms’ (2003, 21-49).

7. This generic hybridity (cf. Sandro Jung’s essay in this volume) can often appear to be even more marked in translations than in the English. For instance, where Macpherson’s notes signal a lyrical set-piece in the original Gaelic, as opposed to ‘recitative’ (cf. PO, 492, n. 50), prose translations tend to use verse, whilst verse translations (eg.

Cesarotti, Denis) vary the metrical and stanzaic pattern.

8. For Macpherson’s impact on the development of prose poetry, both in English and other languages, see Füger (1973, 104-05, 116-22).

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