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.
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