THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18988, 30 April 1927, Page 13

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY. (specially vtbittek tor the fress.) By A. H. Grilling. CCXV.— ON OSSIAN. '•Chatterton died by poison or starvation ; the Shakespeare hastened the death of Ireland; but James Macpherson, an obscure tutor, flourished under persecution, exchanged angry letters with Dr. Johnson, translated Homer atrociously and died a member of Parliament." The Ossian controversy in which Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Macpherson were the chief protagonists, raged fiercely for ten years or more and was one of the outstanding events in the history of eighteenth century English literature Besides the actual issue involved, it raised the burning question of Scottish or English literary supremacy. The fiery - Celtic spirit was roused against the literary dictatorship of the great Dr. Johnson and the partisanship on both sides was fierce and intense. The argument for Macpherson is forcibly stated by George Eyre-Todd, in the introduction to the Poems of Ossian in the "Canterbury Poets" series. In 1762 Macpherson published two volumes of prose translations entitled "Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books with other lesser poems," On this Eyre-Todd comments :

At that time the dominating figure among the literary coteries of the metropolis was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eminent dictionary maker; and his violent prejudices against everything Scottish weregreatly in fashion. Londoners, besides, had not forgiven or forgotten the pamo into which they had been thrown seventeen years previously by the march to Derby of the Highland host under the young Chevalier. Th© fact therefore that a book hailed from the north side of tho border was by no moans, just then, a passport to its kindly reception. lno coldness with which Hume, the most illustrious historian of hi 3 time, had lately been received, and tho furious attacks which were killing poor _ tho greatest novelist of the day, sufficiently illustrato tho existing attitude of the London critics towards Scottish men of letters. When, therefore, a translation appeared, professing to have found among the mountaineers of Scotland, whom it was the fashion of the hour to ridicule, th© remains of a bard who should take rank among the greatest of the world a singers, it was not at all likely that his work should pass unchallenged. It was, indeed, as if a waterspout had suddenly discharged itself into a red hot crater the silence of utter astonishment, and then the whole energies of literary London arose to destroy and expel the intruder. To Dr. Johnson and his anti-Scottish frienus the discovery of Buoh works of genius among the people of tho "barbarous north" was so astonishing that they flatly declared it impossible; and at once there arose upon the subject as great a controversy, probably, as has ever raged in the arena of letters.

The other side of the case is fairly put by Sir Edmund Gosse in his book on Eighteenth Century Literature, when after discussing "the marvellous boy" Thomas Chatterton, he says:--"The Ossian problem has not proved so easy of solution as the Rowley problem. The wild Gaelic rhapsodies which formed, the taste of so many wouldbe lovers of romance, from David Hume to the great Napoleon, were first given to the world under very suspicious circumstances by James Macpherson, an ambitious Highland schoolmaster, in the form of a tiny volume of fragments from the Erse language. The reading public was very much interested in the supposed translations and certain friends of literature, including Boswell, 'Douglas' Home, Hugh Blair, and Lord Lynedoch, subscribed to enable Macpherson to travel through the Highlands and the Hebrides in search of oral poetry. The result was the most important of all the Ossian literature—the ancient epic of Pingal in six books, published m quarto in 1762. To this volume Macpherson prefixed an. essay on the antiquity of those verses which he confidently attributed to Ossian, a Gaelic bard of the third century. Sixteen lesser pieces were appended to 'Fingal to fill up the-volume. Of these, the most striking were 'Temora,' 'Cithoma, and 'Croma,' but so far as style and subject were concerned, there was really very little to choose between them." Sir Edmund Gosse continues:-

"Temora" proving attractive, Macplierson enlarged it to eieht books and published it separately in 1703. • A controversy immediately sprang up between those who believed and those who disbelieved in the authenticity of those works. For ten years until tho very name of Ossian became a weariness, people argued up and down. Maopiierson found a eturdy_ sceptio in Dr. Johnson and becoming insolent, dared to provoke the sage with personal violence so that Dr. Johnson provided himself with a strong oaken planthead with a knob as large as an orange. As an original writer, Macpherson became more and more discredited, but as an individual more and more wealthy; and to prove that no honour lies beyond the grasp of-unprincipled mediocrity, he was tuned in Poets' Cornor.

"Fingal" was published in 1762, rand two years later Johnson issued his "Journey to tho Hebrides," in which he bluntly denounced Macpherson as a thorough impostor, and declared the poems to be devoid of authenticity. Writing to Boswell in January, 1775, Johnson said:—"l long to hear how you like the book- it is, I think, much liked here. But Macpherson is very furious; can you give men any more intelligence about hi in; or his 'Fingal.' : ' To which Boswell returned reply: "As to Macpherson, I am anxious to have from yourself a fuller and pointed account of what has passed between you and him. It is confidently told here that before your book came out he sent to you to let you know that he understood, you meant to deny the authenticity of Ossian's poems; that the originals were in his possession; that you might liavo inspection of them; and might take tho evidenco of people skilled in the Erse language; and that he hoped, after this fair offer, you would not be so uncandid as to assert that he had refused reasonable proof. That you paid no attention to his message, but published your strong attack upon him: and then he wrote a letter to you in such terms as he thought suited to. one who had not acted as a man of veracity. You may believe it gave me pain to hear your conduct represented as unfavourable, while I can only deny what is said on the ground that your

character refutes it, without having any information to oppose. Let me, I beg of you, be furnished with a sufficient answer to anv calumny on the occasion." Under date, February 7th, 1775, Johnson made reply as follows : I am aurprised that, knowing ae you dc. the disposition of your countrymen to teU lies in tavour o£ eacn other, you can ua at all affected by any reports ttiat circulate among them. Macpnerson never in hi 3 life offered me a s,ght ol any original or any evidence of any kind, but thought only of intimidating me by noise ana threats, till my last answer—that 1 worn a not be deterred from detecting what Jthought a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian—put an end to our correspondence. Tho state of the question is this: He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from eld manuscripts. His copies, if i-e « aci tbetn, and I believe him to have none, are nothing. Where are tho manuscripts. They ran bo shown if they Sexist, but they wero never shown. "De non existentibus et non apparentibus," save cur law, "eadem est ratio." No man has » claim to credit upon his own word when better evidenco, if lie had it, may be easily produced. But so fai as we can find, tho Erse language was never written till very' lately for the purposes of religion. A nation that cannot write or a language that was never written iias no manuscripts. But whatever he has he never offered to ehoT. If old manuscripts should bo now mentioned, I should, unless there were more evidence than can be easily had, suppose them another proof of Scotch ronspiracy in national falsehood.

Do not censure tho expression; .you know it to ho true. ,

Macpherson's letters to Johnson have apparently not been preserved —or at least never published —but Johnson's final reply was couched in strong terms. "Mr James Maepherson,—l received your foolish and impudent lottcr. Any violence offered mo I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian. What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. Tor this opinion I have given my reasons to the public which I looked to you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable; and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will." It is recorded that Blair once asked Johnson whether, he thought that anv man of a modern age could have written Ossian. "Yes, Sir," replied Johnson, "many men, many women, and many children." Leslie Stephen's comments on Johnson's attitude to Ossian are to the point:—

Johnson was a thorough sceptic as to the authenticity of Ossian. Hie scepticism did.not repose upon the philological or antiquarian reasomngß wh.ch would be applicable in the controversy from internal evidence. It was to some extent the expression of a 'general incredulity, which astonished his friends, especially when contrasted- with h.s tenderness for many puerile supersitions. He could scarcely be induced to admit the truth of any narrative which struck fcim as edd, and it was long, for example, before be' would believe in the Lisbon earthquake. Yet he seriously discussed the truth of second eight; bo carefully investigated the Cock lane ghost—a goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called spiritualism, and with almost equal absurdity; he told stories to Boswel! about a "shadowy" being which had once been fieen by Davey, and declared that he had once heard hia mother call "Sam," when no waa at Oxford and she at Lichfield. The apparent inconsistency was in truth natural enough. Any man who clings with unreasonable pertinacity to the prejudices of his childhood must ho alternately credulous and sceptical in excess. In both case 3 ho judges by his fancies in defiance of evidence and facts and rejects according to his likes and dislikes. Ossian would be naturally offensive to Johnson as one of the earliest and most emarkable manifestations of that growing- taste for what was called "Nature" as opposed to civilisation of which Rousseau was the great mouthpiece. Nobody more heartily despised that form of "cant" than Johnson. A man who utterly despised tho scenery of the Hebrides as compared with Greenwich Park or Charing Cross would hardly take kindly to the Ossianesque version of the mountain passion. The book struck him as sheer rubbish. I have already quoted the retort about "many men, many women, and many children." "A man," he said on another occasion, "might write such stuff forever if he would abandon his miud to it."

Johnson staked his case ou Maepherson's inability to produce the Gaelic originals of his Ossian poems. "On the other hand Maepherson was not a Gaelic scholar, a proof of his inability to compose Gaelic texts, which were ultimately published. There is the curious fact that Ossian was published in all the languages of Europe before the Gaelic appeared." "When at length," says one authority, "the great edition of 1807 was issued, there wore Gaelic texts for only one-half of the poems, and for about three-fourths of the matter published by Maepherson in English forty-five years previously. For the rest no 'originals,' ancient or modern, have ever yet been found." The same writer declares: "The. truth seems to be that these so-called translations were essentially the compositions of James Maepherson, and that the Gaelic texts were prepared with or without aid from his friends, but how or when wo do not now know. Nor can we say how much he was indebted directly or indirectly to oral traditions." The whole matter is adequately summed up by a student so carefully trained in research as Dr. Haddon, collaborator with Bishop Stubbs:—

Everyone now admits that Macpherson having traditional material at his disposal, by no means confined himself to it, hut was a free inventor as well as a free translator. Looking back at the .man and his times, we can Bee how cleverly he played hia part. ITo M-as most wrongly accused on some points, and became mosS judiciously angry. His anger made him taciturn nnd he wrapped himsolf in it as a cloak. But the Celtic nationality was roused, and it fought for him when he would not defend himself.

It is only fair to give the other side of the controversy, as set forth by Mr Eyre-Todd: "Upon the first appearance of Macpherson's translations of 'Ossian,' the foremost naturally in the attack upon their authenticity was Dr. Samuel Johnson. The great lexicographer was followed, however, by such a northern supporter as Dr. Smith, of Campbelltown. Tho natural sceptic bias of Hume's mind led him to talce tho same side. And Mr' Malcolm Laing, author of a set of 'Notes and Illustrations' to Ossian, printed at Edinburgh in 1805, finally professed to set the question at rest, by showing how everything in Macpherson's translations had been stolen from such sources as the Bible and Homer. 'An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian,' by W. Shaw, A.M., published in London, in 1781, also condemned Macpherson as spurious; while Pinkerton, finding that the authenticity of Ossian would disprove some of his cherished theories regarding tho early races of Scotland, made occasion in the second volume of his history to discredit the poems as forgeries. *Of later writers, Lord Macaulay has inherited the antiSeottish prejudices of Dr. Johnson with doubled virulence, and this to the suppression of fact in at least one instance. In th 6 thirteenth chapter of his history he forgets the existence of Johnson, and describes an enthusiasm for things Scottish existing at the time of Ossian s publication. That enthusiasm only arose forty years later "with the rising star of Walter Scott." The summing up from this writer's point of view, mnkes an interesting contribution to the con-. troversv:—

Time Itself has answered many °* th Sf." attacks, ©r. Johnson's declaration in M» "Journey to tho Western Island* »«*

"the poems of Ossian never existed m anv other form than that which we have seen," and that "the editor or author never could show the original nor can it be shown by any other." was refuted by the publication of the Gaelic orieinals in 1307. (The Rev. M. Clerk, of Kilmalhe, in the introduction to his new translation of Ossian, 1870, quotes an advertisement from the "Literary Journal" of 1784, in which Mr Beckett, Macpherson's publisher, r-ertifles that the Gaelic 3ISS. of Ossian have been exposed for public inspection durins twelve months at his shop in the Strand.') Sir Alexander Jlacdonald in a volnme on the subject, published at Liverpool in 1805, sufficiently met Laing s assertions and unhesitating i n f?rences. And the "dissertations" of Dr. Blair, Dr. Graham, Sir John Sinclair, and many others, offered abundant argument supporting the authenticity of thfl Ossianio poems.