CHAPTER III. FROM THE REFORMATION TO MACPHERSON. ̓Αναξιφόρμιγγες ὕμνοι, Τίνα θεὸν, τίν ̓ ἥρωα, Τίνα δ ̓ ἄνδρα κελαδήσομεν ;—PINDAR. BETWEEN the poetry of the Dean of Lismore's Book and that which we are now about to consider there is a wide gap. I cannot tell how it is,—perhaps it is not wise always to demand reasons for the sudden rise of poetical or artistic schools, but somehow or other, even in the furthest west and most thoroughly Popish of the Western Highlands, the spirit of intellectual individualism seems to have infected the atmosphere; and an army of Celtic poets comes into view, in whom the elements of family-genealogy and clan-eulogy, though in no wise extinct, are subordinated to the personal character and genius of the bard. This is a thoroughly modern element; an element, however, which in the Highland poets never thrusts the workman with undue prominence-as in the case of Lord Byron-into the foreground of his work. The Celtic bard of this epoch, though no longer the mere spokesman of the clans, is thoroughly popular not only in the character of his environment and in the tone of his treatment, but generally in the choice of his subject. He does not compass heaven and earth, like some of our modern poets, to find a subject, and find a bad one after all. If he does not find it in his own G bosom, he will certainly find it among his own hills. O càiraibh mi ri taobh nan allt And again : O cuir mo chluas ri fuaim Eas-mòr Bidh cruit agus slige ri 'm thaobh 'S an sgiath a dhiòn mo shinnsir 's a' chath. "Where I may hear the waterfall, And the hum of its falling wave, And give me the harp, and the shell, and the shield This poem, by whomsoever written, is extremely beautiful, melodious in language, polished and graceful in execution, so as not undeservedly to claim a place in the great echo chamber of Highland poetry, very similar to that occupied by Gray's Elegy among ourselves. But more noteworthy, 1 Poems by Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Edinburgh, 1803. perhaps, than its internal excellence is the evidence which it affords of a poetry of high literary culture existing in the Highlands long before the time of Macpherson. It is quite modern in its sentiment and tone; a tone, if I may venture to guess, perhaps caught from the pastoral poetry of the Italians about the time of Milton fashionable in England, with a reminiscence of the old Ossianic times, but without the slightest flavour of Christianity. In these respects it seems to belong to the same school as Macpherson's Ossian; and as a significant precursor of Fingal, though in a much less ambitious style, it seems to me to deserve much more attention from Lowland critics than it has hitherto received. The two other poems in Mackenzie's collection which precede "The Aged Bard's Wish" are entitled Mordubh and Collath. They are in the style and manner of Macpherson; and, though assumed by Mackenzie to be ancient, do in all likelihood belong to that same school of modern literary Gaelic to which we have referred "The Aged Bard." Of the first poem, Mordubh, an English prose translation appeared in Clark's Caledonian Bards, published in 1778, and a poetical version by Mrs. Grant of Laggan in her poems About this book a mystery hangs, which it seems impossible to clear up. Mrs. Grant declares her perfect faith in the honesty of the translator, who, according to a MS. note in my copy, was by birth a Badenoch man, afterwards bred as an engraver in Edinburgh, and finally settled as a land-surveyor in South Wales; but in an age where, from the success of Macpherson, the temptation was great to trump up Caledonian poems, one cannot feel warranted to take stand upon it as on any very sure foundation. Of the second poem, Collath, the authorship is spoken of by Mackenzie as a matter of literary fact, when he says that Fonar, the author of this poem, belonged to the poem illustrious and once powerful family of Collath. But Mr. Campbell, in his Highland Tales (iv. p. 224), asserts that the author of this piece was the Rev. Mr. Maccallum, minister of Arisaig in Inverness-shire, who published it as an ancient in the first edition of his old Gaelic poems in 1820; and when he found his pious fraud passing current, was seized with a twitch of conscience, and in the preface to the third edition of the poems in 1842 confessed to the authorship. And this witness is true: for, though I have not been able to lay my hands on this edition, on account of its extreme rarity, I saw a complete copy of the preface with the confession in the possession of a gentleman well known for his curious collection of Gaelic books.1 These two poems, therefore, both in their style and in the ambiguity or admitted disingenuousness of their authorship, may be regarded as coming fitly under the rubric of the famous Ossianic controversy, and may have some not unimportant indirect bearing on its critical treatment. In the meantime we shall behave wisely by simply dismissing them from our view. The well-marked figure who leads the van of the goodly company of post-Reformation lyrical bards, is MAIRI NIGHEAN ALASTAIR RUAIDH, that is, Mary the daughter of Red Alexander; for the Highlanders, like the Homeric heroes, with the strong feeling of clanship which possessed Greeks and Celts alike, generally add the patronymic to the personal name, just as the botanists mark at once the common and the peculiar in any plant by a double name, of which one characterises the genus and the other the species. Mary was a Macleod, born at Rowdil, at the south-east corner of Harris,2 in the year 1569, and her father was 1 Mr. James Macpherson of the Union Bank, Edinburgh. 2 At this place there is an interesting old monument of the Macleods, belonging to the year 1428. See Murray's Handbook of Scotland: Inver son of Alastair Ruadh or Roy, as Lowlanders call it,1 a descendant of the chief of the Macleods. Mary, like many of the authors of our best Scottish songs, was not professionally a poet; she merely had the fountain of human sympathy deep within her, which, fed from the old lyrical habit of her race, gushed out as occasion might call in the fresh and natural way which it is the highest glory of professional poets like Goethe to imitate with success, as it is, on the other hand, a most perilous seduction for a popular poet like Burns, to prink the unadorned simplicity of his ploughman's Muse with the glittering spangles and curious lace-work of a highly polished literary style. Her function in life seems to have been that highly respectable one which figures so largely in the Odyssey and the Attic drama: she was τpódos, or nurse, to five lairds of the Macleods, and two of the lairds of Applecross. As such, her headquarters were at Dunvegan, the castled seat of the Macleods, on one of those picturesque tongues of sea that fork themselves far inland on the west coast of the isle of Skye. Here she was often seen sitting alone in a brooding humour on the cliffs looking seaward, or oftener, no doubt, especially in her later years, going from house to house with her tartan tonnag fastened in front with a large brooch, and a silver-headed cane in her hand, in search of that easy gossip on all subjects of local interest in which poets of a healthy tone find the natural fuel for their human sympathies. She is reported also to have been signally addicted to snuff-a most unpoetical practice and whisky, ness-shire, Harris. The large and commodious steamboats which now visit those parts will generally, at the request of intelligent travellers, stop here long enough to allow a hasty inspection of the monument, which is within the church, close to the shore of the snug little bay of Rowdil. 1 Roy of course is an approach to the phonetic spelling of the Gaelic. The real spelling, ruadh, shows at once its linguistic identity with the Greek -pv0-pós, the German roth, and our own red. |