JAMES MACPHERSON CHAPTER I THE AGE AND THE RACE I JAMES MACPHERSON is a poet whose fame in his own epoch now astonishes posterity. He appeared at a time of transition; an old school was going out, a new one coming in; and the new school made him one of its heroes and pioneers. The classical literature of the early eighteenth century had passed its prime, and was dying, like all things, of its own limitations. The reaction against it which led to the romantic movement was beginning. If it were possible to describe the poetry of Pope's age in a single phrase, it might be called one which had its roots in criticism rather than imagination. It aimed at a revival or emulation of Latin and Greek literature by using the works of antiquity as models and its critics as law-givers. The taste of the rising generation now demanded something less studied, more spontaneous and more exciting. The younger A men were seeking also for a wider outlook upon society and history. Classical writers had neglected a large part of experience. They wrote for scholars and courtiers, ignoring whatever fell outside the range of scholarship and the tastes of gentlemen in their own age. Looking backward, they saw between themselves and the Roman Empire only a gulf of semi-barbarism from which the world had just emerged once more into the light of day. Everything medieval was despised as the product of ignorant men among an uninstructed people. From all the authors of Europe before Erasmus, and from the mass of popular poetry that might exist beyond the inner world of cities and colleges, there was nothing to be learned, and in them nothing to enjoy. "Men who think," said Voltaire, and what is rarer, men who have taste, count but four centuries in the history of the world." These were the centuries in which culture had been perfected, those of Pericles in Greece, of Caesar and Augustus at Rome, of the Renaissance in Italy, and of Louis XIV. Around them were only dim and obscure spaces, into which those who had been born in more favoured times would care little to penetrate. New conceptions of life forced the old standards to give ground and opened the way for a new poetry. The revolution was begun by Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose teaching became opera tive in many fields and influenced every country in Europe. tree. Rousseau stoutly laid the axe to the root of the What the men of the classical period had believed in, he reversed and denied. What they admired, he rejected. For Rousseau the magic principle that resolved all difficulties was not authority, imitation or law, but Nature. "Return to Nature," is his constant cry. Mankind had wandered far from Nature, and every step from it had been a declension; back to Nature it must somehow find a path. Those ages of refinement and art, of brilliant city and social life, which Voltaire had thought the only periods worth regarding, were to Rousseau the most pernicious. They were times of corruption and decay. Happiest of all was the natural man who lived before society had been formed, before the invention of property, before the competition for power and possessions had begotten all the vices and had crushed the virtues that spring in the human heart. The primitive, untrained, untutored man was benevolent and good; for Nature made him so. Society depraved him, and in modern civilised life, in such cities as Rome had been and Paris now was, he reached the lowest level of all. His degeneracy increased in proportion as he imagined himself to be refined and elevated. The happiest communities now to be found were not those of Europe, but those outside it which |