A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 25

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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.s.sistants, 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 pa.s.sage 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]

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 Macc.u.mhail. 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 t.i.tle "Sean Dana," 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 a.s.sertion 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 cla.s.sical 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 h.o.a.ry 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 repet.i.tions, 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 ent.i.tled "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," "Cerd.i.c.k," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a composition which he called "G.o.dred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and one from the ancient British, which he ent.i.tled "The Heilas." He did not catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sions, 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 n.o.ble 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 ill.u.s.trious 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-G.o.d whom my hand had emanc.i.p.ated."[28]

In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender pa.s.sage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the sh.o.r.e. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul."

It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and of the primeval forest. Here is a pa.s.sage from his "Genie du Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs, vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long gra.s.ses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler.

Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber, the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again."

In Byron's pa.s.sion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a consciousness of Ossian in reading such pa.s.sages as the famous apostrophe to the ocean in "Childe Harold"--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"--

Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed _locus cla.s.sicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning,

"O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30]

or the description of the storm in the Jura:

"And this is in the night: Most glorious night!

Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30]

Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr.

Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repet.i.tions of the Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point, indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Gotzism"[32]

_i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which "Werther" gave utterance, and has a.s.sociations with works of a very different kind, such as the fictions of Richardson and Sterne. In England, Scott became the foremost representative of "Gotzism," and Byron of "Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes of "Manfred," "Childe Harold," and "The Corsair" were the latest results of the "Il Penseroso"

literature, and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened a reaction.

Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in England are the numerous experiments at versifying MacPherson's prose. These were not over-successful and only a few of them require mention here. The Rev.

John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, "attempted" "Carthon," "The Death of Cuthullin" and "Darthula" in heroic couplets, in 1769; and "Fingal" in 1771. In the preface to his "Fingal," he maintained that there was no reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's "Ossian." "Fingal"--which seems to have been the favorite--was again turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author quotes Dr. Blair's _dictum_ that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil "in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native majesty of pa.s.sion." National pride enlisted most of the Scotch scholars on the affirmative side of the question, and made the authenticity of Ossian almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were merely respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be guessed from a half dozen lines:

"When Moran, one commissioned to explore The distant seas, came running from the sh.o.r.e And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps.

Innumerable foes the land invade, And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'"

Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional ballad stanzas, thus:

"But many a fair shall melt with woe At thy soft strain in future days, And many a manly bosom glow, Congenial to thy lofty lays."

These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814 "Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33]

The pa.s.sage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection.

Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem, that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs.

Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of sh.e.l.ls in her feather dressing-room."

The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen der Volker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay "Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker" written in 1773. Schiller was one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards"; and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German literary history as _Bardengebrull_. MacPherson's personal history need not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a government pamphleteer, writing against Junius and in favor of taxing the American colonies. He was appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in Parliament for the borough of Camelford, and built a handsome Italian villa in his native parish; died in 1796, leaving a large fortune, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to render the "Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was overwhelmed with ridicule, and probably did much to increase the growing disbelief in the genuineness of "Fingal" and "Temora."

[1] "Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edinburgh, MDCCLX. 70 pp.

[2] This was sent him by MacPherson and was a pa.s.sage not given in the "Fragments."

[3] From "Carthon."

[4] Scandinavia

[5] An unconscious hexameter.

[6] From "Fingal" book ii.

[7] See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his "Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1870.

[8] This story as been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyce's poem of "Deirdre," Boston, 1876.

[9] See "Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in Scotland, chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872.

Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and published at Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas MacLauchlan, with a learned introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene.