When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland in 1760 at Edinburgh, he presented them in a form that undoubtedly had a good deal to do with the remarkable success of the little volume. His rhythmic prose, with its simple syntax and exotic and profuse imagery, had the appeal of novelty; and this style was easily preserved in translation, thus accounting for some of the vogue of Ossian on the continent. But most important of all, the rhythmic prose gave the impression of authenticity. Hugh Blair noted in his Preface to the Fragments that "the translation is extremely literal. Even the arrangement of the words in the original has been imitated"; and to those who, like Blair, believed in Macpherson the peculiar rhetoric of a passage like the following derived from the effort to be literal:

The wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day. The clouds are divided in Heaven. Over the green hills flies the inconstant sun. Red through the stony vale comes down the stream of the hill. Sweet are thy murmurs, O Stream! but more sweet is the voice of Alpin the son of the song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, and red his tearful eye. Alpin, thou son of the song, why alone on the silent hill? why complainest thou, as a blast in the wood; as a wave on the lonely shore?

This was thought to be an exact rendering of the Gaelic original, with only very minor liberties taken by the translator.

Indeed, it was not unreasonable for Macpherson's readers to think that he was only a translator. His unusual style was like nothing seen before in English prose or verse. George Saintsbury [in A History of English Prosody, 1908] has given an accurate description of one of its central features: "His chief special secret … is the sharp and absolute isolation of sentences of unequal length. There is hardly anywhere, in verse or prose, a style so resolutely cumulative, while maintaining such complete want of connection between the constituents of the heap. Each sentence conveys its meaning completely—as far as it goes." Because Macpherson used the short clause or phrase as a unit, his prose easily resolves itself into a series of short lines, many of which show the rhetorical device which Biblical critics call parallelism, that is, stating the same general idea in different images (as in the three clauses at the beginning of the quotation), or repeating words or syntactic structures in successive clauses. The lines usually have from three to six accents and can be scanned as a mixture of common metrical feet, particularly iambs and anapests, with a frequent substitution of dactyls. Sometimes there are fourteeners, or octosyllabic couplets, or even common measure, but regularity was never consistently pursued, and the distinctive rhythm derives from the use of lines with a varying number of accents. In this "measured prose" (Macpherson's term for it) the use of imagery is notable. The epithets ("darkbosomed ships," "White-armed Foinabragal") and the genitives of description ("the son of the song," "hill of storms," "dweller of battle's wing") are reminiscent of Homer or the Bible but no English poet had consistently employed them. Taken singly, the similes, metaphors, and personifications could be paralleled in many eighteenth-century poems, but their profuseness and the fact that they are almost all drawn from simple natural objects set off Macpherson's own practice. For his later collections, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), Macpherson used the same style, and all of the characteristics mentioned above can be illustrated from any page of the Ossian poems.

If Macpherson did not translate literally from Gaelic originals, then where did he get the idea for the poetic prose? The answers to this question that are given in standard accounts assume that Macpherson either invented it himself or derived it from English or classical models, the Bible being the one most frequently mentioned. In this respect modern commentators have advanced little beyond the approach of Malcolm Laing, the most perversely dedicated of those contemporaries who sought to expose Macpherson as a complete fraud. Besides attempting to discover every plagiarism that Macpherson might have committed, Laing also argued that the poetic prose was inspired by Bishop Lowth's explanation of the principle of parallelism in Hebrew verse; his argument is the ultimate source of the common idea that in some way Macpherson stole his style from that of the Biblical poetry. But this theory, and any others that do not take into account the influence of genuine Gaelic poems, are highly improbable when we consider the facts of Macpherson's career and the light that scholars of Gaelic have shed upon it. The remainder of this paper will be concerned with showing how this evidence helps to explain the origin of Macpherson's poetic prose, and, incidentally, with reviewing some aspects of the Macpherson problem about which there are widespread misconceptions. The paper's conclusion would probably not surprise specialists in Gaelic literature, but it is one which they themselves have not presented in any specific or developed way.

It has been clear for a long time that the inspiration for Macpherson's poems came from the genuine Ossianic ballad, a comparatively late development in the cycle of stories, poems, and legends concerned with the Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his band of warriors, the Fian. Assuming a standard form in the fifteenth-century, the ballads entered into the folk tradition of Scotland and Ireland, versions of them to be heard even today in the Western Islands. They employed a variety of meters and rime schemes but were almost always in quatrains of short end-stopped lines, with the simple syntax and the use of formulas characteristic of the genuine ballad in any culture. In subject matter they celebrated the significant events of the Fionn cycle and incidental adventures of the members of the Fian: the battle of Gabhair, for example, at which the great hero Osgar died; or the combat that occurred when a maiden fled to the Fian for protection from a pursuer. Some of the ballads are recited by Oiséan, the son of Fionn and the father of Osgar. He survives the Fian and, old and blind, sadly relates the great deeds of an heroic age that has disappeared. Sometimes he encounters St. Patrick, who, although sympathetic to the Fian, represents a new, non-heroic, Christian scheme of values. Before Macpherson wrote there was little public interest in the ballads in Scotland. The only version in print was a metrical English paraphrase of the story of Fraoch that the collector Jerome Stone published in The Scots Magazine in 1758. However, the manuscript collections that have survived show that the ballads were well known and frequently recited in those areas where Gaelic was still a living language. Campbell's Leabhar na Feinne (Book of the Fian) lists sixty-three versions of ballads that derive from the period between 1739 and 1760. And later authentic versions give greater evidence of the vitality of the ballad tradition. Anyone of Macpherson's age who knew Gaelic and who went among the Gaelic-speaking

population could easily have heard the old ballads of Fionn and the Fian.

That Macpherson in fact knew some of the ballads and used them as sources has been known to objective students of the controversy since 1805, when the Highland Society published its Report of the Committee … Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian. A recent study, Derick S. Thomson's "The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's Ossian" [see essay dated 1951], affirms the validity of the Committee's conception of Macpherson's procedure and spells out in a detailed way exactly what ballads Macpherson knew and when and how he used them. According to Thomson, "We can prove, in most cases conclusively, that Macpherson in the course of his writings made use of some fourteen or fifteen Gaelic ballads." Thomson also reviews what has been long known from contemporary accounts, that Macpherson, after the success of his Fragments and after he was subsidized to go to the Highlands to find an epic, became a close student of the ballads and was an eager collector of them, both from manuscripts and from oral recitation. One little-known fact is relevant here: in spite of many assertions in print to the contrary, there are Gaelic "originals" for many of Macpherson's poems. When he published the epic Temora in 1763, he included a Gaelic version of its seventh book; and in his last years he worked on a Gaelic edition of the complete works of Ossian. This version, about two-thirds complete, appeared posthumously in 1807, edited by friends from his manuscripts and notes. The two specimens of Gaelic poetry are known on philological and other grounds to be fraudulent, but in subject matter, style, and metrics they show their derivation from genuine ballads. Even if Macpherson had a good deal of help in composing them, they still prove his direct acquaintance with the ballad tradition.

But did Macpherson know much about the ballads before it became profitable for him to do so? This is the question that is central to our concern. To approach it we had best review the circumstances of the meeting with John Home that directly led to the publication of the Fragments. In the summer of 1759 Macpherson, an obscure tutor, and Home, famous in Scotland for his Douglas, were both at the spa Moffatt. The son of a farmer, Macpherson had grown up in the Highlands in the district of Badenoch, and had, as a boy, spoken Gaelic as well as English. His epic The Highlander (1758) had had no success. It and some juvenilia that have survived show Macpherson to have been a mediocre poet. Conventional in style, using clumsy blank verse or heroic couplets, too strongly influenced by Blair's Grave and Thomson's Seasons, his poems are of a kind that any young Scot with moderate talents might have written. Home struck up an acquaintance with Macpherson and, interested to find that he knew some of the vernacular literature of the Highlands, asked for translations, Macpherson at first refusing. But Home, as he reported later to the Highland Committee, persisted:

Mr Home, with some difficulty, persuaded him to try, and in a day or two he brought him the poem on the death of Oscar; with which Mr Home was so much pleased, that in a few days two or three more were brought him, which Mr Home carried to Edinburgh, and shewed them to Dr Blair, Dr Fergusson, Dr Robertson, and Lord Elibank….

Encouraged by Home, Macpherson went to Edinburgh, and with the support of Blair and others his Fragments were printed.

Of the fifteen Fragments (sixteen in the second edition), two have obvious ballad sources. Fragment VI parallels the popular ballad in which the Fian protect a maiden who flees to them for help. Macpherson later incorporated it into Fingal, the Fragment version being, according to Thomson, more faithful to the tradition. Fragment XIII is also not completely invented, following one of the Garbh mac Stairn ballads that describes the coming of a foreign invader to Ireland. It too is less distorted than Macpherson's later adaptation of it for Fingal. None of the other Fragments closely follows any known ballad source, although the heroes and their names are taken from the Fionn cycle, Fingal (i.e., Finn of the Gaels) being based of course upon Fionn himself, Oscur upon Osgar, Oscian upon Oiséan, Gaul upon Goll, and so on. The first poem that Macpherson brought Home, "The Death of Oscur" (printed as Fragment VII—Macpherson later changed Oscur to Oscar), was probably largely Macpherson's own invention, for it has Osgar lose his life in a way completely unknown to tradition. Instead of falling at Gabhair, Oscur here dies because of the fatal effects of love: both he and the warrior Dermid fall in love with the daughter of the slain chieftain Dargo, and the conflict of love and friendship leads to the death of all three. From the beginning, then, Macpherson never literally translated genuine ballads, but he did know something about them. And this knowledge is certainly relevant to the style of his English poems.

When one compares the Fragments with ballads of the kind that Macpherson might have known, it seems obvious that many of the peculiar features of his poetic prose result from an attempt to imitate the style of the ballads. What follows will point out some of the similarities between the two, with particular attention to examples from "The Death of Oscur," the first of the Ossian poems, and, by Home's testimony, in the printed version substantially the same poem that he had seen at Moffatt.

To begin with, the sharply paratactic and episodic quality of the poetic prose can be easily paralleled in any one of the ballads. Consider this passage from a "Lay of Osgar" that relates the traditional death at Gabhair:

Osgar
"Raise me now with you, Eanna [the Fian],
Never before have you lifted me;
Take me now to a clear mound,
That you may strip off me my armour."

Oiséan
"There was heard at the northern strand,
Shouts of people and edge of arms;
Our warriors suddenly started,
Before that Osgar was yet dead."

("Togaibh leibh mi nis Fhianna,
Nior thog sibh mi roimhe riamh;
Thugaibh mi gu tulaich ghlain,
Ach gu'm buin sibh dhiom an t-aodach."

"Chualas aig an traigh mu thuath
Eibheach sluaigh a's faobhar arm,
Chlisg ar gaisgich gu luath
Ma'n robh Osgar fhathasd marbh.")

But examples are hardly necessary here. The quality that Saintsbury thought to be Macpherson's "chief special secret" and that has often been traced to the influence of the Bible is clearly to be found in the Gaelic. In fact, as Bertrand H. Bronson has clearly explained [in The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 1949], it is a part of any genuine ballad style: "The textual line of the ballad, in singing, is seized by the ear as a musical phrase: it is this which has discouraged suspensions of meaning and kept the sentence-structure uncomplex. Each typical line of a ballad yields its total content as it is sung: … the conjunctions between phrase-lines are habitually progressive; and, or, for, nor, till; and if is likely to come before, not after, the apodosis." Any literal translation of the Gaelic ballads will give a sense of an original that has short, syntactically independent lines, the very quality that Macpherson's prose gives.

Moreover, because such a style so clearly limits discursiveness and development, the Gaelic ballads, like other ballads, proceed by repetition with variation (i.e., by parallelism), change abruptly from one scene to another, and avoid discursive or analytical transitions. Macpherson has certainly caught some of this. His obvious parallelisms ("The warriours saw her, and loved; / Their souls were fixed on the maid." "They reaped the battle together. / Their friendship was strong as their steel") represent the kind of variation upon a single idea that is typical of ballad literature. His piling up of similes is an aspect of this. More generally, in the Fragments one often notices the abruptness of the shift from speaker to speaker, from scene to scene, that also characterizes the genuine ballad.

The rhetorical pattern of question and response so common in the Fragments is also imitated from the Gaelic. "Why openest thou afresh the spring of my grief, O son of Alpin, inquiring how Oscur fell?" asks Ossian at the beginning of "The Death of Oscur," the whole poem being a dramatic reply to the implied question. "The son of Alpin" is a traditional epithet for St. Patrick in the ballads, many of them developing as Oiséan replies to Patrick's questions about the Fian. For example, in a ballad from the sixteenth-century Dean of Lismore's Book, Patrick asks to be told of the battle of Gabhair and Osgar's death: "O Oiséan, tell me tidings: when you fought the stout battle, when thine own son fell in the strife,—or didst thou attain speech with him?" And Oiséan's reply is the poem. In the twenty-nine poems in the Dean's Book there are six which proceed completely in a dialogue framework, the others often using dialogue within some other kind of framework. Macpherson's practice here seems close to the ballad tradition. Four of his Fragments are completely in dialogue form, and others make frequent use of the dialogue, the dialogues in "Oscur" between Oscur and Dargo's daughter being typical of the ballad style: "Why that gloom, son of Oscian? what shades thy mighty soul?" "Though once renowned for the bow, O maid, I have lost my fame."

In his tracing of sources Thomson has pointed out one specific stylistic parallel: "Again, in style, Macpherson is sometimes close to the ballads, especially in his use of parenthetical or descriptive phrases. … In the bal lads these phrases and lines have no particular relevance to the context, but are used to fill out the stanza, or to provide a rhyme." By this he appears to have in mind such phrases as "son of Ronan, " "Goll, the Foe of Fionn," "Caoilte, the stout warrior," "Oiséan of brave deeds"; "The warrior ceased not from his warlike work, Conlaoch the furious and over-whelming" ; "Think not but to resist him, O King of blue blades and terrible." In "The Death of Oscur" there are such comparable examples as "O son of Alpin, " "Prince of the warriours, Oscur my son," "son of Morny, " and from others of the Fragments, "Gaul, the tallest of men," "Crimora, bright in the armour of man" "gloomy son of Mugruch, Duchommar." Here the use of the "son of" epithet is obviously taken from the Gaelic mac formula. And Macpherson in the epithets sometimes follows traditional ascriptions. Tallness is ascribed to Goll in the Dean's Book—"a warrior fierce and tall," and just as the maidens in Macpherson always have "breasts, as the new-fallen snow," so are they often in the ballads "fair-breasted" (uchtgheal) or "white bosomed" (gealocht. Incidental ly, Macpherson's frequent use of the "O" of address before names and epithets is taken from the Gaelic a form—a Phádraig (O Patrick), a Ghuill (O Goll).

The profuseness of Macpherson's imagery is not typical of the ballads, but the use of imagery from nature and simple objects is something the two have in common. And occasionally the ballad writers were profuse. Here, for example, is a stanza from the Fraoch ballad that Stone collected about 1750:

Blacker than the raven was the growth of his hair.
Redder was his cheek than the blood of the fawn;
Smoother than the foam of streams,
Whiter than snow was the skin of Fraoch.

One can see how a description like this from the Dean's Book—"Brighter her radiance than the sun, and her disposition yet nobler than her form. The maiden who came from afar, we too met her graciously."—parallels the more elaborated description of Fragment VI: "Her breast was like the snow of one night. Her cheek like the bud of the rose. Mild was her blue rolling eye: but sorrow was big in her heart." Both describe the maiden who fled to the Fian, and Macpherson's practice here gives some insight into how he put together "The Death of Oscur." The comparable description of Dargo's daughter—"His daughter was fair as the morn; mild as the beam of night. Her eyes, like two stars in a shower: … her breasts, as the new-fallen snow …"—show Macpherson using in an original story the traditional ballad technique of describing a beautiful maiden in terms of images from nature.

Two final parallels can be easily demonstrated. The ballads abound with genitives of description in the Gaelic na form: "the Hill of the Fian" (Tulach na Féine); "Sons of the Craftsman" (Clann na Cearda); "O cleric of the fair croziers" (A chléirigh na mbachall mban). This form is the source of Macpherson's incessant genitives, for his "Prince of the warriours," "brook of the mountain," "brook of the hill," "sons of the mountain." Finally, we may note the inversions. Macpherson is particularly fond of beginning a line with an adjective or verbal ("Fixed on a tree by the brook of the hill," "Blessed be that hand of snow," "Sightless are his aged eyes"). Because of the nature of the Gaelic line any attempt to translate literally would result in such inversions. In this respect Hugh Blair's Preface to the Fragments presented a half-truth when it observed that the literalness of the translation caused "some inversions in style, that otherwise would not have been chosen."

These examples are sufficient, I think, to show how in both general and specific ways Macpherson's style derives from the genuine ballads. If he had been called upon to do so, Macpherson could probably have turned any one of the Fragments into a Gaelic poem that would have resembled a genuine poem, in something like the way Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner resembles a genuine English ballad. In fact, this is exactly what Macpherson later did when he, perhaps with the help of some collaborator, created the Gaelic Ossian, in which some of those parts of the Fragments that were incorporated into the Fingal and Temora collections can be found in ballad form. Fragment XIII, for example, which became the beginning of Fingal, can be found in Gaelic in the volume of 1807.

What all this points to is that if Macpherson, after Home's demand, had conceived or even worked out in detail a Gaelic ballad that imitated the genuine ballad style, conventions, and atmosphere, while giving the hero Osgar a novel fate; and if he had put this into English prose, attaining a kind of rhythm by avoiding clusters of accented and unaccented syllables; then the result would be very much like what we have in "The Death of Oscur." The problem is, of course, not solved that simply. The ballads are primarily heroic, not romantic. They contain details of daily life, sometimes have a satiric or comic tone, and often simply narrate the deeds of the warriors. In contrast, the fifteen Fragments are all elegiac and thirteen of them are concerned with unhappy love. Macpherson must have approached Gaelic poetry with a taste already formed, a taste like that of many young men of his time. The elegiac tone of those ballads attributed to Oiséan and the occasional romantic love stories told in the ballads are what must have appealed to him. His juvenilia and the sources he plagiarized from show a fondness for the graveyard school of poetry, a practice of the kind of poetic diction used by Gray, a passion for sentiment, and an appreciation of striking images, whether found in the Bible, Homer, Virgil, or Milton. The process of selection that such a taste would impose upon his originals and the proviso that the translation be in prose give the simplest explanation of the origin of his style.

That Macpherson used prose has inspired some of the searching for English models. But why he did so can be explained in a straightforward way. This was really not his own idea. In the Preface to the 1773 Works of Ossian, he observed that his original intention had been to publish in verse, but "he had yielded to the judgment of others in a mode which presented freedom and dignity in expression instead of fetters, which cramp the thought, whilst the harmony of language is preserved." There would have been some advantages to using traditional poetic forms, but "it is, however, doubtful, whether the harmony which these poems might derive from rhyme … could atone for the simplicity and energy which they would lose." It is unlikely that he was lying about this when we consider that Home and Blair would have seen the lie. That they encouraged him to work in this form is the result, I think, of the qualities they wanted in the translations, something literal, true, genuine, close to the Gaelic, and yet also "poetic," smooth, capable of stirring emotion. These indeed were the general demands of the admirers of exotic literatures, very few of whom could read the original poetry of the Scots, the Welsh, the Scandinavians, the Lapps, the Arabs, and the Iroquois (a not unusual concatenation in the 1760s). Such an audience would not have been satisfied by the old scholarly tradition of translations into Latin, as used, for example, in George Hickes' Linguarum Veterum Septentriolum Thesaurum (1705), nor by translations in the tradition of Dryden or Pope. Enthusiasts like Blair and Bishop Percy were strongly interested in the culture portrayed in the exotic poetry and wanted translations that did not distort it. Besides the poems of Ossian, such works as Evan Evans' Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764) and Bishop Percy's Song of Solomon (1764) are translations that satisfied these demands of the age. We may note also that before Macpherson the literal prose translation had been practiced and had the support of some critics. In this respect the close relationship between the Edinburgh circle and French thought and culture is probably important. It was common in France to publish prose translations of foreign poetry, and the influential Abbé Batteux had argued in his Cours de Belles Letters that the only satisfactory way to translate poetry was by prose. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the section of the Cours dealing with translation was published in Edinburgh a few months before the Fragments came out.

Given Macpherson's sensibility, his knowledge of the authentic ballads, and the interests of his supporters, one can see clearly the genesis and continuation of the style of the Ossian poems. What must have been a sudden inspiration to satisfy Home's demand was "approved," and Macpherson had found an instrument that would take him from obscurity to fame. That he did in fact reflect and adapt some of the qualities of Gaelic originals is at least a partial clue to his success, and also helps to explain some of the faith of his supporters, most particularly of those who had some acquaintance with Gaelic literature. And, in this respect, his friends must be given credit for being more nearly right about Macpherson than those who thought that nothing in the Ossian poems derived from an authentic native tradition.