Fragments of Ancient Poetry, by James Macpherson

Byron was actually the third Scotsman in about fifty years who awoke and found himself famous; the sudden rise from obscurity to international fame had been experienced earlier by two fellow countrymen, Sir Walter Scott and James Macpherson. Considering the greatness of the reputation of the two younger writers, it may seem strange to link their names with Macpherson's, but in the early nineteenth century it would not have seemed so odd. In fact, as young men both Scott and Byron would have probably have been flattered by such an association. Scott tells us that in his youth he "devoured rather than perused" Ossian and that he could repeat whole duans "without remorse"; and, as I shall discuss later, Byron paid Macpherson the high compliment of writing an imitation of Ossian, which he published in Hours of Idleness.

The publication of the modest and anonymous pamphlet, Fragments of Ancient Poetry marks the beginning of Macpherson's rise to fame, and concomitantly the start of a controversy that is unique in literary history. For the half-century that followed, the body of poetry that was eventually collected as The Poems of Ossian provoked the comment of nearly every important man of letters. Extravagance and partisanship were characteristic of most of the remarks, but few literary men were indifferent.

The intensity and duration of the controversy are indicative of how seriously Macpherson's work was taken, for it was to many readers of the day daring, original, and passionate. Even Malcolm Laing, whose ardor in exposing Macpherson's imposture exceeded that of Dr. Johnson, responded to the literary quality of the poems. In a note on the fourth and fifth "Fragments" the arch prosecutor of Macpherson commented,

"From a singular coincidence of circumstances, it was in this house, where I now write, that I first read the poems in my early youth, with an ardent credulity that remained unshaken for many years of my life; and with a pleasure to which even the triumphant satisfaction of detecting the imposture is comparatively nothing. The enthusiasm with which I read and studied the poems, enabled me afterwards, when my suspicions were once awakened, to trace and expose the deception with greater success. Yet, notwithstanding the severity of minute criticism, I can still peruse them as a wild and wonderful assemblage of imitation with which the fancy is often pleased and gratified, even when the judgment condemns them most."2

It was John Home, famous on both sides of the Tweed as the author of Douglas, who first encouraged Macpherson to undertake his translations. While taking the waters at Moffat in the fall of 1759, he was pleased to meet a young Highland tutor, who was not only familiar with ancient Gaelic poetry but who had in his possession several such poems. Home, like nearly all of the Edinburgh literati, knew no Gaelic and asked Macpherson to translate one of them. The younger man at first protested that a translation "would give a very imperfect idea of the original," but Home "with some difficulty" persuaded him to try. In a "day or two" Macpherson brought him the poem that was to become "Fragment VII" in this collection; Home was so much pleased with it that he requested additional translations.3

"Jupiter" Carlyle, whose autobiography reflects the keen interest that he took in literature, arrived at Moffat after Home had seen the "translations." Home, he found, "had been highly delighted with them," and when Carlyle read them he "was perfectly astonished at the poetical genius" that they displayed. They agreed that "it was a precious discovery, and that as soon as possible it should be published to the world."4

When Home left Moffat he took his find to Edinburgh and showed the translations to the men who earned the city Smollett's sobriquet, a "hotbed of genius": Robertson, fresh from the considerable success of his two volume History of Scotland (1759); Robert Fergusson, recently appointed professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh; Lord Elibank, a learned aristocrat, who had been patron to Home and Robertson; and Hugh Blair, famous for the sermons that he delivered as rector of the High Church of St. Giles. Home was gratified that these men were "no less pleased" with Macpherson's work than he had been. David Hume and David Dalrymple (later Lord Hailes) were soon apprised of the discovery and joined in the chorus of approbation that emanated from the Scottish capitol.

Blair became the spokesman and the leader for the Edinburgh literati, and for the next forty years he lavished his energy in praising and defending Macpherson's work. The translations came to him at the time that he was writing his lectures on belles lettres and was thus in the process of formulating his theories on the origins of poetry and the nature of the sublime. Blair lost no time in communicating with Macpherson:

"I being as much struck as Mr Home with the high spirit of poetry which breathed in them, presently made inquiry where Mr. Macpherson was to be found; and having sent for him to come to me, had much conversation with him on the subject."5

Macpherson told Blair that there were "greater and more considerable poems of the same strain" still extant in the Highlands; Blair like Home was eager for more, but Macpherson again declined to translate them. He said that he felt himself inadequate to render "the spirit and force" of the originals and that "they would be very ill relished by the public as so very different from the strain of modern ideas, and of modern, connected, and polished poetry." This whetted Blair's interest even more, and after "repeated importunity" he persuaded Macpherson to translate more fragments. The result was the present volume, which Blair saw to the press and for which he wrote the Preface "in consequence of the conversations" that he had with Macpherson.6

Most of Blair's Preface does seem to be based on information supplied by Macpherson, for Blair had almost no first-hand knowledge about Highland poetry or its traditions. It is apparent from the Preface then, that Macpherson had not yet decided to ascribe the poems to a single poet; Ossian is one of the principal poets in the collection but the whole is merely ascribed "to the bards" (see pp. v-vi). It is also evident from the Preface that Macpherson was shifting from the reluctant "translator" of a few "fragments" to the projector of a full-length epic "if enough encouragement were given for such an undertaking."

Since Blair became famous for his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London, 1763), it may seem strange that in the Preface to the Fragments he declined to say anything of the "poetical merit" of the collection. The frank adulation of the longer essay, which concludes with the brave assertion that Ossian may be placed "among those whose works are to last for ages,"7 was partially a reflection of the enthusiasm that greeted each of Macpherson's successive publications.

Part of the appeal of the Fragments was obviously based on the presumption that they were, as Blair hastened to assure the reader, "genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry," and therefore provided a remarkable insight into a remote, primitive culture; here were maidens and warriors who lived in antiquity on the harsh, wind-swept wastes of the Highlands, but they were capable of highly refined and sensitive expressions of grief—they were the noblest savages of them all. For some readers the rumors of imposture served to dampen their initial enthusiasm, and such was the case with Hume, Walpole, and Boswell, but many of the admirers of the poems found them rapturous, authentic or not.

After Gray had read several of the "Fragments" in manuscript he wrote to Thomas Warton that he had "gone mad about them"; he added,

Gray concluded his remarks with the assertion that "this Man is the very Demon of Poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages."8

Nearly fifty years later Byron wrote a "humble imitation" of Ossian for the admirers of Macpherson's work and presented it as evidence of his "attachment to their favorite author," even though he was aware of the imposture. In a note to "The Death of Calmar and Orla," he commented,

"I fear Laing's late edition has completely overthrown every hope that Macpherson's Ossian might prove the translation of a series of poems complete in themselves; but while the imposture is discovered, the merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without faults—particularly, in some parts, turgid and bombastic diction."9

In 1819 Hazlitt felt that Ossian is "a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers," and he classed the work as one of the four prototypes of poetry along with the Bible, Homer, and Dante. On the question of authenticity he observed,

"If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, 'Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!'"10

There is some justice in Macpherson's wry assertion that "those who have doubted my veracity have paid a compliment to my genius."11 By examining briefly the distinctive form of the "Fragments," their diction, their setting, their tone, and their structure, we may sense something of the qualities of the poems that made them attractive to such men as Gray, Byron, and Hazlitt.

Perhaps Macpherson's most important innovation was to cast his work into what his contemporaries called "measured prose," and it was recognized early that this new form contributed greatly to their appeal. In discussing the Fragments, Ramsey of Ochtertyre commented,

"Nothing could be more happy or judicious than his translating in measured prose; for had he attempted it in verse, much of the spirit of the original would have evaporated, supposing him to have had talents and industry to perform that very arduous task upon a great scale. This small publication drew the attention of the literary world to a new species of poetry."12

For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique. Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: repetition, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and completion in which the second line picks up part of the sense of the first line and adds to it. These are both common in the Fragments, but a few examples may be useful. I have rearranged the following lines and in the other passages relating to the structure of the poems in order to call attention to the binary quality of Macpherson's verse:

Macpherson also used grammatical parallelism as a structural device; a series of simple sentences is often used to describe a landscape:

The poems also have a discernible rhythmical pattern; the tendency of the lines to form pairs is obvious enough when there is semantic or grammatical parallelism, but there is a general binary pattern throughout. Typically, the first unit is a simple sentence, the second almost any grammatical structure—an appositive, a prepositional phrase, a participle, the second element of a compound verb, a dependent clause. A simile—in grammatical terms, an adverbial phrase—sometimes constitutes the second element. These pairs are often balanced roughly by the presence of two, three, or four accents in each constituent; there are a large number of imbedded iambic and anapestic feet, which give the rhythm an ascending quality:

As E. H. W. Meyerstein pointed out, "Macpherson can, without extravagance, be regarded as the main originator (after the translators of the Authorized Version) of what's known as 'free verse."13 Macpherson's work certainly served to stimulate prosodic experimentation during the next half century; it is certainly no coincidence that two of the boldest innovators, Blake and Coleridge, were admirers of Macpherson's work.

Macpherson's diction must have also appealed to the growing taste for poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life. A simple listing of the common nouns from the opening of "Fragment I" will serve to illustrate this tendency: love, son, hill, deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream, rushes, mist, oak, friends. Such diction bears an obvious kinship to what was to become the staple diction of the romantic lyric; for example, a similar listing from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" would be this: slumber, spirit, fears, thing, touch, years, motion, force, course, rocks, stones, trees.

The untamed power of Macpherson's wild natural settings is also striking. Samuel H. Monk has made the point well:

"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions carried with them the thrill of the genuine and of naïvely archaic."

And Monk adds, "imperceptibly the Ossianic poems contributed toward converting Britons, nay, Europeans, into enthusiastic admirers of nature in her wilder moments."14

Ghosts are habitually present in the poems, and Macpherson is able to present them convincingly because they are described by a poet who treats them as though they were part of his and his audience's habitual experience. The supernatural world is so familiar, in fact, that it can be used to describe the natural; thus Minvane in "Fragment VII" is called as fair "as the spirits of the hill when at silent noon they glide along the heath." As Patricia M. Spacks has observed, the supernatural seems to be a "genuine part of the poetic texture"; and she adds that

"within this poetic context, the supernatural seems convincing because believed in: it is part of the fabric of life for the characters of the poem. Ghosts in the Ossianic poems, almost uniquely in the mid-eighteenth century, seem genuinely to belong; to this particular poetic conception the supernatural does not seem extraneous."15

The Fragments was also a cause and a reflection of the rising appeal of the hero of sensibility, whose principal characteristic was that he could feel more intensely than the mass of humanity. The most common emotion that these acutely empathetic heroes felt was grief, the emotion that permeates the Fragments and the rest of Macpherson's work. It was the exquisite sensibility of Macpherson's heroes and heroines that the young Goethe was struck by; Werther, an Ossianic hero in his own way, comments,

"You should see what a silly figure I cut when she is mentioned in society! And then if I am even asked how I like her—Like! I hate that word like death. What sort of person must that be who likes Lotte, in whom all senses, all emotions are not completely filled up by her! Like! Recently someone asked me how I like Ossian!"16

That Macpherson chose to call his poems "fragments" is indicative of another quality that made them unusual in their day. The poems have a spontaneity that is suggested by the fact that the poets seem to be creating their songs as the direct reflection of an emotional experience. In contrast to the image of the poet as the orderer, the craftsman, the poets of the Fragments have a kind of artlessness (to us a very studied one, to be sure) that gave them an aura of sincerity and honesty. The poems are fragmentary in the sense that they do not follow any orderly, rational plan but seem to take the form that corresponds to the development of an emotional experience. As Macpherson told Blair they are very different from "modern, connected, and polished poetry."

The Fragments proved an immediate success and Macpherson's Edinburgh patrons moved swiftly to raise enough money to enable the young Highlander to resign his position as tutor and to devote himself to collecting and translating the Gaelic poetry still extant in the Highlands. Blair recalled that he and Lord Elibank were instrumental in convening a dinner meeting that was attended by "many of the first persons of rank and taste in Edinburgh," including Robertson, Home, and Fergusson.17 Robert Chalmers acted as treasurer; among the forty odd subscribers who contributed 60£, were James Boswell and David Hume.18 By the time of the second edition of the Fragments (also in 1760), Blair, or more likely Macpherson himself, could inform the public in the "Advertisement" "that measures are now taken for making a full collection of the remaining Scottish bards; in particular, for recovering and translating the heroic poem mentioned in the preface."

Macpherson, a frugal man, included many of the "Fragments" in his later work. Sometimes he introduced them into the notes as being later than Ossian but in the same spirit; at other times he introduced them as episodes in the longer narratives. With the exception of Laing's edition, they are not set off, however, and anyone who wishes to see what caused the initial Ossianic fervor must consult the original volume.

When we have to remind ourselves that a work of art was revolutionary in its day, we can be sure that we are dealing with something closer to cultural artifact than to art, and it must be granted that this is true of Macpherson's work; nevertheless, the fact that Ossian aroused the interest of major men of letters for fifty years is suggestive of his importance as an innovator. In a curious way, Macpherson's achievement has been overshadowed by the fact that many greater writers followed him and developed the artistic direction that he was among the first to take.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1 (return)
[ See Scott's letter to Anna Seward in J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1900), I, 410-15.]

2 (return)
[ The Poems of Ossian, ed. Malcolm Laing (Edinburgh, 1805), I, 441.]

3 (return)
[ See Home's letter to Mackenzie in the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1805), Appendix, pp. 68-69.]

7 (return)
[ Quoted from The Poems of Ossian (London, 1807), I, 222. After its initial separate publication, Blair's dissertation was regularly included with the collected poems.]

8 (return)
[ Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford, 1935), II, 679-80.]

9 (return)
[ The Works of Lord Byron, Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1898), I, 183.]

10 (return)
[ "On Poetry in General," The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930), V, 18.]

11 (return)
[ Quoted in Henry Grey Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1908), p. 240.]

12 (return)
[ Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), I, 547.]

16 (return)
[ The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Bayard Morgan (New York, 1957), p. 51.]

FRAGMENTS OF ANCIENT POETRY

Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,

and

Translated from the Galic or Erse Language

LUCAN

PREFACE

The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be exactly ascertained. Tradition, in the country where they were written, refers them to an æra of the most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas, and paint those manners, that belong to the most early state of society. The diction too, in the original, is very obsolete; and differs widely from the style of such poems as have been written in the same language two or three centuries ago. They were certainly composed before the establishment of clanship in the northern part of Scotland, which is itself very ancient; for had clans been then formed and known, they must have made a considerable figure in the work of a Highland Bard; whereas there is not the least mention of them in these poems. It is remarkable that there are found in them no allusions to the Christian religion or worship; indeed, few traces of religion of any kind. One circumstance seems to prove them to be coeval with the very infancy of Christianity in Scotland. In a fragment of the same poems, which the translator has seen, a Culdee or Monk is represented as desirous to take down in writing from the mouth of Oscian, who is the principal personage in several of the following fragments, his warlike atchievements and those of his family. But Oscian treats the monk and his religion with disdain, telling him, that the deeds of such great men were subjects too high to be recorded by him, or by any of his religion: A full proof that Christianity was not as yet established in the country.

Though the poems now published appear as detached pieces in this collection, there is ground to believe that most of them were originally episodes of a greater work which related to the wars of Fingal. Concerning this hero innumerable traditions remain, to this day, in the Highlands of Scotland. The story of Oscian, his son, is so generally known, that to describe one in whom the race of a great family ends, it has passed into a proverb; "Oscian the last of the heroes."

There can be no doubt that these poems are to be ascribed to the Bards; a race of men well known to have continued throughout many ages in Ireland and the north of Scotland. Every chief or great man had in his family a Bard or poet, whose office it was to record in verse, the illustrious actions of that family. By the succession of these Bards, such poems were handed down from race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition. And tradition, in a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them in a great measure incorrupted to this day.

They are not set to music, nor sung. The verification in the original is simple; and to such as understand the language, very smooth and beautiful; Rhyme is seldom used: but the cadence, and the length of the line varied, so as to suit the sense. The translation is extremely literal. Even the arrangement of the words in the original has been imitated; to which must be imputed some inversions in the style, that otherwise would not have been chosen.

Of the poetical merit of these fragments nothing shall here be said. Let the public judge, and pronounce. It is believed, that, by a careful inquiry, many more remains of ancient genius, no less valuable than those now given to the world, might be found in the same country where these have been collected. In particular there is reason to hope that one work of considerable length, and which deserves to be styled an heroic poem, might be recovered and translated, if encouragement were given to such an undertaking. The subject is, an invasion of Ireland by Swarthan King of Lochlyn; which is the name of Denmark in the Erse language. Cuchulaid, the General or Chief of the Irish tribes, upon intelligence of the invasion, assembles his forces. Councils are held; and battles fought. But after several unsuccescful engagements, the Irish are forced to submit. At length, Fingal King of Scotland, called in this poem, "The Desert of the hills," arrives with his ships to assist Cuchulaid. He expels the Danes from the country; and returns home victorious. This poem is held to be of greater antiquity than any of the rest that are preserved. And the author speaks of himself as present in the expedition of Fingal. The three last poems in the collection are fragments which the translator obtained of this epic poem; and though very imperfect, they were judged not unworthy of being inserted. If the whole were recovered, it might serve to throw confiderable light upon the Scottish and Irish antiquities.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fragments of Ancient Poetry

FRAGMENTS OF ANCIENT POETRY

By James Macpherson

The Augustan Reprint Society

Introduction By John J. Dunn

INTRODUCTION

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION