Various - The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875

He despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it not because it was essentially common-place, but because it had a superficial air of originality." And in his History of England occur the following words:—"The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the learned from the moment when the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began to disappear. So strong was this impulse that where the Highlands were concerned men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old, and were gravely classed with the Iliad. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who fabricated these forgeries," &c., &c. Our first objection to these criticisms is their undue strength and decidedness of language, which proclaims prejudice and animus on the part of the writer. Macaulay here speaks like a heated haranguer or Parliamentary partizan, not like an historian or a critic. Hood says—"It is difficult to swear in a whisper"; and surely it is more difficult still to criticise in a bellow. This indeed points to what is Macaulay's main defect as a thinker and writer. He is essentially a dogmatist. He "does not allow for the wind." "Mark you his absolute shall ," as was said of Coriolanus. No doubt his dogmatism, as was also that of Dr Johnson, is backed by immense knowledge and a powerful intellect, but it remains dogmatism still. In oratory excessive emphasis often carries all before it, but it is different in writing—there it is sure to provoke opposition and to defeat its own object. Had he spoken of Macpherson's stilted style, or his imperfect taste, few would have contradicted him, but the word "trash" startles and exasperates, and it does so because it is unjust; it is too slump and too summary. Had he said that critics had exaggerated Macpherson's merits, this too had been permitted to pass, but when he declared them in his writings to be entirely "without merit," he insults the public which once read them so greedily, and those great men too who have enthusiastically admired and discriminatingly praised them. Macpherson's connection with these Poems has a mystery about it, and he was probably to blame, but every one feels the words, "the impostor who fabricated these forgeries," to be much too strong, and is disposed, in the resistance and reaction of feeling produced, to become so far Macpherson's friend and so far Macaulay's foe. We regret this seeming strength, but real infirmity, of Macaulay's mode of writing—not merely because it has hurt his credit as a critic of Ossian, but because it has injured materially his influence as an historian of England. The public are not disposed, with all their admiration of talents and eloquence, to pardon in an historian faults of boyish petulance, prejudice, and small personal or political prepossessions, which they would readily forgive in an orator. Macaulay himself, we think, somewhere speaking of Fox's history, says that many parts of it sound as if they were thundered from the Opposition Benches at one or two in the morning, and mentions this as a defect in the book. The same objection applies to many parts of his own history. His sweeping character of Macpherson is precisely such a hot hand-grenade as he might in an excited mood have hurled in Parliament against some Celtic M.P. from Aberdeen or Thurso whose zeal had outrun his discretion.

Macaulay, it will be noticed, admits that Ossian's Poems were admired by men of taste and of genius. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this fact should have made him pause and reconsider his opinions ere he expressed them in such a broad and trenchant style. Hugh Miller speaks of a critic of the day from whose verdicts when he found himself to differ, he immediately began to re-examine the grounds of his own. This is a very high compliment to a single writer; but Macaulay on the Ossian question has a multitude of the first intellects of modern times against him. The author of the History of England is a great name, but not so great as Napoleon the First, Goethe, and Sir Walter Scott, nor is he greater than Professor Wilson and William Hazlitt; and yet all these great spirits were more or less devoted admirers of the blind Bard of Morven. Napoleon carried Ossian in his travelling carriage; he had it with him at Lodi and Marengo, and the style of his bulletins—full of faults, but full too of martial and poetic fire—is coloured more by Ossian than by Corneille or Voltaire. Goethe makes Homer and Ossian the two companions of Werter's solitude, and represents him as saying, "You should see how foolish I look in company when her name is mentioned, particularly when I am asked plainly how I like her. How I like her! I detest the phrase. What sort of creature must he be who merely liked Charlotte; whose whole heart and senses were not entirely absorbed by her. Like her! Some one lately asked me how I liked Ossian." This it may be said is the language of a young lover, but all men are at one time young lovers, and it is high praise and no more than the truth to say that all young lovers love, or did love, Ossian's Poems. This is true fame. Sir Walter Scott says that Macpherson's rare powers were an honour to his country; and in his Legend of Montrose and Highland Widow, his own style is deeply dyed by the Ossianic element, and sounds here like the proud soft voice of the full-bloomed mountain heather in the breeze, and there like that of the evergreen pine raving in the tempest. Professor Wilson, in his "Cottages" and his "Glance at Selby's Ornithology," is still more decidedly Celtic in his mode of writing; and, in his paper in Blackwood for November 1839, "Have you read Ossian?" he has bestowed some generous, though measured praise, on his writings. He says, for instance—"Macpherson had a feeling of the beautiful, and this has infused the finest poetry into many of his descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the mountains, and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, and was inferior far in the perceptive, the reflective, and the imaginative faculties, still he could see , and feel , and paint too, in water colours and on air canvass, and is one of the Masters." Hear next Wilson's great rival in criticism, Hazlitt. They were, on many points bitter enemies, on two they were always at one—Wordsworth and Ossian! "Ossian is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihood, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets—namely, the sense of privation—the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country—he is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed, with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head, the fox peeps out of the ruined tower, the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale, and the strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only 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 year, ye bring no joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says Wilson, "frequently in his Letters expresses his wonder and delight in the beautiful and glorious inspirations of the Son of the Mist." Even Malcolm Laing—Macpherson's most inveterate foe—who edited Ossian for the sole purpose of revenge, exposure, and posthumous dissection, is compelled to say that "Macpherson's genius is equal to that of any poet of his day, except perhaps Gray."

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