Macpherson, who lurked across the valley among the cliffs of Craig Dhu. On all this James Macpherson, an eager and observant boy, nine years of age, must have looked with not a little interest. He grew up under the shadow of this disaster to his race and clan; the final conquest of the Highlands, and the obliteration of their ancient modes of life taking place before his eyes. In his poems some reminiscence or echo of these early experiences is discernible. They are full of regret for a great and heroic past, now lost beyond all recall, and of lamentation for the warriors of an earlier time whose day of glory is gone. Ruin is all around. Untergang der Helden, Jammer und Wehmut, said Herder, are the prevailing theme. That this note is universally and perennially Celtic is a hard saying; but it may well have been suggested by the defeat of the Highland chiefs in their last struggle, and the passing away of the old Highland system, when reflected in the imagination of a young poet who had witnessed the overthrow. Matthew Arnold perceived in the English character a shallow optimism and self-satisfaction which turned away from the emotional aspects of life and congratulated itself smugly on material well-being. Against this English optimism he placed the deeper, more sensitive, and therefore sadder nature of the Gael. A lover of paradox might retort by claiming melancholy reflective ness as the Englishman's birthright. He might cite the testimony of foreign observers. To Germans and Frenchmen the English seem a dismal nation, incapable of true gaiety, and weighed down in spirit by that spleen which their damp and frowning climate engenders. It was under some such aspect that our literature first became known in the eighteenth century to continental critics. Madame de Staël speaks of English poems which are remplis de cette noble mélancolie qui est la majesté du philosophe sensible. She propounds the question, "Why the English, who are happy in their government and their manners, have a much more melancholy imagination than the French ?"—and answers it by declaring that serious meditation is the result of liberty. This very problem of English melancholy-the gravity and dejection of the English poets-was also discussed by Goethe, who put forward his own solution. And it is true that about that period our poetry had taken a melancholy bent. Imagination played around the shortness of life, the transitory world, death and its sad accompaniments. Gray's Elegy is the typical poem of the time: beside it may be placed Warton's Pleasures of Melancholy, Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, Robert Blair's Grave, and, above all, the Night Thoughts of Edward Young, in which the literature of sadness found its most strenuous ex1 De la Littérature, ch. xv. 2 Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk. xiii. pression. It was such works as these that Goethe and Madame de Staël had before them when they spoke of English melancholy. Beside them Ossian fell naturally into place. The popularity of Night Thoughts on the Continent was enormous: everywhere it was translated, everywhere read. The "note of romantic despair" which Mr. Gosse has found in it, exactly suited the European reader. When Ossian came a few years afterwards, the public imagination was all the more ready to welcome it. Thereafter Ossian and Night Thoughts made the tour of Europe together. But few will be willing to recognise in Macpherson the despairing revolt of the Celt, and in Young the abiding gloom of the Saxon: the world would be altogether too black. It is better on the threshold of our subject to abandon racial comparison and psychological surmise. More definite tests of authenticity can be applied. Macpherson was not the only man who gathered Ossianic lays in Scotland. Other collections were made there long before; others in his lifetime; others in our own day. Many of these poems have now been edited and translated into English by accurate scholars. They can be read along with Macpherson, their tone and substance compared with his. Upon the question which men disputed so stoutly, and with such varied results, a flood of light has thus been cast. The Ossianic controversy exists no longer; it is now certainly known how far the work of Macpherson resembled the traditional poems that were repeated by the peasants of the North, how far and how widely it differed from them. But the means of determining this emerged only in the later years of the nineteenth century. CHAPTER II RIVAL OSSIANS Of the criticisms which Macpherson encountered, the most authoritative and yet the most neglected have been those of Irish scholars. Ireland had its own Celtic traditions: it had manuscripts of great antiquity even in the dismal seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were Irishmen who wrote the Gaelic language, and studied its literature with something of patriotic pride. Macpherson's Ossian came fairly within their scope. The further we recede in history, the nearer Ireland and Scotland draw to each other. One name, Scotia, has been borne by both. Gaelic was once their common speech, and the early poetry of the two countries is so closely intertwined that distinction is scarcely possible. Many of Macpherson's characters are avowedly Irishmen : the whole action of Fingal, from beginning to end, takes place on Irish soil: the contest of two rival houses for the Irish crown supplies the main theme of Temora. It would be strange if such events survived only by tradition in the Scottish Highlands, no knowledge of them remaining in the country where they happened. There were, in fact, records |