HAVE YOU READ OSSIAN?
Ay—here is Dr Blair's celebrated "Critical Dissertation," which in our teens we read with devoutest faith, undoubtingly believing with the venerable sage—the good old boy—that Homer and Virgil, though the gods of our young idolatry—sunbright both, in the golden morn of our imagination—were not greater or more glorious "orbs of song" than our own Ossian. Was that belief delusion all? Are the Songs of Selma but unmeaning words—idle as the inarticulate winds, the murmurs of the Harp and Voice of Cona? Let us return, if we can, to our old creed—let us abjure, if we can, the folly of wisdom—let us enjoy, if we can, though it be but for an hour, the bliss of ignorance at the feet of the simplest of all Professors that ever lectured on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres.
Whether "Fingal fought and Ossian sung" in the second century, and these be, indeed, the veritable songs; or Macpherson, from a few fragments of no great antiquity, floating on the breath of tradition, conceived the idea of his splendid forgeries, the Critical Dissertation, look at it in what light you will, is nothing less than a moral and intellectual phenomenon. Yet it gave the law to all Europe. The finest spirits on the Continent, fortified by it in their admiration of the genius displayed in these extraordinary poems, set no bounds to their enthusiasm, and Ossian in France, Germany, Italy, was all the rage.
Incur own country one seldom how hears the name; and the rant, bombast, and fustian of Macpherson, have long been the ridicule, not merely of our critics but some of our greatest living poets. Wordsworth even waxes witty—and exclaims, "All hail! Macpherson! hail to thee, sire of Ossian! The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause." He then speaks scornfully of "the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance." That is coming it rather strong; for Macpherson was a man of genius, and all the world has allowed that there is poetry in the pseudo-Ossian. Wordsworth says, "that having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature every thing is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened—yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the characters never could exist—that the manners are impossible, and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society as there depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which Macpherson defied; when with the steeps of Morvern before his eyes, he could talk so familiarly of his car-borne heroes of Morvern, which, if one may judge from its appearance at the distance of a few miles, contains scarcely an acre of ground sufficiently accommodating for a sledge to be trailed along its surface." Wordsworth quotes a single description, as an instance of what he means—and in proof that all the imagery in Ossian is spurious; but that will never do; even true poets sometimes miss it—and then Macpherson was such a confirmed mannerist, and so proud of his manner, that he frequently kept jot, jotting down images just as they came to hand—and their variety is not great—at the time unaffected by that feeling of the beautiful, which nevertheless belonged to his nature, and which has infused the finest poetry into many of his descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the mountains; and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, and was his inferior far in the perceptive, the reflective, and the
