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SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40.3 (2000) 511-537



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The Lawless Language of Macpherson's Ossian

Corinna Laughlin


James Macpherson's Ossianic forgeries, first published 1760-63, were an immediate sensation, not unlike Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or perhaps director James Cameron's recent film Titanic: they were adored, they were hated, but, in general, they were not written about with much intelligence. The long dissertations Hugh Blair and Macpherson himself supplied for the various editions of the poems, biased though they are, are still the most thorough commentaries on Ossian in English. 1 Fiona Stafford discusses the situation in her introduction to Howard Gaskill's 1996 edition of the Poems of Ossian: it would not, she writes, be "particularly enlightening to reconstruct a 'Critical Heritage' [for the Ossianic poetry], since early readers of Ossian tended either to fall into eulogistic abstraction, or to sit down and compose their own Ossianic poetry." 2

But these adaptations and imitations, I will argue, constitute the best possible "Critical Heritage" for the Ossianic poetry: they show us contemporary readers who felt compelled to rewrite what they read. In looking at some of the first responses to Macpherson's Ossianic forgeries, a pattern emerges. These readers attempt to take control both of the difficult language of the poems and of the emotion that language embodies. A close reading of some of these texts provides a unique window on the reception of Macpherson's Ossianic poems, and also illuminates the role of the poems in the shaping of the literature of sensibility.

I. A Brief Look at Ossianic Language

Let us begin by looking at a typical, and very famous, passage from the poems: the opening of "Berrathon," Ossian's funeral elegy for Malvina [End Page 511] . (This is what Werther sings to Charlotte in Jules Massenet's opera.)

Bend thy blue course, O stream, round the narrow plain of Lutha. Let the green woods hang over it from their mountains: and the sun look on it at noon. The thistle is there on its rock, and shakes its beard to the wind. The flower hangs its heavy head, waving, at times, to the gale. Why dost thou awake me, O gale, it seems to say, I am covered with the drops of heaven? The time of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves. Tomorrow shall the traveller come, he that saw me in my beauty shall come; his eyes will search the field, but they will not find me?--So shall they search in vain, for the voice of Cona, after it has failed in the field. The hunter shall come forth in the morning, and the voice of my harp shall not be heard. "Where is the son of car-borne Fingal?" The tear will be on his cheek.

(1:257-8)

Perhaps the first thing we might observe here is the rhythmic quality of Macpherson's language. Again and again, patterns of regular meter emerge, only to disappear again into the looser rhythms of prose. Thus, we get a couple of near fourteeners--"The thistle is there on its rock, and shakes its beard to the wind" and "The time of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves." But, even as it seems to demand that we read it as verse, this prose-poetry resists any attempt to break it up into a recognizable poetic form (blank verse, for example). Again and again, awkward, strange, or otherwise "unpoetic" phrases upset the poetic rhythms: "waving, at times," "the son of car-borne Fingal." George Saintsbury has described this quality of Macpherson's work as "the rather schoolboy process of 'unrhyming' and stowing away fragments and lumps of actual metre in the pudding"; 3 but Macpherson's technique is clearly more complex than that. He tiptoes on the very edge of poetry, but invariably he draws back from it. The effect is deliberately fragmentary. Macpherson makes us feel (as has been remarked) that we are reading an epic in...

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