[In the following essay, Jaffe examines the influence of Ossianic poems, both in terms of language and their inclusion of the idealized noble savage, on Chateaubriand's work.]

The curious, and ironic, relationship between Chateaubriand and the poems of Ossian is interesting not only in itself but also as an excellent example of the important distinction, in comparative literature studies, between success and influence. It may have not been sufficiently recognized that while success may be accompanied by influence, it often is not, and that it is therefore important not to assume the presence of the one from the presence of the other. The distinction between the two is more than technical: it involves a distinction in kind and quality between two modes in which literature has within it the potentiality of impinging upon the reader.

In one mode, literature can impress on a number of levels, as, for example, the ideological and the aesthetic; it can interest and excite; it can serve as impetus or key to philosophical reflection; it can mirror or offer new organizations of experience. It can have these effects upon the generality of readers, who may in turn, if they should happen to be critics, express their admiration, concurrence, or reservations. In this mode, literature is object, designed by its creator to achieve something, and as Sartre points out in his Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, the author and the reader are associated in an act of “création dirigée,” in which it is hoped that what the reader finds and creates in his reading will be close to what the author had in mind. This hope, of course, is never entirely realized, but it may be approximated. It is in this mode that a work of literature may enjoy success, and an enthusiastic reception; it may even be held up for all to appreciate.

Among the readers of works of literature, however, there is a special subclass, that of creative artist, of writer, of poet. These form a subclass because writers are two things at once: they are representative of their time and culture, sharing with their contemporaries an intimate relationship with their societies, but they are also something else, hard to describe, but evident in their work—creative men. They are all in a way geniuses, motivated by a variety of internal pressures to express themselves, driven by a kind of inevitability to convert their experiences into artistic form; and while these experiences may be analogous to all, their expression in art is the province of a gifted few. I should like to suppose that the hope underlies the work of those who profess literature that sometime it will be possible to come closer to an understanding of the nature of the creative process, for it is the impulses which inform art that give the lie to the apparent drabness of human existence and ennoble that existence. Be that as it may, the effect of literature upon this subclass of reader is different from its effect on the general reader: in this mode, literature may offer itself to the creative artist as a valid form of art. A work can say to him, quite apart from what it may seem to say, that the way in which it is saying something is a valid way in which the concept may be expressed—valid, that is, artistically. In effect this is what happened at the time of the Italian Renaissance: antiquity was not discovered as one discovers something long buried but rediscovered in the sense that classical literature was seen as a suitable artistic model, as, in other words, a valid expression. It is clear that this particular form of impact happens only with the reader who is also writer or artist, for the need to create is essential to an understanding of the validity of any special terms of creation. It is if and when this kind of impact takes place, and only if and when it takes place, that true literary influence occurs. Influence involves the acceptance, by a person capable of being influenced (in the case of literature, a writer), of the artistic validity of a work. Influence is therefore rarer than success and does not in every instance go hand in hand with it. Furthermore, influence seldom occurs immediately after the initial contacts, for the process is too complex not to require the passage of time.

In dealing with the relationship between Ossian and Chateaubriand we are, without doubt, dealing with an example of true influence: its preconditions are present in particular as well as in general. We are also dealing with an ironic example of influence, in which the influencing element is in itself false, passes through an additional falsification in the process of translation, and ultimately lodges firmly in a place where it has no intrinsic reason to be, at the head of one of the characteristic streams of French romanticism. This situation came about by a combination of accident, the peculiar artistic motives of Chateaubriand, and the gap between the appearance of the poems of Ossian and their effect.

It is not necessary to recount the story of the publication of the Ossianic poems as alleged translations from the Gaelic by Macpherson. The truth of the controversy surrounding them is irrelevant, in any case, to the purposes of this study, since the poems are either Macpherson's translations or his own compositions. If they are the former, their antiquity (to at least 200 A.D. by internal evidence) places them well out of the range of material suitable to the French romantics of the nineteenth century. If they are Macpherson's own, they are not the products of the environment which gave them their fame, and their language can be neither original nor representative. In either event, the legends concerning Ossian and his son Fingal were known in outline, of course, since the fourth or fifth centuries. They had a special generic quality: whereas in the traditional Homeric epic there is a sharp distinction between the bard and the protagonists, whose exploits he sings objectively and historically; in the Ossianic poems the bard and the hero are one, the bard is the hero grown old, who now sings of what he did in his youth. There is thus to be found in the Ossianic poems, by reason of this relationship between bard and subject, an intrinsic, inevitable melancholy, not a product of the point of view of the narrator, nor a reflection of the way in which he looks at experience, but that melancholy which stems from the passage of time, from the remoteness of the event, and from the contrast between the energy and braveness of youth with the feebleness of age. It is a melancholy inherent in the contrast between life and death, a melancholy of Autumn, part and parcel of that season's relation to Spring, Winter, and Summer. To this tone of sadness is added that of the remote Gaelic countryside, swept by cold wind, permeated by damp, where nothing that was bright, green, or colorful could flourish; as a result, the Ossianic poems are illustrative of environmental symbolism, where the quality of nature matches, in hue and texture, the mood of man.

The setting of the Ossianic poems has yet another significant peculiarity which distinguishes them from traditional epic: the episodes are fragmentary and inconclusive, rather than parts of continuous odysseys. They flare up here and there and then subside, as sudden bursts of heat from a uniformly quiescent fire. The effect of this fitful nature of the action is to make it impossible for the reader to concentrate upon the idiosyncratic character of the protagonist: there is, so to speak, no Ulysses. For this reason, many of the characters in Ossian are to all intents indistinguishable: Morven, Cuthullin, and Cathmor are really little different from Ossian or Fingal. It thus follows that it is the background which attracts the larger share of attention: the persons of the foreground are of insufficient distinction to block the view. Now this background, given prominence because of the structural implications of the genre, is primitive, cold: in a word, it is antique. It is for this reason that in the eighteenth century, when they first came to the attention of the French, the Ossianic poems seemed to present, and indeed were taken as presenting, examples of primitive poetry free from the falsifications of intellectual and sophisticated civilization, genuine outpourings of the human spirit unfettered by convention, pure poetry sprung from the soul of man rather than from the contrived schools of art. They served, therefore, as examples of a return to the unadulterated sources of man's poetic aspirations and inclinations, and they offered, to many poets, an artistically valid means of escaping from what were becoming, in the poets' views, the suffocating restrictions of taste, stylistic tradition, and the limitations of genres. That this was not necessarily the nature of the Ossianic poems is irrelevant: what is relevant is that the poems came along at a time when poets were grasping for just this experience.

Perhaps for these reasons (although literary conditions were not the same in Britain as in France), perhaps for others, Macpherson, under the persuasion of Dr. Blair, published a version of the poems in 1760; some no doubt adapted, some no doubt invented. His final versions appeared in 1765. Turgot translated the first fragments into French as early as 1761, and his translation came to the excited attention of Diderot, who found not only a confirmation of the point of view of his Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1758) but another important element that becomes ironic in the light of Chateaubriand's later use of the material. Diderot noted with satisfaction that the heroes of Ossian, although utterly deprived of any formal church and without the benefits of organized Christianity, were nonetheless men of noble souls, capable of the most delicate sentiments and able to meditate upon the uses of human life and the frailties of man. Thus, to anticipate, does the Ossianic series appear to embody the ideal type of the noble savage, and thus it is not surprising to discover in Chactas precisely these qualities, which make it possible to accept in savages an attitude and a vocabulary which under other conditions would be absurd. Such a reading of Ossian serves, in addition, to solve a fundamental problem in romanticism, which is that the primitive hero, because he is primitive, can be neither a moral nor a Christian hero; he lacks the intellectual sophistication essential to the meditative role. James Fenimore Cooper, for example, was plagued by this problem in Deerslayer: Natty is not equipped to assimilate his experience sufficiently to comment upon it meaningfully. The role of Ossian is to say, in effect, that this is not a problem at all; that primitivism and contemplative faculties may be associated in the same man. Ossian thus provides a most welcome solution.

The first major and complete translation of Ossian was that by Le Tourneur in 1777. It was to be critical for two reasons: it had an enormous success in France, and it was inaccurate. First, of course, it was a translation of Macpherson, and Macpherson's version was either not Gaelic at all or else a translation from the Gaelic whose accuracy Le Tourneur was in no position to assess. Second, Le Tourneur, following a respectable tradition in France, rearranged the material to make it smoother. Later translators such as Baour-Larmian continued Le Tourneur's implicit and explicit errors, and his inaccurate version affected even Napoleon, who, probably unaware of them, is said to have read the work before going to sleep at night. Success, however, is not influence. Before the Ossianic poems could become influential, in whatever version, they would have to reach a point where a creative artist, yet in his formative years, searching for a model which would offer him a valid means of expressing what he had to express, could find in Ossian a nourishing, artistic source, and could incorporate Ossian into the creative act. Such a man was Chateaubriand, who relatively early in his life had become saturated with the impact of Ossian, and whose imagination was never again quite free from it.

In the personal history of Chateaubriand there was a general predisposition to the Ossianic atmosphere: as a young man his own dreams had been along similar lines, so that he had a certain affinity for the cadre. His true discovery of Ossian, however, occurred in the course of a fortnight's stay on the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, when his friend Tulloch declaimed to him the bulk of Le Tourneur's translation. He was apparently so moved and impressed by this confrontation with the oral rendition of the text that in 1793, while in London, he translated some thirty pages of Macpherson's original into French. This circumstance emphasizes the particular nature of the Ossianic influence upon Chateaubriand, an influence of language and tone: apart from the ideological concepts which may have originally entranced him, the impact of Ossian upon him was clearly the verbal and rhythmic one which resulted from his exposure to Tulloch's oral exposition and from his own act of translation, with its concomitant emphasis upon linguistic nuance. As a result, therefore, of this combination of unlikely elements, any one of which, in terms of the progress of purely literary history, could have been missing, to the collapse of the whole structure, Chateaubriand came to represent his own primitive people in Ossianic terms: his American savages resemble in many particulars the heroic, ancient Celts as they appear in Macpherson.

They resemble them not only in character (Chactas, for example, could suitably figure in any of the fragmentary adventures of Fingal) but in language as well, in the so-called style sauvage. This “style sauvage” is the language used by Chateaubriand to characterize the nature of primitive speech, and it is a language borrowed directly from that language which Macpherson attributed to his Celtic heroes in the first place. It is thus a borrowing of an attribution, not even of a genuine style, but in the development of the genre it is significant. For one of the ultimate effects of Chateaubriand upon the development of French romanticism was the production of a strong association of the état d'âme which we know as “mal du siècle,” with the framework of expression which he created from elements he took from Ossian via Macpherson. For a long time after Chateaubriand, the one did not occur without the other, and the presence of the one implied the other. In this fashion, a style of speech which, if it was genuine, was remote from the romantic experience and which, if it was false, was certainly unrelated to it, became the linguistic vehicle for an entire point of view; the style became one in which an approach to the world was effectively conveyed. There is an intimate relationship between the mode of expression and the nature of what is expressed: as Joyce so perfectly understands, experiences often come to us in the linguistic garb with which they have habitually been clothed, a garb which may delude us into thinking that we are feeling what we ought to be feeling. Much of romantic emotion is tied in this way to romantic expression; it is not certain which comes first. And romantic expression was long linked with the particular verbal quality of Macpherson's version of the speech of Ossianic times. To be noble meant expressing oneself in this form, and expression in this form meant that one was noble.

The prominent stylistic characteristic of Ossian/Macpherson is a rhythmic, cadenced prose, original in itself, and opposite to the generality of French poetry of Chateaubriand's day. For example, the king in “Fingal” says: “Whose fame is in that dark-green tomb? … four stones with their heads of moss stand there. They mark the narrow house of death. … Some chief of fame is here, to fly, with my son, on clouds.”¹ And the bard in “Temora” sings: “No sleep was thine in darkness, blue-eyed daughter of Conmor. Sulmalla heard the dreadful shield, and rose, amid the night. … Can danger shake his daring soul? In doubt, she stands, with bending eyes. Heaven burns with all its stars.”² These may be compared with the following description by Chateaubriand in Book XII of Les Natchez: “Mère des actions sublimes. Toi qui, depuis que la Grèce n'est plus, as établi ta demeure sur les tombeaux indiens, dans les solitudes du Nouveau-Monde … toi qui, parmi ces déserts, es pleine de grandeur … prête-moi tes paroles les plus fortes et les plus naïves, ta voix la plus mélodieuse et la plus touchante, tes sentiments exaltés, tes feux immortels, et toutes les choses ineffables qui sortent de ton coeur. …”³

Apart from the general rhythmic style, and from the steady presence of the cadence, Chateaubriand makes another use of the Ossianic mode: he places in the speeches of his American savages the figures, the allusions, and the tones of the Gaelic warriors whom Macpherson immortalized. From “Fingal,” for example, we have a description of battle:

As roll a thousand waves to the rocks, so Swaren's host came on. As meets a rock a thousand waves, so Erin met Swaren of spears. Death raises all his voices round, and mixes with the sound of shields. … Chief mixes stroke with chief, and man with man; steel, clanging, sounds on steel. Helmets are cleft on high. Blood bursts and smokes around. … As the noise of the troubled ocean, when roll the waves on high. As the last peal of thunder in heaven, such is the din of war.⁴

It is extraordinary how closely Chateaubriand follows this passage in tone and allusion in a description of battle in Book X of Les Natchez:

La trompette sonne, et la cavalerie se précipite dans les chemins qui lui sont ouverts. Un bruit sourd s'élève de la terre, que l'on sent trembler sous ses pas. Des batteries soudainement démasquées mugissent à la fois. Les échos du foret multiplient la voix des ces tonneries. … Satan mèle à ce tumulte des rumeurs surnaturelles qui glaceraient d'effroi les coeurs les plus intrépides. Jamais tel bruit n'avait été ouï, depuis le jour où le chaos, forcé de fuir devant le Créateur, se précipita aux confins des mondes arrachés des ses entrailles; un fracas plus affreux ne se fera point entendre. …⁵

The relationship in language between Chateaubriand and Ossian is not of tone alone: it is also found in specific imagery. The bard, for example, writes in “Carric-Thura”: “Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal? who recount thy fathers? Thy family grew like an oak on the mountain, which meeteth the wind with its lofty head. But now it is torn from the earth.”⁶ And Outougamiz is the subject of this description: “… son âme, s'agrandissant avec les périls, s'élève comme un chêne qui semble croître à l'oeil à mesure que les tempêtes du ciel s'amoncellent autour de sa tête.”⁷ The chief of the Natchez, in Book XI, is condemned to die. He is bound to a stake, and fire is applied to his feet. He undergoes horrible sufferings, but bears them singing, and at the end, on the point of death, he says: “Je vais rejoindre mes pères. Je ne me suis livré à ces actions qu'afin de t'encourager à mourir et de montrer ce que peut un homme lorsqu'il veut exercer toute la puissance de son âme. Pour l'honneur de ta nouvelle patrie, imite mon exemple.”⁸ The same situation, in effect, is described in these terms in “Temora”: “Lift up, o Gaul, the shield before him. Stretch, Dermid, Temora's spear. Be thy voice in his ear, O Carril, with the deeds of his fathers. … If there my standard shall float on wind, over Lubar's gleaming stream, then has not Fingal failed in the last of his fields.”⁹ The end approaches, in life, in poems, in stories, in tales of old, and heroes grow dim. Chactas, not far from the end of his life, says: “Moi je touche au terme de la course. En achevant mon pélérinage ici-bas, je vais traverser les déserts où j'ai commençé … rien de ce qui existait … n'existe aujourd'hui: le monde que j'ai connu est passé: je ne suis plus que le dernier arbre d'une vieille futaie tombée, arbre que le temps a oublié d'abattre.”¹⁰ In similar circumstances, thus speaks the bard in “Berrathon”: “But why art thou sad, son of Fingal? Why grows the cloud of thy soul? The chiefs of other times are dead. They have gone, without their fame. The sons of future years shall pass away. Another race shall arise. The people are like the waves of ocean; like the leaves of woody Morven they pass away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift their green heads on high. … But my fame shall remain, and grow like the oak of Morven, which lifts its broad head to the storm, and rejoices in the course of the wind.”¹¹

Ossianic language passes into French romanticism through Chateaubriand, although quite independently Lamartine came upon it as well. There are also some echoes of Ossian in Alfred de Vigny, notably in Eloa, but these are relatively faint. The introduction into France of Byron, Gessner, and Scott weakened the Ossianic mode and tended to replace it: by placing the arrival of Christianity in the context of ancient Gaelic civilization, Leconte de Lisle, in his Barde de Temrah, probably gave it its coup de grâce.

In this fashion did the ancient Scots survive, in odd and ironic form, in the heart of a civilization which, had it not been for a strange concatenation of circumstance, would not in all likelihood have heard of them, or, hearing, have paid them any heed. And in this fashion as well, did ancient Scots come to roam the lands of the American Indians and to lend dignity to their speech, forever preserved in literary art. Influence is not only a complex matter in literature; it often works in curious ways.

Notes

1. The Poems of Ossian, trans. James Macpherson (Edinburgh, 1896), pp. 88-89.

2. Ossian, p. 305.

3. François René de Chateaubriand, Les Natchez (Paris, 1923), p. 299.

4. Ossian, p. 45.

5. Chateaubriand, p. 282.

6. Ossian, p. 166.

7. Chateaubriand, pp. 300-301.

8. Chateaubriand, p. 296.

9. Ossian, pp. 316-317.

10. Chateaubriand, p. 378.

11. Ossian, pp. 405-406.