In Antiquity and Modernity

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In Antiquity and Modernity A Critical Survey of Ossian alexander stoddart

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In Antiquity and Modernity A Critical Survey of Ossian alexander stoddart ‘…if it were not for the neglect, or rather, the abhorrence which had overtaken that emphatic (Gaelic) language, their merit would at once be recognised. Some of (the poems) were of a high antiquity, and for sublime sentiment, nervousness of expression and high-spirited metaphor, were hardly to be equalled among the chief productions of modern times; others, again, were very tender, simple and affecting.’

(Bailey Saunders; the life and letters of james macpherson, 1894)

But it was not James Macpherson, the celebrated exegete of the poetry of the fabled Ossian, who here advocated the lays of ancient Gaeldom. Rather, it was a young man named Jerome Stone, a schoolmaster in Dunkeld, who in 1755 told the Scots Magazine of a body of ancient verse extant in verbal tradition, and of great quantity, in the Highland wastes of Scotland. Stone had not been a native Gaelic speaker but had learned the language, and Hebrew too, the better to integrate with those among whom he was posted in his employment. No sooner had Stone published a free translation of one of these poems than he expired of a fever.

Albin and the Daughter of Mey, given in a very free English rendering, commenced a kind of revolution, of which neither the Scots Magazine, nor the deceased Stone, could ever have

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dreamed. It was not, as we can now see, the actual disclosure to the Anglophone world of hidden Gaelic verse which was so remarkable.

What Stone had done for the future of literature was rather to be found in the nature of that free translation. Between the original Gaelic and the new English some marvellous Rubicon had been crossed, and a sound both ancient and modern – properly synthetic – had been voiced. For compare this:

The sigh of a friend in the grove of Fraoch, A sigh for the hero in its rounded pale, A sigh which causes each man to mourn, And which makes each maiden weep. with Stone’s ‘translation’ of the same lines, Whence come these dismal sounds that fill our ears?

Why do the groves such lamentations send?

Why sit the virgins on the hill of tears, While heavy sighs their tender bosoms rend?

Modernity and antiquity were suddenly singing in collaboration with one another, with colossal modifications under way. An original, quite innocent and vernacular poesy was shortly to be subjected to a treatment ‘in the vast’ whose impact on the arts would determine the course of modern culture in the West. What Stone had started, Macpherson would soon bring to full fruition, under the enchanted name of Fingal.

* James Macpherson was born in 1736, or 1738, in Ruthven near Kingussie to a poor farmer and the daughter of a tacksman, herself named Macpherson. He was brought up ‘a barefit laddie’ with no experience of his boyhood recorded, except in one event that he witnessed as a young child – actions at the heart of warfare.

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Ruthven Barracks, a strategic location in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, saw complex exchanges of occupancy between the Government and Rebel sides, and was ultimately burned. He saw bloody retreats and the internal exile of his clan Chief, Cluny Macpherson, who lurked in a hideout on Ben Alder, so beautifully illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel Kidnapped.

What, spiritually, could the boy have inherited from the Government restrictions so uniformly laid upon the lands and culture of the people north of the Highland Line in the years after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden? Their dress forbidden, their arms denied them, their very language proscribed; here was a particularly modern, political imposition put upon a population unsuited to the view forward. The young Macpherson, reportedly sensible both of past romance and of the peculiar beauties of his native landscape, is thought to have developed a care in youth; a care for the historic cultural resonances of his homeland, for their seriousness and their sensibility – and most of all for their survival.

The boy goes, in 1752, to University in Aberdeen, where the philosopher Thomas Reid is the boast, but the authorities report him displaying ‘more genius than learning’. His genius leads him to poetic composition, and to a voracious consumption of both the classics and modern literature. In Aberdeen we first hear of his character – competitive and indignant – which will stand him in bad stead during his later adventures in the south.

Returning to Ruthven after an unmatriculated spell in Edinburgh University (c. 1755 – 56) Macpherson takes a post in a charity school and turns to poetic composition, influenced both by ancients and moderns, and mostly undistinguished. The Highlander was published in Edinburgh in 1758, treating of an invasion of Scotland by Danish forces in the reign of King Malcolm II. Later, a short poem On the Death of Marshal Keith gave the young

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Macpherson a little name in the literary circles of Edinburgh, to which he returned to take up literary hackwork and give private tuition.

Then, in 1759, the year of the birth of Burns, Macpherson went to Moffat in the Scottish Borders to attend a pupil’s vacation there.

One day he was playing bowls on the village green where he met John Home, ‘the author of Douglas’ – a famed literary lion, highly patronised and protected by the Scottish Tory ascendancy. Home found in Macpherson ‘an exceedingly good classical scholar’ and the two then discussed the recently noticed question of the nature of ancient Highland poetic remains.

‘Do you know of any such poems?’ asked Home. Macpherson said he knew a few, and when Home requested to see them Macpherson asked if he knew any Gaelic.

‘Not one word,’ said Home.

‘Then how can I show you them?’

‘Very easily,’ replied Home. ‘Translate one of the poems which you think a good one, and I imagine that I shall be able to form some opinion of the genius and character of the Gaelic poetry.’

Macpherson returned a few days later to present Home with The Death of Oscar. The older man was extremely impressed by what he read, and through this fragment, and a few others, Macpherson mounted the first rung of Fame’s ladder.

‘Why openest thou afresh the spring of my grief, O son of Alpin, inquiring how Oscar fell? My eyes are blind with tears; but memory beams on my heart. How can I relate the mournful death of the head of the people? Prince of the warriors, Oscar, my son!

Shall I see thee no more ...?

* James Macpherson was described by a witness in Moffat as a

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handsome man and tall, but also ‘proud, reserved and apparently of an unsocial disposition’. His thick legs required him to wear riding boots, which were unfashionable at the time. He was, in so many other important ways, an anomalous figure; far from home, thrust from his distinctive native culture, uncertainly qualified although capable as a scholar, and above all ambitious as a poet. In Moffat he first wrestles with his lifelong problem – his ambivalent relation to the poetry of others long dead. Reluctant to turn from his own poetic invention to the translation of extant material (and so seemingly to give up his hopes as an originator) he delays, and twists and turns away from the eager Home and his appetite for ancient lays rendered anew in the Saxon tongue. And yet, by means of these few fragments an opening has appeared for him; an aperture into the company of greatness.

For Home has hurried off to Edinburgh with Macpherson’s renderings, and shortly the scraps will be seen and measured by the most accomplished men of letters, the most select of all in their time, in the Athens of Caledonia: Monboddo, Kaimes, Robertson the historian, Adam Smith on occasion, through from Glasgow; Home himself, and the dictator of literary taste Dr Hugh Blair.

And among them a fat man, with ‘a face like an oyster-eating alderman’, who would outshine them all and live in a blistering sun of renown for eternity – the great David Hume, progenitor of Kant ‘the All-destroyer’. Into this world the young Macpherson was shoved.

Blair was the man to take up the case, and now Macpherson entered into long discussions with him on the question of the surviving songs and rude fragments, and the whole tradition of bardic song in the north from a cultural viewpoint. What, in short, were the manners of those to whom the senachies (the elder poets) ministered? And what was the extent of the remains?

When I learned’, wrote Blair, ‘that, besides the few pieces of

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that poetry which he had in his possession, greater and more considerable poems of the same strain were to be found in the Highlands, and were well known to the natives there, I urged him to translate the other pieces which he had, and bring them to me…. He was extremely reluctant and averse to complying with my request, saying that no translation of his could do justice to the spirit and force of the original; and that besides injuring them by translation, he apprehended that they would be very ill-relished by the public, as so very different from the strain of modern ideas, and of modern, connected, and polished poetry.’ But Macpherson obeyed, and a slight volume of sixteen pieces was brought forth, in 1760: Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Galic [sic] or Erse Language – prefaced by Blair himself.

How does it go? The poetry is seldom read today, for its tone is lamentational and requires an undistracted reader – or more, an attentive audience (for these lines are better heard than read). Not delivered in verse, but thrust into a monolithic prose, it is devoid of compelling plot, of irony and of deity. A fantastic emptiness seems the backdrop, and the effect on the ear is one of reverberation; ‘noble’, ‘sentimental’, ‘affecting’, ‘sublime’ are the habitual adjectives.

Yet the best word for this poetry is ‘ideal’. Nothing here was ever encountered in life; it is an arrested, typified and sculpted simulacrum: By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged tree, old Ossian sat on his moss; the last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul; he began and lamented the dead.

But, Oh! What voice is that? Who rides on that meteor of fire?

Green are his airy limbs. It is he! It is the ghost of Malcolm! – Rest,

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lovely soul, rest on the rock; and let me hear thy voice – He is gone, like a dream of the night.

They live. I saw them return from the chace, like a stream of light.

The sun was on their shields. Like a ridge of fire they descended the hill. Loud is the voice of the youth; the war, my love, is near.

Tomorrow the enormous Dargo comes to try the force of our race.

The race of Fingal he defies; the race of battle and wounds.

As nature is frozen, escalated and etherealised in lines such as these, so the original lays were – must have been – likewise transfigured; transfigured from their vernacular form as recited by the hearths of the north and in the western islands. Now it was as if a sudden strange sound had spread through the salons of Pompadour society, and all were stopped in their conversation; some meteor had been sighted and polite society was turning to regard this growing, this wan light, reflected as it were off a shield. Quotidian cares seemed to drop away as Grief – and a certain weird joy in it – became the constant idea. It was the commencement of the aesthetic movement, a denial of the contemporary in resort to the ‘dark brown years of other times,’ a flight into impossible realms of lost heroism, a certain affront to the realism of the curmudgeonly spirit. Thus, in these songs of love, and death, and battle, battle was first joined. The world was split; some loved, some loathed.

Macpherson’s Fragments, as Sheridan later was to point out, served as a psychological index. You could tell a man’s heart from them, even simply by mentioning the word Ossian. One can still do this today.

* Sixty pounds procured by a subscription opened in the Parliament House, a further hundred, and who knows what further monies, released Macpherson from his tutorial post. He was now headed north, with letters of introduction to the gentry and clergy of the

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northern parishes. He had a commission – to discover the lost epic that all in the circle of Blair now believed to be awaiting recovery.

This was thought a mighty song, recounting the exploits of Finn MacComhal (Fingal) and his hero-band, always in the lines of rescue and defence. It is composed by Ossian, Fingal’s son, perhaps in the third century ad, under the reign of king Cormac MacArt. It refers to the ‘Men of Lochlan’ who threaten the shores of Scotland, and the ‘Kings of the World’, whom some construe as Roman imperial forces.

The maidens are rescued, the tyrants deposed, the peoples defended or freed. Long passages describe the armies in geological terms, and warriors fall like blasted oaks. Actions are taken in the highest disinterest, the only care being for the renown of the hero when confined at last in ‘the long house’. As philosophers were expanding upon the categorical imperative of duty at this time, so our young frustrated poet was gleaning evidence in ‘rude and barbaric’ times and regions of an equal virtue, sometimes known as ‘chivalry’.

He passed through Perthshire and Argyll up into the deserts west of Inverness, thence across to Skye and out to the Hebridean isles, the Uists and Benbecula. Transcribing recited verses from those who would sing to him (and others were with him to do this, later standing as witnesses) and finding surprising amounts of written manuscript materials, he encountered ministers, lairds, smiths and shepherds on his travels. A weight of material was gathering. Most importantly, he met a poet – beyond the Muir on Benbecula; the great John MacCodrum.

‘Have you anything on the Fingalians?’ asked Macpherson, in his Speyside Gaelic.

‘If I did have,’ replied the bard in his island tongue, ‘then I should wait a terrible time for the debt to be repaid.’

It was a sally which irked the proud Macpherson, but MacCodrum

 was a fund of song. ‘I have heard him repeat, for hours together, poems which seem to me to be the same with MacPherson’s translations,’ declared Sir James MacDonald of Sleat. MacCodrum had been ‘out in the ’45’ and as a poet ‘emphasised the power of the highland broadsword as an apocalyptic agent of deliverance…’ as the modern scholar Pittock puts it. Something more than just song was surviving on the outer rim of Europe. Sounds modern and ancient could issue from one mouth, as if the intervening time – the divide between the living and the dead – were no more than a thinning membrane or a subtle sandbank marked by foam.

* Now Macpherson was a man of his time, and let there be no doubt that the cult of The Fragment, so popular in literature in somewhat later times, and so mandatory in sculpture of recent times, was in no way developed beyond the point of the antiquarian’s interest in Macpherson’s era. What his contemporary, the painter and archaeologist Gavin Hamilton, did with excavated sculptural remains found in Rome, our man did with his discovered literary shards; which is to say that when Hamilton excavated a broken statue, perhaps merely a torso, he did not valorise the predations of Visigoth or Hun by presenting these finds in mutilated (but ohso-authentic) state, rather sending them off to the restorers, who would fit the rump with the missing parts, wrought anew in the manner of the old. ‘We think it a Meleager,’ they might conjecture – and so the attributes would be added to accord with that hero’s type.

Macpherson worked likewise, making something intact from something in parts – and adding missing sections, and perhaps whole new passages. Modernity in collaboration with antiquity – a violation of the temporal divide – is how culture is defined. It blazed forth, in 1761, as Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books… composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal. Translated from the

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Galic Language by James Macpherson. A second edition was printed within a month, and many more thereafter. Soon a second epic, Temora, appeared; more mysterious, more refined still than Fingal, and perhaps almost entirely modern… like the Warwick Vase itself.

* Fortune turned both in favour of Macpherson, and against him.

His translations rode in a Rhine-journey of triumph throughout Europe, and in Germany Goethe involved his own translations of Macpherson’s work in his The Sorrows of Young Werther. France leapt in Gallic sympathy to the free, unshackled stanzas and imagined her own Revolutionary heroes welcomed into a Walhalla with Ossian’s ghost posted at its gates. Napoleon never was without a copy, and all people of sensibility (it was a particular cast of spirit) became familiar with the shells of Selma, the deer, the crags, the hundred winds on Morven, Fingal himself, the children of his pride, Ryno like a pillar of fire, the dark brow of Gaul, the bards of song, the meteors, the silent beams, the feebly-whistling grass.

Scandinavia rose in emulation, so that artists now turned to their own mythologies, to apply the forms of neo-classicism to the representation of the Eddic tales. Here is a Thor, like a new Poseidon, smiting the Midgard Serpent; here an Odin, formed like a darkened Jupiter. In Finland national survival was hung upon a similar literary endeavour. Still today the Finns celebrate Kalevala Day, when they remember the composition of their own national epic from Karelia’s gathered folk-traditions; forged (yes forged, but in the way one forges a sword) by Elias Lonnrot in 1835. And America too had been smitten, in a political way, by this model of primitive nobility, Jefferson holding it as a paradigm and declaring Ossian the greatest poet who had ever lived.

And as Ossian went to the world, so the world started to turn, in a queer codicil to the Grand Tour, in the direction of Scotland,

 the land of the Homer of the North. So we see tourists, for the first time in number, tarrying by the shores of Loch Katrine and taking little sailing boats out across the sea to gaze in stupefaction at Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. Scottish tourism had its commencement at the behest of Ossian and the leading people came: Mendelssohn of course; Bruch in due course; Schinkel the architect and Johanna Schopenhauer. These individuals arrived and gazed at these oozy shores ignorant of Macpherson’s misfortune.

What had he done wrong then, this proud, ambitious… inconsistent man? Some people believed he was a liar, and that a poetry of beauty, and above all nobility, could never have come from a barbarous people located so far from civilisation. They believed that no song could have survived the passage of fifteen hundred years through word of mouth alone, and that the entire collection of Ancient Poetry was nothing other than a modern imposture. The leading light of this opinion in the eighteenth century was Samuel Johnson, as Hugh Trevor-Roper was in the twentieth. Between them a peevish rainbow of incredulity spanned, but recent scholarship has worked steadfastly against their belief in the fraud-ideal, and proven Macpherson a more conscientious man than either was prepared to admit. They hated him not on account of any learned discovery concerning him or his works, but only for visceral reasons. Both, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘smelt Scot’ when Ossian was mentioned – and every Scot smelt bad.

Then again, wasn’t Johnny Foreigner keen on Ossian too? There!

The certainties they proclaim are laughable and their motives for stating them quite transparent. Trevor-Roper actually believed that there had been no substantial poetry in Scotland at all, ‘before the Enlightenment came to that country’.

Macpherson and Johnson fought nearly physically, the latter challenging the former to exhibit his originals as proof of the authenticity of the poems. Macpherson had already shown several

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antique manuscripts in Edinburgh, and now he placed them in the hands of his London publishers with the offer to set up a subscription to have them published. Now who would subscribe to such a purpose? Consequently these helpful papers lay, available to public inspection, in the Strand office of the publishers for some months. At no time had Macpherson refused to exhibit what written sources he had. One cannot, of course, exhibit an oral tradition, and it was in this that the Johnsonians so passionately disbelieved. After all, what, with the best will in the world, would Johnson have done before a tattered manuscript collection, borrowed from an island castle, written not only in Gaelic, but in the Renaissance form of that seemingly autochthonous, but sometimes Latinate language?

Modern scholarship bounds ever more to Macpherson’s aid, so that shortly the idea that Ossian was a great literary fraud will be known itself as a great literary fraud. And Europe’s sustained interest can only bolster a growing home appreciation of the sophistication of Macpherson’s enterprise. As Hugh MacDiarmid said: Profoundly influential in every other European country, Ossian was practically without effect on English literature, and it was the English and Anglo-Scottish elements who were most concerned to destroy its influence by proving the non-existence of the alleged originals, and, even if these had been forthcoming, would still have been most concerned… to minimise the value of the work…

It is no accident that three Scottish writers have had a far greater European vogue than any English writer – Ossian, Scott and Byron; that Ossian and Byron are relegated in English literature to a far smaller degree of importance than Europe concedes them; and that there is the same discrepancy between the English and the European estimate in the case of another Scottish writer, Carlyle.

 Macpherson, now getting rich, commenced his long, prosperous decline; his great unravelling in all the steam of growing influence and interest. He took employment as the secretary and surveyorgeneral to the Governor of the Western Provinces, travelling to Pensacola in Florida. He was only away two years, and back in London in 1766. He had a pension from his short appointment and was moving into political power, but still he had literary ambitions. A history of Great Britain and Ireland from a Celtic point of view was followed by a translation of the Iliad of Homer – and a very mixed reception that got. Returning to historical studies did little to raise his scholarly stock; David Hume wrote to Adam Smith that, of all men of parts, Macpherson had ‘the most anti-historical head in the universe’, but his History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hannover was successful, entered a second edition quickly and brought Macpherson £3000 for the copyright.

Next he became a Court employee, paid £600 a year to pressurise the newspapers against attacking the Government. He became an avid pamphleteer in support of Lord North’s America policy and in 1777 became involved in Indian affairs as they raged between the Nabob of Arcot and the East India Company. He prepared the Nabob’s case, to be put before the Company and ultimately the Government. The labour was hard, ‘for the wading through the sink of East India corruption and mismanagement is a task which adds disgust to toil’. He worked, too, in Irish affairs, presenting the Government’s position to the public in respect of the Volunteer Militias and the annulling of the restrictions on Irish manufacture.

Now he was also the London agent of the above Nabob of Arcot and everything was prosperous. His books, and above all the Ossianic material, were bringing in fantastic sums, as edition after edition flew from the bookshelves. He wanted a seat in the Commons.

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In the general election of 1780 Macpherson was returned for a Cornish borough. In 1784, when Pitt the Younger claimed the nation, Macpherson got senior membership for Camelford and had the seat until his death. Not much of a voice in Parliament, he had a splendid coach to conduct him from his townhouse in the Strand to his Putney villa. In 1785 he was received by the Prince of Wales and in the same year, Whitehead having expired, found himself on the long list for the appointment of Poet Laureate.

* The final retiral of James Macpherson brings us at last back to the pearly skies above Speyside, the scene of his childhood. Robert Adam designed him a house, still standing, called Belleville, and from this spot, just east of Kingussie he acted as a beloved laird, concerned for the welfare of every tenant on his estate. Still travelling between London and the Highlands, his political flame drew in, but he kept his Indian business in trim. In leisure he returned to the old question – the Ossian materials, and began to prepare a verbatim translation of the manuscript materials and notations he still had from his tours long ago in the north-west.

In this he might have supplied what later generations for so long failed to give: an academic, archaeological account of the remains, stripped of their corrections, their stylisations, their storm and their stress. How could this have placated the Johnsonians who still snapped at him? They had paid not the slightest attention to these things when he had displayed them in London.

In the autumn of 1795 Macpherson left London for the last time, returning to the Highlands with a plan to rest there the winter through. In the middle of February, becoming ‘languid and dispirited’ after a storm, he sank into immobility while not losing his consciousness. A prescription he disdained to take and, giving up on food, prepared to die. Praying fervently, so it seems, he expired on Tuesday 17th of February 1796 at the age of about

 sixty. Another Scottish poet would survive him until the summer (spring?) of that year; one who himself had collected many poetic remains, had himself written a poem in Ossianic duans, and had named his farm-dog Luath after the favourite hound of Fingal.

That poet was buried in Dumfries.

Macpherson’s remains were transported to Westminster Abbey, where they lie in Poet’s Corner. A little obelisk was erected near Kingussie to remember the man in Badenoch.

* Macpherson’s story is one of tragedy in perfect success. Had he been an originative poet he would not have cared for devoting so much time to translation – or transliteration, or whatever the term (is there one?) might be for what he did. An ethnic propensity to pride and care for the taking of his word, made him flare against and resist his inquisitors. In a critical age, where picking a thing to bits was the prime project, his approach declined to fit. How could there be a ‘science’ of a culture, and how can a feeling be codified, a hanging rock measured or a meteor bearing a ghost be accomodated in a society rendered stale by the smile of the sceptic?

That smile, if you wish to see it, can be seen best on Houdon’s statue of Voltaire. In many ways it is a smile of panic, directed against anything that cannot be accounted for. In yesteryear it was the expression of the Whig spirituality. Today it is seen on the face of the scientist when metaphysics is the talk. Macpherson’s fame depended on another’s genius and this gave him no end of dyspepsia. Or was the poetry, miraculously, entirely authorless?

In the later part of the nineteenth century Wallace supplanted Fingal, and an epoch of National Romanticism brought Blind Harry to the fore and monuments to the hilltops recording the historical struggle for the Scottish Crown. The Church had split apart in ’43, but how could any pre-Christian mythology

 other than the Hebraic play any part in the emblematics of Free Presbyterianism’s seemly revolt? But for Yeats, Fiona MacLeod and the painters and sculptors of the Celtic Twilight movement, we might have seen the lays of Selma, the song of Lora, lost forever.

Yet the images are immortal, and still the rolling eye of the Ossianic hero conveys the archetype of battle-fury. For refined description of typical landscape, and semblance of sunlight upon it, the poems are properly admired; by their conveyance of the look of the North wrested from time and any geography, they still might enchant, if enchantment be still legal. The body of Oscar (the son of Ossian and the Achilles of the Fingalians) borne back from Ireland to Morven on his shield, to be buried there to the sound of Ullin’s harp, still might survive as a sign, like Patroclus’s body in the Homeric repertoire, or the Sleeping Knight in the Thornthicket in the Arthurian tradition, or the recumbent Templar in the Crusading, or the procession bearing Siegfried in the Wagnerian.

A sign. A great signal of something; but of what? It is so hard to translate what we feel.

Alexander Stoddart, Paisley 2010