A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

"Or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."

Laing's method proves too much and might be applied with like results to almost any literary work. And, in general, it is hazardous to draw hard and fast conclusions from internal evidence of the sort just reviewed. Taken altogether, these objections do leave a strong bias upon the mind, and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian," as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been thoroughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was put before the public. But remembering Beowulf and the Norse mythology, one might hesitate to say that the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always insensible to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melancholy is a Celtic monopoly.

The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case was his refusal or neglect to produce his originals. The testimony of those who helped him in collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, i.e., he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he manipulated them—and to what extent—by piecing fragments together, lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts, and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the Literary Journal of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14]

But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts were to be seen; or that—being ignorant of Gaelic—it would have helped them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, e.g., Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them—and I believe him to have none—are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if they exist, but they were never shown. De non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio." And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to doubt."

Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell thinks that under this double process of distillation—a copy by MacPherson and then a copy by Ross—"the ancient form of the language, if it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and meaning, and a substitution of whole words."

But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,' published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18] then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call 'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole matter—in 1862—is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press; published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson and that "he and other translators afterward worked at it and made a Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies according to the translator's skill and knowledge of Gaelic."[21] On the other hand, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr. Archibald Clerk, are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted the Highland Society's text in 1870,[22] with a literal translation of his own on alternate pages and MacPherson's English at the foot of the page, believes implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the Gaelic originals. "MacPherson," he writes, "got much from manuscripts and much from oral recitation. It is most probable that he has given the minor poems exactly as he found them. He may have made considerable changes in the larger ones in giving them their present form; although I do not believe that he, or any of his assistants, added much even in the way of connecting links between the various episodes."

To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson's English with Mr. Clerk's, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a translation from the former. The reflection in a mirror cannot be more distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, e.g., the closing passage of the second "Duan," or book, of "Fingal."

"An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."—MacPherson.

"A ruthless arrow found his breast.
His sleep is by thy side, Galbina,
Where wrestles the wind with ocean.
The sailor sees their graves as one,
When rising on the ridge of the waves."
—Clerk

But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says: "The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23]