SOURCE: "The Vogue of Ossian in America: A Study in Taste," in American Literature, Vol. 2, No. 4, January, 1931, pp. 405-17.

[In the essay below, Carpenter analyzes the reaction of Americans to the works of Ossian, asserting that a century after the poems first appeared, they influenced in a positive way the poetry of Walt Whitman.]

I

It has been said so often as almost to become a truism that American literary taste has followed slowly after European literary taste at an interval of from twenty to fifty years.¹ For instance, in the eighteenth century English literary circles developed a love for wit and elegance, and, after a due period of incubation, the Hartford Wits and Washington Irving translated this vogue to America. Then the great Romantic writers captured English taste by storm, and several decades later a Romantic movement sprang up in America. Then came European realism, followed by the realism of Howells and his disciples. And so on. Usually the fact of imitation by American writers is accepted without question, and the lag in literary taste in this country is set forth as evidence of mental backwardness or torpor. The implication is that if only American writers had kept up with the trends of European taste more alertly, they would have achieved better results.

This generalization contains a large element of truth, but needs definition and qualification. The fact is not as simple as to be covered by so large a statement. The Hartford Wits, in their essential quality of satire and patriotic fervor, were so different from the London wits as to make comparison difficult. If Emerson and Whitman were pure Romanticists, then none of the various definitions of Romanticism so far formulated is adequate. It is the purpose of this study to take one acknowledged touchstone of European literary taste (or the lack of it), and to measure American taste by reference to it, over a period of almost a century.

The poems of Ossian, "translated by James Macpherson, Esq." appeared in England from 1760 to 1763,² and a century later Walt Whitman was still enthusiastic over their beauty. The vogue of these poems is extraordinarily significant, because they anticipated so perfectly the spirit of early European Romanticism, because they were so popular in both Europe and America, and chiefly because they were pretty certainly not authentically the poems of Ossian, the third-century Gaelic bard to whom Macpherson attributed them. From their first publication they were doubted, but Macpherson and his friends achieved so many plausible subterfuges that the public could never absolutely assure itself that the poems were not genuine Ossianic remains, and even now positive proof is lacking. The result was that for over a century, those who were naturally attracted to the poems might always accept them as genuine, merely by exercising sufficiently their "will to believe."

In general, we may trace the vogue of the Ossianic poems through three distinct phases in America. In the first, from 1766 to 1775, the poems immediately affected a few prominent writers, and gave notice of greater popularity to come. This period was cut short by the Revolution, after which, from 1786 to 1800, ensued a period of newspaper publicity and of enthusiasm among minor poets. Their popularity in this period was wide-spread, and, occurring thirty or forty years after their English publication, seems to bear out the generalization quoted above. But a third period of intermittent popularity followed this, during which the foremost writers of America became indebted to the poems, until finally Walt Whitman converted their rhythms and spirit into an entirely new type of poetry. The long accumulated influence which Ossian exerted over him proves how little alertness to the newest vogues has to do with the processes of literary creation. For Whitman, writing almost a century after, regarded these poems as, in a sense, classics, and drew from them an original inspiration entirely independent of the latest, up-to-the-minute standards of critical taste.

II

"Fingal and Temora, ancient epic poems,"³ were first offered to the American public by David Hall, a Philadelphia bookseller, in 1766, less than four years after their English publication. And four years later still, Jonathan Sewall, a minor New England poet, reported having "a copy of the poems … as early as 1770, when they were but little known in this country."⁴ By 1773, however, ten years after their English appearance, the poems were achieving popularity in America, as we may infer from two significant documents.

On February 25, 1773, Thomas Jefferson, from Virginia, wrote a long letter to Charles Macpherson, a merchant of his acquaintance in Edinburgh, expressing his enthusiasm over the newly discovered Ossian:

Dear Sir,—

Encouraged by the small acquaintance which I had the pleasure of having connected with you during your residence in this country, I take the liberty of making the present application to you. I understood you were related to the gentleman of your name (Mr. James McPherson), to whom the world is so much indebted for the elegant collection, arrangement, and translation of Ossian's poems. These pieces have been, and will, I think, during my lifetime, continue to be to me the sources of daily pleasures. The tender and sublime emotions of the mind were never before so wrought up by human hand. I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the north the greatest poet that has ever existed. Merely for the pleasure of reading his works, I am desirous of learning the language in which he sung, and of possessing these songs in their original form. Mr. McPherson, I think, informs us he is pos-sessed of the originals.… If they are printed, it will abridge my request and your trouble, to the sending me a printed copy; but if there be more [sic] such, my petition is that you would be so good as to use your interest with Mr. McPherson to obtain leave to make a manuscript copy of them, and procure it to be done.… I would not regard expense in doing this. I would further beg the favor of you to give me a catalogue of the books written in that language, and so send me such of them as may be necessary for learning it. These will, of course, include a grammar and dictionary.⁵

Apparently no reply was received from Charles Macpherson,—in any case none is recorded, and Jef-ferson's enthusiasm was allowed to cool somewhat. But that he retained his love for the poems in spite of this is proved by a sentence from the memoirs of François Jean de Chastellux, who tells us that in 1782 he and Jefferson spent "the greater part of a night with the poems and a bowl of punch."⁶

In New England at about the same time John Trumbull must have been reading these poems with different emotions, for in 1775 his satiric M'Fingal appeared, the hero of which took his name from Macpherson's "epic." Clearly Trumbull believed that the poems of Ossian were sufficiently popular to give point to his attack, although he did not attempt to carry the parody much beyond the title. The note which he appended to this, in the first edition, illustrates the spirit with which he approached Ossian, and furnishes a striking contrast to Jefferson's attitude:

See Fingal, an ancient epic poem, as the work of Ossian, a Caledonian bard, of the third century, by James M'Pherson, a Scotch ministerial scribbler.⁷

Apparently, however, Trumbull became uncertain of his censure, for in the 1813 edition the note was changed to read:

Ossian (son of Fingal), a Caledonian bard of the third century, whose poems were translated and published by James M'Pherson.

But finally, in the definitive edition of 1820, Trumbull returned to a position more nearly like his original one, saying:

See Fingal, an ancient epic poem, published as the work of Ossian, a Caledonian bard, of the third century, by James M'Pherson.⁸

In these later notes it seems as though Trumbull had been influenced both by the doubtful nature of the Ossianic controversy, as it raged in England and was echoed in America, and by the increasing popularity of the poems themselves among a large group of readers.

Thus, by the outbreak of the Revolution, only thirteen years after the appearance of the poems in England, they had excited both enthusiasm and scorn in America, and had been read with interest by men of note in both New England and Virginia. They had already suggested the title of a poem of major importance. There seems every probability that, if the Revolution had not intervened, they would have gained a quick popularity. As it was, they reasserted themselves as soon as the American public could again turn its attention to literary concerns.

III

Following the Revolution, the poems enjoyed much the same controversial fortune that they had had before, but the rise of new American magazines helped to spread their influence. The first American imitation of the Ossianic style appeared in 1786, in the newly published Columbian Magazine, under the title of "The Loves of Artho and Colval."⁹ In the same year the first attempt to versify the rhythmic prose of Macpherson's "translation" was published by Joseph Brown Ladd in his Poems of Arouet, at Charleston, the subject being "The Battle between Swaran and Cuchullin." And in the next year The Columbian Magazine was again responsible for the first true parody of Ossian. In "A Fragment, in Imitation of Ossian," the bard gave a humorous twist by addressing his lament to his insomnia, not his love:

I wept for the loss of no maiden with a breast of snow, neither did I mourn that wealth was denied me—… Oh! that I could but enjoy calmness and quiet, they have long been strangers to my weary couch.¹⁰

In 1790 the first American edition of the poems was published by Thomas Long of Philadelphia, the text being taken from Macpherson's "definitive edition" of 1773. The book sold popularly for two dollars.

During the next decade the poems of Ossian became the subject of continuous discussion and imitation. The Columbian Magazine was joined by The New York Magazine in promoting the controversy over the authenticity of the poems, and the general theory of primitive poetry. As usual the "tenderness and sublimity" of the Ossianic sentiment were pointed out, and critical authorities of Europe were cited to much length, although to little purpose. Ossian was frequently preferred to Homer and Vergil, and at times the names of Shakespeare and Milton were included.

Meanwhile various minor poets produced imitations of various sorts. Richard Alsop, usually included as one of the Connecticut Wits, made up for the adverse satire of Trumbull by versifying a fragment of Temora.¹¹ William Munford at Richmond, Josias Lyndon Arnold at Providence, Paul Allen at Salem, and Jonathan Sewall at Portsmouth, published other versifications.¹² Of these, Sewall was the most enthusiastic versifier, paraphrasing two entire books of Fingal, and parts of two more, and declaring that he had nearly completed the whole poem, which he might be induced to publish later (but which he never did).

Jonathan Sewall joined with John Blair Linn in paying Washington the tribute of comparison with the mythical Ossian. Linn was so extravagant in his poem: "The Death of Washington. A Poem in Imitation of the manner of Ossian," that his sense of propriety was challenged by an unregenerate reviewer who thought it a doubtful compliment to compare Washington with one who lived in "a savage state of manners."¹³ But if the trend of Linn's poem was enthusiastic, Sewall's specific comparison was more extravagant still, concluding with this "Address to Ossian":

No ancient hero may with thee compare,
Greece, Carthage, Rome, to rival thee despair,
America, this honor's kept for thee!
Like Fingal one is thine, and Washington is
  he!¹⁴

This flood of discussion and imitation of Ossianic poetry seems to furnish secure basis for the common generalization concerning American taste. The Ossianic poems did become popular in America about forty years after their English popularity. But it is important to notice that the only literature of importance which these poems inspired in America was written during their first and immediate period of popularity, in 1775, and, more significantly, during the final period during which journalistic interest in them had largely subsided.

IV

During the nineteenth century the name of Ossian appeared in print in America chiefly through the pages of the major American authors. To be sure, many minor writers still read Ossian, and the poems usually were to be found on the shelves of most libraries, along with other eighteenth century "classics."¹⁵ But the Ossianic controversy was no longer "news," and the poems no longer invited imitation. They had become of age, as it were, although their paternity was still dubious. And as might be expected, the characteristic qualities of the chief American authors are revealed by their divergent attitudes toward this problem child of English literature.

Emerson, perhaps, appears to best advantage. Although Ossian appears only once on his reading lists (in 1852), it is possible that he had read the poems earlier, and certain that he admired them. But he knew that they were not accepted as authentic by the best critics, and he did not praise them blindly. Yet he mentioned them in his essay on "Inspiration," in one of his oracular announcements, as follows:

You shall not read newspapers, nor politics, nor novels.… You may read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton,—and Milton's prose as his verse; read Collins and Gray; read Hafiz and the Trouveurs; nay, Welsh and British mythology of Arthur, and (in your ear) Ossian.

The parenthetical qualification is explained further by a more detailed criticism in his Journals for 1853:

For poetry, Ossian had superiorities over Dryden and Pope, but, though seizing the poetry of storms and of the rude British landscape and the sentiment as they had never seen it, yet wanting every other gift, wanting their knowledge of the world, their understanding, their wit, their literature, he made no figure but a ridiculous one in the hands of men of letters.

Thus Emerson qualified his expressions concerning Ossian, with due regard for reality. But we may guess from his enthusiasm over the various "translations of the Welsh Bards" (scarcely more authentic than Ossian) how high his opinion of Ossian might have been had he not been quick to recognize the probable facts. As it is, he read at least three books on the Welsh bards,¹⁶ and quoted them frequently, both in his Journals and in his Essays.

Thoreau, less shrewd than Emerson, accepted Ossian unreservedly, and appears in a less fortunate light. Eager to believe in their authenticity, he found an opportunity in the publication of The Genuine Remains of Ossian, literally translated … by Patrick Macgregor, MA. (London, 1841). Actually this book consists of a re-translation into English of the rough Gaelic "originals" which Macpherson left among his papers at the time of his death. He and his cousin had in all probability translated them from his first English text. Yet, although this new version never gained much acceptance among critics, Thoreau read it eagerly and took it for a vindication of Macpherson's honesty, with the result that he repeated all the old fallacies and primitivistic extravagances when he proclaimed his enthusiasm in a long passage near the end of his Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers:

The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects of the same stamp with the Iliad itself.…

Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian.…

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized society appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and of the arts of luxury.…

The grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry. Ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal language.… ¹⁷

And these opinions are repeated and expanded in a second passage some pages further on.

The attitude which vitiates Thoreau's opinions, of course, is that of the convinced primitivist. There can be no doubt that here he appears at his worst, because here he leaves his proper field of the natural appreciation of literature and life, and attempts the rôle of an historical critic, for which he was ill fitted. But even here there appears a characteristic energy and an affirmative quality in his attitude which sets it off from the standard effusions of the earlier sentimentalists.

Thoreau's wrong-headed assertions stand in sharp contrast to the careful renunciation of the poems by Longfellow. The elder poet seems to have admired them hardly less than Thoreau, but resolutely to have put them aside as unauthentic. In his old age, however, he cast a backward glance o'er the untravelled road, and confided to his Journal in 1872:

It came into my head today to read Ossian, which I have not looked into for forty years or more,—the strange rhapsody, "Did Ossian hear a voice? Or was it the sound of the days that are no more?" It is full of the figures of the mist and rain that shroud the northern shores of Scotland and Ireland, and cannot be wholly a forgery.¹⁸

James Russell Lowell, the sound critic, had no such regrets. As always, he stood at the opposite pole from Thoreau, and in his essay on the Concord writer, pointed out the weak spot in his critical armor, while at the same time demonstrating his own keenness of literary perception:

He [Thoreau] somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the historical evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy of those poems should be conclusive of their modernness."¹⁹

V

At the end of this series of American writers who came in contact with the poems of Ossian, and who were either attracted or repelled by them, stands Walt Whitman. Certainly he came under their influence more completely than did any of the others, and, fortunately for him, he had the examples of the others to guide him. He was naturally of the type of mind of Emerson and Thoreau, rather than of Lowell, but he largely avoided the pitfall into which Thoreau had fallen. At the same time he accepted the Ossianic poems as literature, because of their natural appeal to him; and we may be thankful that he did. It is probable that Macpherson's choice of a rhythmic prose for his "translations" had much to do with the genesis of Whitman's new type of free verse. Certainly Ossian ranked with the world's classics in its formative power over him; and, reënforcing the example of biblical poetry, it very possibly suggested to him the whole idea of his new poetic style.

Whitman himself freely acknowledged this indebtedness, both in his published works, and in his personal notes (later published by his literary executors). Attention has been called to it by his friend, H. B. Binns,²⁰ and by Professor Bliss Perry. Professor Perry's statement is especially suggestive:

There were at least two books, widely read in the fifties and on the shelves of many a family that did not own a Shakespeare, which seemed to prove that conventional poetic form was a negligible element in securing an emotional effect. One was Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, which Whitman had declaimed by the seashore in his youth, and which he read throughout his life. [The other was Tupper's Proverbial Philo-sophy.]²¹

In Whitman's "Notes and Memoranda from Reflections preparatory to writing Leaves of Grass," his attitude seems to vary between critical shrewdness and an unguarded acceptance of Ossian as primitive poetry; but always he is enthusiastic over the poems. In his first note he approaches the poems cautiously:

James Macpherson, 1737-1796. Ossian, the real Ossian, if ever there was one, is put down at 300 or 400 B.C. [sic]. Very likely a myth altogether. Ossian, bosky shield—wooden shield.

The Irish swear that Ossian belongs to them—that he was born, lived, and wrote in Ireland.²²

At the end of this entry he pasted in a clipping of Ossian's "Address to the Sun." And shortly after this he copied another "Ossianic paragraph" (not reprinted) with the following note of primitivistic enthusiasm, tempered by a certain shrewdness:

Ossian must not be despised—it means that kind of thought and character growing among a rude, combative, illiterate people, heroic, dreamy, poetical…

How misty, how windy, how full of diffused, only half-meaning words! How curious a study! (Don't fall into the Ossianic, by any chance.)

Can it be a descendant of the Biblical poetry? Is it not Isaiah, Job, the Psalms and so forth, transferred to the Scotch highlands? (or to Ireland)?²³

Towards the end of his life he recalled "some embryonic facts of Leaves of Grass," as follows:

Later [after my sixteenth year], at intervals, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country or to Long Island's sea-shores—there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than in any library or indoor room …) Shakespere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German "Nibelungen," the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.²⁴

It is significant that Ossian is the only non-classic name on the list.

After writing the Leaves of Grass he continued to read Ossian, and one entry practically sums up his whole attitude:

Reading Ossian awhile this morning.

Ossian—?

For all their restorations—perhaps something worse—there is to me so much race (to use an old Scotch word) of the prehistoric, primitively Irish and Caledonian thought and personality in these poems,—notwithstanding their general mistiness and gossamer character …—I have had more or less good from what they give out.²⁵

A later note is interesting in that it suggests that Whitman was struck by Thoreau's enthusiasm for Ossian. It was obviously written down after reading the passage from Thoreau's Week:

Ossian—Thoreau.

Macpherson 1737-1796. Chaucer.… Names of poets:—bards, scalds, minstrels, minne-sängers (love singers), and meister-sängers, troubadours, trouveurs..

Nibelungen.…²⁶

In Whitman's November Boughs, "A Thought on Shakespere" suggests that the author may have followed Thoreau's example in giving credence to the new "genuine Ossian":

The most distinctive poems—… the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle … or Chaucer, or Spenser, or bona fide Ossian, or Inferno—probably all had their rise in the great historic perturbations.…²⁷

But whether this is so or not makes little difference, for it was Macpherson's poetic prose which influenced Whitman far more than any primitivistic theory which he may partially have accepted. In Specimen Days one whole section, entitled "An Ossianic Night—Dearest Friends," and dated November, 1881, shows how Ossian recurred to his mind, even in old age, and fused itself with his daily experiences:

—Again back in Camden. As I cross the Delaware in long trips tonight, between 9 and 11, the scene overhead is a peculiar one—swift sheets of flitting vapor-gauze, follow'd by dense clouds throwing an inky pall over everything.… All silently, yet driven as if by the furies they sweep along, sometimes quite thin, sometimes thicker—a real Ossianic night—amid the whirl, absent or dead friends, the old, the past, somehow tenderly suggested—while the Gael-strains chant themselves from the mists—…

Several paragraphs of quotation follow, largely from the "Songs of Selma" of Ossian, and the passage concludes with a reminiscence of friends:

How or why I know not, just at that moment, but I too muse and think of my best friends in their distant homes—of William O'Connor, of Maurice Bucke, of John Burroughs, and of Mrs. Gilchrist—friends of my soul—staunchest friends of my other soul, my poems.

A letter from William O'Connor, in reference to this passage, reflects the opinion of a contemporary on the merits of Ossian:

I have just read Specimen Days, and seen the splendid compliment you pay me. To be remembered in connection with Ossian and on an Ossianic night, is the highest tribute possible.²⁸

All of this evidence is direct and clear. But many parallels could also be drawn between the phrasing of Ossian and of Whitman's poems. A careful comparison of the two should reveal much to the student of the processes of poetic inspiration. One parallel is sufficiently striking to warrant notice here, for the "Songs of Selma" (quoted in Specimen Days) beginning with the famous address to the evening star:

Star of descending night! Fair is thy light in
  the West!

strongly suggests the motif of the evening star in the great poem beginning:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd
And the great star early droop'd in the
  western sky in the night.…

Certainly Whitman did not "fall into the Ossianic, by any chance," but equally certainly he did "have more or less good" from what the poems gave out. Through Whitman, the poems influenced American literature profoundly. But probably Whitman would not have fallen so completely under their influence, had it not been for the example and enthusiasm of other American writers, and for the continuous popularity of the poems in America.

This American vogue of Ossian appears, then, as an interesting and an important phenomenon. It shows how, in the first stage of their popularity, the poems appealed quickly to a few American men of letters.—Then how, in their second period, the poems enjoyed a wide American notoriety and discussion, following the English vogue at an interval whose length was increased by the Revolution.—And finally, how, when the poems had become common property, various major American writers returned to them repeatedly; until Walt Whitman transmuted their dubious rhythms and phrases into the material of an authentic poetry of an utterly new and American type.

Notes

¹ For much of the material embodied in the first part of this article, the author is indebted to Mary Rives Bowman, The Reception of Ossian in America, a Master's thesis done at the University of Chicago in 1926. This thesis carries the history only to the year 1800, but for this earlier period it is very complete and detailed. The specialist should consult this work for further information.

²Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760; Fingal, 1761-2; Temora, 1762-3.

³ An advertisement in The Pennsylvania Gazette for January 23, 1766.

⁴Miscellaneous Poems (Portsmouth, 1801), p. 3.

⁵Works, ed. P. L. Ford (New York, 1904), II, 36-37.

⁶Travels in North America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, p. 45.

⁷M'Fingal (Boston, 1785), p. 6.

⁸Poetical Works, I, 4.

⁹ I, 50 (1786).

¹⁰The Columbian Magazine, I, 292 (February, 1787).

¹¹American Poems (Litchfield, Conn., 1793), pp. 255-264.

¹² For a complete bibliography of versifications, imitations, and magazine articles published in America, see Mary Rives Bowman, The Reception of Ossian in America, pp. 17-20.

¹³The Monthly Magazine and American Review, II, 308 (1800).

¹⁴Miscellaneous Poems (Portsmouth, 1801), p. 272.

¹⁵ See V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, II, 31, 111, 188.

¹⁶ Books by D. W. Nash, by Davies, and by Owen.

¹⁷A Week, ed. Odell Shepard (New York, 1921), pp. 254-258.

¹⁸ Samuel Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Final Memorials (Boston, 1887), p. 196.

¹⁹Prose Works (Boston, 1898), I, 369.

²⁰Life of Walt Whitman (London, 1905), pp. 58, 318.

²¹Walt Whitman (Boston, 1906), p. 90.

²²Writings of Walt Whitman (Camden edition), IX, 94.

²³Ibid., IX, 94-95.

²⁴Ibid., III, 55.

²⁵Ibid., IX, 178.

²⁶Ibid., IX, 227.

²⁷Ibid., VI, 124.

²⁸ Quoted by Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, III, 128.