CHAPTER IV.

MACPHERSON AND THE OSSIANIC QUESTION.

"Diogenes Laertius attributes the merit of the collecting and arranging of the Homeric poems to Solon; Cicero gives it to Pisistratus; and Plato to Hipparchus; and they may possibly have been all concerned in it. But there would have been no occasion for each of these persons to have sought so diligently for the parts of these poems, if there had been a complete copy. If therefore Solon or Lycurgus and the other personages committed to writing and introduced into Greece what had been before only sung by the rhapsodists of Ionia-just as some curious fragments of ancient poetry have been recently collected in the Northern parts of this island— their reduction to order in Greece was a work of taste and judgment; and those great names that we have mentioned might claim the same merit in regard to Homer that the ingenious editor of Fingal is entitled to from Ossian."-ROBERT WOOD.

THE interest generally excited by a great criminal trial is of two very different kinds. Setting aside those to whom a shocking murder or a great swindle is merely a novelty to stare at and to talk about, like a man with six fingers or a pig with two heads, the persons interested in a prisoner at the bar on trial for an alleged felony belong to two classes: either they have a warm sympathy with the fate of the individual, eager for his acquittal if they have reason to think him unjustly accused, or zealous for his condemnation if they have grounds to believe him an arrant knave and a conspirator against the peace of society; or they have no feeling whatever for or against the un

move.

happy individual, but they watch with keenness, and follow with satisfaction, the links in a long series of circumstantial evidence as they gradually move into their proper places, and form themselves into a chain of close-compacted facts, which no most cunning machinery of lies can either break down or overleap. Such persons follow the stages of the trial from day to day, or it may be from week to week, with a purely scientific interest, such as mathematicians feel in working out the steps of equipollency that lead to their conclusions, or the accomplished chessplayer in calculating the far-reaching consequences of each Quite similar to this is the interest which attaches to certain notable questions of literary criticism. To a Christian, for instance, the question as to the authenticity of the Gospel of St. John, or any other notable part of the canon, possesses an interest so vital and so absorbing as often to deprive him of that coolness which is absolutely necessary for the exercise of a critical judgment, while to a sceptic, or the adherent of another creed, it is simply a question of evidence with which he may amuse or exercise his intellect for an hour, as his inclination may lead and his leisure allow. Of questions of this kind there are few in modern times more notable than that about the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, published by James Macpherson in the second half of the last century. At the present moment a real vital interest in these poems is confined to persons of genuine Highland descent, and a few thinkers and scholars fond of treading in unbeaten ways; to the great mass of persons of education in Europe, Ossian is but the faint echo of a storm that has long ago blown itself asleep. Whether this indifference of the public mind to a literary production which, in the days of our fathers and grandfathers, thrilled Europe with admiration, and struck chords of sympathy in such dissimilar bosoms as Goethe,

and Buonaparte, has arisen from the reaction that always follows on excessive admiration, in combination with the absence of that spur of novelty, always powerful to draw the gaze of the majority; or whether Macpherson has just shared the fate of Plutarch and Dr. Blair, and many familiar respectable occupants of our library shelves in the last century, I shall not inquire; but the fact is certain. As among a thousand Germans, being readers of poetry, you will not find one now who has read Klopstock's Messiah, so among a thousand Englishmen or Scotsmen of average literary culture, not being Highlanders, you shall not stumble on one who has read a page of Ossian. Nay, even among genuine Highlanders, hot as their blood will boil on occasions when we, ignorant or insolent Saxons, may treat them to a dish of sceptical cabbage heated up from the stale dogmatisms of Dr. Johnson and Malcolm Laing, even with such men, I apprehend, it will not seldom be found that their connection with Ossian is very similar to that sort of relation which exists between a certain not inconsiderable class of professing Christians and their Bible,—the relation not of living knowledge, but of traditional reverence. But however this be, it is certain that to the general public the Ossianic question has lost all vital interest; Macpherson's Ossian is not read; admired only partially by the very few who do read it; and pronounced “trash" by hundreds who never heard of Wordsworth's crushing verdict,1 and by most persons, I imagine, who are accepted as mouth-pieces of the cultivated judgment of the present hour. This, of course, does not settle the real value of the poems; the critical appreciation of every age is generally one-sided, and like other things, is, to a certain extent, always the product of reaction, and may even be sometimes

1 "The spirit of Ossian is glorious, but Macpherson's Ossian is trash." -Wordsworth to Dr. Norman Macleod. See Macleod's Life, vol. i. p. 68.

the mere creature of fashion; but it determines me in the present section of this work to expatiate rather on the secondary interest of Macpherson's Fingalian poems, as opening up a rare question for the appreciation of literary evidence, than on the intrinsic value of the poetry by such evidence accredited. And I do this the more willingly that the question as to the authenticity of these poems is in its most striking features a Gaelic repetition, or was rather a Gaelic harbinger of the famous question as to the character and genuineness of the Homeric poems raised by the mighty German Aristarch, Frederick Augustus Wolf. James Macpherson is unquestionably either the Homer or the Pisistratus of the Caledonian Celts; if the former, he is the Celtic poet who fused into epic wholes the floating ballad literature of the Grampians, just as the genius of the great Smyrnean minstrel caused the heroic traditions of the Greeks of the Ægean to crystallise round the plain of Troy and the rock of Ithaca; if only the Pisistratus, then he must be content with the lesser praise of having collected the scattered limbs of a previous Celtic Homer, and put the pieces together of a great work, to the creation of which he had no more pretensions than Cuvier to the construction of the Megatherium.

As the present generation for whom I write have grown up, I fear, in a general ignorance of all that belongs to Ossian and the Ossianic question, I must set out here with a clear and succinct statement of the facts of the case.

On the 2d day of October 1759, Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, a Presbyterian clergyman of mark in those days, came from the neighbourhood of Dumfries to Moffat, and found there John Home, the author of Douglas, with whom he took up his quarters for the day. In the course of conversation, Home mentioned to Carlyle that he had long been on the scent for some old Gaelic poems, which Professor

Ferguson, an Atholl man, informed him were current in the Highlands, and that he had at last stumbled upon a person who could give him some definite information on the subject. This was a young man, by name James Macpherson, from the district of Badenoch, in the centre of the Highlands, of good family, and well educated, an excellent classical scholar, and no stranger to the Muses,1 and who was at that time acting as tutor to young Graham of Balgowan, afterwards Lord Lynedoch. From this young man Home had learned that he had in his own possession some of these old poems, which Home eagerly solicited him to translate. To these solicitations at first, the lad, whether from native modesty or from Highland pride, or a combination of both, was unwilling to yield; at last, however, he gave in, and produced an English version of one of the most famous of the Ossianic ballads, known familiarly as the "Death of Oscar." The author of Douglas was delighted at the amount of poetical genius displayed in this ballad; the Inveresk Doctor of Theology agreed with him that it was "a precious discovery;" the matter was communicated to Dr. Blair, the great arbiter of taste among the modern Athenians of those days; and the result was that Macpherson was induced, under Blair's patronage, in June 1760, to give to the world a small volume of ancient Gaelic poems, under the title Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland. So introduced, such a volume, published in the capital of Scotland, could not fail to attract attention; young Macpherson, like Burns, was immediately afterwards laid hold of by the leaders of the Edinburgh literary circle, who, with hopeful

1 Macpherson's first literary publication, The Highlander, a Poem in Six Cantos, was published in the previous year (1758), and though not calculated to set either the Thames or the Water of Leith on fire, was sufficient, considering the youth of the author, to make him known to a few as a literary aspirant of some promise.