Another parallel may perhaps be found in the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. Take, for instance, the question of manners. Politeness is a codification of the impulses of a heart that is moved by good will and consideration for others. If the impulses are not
there, the politeness is so far unreal and insincere—a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they imitated.
The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a truer and deeper
vein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples. Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland and Gray’s Bard show the literary world prepared to put itself to school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once famous tragedy of Douglas. In the summer of that year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. In the light of what we now know it is not difficult to understand the genesis of this great European fraud. Macpherson was proud of his race, which he had
celebrated in an heroic poem called The Highlander. He had interested himself in Gaelic poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue was not good, and he had by him some fragments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was flattered by Home’s appeal to him, and, feeling perhaps that the few and slight genuine poems which he could produce would hardly warrant the magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic literature, he forged a tale in poetic prose, called The Death of Oscar, and presented it to Home as a translation from the Gaelic. The poem was much admired, and Macpherson, unable now to retrace his steps without declaring himself a cheat, soon produced others from the same source. These were submitted to the literary society of Edinburgh, with the great Dr. Blair at its head, and were pronounced to be the wonder of the world. From this point onward, during a long and melancholy life, poor Macpherson was enslaved to the fraud which had its beginning in the shyness and vanity of his own character. He was bound now to forge or to fail; and no doubt the consciousness that it was his own work which
called forth such rapturous applause supported him in his labors and justified him to his own conscience. A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh bringing with him Fingal, a complete epic poem in six books. This was followed by Temora, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established.
These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern civilization. Its
most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University, were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly from himself.
The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally melancholy,—a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples, and extracted from works that were held in high esteem in the eighteenth century—Young’s Night Thoughts, Blair’s Grave, Gray’s Bard, and the soliloquies of Milton’s Satan.
Macpherson was soon challenged, and his whole life was passed in a brawl of controversy. Two famous men dismissed him contemptuously. Dr. Johnson, who knew what honesty means among scholars, treated him as an impudent