Born, at Kingussie, Invernesshire, 27 Oct. 1736. Early education at parish school. Matric., King’s Coll., Aberdeen, Feb. 1753. To Marischal Coll., 1755. Probably studied at Edinburgh Univ., winter of 1755–56. After leaving Edinburgh, was master in school at Ruthven; and afterwards private tutor. Contrib. to “Scots Mag.,” 1758. Friendship with Home and Dr. Carlyle, who encouraged him in publication of translations of Gaelic poems. Travelled in Highlands, 1760, collecting material. To London, 1761. Sec. to Governor of Pensacola, West Florida, 1764. Returned to England, 1766. Employed by Government to write on political questions. Agent to Nabob of Arcot, 1780. M.P. for Camelford, 1780–96. Died, at Badenoch, Invernesshire, 17 Feb. 1796. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Highlander” (anon.), 1758; “Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands” (anon.), 1760; Ossian’s “Fingal,” translated from the Gaelic, 1762; Ossian’s “Temora,” translated, 1763; “Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland,” 1771; translation of Homer’s “Iliad,” 1773; “A History of Great Britain, from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover” (2 vols.), 1775; “Original Papers, containing the Secret History of Great Britain” (2 vols.), 1775; “The Rights of Great Britain asserted against the claims of America” (anon.), 1776; “A Short History of the Opposition during the last Session” (anon.), 1779; “The History and Management of the East India Company” (anon.), 1779. He edited: “Letters from Mahommed Ali Chang, Nabob of Arcot, to the Court of Directors,” 1779. Collected Works: “Poetical Works,” 1802. Life: by T. B. Saunders, 1894.

Personal

  I received your foolish and impudent note. Whatever insult is offered me, I will do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I will not desist from detecting what I think a cheat, from any fear of the menaces of a Ruffian. What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable; and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.

  “Why dost thou build the tower, son of the winged days? Soon will thou depart with thy fathers. The blast from the desert shall rush through thy hall, and sound upon the bossy shield.” Do you recollect, dear Madam, when I stopped with you at the gate of Belleville, I repeated those lines, and observed what a suitable inscription they might prove for the front of poor James Macpherson’s new house. It would appear I was moved by a prophetic impulse when I predicted that he never would see it finished…. He felt the approaches of death, and hoped no relief from medicine, though his life was not such that one would like to look back on at that awful period: indeed whose is? It pleased the Almighty to render his last scene most affecting and exemplary. He died last Tuesday evening; and, from the minute he was confined, till a very little before he expired, never ceased imploring the Divine mercy in the most earnest and pathetic manner. People about him were overawed and melted at the fervour and bitterness of his penitence; he frequently and earnestly entreated the prayers of good serious people of the lower class who were admitted. He was a very good-natured man; and now, that he had got all his schemes of interest and ambition fulfilled, he seemed to reflect and grow domestic, and showed, of late, a great inclination to be an indulgent landlord, and very liberal to the poor; of which I could relate various instances, more tender and interesting than flashy or ostentatious. His heart and temper were originally good; his religious principles were, I fear, unfixed, and fluctuating. But the primary cause that so much genius, taste, benevolence and prosperity, did not produce or diffuse more happiness, was his living a stranger to comforts of domestic life, from which unhappy connexions excluded him.

  A Scottish Chatterton of maturer growth who did not commit suicide.

  As an original writer Macpherson became more and more discredited, but as an individual more and more wealthy; and, to prove that no honour lies beyond the grasp of unprincipled mediocrity, he was buried in Poet’s Corner.

  He went up to London—was appointed to go with Governor Johnston to Florida, in America; remained there at Pensacola, a year or more; but quarrelled with his chief (he had rare aptitude for quarrelling) and came back in 1766. Some English historical work followed; but with little success or profit. Yet he was a canny Scotchman, and so laid his plans that he became agent for some rich nabob of India (from these pickings winning a great fortune eventually); entered Parliament in 1780; had a country house at Putney, where he entertained lavishly; and at last built a great show place in the highlands near to his birth-place—which one may see to-day—with an obelisk to his memory, looking down on the valley of the Spey; and not so far away from the old coach-road, that passes through Killiecrankie, from Blair Athol to Inverness, but the coach man can show it—as he did to me—with his whip…. Yet if his bock of Ossianic poems was ten-fold better than it is, it would hardly give an enduring, or a brilliant gloss to the memory of James Macpherson.

  If none but the great deserved a biography, this book would not have been written. For Macpherson was in no sense a great man: he was a miscellaneous writer of considerable talent, a busy journalist, a member of Parliament, an agent for an Indian prince, a popular and prosperous citizen; and, beyond the fact that he brought out the Ossianic poems at the age of twenty-five, he did little in the sixty years of his life that would entitle him to permanent remembrance. This work of his youth was, as he declared, translated from Gaelic fragments found in the Scottish Highlands. By its wonderful success, and its no less wonderful influence on literature, both in England and on the Continent, it gave him, in his own day, a world-wide reputation. Literary fashions have suffered many changes in the century that has passed since his death, and Macpherson’s reputation no longer exists; but his work retains an historical interest of a curious and unique character…. While I believe that, on the whole, he has been greatly slandered, he is certainly no hero; and I hope that I am not afflicted, in regard to him, with what has been called the lues boswelliana, or the disease of admiration.

  The big, burly politician lived in society…. As he grew elderly, rich, and prosperous, Macpherson’s heart yearned for his old Highland district, and he turned his eyes to Badenoch; there he resolved to buy land and build a home within sight of his native mountains. Two or three small farms were bought on the banks of the Spey and soon a villa, bearing the cockney title of “Belleville,” which had been designed by his friend Adam, the architect, rose in the wilds, two miles from Kingussie. People long remembered the great man from London, who came every year, bedizened with rings and gold seals, and clad in fur-edged coat. They told stories of the grand state he kept up as a Highland chief, his splendid table, his home filled with guests; of his sallying forth in the morning and bringing bibulous lairds from houses far and near, who in the dining-room, from whose walls portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds looked down, kept high revelry till they and the nights were far spent. But good things, too, were told of Macpherson, pleasant to remember; of his refusing from a grateful Government the forfeited estate of Cluny Macpherson, which was thereupon restored to its rightful owner; his generosity to the poor, whom he employed at high wages, which no Badenoch man had ever dreamed of; his kindly remembrance of all about his native Ruthven. Now that his ambition was satisfied, now that his struggle with poverty and obscurity was over he could be the pleasant, affable man, the kindly landlord, and the genial host.

Poems of Ossian

  Several gentlemen of the Highlands and Isles, generously gave me all the assistance in their power, and it was by their means I was enabled to complete the Epic Poem. How far it comes up to the rules of the Epopœia is the province of criticism to examine. It is only my business to lay it before the reader as I have found it…. A man diffident of his abilities might ascribe his own compositions to a person whose remote antiquity and whose situation when alive might well answer for faults which would be inexcusable in a writer of this age…. But of this I am persuaded … that some will think, notwithstanding the disadvantages with which the works ascribed to Ossian appear, it would be a very uncommon instance of self-denial in me to disown them, were they really of my composition.

  It is as beautiful as Homer.

  There we find the fire and enthusiasm of the most early times, combined with an amazing degree of regularity and art. We find tenderness, and even delicacy of sentiment, greatly predominant over fierceness and barbarity. Our hearts are melted with the softest feelings, and at the same time elevated with the highest ideas of magnanimity, generosity, and true heroism.

  I never was able to discover in his most unguarded moments that he was any other than the collector and translator of the works of Ossian, or assumed any other merit that might be derived from thence. But I have heard him express the greatest contempt and disdain for those who thought him the fabricator of them. If there was any person who asserted that Macpherson had owned it to himself, even that would not shake my faith; for I knew him to be of a temper, when he was teased and fretted, to carry his indignation that far.

  I have no less zeal for the “Poems of Ossian,” than if I had been born on one of his favourite mountains; and I shall be very glad to see history confirm all that his poetry has set forth.

  Homer 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 noble 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 illustrious 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 langour and pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated.

  Doctor Johnson having asserted in his late publication that the Translator of Ossian’s Poems “never could show the original, nor can it be shown by any other,” I hereby declare that the originals of “Fingal” and other poems of Ossian lay in my shop for many months in the year 1762, for the inspection of the curious. The public were not only apprised of their lying there for inspection, but even proposals for publishing the originals of the poems of Ossian were dispersed through the kingdom, and advertised in the newspapers. Upon finding that a number of subscribers sufficient to bear the expenses were not likely to appear, I returned the manuscript to the proprietor, in whose hands they still remain.

  I see you entertain a great doubt with regard to the authenticity of the poems of Ossian. You are certainly right in so doing. It is indeed strange that any men of sense could have imagined it possible, that above twenty thousand verses, along with numberless historical facts, could have been preserved by oral tradition during fifty generations, by the rudest, perhaps, of all the European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled. Where a supposition is so contrary to common sense, any positive evidence of it ought never to be regarded. Men run with great avidity to give their evidence in favour of what flatters their passions and their natural prejudices. You are therefore over and above indulgent to us in speaking of the matter with hesitation.

  Mr. Tyrrwhit has at last published the Bristol poems. He does not give up the antiquity, yet fairly leaves everybody to ascribe them to Chatterton, if they please, which I think the internal evidence must force every one to do, unless the amazing prodigy of Chatterton’s producing them should not seem a larger miracle than Rowley’s and Canning’s anticipation of the style of very modern poetry. Psalmanazar alone seems to have surpassed the genius of Chatterton, and when that lad could perform such feats, as he certainly did, what difficulty is there in believing that Macpherson forged the cold skeleton of an epic poem, that is more insipid than “Leonidas?”

  Mr. Macpherson is by many supposed to be the sole and original author of the compositions which he has published as translations of the works of Ossian; this charge I am enabled to refute, at least in part, having fortunately met with the originals of some of them. Mr. Macpherson, I acknowledge, has taken very great liberties with them; retrenching, adding, and altering as he judged proper: but we must admit that he has discovered great ingenuity in these variations.

  I look upon M’Pherson’s “Fingal” to be as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with. Had it been really an ancient work, a true specimen how men thought at that time, it would have been a curiosity of the first rate. As a modern production, it is nothing.

  I was the first person who brought out to the notice of the world, the poems of Ossian: first, by the “Fragments of Ancient Poetry” which I published, and afterwards, by my setting on foot the undertaking for collecting and publishing the “Works of Ossian;” and I have always considered this as a meritorious action of my life.

  Mr. Macpherson must not only be esteemed as one of the first poets, but as exhibiting an attention and skill in the preservation of costume hitherto unparalleled. Ancient or modern, however, these poems must be viewed as pregnant with beauties of the highest rank; uniformly mild and generous in manners and sentiment, uniformly simple, pathetic, and sublime, vivid and picturesque in imagery, in diction rapid, nervous, and concise, they are alike calculated to melt and meliorate the heart, to elevate and fire the imagination. I do not hesitate to affirm that, if in sublimity the palm must be allowed, and I think it must, to our great countryman, yet in the pathetic the Caledonian is far superior, not only to Milton, but to every other poet. Conceiving, therefore, as I firmly do, that Fingal and Temora are solely indebted to Mr. Macpherson for their form, and for, probably, a very considerable portion of their matter, and as the bard under whose name they are now published was totally unknown till within these forty years, I have placed them, and wish indeed there to place the whole collection, which is in fact truly epic, at the head of the first department, where I am confident they need not fear comparison with any specimens of our elder poetry.

  After a long interval the poetical genius of the Scots was revived in the tender and luxuriant Thomson; but the spurious poems of Ossian, a recent forgery, still continue to pollute their history, and to corrupt their taste.

  The Phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. It traveled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause…. Open this far-famed book! I have done so at random, and the beginning of the “Epic Poem Temora,” in eight books, presents itself…. 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 everything is indistinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness. In Macpherson’s work it is exactly the reverse: everything (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…. Yet, much as these pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy, Chatterton, on their first appearance…. This incapability to amalgamate with the literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in this respect, the effect of Macpherson’s publication with the “Reliques” of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions.

  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 grasses 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.

  You recall me to some very pleasant feelings of my boyhood when you ask my opinion of Ossian…. Ossian and Spenser were two books which the good old bard [Dr. Blacklock] put into my hands, and which I devoured rather than perused. Their tales were for a long time so much my delight, that I could repeat without remorse whole Cantos of the one and Duans of the other; and wo to the unlucky wight who undertook to be my auditor, for in the height of my enthusiasm I was apt to disregard all hints that my recitations became tedious…. Ossian’s poems, in particular, have more charms for youth than for a more advanced stage…. After making every allowance for the disadvantages of a literal translation, and the possible debasement which those now collected may have suffered in the great and violent change which the Highlands have undergone since the researches of Macpherson, I am compelled to admit that incalculably the greater part of the English Ossian must be ascribed to Macpherson himself, and that his whole introductions, notes, &c., &c., are an absolute tissue of forgeries.

  Little as we participate in the unqualified enthusiasm expressed by some admirers of Ossian, still the influence exercised by these poems on the public taste is certainly very remarkable…. My observations of these Ossianic poems have been founded on the principle of conceding to them the highest possible antiquity, which is at all consistent with historical truth, and at the same time acquiescing at once in their relative authenticity. Certainly, unless the contrary be proved by extraneous circumstances, no internal evidence militates against the supposition that such a hero-race as that of Fingal existed on the northwest coast of Scotland in the ninth and tenth centuries; that it actually produced an Ossian, who, as bard and hero, celebrated his own exploits and those of his race. If his constant recurrence to the melancholy remembrance of departed ancestors, and the earlier period of their glory, become by frequent repetition monotonous and wearying, still the continual interweaving of the person of the bard into the history narrated, affords a happy poetical and universal point of union, and greatly contributes to enhance that fascinating interest with which the poems have inspired so many readers and hearers. This circumstance is, indeed, so peculiarly propitious, that many succeeding bards have adopted the form once suggested, and written and sung as if in Ossian’s person.

  They are utterly worthless, except as an edifying instance of the success of a story without evidence, and of a book without merit. They are a chaos of words which present no image, of images which have no archetype:—they are without form and void; and darkness is upon the face of them. Yet how many men of genius have panegyrised and imitated them!

  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 the Voice of Cona? Let us return, if we can, to our old creed—let us abjure, if we can, the folly of wisdom.

  It is many years ago since I looked at Ossian, and I never did much delight in him, as that fact proves. Since your letter came I have taken him up again, and have just finished “Carthon.” There are beautiful passages in it, the most beautiful beginning, I think, “Desolate is the dwelling of Moina,” and the next place being filled by that address to the sun you magnify so with praise. But the charm of these things is the only charm of all the poems. There is a sound of wild vague music in a monotone—nothing is articulate, nothing individual, nothing various. Take away a few poetical phrases from these poems, and they are colourless and bare. Compare them with the old burning ballads, with a wild heart beating in each. How cold they grow in the comparison! Compare them with Homer’s grand breathing personalities, with Æschylus’s—nay, but I cannot bear upon my lips or finger the charge of the blasphemy of such comparing, even for religion’s sake…. And that reminds me of a distinction you suggest between Ossian and Homer. I fashion it in this way: Homer sometimes nods, but Ossian makes his readers nod.

  You ask me about Ossian—now here is truth—the first book I ever bought in my life was Ossian…. It is now in the next room. And years before that, the first composition I ever was guilty of was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived, through two or three scraps in other books—I never can recollect not writing rhymes … but I knew they were nonsense even then; this, however, I thought exceedingly well of, and laid up for posterity under the cushion of a great armchair. “And now my soul is satisfied”—so said one man after killing another, the death being suggested, in its height of honour, by stars and stars (*  *  *  *). I could not have been five years old, that’s one consolation. Years after, when I bought this book, I found a vile dissertation of Laing … all to prove Ossian was not Ossian…. I would not read it, but could not help knowing the purpose of it, and the pith of the hatefully—irresistible arguments. The worst came in another shape, though … an after-gleaning of real Ossianic poems, by a firm believer whose name I forget—“if this is the real”—I thought! Well, to this day I believe in a nucleus for all that haze, a foundation of truth to Macpherson’s fanciful superstructure—and I have been long intending to read once again those Fingals and Malvinas.

  The history of Celtic poetry in Scotland has been invested with a false brilliancy, which time is gradually impairing. The poems ascribed to Ossian, whatever may be their intrinsic merit, have been chiefly admired as the productions of a remote age, and of a nation which, if not utterly barbarous, was, at all events, very imperfectly civilized; and when this charm of antiquity is completely dissolved, they cannot be perused with the same degree of enthusiasm.

  One circumstance, which has contributed to keep up the dispute about Ossian so much longer than that about Rowley, no doubt, is, that there was some small portion of truth mixed up with Macpherson’s deception, whereas there was none at all in Chatterton’s. But the Ossianic poetry, after all that has been said about its falsehood of style and substance as well as of pretention, making it out to be thus a double lie, must still have some qualities wonderfully adapted to allure the popular taste. Both Chatterton and Macpherson wrote a quantity of modern English verse in their own names; but nothing either did in this way was worth much: they evidently felt most at ease in their masks.

  When the Gaelic “Fingal,” published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English as something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation from MacPherson’s English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call “full sense verses.”

  The Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson’s “Ossian,” carried, in the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise Macpherson’s “Ossian” here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of Macpherson’s “Ossian,” she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection. But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its silent halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and you can see, even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth century.

  MacPherson got much from Mss. 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 assistants, added much, even in the way of connecting-links between the various episodes.

  A Scotchman, a man of wit, of overmuch wit, having written to his cost an unsuccessful rhapsody, wished to recover himself, went amongst the mountains of his country, gathered picturesque images, collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who, with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French grisettes and perruquiers. Macpherson displayed to the world an imitation of primitive manners, not overtrue, for the extreme rudeness of barbarians would have shocked the people, but yet well enough preserved or portrayed to contrast with modern civilisation, and persuade the public that they were looking upon pure nature. A keen sympathy with Scotch landscape, so grand, so cold, so gloomy, rain on the hills, the birch trembling to the wind, the mist of heaven and the vagueness of the soul, so that every dreamer found there the emotions of his solitary walks and his philosophical glooms; chivalric exploits and magnanimity, heroes who set out alone to engage an army, faithful virgins dying on the tomb of their betrothed; an impassioned, coloured style, affecting to be abrupt, yet polished; able to charm a disciple of Rousseau by its warmth and elegance: here was something to transport the young enthusiasts of the time, civilised barbarians, scholarly lovers of nature, dreaming of the delights of savage life, whilst they shook off the powder which the hairdresser had left on their coats.

  The fate of a poem which excited the enthusiasm of Goethe and Napoleon, and which nobody can read at the present day, certainly suggests some curious problems. Briefly, we may assume that its vague and gigantesque scenery, its pompous mouthing of sham heroics, its crude attempts to represent a social state when great men stalked through the world in haughty superiority to the narrow conventions of modern life, were congenial to men growing weary of an effete formalism. Men had been talking under their breath and in a mincing dialect so long that they were easily gratified, and easily imposed upon, by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment.

  Above all, Ossian, that poet of the vague—that northern Dante, as great, as majestic, as supernatural as the Dante of Florence, and who draws often from his phantoms cries more human and more heart-rending than those of the heroes of Homer.

  The appearance of this poetry gave to the English-speaking mind the thrill of a new and strange emotion about mountain scenery. Whether the poetry was old, or the product of last century, it describes, as none other does, the desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland shores or on the headlands of the Hebrides.

  Not into literature only did MacPherson’s book pour a new lava-steam, but it initiated, in the domain of Historical Science, the most fruitful new researches. Directly springing from, or indirectly stimulated by, the enthusiasm excited by “Ossian,” researches were instituted into the antiquities of all the three great races of Europe—not of the Kelts only, but of the Teutons, and of the Slavs—and collections were made, or edited, of their ancient poesies. It is unnecessary to recall the dates of the several publications. Only this general fact we need here note, that if, in very various degrees, propter “Ossian,” in every case post “Ossian,” were such works as the Welsh “Myvyrian Archæology” and “Mabinogion;” Müller’s “Collection of German Poems from the 12th, 13th and 14th Centuries,” and Grimm’s “Teutonic Mythology;” and the numberless Slavonic Folk-lore collections which were the antiquarian bases of the great political fact of Panslavonic aspirations. And considering this, we see that by no means was the scope and bearing of the researches springing from, or stimulated by, MacPherson’s “Ossian” confined to the sphere of historical theory, and religious belief. Few things are, in the last hundred years, more remarkable than the direct transformation of historical theories into political forces. Political aspirations of nationalities or races to union or re-union are but the transference into the sphere of practical endeavour of the theories of antiquaries and historians. Yet no forces have in Europe, in this century, shown themselves more powerful. And more particularly events are now indicating, with almost daily increasing clearness, that the Keltic Revival, directly, initiated by MacPherson’s “Ossian,” will show itself hardly less important as a political force than the Slavonic Revival, indirectly stimulated by “Ossian.”

  Addison had already directed attention to the English ballad-poetry, and Klopstock, Gleim and others had profited by his example. Bishop Percy’s collection of English ballads was, therefore, received with general rapture in Germany, and the sentimental heroic poetry of Celtic origin, which Macpherson sent forth under the name of Ossian, was greeted with enthusiastic applause by a race of poets full of sentiment and warlike sympathies.

  Space (fortunately) does not permit a discussion of the Ossianic question. That fragments of Ossianic legend (if not of Ossianic poetry) survive in oral Gaelic traditions, seems certain. How much Macpherson knew of these, and how little he used them in the bombastic prose which Napoleon loved (and spelled “Ocean”), it is next to impossible to discover.

  Curiously enough, although Macpherson died suddenly, his papers were searched in vain for a scrap of evidence for or against his culpability. In these days few will be credulous enough to pin their faith to the misty songs of Ullin; but there are probably some persons of intelligence, especially north of the Tay, who still “indulge the pleasing supposition that Fingal fought and Ossian sang.”

  It has been seen that among his contemporaries and fellow-countrymen there were some who showed signs of the coming romantic movement; but he was the first in the English language who powerfully and decisively expressed it. And this must be set down as his signal merit. Far from being a mere translator, he was peculiarly original. Not that Macpherson created the spirit of romance…. It does not follow that Macpherson was a man of great genius. On the contrary, the range of his ideas was so narrow that to read any one of his poems is to become master of almost all that he had to say. The same expressions, the same images, and almost identical situations recur again and again. Repetition was affected no doubt partly to give an aspect of antiquity; but in Macpherson it goes deeper and discloses poverty of mind. Still, to deny him the praise of having well expressed his few thoughts is unjust. There is much fustian in his style, and it speedily palls upon the ear; but the peculiar poetic prose which he formed for himself has, in little bits, a powerful charm. His descriptions of scenery and of aspects of nature are often very beautiful. We ask again and again why they are there, but he who can forget their incongruity with a poem of the third century must feel their truth.

  Ossian points as directly to Byron as the chivalry and ballad revivals point to Scott. These indicate the two great streams in the Romantic movement. In Byron’s poetry—sincere or feigned—we see constantly manifest the Ossian feeling. What Byron himself thought of Ossian I have had a good opportunity to observe by perusing Byron’s own manuscript notes in a copy of the Ossian poems. The following notes I copied directly from Byron’s handwriting: “The portrait which Ossian has drawn of himself is indeed a masterpiece. He not only appears in the light of a distinguished warrior—generous as well as brave—and possessed of exquisite sensibility—but of an aged venerable bard—subjected to the most melancholy vicissitudes of fortune—weak and blind—the sole survivor of his family—the last of the race of Fingal. The character of Fingal—the poet’s own father—is a highly finished one. There is certainly no hero in the Iliad—or the Odyssey—who is at once so brave and amiable as this renowned king of Morven. It is well known that Hector—whose character is of all the Homeric heroes the most complete—greatly sullies the lustre of his glorious actions by the insult over the fallen Patroclus. On the other hand the conduct of Fingal appears uniformly illustrious and great—without one mean or inhuman action to tarnish the splendour of his fame—He is equally the object of our admiration esteem and love.” Speaking of Ossian’s skill in depicting female characters, he writes, “How happily, for instance, has he characterized his own mistress—afterwards his wife—by a single epithet expressive of that modesty—softness—and complacency—which constitute the perfection of feminine excellence—‘the mildly blushing Everallin.’… I am of opinion that though in sublimity of sentiment—in vivacity and strength of description—Ossian may claim a full equality of merit with Homer himself—yet in the invention both of incidents and character he is greatly inferior to the Grecian bard.” These quotations are interesting as showing how seriously Byron took Ossian and how carefully and thoughtfully he read him. The influence of Ossian lasted long after the immediate excitement caused by its novelty and professed antiquity had passed away.

  The problem of Macpherson’s true character must now be regarded as depending, not upon any question as to the survival of ancient Celtic poetry in the Highlands—for of the existence there, in Macpherson’s day, of even a considerable body of such traditionary remains there seems no longer any room to doubt—but rather upon the particular degree of fidelity and conscientious care displayed in his arrangement and translation of the several “fragments” recovered by him from the Highlanders, and declared by him to be none other than the disjecta membra of the long-lost epic of “Fingal.”

  Ossian was translated into Italian by Cesarotti; there were two versions of him in Spanish, several in German, one in Swedish, one in Danish, and two in Dutch, of which one was by Bilderdyk. In Germany, especially, he created a furor. The true originator of Northern poetry was found at last; “Thou, too, Ossian,” cried Klopstock, “wert swallowed up in oblivion; but thou has been restored to thy position; behold thee now before us, the equal and the challenger of Homer the Greek.” “What need,” wrote Voss to Brückner, “of natural beauty? Ossian of Scotland is a greater poet than Homer of Ionia.” Lerse, in a sonorous discourse at Strasburg, acknowledged three guides of the “sacred art of poetry:” Shakespeare, Homer, and Ossian—two Northern poets to a single classic. Herder wrote a comparison between the Homeric and the Ossianic epics, spoke of Ossian as “the man I have sought,” and contemplated a journey to Scotland in order to collect the songs of the bards. Bürger imitated him, and Christian Heyne constituted himself champion at the University of Göttingen. Lastly, Goethe, need we remind the reader, drew inspiration from him in “Werther” and elsewhere. When his spirits are high Werther’s taste is for Homer, but in sorrow he feeds upon Ossian, and when “it is autumn within and about him,” he cries: “Ossian has completely banished Homer from my heart!”

  In his former works M. d’Arboiss had already drawn up a catalogue of Irish epics; he had examined them and briefly defined their character and their literary importance; he had taught us how to distinguish the cycle of Ulster, which crystallised in the North of Ireland around the heroic figure of King Conchobar or Conor; the cycle of Leinster, which celebrated in the east of Ireland the deeds of Osson, or Ossian, as the moderns have it; and finally the mythological cycle, formed in earth, sea and sky, around the conceptions of a religious imagination. He showed us how the two Epics of the North and the East, artificially combined and quite transformed from their rude, barbarous and fierce antiquity, were idealised out of all semblance by the rhetorical Macpherson till they condensed anew into those pale, vague, nebulous poems of Ossian which appeared so tremendous a revelation of nature to the earlier Romantics. A whole generation found in this mutilated paraphrase a joy for ever. Napoleon, Goethe, Lamartine read and raved of Ossian, as also Baour-Lormian. And Werther was to write: “Ossian has supplanted Homer in my heart.” M. d’Arbois and his collaborators, Mm. Dottin, Duvau and Ferdinand Grammont give, in the present volume, numerous specimens of these various epochs, which dwell, still unpublished, in the dusty seclusion of libraries and archives. It is interesting to study them, to turn from Macpherson to his models. Despite his inferior value—for the copy is far below the original—his versions merit our attention, not only on their own merits and as the testimony, however ill-reported, of a forgotten world, but for the indirect and latent action which during more than fifty years they continued to exercise upon the imaginative literature of Europe. In two of the episodes selected: the death of Derdrin and the death of Cûchulain, the editors give, side by side with the version of Ossian, a literal translation from the original epic. One knows not which is the more surprising, the audacity with which Macpherson has drowned the brutal, savage, old legends in a vapour of vague exclamations, or the innocent good faith with which our romantic fore-fathers accepted these tricked-out ecstasies and insipid, tame tirades which we have not the patience to read to the end of, as the unsophisticated voice of Nature. It is a matter to give pause to the advocates of an absolute standard in criticism, a shaft the more in the quiver of the impressionists, chi oggi han il grido, till a new mode arise.

  The imposture (for that in the main it was imposture is certain) of Macpherson is more interesting as a matter of tendency than of essence. The world wanted romance; it wanted “the Celtic vague;” it wanted anything but what it had had: Macpherson met it with a sort of clumsy genius. All the others named catered for the same want, not with the intelligent scoundrelism of the adulterator, but with the honest attempt of the still unqualified artist.

  We do not acquit a man of dishonesty because he passes a few good half-crowns amid hundreds of his own coinage. We know that this is a necessary trick of the game, and part of the prudential wisdom of knavery…. We certainly believe that many men, and many women, given a few Gaelic names and a tale to tell about them, could, after one perusal of “Fingal” or “Temora,” turn out a poem which, bating perhaps the felicities which appear at very rare intervals in Macpherson’s compilation, and prove that he had some poetic gift, would pass for Macpherson-Ossianic.

  In studying the landscape of Macpherson’s “Ossian” we soon learn that it belongs unmistakably to Western Argyleshire. Its union of mountain, glen, and sea removes it at once from the interior to the coast. Even if it had been more or less inaccurately drawn, its prominence and consistency all through the poems would have been remarkable in the productions of a lad of four-and-twenty, who had spent his youth in the inland region of Badenoch, where the scenery is of another kind. But when we discover that the endless allusions to topographical features are faithful delineations, which give the very spirit and essence of the scenery, we feel sure that whether they were written in the eighteenth century or in the third, they display a poetic genius of no mean order. The grandeur and gloom of the Highland mountains, the spectral mists that sweep round the crags, the roar of the torrents, the gleams of sunlight on moor and lake, the wail of the breeze among the cairns of the dead, the unspeakable sadness that seems to brood over the landscape whether the sky be clear or clouded—these features of west Highland scenery were first revealed by Macpherson to the modern world. This revelation quickened the change of feeling, already begun, in regard to the prevailing horror of mountain-scenery. It brought before men’s eyes some of the fascination of the mountain-world, more especially in regard to the atmospheric effects that play so large a part in its landscape. It showed the titanic forces of storm and tempest in full activity. And yet there ran through all the poems a vein of infinite melancholy. The pathos of life manifested itself everywhere, now in the tenderness of unavailing devotion, now in the courage of hopeless despair.

General

  His “History” is pronounced by Fox to be full of “impudent” falsehoods; it has long sunk from public notice, and had no charm either of style or thought to relieve it from neglect. Nor is it possible to believe, that one who wrote so dull a history could have produced so wild and imaginative a poem as that which the world has generally attributed to him.

  Though he never could have become so important a figure as he thought himself, we are convinced that he would have achieved a fame in literature quite as great and much less sinister if he had been more honest.

  That a writer of the stamp of James Macpherson should have been destined to approach history at all was, I think, a remarkable freak of nature. That it should be reserved, however, for the author of the “Ossian” fraud to discover and give to the world important facts, tearing to shreds the character of one of the greatest men that this country has ever produced, is, I submit, a little too hard for belief by rational beings. Is it reasonable to suppose that “Original Papers” on English history produced by the inventor of the Gaelic “Originals” of the Ossian poems are likely to be genuine? The point is, indeed, virtually settled at the outset by the fact which I have mentioned that the manuscripts in question, imputing such fearful crimes to Marlborough, Godolphin, and their associated helpers in the work of the Revolution, are not original. I must ask my readers to keep this steadily in view; for the whole gist of the position taken up by Dalrymple, Hallam, Macaulay, and all more recent followers of Macpherson lies in the assumption that the Nairne papers in the Bodleian library are original state documents, and therefore not to be gainsaid.