A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's, 1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) under the title "Sean Dàna," Smith frankly took liberties with his originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his own editorial labors.[24]

Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to "amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the ancient classical literatures, e.g., have always worked; or as Italian and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had never been what the Germans called a Kultursprache; and now it was the idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses.

Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them. And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly here was what it had been waiting for—"a tale of the times of old"; and the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment."

The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful. Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793), which contains two verse imitations of the same, as ecce signum:

"How long will ye round me be swelling,
O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea?
Not always in caves was my dwelling,
Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26]

In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla—An Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . . Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon: "Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from "Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . . Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the wind in the tempest."

In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has two Ossianic lines in quotation points—

"Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?"

Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German Sturm und Drang period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom, the Byronic Zerrissenheit, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs.

"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and gone recurs to the hero's mind—deeds of times when he gloried in the approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the traveler who is sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb, but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend, that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28]