J. C. ROGER.

Friars Watch,
Walthamstow.
October, 1890.

CELTIC MSS.
IN RELATION TO
THE MACPHERSON FRAUD, &c.

My attention was lately directed to a lengthy article that appeared in The Scotsman of the 12th of last November, bearing the initials of Mr. Mackinnon, Professor of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh, to whom I sent a copy of my book, Celticism a Myth, then just issued from the press. The article begins with a tribute to the assiduity of the Historiographer Royal in the cause of Celtic literature; but is plainly intended as a refutation of my statement to the effect that “It is no longer pretended that any Gaelic poetry has been preserved in early manuscripts,” &c. In citing the remark of Dr. Irving it was certainly not my intention to call down an exhibition of Professor Mackinnon’s Celtic wares—of the authenticity and character of which I am profoundly ignorant—but simply to express my conviction that the alleged manuscript documents of which Macpherson professed to give a translation did not exist. De non existentibus et non apparentibus Dr. Johnson says, eadem est ratio. There are unfortunately now no Doctor Johnsons, or Pinkertons or John Hill Burtons to deal with these possible inventions or forgeries of a later age, the perhaps “other evidences” of what the great lexicographer characterised as “Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood.” Ample time and opportunity has been afforded since 1762—the date when Macpherson first gave to the world his Ossian the Son of Fingal—to fabricate missing documents or supply others of more startling character. A pungent criticism from the pen of Mr. Hill Burton, or a crushing commentary by either of the other named critics, would probably have relegated these so-called Celtic MSS.—some of them at least—to the nothingness whence they came. It is clear that what Professor Mackinnon brings forward is not evidence, certainly not such as would be accepted in a Court of Law. There is no substantiation of the Macpherson manuscripts save the statements, and what I fear must be regarded as the fabrications, of a number of interested individuals retailed at second-hand, none of all whom can be accepted as unprejudiced witnesses. After the strictest search for the originals of Ossian, Dr. Johnson came to the conclusion that as regards Scotland and the pretensions of James Macpherson, there was not in existence “an Erse manuscript a hundred years old.” Any attempt therefore, in our day to bring into agreement this literary imposture with the difficulties which stultify all conception of its genuineness is foredoomed to failure. If, as Mr. Mackinnon alleges, it be “perfectly established” that Macpherson carried away from the North-West Highlands several Gaelic manuscripts it is equally certain he never exhibited them to anyone capable of forming a judgment as to their authenticity. “The collection proper,” it would appear, “consists of sixty-three separate parcels.” How many of these are genuine we shall probably never know. These are “Transcripts of several MSS. or portions of MSS. by Mr. McLachlan, and the Rev. Donald Mackintosh,” and collections of “Ossianic poetry made by a schoolmaster at Kilmelford,” volumes of tales which belonged to Mr. Campbell of Islay, a collection of Gaelic poetry made by a schoolmaster at Dunkeld, the MSS. whatever these may be, written in “The old Gaelic hand!” the use of which, we are told, was discontinued about the middle of the last century. “Regarding the history of the great majority of these documents,” it is said “we are ignorant”—certainly at least, I am, most profoundly. It appears however, that “The Rev. Mr. Gallie saw in Macpherson’s possession” ‘several volumes, small octavos, or rather large duodecimo in the Gaelic language and characters’! Scarcely less authentic is the fact that Lachlan Macviurich “remembers well that Clanranald made his father give up the Red book to James Macpherson,” and that Macpherson himself deposited certain MSS. with his publishers Messrs. Beckett and Dehondt which for a whole year remained in the custody of that firm. These manuscripts mentioned by Mr. Mackinnon were probably the Gaelic leases of Macleod of Rasay referred to by me in Celticism a Myth. The fact that Macpherson so prostituted his talents, and character for integrity was stated to me many years ago by an aged clergyman of the Church of Scotland, who vouched for his statement on the faith of his friend George Dempster of Dunichen, who was cognizant of the circumstance. Father Farquharson, it is alleged, made a collection of Gaelic MSS. before 1745, the last leaves of which were used to kindle a stove fire in the Roman Catholic College at Douay, a circumstance, as I think, not greatly to be deplored, while the “illiterate descendant” of the Seanachies attached to the family of Clanranald describes the dispersion of the manuscript library accumulated by his ancestors, and the fate of certain parchments [? old leases] which were cut down for tailors’ measuring tapes. “He himself” (the descendant of the Seanachies) “had possession of some parchments after his father’s death,” but not being able to read, these disappeared from view. A valuable witness truly in the identification of doubtful MSS. “Such acts of vandalism,” we are told, “are not likely to occur again.” Probably not. Like Joshua arresting the Sun and the Moon, they are “things that have once been done but can be done no more.” The fact of the dispersion, however, and the fate of the parchments, leases, title deeds, literary treasures or by whatever name they may be called, rests on the testimony of this Celtic ignoramus who, it is to be feared, would not be too particular in any relation concerning the “glories and greatness” of his country, his personal consequence, or the departed grandeur of his clan. I well remember, many years ago, meeting with an ignorant Highlander of some property, who offered to sell for ten pounds an ancient claymore, with a pretentious, but unauthenticated pedigree, for which he declared, with the voluntary accompaniment of an oath, he had previously declined “A Sousand pounds.” It is my experience that to persons of this class it comes more natural to state a falsehood than to speak the truth. We all remember Charles Surface’s exculpatory witness in The School for Scandal, “Oh yes, I swear.” Mr. Mackinnon states that “The Gaelic text of Ossian which James Macpherson handed over to Mr. Mackenzie, and which was given to the editor of the edition of 1807, has disappeared.” How very odd that manuscripts on which the human eye never rested should thus so strangely disappear! Can that be said to disappear which was never visible? Of the poems of Ossian, Dr. Irving says, “We are required to believe that these were composed in the third century; and that by means of oral tradition, they were delivered by one generation to another for the space of nearly fifteen hundred years. If this account could be received as authentic, if these poems could be regarded as genuine, they must be classed among the most extraordinary effort of human genius. That a nation so rude in other arts, and even unacquainted with the use of letters, should yet have carried the most elegant of all arts to so high a degree of perfection, would not only be sufficient to overturn every established theory, but would exceed all the possibilities of rational assent. But if we could suppose an untaught barbarian capable of combining the rules of ancient poetry with the refinements of modern sentiment one difficulty is indeed removed; but another difficulty scarcely less formidable still remains—By what rare felicity were many thousand verses, only written on the frail tablet of memory, to be safely transmitted through fifty generations of mankind? If Ossian could compose epic poems on the same model as Homer, how was it possible for them to preserve their original texture through the fearful vicissitudes of nearly fifteen centuries? * * * * It is utterly incredible that such poems as Fingal and Temora, consisting each of several thousand lines were thus transmitted from the supposed age of Ossian to the age of Macpherson.” “It is” Dr. Irving continues “no longer pretended that any Gaelic poetry has been preserved in early manuscripts; and indeed the period when Gaelic can be traced as a written language is comparatively modern.” “That many poems and fragments of poems,” he goes on to say, “were preserved in the Highlands of Scotland cannot however be doubted; and it is sufficiently ascertained that Macpherson was assiduously employed in collecting such popular reliques, some of which had perhaps existed for many ages. From the materials which he had thus procured he appears to have fabricated the various works which he delivered to the public under the name of Ossian, and afterwards to have adjusted the Gaelic by the English text.” “The ground upon which Hume finally decided against the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, was the impossibility of any man of sense imagining that they should have been orally preserved ‘during fifty generations, by the rudest, perhaps of all European nations; the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled.’” Such is the historian Hume’s estimate of the Macpherson fraud as stated by the Edinburgh Review, and such the beggarly array of evidence on which, according to the abettors of Macpherson, the honour and glory of Scotland, must rest in all time to come. The Scotch are a stubborn race on which to operate, especially in matters that concern their nationality. They have conceived the idea that in the dark ages—dark to all but them—their countrymen, a Celtic race, were skilled in the sciences and acquainted with art. This as an article of faith has hardened into a conviction not to be shaken, and is that which, in their view, distinguishes Scotland above all competitors. In it, in the remote ages of the past, there existed culture and refinement rivalling that of the most literary nations of antiquity whether Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek or Roman. The roving Northmen, according to their account, were but plundering pirates, and other nations barbarians. No evidence, however overwhelming, will alter or modify this opinion. Not on any terms will they be induced to give up their preconceptions. Philologers and Ethnologists, Professors, and specialists, et hoc genus omne, are called to the rescue, while they refuse to look at the clearest facts. When their favourite idol begins to shake they rush into the market-place crying “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” It is impossible to doubt that Macpherson was an impudent impostor. When his veracity was impugned no simpler method of clearing his reputation from the aspersions cast upon it could have been devised than the very reasonable plan suggested by Dr. Johnson, that he should place the manuscripts in the hands of the professors at Aberdeen where there were persons capable of judging of their authenticity. The manuscripts were never produced, and in admitting this fact the defenders of Macpherson resign the whole question. “To refuse,” Dr. Johnson says, “to gratify a reasonable curiosity is the last refuge of impudent mendacity.” Dr. Johnson’s letter to this vain-glorious boaster repelling a threat of personal violence is a master-piece of contemptuous scorn and defiance. “Mr. James Macpherson, I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel, and what I cannot do myself the law will do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian. What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture. I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities since your Homer are not so formidable, and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.”

We are told that the subject of the Pictish language has been thoroughly discussed by Dr. W. F. Skene in his Four Ancient Books of Wales, that, in addition to Pean Fahel, the sole Pictish word formerly known he has discovered four other distinct words, besides a number of syllables entering into proper names; and from all these he deduces the opinion that Pictish “Is not Welsh, neither is it Gaelic; but it is a Gaelic dialect partaking largely of Welsh forms” whatever that may mean. “More especially,” we are told, “he holds that Pictish as compared with Gaelic, was a Low dialect, that it differed from the Gaelic in much the same way that Low German differs from High.” It is perhaps unnecessary to add that I regard this supposed solution of the Pictish difficulty as so much figment. It is simply the arbitrary conclusion of a man looking into a mill stone, and giving a deliverance in regard to which he is in no more commanding position than the most illiterate specimen of humanity to be found in the slums of the Northern Metropolis. On the other side of the question it is open to me to state that the Pictish words which Mr. Skene persuades himself he has discovered, and which on his own shewing are neither Welsh nor Gaelic but, belonging to a Low dialect of the latter may after all be only the obsolete remains of an early Gothic speech. The ruler of the Picts about the end of the sixth century, it is said, was Brude, the son of Mailcon, who died in 586. The most active of all the Pictish sovereigns, according to the received accounts, was Hungus or Ængus who began to reign in 730. In so far then as these names may not be absolute myth, they may be claimed as Scandinavian. With Brude compare the Norse personal names Brodi, Breid-r, and Brodd-r (the r final separated by a hyphen being merely the sign of the nominative case). Mailcon is the united Scandinavian personal names of Miöl and Kon-r. With Hungus or Ængus compare the Scoto-Norwegian names Magnus Anguson, and Angus Magnuson.

The Norwegians in Man, in the Hebrides, and in the North, and North-Western Highlands were confessedly the dominant and more numerous race, and there for upwards of four centuries held uninterrupted sway.

Did the Norwegian colonists eventually go off in vapour, leaving behind them only a native residuum speaking a purely Celtic dialect freed from all taint of the Northman’s language after the close contact of so many centuries? If the Norwegian element was not so sublimated, but as Pinkerton affirms, and which I believe, continues in the modern population of those portions of the United Kingdom, what becomes of the purity of the so-called “Primitive Celtic tongue”? Assuming that it was Celts among whom the Norwegians settled, is it possible to conceive that men of such force of character as the Northmen made no lasting impression on the speech of the wretched Celtic inhabitants whom they trampled under foot? Despite the researches of philologers is it rational to conclude that what is now called Celtic can on any intelligible hypothesis be the primeval speech of the unlettered savages who before the advent of the Romans had been driven into the western portion of the Island by the Belgae? “It is not in nature,” the Saturday Reviewer says, “that people should accept Mr. Roger’s or Pinkerton’s opinion in preference to the universally held belief that the Celtic speech is a language of the Indo-European family of speech,” &c. But it is not alone Mr. Roger and Pinkerton with whom the Reviewer has to deal. The late Lord Neaves, an eminent Scotch judge and antiquary, held an opinion very much akin to that of Pinkerton, that the Erse, and Gaelic, and Manx dialects, if not entirely a form of obsolete Gothic speech, contain at least a very large admixture of the northern tongue. The editor of the Athenæum too, in reviewing Skene’s Highlanders of Scotland, draws attention to the fact of the striking resemblance between the oldest Erse monuments and those dialects confessedly Teutonic, holding this decisive of the question that the Scots were Germans. On the same side of the question is the strongly expressed opinion of the late Dr. R. Angus Smith, F.R.S. “I consider,” he says, “those who hold the nations called Celtic and those called Teutonic, as one race, to be simply abolishing the knowledge we get from history, and refusing to look at very clear facts.” I am not however going to quarrel with the Saturday Reviewer, who virtually concedes all for which I contend, that the Celts were entirely without art or culture, of which more hereafter. On the question of civilizing influences we have the testimony of Professor Kirkpatrick, of the Scotch Bar, a gentleman of well-known scholarly accomplishments, who occupies the Chair of Constitutional Law and History in the University of Edinburgh. “I have long been of opinion,” he writes, “that we owe the whole of our civilization to Scandinavian and Teutonic ancestors, and partly to Roman influence, and your very interesting volume confirms that opinion.” There is still another phase of the question with which the philological critic has to deal, and this is, that only where the Northmen settled are found those remains of what is called Celtic speech. “The Northmen formed colonies in Wales, in Cornwall, in Brittany, in Ireland, in the Highlands and islands of Scotland, and in the Isle of Man, and there only do we find those dialects usually known as Celtic.” I do not pretend to explain this, but I state it as an outside fact, which, in my view, it is incumbent on the Celtic philologer to explain. It is, of course, impossible to reach any confident conclusion as to what may have been the language on which the Northman grafted his Teutonic speech, though it must be obvious to every unprejudiced enquirer, that those dialects must now be very much mixed and altered and corrupted from close contact for many centuries with the language of a dominant race. Having regard to this fact, the question arises whether “the universally held belief” referred to by the Saturday Review, be not founded on the Gothic accretions derived from the Northmen, rather than on the structural peculiarities of the original language of the people among whom the Northmen settled. It is evident from the remarks of Professor Max Muller that too much importance is not to be attached to what is told us by the Celtic philologer. “Celtic words,” he says, “may be found in German, Slavonic, and even Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their number is much smaller than commonly supposed. A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken by Celtic enthusiasts for original words from which German and Latin might in their turn be derived.”

Professor Kirkpatrick’s opinion suggests a natural connection between the Celtic myth, and M. du Chaillu’s account of The Viking Age. The Scotsman, in its review of this book, wonders what Professor Freeman will say, and we are not long left in doubt. He looks down upon M. du Chaillu from a lofty eminence, evidently regarding him with something like pitying contempt. He is not sure he should have thought the doctrine set forth by M. du Chaillu worthy of serious examination, but for the singular relation in which it stands to Mr. Seebohm’s “slightly older teaching,” in his book called The English Village Community. Mr. Seebohm’s views, he says, are the evident result of honest work at original materials, and eminently entitled to be considered, and if need be, answered. But obviously both are eminently objectionable. Though differing in method, they rival each other in daring and absurdity. The only question is whether M. du Chaillu’s theory need be discussed at all. Professor Freeman has decreed this, and after so supreme a master in the art of criticism it is vain to question it.

It will thus be seen he lauds the one in order to disparage the other. He compliments Mr. Seebohm and spits contemptuously in M. du Chaillu’s face. I am Jupiter, and by contrast in the scale of intelligence, you, M. du Chaillu, are only a black beetle. “The strife in its new form,” he tells us, “has become more deadly.” M. du Chaillu threatens to wipe out entirely Professor Freeman’s antiquated conception of a Saxon invasion, and the latter is constrained to worship in secret the divinity he pretends to despise. Professor Freeman’s views will be found in The Teutonic Conquest in Gaul and Britain. He has had his say, and “if anybody cares to know what that say is, he may read it for himself.” Professor Freeman has written what he has written, and woe to him who reads to controvert. It does not, however, follow that what Professor Freeman has written is necessarily the gospel of English history. Both theories alike, it would appear—Mr. Seebohm’s and M. du Chaillu’s—throw aside the recorded facts of history! What are the recorded facts of history in relation to the so-called Saxon invasion? The Saxon invasion was doubted in the days of Bishop Nicolson, who refers to the short and pithy despatch Sir William Temple makes of the Saxon times, and the contempt with which he speaks of its historians. The good Bishop himself is constrained to admit he does not know what has become of the book written by King Alfred against corrupt judges, nor of that gifted King’s collection of old Saxon sonnets.[1] The late J. M. Kemble taught the learned world to believe that, “the received accounts of the Saxon immigration, and subsequent fortunes, and ultimate settlement are devoid of historical truth in every detail.” Here is an eminent scholar who, having examined the subject with perfect historical candour, regarded the Saxon invasion as fiction and fabrication from beginning to end, and who surely may be accepted as a valuable witness. To the same purpose we have the statement of Mr. James Rankin, F.R.A.S., “Who the Saxons were, or when they arrived, or where they settled, is a subject on which tradition is entirely silent, for of written history there is none.” Professor Freeman says that M. du Chaillu has put forth two very pretty volumes with abundance of illustrations of Scandinavian objects. He contemns the pictures but admires the frames. Most of them, however, he adds, will be found in “various Scandinavian books,” but he does not suggest that the “various Scandinavian books” are not readily accessible to the English reader.