In respect of some of their external features, and of the controversy which they have aroused, the parallel between the Ossianic poems, as Macpherson left them, and the Nibelungenlied in the form in which it has come to us from the close of the twelfth century is curiously exact. The matter of both is a mixture of myth and history, and both are based on songs and ballads of uncertain date and origin. In the one and in the other a fresh and alien element is superinduced; in the Nibelungenlied the ideas of the age of chivalry refine the gods and heroes of an early mythology: in the Ossianic poems, a literary elegance obscures what was rough and harsh in the old Celtic legends. In either it cannot be determined how much was drawn from ancient lore and how much was added by the collector; but there seems to be as good a case for the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, as for that of the Edda or the Nibelungenlied; and with the old writers who gave those works to the world, Macpherson is fairly entitled to rank.1

I am afraid this is a conclusion which can scarcely be accepted. Setting aside the completely different degrees of antiquity in the several writers, it is plain that there is an essential difference between Snorro Sturleson, together with the poet of the Nibelungenlied, and (Mr. Saunders might have added) the author of the Song of Beowulf, on the one hand, and Macpherson on the other; the three former are to be considered primarily as inventors, dealing with floating legendary materials, preserved in their own time and in their own language; the latter is professedly a translator. The titles of his translations show that he asserted his works to be, in their Gaelic form, the actual composition of Ossian: if they were not a faithful rendering of this in English, Macpherson intended deliberately to deceive his readers; and the only question is, what was the extent of his fraud. Upon this point the Report of the Highland Society wisely refuses to pronounce: any conclusion we may arrive at must be a purely critical inference; nor is the question indeed of much importance. The Ossianic poems are not in any case very marvellous productions. They are ex hypothesi addressed to the simple and natural feelings of men in an early stage of society, 1 Life and Letters of James Macpherson, pp. 322-323.

VOL. V

2 D

and the language in which they are expressed employs the figurative forms common to the poets of all barbarous nations. Far more interest attaches to the investigation of the causes which made them appeal so strongly to the eighteenth century, and of the means employed by Macpherson in handling his materials.

As regards the spiritual causes that were at work, they were for the most part those which I have classed in this chapter under the name of the Romantic movement: the longing for simplicity and solitude, the tendency to Nature-Worship, the revolt alike against the conventions of town society and the restrictions of the heroic couplet. Added to these was the element of patriotism. It was supposed that a Scottish poet had been discovered, greater -so thought Blair and his Edinburgh friends in their infatuation-than Homer himself. This Scot must, it was believed, have certainly left behind him an epic poem, which it was the duty of his compatriots to discover. How great an impulse was given to Macpherson's invention by this temper of the time appears from Blair's evidence before the committee of the Highland Society :

I remember well (says he, speaking of a dinner party given to promote the recovery of the epic) that when the company was about to break up, and I was going away, Mr. Macpherson followed me to the door, and told me that from the spirit of that meeting, he now for the first time entertained the hope that the undertaking to which I had so often prompted him would be attended with success; that hitherto he had imagined they were merely romantic ideas which I had held out to him: but he now saw them likely to be realised, and should endeavour to acquit himself so as to give satisfaction to his friends.1

Macpherson, in fact, had to play up to the enthusiasm of his audience, and no fitter actor could have been selected for the task. He was a man of genuine gifts; a real capacity for imitative expression appears even in his avowedly original verse; and a taste refined by a sound

1 Report of the Highland Society: cited in Mr. Bailey Saunders' Life and Letters of James Macpherson, p. 93.

classical training made him feelingly alive to the influences in the air of his age. Johnson's confidence that he would be unable to produce any MSS. justifying the pretended unity of his Gaelic Epics was well founded. On the other hand, in his wanderings through the Highlands he must have gathered a large store of oral materials. The Bards of the Highland chieftains retained a status and a poetical tradition much superior to those of their degenerate brethren, the English ballad - singers. Among them Macpherson would have heard many songs filled, no doubt, with images derived from rocks, valleys, mountains, streams, moors, mists, and more particularly ghosts; numerous love elegies and lamentations for the dead; frequent allusions to the deeds of the great Celtic hero, Finn MacCumhaill. These would often have been capable of literal rendering; but upon them, as Mr. Saunders allows, "a fresh and alien element is superinduced"; in other words, the unity of form and spirit in the Ossianic poems is derived from Macpherson himself. The judgment and taste he shows in fusing his materials rises almost to genius. Instead of attempting, like some of his predecessors, to make his translation in English verse, he felt intuitively that it ought, in English, to be shaped into metrical prose, and, as Laing suggests, the specimens of Hebrew poetry, given by Louth and repeated by Blair in his lectures, probably furnished him with the required model. For the rest his knowledge of the English Bible, together with his fairly wide reading in classical and English literature, gave him all the supplementary images he needed for the refinement of the oral style of the Bards. It is impossible to read his "translations" without perceiving how much they owe, especially in respect of the abundant use of description and simile, to Homer, Milton, Pope, and even Gray. No one, on the other hand, acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Death of Byrhtnoth is likely to take the following elaborate battle-piece for the style of narrative peculiar to oral minstrelsy :

1 See vol. i. p. 450.

As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so gloomy, dark, successive, came the chiefs of Lochlin's echoing woods. Tall as the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King. His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world is silent and dark, and the traveller sees some ghost sporting in his beam! Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks! A blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin appear like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners on shores unknown are trembling at veering winds!

As a hundred winds on Morven ; as the stream of a hundred hills; as clouds fly successive over heaven; as the dark ocean assails the shore of the desert; so roaring, so vast, so terrible, the armies mixed on Lena's echoing heath. The groan of the people spread over the hills: it was like the thunder of night, when the clouds burst on Cona; and a thousand ghosts shriek at once on the hollow wind.

Such were our words when Gaul's loud voice came growing on the wind. He waved on high the sword of his father. We rushed to death and wounds. As waves, white bubbling over the deep, come swelling, roaring on; as rocks of ooze meet roaring waves; so foes attacked and fought. Man met with man, and steel with steel. Shields sound and warriors fall. As a hundred hammers on the red son of the furnace, so rose, so rung their swords.

2. The Scandinavian Revival proceeded upon quite different lines. From the days of Snorro Sturleson and Saxo Grammaticus, writers of different kinds had been careful to preserve records of Norse antiquities and legends; but these had produced no effect on the course of English Poetry. Neither Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, nor Milton, makes any use of Scandinavian mythology. The English imagination had, from the early days of the Norman Conquest, been turned so exclusively to the sources of legendary antiquity opened to it by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the indifference of the nation to its true descent was made a matter of reproach by the antiquary Richard Verstegan.1 Verstegan discourses quaintly on

1 He says, "Observing then, withall how diverse of our English writers have been as laborious and serious in their discourses of the Antiquitie of the Brittans as if they properly appertained unto Englishmen, which in nowise they doe or can doe, for that their offsprings and descents are wholly different

Scandinavian mythology, speaking of the "Idols," Woden, Tuysco, Thor, and Friga; but though Milton was no doubt acquainted with his book, these deities make no figure among the gods of the Gentiles enumerated in Paradise Lost (Book i. 506-521). They had in fact, as I have already said, been long expelled by the Christian missionaries from popular belief, and for poetical purposes the grimness of Norse legend offered few attractions to minds fed by the Classical Renaissance on the rich beauties of Greek mythology. But for readers whose ennui would not yield to the too familiar stories of Ovid's Metamorphoses the discovery of the Scandinavian antiquities was in every sense a godsend.

In 1760 Gray was contemplating a History of English Poetry, and had made up his mind to write a chapter on Norse legend. The book from which he chiefly drew his information was Thomas Bartholinus' Antiquitatum Danicarum de causis Contemptae a Danis adhuc Gentilibus Mortis Libri tres. This contained two Norse odes, with Latin translations, which Gray adapted in 1761, intending them as specimens for his History; 2 but when he dropped his historical design, he laid his renderings aside. In 1767, however, he determined to insert them in the Edition of his Poems, published by Dodsley, and he wrote to Beattie describing the odes as "two pieces of old Norwegian poetry, in which there was a wild spirit that struck me," while in a letter to Walpole he spoke slightingly of these and his Welsh adaptations as "two ounces of stuff." 4

Whereby and through the lacke of due distinction between the two nations our true originale and honorable Antiquitie lieth involved and obscured, and are remaining ignorant of our owne true ancestors, understand our descent otherwise than it is, deeming it enough for us to heare that Eneas and his Troians, the supposed ancestors of King Bruto and his Brittans, are largely discoursed of." Cited by Mr. Frank Edgar Farley in his Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (p. 9), an admirable and exhaustive Monograph on the subject in vol. ix. of Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (Boston), to which the reader is referred. 1 Vol. i. p. 38.

2 Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement, pp. 34-35. 3 Letter of 24th December 1767.

4 Letter of 25th February 1768.