SOURCE: "Fool's Gold: The Highland Treasures of Mac-Pherson's Ossian," in ELH, Vol 53, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 567-91.

James MacPherson was once a famous man, famous for translating Ossian's poems. If he is remembered now, it is for forging the Ossian poems, with the emphasis on the forgery rather than the poetry; but mostly he is hardly remembered at all. If literary memory is founded on quality, then the turgid prose of these "poems," with its thick syntax and grand, vague gestures, certainly encourages forgetfulness. But if we think of him as a literary event, as a writer who generated a great deal of interest (regardless of the source of that interest), then he seems more deserving of attention. The Ossian books figure in the education of all major writers through about 1830, most often as a fond memory of youth (just as Walter Scott's novels will for the later nineteenth century); Ossian gave to these youths that adventure, mystery and romance that is still, to some extent, the clearest association of the Scottish Highlands. To the literary scholar MacPherson offers an interesting example of the literary criminal, a kind of malefactor whose faults are at best vaguely defined. In MacPherson's case the difficulties are exacerbated by the genuine complexity of the facts, the source of the surprising duration and interest of the "Ossianic Controversy," which lasted for almost fifty years. The definition of MacPherson's crime, and the delineation of the attractive (to the eighteenth century) qualities of the poems themselves, are parallel problems that lead to the same problematic place: the mysterious, unavailable Highlands, source of treasure and terror. To talk about the Ossian poems, one must start by sorting through the odd collection of Highland materials that the poems bring with them, and then turn to the poetry itself.

The Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 are marks of the entrance of the Highlands into British culture. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Gaelic-speaking people of northern Scotland were a mystery to the rest of the population of the island, though their periodical descents to prey on the Lowlanders made them a feared mystery. At the end of the eighteenth century they were a different kind of mystery: a culture whose strange ways were a subject of great curiosity—mystery made into a cultural commodity, and a culture that was rapidly disappearing into the legends of history. It is common to fix the date of the Highland's decline at 1745, and certainly there is reason to do this. The martial spirit of the clans had made its one, final, all-too-conspicuous appearance, the Hanoverian establishment had noticed it, and decided to eliminate it. The policy of elimination took several paths, but all focussed on destroying the functioning of the clan, which they took (correctly) to be the central feature of the Highland culture.

The policies actually put into practice aimed at reducing the isolation of the Highlands, at mixing this durably foreign culture in with the rest of Britain. The hereditary jurisdiction of the chiefs was abruptly ended, curbing their despotic control over their clans, and the substitution of British law was accomplished by the quartering of troops in the region and the large-scale construction of the military roads. It is important to remember that the isolation of the Gael was compounded by their very foreign tongue, which has no connection at all with what we call "Scottish." Early on, in 1716, the teaching of English was seen as a way of "reducing" the country. The problem with Gaelic, what made it so "foreign," was not that it was especially difficult to learn, but rather how it had to be learned. In the mid-eighteenth century there were no Gaelic grammars or dictionaries, and the only textual support was a New Testament. Gaelic had to be learned from the mouth of an actual speaker (an actual Highlander), and, because the upper classes so eagerly abandoned their native ways as they mixed with British society, the only reward for learning Gaelic was the ability to talk with lower-class Highlanders.

Both of these methods of including the Gael (building roads and attempting to suppress Gaelic) sought to rend the shroud of secrecy that surrounded, or seemed to surround them. So it is not a simply gratuitous pun on my part to include in this category the outlawing of "Highland garb" as one of the most effective methods of eliminating the crucial and dangerous difference of Highland culture. The distinctive way in which the Highlanders shielded themselves from the elements provided a sort of badge of culture, separating them from others and identifying them with each other. Scott explains the purpose of this tactic best:

The system of disarming the Highlands had been repeatedly resorted to upon former occasions, but the object had been only partially attained. It was now resolved, not only to deprive the Highlanders of their arms, but of the ancient garb of their country; a picturesque habit, the custom of wearing which was peculiarly associated with use of warlike weapons. The sword, the dirk, the pistol were all as complete parts of the Highland dress as the plaid and the bonnet, and the habit of using the latter was sure to remind the wearer of the want of the former. It was proposed to destroy this association of ideas, by rendering the use of the Highland garb, in any of its peculiar forms, highly penal. [Tales of a Grandfather]

As Scott describes, the government cannily fixed upon a kind of metonymical lynchpin of Highland culture: not crucial in itself, but through its connections, its association, leading to the very heart of Highland identity. In terms of its specific goals, this law was very effective, for though it was repealed only four decades later, the tartan did not reappear.

If this disappearance is a mark of the disappearance of a culture, we should be surprised, I think, that it happened so quickly. This surprise is justified, and the '45 and its aftermath are not enough to account for the state of Gaelic culture by the end of the eighteenth century. The legal repression of Gaelic culture was terribly successful, but the Highlands were opened to this repression by internal causes, and the success must be at least partly attributable to this vulnerability. And as with any cultural subjection, it is important to remember that what was being destroyed was fully a way of life, culture in all senses—economic, social and artistic. It is the last sense I wish to emphasize here, but the way to it is through the first two, the economic and the social.

The close-knit, purposefully cohesive and isolated social structure of the clan had been under pressure throughout the seventeenth century, and in the early eighteenth century this pressure intensified and expanded. Chiefs had begun to feel the attractions of Lowland life (sons were being sent out of the Highlands for their education). The old communal economy, where rent was paid in kind, and in blood in the form of periodic military service, was not designed to satisfy the needs of this new way of life. The chiefs needed a transportable medium of exchange, something to translate their local wealth into a true British wealth. They wanted to live in Edinburgh or London; they wanted the accoutrements of the British manor house; they wanted to travel to the continent. This translation, of course, is effected by money, and the eighteenth-century Highland chief began to feel the need for it. There were a number of ways to get more money out of a given estate, all of which involved "improvement," methods of increasing cash return through increasing productivity or changing the product itself. Improvement usually implied enclosure of previously communal land, and the new product was (in most cases) wool, which implied not only enclosure but depopulation. These methods were entirely destructive of the old communal life, and substituted for it a new focus on the individual and individual holdings.

One of the casualties of this disruption of the old communal culture was the literary tradition associated with the bards ("bard" is a Welsh word that came to be the name for this feature of Celtic culture). This tradition was intimately connected to the institutions of the clan, for the bards were hereditary retainers who farmed their memories and spirits instead of the soil (though they were often given farms in return for their pains). Everything about this tradition indicates that it was a classical tradition: the poetry developed a particular vocabulary, was extremely aware of an inherited corpus, and depended on the forms associated with patronage (eulogies, elegies, and depictions of military exploits). The transmission of poetry was largely oral, though manuscripts were kept by certain bards in certain cases. Throughout its lifetime, this tradition maintained close links with Ireland, even after Scottish Gaelic diverged from Irish as a separate Gaelic dialect. Bards were routinely trained in Ireland, returning to Scotland to ply their trade.

The bards were responsible for the transmission and development of the (verse) Ossianic cycles, and for their retention in long form, though the popular tradition also contained Ossianic material in the form of tales. There was a sharp distinction between a poetic tradition associated with learning and a popular tradition; the bards did not write popular verse, and they could not be described as being part of a folk tradition. There was a strong folk culture, vernacular in the sense that the works were in the local dialect instead of the literary dialect of the bards, in which the Ossianic legends had a large place. The folk tradition tended to erase the identities of individual artists, as folk traditions always do, while the bardic tradition was obsessed with the transmission of such data. The bards often functioned as genealogists for the clan, and they transmitted their own information along with that of their chiefs. In the mid-eighteenth century, the son of a bard, illiterate and incapable of carrying on the tradition, was still able to recite the sixteen generations of bards before him. This thematization of their own history, and of their place in recording it, is a major feature of bardic poetry, and certainly the feature that interested people like MacPherson. He describes the importance of the Ossianic poetry as linked to this interest in history, for the chiefs loved to hear of the exploits of the heroes, and to hear how they were descended from such heroes. The bardic succession projects the song of origins forward:

bards were employed to repeat the poems, and to record the connection of their patrons with chiefs so renowned…. By the succession of these bards, the poems concerning the anscestors of the family were handed down from generation to generation.

This is a structure of interlocking fame, with the fame of the ancestors being gathered up by the fame of a poem and projected into the future. The bard thus occupies a historical middle ground, handing the past to the future by virtue of his verse. That the succession of bards created a self-consciously perpetuating tradition points out that this middle ground is a good place to be; that is, the activity of "handing on" is regarded as one definition of poetic activity. This structure is absolutely central to MacPherson's project, and I will return to it later.

In the seventeenth century this tradition fell into decline from a variety of causes, among them the continuing disintegration of clan structure and the (consequently) decreasing number of clans who retained bards; by the early eighteenth century it was largely moribund. In its place developed a thriving vernacular poetry, not a folk-tradition but poetry of the sort we are familiar with from English literature; we feel comfortable calling the practitioners "poets" instead of bards. This movement, generally regarded as the true flowering of Gaelic verse, peaks in the mid-eighteenth century and then disappears. These poets are not part of the bardic continuity. The decline that Gaelic had undergone by the middle of the eighteenth century was not the loss of culture or of high-quality verse, but the loss of a classical tradition that had very strong historical associations: it was an inheritance that got misplaced.

This is the situation that MacPherson found on his tours in the early 1760s. Because no sense of their value had been retained, MacPherson was able to obtain several manuscripts from the ClanRanalds, precious relics of a forgotten age. The present generation of the bardic family (MacVuirich, or MacMhuirich), Lachlan, was unable to read the manuscripts and had no real idea what they contained; he says that some pages had been used for tailor's measures. The poetry itself survived on the tongues of people who were able to remember it, with remnants of bardic poetry mixed with remnants of folk tradition. Bardic poetry survived, literally, in fragments. One could still find people who could recite (continuously) for days, but they were becoming increasingly rare.

The Highlanders were very well aware that things had changed, and their descriptions make the Highland Society's Report fascinating reading. The report itself offers this explanation for the fugitive condition of the Ossianic tradition:

[There has been] a change of manners in the Highlands, where the habits of industry have now superseded the amusement of listening to the legendary narrative or heroic ballad, where consequently the faculty of remembering and the exercise of repeating such tales or songs, are altogether in disuse, or only retained by a few persons of extremely advanced age and feeble health, whom … it is not easy to discover.

This passage does what I am trying to do: it links poetics to a social and economic argument. The phrase about the new "habits of industry" euphemistically describes the destruction of the old communal order; it also implies that the old order was one of indolence and primitive laziness (one can find this notion in Hugh Blair). These new habits have caused the traditional inheritance to lose its way, and as a result the poems are only available from very old people who may pass on at any time, without passing on their verse. Old age, clinging to old habits in the face of new ones, isolated and on the verge of dissolution, is a central figure in the Ossian poems, and so this theme too will return.

Industry is described in a more partisan way by a Highlander from the Western Isle of South Uist:

We can easily prove, that the noblest virtues have been ruined, or driven into exile, since the love of money has crept in amongst us; and since deceit and hypocrisy have carried mercenary policy and slavish, sordid avarice into our land. Before this modern change, our Chiefs cherished humanity.

The profound sense of loss that this man feels overwhelms all writing about the Highlands at this time, and it is the articulation of this sense of loss—rather than the actual circumstances of decline—that seems to begin around 1745. This is not the "joy of grief" that will become a fashion through MacPherson's efforts, but real grief over the destruction of a culture, arising from the sudden realization that things have passed away. This lament finishes my historical picture by confirming that Highland culture was under the pressures I have been describing and by emphasizing that the theme of money and avarice has a way of popping up when talking about the Ossian books.

When I say that a sense of loss overwhelms writing about the Highlands, I mean to include MacPherson's Ossian poems as well, overwhelmed as they are by a sense of lateness. It is the subject of Ossian's familiar call:

Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame! Roll on, ye dark-brown years; ye bring no joy on your course! Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of song are gone to rest. My voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid.

In many ways this is the "historical" Ossian found in Gaelic tradition, but MacPherson has modified him to his taste. The son of Fingal (of Finn), he is the last of the race of heroes founded by Fingal. This eminence is of a special kind, for he was not the last-born of the Finns, but has been cut off before and after: Fingal his father and Oscar his son die before him, leaving him, as he says, on a temporal island isolated from both past and future. He compensates for his isolation through his singing, his verse, and this compensation works in both directions. His memory returns the past to him, and his voice, which through the metaphor of song is the name for his poetic faculty, pours it forth in the form of poetry, which overleaps Oscar and lives on.

This compensation is the obsessive subject matter of the stories, and forms the substance of what makes them "heroic" poems: heroes are strong people, famous because they have survived, and famous people have poems sung about them. Because all heroes, even the strongest, pass on, survival by personal strength is replaced by survival in heroic verse. Fingal says this to one of his vanquished enemies, whom he has forgiven:

Swaran … to-day our fame is greatest. We shall pass away like a dream. No sound shall remain in our fields of war…. Our names may be heard in song. What avails it, when our strength hath ceased? O Ossian … you know of heroes that are no more. Give us the song of other years.

Fingal questions the value of living on in song instead of in body, as a way of expressing the evanescence of his prowess, but he also takes comfort in the songs of past heroes. The moment of comfort underwrites the present (shielding it from the future) by summoning up the past; we are compensated for our losses by the depiction of past loss. We hear of this moment from Ossian, of course, and this moment of song is also recorded in song: past and future needs meet in the activity of the bard, with future songs (those composed now, in the spontaneous present) singing of the use of the past in the present. This is the moment of "handing on," when tradition generates itself. Imitating the self-referential tradition he mined his ideas from, MacPherson dramatizes the compensation fame offers for loss: to be embedded in a heroic poem, a poem that perpetuates the memory of heroes (this is a more detailed way of saying that the most popular subject matter in these songs is the subject of singing itself). These poems are thus about continuity, but continuity as highlighted by discontinuity. Ossian is a runner in the bards' continuous race toward the future, but he has no one to hand his baton to, no ear to pour his poems into: he must entrust them to the wind. He goes through the motion of handing, the composition of song, without the cultural machinery that the singing is part of. No chiefs are gathered to hear him—there are no more chiefs. He is an oxymoronic bard, a bard famous for having no successor.

The popularity of these poems hints that there must be some powerful profit to be derived from this depiction of a lonely singer. The phrase contemporaries applied to it, a phrase taken from the songs themselves, is "the joy of grief." Ossian is ruled by oxymoron, and this is another example. What is the joy of being the last of the Finns? It is the joy of memory, the business of the bards, but it is also, in Ossian's case, the joy of having things behind him. He is old, he is blind, he has nothing left to him, but he is also beyond anxiety; he has no heroic activity left to him except to mine the heroism of his age, the age that will pass away with him. Because of his weakness, because of his utter dependence on his past for his poetic activity, Ossian is infinitely close to being overwhelmed by his past, made small by it, but because he is part of the past recalling it is exhilarating instead of sickening. He cannot repeat the heroism of Fingal (he is old and weak), but he was himself a hero, his son was a hero, so his inferiority is the subject of lament but not anxious reflection.

As the frequent exclamations and "O"s indicate, Ossian's song is a spontaneous one, one of the benefits of having his subject matter be a part of his soul, his memory:

then comes a voice to Ossian, and awakes his soul! It is the voice of years that are gone! they roll before me, with all their deeds! I seize the tales, as they pass, and pour them forth in song.

He makes his poems from the past, from a simple excavation of the materials of the past, but this past is also part of him. His extreme age energizes this scene. He is ready to depart; like Gray's, MacPherson's bard is the last, and with his extinction the last easy link to the past will be pushed forever out of reach. Ossian was praised as a poet of the sublime, and this is an example of his sublimity. A whole tradition, a history of singing and victory, of heroism and great deeds, concentrates itself in the person of Ossian, and trembles on the precipice of extinction. His job is to translate these deeds into permanence, to give them a form that will convey them into the future, to keep them from being lost in dark time. This is the bard's job: but again, Ossian has no audience but the air; alone on his rock, he sings only to the mysterious forces (into the blast) that preserve some things and obliterate others. The immediate, staged drama of these poems is that this dying effort worked: the poems are presented as having succeeded, as having made the trip, dropping into the modern world with the scent of the ancient still miraculously fresh. Whether Ossian's last song, thus preserved, is a curse (like the song in Gray's poem) or a treasure remains to be seen.

As I have described them so far, these poems, or prose-poems, are the works of a poet called Ossian; and so they are, in an important sense, and the drama they invoke depends on that authorship. Equally important to the success of these works, though, is the dramatic presence of MacPherson, the editor-translator, who is part of the machinery that presents Ossian to us in his simple guise. As editor, MacPherson constantly makes himself known to us through notes, and he imposes two hefty "dissertations" on us before we begin the actual poems. His presence as translator continually returns to us through his careful style of translation, his use of a style that connotes translation. The most common and the most effective feature of this style is its inversions, things like "bent is his head of age" instead of "his aged head is bent." (This has the added advantage of being something English readers would be likely to call poetic diction.) The other obtrusive feature of his style is also illustrated by my example: the use of clumsy "of" phrases instead of simple possessives. Added to this, of course, is the "measured prose" itself, labelled as "poetry" by the titles of the books and of the individual pieces. By calling this prose poetry, MacPherson conjures up the shadowy original, marching dim Gaelic feet through unknown Gaelic meters, and at the same time his humble refusal to recreate this meter is always before our eyes.

This style has been described as derived from features of the Gaelic originals MacPherson worked from, and this may well be true; but the important fact is that MacPherson has retained them, and has depicted himself as avoiding one of the tasks of the translator, that of turning things into good English. It is a rhetorical trick designed to express literality, faithfulness, and its advantages for MacPherson are obvious. If his office is that of the humble translator, then anything which reinforces that humility reinforces his position as translator, the position he is trying to hold onto in the controversy.

The apparent literality of the translation becomes part of an argument for the merit of the poetry in Hugh Blair's "Critical Dissertation," a quaintly fervent work almost invariably attached to editions of Ossian after 1763. Blair cheers MacPherson's choice of prose over verse because it lets the "spirit" of Ossian come through (the mechanics of foreign meter would interfere with spirit), and goes on to describe translation as a test of poetic merit:

Elegant, however, and masterly as Mr. MacPherson's translation is, we must never forget, whilst we read it, that we are putting the merit of the original to a severe test. For we are examining a poet stripped of his native dress: divested of the harmony of his own numbers. We know how much grace and energy the works of the Greek and Latin authors receive from the charm of versification in their original languages. If, then, destitute of this advantage, exhibited in a literal version, Ossian still has power to please as a poet … we may very safely infer, that his productions are the offspring of true and uncommon genius.

Setting aside for the moment the nice figure of the undressed Highlander, here we see Blair effectively erasing form as a critical ingredient in poetry. The genius of poetry is something that informs form, that underwrites the grace and charm of form. That this meshes so well with MacPherson's tactics is one of the marks of MacPherson's skill; as a principle of poetics, the test of translation not only supports his rhetoric of translation, but it enthusiastically supports the metaphor of song and Ossian's spontaneity. The voice that calls to Ossian (inspiration, the spirit of genius) is the important part of the poems, and it will be heard even through the veil of English.

MacPherson picks up this argument himself. He says of his poems:

That they have been well received by the Public, appears from an extensive sale; that they shall continue to be well received, he may venture to prophecy without that gift of that inspiration, to which poets lay claim. Through the medium of version upon version, they retain, in foreign languages, their native character of simplicity and energy. Genuine poetry, like gold, loses little, when properly transfused; but when a composition cannot bear the test of a literal version, it is a counterfeit which ought not to pass current.

The counterfeit poem would be one in which there is no real gold, no real poetry, and this hollowness is revealed by the bite of a literal version; here form is something which could actually hide the presence of true poetry. Echoing Blair (this was written after Blair's "Dissertation"), MacPherson insists that poetry needs to be undressed in order to test for essential quality. This undressing, which occurs when the poems are translated, absorbed into another language, has a suspicious resonance that I will take up shortly. In this passage MacPherson also thematizes the difficulties of his own project: to convince the public of the value of his gold, his poems, so that they will let them pass current. He does this constantly, especially in his footnotes (where he will often berate certain poems as "forgeries of a later age"), and this is all part of his tactics of truthfulness, of frankness, which make up so large a part of the Ossian books.

Inspiration, in this passage, is curiously linked to the sale of books, or negatively linked (sales eliminate the need for inspiration), which is at least congruent with Blair's general thought that spirit and inspiration are things that go along with quality; since sales are an affirmation of quality too, we may bypass the need for inspiration of vision. This inspiration also corresponds to Ossian's inspiration, the power that projects his songs into the future, and (again) to this power as it is described by Blair, the true spirit of genius that shines through even in a foreign tongue and culture. Something has happened here, though, for MacPherson is confident that he has evaded passing time without the benefit of inspiration; he feels sure that he and his poems are projected safely into the future (become famous as heroes are famous). His sureness is based on money, sales, on the gold that has been exchanged for poems in the commercial economy of Britain. This is veiled self-congratulation on MacPherson's part, of course, but it is also part of a picture that includes Blair's disrobed Highlander. This picture absorbs many elements, and I want to describe it here, and go on, in the next section, to follow out some principles of its composition.

Gold is a mark of purity, of something that resists diminution and counterfeit through its individual integrity. It also has an abiding relationship to money, being sometimes actual currency and sometimes the guarantor of the value of currency (MacPherson seems to use both qualities above). MacPherson says that his poems are gold, and hence good, but we also remember that gold (figurative gold: money) is what he got in return for them. This association makes the part about inspiration troubling, as if some mercenary spirit had replaced true poetic quality with monetary reward, and as if MacPherson were insisting that he did all this without that quality which is essential to true poetry, throwing his crime in our faces. His boldness exploits the associations of translation, for the translator creates poetry without inspiration, simply mining the riches of a poem in a different language; this is what makes us think of "mere" translators. True quality is that which can survive this process (which both Blair and MacPherson seem to feel is rather brutal—a test) without deformation. If we put into this pot the undressed Highlander, the Ossianic poem in English, then we may follow the monetary thread out of poetics into the society of the Highlander in 1760, forbidden to wear his national dress, and forbidden to live the way his ancestors had lived. Behind this transition is gold too, in the form of avarice (gold as a metaphor) and in the form of money, the invasion of commercial economy. This is translation in another form, the translation of a culture, which threatens to become dislocation, and makes up the pathetic part of the picture.

Today what is best remembered about the Ossian poems is that people argued so much about them. The fascination of the "Ossianic controversy" has all but pushed the poems themselves from view, and one might argue that this has happened because the controversy is more interesting than the poems. But the controversy is not a gratuitous addition; it is intimately bound up with the complex genealogy and exotic subject matter of the poems. Even the simplest facts about them tended to add to their mystery. The argument against MacPherson's claims is most often represented by Samuel Johnson [in "A Journey to the Hebrides and the Western Isles"]:

I believe that [the Ossian poems] never existed in any other form than that which we have seen. The editor, or author, never could show the original; nor can it be shown by any others…. He has doubtless inserted names that circulate in popular stories, and may have translated some wandering ballads, if any can be found.

He goes on to add, using our familiar money-metaphor:

It is said, that men of integrity profess to have heard parts of it, but they all heard them when they were boys…. They remember names, and, perhaps, some proverbial sentiments; and, having no distinct ideas, coin a resemblance without an original.

The positive side of the controversy is perfectly represented by Blair in the quotation above. So far this is clear and understandable enough, and the only puzzle is why the controversy lasted so long, from 1760, when the Fragments were published, until 1805, when the Highland Society's Report came out. Part of the solution to this puzzle can be found in MacPherson's own behavior. When people request his originals, he invariably replies with a lament that the orthography of the manuscripts was so idiosyncratic that only he could comprehend it, and that he simply did not have time to do what only he was capable of. This defense is ingenious, and very difficult to argue with. At this time, Gaelic was singularly unavailable to those out of earshot. Spoken by thousands, it had lapsed out of texts. Even the Highland ministers, who delivered sermons in Gaelic, were largely illiterate in Gaelic itself; they were taught to read and write in English. Amongst those who could read Gaelic texts, the standards of orthography were not fixed, and would not be for another century. MacPherson could thus plausibly say that he had a manuscript that only he could read.

On the other side, these same factors strengthened Johnson's assertion that the Ossian poems had to be fakes because Gaelic was a language without texts, unwritten; it merely "floated in the breath of the people." Without the refinement generated by the presence of writing (a polished language, or literary language), Johnson says, all development is short-circuited: "diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood." This is the unique quality about the case of Ossian. Both sides of the controversy are curiously insulated, insulated by the now-outlawed tartan plaid, the secrecy of the Highlander. This difficulty crops up in any discussion of Ossian, even in the attempt to define MacPherson's crime.

It should be clear by now that calling MacPherson a forger is true only in a qualified sense, as has been shown many times by the rehearsal of the following facts: in the eighteenth century, there were many poems in Gaelic that contained a persona called Ossian (Osein), most of which were in oral form, but some of which were in manuscript. MacPherson had some of these manuscripts, or at least one major manuscript, referred to as "The Red Book." Many parts of many of these poems make their way into MacPherson's Ossian books, translated fairly faithfully. Thus when Highlanders said that they heard the Ossian poems in their youth, they were telling the truth, as far as they knew, for MacPherson's poems were at least partly made up of the poems they had heard. The problem of identity, which Johnson touches on above, is a real problem, and should not be dismissed as simplemindedness or stubborn national pride. The Highland Committee, attempting to discover exactly what poems MacPherson had in his possession, was faced with answers like this from their Highland correspondents:

I shall make no difficulty of thinking that the editor of Ossian's works has translated those parts of the original which were repeated in my hearing, I will not say with servile exactness, but on the whole inimitably well.

Inimitable, not servile: those terms are repeatedly applied to MacPherson's efforts. Calling a translation servile bolsters the authority or integrity of the function of the translator, even while condemning an actual instance of translation. The use of such a term implies that a strong or manly translator is not servile to his original, but somehow asserts his own integrity in the process of turning one language into another. He is not a mere functionary under the thumb of the original, but a writer in his own right; not simply handing the poem from one language to another, invisible, but adding transformation to translation. In MacPherson's case, there seems to be an air of present fame to the term, as if one should not be too servile to the past, but respect and use the past. This becomes one way of defending MacPherson. Lord Webb Seymour, who took a tour in the Highlands and dabbled in Ossianic research, had poems recited to him in Gaelic and then translated, and spoke with people who claimed to have compared the English and Gaelic versions; but all he was able to say was that "in slight outline" the versions corresponded, or that he "found them to vary but little." The investigator, instead of confidently dividing sheep from goats as he would like, the false and derivative from the true, finds himself confronted with a curious mixed breed, neither one nor the other. If the task is not one of matching words, what is left of the problem?

This vexing and unavoidable confusion fueled the controversy. MacPherson's crime always threatened to degenerate into a matter of the theory of translation. This removes the focus of the critical eye from MacPherson's originals to his relationship to his originals, from forgery to skill. The role of the editor was, at this time, a large one; he was free to work over the materials, even to add things when this seemed appropriate (as Bishop Percy did). Was this MacPherson's crime? Was he just a bad translator? If he was a bad translator, it was not his actual text that was at fault, but the relationship of that text to the original. His problem would be that he had been too independent (hadn't been servile enough), that he had not let the original guide him completely enough but had added parts of himself to someone else's work. He would be guilty of not having enough respect for the inheritance of tradition, of not being a faithful part of the long chain of passing-on that delivers the past to the present. To this could be answered, as above, that the twist MacPherson puts in the chain of tradition is just the translator's job: he produces not a copy but a literal version, a version that another culture can absorb.

This problem, though not solvable in any clear way, would have disappeared quietly enough if the originals had been available; people could have made their own decisions, but at least they would have been arguing a question of poetics and not one of morality. MacPherson's refusal to produce his originals, however, was taken as proof of their forgery, as well as of the general perversity of the man. He did have originals, in some form, which some people knew, so that his answer that it was simply too complicated to put them into a form appropriate for inspection sounded plausible. This is the center of the voiced controversy, but this textual matter is only a ruse, a diversion from the real problems, which Johnson illustrates so well, and which is summed up by the thoughts of another Highland visitor, William Shaw. In his "Enquiry into the Authenticity of the poems ascribed to Ossian" (1782), he describes asking some Highlanders to produce some poems of Ossian. He expects his witnesses to produce manuscripts,

but instead of going to their cabinet for manuscripts, or copies of them, as I expected, application was made to some old man, or superannuated fiddler, who repeated over again the tales of the 15th century.

Here again is the old man, the repository of tradition, and Shaw's disgust is the disgust of the foreigner, the outsider, to whom this tradition is meaningless, as well as the disgust of the literate for the illiterate and the young for the old. As Johnson says, Gaelic floats on the breath of the Highland peasant, and he and Shaw find the presence of poetry in these circumstances simply unbelievable, or simply silly, not worth considering if it exists (it is not really poetry). For them, "original" means "written": they wanted manuscripts, not memories. It seems as though Johnson would have been satisfied with transcripts of the original recitals, but even these were not available. The possibility, in an oral tradition, for variation or mutability obliterates any meaning Johnson might recognize in the word "original." As he says, he thinks that people, when they recognize Ossian, coin a resemblance without an original, like people using an unsound currency. He is disturbed, in fact, by the shadowy presence of the cognate "originality" (what Ossian has, the voice that comes to him), and the possibility that the Ossian poems could be a record of someone else's originality, even MacPherson's. Chasing these poems would seem to be as fruitless as chasing the wind, a wind that threatens to be simply the inspiration of whomever you are talking to. To someone who had not found his poems being recited, MacPherson could always answer, "well, I heard them, but the people who told them to me have died; so perhaps their poetry died with them." What could be said to this? MacPherson could claim that his poems are themselves originals, the first capture of oral materials.

Part of the reason people distrusted oral poetry was that they had difficulty believing that an oral tradition could be resilient and sturdy enough to survive the hundreds of years between composition and capture. The cusp of transmission bothers Johnson, for instance; diction is always in its childhood in a nonliterate society because transmission of the past is impossible, and each generation must start from scratch. This was a popular subject for speculation, and most of the explanations for successful transmission went something like this:

Language is changed from its use in society, as coins are smoothed by their currency in circulation. If the one be locked up among a rude, remote, and unconnected people, like the other when it is buried in the earth, its great features and general form will be but little altered.

This invokes a principle of mixture (or circulation), and the accurate transmission of past language depends on the culture remaining pure, in an unmixed state:

At a distance from the seat of government, and secured, by the inaccessibleness of their country, [Highlanders] were free and independent. As they had little communication with strangers, the customs of their ancestors remained among them, and their language retained its original purity.

These are familiar topoi of the eighteenth century, where purity is associated with the primitive, and where the retention of the qualities of the primitive, the qualities of Ossian, depends on the parallel retention of purity. These topoi extend as far as poetics, and primitive people are said to "display themselves to one another without disguise: and converse and act in the uncovered simplicity of nature," making them naturally poetic. This state is usually described as coming before commerce, and before Art, and here it also comes before the need for translations of any kind. Mixture, we could say, would be easy, unimpeded by the difficulties of modern language. The refreshing qualities of the primitive were what the Ossian poems seemed to bring with them from the past, true remains, communicating their freshness and especially their simplicity to an age that had grown beyond such things. This simplicity is always tied to boldness, boldness of imagination, and in the anthropomorphic historical model, this boldness is attributed to the youth of mankind, just as it is the domain of actual youth:

The powers of imagination are most vigorous and predominant in youth; those of the understanding ripen more slowly, and often attain not to their maturity, till the imagination begin to flag. Hence, poetry, which is the child of the imagination, is frequently most glowing and animated in the first ages of society. As the ideas of our youth are remembered with a peculiar pleasure on account of their liveliness and vivacity; so the most ancient poems have often proved the greatest favorites among nations. [Blair]

In the language I applied to the poems, the losses of age are compensated by the memories of youth, and the natural result is that the memories of youth are contained in the oldest of poems, as old Ossian contains his past.

The other ancient poems are, of course, those of Homer, and Ossian is compared to Homer in a very specific way by Blair. When describing the Aristotelean regularities of Ossian, he dismisses any astonishment over their existence by insisting that Ossian is nature, like Homer, and that "Aristotle studied nature in Homer". Ossian is prerule, part of the basis from which rules are derived. This explanation of the disturbingly western features of Ossian (that he got them from the original, nature) was a popular one, as popular as attacking MacPherson on these grounds. Malcolm Laing, in the last year of the controversy, brought out an edition of the poems in which he claimed to trace "every simile, and almost every poetical image" to sources in western tradition. The bizarre energy of Laing's effort is a perfect example of the power of rule as it is embodied in tradition, and of the release MacPherson could obtain by exploiting a manipulated history. MacPherson's picture of inheritance is conservative but enriching, ancient but refreshing. Opposed to this is the tradition of the West, which produces a mind like Laing's, where the present and the future are obliterated by their original, the past. Originality is defined as simply that quality that generates rules, and makes for its own extinction. Transmission of a culture like the one Laing reflects turns all composition into translation, and his edition of Ossian is an example, where he decodes MacPherson to find the original language "with which the author's mind was previously impregnated," impregnated by the winds of tradition.

Here I need to collect my metaphors again. Ossian is praised for his "originality," meaning his presence at the origin, and he is placed, in the hierarchy of tradition, at the very top, the place where rules begin. These rules are the definition of a classical tradition: they define what poetry is and can be. It is the circumventing of the power of rules, the bold and the simple, that reasonable moderns find so pleasing in the poems. Their simplicity is the simplicity of gold, which refreshes us by its refusal to compromise with baser material, by its permanence. It is this simplicity that MacPherson insists makes for the possibility of translation, that makes it possible to appreciate the poems even when they are robbed of their native dress. Their simplicity has been retained by their lack of circulation, by the impregnable Highlands, and so their simplicity is a result of their being unknown. They are a treasure, which MacPherson can rescue from non-circulating burial in the secrecy of the Highlands, and translate into the modern world.

Those who criticize MacPherson say one of two things: either that he refused to be guided by the rules of inheritance, and deformed and re-forged what he received by "translating" it into something else, or that the whole ethos of earliness is nonsense, that "primitive poetry" is an oxymoron, and that MacPherson is only trying to escape the consequences of the lateness of the age by palming his own originality off as primal simplicity. In both cases he violates what we might call laws of currency, laws of a system in which something stands in for an original. In the first, he undermines the value of the translation by not properly fixing the relationship of representative to original, and in the second he is guilty of pretending that he has a gold original when in fact all he has is the translation.

Tied to this is a contradictory, or oxymoronic, arrangement of youth and age. Because of their extreme age, the Ossian poems are productions of humanity's youth, and remind us of that youth; because of his extreme age, Ossian is reduced to singing about his youth. Because the Highlands remained retarded, youthful, these productions of old age were preserved from the deformations of younger times. The oxymoron appears on the simplest of levels, in the fact that the person behind the hoary persona is the twenty-five-year old MacPherson. Linked to this is the social problem the Highland Committee encountered: that the tradition that underwriters MacPherson's effort is in the memories of the superannuated, those who have lived beyond the destruction of their culture, or, worse yet, was in their possession, for they may have died.

To admit that the retrieval of these poems is an exhumation is to admit that the refusal on the part of the Highlanders to mix with the rest of Britain retained the purity that transmits the freshness of youth to us. For loyal British subjects, this might be hard to admit, for this very purity, this resistance to the impregnation of western culture, was the danger that lurked in the Highlands until it appeared openly in 1745. Even the appealing parts of Ossian, his boldness, loyalty, martial vigor, and romance, were the qualities so strongly attached to Bonny Charlie and the '45. By retaining their "early" culture, the Highlanders remained free from the "toil and business, which engross the attention of a commercial people." That we have come to know these poems is a sign that what preserved them has passed, and that the Highlanders, wrapped up in their new habits, absorbed by a commercial people, have in some way been robbed of their treasure. To have them at all is completely sufficient to describe the mixture that destroys things like them.

As a way of starting to conclude, I re-ask the most important questions about the Ossian episode. What was MacPherson's crime? And why did he do it, what profit did he stand to gain? In the way of answering the second question first, I offer a different formulation of it, put in the form of an objection to questions about MacPherson's honesty:

none but a madman, or a wild enthusiast, could think of forfeiting his honesty, and disclaiming the merit of his own compositions, merely to gratify the imaginary honour of having been born in the corner of a country which, perhaps, 1500 years ago, chanced to produce a bard of some merit.

The simplest answer to this riddle is money. MacPherson stood to gain a lot of money as a result of his fame, and indeed he did, from the various positions he was able to obtain (most notably, agent for the Nabob of Arcot). This is perhaps to be guilty of the same lack of imagination that the above writer is guilty of, to ignore the way such a ruse could ease the burden of the past, to ignore the possibility that MacPherson perpetrated his scheme in order to find his way into a canon otherwise (apparently) closed. But fame is another name for the canon, and money is just the material and modern representative of fame, a palpable expression of why people want to be famous. Money does what we so often think modernity does, reducing things to their basal materialities: "living on" in fame becomes a statement about estates and everyday material concerns. Fame and money were hard to come by in the depths of the North, which seemed to offer only its own peculiarities as a possible commodity, and so MacPherson's course appears clever, even inspired.

From here we can answer the other question. MacPherson was guilty of fraud, but not the simple fraud he has become famous for. What he did with the inheritance of the Highlander is nothing worse than absorption, that respectable bardic activity; and his manipulations might also be called bardic, an exploitation of the possibilities of tradition. He adapted the Gaelic tradition to the modern world. Even modern scholars thank him for saving "The Red Book" from the tailor's scissors, and he was largely responsible for the explosion of activity in the nineteenth century that did in fact save many parts of Gaelic culture from complete disappearance. His crime is apart from these scholarly matters.

MacPherson's activity stands as an emblem for the movement of his culture into Britain, and his picture is one of ease and humility, of handing the dark past to the present, the mountain people to the Lowlanders, with one easy gesture. This, he says, is possible because of the golden integrity of his originals, for gold is always easy to circulate: its virtues are pan-cultural, recognized by every eye. This gold is the inheritance of every Gael, but, as the eighteenth century wears on, it becomes painfully clear that the golden part is just a metaphor, and that it is in fact a mark of danger, something to be obliterated (what it represents, the integrity of the Highlander, is dangerous). The Ossian poems make it equally clear that this obliteration can take the form of a feast on the remnants of Highland culture. MacPherson's crime is the preparation of this feast, and his fraud is in his ease. He substitutes simplicity for nakedness, and in doing so he makes it seem that the mixing of the Highlander with the rest of Britain, the whisking away of the tartan, is painless, or even joyful (the joy of grief). He pretends that it does not leave the humble Highlander simply naked. He (and here he is standing as a representative of many, including Blair) covers over the essential immiscibility of the Highlander, and the destruction that would have to take place before mixture.

His arguments about poetry are versions of this fraudulent ease, and here the fraud is plainly an underhanded way of portraying his own genius. The Ossian poems, products of genius, easily pass from version to version, in the hands of genius. Form is erased, essence is transmitted, and the forms of culture, the Gaelic rhyme or the tartan plaid, are left as tokens of locality, unimportant and unnecessary. The ease of mixture, of absorbtion, is utterly dependent on this erasure of distinguishing form. Thus another way of defining the fraud is to say that MacPherson pretends that the magic of the ancient can be separated from its material form, which returns us to saying that MacPherson fraudulently claims that the Highlander, be it Ossian or his descendants, can be translated with primitive virtues intact: that the poems can be divested of foreignness without loss. The potion thus prepared is an imperial elixir, a cure for the ills that a highly wrought culture develops, and preparation of the elixir does not damage the source of the cure. A crime this complex needs a name, or a category; we may call it the crime of Pastoral: "Pastoral" to describe the way the virtues of the primitive are depicted as translatable, and the way this translation pretends that the resulting mixture is not unstable or exploitive; and "crime" because, as I have been saying, this picture cannot be realized without pain.

Of course the poems have a bad conscience, and the drama of Ossian, the old blind bard, is the drama of the extinction of a culture. I have traced other features of this bad conscience, particularly in MacPherson's replacement of inspiration with money. This bad conscience can, tentatively, be associated with the failure of MacPherson's vision, the general and complete lapsing of the Ossian poems from the canon. This gives a rather constructive interpretation to the power of the canon, which seems at least partly suspect, but we can say that the charms of Ossian, the charms of the primitive, gradually lost their magic, and the fraud, as I have described it, became, eventually, all too clear.