It is no accident that the later eighteenth century was the great age of literary forgery. Macpherson, Chatterton, Pinkerton and Ireland (Steevens is perhaps another case) share a world which made forgery an innovative answer to a difficult series of questions which faced the wouldbe artist. The circumstances are fairly familiar, but the problems they posed have only recently been receiving any attention.

The chief question consciously or unconsciously asked by the ambitious was, "How can I be a great poet now?" In what follows I shall be concerned primarily with Macpherson, for though we do not consider him to be among the first rank of poets of his day, he was the first among them to provide a striking answer to the question, and his solution was immediately successful and influential. I shall then consider Chatterton's solution briefly in relationship to Macpherson, and end with a short account of a non-forger, Blake, who was a better poet than either and whose achievement may be best seen in the context of late eighteenth-century dilemmas.

Macpherson's "Preface to Fingal" reveals a mind finely attuned to the implications of his enterprise. Throughout it his comments are far more appropriate to his own situation than to Ossian's:

Poetry, like virtue, receives its reward after death. The fame which men pursued in vain, when living, is often bestowed upon them when they are not sensible of it. This neglect of living authors is not altogether to be attributed to that reluctance which men shew in praising and rewarding genius. It often happens, that the man who writes differs greatly from the same man in common life. His foibles, however, are obliterated by death and his better part, his writings remain: his character is formed from them, and he that was no extraordinary man in his own time, becomes the wonder of succeeding ages.—From this source proceeds our veneration for the dead. Their virtues remain, but the vices, which were once blended with their virtues, have died with themselves.

This is a suitable apologia for a living man who has written a book supposedly by a dead man, for a profligate who has written a morally uplifting work. Ossian's living fame is rather beside the point, and his "foibles" as they cannot be known are hardly available for speculation. Macpherson displays in this preface an urge to confess which seems just barely to become part of his defense of the work's authenticity. In the next paragraph he continues,

This consideration might induce a man, diffident of his abilities, to ascribe his own compositions to a person, whose remote antiquity and whose situation, when alive, might well answer for faults which would be inexcusable in a writer of this age.

Describing his own practice he emphasizes the gain, the comparative freedom such a writer might have from anxieties about modern critical judgment and its demands on the writer. Attributing this last view to an "ingenious gentleman" of his acquaintance, he goes on to say that upon reading the poems themselves the gentleman was convinced of their authenticity and adds—with perhaps a sly recognition of his own real originality—"it would be a very uncommon instance of self-denial in me to disown them, were they really of my composition."

If we step back, some of Macpherson's achievements should come into focus: the acceptance of the age's demands for literary excellence, the development of significant new genres, the innovative adoption of ancient and modern literary tradition. Macpherson's achievement was in the genre most admired by eighteenth-century critics, and least successfully written by eighteenth-century poets, the epic. It is worth noting that his first book, the Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), anticipated that characteristic Romantic genre, the fragment, which became a norm as poets and critics began to consider the long poem a contradiction in terms. Macpherson also anticipates another Romantic development, the prose poem. As Malcolm Laing observed in 1805, he probably was indebted to Lowth's recent praise of the sacred poetry of the Hebrews (1753) for his choice of rhythmical prose as a medium for ancient epic poetry. The success of King James's committee of translators made such an alternative a distinct possibility, and Macpherson's account of his decision sounds like a diffident Milton defending blank verse in Paradise Lost. He considers the use of prose a novelty, yet he intended to rhyme until others (Macpherson's whole achievement is hedged round with nameless others) convinced him of the rightness of his final choice, "a mode which presented freedom and dignity of expression, instead of fetters, which cramp the thought…. " He, too, would free the heroic poem from what Milton called "the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming." Like Milton and the Bible, Ossian was greatly praised for his sublimity.

As Schiller notes in his "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," the opposition of the moderns to the ancients is generally put in terms which take the genres and tones of the ancient's literary achievements as highest in the scale. By becoming an ancient, Macpherson placed that Herculean burden of the past on other shoulders. He made of all the major impasses that faced the modern poet a broad highway that took him back to the ancients for a solution. But there was a price: it consisted of fame for his creation at the partial expense of his own fame and even, in certain quarters, of his reputation.

Many critics of the time insisted that the great poet must be original, and this brought in its wake the kind of selfconsciousness that Walter Jackson Bate has recently discussed as the burden of the past. One could praise Shakespeare's woodnotes wild and despair of equaling his achievement, but one could hardly go about his innocent plotpilfering and expect to be great. One could imitate, but, as Johnson put it, "no man was ever great by imitation."

The age was interested not only in originality but in original genius. There was a steadily developing fascination with the poet as person and a shifting emphasis from the work he produced to the poem as expressive of his personality. Part of the difficulty critics have with Johnson's Life of Milton comes from a failure to recognize that Johnson assumes the poet should accommodate himself to his audience whereas we assume that the reader should accommodate himself to the poet. This attitude is part of a legacy, probably deriving from Longinus, that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have left us. The development of print culture, the independence of the artist that came with the decline of patronage and the rise of professionalism, the burgeoning (an effect which became a cause) of literary biography: these were a few of the reasons why poets began to supersede poetry as an object of inquiry.

The primitivism of the eighteenth century was pervasive and far-reaching in its implications, though usually treated with suspicion by critics such as Johnson, Hume and Gibbon. The most important aspect of primitivism for Macpherson derives from Thomas Blackwell's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735)—Blackwell was one of Macpherson's professors at Aberdeen—and continues as a distinctly though not exclusively Scottish concern. It identified poetry as the natural language of primitive man and suggested that only among primitive men was genius to be found. And even Johnson, on empirical grounds, could come to some of the same conclusions. In a famous passage in Rasselas Imlac notes that "in almost all countries, the most ancient poets are considered as the best," surveys some of the possible reasons for this preference and concludes, "whatever be the reason, it is commonly observed that the early writers are in possession of nature, and their followers of art…." Where there such agreement on the virtues of the early writers, Macpherson's decision to become an ancient seems, biding the question of authenticity, a fairly obvious choice.

And his work was doubly primitive. Ossian was not only a member of an ancient primitive society, but his native Scotland remained partly primitive in modern times. This association of Scotland with primitivism would later spur on the cult of the poetical plowboy, Bobbie Burns, partly at the expense of that excellent Scots poet, Robert Burns. Just five years after Macpherson's fragments appeared, Percy explained why most of the minstrels in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry came from the "North Countrie" by saying "the civilizing of nations has begun from the South: the North would therefore be the last civilized, and the old manners would longest subsist there." The Romantic associations of modern Scotland may have had something to do with the European vogue of the Ossian poems.

The complement to primitivism was the belief that, to take the phrase of Milton's to which Samuel Johnson objected so strenuously, it was an age too late for poetry. This was a favorite theme of the mid- and late eighteenth century. (In fact for the last few hundred years a number of our greatest poets have been writing superb poems about the impossibility of writing poetry.) Milton's example should have been sufficient to show the fallacy of such thinking, but instead Milton ironically became the last possible great poet. In Collins's "Ode on the Poetical Character" the would-be poet attempts to reach the poetic Eden, the place where Milton is to be found, but though Collins's "trembling feet his guiding steps pursue," the attempt is a failure:

In vain—such Bliss to One alone,
Of all the Sons of Soul was known,
And Heav'n, and Fancy, kindred Pow'rs,
Have now o'erturn'd th'inspiring Bow'rs,
Or Curtain'd close such Scene from ev'ry future View.

Gray was no more sanguine: "The Bard," which was to become the most popular ode of the next generation (if Robert Southey's testimony in his Life of Cowper is reliable) shows a medieval prophet-poet, at odds with the political rulers, committing suicide, though not before prophesying the triumph of poetry and prophecy in the age of Elizabeth. Though the poem is set in the past, the application, as other poems by Gray make evident, is certainly contemporary. "Oh! Lyre divine," he asks in "The Progress of Poesy," "What daring Spirit / Wakes thee now?" And in the unpublished "Stanzas to Mr. Bentley," he regrets that

… not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration giv'n
That burns in Shakespear's or in Milton's page,
The pomp and prodigality of heav'n.

Several reciprocal influences were at work here. The rise of literary history was directly related to the rise of historical thinking generally and an intensification of nationalism. Nationalism demanded a great literature, and English literary history, at least from the time of Dryden, made much of the greatness of national achievement. Perhaps Scottish nationalism and the Golden Age of Scottish literature were paradoxically a product of the Union that made Scotland a part of Great Britain. In any case the general reception of the Ossianic works, with Hugh Blair declaring Ossian the equal of Homer and Highland Scots by the score prepared to state under oath that they had learned these poems as boys, shows that the country was crying out for such a past and such a poet. Hume, who had given early support to Macpherson, soon began to regard his productions skeptically. He gave Blair some good advice (unheeded) on how to determine the authenticity of the works, and in an interview with Boswell after Johnson's tour of the Hebrides offered a number of objections, including the difficulty of oral transmission (a hurdle that no longer exists for modern scholars). He viewed the fame of the Ossianic poems as a product of their putative antiquity, for he thought that if Macpherson had published them under his own name they would not have been read through. He ascribes the Highlanders' support of Macpherson to the flattery of having a great poet among their warlike ancestors. Boswell told him that Johnson claimed

that he could undertake to write an epic poem on the story of Robin Hood which the half of the people of England should say they heard in their youth. Mr. Hume said the people of England would not be so ready to support such a story. They had not the same temptation with the Highlanders, there being many excellent English Poets.

Hume's observation is acute; national consciousness demands literary history. The Ossian affair illustrates the need for myth at its broadest level. Macpherson may be said, in at least several ways, to have forged the uncreated conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul.

And the immediate success of Macpherson's Ossian poems, whatever our own judgment of his achievement, is indisputable. It can perhaps be best seen in the chapter headings of William Duff's Critical Observations on the Writings of the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (1770). Duff devotes a chapter apiece to seven poets, Homer, Ossian, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto and Tasso. The sixty-page chapter on Ossian is longer than those on Spenser and Milton, and only two pages shorter than that on Homer.

There were likenesses between Macpherson and the better artist whose undisputed forgeries helped to give the age something of its characteristic tone, Thomas Chatterton. Both poets were provincials who turned their provincialism to poetic gain. The works of both were precocious achievements, and both poets led the world to believe that they were even more precocious than they were in fact. Chatterton was, as has been noted by Meyerstein and others, an imitator of Ossian, and one wonders if his first ill-fated letter to Walpole was also in imitation of Macpherson's successful application to the antiquarian of Strawberry Hill. At any rate, Chatterton had before him not only the example of Macpherson's success, but also the question of authenticity. An Ossianic imitator was still burdened with the tag of unoriginality, so to show that he had truly learned Macpherson's trick, Chatterton had to come up with an original though analogous solution to the problem. This was a game that could only be played by one at a time.

The primary influences on Chatterton's medieval poems were Percy's Reliques and Elizabeth Cooper's The Muses' Library. Though Percy in his Preface to the Reliques makes rather modest claims for his minstrels, more was at stake. The poets he introduced to the public tended to be an anonymous lot, but Thomas Rowley, a putative contemporary of John Lydgate, arguably would be among the first great English poets, as secure in his sphere as Homer and Ossian in theirs—such at least, I suggest, was the logic behind the Rowley poems. Chatterton's creation, like Macpherson's, made his conquests. A quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, Lancelot Sharpe, in his preface to Poems, Supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and others (1794), mentions the controversy over authenticity, but goes on to rank the poet, whoever he may be, "in the fourth place among our British poets." Whether it is Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton who is pushed from his pedestal, we are not told.

There were, of course, other exemplars for Chatterton. As he pointedly asks Walpole in a satire his sister talked him out of sending,

thou mayst call me Cheat—
Say, didst thou ne'er indulge in such Deceit?
Who wrote Otranto?

The long ago and far away Gothic of The Castle of Otranto, like the contemporary bourgeois novels of Richardson, was nominally the presentation of a self-effacing editor. And Collins, who adumbrates both the problems and solutions of Macpherson and Chatterton in less assertive fashion, indulged in such deceit in his Persian Eclogues thirty years before the appearance of Rowley. The "Preface" claims that these oriental poems, which according to Johnson he later liked to call his "Irish eclogues," were the product of "the Beginning of Sha Sultan Hosseyn's Reign."

This is not yet the end of the story. Ossian became one of the great figures for the rising generation and has retained a place, if a small one, in world literature. I say world literature, not English, for if there are only about five articles published on Macpherson in a given year, they are likely to be in four languages. This is one more of Macpherson's lingering achievements that has paled. Unlike most of the writers and critics of the eighteenth century, we are wary of poetry which can be successfully translated. Those who believed, like Addison early in the century, that the very test of true wit was translation, probably viewed the European vogue of Ossian as the final seal of poetic excellence. Macpherson himself was quick to seize on this evidence of his achievement in the preface to a later edition (1773):

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 operation must, however, be performed with skilful hands. A Translator, who cannot equal his original, is incapable of expressing its beauties.

Macpherson seems to have enjoyed some of the ironies of his position. Here the "counterfeit" is the poem which cannot be translated, and the translator must "equal his original" if he is to make it live in another language. Far from being a humble drudge, the translator must be on a par with the great poet who wrote the poem. Though Macpherson's comments refer to the continental translators of Ossian, he is taking the last step in overcoming if not fulfilling the conditions of greatness that the age demanded. After giving of necessity to Ossian what was really his, he finds a way of getting equal billing with his own creation.

The real moral of Macpherson's innovation can best be seen in the words which Richard Hurd, whose writings contain a congeries of the themes I have been discussing, quotes to refute contemporary critics in letter ten of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance: "they, who deceive, are honester than they who do not deceive; and they, who are deceived, wiser than they who are not deceived." Take this remark as a gloss on Blake's "I Believe both Mac-pherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient Is so…. I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other Poet whatever Rowley & Chatterton also": the importance of Macpherson's solution of the dilemmas of the late eighteenth-century poet should become clear. The factually false became imaginatively true, and the poets of the early nineteenth century generated their own myths.

The topic of Blakean inspiration is an intricate one, and I cannot do much more here than point to some of the implications of what I have been saying in the context of his work. Blake had his own version of the poetic wasteland found in Collins and Gray; it appears, significantly, in the poem "To the Muses":

Collins practically stops at such a position, but for Blake it is a starting point. One of the "memorable fancies" of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a little symposium on becoming a prophet-poet. Blake asks Isaiah and Ezekiel, who had come to dine with him, "how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them," and Isaiah replies:

I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain conflrm'd that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.

And to Blake's question, "does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?" Isaiah replies:

All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.

This advice from a master would suggest that the recovery of nerve (to adopt the phrase Peter Gay applies to the Philosophes) must come from within, especially during a period when the culture would seem to offer little support. It also suggests that the poet, who has become déclassé, can only find his proper society in those avatars, the prophet-poets of the past.

At this point we may see the solutions of Macpherson, Chatterton and Blake side by side. When writing to his friend Thomas Butts of his epic Milton, Blake could say, "I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity." Although this letter may not describe the poem we now know as Milton, it is consistent with Blake's emphasis in the completed poem and in Jerusalem as well on "dictation" as the means by which he writes. Macpherson was the translator; Chatterton, the discoverer's middleman; Blake, the secretary: by such mediations were poems written during this period.

Blake's Milton may provide us with one last clue to the problems the poet faced at this time. In typically perplexed fashion Henry Crabb Robinson reports of Blake that "the oddest thing he said was that he had been commanded … to write about Milton, and that he was applauded for refusing—he struggled with the Angels and was victor…. " Here, through the dark glass of Crabb Robinson's perception, is an emblem of the relation of the poet to his literary past: it is burden and blessing. He may wrestle with the angel of poetry, but he dare not let it go unless it bless him.

In an age when the best poets (with the notable exception of Johnson) believed that it was hardly possible to write great poetry, and when they also believed (including Johnson) that the greatest poetry had been written in previous historical periods, the first task of the literary artists we sometimes think of as forgers was to create "poets" capable of producing great poetry, to find voices which did not exist in their own culture, and we rightly think first not of Macpherson's Caledonian epics, but of Ossian; not of Chatterton's medieval poetry, but of Rowley. Staggering problems often require radical solutions; getting out from under the burden of Atlas may take some undignified trickery. Only consider: Blake, the poet who solved these problems by the most radical means while preserving his own integrity, produced epics whose idiosyncracies made them only twenty-five years ago, according to their foremost modern admirer, Northrop Frye, "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language…." By putting himself in direct imaginative contact with Homer and Milton, Isaiah and Ezekiel, Blake obtained his metaphors for poetry. And his contemporaries thought him mad rather than dishonest.