Poems of Ossian/Introduction
INTRODUCTION.
From the earliest ages mankind have been lovers of song and tale. To their singers in times of old men looked for comfort in sorrow, for inspiration in battle, and for renown after death. Of these singers were the prophets of Israel, the poets and rhapsodes of ancient Greece, the skalds of the Scandinavian sea-kings, and the bards of the Celtic race. The office was always most honourable, the bard coming next the hero in esteem; and thus, first of the fine arts, was cultivated the art of song.
Down to quite a recent time the household of no Highland chief was complete without its bard, to sing the great deeds of the race's ancestors. And to the present day, though the locomotive and the printing press have done much to kill these customs of a more heroic age, it is not difficult to find in the Highland glens those who can still recite a "tale of the times of old."
During the troubles of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, of the Civil Wars and Revolution in the seventeenth, and of the Parliamentary Union and Jacobite Rebellions in the early part of the eighteenth, the mind of Scotland was entirely engrossed with politics, and the Highlands themselves were continually unsettled. No thought, therefore, could be given to the possibility of literary remains existing among the clans. It was only in the latter half of last century that secure government began to allow leisure for the growth of that culture which a few years later was to earn for Edinburgh the title of "The Modern Athens;" and then it occurred to some of the men of letters in the Scottish capital to examine the value of the traditional lore which was known to survive in the Highlands and western isles.
At length, however, the Rev. John Home, author of the tragedy of "Douglas," found a means of furthering his enquiries on the subject of Celtic poetry. At the little watering-place of Moffat, among the Dumfriesshire hills, in the summer of 1759, he met a young Highland schoolmaster named James Macpherson, who was travelling as tutor to Mr. Graham the younger, of Balgowan, and who had in his possession several transcripts of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the north. Mr. Home obtained translations of one or two of these poems, and finding them to be of high and singular beauty, forwarded the manuscripts to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University. The latter gentleman was at once deeply interested in the discovery, and pressed Macpherson to furnish translations of the remaining pieces in his possession. This, Dr. Blair has recorded, Macpherson was very unwilling to do, declaring that they were so entirely different from the style of modern poetry as to have little chance of gaining attention, while the fire and force of the original Gaelic must be altogether lost in any translation he might be able to make. These objections, however, were finally overcome, and as a result Dr. Blair published at Edinburgh, in 1760, a small volume entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language.
By this publication an intense interest was at once excited among the literati of Edinburgh. Forthwith, at a dinner of the patrons and professors of literature and antiquities in the Scottish metropolis, it was resolved to institute a search for further poetic remains, and a subscription was made for the purpose. Upon enquiry the young schoolmaster was found likely to prove a suitable agent for the enterprise. Born at Kingussie in Inverness-shire in 1738, he was sufficiently familiar with the Celtic language and character, while an education for the kirk at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh had furnished him with the scholarship necessary for the selection and translation of such works of merit as might be discovered. He had also already shewn some evidence of literary taste. A few poetical pieces by him had appeared in the Scots Magazine; he had published in 1758 a poem in six cantos, entitled The Highlander; and he had written an ode upon the arrival of the Earl Marischal in Scotland. All these facts pointed him out as qualified in a marked degree for the task, and accordingly he was commissioned to undertake a tour through the Highlands for the purpose of collecting and preserving the remains of Gaelic poetry.
Before the rebellion of 1745 the chief amusement of the Highlanders during the long dark nights of winter had been the recital of ancient tales and poems; and many old people who remembered these still survived when Macpherson made his enquiries. He travelled through such remote parts of north-west Inverness-shire, Skye, and the western isles as were most likely to retain these traditionary remains in their most perfect form; and it was not long before he discovered that the finest of the compositions were attributed to Ossian, the son of Fingal, a warrior bard of distant antiquity. For the collation and translation of the poems, and for the determining of obsolete words, the collector engaged the assistance of Mr. Gallie, afterwards minister in Badenoch, as well as of Mr, Macpherson of Strathmashie. Presently, by the advice of friends, he removed to London; and there, in 1762, under the patronage of Lord Bute, he published the first results of his labour. These were two volumes of literal prose translations entitled Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books, with other lesser poems.
At that time the dominating figure among the literary coteries of the metropolis was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eminent dictionary maker; and his violent prejudices against everything Scottish were greatly in fashion. Londoners, besides, had not forgotten or forgiven the panic into which they had been thrown seventeen years previously by the march to Derby of the Highland host under the young Chevalier. The fact, therefore, that a book hailed from the north side of the Border was by no means, just then, a passport to its kindly reception. The coldness with which Hume, the most illustrious historian of his time, had lately been received, and the furious attacks which were killing poor Smollett, the greatest novelist of the day, sufficiently indicate the existing attitude of the London critics towards Scottish men of letters. When, therefore, a translator appeared, professing to have found among the mountaineers of Scotland, whom it was the fashion of the hour to ridicule, the remains of a bard who should take rank among the greatest of the world's singers, it was not at all likely that his work would pass unchallenged. It was, indeed, as if a waterspout had suddenly discharged itself into the red-hot crater of a volcano. For a short time there was the silence of utter astonishment, and then the whole energies of literary London arose to destroy and expel the intruder. To Dr. Johnson and his anti-Scottish friends the discovery of such works of genius among the people of the "barbarous north" was so astonishing that they flatly declared it impossible; and at once there arose upon the subject as great a controversy, probably, as has ever raged in the arena of letters.
In the following year Macpherson printed a second instalment of translations—Temora, an Epic Poem in eight books, with other poems; and, as a specimen of the materials upon which his work was based, he annexed the original Gaelic to one of its divisions. With this publication Macpherson's contribution to the controversy may be said to have ended. It is true, he published a revised and rearranged version of the translations in 1773. But, disgusted by the treatment he had received, he refused during his life to print another word of the originals. Only at his death it was found that he had left a thousand pounds to defray the cost of their publication. From various causes the appearance of the Gaelic text was delayed, and its issue, which would have gone far to set the question at rest, was only effected by the Highland Society of London, in 1807. By that time the forgeries of Chatterton had prejudiced the public mind, the war of words was over, and the ear of England was throbbing with the greater thunders of Trafalgar Bay.
The rest of Macpherson's career may be briefly sketched. In 1764 he went out to Pensacola as private secretary to the Governor there. A difference, however, arising, he gave up the position, made a tour through the West India Islands, and returned to London in 1766 with a pension of £200 a-year. In 1771 a volume of Gaelic antiquities which he published under the title of An Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, was most bitterly attacked upon its appearance. This, with the similar abusive reception accorded his prose translation of the Iliad of Homer, published in two volumes in 1773, serves to shew that the attitude towards him of the literary cliques of London had not altered in ten years. Better fortune must have attended the publication in 1775 of his History of Great Britain, from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover, with its companion volumes of Original Papers; for he is said to have received for this work the sum of £3000. The Government also employed him to write two pamphlets in defence of their action in the dispute and rupture with America. And on being appointed agent in Britain for the Nabob of Arcot he was provided with a seat in Parliament. Failing in health at last, he retired to Belleville, a mansion he had built in Alvie, Inverness-shire, where he died on the 17th February 1796. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Upon the first appearance of Macpherson's translations of Ossian, the foremost, naturally, in the attack upon their authenticity was Dr. Samuel Johnson. The great lexicographer was followed, however, by such a northern supporter as Dr. Smith of Campbelltown. The natural sceptic bias of Hume's mind led him to take the same side. And Mr. Malcolm Laing, author of a set of "Notes and Illustrations" to Ossian, printed at Edinburgh in 1805, finally professed to set the question at rest by showing how everything in Macpherson's translations had been stolen from such sources as the Bible and Homer. An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, by W. Shaw, A.M., published in London in 1781, also condemned Macpherson's work as spurious; while Pinkerton, finding that the authenticity of Ossian would disprove some of his cherished theories regarding the early races of Scotland, made occasion in the second volume of his history to discredit the poems as forgeries. Of later writers Lord Macaulay has inherited the anti-Scottish prejudices of Dr. Johnson with doubled virulence, and this to the suppression of fact in at least one instance. In the thirteenth chapter of his history he forgets the existence of Johnson, and describes an enthusiasm for things Scottish existing at the time of Ossian's publication. That enthusiasm only arose forty years later with the rising star of Walter Scott.
Time itself has answered many of these attacks. Dr. Johnson's declaration in his Journey to the Western Islands that "the poems of Ossian never existed in any other form than that which we have seen," and that "the editor or author never could show the original, nor can it be shewn by any other," was refuted by the publication, already referred to, of the Gaelic originals in 1807.[1] Mr. Alexander Macdonald, in a volume on the subject published at Liverpool in 1805, sufficiently met Laing's sweeping assertions and unhesitating inferences. And the "dissertations" of Dr. Blair, Dr. Graham, Sir John Sinclair, and many others, offered abundant argument supporting the authenticity of the Ossianic poems.
The alternative objection urged both by Johnson and Hume against the bona-fide character of Macpherson's translations, was that the human memory is incapable of retaining compositions of such length. And in these days of printed books, almanacs, and universal note-taking, the objection presents some plausibility. The same argument was urged in 1795 by the German professor, F. A. Wolf, and others, against the authenticity of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. But Macpherson, it should be remembered, did not profess to have gathered his materials complete from the recitation of a single individual. He found them in scattered fragments, and exercised his judgment in piecing them together. A parallel case might be cited in the Kalewala of Finland, an epic poem of which Dr. E. Lönnrost collected and published in 1849 no fewer than 22,793 verses which had been preserved by memory alone from the remotest antiquity. Even had the case been otherwise, the prodigious memories of Scott and Macaulay, well known in later years, are enough to prove such a feat as the remembrance of Ossian's entire poems by one mind possible. Among the humbler classes, too, "long" memories are by no means uncommon. If the curious will turn to the diary kept by Robert Burns during his Border tour in 1787, they will find that upon the poet's visiting Jedburgh he was taken to see a certain "Esther," who could repeat Pope's Homer from beginning to end. No one doubts now that immense powers of memory can be attained by practice. To this day, in remote Scottish kirks the members are accustomed to hear every Sunday from the pulpit one and sometimes more sermons of an hour's duration, which have been committed to memory during the previous week by the minister. To these instances should be added the fact noticed by more than one critic, that the sequence and cadence of the Gaelic verses afforded a help to the memory equalled by the compositions of no other race. There is proof, besides, that an organisation existed for the express purpose of preserving these poems. Julius Cæsar (De Bel. Gal. vi. 13) and other historians have left it on record that, for the purpose of getting their traditional lore "by heart," a probation of from nine to twenty years had to be served to the Druid priesthood, of whom the bards were a branch. The Spartans, it will be remembered, disdaining writing, preserved their laws for centuries by a similar method. The objection upon the score of memory may therefore very fairly be considered disposed of.
The unsettled state of the Highlands, which Dr. Johnson urged as an additional hindrance to the authentic preservation of oral traditions for long periods, possesses even less force at the present day as an argument. The survival of the unwritten Iliad and Odyssey through the troubles of early Greece might be matter for equal scepticism. Rather were these lonely and secluded glens, inaccessible to enemies, and the home of an unmixed race, proud of its antiquity, the most likely places for such traditions to be preserved. It would be an interesting study, indeed, to discover how much of the world's romance has come out of mountainous countries. In flat and peaceful lands life is easy and eventless and commonplace. The art of Holland deals largely with eating and drinking. But among the hills men dwell alone with nature. The plunging roar of the torrent, valley answering valley with the reverberations of the thunder, the mountains themselves rolling their purple billows upward into the blue—all fill the soul with the sublime; and life under the Bens grows sombre and sweet, and keeps and gathers memories. To the present day in the Highlands are to be heard recited compositions of undoubted beauty, descended from the remotest antiquity. The Dean of Lismore's Book was engrossed before 1537, yet the editor of the printed edition of 1862 was able to append to one of its contents (p. 42) a version of the poem, "taken down from the oral recitation of a Cristina Sutherland, an old woman in the county of Caithness, in the year 1856." And the beautiful story of Grainne and Diarmid, a legend common to Ireland and Scotland, also included by the worthy Dean (p. 30), may still be heard in the traditionary Gaelic in its native district of Benderloch.
Hume, again, in his well-known letter to Dr. Blair, demanded proof that there existed in the memory of the Highlands any Gaelic poem corresponding exactly and completely to a translation by Macpherson. And it is true that with all the researches of the Highland Society on the subject, detailed in the "Report" of their special committee published at Edinburgh in 1805, no such word-for-word copy could be found. Versions of closely similar compositions, and fragments of the literal originals only, were discovered. The same argument, however, applies with much stronger force to such a collection of ancient ballads as Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which does not suffer the overwhelming disadvantage of being a translation. It is certain that no literal copy of any one of the ballads collected and printed by Sir Walter Scott could have been found by Yarrow or among the Cheviot hills. The printed versions, as is well known, were collated by Scott from the recitals of various persons, and bear only part resemblance to the tradition of each. In the same way Macpherson collated the various copies of ancient poems which he managed to procure. Such gaps in the poems as occur, for instance, in "Colna-dona," and the first duan of "Cath-loda," offer testimony to his style of work. This fact, together with the difficulty translation inevitably introduces, besides the altering of titles and phoneticising of names which Macpherson effected, was quite sufficient to preclude the possibility of any of his transcripts being found complete and exact in the original. The Report of the Highland Society alludes to this circumstance. It says (p. 152), "The advantage he (Macpherson) possessed, which the Committee began its inquiries too late to enjoy, of collecting from the oral recitation of a number of persons, now no more, a very great number of the same poems on the same subjects, and then collating these different copies or editions, if they may be so called, rejecting what was spurious or corrupted in one copy, and adopting from another something more genuine and excellent in its place, afforded him an opportunity of putting together what might fairly enough be called an original whole, of much more beauty, and with much fewer blemishes, than the Committee believe it now possible for any person, or combination of persons, to obtain."
Presuming upon this difficulty, Macpherson's opponents did not scruple to bring against him charges of the basest sort. Not content with doubting his faithfulness as a translator, they asserted that he had stolen much of his work from the masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. These critics boldly attacked the finest passages of the translations, and, upon the strength of a fancied resemblance to passages elsewhere, declared them plagiarisms. The acmé of this kind of criticism was reached by the publication of the edition of Ossian already alluded to with "Notes and Illustrations" by Mr. Malcolm Laing. Of Mr. Laing it has been said by a previous editor that he "is one of those detectors of plagiarisms, and discoverers of coincidences, whose exquisite penetration and acuteness can find anything anywhere." Laing asserted in his preface that he had traced "every simile and almost every poetical image" in Macpherson's translations "to their source;" and his charges of minute, learned, and painstaking ingenuity in plagiarism would, if substantiated, prove Macpherson the most marvellous phenomenon of literary industry, sagacity, and intelligence the world has ever seen.
An instance or two of this ingenious detective faculty of Mr. Laing, taken quite at random, may show the reliance to be placed on his criticism. In the second book of "Fingal" occurs the simile, "Faintly he raised his feeble voice like the gale of the reedy Lego." The first part of this Laing derived from the Iliad, xxiii., 105, ὤχετο τετριγῡια (with a faint shriek he was gone). The second part, "the gale of reedy Lego," the critic felt certain Macpherson had borrowed from his own lines in "The Highlander"—
As breezes sing through reeds their shrilly song."
Again, in the "War of Caros" occurs the simile, "It is like the field, when darkness covers the hills around, and the shadow grows slowly on the plain of the sun." This Laing considered stolen from Virgil's
(Fall longer shadows from the lofty hills.)
Such slender proofs, it is evident, will not bear the superstructure their author sought to build upon them. Closer resemblances, it is true, may be found. Thus Laing and other critics professed to have discovered in Milton the original of the magnificent Address to the Sun at the end of "Carthon." But it should be remembered that something more than mere likeness is necessary in order to establish a charge of literary theft. As a matter of fact, one of the correspondents of the Highland Society, writing in April 1801, forwarded a copy of Ossian's Address to the Sun which he had taken down thirty years previously from the recitation of an old man in Glenlyon. This old man had learnt it in his youth, long before Macpherson was born, from people in the same glen; and his manuscript, when translated, proved almost word for word identical with the passage in "Carthon." Few people nowadays will deny that it was as natural in Ossian to sing of "white-bosomed Colma" as it was in Homer to describe "white-armed Nausicaa." Yet resemblances like these were sufficient to the minds of such critics as Mr. Laing to prove their charges of plagiarism. Ossian dare not note a weeping woman, because Andromache once wept at Troy; and his chieftains must not be strong and valiant, since Samson once fought at Ramath.
Nothing in literature, perhaps, is easier than to accuse a writer of plagiarism, and to summon by way of proof certain similarities of expression, and even of thought. Nearly all great authors have, at one time or another, been subjected to this kind of detraction. It is on record that an ingenious critic once sought to prove the Æneid Erse, from the likeness in sound and meaning between Arma virumque cano and 'Airm's am fear canam. But never, probably, before did the charges descend to so minute particulars as in the case of Ossian. Regarding this kind of attack, Dr. Johnson himself may be quoted. In the Rambler, No. 143, he says—"When the excellence of a new composition can no longer be contested, and malice is compelled to give way to the unanimity of applause, there is yet one expedient to be tried by which the author may be degraded though his work be reverenced. . . . This accusation is dangerous, because, even when it is false, it may be sometimes urged with probability." Only when one writer makes use of ideas or language which he could not otherwise than by theft have produced, will the charge of plagiarism hold good. There is entire absence of such a circumstance from the translation of Ossian.
Much detraction of Macpherson's work has been based on the translator's own letters and on his efforts in archæology. In a letter to Dr. Blair he remarked "that his Highland pride was alarmed at appearing to the world only as a translator." Again, in the preface to the edition of 1773, Macpherson wrote regarding improvements in his version: "Errors in diction might have been committed at twenty-four which the experience of a riper age may remove, and some exuberances in imagery may be restrained with advantage by a degree of judgment acquired in the progress of time." Upon these words Laing insisted that Macpherson claimed for himself the authorship of the Ossianic poems. Less prejudiced critics can take a more obvious meaning from them. In the same page with the latter extract Macpherson twice expressly alludes to himself as "the Translator." Had he been anything more than this he would certainly have used a more distinct means of making his merit known, since self-effacement was by no means a conspicuous trait of his character. Also, in his introduction to "Comala," Macpherson asserted that the Caracul referred to in that poem was the Caracalla of the Roman writers. Now, Gibbon has noted that this was a name given to Antoninus, the son of Severus, four years after his defeat by the Caledonians in 211 A. D.; that it was hardly used till after his death; and even then seldom employed. It has, therefore, been argued that the name could not have been familiar to a Gaelic bard of the third century. It must be remembered, however, that Ossian was not born when his father Fingal defeated the Roman general; that the bard lived to converse with Christian refugees driven into the wilds by another Roman emperor nearly a hundred years later; and that he had, therefore, every opportunity to be aware of any title disparaging to his father's enemy which might arise even long after the battle described. The classical parallels themselves, which Macpherson furnished in several notes by way of illustration to the text of Ossian, were construed as traces of forgery. When, for instance, he likened Gaul to Ajax, and the Celtic idea of a ghost to the εἰδωλον of the ancient Greeks (Fingal, B. ii.), it was asserted that he had manufactured warriors and ghosts upon Greek models. But it must occur to everyone that as a forger Macpherson would have been foolish indeed in so simply furnishing the key to his own fraud. Such proof, if allowed, would establish a charge of forging Virgil against all the editors who ever wrote notes to the Æneid. Laing made use, further, of several reported remarks of Macpherson to infer that he was willing to be considered author of these poems. But these references were all of such third and fourth hand authority as would only be received by the gossip-mongers of literary back parlours. No one nowadays sets much store on what A feels certain B told him was once hinted to him by C.
Happily, evidence of a different sort has become available to prove that poems concerning Fingal and his heroes have existed from remote antiquity in the Scottish Highlands, and that many of these poems are identical with Macpherson's translations.
The Albanach Duan is a versified chronicle of the date of Malcolm III. in 1056, and regarding its antiquity there is no dispute. It is true that it does not mention Fingal or his heroes. But this no mere disproves the existence of the poems of Ossian than the absence of Colonel Newcome's name from the Army List disproves the existence of Thackeray's novel. What the Albanach Duan does prove is that metrical compositions existed in Gaelic before 1056; for it bears traces of having been formed from older records. From the earliest dawn, however, of regular literature in Scotland references are common enough to the Ossianic heroes. Barbour, the historian of Robert the Bruce, in 1375, mentions Fingal and Gaul, the son of Morni:—
"He said, Methinks Martheoke's son
Right as Gow-mac-Morn was won
To have from Fingal his menzie."
Dunbar also, in 1503, and Gawin Douglas before 1522, as well as Hector Boece in 1520, all mention the fame of these heroes. And in 1576, in the first book printed in Gaelic—Knox's Forms of Prayer and Catechism—Bishop Carswell, the translator, in his preface refers with pious severity to histories extant and popular in the Highlands "concerning warriors and champions and Fingal, the son of Comhal, with his heroes." Still further, in the Dean of Lismore's Book already mentioned, the manuscript of which, written before 1537, is still to be seen in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, are to be found many incidents and whole passages which occur in Macpherson's translation. Of these are the death of Oscar, the tales of Cuchullin and Conloch, and Fainasollis, the Maid of Craca, with references to many other of the heroes of Ossian. Several of these compositions, preserved by the Dean, are distinctly headed, "The author of this is Ossian, the son of Finn."
The existence of the two last-named books, it may be noted in passing, demolishes another of Dr. Johnson's dogmatic assertions—that there was not a book in the Gaelic language a hundred years old.
To this evidence remains to be added the specific testimony of the committee of the Highland Society who investigated the whole subject. In their Report, already referred to, they explicitly state as the result of their enquiries that "such poetry," as that published by Macpherson, "did exist; that it was common, general, and in great abundance; that it was of a most impressive and striking sort, in a high degree eloquent, tender, sublime." The researches of the committee resulted in the accumulation of a mass of detailed evidence of which the extracts below are fair specimens. It has to be remembered, in examining the Report, that the committee possessed no clue whatever to the quarters from which Macpherson had derived his originals. It must also be noted that the independent versions of many of the passages were got from people who knew no English, and who had never heard of Macpherson.
Letter from Rev. Donald Macleod, Glenelg, to Dr. Blair, March 26th, 1764:—"It was in my house that Mr. Macpherson got the description of Cuchullin's horses and car in Book i, p. 2, from Allan MacCaskie, schoolmaster, and Rory Macleod, both of this glen. He has not taken in the whole of the description; and his translation of it (spirited and pretty as it appears, so far as it goes) falls so far short of the original in the picture it exhibits of Cuchullin's horses and car, that in none of his translations is the inequality of Macpherson's genius to that of Ossian so very conspicuous."
Letter from Lachlan Macpherson, of Strathmashie, October 22, 1763:—"In the year 1760 I had the pleasure of accompanying my friend Mr. Macpherson during some part of his journey in search of the poems of Ossian through the Highlands. I assisted him in collecting them, and took down from oral tradition, and transcribed from old manuscripts by far the greatest part of those pieces he has published. Since the publication I have carefully compared the translation with the copies of the originals in my hands, and find it amazingly literal, even in such a degree as to preserve in some measure the cadence of the Gaelic versification."
Letter from Rev. John Macpherson, D.D., of Sleat, Nov. 27, 1763:—"I have in obedience to your request made enquiry for all the persons around me who were able to rehearse from memory any parts of the poems published by Mr. Macpherson, and have made them to rehearse in my hearing the several fragments or detached pieces of those poems which they were able to repeat. This done, I compared with great care the pieces rehearsed by them with Mr. Macpherson's translation. These pieces or fragments are: the description of Cuchullin's chariot—Fingal, Book i, p. 11. The rehearsers are John Macdonald of Breakish in Strath, Isle of Skye, gentleman; Martin Macllivray, tenant in Slate; and Allan Macaskle, farmer in Glenelg." Here follows a long list of passages, with the names of the rehearsers attached.
Letter from Lieutenant Duncan MacNicol, late of 88th Regiment, Sockrock, in Glenurchy, Jan. 1764:—"I have been at some pains in examining several in this country about Ossian's poems, and have found out as follows:—Fingal, B. iii., p. 45, 'Oscar I was young like thee when lovely Fainea-sollis,' etc., to the end of the third book. Fingal, B. iv., p. 50, 'Eight were the heroes of Ossian,' etc., mostly word for word to p. 58 or the end of the fourth book." And an array of further passages, among which is one beginning "Then Gaul and Ossian sat on the green banks of Lubar," a passage Laing asserted to be an imitation by Macpherson of the 137th Psalm.
Letter from Sir John Macpherson, Lauriston, February 4th, 1760:—"I do myself the pleasure of presenting you with a few specimens of Ossian in his native dress. . . . The three pieces which I have selected had each a particular title to regard. . . . The Address to the Evening Star[2] claimed attention on account of its inimitable beauty and harmonious versification. The original of this piece suffered even in the hands of Mr. Macpherson, though he has shewn himself inferior to no translator. The copy or edition which he had of this poem is very different from mine; I imagine it will, in that respect, be agreeable to Mr. Percy. The gentleman who gave it me copied it from an old MS. which Mr Macpherson had no access to before his 'Fingal' came abroad."
The Report from which these extracts are taken is not the only record of enquiries regarding the existence of ancient Gaelic poetry. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1782–3 appear the results of an independent research by Mr. Thomas Hill. This gentleman, though unacquainted with the Gaelic language, succeeded in collecting from oral tradition and otherwise in the Highlands many traditional compositions of the greatest beauty.
Such testimony, ancient and modern, may be left to make its own answer to the dogmatic assertions of Highland barbarism fulminated by Dr. Johnson. And since many of the most beautiful passages in Macpherson's translation are among those specifically vouched for as genuine, the value of Mr. Laing's assurance that he had discovered the source of "every image," etc., needs no further comment.
After the production of so great a mass of evidence it became impossible to declare the translation of Ossian altogether spurious. It was still possible, however, for impugners of that work to declare that Macpherson, instead of strictly translating, had expanded and improved upon the remains which he found. Obviously the burden lay with the assailants of Macpherson's work to prove their assertion true, and had their charge been well founded, the task should not have been difficult. They had only to point out in these poems an image or an epithet which could not have occurred to the Gaelic bard, in order to show that Macpherson had used unwarranted freedom in making his translation. In such a criticism, of course, two facts must be kept in view: (1) that compositions passed down from century to century by mere word of mouth must inevitably suffer some variation and corruption; and (2) that the version to be criticised was a translation, liable to be varied somewhat in complexion by the translator's choice of phrase. But Macpherson was a man of university education, imbued with the lore of classical antiquity. His work, besides, was done during the most conventional age of English poetry, fifty years before Scott and Byron appeared to break the fetters of Pope; and his own early poems are strongly marked with stiff conventionality. His verses are full of "blythsome shepherds" and classic "swains," of personifications of "Virtue" and "Fortune," with the other stilted machinery of his time. Had he, therefore, been inclined to "improve" upon his text, his work could hardly fail to smell of the lamp, to contain artificialities, anachronisms, and allusions impossible to a dweller in the third century. Drums, trumpets, or at least bagpipes must have found their way into some of the descriptions of war, and at their feasts the heroes would surely have quaffed their drink from some politer vessel than a cup of shell. The difficulty of avoiding such slips may be judged from the mistakes made even by the high priest of imagination. Shakespeare himself makes King Lear in the crisis of his distress beg the undoing of a button, an article of dress unknown probably for centuries after the date of the tragedy. One of the most remarkable features of these translations, however, is their entire freedom from such defects. In all Ossian there is only one allusion to wine. It is referred to by way of simile in "The Battle of Lora" as a very beautiful and rare object, and probably, like the "thousand lights from the stranger's land" mentioned in "Carthon," it may have been found among the spoils of some Roman defeat.
The same kind of reasoning may be applied to the much finer particulars of literary style. A writer of modern days makes free use of general and abstract terms. Our poets sing broadly of manhood and womanhood, of unnamed landscapes and the picturesque in nature. Had Macpherson expanded his material, his work could hardly fail to contain some such expressions. His translations, on the contrary, remain true to the powers of their original language. In Gaelic there are no words for "landscape" or for "picturesque;" the ideas, as in all primitive tongues, are concrete, and Ossian sings only of named objects, of "car-borne Cuthullin" and "blue-eyed Comala," of "green Erin of streams" and of "woody Morven." Allusions and speech both, in these poems, suit ancient Celtic times and no other period known to history. The wind whistles through open dwellings, and lifts the long locks of a people living by the chase; and the greatest admiration is bestowed on bodily strength, courage, and warlike qualities; while the language supplies its lack of terms by the abundant use of figure.
Macpherson was charged with having borrowed from the Bible; this, apparently, upon no stronger evidence than the fact that several passages of his translations fell little short of the sublimity of passages in Holy Writ. The charge, indeed, might have presented some show of reason, had his work betrayed any traces of the atmosphere of a southern clime, or the details of an advanced civilisation. Isaiah's images, however, are of corn and spices, of cities and shepherding and lions of the desert. Ossian's, on the other hand, refer to an earlier, hunter stage of society; to the roaring winds and blazing hearths of a colder clime; to grey mists, pale ghosts, and the sheen of the "northern lights."
A similar accusation of having borrowed from Homer might be disposed of by the same reasoning. There are many essential points of difference. One detail only need be noticed; Homer's heroes insult and deface the bodies of their fallen enemies, while the warriors of Ossian mourn over those they have slain. But the whole spirit of the two singers is different. Homer everywhere burns with the vivacity of the Greek nature, while Ossian is uniformly tinged with the sweet melancholy native to his northern hills. The late Alexander Smith argued for the authenticity of these poems from their faithfulness to the character of West Highland landscape. "Wordsworth's verse," he wrote, "does not more completely mirror the Lake Country than do the poems of Ossian the terrible scenery of the Isles."
Notwithstanding these facts, probably in no case in literature have the accusations of plagiarism and forgery descended to so minute details. Perhaps the most curious of the arguments against the genuineness of Macpherson's translations was based upon an inversion of the foregoing system of reasoning. It is recorded that someone in Dr. Johnson's company drew attention to the fact that the wolf is not mentioned in Ossian, and inferred that the absence of mention of an animal which must have been common enough in the Highlands in early times was sufficient proof of forgery. Argument of this sort, if allowed, would produce somewhat ludicrous results. The "Song of Solomon" would not be genuine because it failed to mention the house-fly, an insect which must have been common enough in Judasa; and Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" could have been no sort of merit because it omitted a description of the village pump.
The refinement of sentiment indicated in Macpherson's translations was long objected to as impossible in Scotland in the early centuries of the Christian era. This was an argument used by Laing in the dissertation appended to the second volume of his History, and an argument held by him to be unanswerable. It was pointed out that the early contemporary poetry of neighbouring Gothic nations had in it a more savage spirit. The funeral song of Regner Lodbrog, for instance, a Danish poem accurately preserved from the eighth century, is full of such passages as the following:—"We have fought with our swords. I was young, when, towards the east, in the bay of Orcon, we made torrents of blood flow, to gorge the ravenous beast of prey, and the yellow-footed bird." Dr. Blair, however, quoted Ammianus Marcellinus, to show that the Celts were by no means on a level with the savage Goths and Teutons. "There flourished among them," he translates, "the study of the most laudable arts, introduced by the Bards, whose office it was to sing in heroic verse the gallant actions of illustrious men, and by the Druids, who lived together in colleges, or societies, after the Pythagorean manner, and, philosophising upon the highest subjects, asserted the immortality of the soul." The late researches, too, of Anderson, Skene, Hill Burton, and other historians and archæologists, prove early Celtic art to have attained astonishing perfection, beauty, and delicacy. Many examples of this art are now known to antiquarians, but one only need be mentioned. At Abbotsford there is preserved a bronze mask which was unearthed some considerable time ago on the Border. It bears traces of delicate and fine ornamentation, and its shape, bearing horns, is so curious and unmistakable as to render its identification almost certainly true. Mr. Anderson, in his valuable Scotland in Pagan Times (p. 114), suggests it to be part of one of those helmets described by Diodorus Siculus, writing a few years after Cæsar's conquest of Gaul, as worn by the Celts. Further, Dr. Wylie, in his lately published History of the Scottish Nation, says of this prehistoric art, "From the simplest elements it evolved effects of the most exquisite grace and beauty. It was unique. Celtic hands only knew to create it, and on none but Celtic soil did it flourish." In the sixth century, indeed, the Celtic art-faculty, as witnessed by its relics, had developed marvellous perfection. Westwood, in his Palæographia Pieta, declares "there was nothing analogous to it either of a contemporary or an earlier date in the art of Byzantium or Italy." To this testimony might be added the description of Caledonian towns, quite considerable places, by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century. Early Celtic remains of another kind are the "Auld Wives' Lifts" on Craigmaddie moor, near Glasgow, and other ponderous cromlechs; also such formidable fortresses as that on the White Caterthun in Forfarshire, with Craig-Phadric near Inverness; the latter, as Hill Burton shows, being the place at which Columba visited the king of the Picts. The erection of any one of these would be an undertaking of great difficulty even with the aid of modern appliances. Art of such refinement, and engineering works of such magnitude, as they are discovered, are beginning, therefore, to show that the Caledonia of early times was by no means the savagedom it became fashionable for courtly Roman writers like Tacitus to make it out. It would not have suited the purpose of Agricola's son-in-law to write that the general was unable to subdue the Caledonians. Both safer and pleasanter it was to give out that on account of their barbarity these hill tribes were "excluded from the Roman empire." It does not follow that the description was true. In these early times the vulgar, indeed, may have lived rude lives, as the vulgar do at the present day. But the Bards were next to the Chiefs in rank, and Ossian was son of the king.
The generosity displayed towards their foes by Fingal and the other Ossianic heroes has more than once been pointed out as an anachronism. But critics who make this objection forget many well-known traits of Highland character which have descended from the remotest antiquity. As a specimen of these it is enough to mention that sacred regard for the obligations of hospitality everywhere observed in the Highlands, of which Sir Walter Scott has given an accurate portrait in the chivalry of Roderick Dhu.
The poetic beauty, also, of the names used by Ossian has been made subject of exception by adverse writers. Hill Burton went the length of asserting "that the Highlanders have ever shewn themselves peculiarly unconscious of the merits of their native scenery, and that a passion for it is an emotion of recent origin, growing up in the bosom of the Saxon Lowlander who visits it as a stranger." Happily a very slight knowledge of Highland character suffices to refute utterly such a statement. The chief traits of Celtic nature, in fact, are feeling and emotion. The history of the North, with its blood feuds and friendships, declares this at a glance; and it is well known that no race is more unwilling than the clansmen are to leave the shadows of their native glens. Tangible proof, besides, is easily found that sensitiveness to natural beauty is inherent in the character of the Celt. No monument of a language is more enduring than the names it has conferred on places. Even when a race itself has passed away, the names it gave to lake and river and mountain remain to keep green its memory. Now the Highland place-names are undoubtedly descended from the remotest antiquity, and every one of them describes some natural characteristic of the spot, while very many do so in figures of great poetic beauty, A few specimens are Fionn airitdh (Fiunary), the white shieling; Dubh ghlas (Douglas), the dark river; Achadh-nan-sian (Achnasheen), the field of tempests; and Buachaill Eite (the Shepherd of Etive), the hill watching over Glen Etive. These are but names chosen at random, yet they will be seen to show the æsthetic appreciation of natural circumstances in a marked degree. These Highland names cannot be less ancient than the works of Ossian. Obviously, therefore, poetic names like Struthmor (roaring stream) or Comala (maid of the pleasant brow), used by Ossian, are exactly such as might be expected in compositions of early Celtic times. If a parallel be desired, it may be found in the Indian names translated by Longfellow in his "Hiawatha." The American tribes exhibit to-day in some respects the state of society existing in the Celtic Scotland of Fingal's time. They are a people living by the chase, knowing little of the arts of husbandry, and without a literature. Yet the Indian chiefs harangue their warriors in rhetoric glowing with splendid metaphor, and the names they use are full of poetic feeling. Names like Minnehaha (Laughing Water) or Chibiabos (the Blessed Islands) are of similar character and origin with the names in Ossian.
The Gaelic bard, like Homer himself, was by no means the earliest singer of his race. He confesses that he had models to work upon, referring to compositions regarding Trathal, Trenmor, and other ancestors of Fingal, as familiar in his day. In the fourth book of "Fingal," for instance, he hums "as was his wont in danger, the songs of heroes of old." For this reason the high epic and dramatic art exhibited in his works need no more be matter of objection than the same art in the Iliad and Odyssey.
But the most subtle, perhaps, of all kinds of criticism used to prove that Macpherson added passages of his own to the text of Ossian was that brought to bear upon the subject by Mr. Knight. In his Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste, 1805, he remarks—"In describing the common appearances of nature, the bards of unpolished nations are scrupulously exact; so that an extravagant hyperbole, in a matter of this kind, is sufficient to mark as counterfeit any composition attributed to them. . . . James Macpherson, in the person of his blind bard, could say with applause in the eighteenth century, 'Thus have I seen in Cona; but Cona I behold no more: thus have I seen two dark hills removed from their place by the strength of the mountain stream. They turn from side to side, and their tall oaks meet one another on high. Then they fall together with all their rocks and trees.'—(Fingal, B. v.) But had a bard presumed to utter such a rhapsody of bombast in the hall of shells, amid the savage warriors to whom Ossian is supposed to have sung, he would have needed all the influence of royal birth, attributed to that fabulous personage, to restrain the audience from throwing their shells at his head, and hooting him out of their company as an impudent liar. They must have been sufficiently acquainted with the rivulets of Glencoe to know that he had seen nothing of the kind; and have known enough of mountain torrents in general to know that no such effects are ever produced by them; and would therefore have indignantly rejected such a barefaced attempt to impose on their credulity."
Perhaps the best answer to such an attack is its own subtlety. Mr. Knight, besides, has named almost the only passage in all the translations which is open to such objection. But the critic's own statement as to the scrupulous exactness in descriptions of nature by the ancient bards may itself very well be questioned. Poets of all eras have magnified the phenomena of nature in their search for tremendous images; and the imagination of the early ages, wild and undisciplined, was especially prone to exaggeration. There exists a school of students of Semetic literature and modes of thought who consider descriptions such as that of the Red Sea dividing before Israel, and that of the sun standing still above Joshua, to be simply powerful figures of speech. To remain upon solid ground, however, does not David in the 29th Psalm make Lebanon and Sirion skip "like a young wild-ox;" while Isaiah in his 55th chapter writes of the hills breaking forth into singing, and the trees of the field clapping their hands? Homer, too, relates that the pines of Calypso's isle reached to heaven, and that in the storm which assailed the solitary Ulysses the winds of north, east, south, and west clashed all at once together.
Still another kind of attack assailed the English version of Ossian before it had been long before the world. The controversy on the subject had been little more than opened when it was complicated by a claim from the sister isle. As early as 1761 it was asserted that Fingal and his heroes, though discovered in the Scottish Highlands, were not really Scottish, but Irish. Shaw, in his Enquiry already referred to, asserted that Selma was not at all known in Scotland; that no one in the Highlands was acquainted with the name of Fingal; and that, while the name of the hero does not appear in the Chronicon Scotorium, from which the list of Scottish kings is taken, a full account of the actions of Fingal, or Fion MacComhal, may be found in the Irish histories of Dr. Keating and others. A small volume making the same claim on the subject was also published at Dusseldorf in 1787, by one Edmond, Baron de Harold, an Irishman in the service of the Elector Palatine. In it were printed several poems bearing close resemblance of style to Macpherson's translations, and the substance of which the writer professed to have discovered in Ireland. These and other specimens of poetry adduced from Ireland formed in many cases counterparts to compositions included by Macpherson. It should be mentioned here, besides, that the Ossianic Society of Dublin has printed in six volumes (1854–61) a mass of similar poetry which has been preserved by the Irish senachies.
Literal counterparts, like some of these, produced in the original Gaelic, and from hostile motives, should now form strong testimony of the authentic nature of Macpherson's translations. Nevertheless, Laing, eager to seize any instrument for the discrediting of Ossian, used this as an argument to prove that the poetic narratives found by Macpherson in the Highlands were neither Scottish nor antique, but were Irish poems of the fifteenth century.
To the modern reader it may seem of little moment whether Ossian were a bard of Ireland or of Scotland. The peoples of both countries were Celtic, and from the earliest times must have possessed close racial and political ties. The antiquity of the poems, however, seemed affected by the question, and Macpherson therefore felt himself called upon to adduce proofs of their Scottish origin. Accordingly in his dissertation he pointed out that purity of language and freedom from anachronism marked the Scottish poems as original and antique. In the Irish versions, on the other hand, there occurred references to Christianity, the Crusades, and the witchcraft superstitions of the fifteenth century. They also contained words and phrases borrowed from English, a language not in existence in the Ossianic age; and they distorted Fingal and his heroes into mediæval giants and dwarfs. These characteristics, he argued, led to the conclusion that the poems found in Ireland were versions borrowed and "improved upon" at a late period by the senachies of the sister country. He also pointed out that many of these Irish compositions themselves referred the Ossianic heroes to Scotland, such phrases occurring as—
Siol Albin a n' nioma caoile.
The race of Albin of many firths.
And Comhal na h' Albin, Comhal of Albion.
It must be allowed that the whole topography of the poems themselves supports Macpherson's argument. Fingal was King of Morven, and Ossian dwelt in Glencoe. As for Shaw's assertion that the Highlanders were ignorant of Fingal, it has already been answered by the references to that hero adduced from Barbour and the old Scottish writers. The absence of his name from the Chronicon Scotorum need mean no more than its absence from the Albanach Duan, which has been accounted for. And it may be pointed out in reply to Mr. Shaw's third objection, that a little village in Benderloch has been called Selma by its inhabitants from time immemorial.
Up to the year 1805 the arguments used in the Ossianic controversy had been purely hypothetical, and in the absence of tangible proof, had depended entirely upon points of scholarship and ingenuity of reasoning. Since that date, however, a mass of evidence of another kind has become available. And it should be noticed that the whole testimony of facts accumulated since then has gone to prove the authenticity of Macpherson's translation.
In 1807 was published the original Gaelic from which the English version of Ossian had been made, a publication by itself sufficient to destroy the greater part of the adverse criticism. Macpherson could not have written the Gaelic compositions. Again and again is his awkwardness in that language remarked by the correspondents of the Highland Society. Mr. Ewan Macpherson of Knock in Sleat, in his declaration before magistrates printed in the Report (p. 94), affirms most explicitly and positively that Macpherson was utterly unequal to such composition, and he relates a curious anecdote to illustrate the translator's deficiency in Gaelic. It was to the effect that, during Macpherson's tour in 1760 a party of gentlemen were escorting him across the Muir to Benbecula, Clanronald's seat in Uist. Upon the way they fell in with a man who was afterwards discovered to be Mac Codrum the poet. Macpherson addressed him with A bheil dad agad air an Fheinn? wishing to ask whether he knew any poems of Ossian regarding Fingal, but in fact asking whether Fingal owed him anything. Whereupon Mac Codrum wittily took advantage of the mistake, and answered that, if the hero had been in his debt, he had lost the bonds, and feared that any attempt to recover them at that time of day would be unavailing—an answer which hurt Macpherson greatly, and cut short the colloquy. Apart from this, there are in the printed original many archæic and obsolete words which Macpherson evidently made out with great difficulty, and which he certainly could not have used or invented. Adding the fact that these compositions are Gaelic poems of great rhythmic beauty and technique, their publication becomes a mountain of proof of the good faith of Macpherson's work.
Within late years students of Highland antiquities have identified many of the localities referred to by Ossian both in Scotland and Ireland. Some of these localities were quite unknown to Macpherson, and his suppositions regarding others have been shown to be wrong. Further, the study of Ossian has led within the last few years to the discovery of antiquities which would otherwise have remained underground.
The language of the Highlands itself contains many memorials of its great bard. Phrases like Ossian dall, blind Ossian; fiountachk, as ancient as Fingal; Ossian an deigh na feinne, Ossian the last of his race, are familiar enough even at the present day. The association, too, of Ossian's name and the names of the heroes he celebrates with numerous spots in the north has been immemorial. Tourists through Glencoe, the Cona of the poems, have pointed out to them the cave dwelling of the bard high up in the mountain side; and visitors to Killin on Loch Tay are familiar with the castle built by the Breadalbane Campbells at Finlarig, Fingal's Pass.
The late Dr. Angus Smith, in his interesting book, Loch Etive and the Sons of Uisnach, draws attention to the connection between the poem of "Darthula" (the Irish Deirdre) and many of the localities around Loch Etive. Eitche itself, or Etive, is the Etha of Macpherson's translation, while the name of the vitrified fort on the shore of the loch distinctly identifies the spot as the home of the poem's hero. It is Dun Mac Uisneachan, the fort of the sons of Uisnach. Boece and his followers and careless transcribers assigned to it the name Beregonium, but they mistook it for the Roman Rerigonium on Loch Ryan. The correct situation of the latter may be made out from Ptolemy, and its moat is still to be seen on Invermessan farm, near Stranraer. At Balure, near Dun Mac Uisneachan, lies Cambus Naish, the bay of Naisi (softened by Macpherson to "Nathos" for English ears). Near the head of the loch the remains of the hunting lodges used by the three brothers are still to be seen on Eilean Uisneachan, the isle of the sons of Uisnach (Macpherson's "Usnoth"). Half-way up Glen Etive are the Grianan Dartheil, Darthula's sunning-place, with "Darthula's Field" close by. And near Taynuilt still grows "the wood of Naisi," coille naish. The connection is made complete when the writer quotes Darthula's song translated by Skene from Dean of Lismore's Book—
"Glen Etive, O Glen Etive
There I raised my earliest house,
Beautiful its woods on rising
When the sun fell on Glen Etive."
Mr. Clerk of Oban, referred to by Dr. Smith, also points out many memorials of Ossian's hero Gaul or Guill in the names of localities at the head of Glen Lonain in the same neighbourhood. There are the wooded heights of Bar Ghuil and Barran-a-chuil, with Tom-na-Guille between them. The same writer suggests that Gaul's dwelling of Strumon may still be traced in Strumonadh there; and he puts the warrior's first battle at Ichrachan, close by, a spot from which many cairns of the dead have but lately been removed. From the Galic Antiquities of Dr. Smith of Campbelltown he quotes also a well-known parallel poem, the "Death of Gaul," not included by Macpherson, from which several other localities of the district may be identified.
Finally there remains to be quoted the book which carries furthest this process of identifying the topography of Ossian's poems. In Ossian and the Clyde (Glasgow, 1875), Dr. P. Hately Waddell applies to the subject the discoveries of the last hundred years, in geology, geography, and antiquities. These throw a flood of light upon many allusions, previously obscure, in the poems themselves; and by this means he has arrived at the scene of action of nearly all these compositions. It must be confessed that this style of proof, demonstration by the senses, brings a kind of conviction with it that is absent from the mere argument of scholarship. It is one thing to criticise "Fingal" or "Temora" in the lamplight of the study; another matter entirely to be taken to the valley of the Six-mile-water in the neighbourhood of Lough Larne, and to be told that here the battles described in these poems were fought. This Dr. Waddell does, and then proceeds to trace the action of the Ossianic narratives, and to compare the allusions and descriptions these narratives contain with the actual features of the district. For nearly every epithet and statement he finds a corresponding fact in the landscape. A few of these only can be mentioned here. For "the lake of roes" on Cromla, near which fell Morna (Gaelic Muirne), the daughter of Cormac ("Fingal," B. i.), he points to the mountain tarn Lough Mourne. For the retreat of the Druid in the same neighbourhood, in which Sulmalla took refuge, and near which the spirit of Cathmor "sunk by the hollow stream that roared between the hills" ("Temora," B. viii.), he suggests the circle at Stony-glen close by the Sulla-(Sulmalla) tober or Sallow-well, whose waters disappear with such violence through an aperture in the ground as to justify Ossian's title of "Noisy" to the little vale at the present day. The mountain itself, the Larne and Belfast range, full of caves, with the great cromlech near Cairngrainey at one end, Slieve-True (Ossian's Tura) in the middle, and the town of Crumlin at the other extremity, he identifies with the caverned Cromla (Gaelic Cromleach) of the poems. The scene of the battles he considers marked by the two hundred and thirty-seven funeral barrows in the two parishes of Killeagh and Muckamore, both in the valley of the Six-mile-water. In the steep little glen of Glynnès descending to Lough Larne Dr. Waddell finds the spot where Cuthullin undertook, alone with Calmar, to hold the pass to the plain above, against the invading host of Swaran ("Fingal," B iii.). Two miles westward, on Slimoro (Slieve-Mora), with its two prominences of Upper and Lower Carneal (Cormuil), he fastens the description "On Mora stood the king in arms, . . . on Cormul's mossy rock" ("Temora," B. iii.). Dora, the author recognises in Doagh, formerly Dohar, still "yellow in the setting sun" ("Temora," B. i.) from the same spot as of old. And the battle-plain of Moi-lena he considers still traceable in the name of the parish lands of Ballylinny. Dr. Waddell, following the allusions of Ossian, indentified the site of Temora, the royal palace founded by Conar, in the great folk-mote near the village of Connor in the same neighbourhood; and during railway operations there, since the publication of his book, his reasoning has been confirmed by a wonderful discovery of golden reliques.
Macpherson knew nothing of this district, and his notes upon the topography of "Fingal" and "Temora" are extremely few and vague. Meagre as these notes are, he makes the mistake in one of them ("Temora," B. v.) of confounding the Lubar, which flows inland to Lough Neagh, with the stream already alluded to, descending through the glen of Glynnès to the sea.
Several of the episodes in the poems of Ossian were as impossible as the performances of the electric telegraph to the knowledge of Macpherson's day. Like the latter, they have only been rendered feasible by the discoveries of more recent years. Dr. Waddell points out in "Colna-dona," in "Calthon and Colmal" and in "Cathlin of Clutha," narratives of journeys which could only have been accomplished by means of a sea passage across Crinan moss in Argyle. Such a passage was undreamt of in Macpherson's time. Yet Dr. Waddell shows that it must have existed within the centuries of this era. Names like Cambuslang, the "bay of ships," and Langside, the "washing-place of vessels," high now at the foot of the Cathkin hills above Glasgow, with lagg-an-roan, the "seal's pool," in the glen above Lagg, in Arran, prove, without the mass of other evidence the author adduces, that the sea flowed much higher upon the land in Celtic times than it does now. He adduces, further, the testimony of geology, the finding of primitive boats in gravelly deposits at Stobcross and Glasgow Cross, high above present sea level, and the absence of Celtic names from the lower lands about the vale of Clyde. To this may be added the support of the latest Scottish historian. Dr. Wylie remarks, "In the face of the cliff that bounds the carse (of Stirling) on the north, at an elevation to which the tide never rises in our day, is still visible the iron ring to which the fisherman made fast his boat at eve." It may also be remembered that the Roman road to the north stopped at Camelon, near Falkirk, now three miles from the sea, but then doubtless washed by the tide, for the tradition still lingers in the village of ships being moored to its street. A sea-passage, therefore, within Roman times, must have existed over Crinan. This fact, living still in Ossian's poetry, but forgotten otherwise for the last thousand years, and certainly unknown to James Macpherson, Dr. Waddell considers sufficient to establish both the antiquity and the authenticity of these "tales of the times of old."
For the introduction to "Berrathon," the same author finds both confirmation and locality in the geography, antiquities, and traditions of Arran. Macpherson did not know this island, and confesses himself unable to localise the passage. From chemical and geographical allusions in the "War of Inis-thona" (Isle of the Wave) the critic discovers the scene of that poem in the volcanic Iceland (anciently Eisland, Isle of the Sea); and he finds confirmation in the existence of Celtic monuments said to have been found upon the shores of that country by the Norse discoverers in 874. In the same way, often with great minuteness of detail, Dr. Waddell identifies the scenes of most of Ossian's poems. In the course of his criticism he uses modern information to expose the fallacy of many of Laing's assumptions; and he answers the calumnies of Pinkerton by deductions from that historian's own pages. He meets the objection of vagueness which has been brought against the authenticity of Ossian, by filling several leaves with details of Celtic life and manners gathered from the poems; and he shows, in every instance in which comparison is possible, that the facts poetically referred to by Ossian fit with Roman history as exactly as the cog-wheel does to the pinion of machinery. Altogether, he concludes, the compositions of the Gaelic bard afford an authentic and unique glimpse into the otherwise unknown history of the Highlands during the decline of the Roman empire in the north.
Enough has been said in the foregoing pages to indicate the various arguments which have been brought to bear upon these translations of Gaelic poetry. It remains with the modern reader, free from the literary jealousies of a hundred years ago, to decide for himself the weight to be attached to each. More than two thousand years ago in Athens Peisistratus gathered and pieced together the fragments of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Does it seem impossible that the same office should fall to be done in the eighteenth century for a Homer of the North? History, doubtless, has but repeated itself in the storm of adverse criticism which burst upon the restorer of the Celtic bard; and only when the din of wordy battle has died away will be heard the numbers of this last-found lord of song. The merit of the poems themselves, as poetry, may safely be left to take care of itself. Long ago the songs of Ossian earned a place for themselves in the literature of every European language; an Italian version, it is said, being the constant companion and inspiration of the First Napoleon. England alone has refused to admit the claims of the Celtic bard, and that at the bidding of Dr. Johnson, a good and great man indeed, but one who, knowing nothing of the subject, dogmatically imposed his prejudices upon the literary mind of his country, denying, like certain Pharisees of old, that any good thing could come out of Nazareth. The translation, it is possible, might have been better done. More than one attempt has been made to improve upon it, the latest being the version by the Rev. Mr. Clerk of Kilmallie, published in 1870 at the instance of the Marquis of Bute.[3] None of these, however, has superseded Macpherson's version, and the world assuredly would have been poorer had it not been made at all. If power to inspire the heart with valour, chivalry, and virtue be any title to remembrance, the poems of Ossian will live long in the mind of man. But most of all will they be beautiful to the traveller among the lonely glens and valleys of the North. The scenery there asks some such memories. Wordsworth, the poet of Nature, himself felt this as he listened to the plaintive singing of the Highland reaper:—
"Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
It has not been much questioned whether all the compositions translated by Macpherson were the work of the single bard, Ossian. The uniformity of subject and style, as well as of the manners described in the poems, is of itself strong evidence that they were the production of one man. A peculiarity of the bardic traditions, too, makes the conclusion more certain. By the Highland senachies, as may be noticed in the Dean of Lisinore's Book, the name of the composer was in most cases scrupulously preserved along with his work. The fact remains besides, that in many of the poems Ossian unmistakably alludes to himself. There can be little doubt, therefore, of the single authorship. On the other hand, there is no equal reason to suppose that all the extant poems of Ossian were collected and included by Macpherson. Other poems, indeed, have been published by various antiquaries, which possess strong claims to attention. Of such, for instance, are "The Death of Gaul," already referred to, and other compositions printed by Dr. Smith of Campbelltown in his Galic Antiquities. These, however, do not add materially to the poems preserved by Macpherson, and it is therefore probable that his collection presents with fair completeness the best of Ossian's works.
The value of the Ossianic remains for the purposes of history depends very much upon the possibility of fixing the date of their composition. The translator and editors of the poems, therefore, have sought to make this clear.
The manners described in the poems themselves point to a very early state of society. The heroes of Ossian lived by the chase, and had not yet learned the art of tilling the soil. A single detail of much significance, the meaning of which was unknown to Macpherson, may be mentioned here. In a letter to Dr. Blair, dated 2nd October 1764 (Report, p. 36), Lord Auchinleck remarks: In Ossian, "when a hero finds death approaching he calls to prepare his deer's horn, a passage which I did not understand for a good time after 'Fingal' was published, but then came to get it fully explained accidentally. You must know that in Badenoch, near the Church of Alves, on the highway side are a number of Tumuli. Nobody had ever taken notice of these as artificial till Macpherson of Benchar, a very sensible man, under an apprehension of their being artificial, caused to cut up two of them, and found human bones in them, and at right angles with them a red deer's horn above them. These burials plainly have been before Christianity, for the corpse lay in the direction of north and south, not in that of east and west. . . . 'Fingal' was published before any of these tumuli were opened."
This peculiarity of prehistoric burial in Scotland has been independently remarked by later antiquarians. The late Dr. Bryce, of Glasgow High School, about 1864, made a careful examination of the stone circles at Tormore in the island of Arran. In the chapter on "ancient remains" in his well-known book upon that island, he gives the results of his search. In most of the circles he found stone cists containing urns, flint weapons, human remains, and portions of deer's horns. All the cists he found lying roughly north and south, and he observes, "their construction may therefore be inferred to have been anterior to the early Christian times in this country, when a superstitious regard began to be cherished for a direction pointing east," He further hazards the conjecture, "Shall we rather say that the direction had reference to the mid-day sun?" It should be added that the remains found had been burned, another proof of pre-Christian interment.
Comparing these discoveries with the "deer's horn" allusions of the poems, it would appear that the heroes of these compositions were buried before the customs of Christianity had made their way into the country. Ossian himself, therefore, who was their companion, must have lived and sung before the dawn of the Christian era in Scotland.
By way of settling the date, Macpherson himself pointed out the fact that the Celtic bard makes no mention whatever of any divine Being worshipped by his heroes. Unlike the poets of Greece and Rome, Ossian uses no "divine machinery" in his work. To account for this circumstance Macpherson quotes Celtic traditions which affirm that Trenmor, the great-grandfather of Fingal, had, in civil war, suppressed the entire order of the Druids. A reference to the event occurs in "Cathlin of Clutha." The people thus, the translator suggests, had been left without a worship. His theory is helped by the statement of Tacitus, that the Romans from the days of Julius Cæsar had set themselves to the extinction of the Druids. It is supported, too, by the fact that the earliest Christian missionaries found the native religion extinct, and themselves took the name of Culdees from inhabiting the Druids' empty cells.
It should be remembered here, however, that no graven image has ever been found among the remains of prehistoric Scotland. Hence it is just possible to suppose that the objects of Druid worship did not lend themselves to bardic handling. The late research of Rawlinson and other explorers in the East has brought to notice the likeness between the menhirs and cromlechs and circles of Scotland, and the stone remains of ancient Chaldea; between the once-lit altein of Caledonia and Ezekiel's "fire-stones of Tyre."—(Ez. xxviii. 14–16). Dr. Wylie recently, in the first volume of his History of Scotland, already mentioned, describes (chap. xi.) several of the Beltane customs surviving yet in the north from Druidic times, and points out their resemblance to the rites of the ancient peoples who worshipped by fire in Asia. From this it would appear as if the Druids were about to be counted among the priesthoods which, like those found by Paul at Athens, taught the worship of "an unknown God." It seems, indeed, very clearly proved that the Celtic race in Scotland worshipped a Supreme Being through the medium of fire. This fact sufficiently accounts for the absence of divine machinery from the poems of Ossian, and renders valueless Macpherson's data drawn from such a circumstance. Against the tradition of complete extermination, too, quoted by the latter, it may be noticed that the "sons of the rock," or Druids, are frequently mentioned by Ossian. Had the object of their worship been something tangible it could hardly have escaped allusion.
A more definite means of fixing a date occurs in the poem of "Comala." There it is narrated how Fingal in his youth defeated Caracul on the banks of the Carun. If this Caracul (Gaelic, Fierce-eye) was, as there exists no good reason to doubt, the son of the Roman emperor Severus, it makes Fingal a young man of eighteen or twenty in the year 211 A.D. Ossian, his son, must therefore have been born after this date. Again, it was pointed out by Macpherson that the Irish histories, however untrustworthy otherwise, agree in placing the death of Fion Mac Comhal or Fingal in the year 283. Further, there are legendary poems extant (one is printed in the Dean of Lismore's Book, p. 5) describing a dispute waged by Ossian in his old age with a Culdee. The bard appears to have been extremely ignorant of his opponent's faith. It seems fair, therefore, to conclude that the new religion had but lately been introduced to the country. This enterprise was probably effected by the Christian refugees driven northwards out of the Roman empire by the persecution of Dioclesian in 303. From these facts it seems proved with fair clearness that Ossian lived and fought and sang in the latter part of the third century.
As exact material for history, however, the value of the poems of Ossian, like the value of all early poetry, must remain difficult to decide. It can never be absolutely proved that events happened on the plains of Troy or among the hills of Morven exactly as Homer and as Ossian had described them; though it must be confessed that Ossian, as an eye-witness, corroborated in many details by history, tradition, and antiquities, appears entitled to the greater credence. But for another and probably more important kind of truth the work of both bards may be considered absolutely reliable. The Iliad and the Ossianic poems present a general but genuine picture of the civilisation in the countries and at the time in which they were composed.
After all, the chief assurance of immortality for these "tales of the times of old" must rest upon their own sublimity and beauty. There may long be those who doubt the existence of Ossian; but none will deny that in these pages are to be found passages unsurpassed in majesty and hardly equalled in tenderness. What could there be more full of pathos than Ossian's frequent address to Malvina, the betrothed of his dead son Oscar, and the companion of his own old age? And what in literature is nobler than the bard's apostrophe to the splendours of heaven, or his lament at the tombs of heroes?—"Weep, thou father of Morar! weep; but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead; low their pillow of dust. No more shall he hear thy voice, no more awake at thy call. When shall it be morn in the grave, to bid the slumberer awake? Farewell, thou bravest of men."—(Songs of Selma.)
Ossian is not the only bard whose glory appears a marvel to these later days. Out of the dim past, booming like the surge of ocean, still rolls many a billow of primeval song. The Vedic hymns float onward yet down a stream of time whose ripples have been centuries. The world still listens awed to the chants of the prophets of ancient Israel. And still from the storied isles of Greece reverberates the long roll of the tale of Troy divine. Does it seem more strange that the echoes of a heroic age should be lingering yet among the fastnesses of the Caledonian hills?
GEORGE EYRE-TODD.
Gartocharn,
Dumbartonshire.
- ↑ The Rev. M. Clerk of Kilmallie in the introduction to his new translation of Ossian (1870), quotes an advertisement from the Literary Journal of 1784, in which Mr. Beckett, Macpherson's publisher, certifies that the Gaelic MSS. of Ossian have been exposed for public inspection during twelve months at his shop in the Strand.
- ↑ In "The Songs of Selma."
- ↑ Since writing these pages I have had an opportunity of reading Mr. Clerk's Dissertation, and I should like to direct attention to his admirable summary of the whole Ossianic question.