IL CANTO DI OSSIAN -- Massenet -- Berrathon -- Ossian - elegia -- MALVINA -- "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 -- tomorow 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. I: 257-8.

Speranza

James Macpherson's Ossianic forgeries, first published in 1760, 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 are a proof.

Blair (April 7, 1718 – December 27, 1800) was a Scottish author, considered one of the first great theorists of written discourse. 

Macpherson himself supplies for the various editions of the poems, biased though they are, are still the most thorough commentaries on Ossian in English.

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.

But these adaptations and imitations, we will argue, constitute the best possible "Critical Heritage" for the Ossianic poetry.

They show us 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.

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.

This is what Werther sings to Charlotte in the melodramma of Giulio Massenet

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 metre 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 school-boy process of 'unrhyming' and stowing away fragments and lumps of actual metre in the pudding".

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.

And it relates to opera or melodramma in that it is "recitare cantando".

Macpherson makes us feel (as has been remarked) that we are reading an epic in ruins.

The emotion of the passage (and of the Ossianic poetry in general) is also unsettling to the reader.

Ossian's words are decidedly emotional.

And yet it is hard to pinpoint the emotion, which is everywhere and nowhere.

Not a single word describes feeling directly.

We get no adjectives like "sorrowful", "dreadful," "gloomy," no nouns like "grief" or "anguish."

Macpherson comes closest in the last line of the passage:

"The tear will be on his cheek".

But even this is stated matter-of-factly, describing the outward signs of feeling, not the feeling itself.

It is not until more than half-way through the selection that the human presence, Ossian himself, is revealed.

And when he does appear, it is in as indirect a manner as possible.

He is "the voice of Cona," and even "the voice of my harp"--a disembodied presence.

The feeling comes, in fact, not from the human beings, but from the landscape.

Within, we can see nothing.

But everything without expresses oppression and age.

The thistle "shakes its beard to the wind, " "the flower hangs its heavy head".

Ossian compares his own impending death to that of a flower crushed by a storm.

It turns out only a page later that the death to be mourned is Malvina's, not Ossian's.

But such distinctions are (in the world of Ossian) mere technicalities.

Macpherson creates a deliberate but very gentle confusion in the depiction of emotion.

What is important is not what Ossian grieves for, but how the world appears through the lens of this vague grief.


Macpherson's technique is never to present material of the smallest significance without emotionalizing it.

We might turn this observation around, and say that Macpherson's only means of emotionalizing is through the smallest details.

If the landscape takes on the emotion of the characters, the characters also take on aspects of the landscape.

In book 1 of Temora, "the noble Cathmor" asks an enemy:

"how long wilt thou pain my soul?
Thy heart is like the rock of the desart; and thy thoughts are dark" (1:22).

Cathmor himself is just the opposite, Ossian tells us:

"His face was like the plain of the sun, when it is bright: no darkness travelled over his brow" (1:23). Both men are described as scenery--the one terrible, the other pleasant to look at; Cathmor's face is a clear sky, his forehead a hill over which no clouds pass.

The battle in book 2 of Temora shows even more clearly this mingling of landscape and feeling:

Descending like the eagle of heaven, with all his rustling wings, when he forsakes the blast, with joy, the son of Trenmor came; Gonar, arm of death, from Morven of the groves.--He poured his might along green Erin. Death dimly strode behind his sword. The sons of Bolga fled, from his course, as from a stream, that bursting from the stormy desart, rolls the fields together, with all their echoing woods.--Crothar met him in battle: but Alnecma's warriors fled. The king of Atha slowly retired, in the grief of his soul. He, afterwards, shone in the south; but dim as the sun of Autumn; when he visits, in his robes of mist, Lara of dark streams. The withered grass is covered with dew: the field, tho' bright, is sad.

(1:378)

Landscape and the human beings who inhabit it are so intermingled here that it is almost impossible to tell where the one ends and the other begins. The imaginary landscapes embedded in the numerous similes are as vividly described as the actual setting of the battle; and, indeed, at the end of the passage, Macpherson seems to get carried away by his simile simile (sĭm`əlē) [Lat.,=likeness], in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which an object is explicitly compared to another object. Robert Burns's poem "A Red Red Rose" contains two straightforward similes:
, moving into a description of Lara that has no "like" or "as" to set it off: "The withered grass is covered with dew."

In this Ossianic world, the boundary between metaphor and reality becomes blurred. Macpherson's poetry hovers: it never settles definitively in one spot or another; it resists definition, both on the level of language, and in its depiction of emotion and action. [5] In his study of Ossian, Adam Potkay has observed a similar fragmentation pervading Macpherson's depiction of war and violence. He argues, "in Macpherson's Ossian forgeries, even the ability to depict animosity is lost. Primeval force is advertised but concealed; paraded but veiled behind a polite aesthetic... blood appears to burst out of no one and nowhere in particular; the smoothly balanced lines have a soothing effect." [6] Violence is at once made much of, and concealed in beauty: "Death dimly strode behind his sword." The action is fierce, but death itself is a ghostly presence. For all the dramatic (or melodramatic) subject matter of these pieces--suicides, accidental deaths, murders, battles, drownings, tragic love affairs--we see very li ttle action directly; it almost always comes to us through a "half-viewless" (to use a word Macpherson is fond of) scrim of a profoundly emotional, even unbalanced, speaker and landscape. Macpherson's death scenes are always shot very tenderly, in slow motion.

Both Stafford and Potkay point to essentially the same quality of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry: its power to disturb. It is easy to see nothing but empty, occasionally beautiful bombast in the multitudinous pages of Macpherson's works; but, in this case, appearances are decidedly and deliberately deceptive. The broken rhythms of the language reflect a deeper brokenness; and just below the surface of these prose-poems we find a world on the verge On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) is a play written by Eric Overmyer. It makes extensive use of esoteric language and pop culture references from the late nineteenth century to 1955. , a world of emotion without any moral code to keep it under control. This is the fragmentation not so much of emptiness as of "the distress of plenty": the Ossianic landscape is one which threatens any moment either to dissolve, or to explode. [7] What Macpherson has done in his Ossianic poetry, far more than imitate the genuine language of antiquity, is to invent a new language: a language of sensibility. That language is highly impressionistic.

 It never analyzes; and yet it is obsessed with emotion, the more delicate and obscure, the better.


A look at "The Gentleman's Magazine" for the summer of 1760, the year Macpherson's first Ossianic work, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, appeared, provides a glimpse of how the earliest readers approached the poems.

In the June issue, sandwiched between Dr. George Aylet's defense of his controversial amputation of a leg and an account of a new law then in Parliament, Fragments 5 and 12 appeared without any commentary, save a notice that they were examples of ancient Gaelic verse.

In the following issue, July 1760, a certain "F.M." addressed "Sylvanus Urban" in these terms:

"The two Pieces in your last, called Fragments of Scots Poetry, translated from the Erse, pleased me so well, though I believe them to be modern compositions, that I made it the Amusement of two Mornings to put them into Measure."

 He goes on confidently that he feels the poems may have gained something in the transformation.

What is revealing here is the conjunction of pleasure and doubt, to which the reader responded immediately by writing: by putting the poems into a form on which he could get a better grip.

The slippery qualities of Macpherson's language become clear when we compare the opening of Fragment 5--"Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill, and marks the grave of Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind, and strew the grave of the dead.

At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath" [9]--with F.M.'s translation of it:

Now with autumnal glooms the mountains frown,

And settling mists the dusky hills imbrown;

O'er the dun heath the gath'ring whirl-wind roars,

And the streams, black'ning, dash their sullen shores:

On the green hill ordain'd alone to rise,

The time-worn oak betrays where Connal lies;

Round whirl the leaves, as whistling tempests blow,

And strew the mansion of the dead below;

By the lone hunter gliding ghosts are seen,

As slow he muses o'er the twilight green. [10]

Reading these two side by side, one sees again how simple Macpherson's language is.

He uses only three adjectives in the passage, "dark," "grey," and "musing," but the style of eighteenth-century heroic verse heroic verse absolutely depends on them.

In the first three lines alone F.M. gives us "autumnal," "settling," "dusky", "dun," and "gath'ring." In the couplets the verbs, too, are "adjectivized": instead of Macpherson's simple verbs ("is" is most common, though we also get "rests," "rolls," and "stands"), F.M. gives us "frown," "imbrown," "roars," "dash," and "betrays." The rhythm is similarly energized: F.M. changes six short sentences into one long one, punctuated with colons and semicolons, which Macpherson (for an eighteenth-century writer) uses sparingly.

Macpherson's ideas are transformed as well, in subtler ways.

His own version of this brief passage ends with the musing hunter, stalking over the heath, seeing the occasional ghost; Macpherson gives no indication of the time of day, and indeed in the world of Ossian ghosts can appear at any time (Vinvela, of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, liked to visit at high noon.

But FM., subtly echoing John Milton's "L'Allegro," perhaps, makes the ghosts appear on the "twilight green"--a time and place already associated with the supernatural. Fragment 5 is certainly atmospheric, and its emphasis on the tomb site gives it some affinity with the Graveyard School; but F.M. has given Macpherson's graves almost the horror of Blair's, who wrote in some typical lines from The Grave:

The Wind is up: Hark hark 
how it howls! Methinks
Till now, I never heard a Sound so dreary:

Doors creak creak 
 and Windows clap, and Night's foul Bird

Rook'd in the Spire screams loud: The gloomy Isles

Black-plaster'd, and hung round with Shreds of 'Scurcheons

And tatter'd Coats of Arms



, send back the Sound

Laden with heavier Airs, from the low Vaults

The Mansion of the Dead. [11]

In the passage quoted earlier, FM. even replaces Macpherson's "grave" with Blair's phrase "Mansion of the Dead." [12]

The reaction of a more famous contemporary, Thomas Gray, is similarly complex. Gray's response to the poems is frequently quoted as representative of the over-enthusiasm of these first readers--

"I am gone mad about them... I was so struck, so extasie with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." [13]

But, a look at the context of this reaction is illuminating:

If you have seen Stonhewer he has probably told you of my old

Scotch (or rather Irish) Poetry.

I am gone mad about them. they are said to be translations (literal and; in prose) from the Erse-tongue, done by one James MacPherson, a young c lergyman in the Highlands he means to publish a Collection he has of these Specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity.

But what plagues me is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head.

I was so struck, so extaise with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries.

The letters I have in return are ill-wrote, ill-reason'd, unsatisfactory, calculated (one would imagine) to deceive one, and yet not cunning enough to do it cleverly, in short, the whole external evidence would make one believe these fragments (for so he calls them, tho' nothing can be more entire) counterfeit.

But the internal is so strong on the other side, that I am resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the Devil & the Kirk. it is impossible to convince me, that they were invented by the same Man, that writes me these letters, on the other hand it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he should be able to translate them so admirably. what can one do?...

in short this Man is the very Demon of Poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages. [14]

Gray argues with himself about the authenticity of the poems, and no one wins.

He suspects that he is being deceived.

And yet he is reassured by his confidence that James MacPherson is too stupid to deceive him.

The ironic result of this is to strengthen his feeling that the poems must be genuine.

But the translations, which Gray talks about quite as much as the originals to which they are supposed to allude, give him new cause for worry.

If James MacPherson was too stupid to have invented the poems, how could he have translated them so beautifully?

Language is at the heart of Gray's concerns.

The unseen language of the original, and the language of the translation which is before him, are equally hard to accept.

But, like F.M., Gray seems rather to enjoy this feeling of uncertainty than otherwise.


In the same letter, he mentions another recent publication of ancient poetry--Evan Evans's unquestionably authentic poems from Welsh--but with considerably less interest:

"this is in Latin, &, tho' it don't approach the other, there are fine scraps among it." [15]

Gray here compares not the original ancient poetry in each case, but the translations--and finds Macpherson's to be far superior.

Indeed, as the controversy proceeds, Gray becomes ever more interested in the translations themselves, while the originals fade back into the mythical past whence they emerged.

David Hume had observed in a letter that "There appeared to me many verses in this prose ... Pray ask Mr Gray whether he made the same remark, and whether he thinks it a blemish ?" [16]

Gray does not respond directly to the question, but he quotes the poems in verse:

The idea, that struck and surprised me the most, is the following.

One of them (describing a storm of wind and rain) says

Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night:

Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind;

Their songs are of other worlds!

Did you never observe (while rocking winds are piping loud) that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive  note, like the swell of an AEolian harp Aeolian harp

Stringed instrument played by the wind (named for the wind god Aeolus).

It is usually a long, narrow, shallow box with soundholes and 10 or 12 strings strung lengthwise between two bridges. ? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. [17]

Rather than make a decision as to whether the translations themselves were poetry, Gray turns them into poetry (and links them, as he does so, to the great tradition of English verse, by means of Milton).

He, too, must adapt them, in order to accept them.



F.M. took care to mention that his versifications were the work of only "two mornings".

But more elaborate responses followed, particularly in the form of dramatizations.

One of the earliest and most interesting of these is David Erskine Baker's 1763 drama,

"The Muse of Ossian".

In his enthusiasm, Baker lies it down as a fundamental point, to avoid as much as possible the blending of any base alloy of his own with the sterling poetry of the immortal Ossian".

Baker wishes merely to set the poems before his audience so that the "several characters should constantly speak the language of the bard, and appear, as near as possible, what he himself intended they should be." [20]

But Baker runs into difficulties almost immediately.

"His determinedly rigid adherence to his author prevented his extension of either incident or sentiment"; [21] and genre itself was against him.

He writes, "the very nature of an epic poem, whose unbounded scope wanders beyond all the bornes of time, space, and character, being so incons istent with the laws and unities of the drama, confined him to the choice of a few circumstances which appeared capable of being so far united as to form, if not an absolutely regular Drama, yet one in which no very glaring breach of dramatic occonomy should be apparent." [22]

The rules of form, and the tastes of his audience, finally won out over faithfulness to his bard.

The "Prologue" to The Muse of Ossian, written by "Mr Cunningham," reflects many of the same hesitations; but it also makes more clear what it was Baker so admired in the poetry of Ossian.

The prologue begins,

To plan a little work of nervous merit;

To give the sleepy stage a nobler spirit;

To touch a sacred Muse, and not defile her;

This was the task of our (too bold) Compiler. [23]

The key word here is "nervous," which means "well-strung; strong; vigorous" (Dr. Samuel Johnson's definition), but which also implies a certain susceptibility to feeling, as Johnson's quotation suggests: "poor, weak, nervous creatures." [24] Reading on, we find that for Cunningham, too, nervousness carries with it strong emotional implications:

"Can we peruse  a Pathos more than Attic,

"Mor [sic] with the golden treasure stamp'd dramatic.

"Here are no lines in measur'd pace that trip it;

"No modern scenes, so lifeless, so insipid!

"Wrought by a Muse, no sacred fire debarr'd her;

"'Tis nervous, noble -- 'tis true NORTHERN ardor ar·dor 
n.
1. Fiery intensity of feeling. See Synonyms at passion.

2. Strong enthusiasm or devotion; zeal: "The dazzling conquest of Mexico gave a new impulse to the ardor of discovery" . [25]

The nervousness of Ossian is part and parcel of his "Pathos," his prose, his ancientness, and his wild homeland.

Cunningham sums up all his good qualities in two words, which he emphasizes with strong typography: "NORTHERN ardor." The prologue works against the preface in significant ways. While Baker talks apologetically about how the rules of the drama are quite different from the rules of the "epic poem," Cunningham is not concerned with genre at all. Instead, he emphasizes the power of the poems to express and evoke feeling.

The conflict between Ossianic feeling and generic form is reflected in the movement of The Muse of Ossian. The opening of the play comes directly from "Comala, A Dramatic Poem." (It is no surprise that Baker should choose this poem for adaptation--in a footnote to the poem Macpherson informs us that it was most likely intended to be sung in performance, like a third-century opera.) Throughout the first act, Baker stays very close to his original, adding only phrases like "But see, she comes" and "Let us retire" for the convenience of his audience. [26] The first act is very tidy, dramatically speaking--the heroine appears, laments, and is pursued by the villain Hidallan, whom she rejects. But that pattern falls apart as the acts proceed. Act II opens with Comala reciting Colma's speech from "The Songs of Selma"--more and more Baker is obliged to search out passages from the other poems to fill out the action.

This act ends where Macpherson's "Comala" ended, with Comala dead and Fingal grieving. But there is still another act to go: act III opens with Lamor, Hidallan's father, speaking Ossian's famous address to the sun from "Carthon"; his son enters and the scene ends with Hidallan describing his disgrace. It is not until act III, scene 2 that the eponymous hero, Ossian, appears; he speaks only a few words, for all the attention of the scene is on the old, blind Crothar, and his grief at the death of his son, Fovar-Gormo (a story drawn from another poem in the Fingal volume, "Croma"). Ossian never meets up with his father Fingal in the course of the play, and the two stories are united only by the appearance of a messenger in the last scene, informing everyone that Lamor and Hidallan are dead in a bizarre murder-suicide.

What began as a tight, unified play breaks down into something much more like "The Beauties of Ossian": Baker squeezes in as many famous passages as he can, without much concern for who originally spoke them; Ossian himself is the least dynamic character in the piece (though Fingal runs a close second).

The artistic failure of The Muse of Ossian suggests, of course, Baker's lack of skill as a dramatist; but it also shows how Macpherson's poems, and especially Ossianic feeling, resist the kind of structuring Baker endeavored to give them.

Another adaptation, Oithona: A Dramatic Poem, Taken from the Prose Translation of the Celebrated Ossian, set to music by the (then) well-known French composer and violinist, Francois-Hippolyte Barthelemon, was first performed in 1767. [27] The title calls attention to the fact that this work is taken from the popular translations of the poems, not from the original. The language of the poems is clearly a concern to this poet, and the play itself, while remaining extraordinarily close to the outline of Macpherson's "Oithona," transforms it subtly into Gothic-Shakespearean verse and a Gothic-Shakespearean story.

Macpherson's "Oithona" begins atmospherically: "Darkness dwells around Dunlathmon, though the moon shews half her face on the hill. The daughter of night turns her eyes away; for she beholds the grief that is coming" (1:241). In the dramatic version, this passage is transformed into something worthy of Ann Radcliffe
This article is about the 19th-century author. For the 17th century benefactor of Harvard, see Ann (Radcliffe) Mowlson.


Ann Radcliffe (July 9, 1764 - February 7, 1823) was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic novel. :

Around Dunlathmon, solemn Darkness dwells,

Tho' on the Hill, the Moon shews half her Face,

The Daughter of the Night averts her Eyes,

For she forebodes the Sorrow coming on. [28]

The addition of words like "solemn" and "forebodes" changes the tone of the passage considerably (in light of our discussion of the edging-on-verse quality of the prose, it is interesting to see how little adaptation is necessary to turn this prose into blank verse) and the personifications of Darkness, Moon, and Night, present in the original, are intensified. In a period of great settings of poetic prose (George Frederic Handel's Messiah comes to mind), this writer transforms Macpherson's prose into pedestrian verse: though he calls his work a "Dramatic Poem," it is more opera than oratorio oratorio (ôrətôr`ēō), musical composition employing chorus, orchestra, and soloists and usually, but not necessarily, a setting of a sacred libretto without stage action or scenery. . When the hero Gaul appears, he addresses his love in an aria:

When he went forth,

The Tear was on thy Cheek,

The Sigh in secret

Rose within thy Breast;

But now to meet him,

Oh! thou dost not come,

With Songs of Welcome,

And the sounding Harp,

Daughter of Nuath,

Lovely dark-hair'd Maid,

Where in thy Beauty?

Whither whith·er 
adv.
To what place, result, or condition: Whither are we wandering?

conj.
1. To which specified place or position:  art thou stray'd? [29]

Here again, the verse stays extremely close to the original (which reads, "the tear was on thy cheek at his departure: the sigh rose in secret in thy breast. But thou dost not come to meet him, with songs, with the lightly-trembling sound of the harp" [1:242]). But, again, the language is transformed. The rhythm is singsong sing·song 
n.
1. Verse characterized by mechanical regularity of rhythm and rhyme.

2. A monotonously rising and falling inflection of the voice.

adj.
Monotonous in vocal inflection or rhythm. , in the familiar pattern of love ballads; but the neat line (Civil Engin.) a line to which work is to be built or formed.

See also: Neat  breaks conceal some chaotic language. The verse is full of half rhymes--"him," "come," "Welcome"--and some passages are taken directly from the prose--"The Tear was on thy Cheek." The poet seems torn between staying close to Macpherson's prose and turning "Oithona" into something more familiar to himself and his audience. The latter eventually wins; the last stanza is regular both in meter and in rhyme.

The transformation of the language is fairly subtle; the transformation of the story is more obvious. Macpherson's work is carefully (and as Gray observed, only seemingly) fragmentary; adapters of the poems tend to fill in those gaps, thus changing the effect of the poems substantially. Act I of Qithona ends with the departure of Gaul for the island of Tromathon, where Oithona is held captive, and the chorus sings in very familiar strains of men, women, and so on, in verse for which there is no equivalent in the original:

Lovely Females, form'd for Pleasure,

Source of highest human joy,

Oft you cause, in equal Measure,

Griefs that all our Peace destroy. [30]

In spite of his evident enthusiasm for the text, this author, like F.M. and Baker, seems driven to contain, to control, and to conventionalize Macpherson's poems. The ending of act II also seeks to provide closure and to explain the behavior of the heroine (who has disguised herself as a man and joined in the battle with suicidal intentions). Again the final "epode ep·ode 
n.
1. A lyric poem characterized by couplets formed by a long line followed by a shorter one.

2. The third division of the triad of a Pindaric ode, having a different or contrasting form from that of the strophe and " of the chorus ties the package up neatly:

Conscious of her guiltless Shame,

Martyr to her Virgin Fame,

As she fell, all free from Blame,

Glory celebrates her name. [31]

The drama Qithona relishes the trappings of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry--the names, genealogies, doomed love affairs--but the poet (even in spite of his evident respect, bordering on awe, for the text) inevitably transforms his material, in the process endeavoring to place limits on the very qualities that drew him to the poetry in the first place. Like Baker and like F. M. of the Gentleman Magazine, the author of Oithona turns the strangeness of the language of the poems into familiar eighteenth-century forms.

Macpherson's Ossianic poetry both demands and resists adaptation; its slippery language resists containment, and yet, for these writers, cries out for it. At this early stage, Ossian is already being reclaimed, not as a historical curio cu·ri·o 
n. pl. cu·ri·os
A curious or unusual object of art or piece of bric-a-brac.




[Short for curiosity. , or even as an ancient text rediscovered, but as an essentially modern literary work, belonging to belles lettres Noun 1. belles lettres - creative writing valued for esthetic content
belles-lettres

literary composition, literary work - imaginative or creative writing  and not to scholarship. If the primitivism primitivism, in art, the style of works of self-trained artists who develop their talents in a fanciful and fresh manner, as in the paintings of Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses.  of Ossian drew authors to the work, it was its modernism that forced them to respond. All of these adapters sense the peculiarly contemporary quality of Macpherson's poems; and, ironically, the poetic prose translation is far more modern than the "modern" genres into which it gets transformed, [32] The failure of these adaptations to achieve the popularity or success of Macpherson's work shows how much audiences wanted to contain the language of Ossian and how little they liked it once it was contained.


In her essay "Oscillations of Sensibility," Patricia Meyer Spacks analyzes the tendency of sensibility toward violence: "emotional responsiveness implies the possibility of sternness, even ferocity." She calls this "the dark side of sensibility." [33]

Spacks uses this notion of a "dark side" to illuminate the question of women and sensibility: because sensibility is inherently "dependent on female victimization victimization Social medicine The abuse of the disenfranchised–eg, those underage, elderly, ♀, mentally retarded, illegal aliens, or other, by coercing them into illegal activities–eg, drug trade, pornography, prostitution. ," women writers could only choose to write from the victim's perspecrtive. [34] But, this concept can reflect usefully on the reception of the Ossianic poetry as well. From the beginning, readers both responded to and endeavored to control the language of Ossian and, more subtly, the uncontrolled emotion which lurks beneath its surface. In these later adaptations and responses to Ossian, we see that emotion coming into play more prominently.

Ossian becomes the apostle of dark sensibility, and the ability to feel deeply becomes a very dangerous blessing.

Among the most elaborate (and readable) dramatic adaptations of Ossian is The Fatal Discovery (1769) by John Home, Macpherson's first, and one of his most enthusiastic, supporters. [35] This play, written (like Oithona) in blank Absent limitation or restriction.

The term in blank is used in reference to negotiable instruments, such as checks or promissory notes. When such Commercial Paper is endorsed in blank, the designated payee signs his or her name only.  verse, is based on Fragment 9, the story of "Ronnan the bold, and Connan the chief of men; and of her, the fairest of maids, Rivine the lovely and the good." [36]

Macpherson's original fragment is tragic enough. "Rivine the daughter of Conar was the love of Ronnan; her brother Connan was his friend"; [37] but the wicked Durstan is also in love with her, and, through his machinations, Rivine's brother and lover fight to the death (each thinking he is fighting Durstan). But, Rivine manages to escape Durstan's clutches: "Rivine came out with the morn; and--O what detains my Ronnan!--She saw him lying pale in his blood; and her brother lying pale by his side. What could she say? what could she do? her complaints were many and vain. She opened this grave for the warriors; and fell into it herself, before it was closed; like the sun snatched away in a storm." [38] Home makes this simple story considerably more complex. In the fragment, there are a couple of moments that could be considered fatal discoveries, for example, when the dawn arrives and the friends realize that they have killed each other, or in the passage quoted above, when Rivine discovers their pale bodies. Bu t Home multiplies the fatal discoveries, so that the title becomes a vague but powerful description of the atmosphere of the whole play. Home's Rivine has been informed that her lover Ronnan is untrue--that he has in fact married the queen of Erin--and, at the insistence of her father, she has wed Durstan. She is so miserable that her father is tormented by guilt; and, when she first appears, she is the picture of the sentimental heroine--quite different from "the lovely and the good" Rivine of Macpherson's fragment:

--Entranced in thought-

See how she tosses to the skies her arms,

Now wrings her folded hands! Thus is she wont

To wander through the woods, ever alone,

And ever mourning. Like a wounded deer,

Apart she stalks, and seeks the darkest shade

Of hanging rocks, and melancholy boughs,

To hide and nourish her determined sorrow.-

Let us avoid her. O, unhappy child!

I fear thy father's counsel has undone thee! [39]

Macpherson's Rivine is sad, but Home's is morbid; and, when she speaks, she proves to be vengeful as well:

O, how I envy you,

Ye lovelorn maids! who, slighted and forsaken for·sake 
tr.v. for·sook , for·sak·en , for·sak·ing, for·sakes
1. To give up (something formerly held dear); renounce: forsook liquor.

2. ,

Yet entertain no notion of revenge,

But mildly bear your wrongs, decline and die,

The blameless blame·less 
adj.
Free of blame or guilt; innocent.




blameless·ly adv.

blame  victims of inconstant in·con·stant
adj.
1. Changing or varying, especially often and without discernible pattern or reason.

2. Relating to a structure that normally may or may not be present.  man! [40]

Like the poet of "Oithona," Home puts a good deal of emphasis on Macpherson's women; but he seems to relish Rivine's overwrought o·ver·wrought 
adj.
1. Excessively nervous or excited; agitated.

2. Extremely elaborate or ornate; overdone: overwrought prose style.  feelings, and, in fact, intensifies them. Her gesticulations (both physical and mental) take center stage; Home watches in admiration and expects his audience to do so as well. Though she has good cause to be miserable, her feelings even exceed the circumstances--"my heart is full / Of rage, of anger, and of mortal hatred!": [41]

0! save not me

From any misery! But tell me rather,

How I may be more wretched than I am. [42]

Her brother Connan is not surprised by these powerful expressions of feeling, for the wronged Ronan is even more emotional than Rivine. He remembers his parting from his friend, which bespoke be·spoke 
v.
Past tense and a past participle of bespeak.

adj.
1. Custom-made. Said especially of clothes.

2. Making or selling custom-made clothes: a bespoke tailor.  a passionate nature--

From his embrace I turn'd me to the shore:

His arm he stretch'd, and caught my hand again;

He prest it to his breast, he wrung wrung 
v.
Past tense and past participle of wring.



wrung
Verb

the past of wring

wrung wring  it hard;

And, with a look of infinite affection,

Connan! he said, my king commands; I go:

To thee, my friend, I leave my love in charge! [43]

If Ronan felt so strongly on leaving a mere friend behind, what will he do, connan wonders, when he learns that Rivine is wed to another? For Home, the interest of the poem lies in the feelings, which are intense almost to the point of absurdity.

The dramatic tension of Fragment 9 derives from the battle of the two friends, as they unwittingly destroy each other; but, in The Fatal Discovery (in spite of the title), the interest really comes from the issue of suicide--a suitably controversial sentimental subject. Suicide happens frequently in Macpherson's Ossian, but it is always ambiguously expressed (the passage describing Rivine's death, cited above, is open to interpretation--it is possible that Rivine simply died of grief). In fact, Macpherson appended a footnote to one of his earliest works, Fragment 7, saying, "In those early times, suicide was utterly unknown among that people, and no traces of it are found in the old poetry. Whence the translator suspects that the account that follows of the daughter of Dargo killing herself, to be the interpolation interpolation

In mathematics, estimation of a value between two known data points. A simple example is calculating the mean (see mean, median, and mode) of two population counts made 10 years apart to estimate the population in the fifth year.  of some later Bard." [44] But Home's Rivine is suicidal from the moment she comes on stage and she is even more so after her "fatal discovery"; but, it takes her the full five acts to do what she intends. What is most surprising is that no one seems to object to her designs; in fact, they almost applaud her. In act III, she has retired to the cave of an ancient druid, not to weep out the years that remain to her, but, evidently, to kill herself in private. The old man admires her greatly:

I read thy thoughts,

Hadst hadst 
v. Archaic
A second person singular past tense of have.  thou been silent I had known thy purpose.

Thy port exalted, thine enlighten'd eye,

Denote the pitch of thy determined mind;

The storm-toss'd vessel seeks a shore unknown.

I blame thee not, O daughter of affliction!

Strange is thy destiny! thyself thy·self 
pron. Archaic
Yourself. Used as the reflexive or emphatic form of thee or thou.



thyself
pron

Archaic the reflexive form of thou1  alone

Can be thy counsellor. [45]

In The Fatal Discovery, suicide is a noble thing, "exalted" and "enlighten'd." Rivine's own brother, on finding her dead body, is not shocked:

Let me not blame;

Pity forbid that I should blame the dust

Of poor Rivine. [46]

After all the passionate flailings of the hero and heroine in the depths of their agony, the mild sentimental ending comes as something of a surprise. Connan waxes prophetic:

If right my soul forebodes, they shall not lie

In dark oblivion: on their buried woes

The light refulgent re·ful·gent 
adj.
Shining radiantly; resplendent.




[Latin refulg  of the song shall rise,

And brighten the sad tale to future times.

The brave, the fair, shall give the pleasing tear

Of nature, partial to the woes of love. [47]

In Home's drama, the lawless language of Ossian is carefully controlled by the blank verse--but that lawlessness has made its way into the feelings. Other adapters had also sensed the ambiguity of feeling, particularly among the female characters, in the poems; in The Fatal Discovery, that ambiguity becomes more marked. Rivine is the heroine, held up for our admiration, and yet she is passionate to a fault. We are not to judge her conduct, however, but to sympathize with Verb 1. sympathize with - share the suffering of
compassionate, condole with, feel for, pity

grieve, sorrow - feel grief

commiserate, sympathise, sympathize - to feel or express sympathy or compassion  it--all Home asks for his heroine is "the pleasing tear/Of nature." Intense feelings are their own reward: this is the "moral" of Ossian for sentimental writers. Home fills in the blanks of Ossian, as it were, with suicide.

In the same year, 1769, another poet responded in a very different way to Macpherson's work.

*******************************************************

Thomas Chatterton's "Rowley" poems are widely known, and often compared with the Ossianic poetry, but less well known are Chatterton's imitations of Ossian, purporting to be specimens of ancient Saxon poetry in translation.

I want to look briefly at one of these poems, "Ethelgar," which Chatterton submitted to Town and Country Magazine in March of 1769. [48]

More, perhaps, than the other adaptations of Ossian we have looked at, Chatterton seeks to take control of this language--especially ironic considering Chatterton's own struggles with and against the pressures of eighteenth-century verse forms and genre.

Even more ironically, Chatterton, like Home, senses a self-indulgent, suicidal tendency in Ossianic feeling, but, unlike Home, works against it.

The opening of the poem forms a marked contrast to Macpherson's Ossianic verse:

'Tis not for thee, O man! to murmur at the will of the Almighty. When the thunders roar, the lightnings shine on the rising waves, and the black clouds sit on the brow of the lofty hill; who then protects the flying deer, swift as a sable cloud, tost by the whistling winds, leaping over the rolling floods, to gain the hoary hoar·y 
adj. hoar·i·er, hoar·i·est
1. Gray or white with or as if with age.

2. Covered with grayish hair or pubescence: hoary leaves.

3.  wood: whilst the lightnings shine on his chest, and the wind rides over his horns?... --Know, O man! that God suffers not the least member of his work to perish, without answering the purpose of their creation. The evils of life, with some, are blessings; and the plant of death healeth the wound of the sword.--Doth the sea of trouble and affliction overwhelm thy soul, look unto the Lord, thou shalt shalt 
aux.v. Archaic
A second person singular present tense of shall.  stand firm in the days of temptation, as the lofty hill of Kinwulph; in vain shall the waves beat against thee: thy rock shall stand. [49]

Chatterton carefully imitates the patterns and images of Ossianic language--the repetitive phrases that often seem to have no antecedent ANTECEDENT. Something that goes before. In the construction of laws, agreements, and the like, reference is always to be made to the last antecedent; ad proximun antecedens fiat relatio. , the usual ingredients of storms, clouds, hills, deer. But, while the language builds to a pitch of semisublimity in the depiction of the storm, and the struggling stag, Chatterton counters it with a moral reflection that takes away all its ambiguous formlessness: everything, he says, is under control and everything is for a reason.

The story Chatterton goes on to tell points to this moral. Ethelgar is a happy youth, who "sung the works of the Lord"; he meets Egwina, "tall as the towering elm; stately as a black cloud bursting into thunder; fair as the wrought bowels of the earth; gentle and sweet as the morning breeze; beauteous beau·te·ous 
adj.
Beautiful, especially to the sight.




beaute·ous·ly adv.

beau  as the sun," and so on. [50] They marry and have a child; and then, all in one day, the child is killed fighting with a wolf, and Egwina is blasted by lightning. Ethelgar is as lonely and abandoned as any Ossianic hero at this point and he decides to take his own life: "Ethelgar stood terrible as the mountain of Maindip; the waves of despair harrowed up his soul, as the roaring Severn plows the sable sand; wild as the evening wolf, his eyes shone like red vapors in the valley of the dead: horror sat upon his brow; like a bright star shooting through the sky, he plunged from the lofty brow of the hill, like a tall oak breaking from the roaring wind." [51] But Ethelgar is not allowed to die in despair, for, sudde nly, Saint Cuthbert, "arrayed in glory, caught the falling mortal," and, at the same moment, the black clouds that had obscured the sun are dispelled; Ethelgar is set safely on the beach below him. The saint gives him a brief homily homily (hŏm`əlē), type of oral religious instruction delivered to a church congregation. In the patristic period through the Middle Ages the focus of the homily was on the explanation and application of texts read or sung during the  against suicide--"Learn that thou art a man, nor repine re·pine 
intr.v. re·pined, re·pin·ing, re·pines
1. To be discontented or low in spirits; complain or fret.

2. To yearn after something: Immigrants who repined for their homeland.  at the stroke of the Almighty"--and then vanishes, "as the atoms fly before the sun." [52] Ethelgar is converted anew and ends his days in a monastery. Chatterton turns Macpherson's ghosts into Christian saints and guardian angels, and his reclusive re·clu·sive 
adj.
1. Seeking or preferring seclusion or isolation.

2. Providing seclusion: a reclusive hut. , bereaved warriors into contented monks. He retains all the familiar ingredients, but defuses them: he is troubled by the amoral a·mor·al 
adj.
1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral.

2. Lacking moral sensibility; not caring about right and wrong.  and especially the un-Christian quality of this verse (we should remember that Chatterton's own alter-ego, Rowley, is a Catholic priest) and transforms the poetry accordingly.


In the course of this miniature critical h eritage, we have seen a gradual change in the response to Ossian.

From the beginning, readers try (perhaps unconsciously) to set limits, to control Ossian through the subtle transformation of language and feeling.

But, with Home and Chatterton, we see a new element: Home embraces, and Chatterton pointedly rejects, the dangerously powerful emotion the Ossianic poetry embodies, and (to use Potkay's term) even advertises.

With their emphasis on SUICIDE, Home's Fatal Discovery and Chatterton's Ossianic imitations (not to mention Chatterton himself) naturally bring Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "VERTER E CARLOTTA; ossia gl'amanti di Vetzlar -- il canto d'Ossian: melodramma" to mind.

Werther is (arguably) the most important response we have to Ossian.

It defines the role Macpherson's poems--and in particular his lawless language--would play in the literature of sensibility.

The presence of Ossian in "Werther" is a consistent problem for readers, beginning with Goethe himself.

More than fifty years after the novel was published, he provides a much quoted observation to Henry Crabb Robinson.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775 - 1867) was a diarist, born at Bury St. Edmunds, was articled to an attorney in Colchester.

Between 1800 and 1805 he studied at various places in Germany, and became acquainted with nearly all the great men of letters there, including Goethe, Schiller, Herder.

Goethe says:

"while Werther is
in his senses he talks
about Homer.
Only after he grows mad is
he in love with Ossian.



In retrospect, Goethe sees the inclusion of Ossian as a rational, thematic choice, and many of his critics have taken him at his word.

Goethe apparently loses his taste for Ossian fairly rapidly.

The inclusion of Ossian's songs is intended emblematically.

The function of these passages from Ossian is to emphasize Werther's spiritual disease.

But, Goethe himself looks back on Werther, and the Ossian in it, with a certain degree of embarrassment.

In Poetry and Truth, Goethe begins his account of Werther with a long discussion of melancholy, which, he says, has "physical and moral causes" which doctors could explain, but which he attributes to first love, "the seething blood of youth" and "an imagination easily paralyzed by individual things." [56]

Goethe goes on, surprisingly enough, to blame the book on the very influences which inspired Home's The Fatal Discovery.

Goethe writes:

"these gloomy thoughts could not have found such marked development in the minds of German youth if the latter had not been stimulated and assisted in this sad business by external suggestion."

English literature was responsible, especially the poetry, whose great merits are coupled with a grave melancholy that infects everyone who studies it."

Goethe cites the Graveyard School -- Edward Young and Gray -- but also Oliver Goldsmith, Milton, and Shakespeare as purveyors of this melancholy.

But, to Macpherson he devotes a separate paragraph.

It was Ossian who gave the feeling its local habitation.

"In order, as it were, to supply this pervading gloom with a thoroughly suitable locale, Ossian lures us off to Ultima Thule Ultima Thule

to Romans, extremity of the world, identified with Iceland. [Rom. Legend: LLEI, I: 318]

See : Remoteness , where we roam ed about on the infinite gray heath amidst protruding mossy moss·y 
adj. moss·i·er, moss·i·est
1. Covered with moss or something like moss: mossy banks.

2. Resembling moss.

3. Old-fashioned; antiquated.  gravestones, looking around us at the grass blown by a chill wind, and above us at the heavily clouded sky.

Only by moon-light did this Caledonian night really become day.

Perished heroes and vanished maidens hover about us, and we actually beguin to believe that we had seen the ghost of Loda in its fearsome form.

Ossian speaks for the melancholy German youths of the time, and even suggested a solution to their problems.

"It was in this element and environment that we embrace the thought, in something like an exhilaration of depression, that we could abandon life at will, if it no longer pleased us.

Goethe is writing his own covert defense -- "VERTER E CARLOTTA" had been blamed for more than one suicide, after all.

In this elaborate account of the sources of melancholy, Goethe turns the blame back on his own models in English verse.

He quotes Thomas Warton's ode "The Suicide," which shows "How very familiar the English were with this misery ... before the appearance of Werther.

But the lines he quotes are somewhat misleading:

To griefs congenial prone,

More wounds than Nature gave he knew,

While Misery's form his fancy drew

In dark ideal hues, and horrors not its own. [61]

The bulk of Warton's poem is hardly so lyrical, and here (unlike The Fatal Discovery) the horrors of suicide far outweigh the beauties. [62]

We ought to take Goethe's own justification of the presence of Ossian in Werther with a very large grain of salt.

Looking at the novel itself, we find Ossian working in Werther in a much more complex--and inextricable--way.

Ossian is linked, from very early on in the novel, not so much with Werther and his madness, as with CARLOTTA!

Soon after their first encounter Werther complains:

"You should see what an oaf I look
if her name is mentioned in company!
Especially if someone asks me how I like her.--
Like her! I utterly detest the word.
What kind of man would merely LIKE Carlotta,
and not have all his senses and feelings dominated by her!
LIKE her!

Recently some fellow asked me how l liked Ossian!"

-- TO LIKE CARLOTTA -- TO LIKE OSSIAN

Werther's feelings for CARLOTTA are strangely mingled with his feelings for Ossian, and, for both "like" is a preposterous understatement.

And yet, Werther does not say "love".

His feelings are passionate but not at all tender.

He is "dominated by" CARLOTTA , obsessed with her, almost against his will.

In the same way that Ossian infiltrates Werther's feelings for Lotte, Macpherson's Ossianic language begins to infiltrate the novel itself.

In the much-quoted

"Ossian has ousted Homer from my heart"

passage early in the second volume, Werther begins by describing the poems.

But he soon falls into something more like an imitation of them (just as Goethe himself did in Poetry and Truth):

What a world that exalted soul leads me into!
To wander across the heath in the pale moonlight,
with the gale howling and the spirits of his forefathers forefathers npl → antepasados mpl

forefathers npl → ancêtres mpl

forefathers npl → Vorfahren 

in the vaporous mists!
To hear amidst the roar of a forest torrent the faint moans of the spirits in their mountainside caves, and the laments of that mortally stricken maiden weeping over the four mossy, grassed-over stones that mark the grave of the noble warrior who was her lover!

And then to find him, that grey-haired bard, wandering on the vast heath, seeking the places his forefathers knew, and then, ah! finding their tombstones, and raising his eyes in lament to the sweet star of evening as it sinks in the waves of the rolling sea!


The rhapsodic language of the bard takes over both Werther's feelings and his style at this point--and it is a significant point in the novel.

CARLOTTA has married Albert--an event Werther had accepted with apparent equanimity .

But, the journal entry in which he comments on their marriage (and which comes immediately before his plunge into Ossian, quoted above) is full of dashes and unexpressed thought:

"What distresses me, Wilhelm, is that Albert does not seem as happy as--he hoped--or as I--should have expected to be-if--I do not care for all these dashes, but there is no other way I can express this--and I imagine this is clear enough." [65]

The long description of Ossian is therefore doubly significant.

The language of Ossian enters into the novel to express the inexpressible--to stand in for the feelings Werther's own language cannot convey.

Ossian does not play a major role in the stylistic development of the novel--it merely "stands for savagery and extravagance of feeling."

But,  Ossian (for Werther) is not particularly savage.

The important things are rather a certain sort of melancholy that characterizes the work, the godlessness of Ossian's world, and parallels in the work to Werther's own situation.

As in Home's Fatal Discovery, it is not so much the primitivism as the SENSIBILITY of Ossian that appeals to Werther.

Werther looks into the poems not to see the ancient world, but to catch a glimpse of himself.

And yet, the presence of Ossian at this point in "Werther" does more than simply reflect the hero's situation.

It takes over the language of the novel at a point when Werther can no longer speak for himself (more for reasons of propriety than anything else); it represents feelings that are the more powerful for being extremely delicate.

The passages from "The Songs of Selma" in the last section of the novel serve a similar function, though in a much more elaborate way.

Here again, Ossian comes in at a time when expression of feeling seems impossible.

CARLOTTA "did not well know what she was saying, nor what she was doing... she went to the piano and began to play a minuet minuet, but it would not come." [68]

Werther, meanwhile, paces the room in ominous silence.

It is to escape from the awkwardness of the situation that CARLOTTA suggests that they read, and Werther is glad to comply, though the very sight of the manuscript has a powerful effect on him:

"He smiles, fetches the songs, shudders as he picks them up, and his eyes fillwith tears as he opened the manuscript." [69]

Now Werther does not just imitate, he translates, and the "Songs of Selma" comes into the book almost in its entirety.

For six pages, we hear nothing of Werther and Charlotte.

In a sense, the reader is as distracted from their woes as the characters wish to be.

But, of course, Lotte's scheme fails.

She interrupts Werther's reading with a "flood of tears.

Both of them were fearfully agitated.

They could sense their own wretchedness in the fates of the noble heroes.

They sensed it together, and shed tears in harmony.

 The poems that were intended to distract VERTER and CARLOTTA end up encouraging them in their feelings.

By the end of the reading they are brought closer together, both physically and emotionally.

But Lotte "asked him to go on, imploring him in very heaven's voice!" [71]

Again Lotte seeks escape in Ossian.

But again Werther's reading only increases their anguish.

Werther does not continue from where he left off; instead, he leaves "The Songs of Selma" unfinished and reads the famous opening of "Berrathon," the address to the Spring.

THE TENOR ARIA.

But, this time Werther does not get through six pages.

He barely gets through six lines before he "flung himself down before Lotte in deep despair." 

It is at this point that "a premonition of his terrible intention flickered in her soul".

Charlotte realizes that Werther means to kill himself, and she is paralyzed by "pain and sympathy." [74]

Werther's translations of Ossian, which Lotte suggest as a means of avoiding a painful scene, have ended by encouraging one.

 It does not matter that neither of the poems Werther reads deals directly with suicide.

For Goethe, the mourning and loss in the poems are only a cover for self-destruction.

Later in his career, Goethe certainly becomes self-conscious about the presence of Ossian in his novel.

But "Werther" itself is not an entirely self-conscious work.

The way Ossian comes to dominate the novel (finally occupying a not insignificant percentage of the last volume) certainly works thematically, but it also shows Goethe himself under the powerful influence of Ossian.

It is not only Werther who has trouble expressing himself in moments of intense feeling.

Goethe succeeded in this novel in creating a new world, one which speaks for this desire for emotional intensity and imaginative energy, and for the cult of the extraordinary personality who claims to be a law unto himself.

At the same time, it reflects Goethe's sense of the inadequacy of the Sturm und Drang  poetic doctrine, for at an early stage Goethe insista on the need to harness emotional energy and imaginative power, which, in life as in art, need to be disciplined by a sense of what is possible." [75]

But the balance, we w ould argue (and we think the scene discussed above shows), is not perfect.

At the most intense moments Goethe (like Carlotta) looks to Ossian, or to Wilhelm, or to the third-person narrator


NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. , to stand in for and conceal emotions too powerful or too delicate to be described.

Goethe himself was well aware that he had not achieved that balance.

Werther later carefully revised Werther to ensure that "we shall see the sickness of Werther and not identify him with his author, nor ourselves with him totally." [76]

But this second narrator is no more able to get outside of Werther than Werther was able to get outside of himself." [77]

It is no wonder, therefore, that Goethe's account of the novel in Poetry and Truth has a defensive ring to it.

Goethe is attempting to rewrite his novel in retrospect, giving it the distance he feels it should have.

It was only in retrospect from the late Romantic period that Goethe looked back and saw this novel as a psychological study--a portrait of despair.

Sensibility--the movement of subtle feeling--actually breaks down when feeling gets too powerful; and, instead of analysis of feeling, we get the thing itself.



In his recent study, The Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann puts special emphasis on the poetry of Ossian, which set the literature of sentiment and sensibility on a whole new footing.

Macpherson's poetry erodes the sharp division of matter and spirit, body and soul, at every textual level...the world of Ossian appears to subsist as a complex affective system rather than a machine for transmitting information... The words do not name something, they illustrate themselves, they incarnate an idea.

McGann's perceptive analysis sheds light on this discussion of early responses to Ossian.

What MacPherson does is foreground language itself, suggesting that the fact of speech is more important than its content.

In much the same way that violence is concealed (as Potkay has demonstrated), emotion remains partially hidden: the struggles and palpitations of the characters take place behind a veil, so that we can know nothing distinctly except the fact of their agony.

For Goethe , as for Home and the other early adapters of the poems we have examined here, Macpherson's poetry becomes both a threat and a powerful emotional tool--an "affective system," a means of depicting feeling.

In the novel of sensibility, Ossian provides a useful shorthand, full of hints and suggestions of passion, grief, and even suicide, always imprecise but always passionate.

In his influential essay "Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility," Northrop Frye writes that the response to Ossian includes a subconscious factor, the surrendering to a spell.

Dr. Johnson said much the same thing when he observed that a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.

These uneven but always imaginative responses to Ossian admire, but revise, adapt, and occasionally (as in the case of Chatterton) reject.

This limited "Critical Heritage" suggests that contemporary readers were keenly aware of the hypnotic invitation Ossian seemed to hold out to them; but it also suggests that the Ossianic poetry both demanded, and got, as much resistance as it did abandonment.



NOTES

Otto L.Jiriczek's facsimile edition of Fingal and Temora: James Macpherson's Ossian, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitats-Buchhandlung, 1940).

All citations from Macpherson in this essay, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this edition and will henceforth be cited parenthetically  in the text.

Fiona Stafford,
"Introduction: The Ossianic Poems of James Macpherson

James Macpherson (October 27, 1736 – February 17, 1796) was a Scottish poet, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems.

Early life
Macpherson was born at Ruthven in the parish of Kingussie, Badenoch, Inverness-shire, Highland. ," in The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996), p. xvi.

George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (London: Macmillan, 1922), p.470.

Paul deGategno, James Macpherson (Boston: Twayne, 1989), p.39.

Macpherson's spirituality similarly resists definition.

It is a pre-Christian world (as Macpherson and Hugh Blair continually remind us in their footnotes and appendices) and yet, as Stafford has pointed out, Macpherson also avoided any discussion of Celtic mythology.

Macpherson's ancient poetry demonstrates the horror of a world without God" (pp. 156, 107).

And yet, this world without God is peopled with ghosts and spirits.

Macpherson's spirituality is dislocated (we might even say fragmented) and disturbing.

Adam Potkay,
"Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poems of Ossian," PMLA 107, 1 (January 1992): 120--30, 124.

(Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 55.

(8.) F. M., Gentleman's Magazine (July 1760): 335.

(9.) Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry,
Augustan Reprint Society 122 (Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. : William Andrews Clark William Andrews Clark, Sr. (January 8, 1839–March 2, 1925) was an American politician and entrepreneur, involved with mining, banking and railroads. Biography
Clark was born in Connellsville, Pennsylvania.  Memorial Library, 1966), p. 23.

(10.) F. M., p. 335.

(11.) Blair, The Grave, Augustan Reprint Society 161 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973), pp. 4--5.

Another very early response to Macpherson provides a striking contrast to F. M.'s respectable Gentleman's Magazine couplets.

Donald Macdonald's Three Beautiful and Important Passages Omitted by the Translator of Fingalis dated 1761, but was published as a pamphlet in 1762.

These passages are evidently parodic, and clearly no such person as "Donald Macdonald" really existed (Horace Walpole's copy of the pamphlet identifies the author as John Hall Stevenson); but, parody or not, the poems reveal concerns quite different from F. M.'s: "O Shangger, Daughter of Conner-ea, how deceitful are thy Kisses! how dreadful are thy Embraces! Thy Embraces are like the Foldings of an Adder collecting her Strength to dart forth her Fury: thy Kisses are like the great Whirlpool of Malstrom in the Ocean of Norway, sucking Men into the Gulph of Destruction... Thy Breath is like Mildew from the East; withering the Blossom that promised fair Fruit" (p. 7).

Where F. M. emphasized the "Graveyard" quality of Macpherson's language, Macdonald (or Stevenson) puts his emphasis on its oriental echoes--to the point of referring to "Mildew from the East" (the only semicoherent preface to the pamphlet makes the comparison explicit, stating that "the Highlanders, like the Arabians, are happily placed by their Situation for Speculations of an abstracted Nature" [p. 4]). But, what is more striking is Macdonald's transformation of Macpherson's love stories into a Swiftean attack on the female sex.

If there are few consummated unions in the world of Ossian, there are even fewer faithless women; and such a passage as the above is unthinkable in Macpherson.

But, Macdonald seems to find a covert sensuality in the orientalism of the poems; as he observes in the afterword, whenever Macpherson/Ossian "is forced to approach toward Indelicacy in·del·i·ca·cy 
n. pl. in·del·i·ca·cies
1. The quality or condition of being indelicate.

2. Something indelicate.

Noun 1.  by the Nature of the Subject, he either wraps it in the chastest Expressions, or speaks in Terms utterly unintelligible UNINTELLIGIBLE. That which cannot be understood.
     2. When a law, a contract, or will, is unintelligible, it has no effect whatever. Vide Construction, and the authorities there referred to.  to any Female that has been modestly brought up" (p. 15). Macdonald's other fragments show that sensuality even more clearly: "The Spirit of the Moon that trembles in the Waters of Loman at Midnight, breaks through the Bars of Iron in the lofty Tower upon the Windy Lake; stealing to behold my naked Charmer the graceful Uka, where she stands by the crackling fire of Birch ... From her Bosom of Love to her Waist of Bliss she was like the sweet-smelling-purple moor in the Season of ripe berries"(p. 8). In a much more strident way than F. M., Macdonald transforms and takes control of Macpherson's poetry through parody. Both writers seek to familiarize Macpherson's strange language, defusing it, as it were, and putt ing it back into the patterns out of which it constantly breaks.

(13.) Thomas Gray, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray: Volume II, 1756--1765, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), pp. 679--80.

(14.) Ibid.

(15.) Gray, p. 680.

(16.) Quoted in Gray, p. 686.

(17.) Gray, p. 686.

(Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland did not appear until more than a decade later, in 1775; and, yet, his well-known repudiation of the poems is intriguing, especially in context.

Dr. Johnson's discussion moves from life in the Highlands, to education, both of boys and girls boys and girls

mercurialisannua. , to religion, to superstition--especially the debatable existence of "Browny" and the famous Scottish "Second Sight" (Journey, ed. R W Chapman [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924], p. 97).

From there it is (for Johnson) quite an easy step to the bards and the preservation of Scottish history, to the problem of the lack of a written Erse language, and finally to Ossian.

Macpherson is thus placed among a variety of Scottish curiosities and superstitions.

"It is dangerous to quiet our uneasiness by the delusive de·lu·sive 
adj.
1. Tending to delude.

2. Having the nature of a delusion; false: a delusive faith in a wonder drug.  opiate opiate /opi·ate/ (o´pe-it)
1. any drug derived from opium.

2. hypnotic (2).



o·pi·ate
n.
1.  of hasty persuasion," Johnson concludes--very reasonable words, and yet Johnson's language suggests that belief in Ossian is perhaps as dangerous and backward as a belief in fairies (p. 108).

MacPherson has thrust superstition into the contemporary world, and, for Johnson, that is deadly: "the giants of antiquated romance have been exhibited as realities.

If we know little of the ancient Highlanders, let us not fill the vacuity va·cu·i·ty 
n. pl. vac·u·i·ties
1. Total absence of matter; emptiness.

2. An empty space; a vacuum.

3. Total lack of ideas; emptiness of mind.

4.  with Ossian.

 If we have not searched the Magellanick regions, let us however forbear for·bear 1 
v. for·bore , for·borne , for·bear·ing, for·bears

v.tr.
1. To refrain from; resist: forbear replying. See Synonyms at refrain1.  to people them with Patagons" (p. 108).

Even the impeccable Dr. Johnson responds to Macpherson's work less on an intellectual level than on an emotional one.

For helpful surveys of the many dramatic adaptations of Ossian, see James S. Malek, "Eighteenth-Century British Dramatic Adaptations of Macpherson's Ossian," RECTR 14, 1 (May 1975): 36--41, and Edward P. Snyder's The Celtic Revival The Celtic Revival, included the much better known Irish Literary Revival which "began" with writers like Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and William Butler Yeats in Ireland in 1896. The Revival stimulated new appreciation of traditional Irish literature.  in English Literature, 1760-1800 (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1923).

David Erskine Baker,
The Muse of Ossian (London, 1763), p. v.

(21.) Baker p. vi.

(22.) Ibid.

(23.) Baker, p. ix.

Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language A Dictionary of the English Language, one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language, was prepared by Samuel Johnson and published on 15 April 1755. The dictionary responded to a widely felt need for stability in the language.  (London, 1755), s.v. nervous."

(25.) Baker, p. ix.

(26.) Baker, p. 14.

Francois-Hippolyte Barthelemon, Oithona: A Dramatic Poem, Taken from the Prose Translation of the Celebrated Ossian (London, 1767).

(28.) Barthelemon, p.3.

(29.) Barthelemon, p.4.

(30.) Barthelemon, p.7.

(31.) Barthelemon, p. 23.

Matthew Wickman's recent study, "The Allure of the Improbable: Fingal, Evidence, and the Testimony of the 'Echoing Heath,'" PMLA 115, 2 (March 2000): 181-94, also points to the ironic modernity of more pseudo-ancient poems. He reads Fingal not as false evidence (the poem as forgery) but as a self-conscious "critical commentary on the ramifications of evidential ev·i·den·tial 
adj. Law
Of, providing, or constituting evidence: evidential material.




ev  thought...in the later eighteenth century" (pp. 181-2).

Wickman likens Macpherson to such writers as Henry Fielding, whose pioneering fiction is simultaneously meta-fictional, questioning the "juridical Pertaining to the administration of justice or to the office of a judge.

A juridical act is one that conforms to the laws and the rules of court. A juridical day is one on which the courts are in session.



JURIDICAL.  approach" to readerly experience even as it expounds it (p. 182). However, I suspect that for Macpherson, as for Fielding, the radical tendencies of the work--"the paradox endemic to enlightened fictions of probability" (p. 183)--belong more to the genre itself than to any kind of authorial intentionality intentionality

Property of being directed toward an object. Intentionality is exhibited in various mental phenomena. Thus, if a person experiences an emotion toward an object, he has an intentional attitude toward it. . Macpherson sought to create a quite transparent text, one in which the gap between translation and unseen hut always-imagined original would, at times, disappear. What happened instead was an extremely opaque work which operates on so many levels and struggles with so many different issues--generic, historical, eviden-

Tiary--that it is fascinating to contemporary scholarship regardless, and probably in spite of, Macpherson's intent. Indeed, it would be possible to read Macpherson's footnotes and essays on the poems as his own ultimately unsatisfying attempt to control and contain the lawless language of Ossian.

Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Oscillations of Sensibility," NLH NLH Nathan Littauer Hospital (Gloversville, NY)
NLH Nonlinear Helmholtz Equation
NLH New London Hospital (New London, NH)
NLH Number of Levels in the Hierarchical Tree Structure  25, 3 (Summer 1994): 505-20, 517.

(34.) Spacks, p.505.

(35.) John Home, The Fatal Discovery; A Tragedy, in The Works of John Home: Volume II (Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1822), pp.89-178.

(36.) Macpherson, Fragments, p.41.

(37.) Macpherson, Fragments, p. 42.

(38.) Macpherson, Fragments, p. 45.

(39.) Home, p. 100.

(40.) Home, p. 101.

(41.) Home, p. 106.

(42.) Home, p. 107.

(43.) Home, p. 108.

(44.) Macpherson, Fragments, p.35.

(45.) Home, p. 141.

(46.) Home, p. 176.

(47.) Ibid.

(48.) Thomas Chatterton, "Ethelgar," in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 253-5.

(49.) Chatterton, p. 253.

(50.) Chatterton, p. 254.

(51.) Chatterton, p. 255.

(52.) Ibid.



Quoted in Hans Reiss,

"Goethe's Novels" (New York New York, state, United States
New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : St. Martin's St. Martin's or St. Martins may refer to:
St. Martins, Missouri, a city in the USA
St Martin's, Isles of Scilly, an island off the Cornish coast, England
St Martin's, Shropshire, a village in England

 Press, 1969), p.35.

(54.)

Michael Hulse, ed., The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 143 n. 65.

(55.) Reiss, p.35.

(56.) Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts One to Three, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1987), pp. 425-6.

(57.) Goethe, Poetry and Truth, p.426.

(58.) Goethe, Poetry and Truth, p.428.

(59.) Ibid.

(60.) Ibid.

(61.) Thomas Warton, "The Suicide," in The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1802), 1:146-55.

(62.) The opening of the poem is gloomy enough for the most severe taste, and Warton depicts suicide in terms of Gothic horror:

Beneath the beech, whose branches bare, Smit with the lightning's livid livid /liv·id/ (liv´id) discolored, as from a contusion or bruise; black and blue.


liv·id
adj.  glare, O'erhang the craggy crag·gy 
adj. crag·gi·er, crag·gi·est
1. Having crags: craggy terrain.

2. Rugged and uneven: a craggy face.  road, And whistle hollow as they wave; Within a solitary grave, A Slayer of himself holds his accursed abode One's home; habitation; place of dwelling; or residence. Ordinarily means "domicile." Living place impermanent in character. The place where a person dwells. Residence of a legal voter. Fixed place of residence for the time being. .

(1:146)

At the moment of death, the suicide 'fell, and groaning grasp'd in agony the ground" (p. 148). The first six stanzas continue this atmosphere of gloom, full of repellent adjectives like "murky," "scowling scowl 
v. scowled, scowl·ing, scowls

v.intr.
To wrinkle or contract the brow as an expression of anger or disapproval. See Synonyms at frown.

v.tr. ," "aghast," and "horrible." A change takes place at stanza seven, when we discover that the youth who has thus gorily taken his own life was a poet who "Could build the genuine rhyme" (the echo of "Lycidas" is surely not accidental). At this point Warton views the suicide with more sympathy, and, for five stanzas, pities the young man, begging us not to

forbid the twisted thorn

That rudely binds his turf forlorn

With Spring's green swelling buds to vegetate anew.

(p. 151)

But, at the end of the poem, a "cherub-voice" (p. 153) is heard--the voice both of reason and religion; the poetic Ophelia-like youth becomes once again "yon foul self murderer" (p. 154), Warton certainly expressed something of the romance of suicide which Goethe attributes to him, but his attitude toward suicide is really less ambiguous than that expressed in Werther.

(63.) Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 51

(64.) Goethe, Poetry and Truth, p. 94.

(65.) Ibid

(66.) Reiss, p. 35.

(67.) Eric A. Blackall, Goethe and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 284 n. 20.

(68.) Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 119.

(69.) Ibid.

(70.) Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 125.

(71.) Ibid.

(72.) Ibid.

(73.) Ibid.

(74.) Ibid.

(75.) Reiss, p. 59.

(76.) Blackall, p. 53.

(77.) Ibid.

(78.) Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 33.

(79.) McGann, pp. 37--8.

(80.) Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH ELH English Literary History
ELH North Eleuthera, Bahamas (Airport Code)
ELH Entity Life History (database)
ELH Early Life History
ELH Epic Level Handbook (Dungeons and Dragons)  23, 2 (June 1956): 144--52, 148.

(81.) Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson Life of Johnson (1791) is a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It is regarded as an important stage in the development of the modern genre of biography; many have claimed it as the greatest biography written in English.  (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 1207.