William Falconer (1732-69) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a poor barber, whose two other children were both of them deaf and dumb. He went early to sea on board a Leith merchantship, and was afterwards servant to a purser in the navy. Before he was eighteen he was second mate in the Britannia, a vessel in the Levant trade, shipwrecked off Cape Colonna, with the loss of all the crew but three; and this Falconer made the subject of his popular poem. In 1751 he was living in Edinburgh, where he published his first poetical attempt, a monody on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales; wishing, with a zeal worthy of ancient Pistol, To assist the pouring rains with brimful eyes, And aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs! In 1762 appeared the eminently successful Shipwreck, dedicated to the Duke of York, who procured the sailor-poet's appointment as midshipman on the Royal George, whence he was transferred to be purser in the Glory, a frigate of thirty-two guns. Settling in London at the peace, he wrote a poor satire on Wilkes, Churchill, and others, and compiled a useful nautical dictionary. In October 1769 he sailed from England as purser of the Aurora frigate, bound for India. The vessel reached the Cape of Good Hope early in December, but foundered soon after, as is supposed, in the Mozambique Channel. Three editions of the Shipwreck were published during the author's life; the second (1764) had about nine hundred new lines added; the third, issued the very day before he embarked on his fatal voyage, had about two hundred additional lines, with various alterations and transpositions, by no means all improvements-some of the best passages were spoilt, and parts of the narrative confused. Hence Mr Stanier Clarke, in a splendid illustrated edition of the poem (1804), restored many of the discarded lines, and presented a text compounded of the three different editions. This version of the poem is that now generally printed; but the Edinburgh edition of 1858 follows more closely Falconer's latest edition. Clarke conjectured and other editors copied his preposterous error-that Falconer, overjoyed at his appointment to the Aurora, and busy preparing for his voyage, had entrusted to his friend David Mallet the revision of the poem, and that Mallet had corrupted the text. Now, Mallet had at this time been dead for four years, and Falconer, in the advertisement prefixed to the work, expressly states that he had himself subjected it to a strict and thorough revision. Unfortunately, as in Akenside's case, his success was not commensurate with his labour. The Shipwreck has the rare merit of being both true to fact and poetical; even its rules and directions are approved of by seamen. At first the poet did little more than describe in nautical phrase and simple narrative the disaster he had witnessed; the characters of Albert, Rodmond, Palemon, and Anna were added in the second edition. The scene of the shipwreck helped Falconer to many interesting recollections and suggestions. 'In all Attica,' says Lord Byron, if we except Athens itself and Marathon, there is no scene more interesting than Cape Colonna. To the antiquary and artist, sixteen columns are an inexhaustible source of observation and design; to the philosopher, the supposed scene of some of Plato's conversations will not be unwelcome; and the traveller will be struck with the beauty of the prospect over "isles that crown the Ægean deep."' Yet another association for Englishmen Colonna acquired when it brought about Falconer's Shipwreck. Some of Falconer's long descriptive and episodical passagès interrupt the narrative, or are feeble and affected; but the characters of his officers are admirably discriminated: Albert, the commander, is brave, liberal, and just, softened by domestic ties and professional acquirements; Rodmond is rude and boisterous, a hardy, weatherbeaten Northumbrian, yet kindly and unselfish ; Palemon, though 'charged with the commerce,' is the lover of the poem, but too effeminate for his rough work. Evening at Sea. The sun's bright orb, declining all serene, On the Shores of Greece. The natives, while the ship departs their land, Ashore with admiration gazing stand. Majestically slow, before the breeze, She moved triumphant o'er the yielding seas; Then towered the masts; the canvas swelled on high; The Storm and Wreck off Cape Colonna. The circling beach in murderous form appears, Swift from their minds elapsed all dangers past, Down-pressed by watery weight the bowsprit bends, Beneath her bow the floating ruins lie; And now the ship, fore-lifted by the sea, Those who remain the weather shrouds embrace, The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death, In vain, alas! the sacred shades of yore In vain the cords and axes were prepared, Ossian. The 'translator' of Ossian still stands in a dim and dubious light, as indeed he seems to have been willing to do in the eyes of his contem~poraries; about the primeval Celtic bard himself there is perhaps less matter of debate. Time and taste have abated the pleasure with which the 'poems of Ossian' once were read; but effusions which were in their own time quite unique and engrossed so much attention, which were translated into many different languages, which were hailed with enthusiasm by Gray, David Hume, John Home, and other almost equally eminent persons, and which, in an imperfect Italian translation, formed the favourite reading of Napoleon, demand careful study from students of literature. The Ossianic poems must rank as a monument of the romantic movement in European literature, and seem to have given it a not inconsiderable impulse. They delighted Herder, influenced Goethe and Schiller, and were imitated by Coleridge and Byron, though Wordsworth poured contempt on them. For most men they are associated with the name of James Macpherson, who claimed only to have presented them in an English form. James Macpherson (1736-96) was born at Ruthven, near Kingussie in Inverness-shire. A small farmer's son, he was brought up a 'barefoot laddie,' but, fully resolved to become a minister, studied at both Aberdeen and Edinburgh in 1753-56. In 1758 he published a heroic poem in six cantos, The Highlander, which at once proved his ambition and his incompetence. For a short time the divinity student taught the school of Ruthven, whence he was glad to remove to become tutor in a wealthy family. While attending his pupil (afterwards Lord Lynedoch) at the spa of Moffat, he became acquainted, in the autumn of 1759, with John Home, the author of Douglas, to whom he showed what he said were translations of fragments of ancient Gaelic poetry still recited in the Highlands. It was, he declared, still one of the favourite amusements of his countrymen to listen to the tales and compositions of their ancient bards, and he described these fragments as full of pathos and poetical power. Under the patronage of Home's friends-Hugh Blair, 'Jupiter' Carlyle, and Adam Ferguson-Macpherson published next year a small volume of sixty pages, entitled Fragments of Ancient Poetry; translated from the Galic or Erse Language. The publication attracted general attention, and a subscription was made to enable Macpherson to make a tour in the Highlands to collect other pieces. His journey proved highly successful. In 1761 he presented the world with Fingal, an epic poem, in six books; in 1763 Temora, another epic, in eight books. The sale was immense, and the fame of the work spread swiftly over the civilised world. The assumption that, in the third or fourth century, among the wild remote mountains and islands of Scotland, there existed a people exhibiting all the high and chivalrous feelings of refined valour, generosity, magnanimity, and virtue, was eminently calculated to excite astonishment; while the idea of the poems being handed down by oral tradition through so many centuries among rude, savage, and barbarous tribes was little less astounding. Many doubted; others disbelieved; but a still greater number 'indulged the pleasing supposition that Fingal fought and Ossian sang.' It was hinted that Macpherson was not altogether ill-pleased to lie under the imputation of having hoaxed the British public, since he thus acquired the higher credit as a great original poet. At all events he realised £1200 by his enterprise, and in 1764 accompanied Governor Johnston to Pensacola as his secretary; but, quarrelling with his patron, he returned in 1766, and fixed his residence in London, where he became one of the literary supporters of the administration, published some historical works, and was a popular pamphleteer. In 1773 he published a translation of the Iliad in the same style of poetical prose as Ossian, which merely proved a source of ridicule and opprobrium to the translator. But a pamphlet of his in defence of the taxation of America, and another on the Opposition in Parliament in 1779, were much applauded; and he attempted to combat the Letters of Junius, writing under the signatures of 'Musæus,' 'Scævola,' &c. Appointed agen: for the Nabob of Arcot in 1779, he next year obtained a seat in Parliament for the borough of Camelford; yet despite his ambition it does not appear that he ever attempted to speak in the House of Commons. In 1789, having realised a handsome fortune, he purchased the property of Raitts, in his native parish, and having changed its name to the more majestic one of Belleville-since 1900 renamed by his successor Balavil he built upon it a splendid Italianate mansion designed by the architect Adam of Adelphi fame. There he hoped to spend old age in ease and dignity, but survived only seven years. His eagerness for posthumous distinction was seen in some of the bequests of his will He ordained that his body should be interred in Westminster Abbey, and that a sum of £500 should be laid out in erecting a monument to his memory in some conspicuous situation near his home. Both injunctions were duly fulfilled ; he was actually buried near Poets' Corner, and a marble obelisk, with a medallion portrait, may be seen gleaming amidst a clump of trees by the roadside near Kingussie. In order to understand the controversy about Macpherson's merits and demerits, it is necessary to remember that Ossian was the great heroic poet of the Gael; the name is a diminutiveOisean, Oisin, the little os or deer. In Gaelic story Ossian was the son of Fionn MacCumhail, a hero who, in the third century A.D., gathered about him a band of warriors like himself, called the Féinn. The adventures and exploits of these heroes, and especially of the principal figures in the group-of Fionn himself, magnanimous and wise; of his grandson Oscar, chivalrous and daring; of his nephew Diarmad, handsome and brave; of his rival Goll, the one-eyed; and Conan, the villain of the band-their jealousies, dissensions, and final overthrow, constitute the literature of the Feinn. In the legend Ossian was carried away by his fairy hind-mother to Eilean na h-Oige, 'the isle of the ever young,' from whence at length he returned; and now old, blind, and alone, he told the story of the heroes to St Patrick. The legends of the Feinn are but a fragment of the heroic literature of the Gael, and in the oldest MSS. the deeds of Fionn and his companions occupy but little space; but eventually they partly absorbed and totally eclipsed the earlier traditions those of at least two earlier cycles of story; so that Ossianic literature is now practically another name for the heroic literature of the Gael. These traditions, which have come down from the misty past in tale and ballad, were early reduced to writing, and as time went on blossomed forth into vastly developed incident and detail. In ballads preserved in the Book of Leinster (c. 1150 A.D.) Ossian is represented as old and blind, surviving both his father and his son. A fifteenth-century MS. recounts the boyish exploits of Fionn. Later the volume of tradition gets fuller, while cycles tend to become confused. The leader of the Feinn is at one time a god, at others a hero, a king, a giant, but usually a great warrior, as wise as brave. In the book of the Dun Cow his mother is Muirn of the Fair Neck; in later traditions we hear of Fionn as the son of a sister of Cuchullin; at another time a Scandinavian princess gave him birth. But the literary form in which the legends are preserved remains practically unchanged. The Gaelic tale is essentially narrative prose with verse interspersed; Gaelic poetry, older and later, is always rhymed lyric verse. It was in 1760-63 that Macpherson published the longer epics and shorter pieces, epic and dramatic-all purporting to be translations of poems composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal. 'The translation,' Dr Blair is made to say in the preface to the Fragments printed in 1760, 'is extremely literal;' and while the work, in the opinion of many competent judges, possessed great literary merit, the genuineness of the whole thing was early called in question by Dr Johnson and others. An angry controversy followed. It was maintained that Macpherson had jumbled together persons and periods to an unwarrantable extent; that his originals, so far as he had any, were not Scottish, but Irish. If this were all that could be said one would feel justified in regarding, with Professor Windisch of Leipzig, Macpherson's Ossian as a legitimate development of the old traditions. For the legends of the Feinn are the common property of the Gael, whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Man. They are located in Scottish topography time out of mind, and within the last four hundred years almost as rich a harvest of ballad and tale has been recovered in Scotland as in Ireland. It is no doubt absurd to represent Fionn, whom Macpherson, after Barbour, calls Fingal, as a mighty Caledonian monarch, at one time successfully fighting the Roman legions in the third century, at another assisting Cuchullin, who lived in the beginning of the first century, to expel from Ireland the Norsemen who made their appearance for the first time in the end of the eighth; and Dr Douglas Hyde, from the Irish point of view, insists that Macpherson's confusion of the Fenian and Cuchullin eras is 'one of the surest proofs that his brilliant Ossian had no Gaelic original.' But Macpherson had warrant in genuine tradition for mixing up names and epochs. In the 'Battle of Ventry' Fionn defeats the kings of the world. According to a Gaelic tale, his father Cumhal sets up as king of Alba, and the kings of Ireland and Scandinavia combine to effect his overthrow; while the son is for ever fighting Norsemen. Zimmer propounded the theory that the whole of these stories are in their origin traceable to Teutonic sources, the very names by which the hero and his band are known being borrowed from the Norse. But in Macpherson's Ossian there is too wide a departure from genuine Gaelic literature and tradition. In his magnifying of the past, in his sympathy with nature, and in his powerful descriptions of the scenery of his own mountainland James Macpherson is true to the genius of his people, but beyond that he passes wholly away from the Gaelic sphere. Gaelic literature supplies material for epics and dramas; but the epic and dramatic, as literary forms, were unknown to the Highlanders. The dim and shadowy characters of Macpherson are in sharp contrast to the clear-cut features of the Gaelic heroes. As Wordsworth said: 'In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work it is exactly the reverse; everything that is not stolen is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things.' The 'translator' rarely makes a definite statement of fact; but when he does-as when, for example, he arms the old Gaels with bows and arrows-he blunders hopelessly. Macpherson is the most vague and abstract of writers; Gaelic poets are wearisome in detail, and revel in the concrete. In the opening of the third book of Cathloda, Macpherson raises the problem of the origin and issue of things; but he is indebted for his answer rather to Bishop Berkeley than to the son of Fionn. Macpherson was not a Gaelic scholar, and the fact may be considered conclusive proof of his inability to compose the Gaelic text of Ossian, which ultimately did appear, though the only Gaelic printed in the author's lifetime was Temora, Book vii. Ossian was published in all the languages of Europe before he appeared in his own. And when at length the great edition of 1807 was issued, there were Gaelic texts for only one-half of the poems, and for about threefourths of the matter published by Macpherson in English forty-five years previously. For the others no 'original,' ancient or modern, has ever yet been found; several old Gaelic MSS. reported to the committee appointed by the Highland Society to investigate had all mysteriously disappeared by one strange accident or another. And it must be allowed that the truncated Ossian does not show to advantage in his native garb; nor have the Gaelic-speaking people ever known him. There is not a single line of these Gaelic texts which can be proved to have been committed to writing before Macpherson's day. The diction is essentially modern. The loan-words are numerous, several of them borrowed from English. idioms and constructions are colourless, and show traces of classical training rather than of the turns of phrase characteristic of native authors. The so-called blank verse in which the poems are written is unknown to Gaelic poetry. The The truth seems to be that these so-called translations were essentially the compositions of James Macpherson, and that the Gaelic texts were prepared with or without aid from his friends, but how and when we do not now know. Nor can we say how much he was indebted, directly or indirectly, to oral traditions. The conclusions arrived at by the educated generally have been thus summed up by a student so carefully trained in research as Mr Haddan, collaborator with Bishop Stubbs: 'Every one now admits that Macpherson, having traditional material at his disposal, by no means confined himself to it, but was a free inventor as well as a free translator. Looking back at the man and his times, we can see how cleverly he played his part. He was wrongly accused on some points, and became most judiciously angry. His anger made him taciturn, and he wrapped himself in it as a cloak. But the Celtic nationality was roused, and it fought for him when he would not defend himself. Chatterton died by poison or starvation; the Shakespeare forgeries 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.' But even so, Macpherson retains the credit of having produced a considerable body of poetry of a type then quite unknown, strange and curious where not attractive or interesting. Admitting the misty confusion, the iteration of the same imagery, the monotony which inevitably produces tedium, it should be willingly recognised that there is much that is striking and poetical in Macpherson's Ossian-a blend of wildness, magnificence, tenderness, pathos, and Celtic glamour, with traces of the indubitable 'natural magic' of poetry, which, when it was absolutely new and unparalleled, naturally impressed and influenced more than it can do now: it did its work, and left its mark on the literature of Europe. The sections are very various in merit or power. The desolation of Balclutha and the lamentations in the Songs of Selma are conceived with true feeling and poetical power; but the battles of the car-borne heroes are stilted and unnatural, read like the quixotic encounters of knightly romance, and lack the air of remote antiquity, of dim and solitary grandeur, of shadowy superstitious fear, which haunts Ossian's heaths, lakes, and mountains. Ossian's Address to the Sun. I feel the sun, O Malvina! leave me to my rest. Perhaps they may come to my dreams; I think I hear a feeble voice! The beam of heaven delights to shine on the grave of Carthon: I feel it warm around. O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon |