SOURCE: "Ossian and the Canon in the Scottish Enlightenment," in Ossian Revisited, edited by Howard Gaskill, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, pp. 109-28.

[In the following essay, Price studies the factors that propelled the works of Macpherson's Ossian temporarily into the canon of English literature.]

The publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763) illustrates a concerted, if an unusual, attempt to expand the literary canon: concerted in that there seems in retrospect to have been a conspiracy among some of the Scottish literati to force the poem into the canon, and unusual in that the works being thus forced were not 'new' at all but had the authority of antiquity. Richard Sher has commented that 'Macpherson, it is true, produced the Ossianic "translations" themselves, but the Edinburgh "cabal" provided the inspiration, incentive, financial support, letters of introduction, editorial assistance, publishing connections, and emotional encouragement that brought Ossian into print.'¹ The antiquity of Macpherson's 'translations' was, of course, a subject of dispute, and it is possible that the dubious nature of these publications militated against their ready incorporation into the traditional canon of English literature. For example, when the Aberdonian philosopher and literary theorist John Ogilvie, after the publication of his most important work, Philosophical and Critical Observations on the Nature, Characters, and Various Species of Composition (1774), proposed to John Murray that he might comment on Ossian in another book, Murray wrote to him, on 4 April 1777, to say:

Had you entered upon the subject of the authenticity of the poems of Ossian at the first publication of Rona it might have attracted some notice & promoted partisans to your book. But the season is now over. Dr Johnsons Journey is fast asleep, and no person cares much whether Ossians poems are authentic or not. For my own part therefore I would disuade you from employing yourself in this cause, as I am convinced it would prove unprofitable.²

In the event, Murray was wrong about whether anyone cared about the authenticity of the poems: the subject continued to excite comment, and the turn of the century ushered in one formidable commentary and one conscientious inquiry, respectively, Malcolm Laing's The History of Scotland … With [a Dissertation] on the Supposed Authenticity of Ossian's Poems (1800) and the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (HSR), 'drawn up, according to the directions of the committee', by Henry Mackenzie (1805).

Attitudes in the Scottish Enlightenment towards the Ossian poems were, not surprisingly, diverse and inconsistent. The efforts to bring them into the accepted canon of literature are almost a case study for ways in which the canon can develop and can be developed. There is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that there was not only a concerted attempt to give it some sort of canonical status but some genuine enthusiasm among literary theorists for expanding the canon by incorporating into it a work of literature hitherto unknown, and which, of course, reflected credit on the literary genius of Scotland. This determination, or desire, also led to a certain unanimity of sentiment with respect to the poems, and even produced a certain degree of unanimity in critical language. Henry Home (Lord Kames) wrote in his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) that

Every scene in Ossian relates to hunting, to fighting, or to love, the sole occupations of men in the original state of society; there is not a single image, simile, or allusion, but what is borrowed from that state, without a jarring circumstance.³

A few years later, the Gaelic scholar John Smith, in his Galic Antiquities (1780), acknowledged his indebtedness both to Kames and Hugh Blair, and sometimes his critical vocabulary would seem to derive from Kames as well:

The language too, and the structure, of these poems, like every other thing about them, bear the most striking characters of antiquity. The language is bold, animated, and metaphorical; such as it is found to be in all infant states; where the words, as well as the ideas and objects, must be few; and where the language, like the imagination, is strong and undisciplined.⁴

Kames and Smith are, to be sure, chiefly concerned to vindicate the authenticity of the poetry, but their arguments are couched in the kind of critical language that aims not just at compelling acceptance of the poetry's authenticity but also at impelling the reader towards incorporating the work into the accepted canon of literature. By the time Smith was writing, in 1780, the views that he expressed typify the standardized critical vocabulary that Ossianic exponents employed; the language 'echoes', not only Kames but the theoretical and critical taxonomies that were being invoked to give aesthetic and cultural validity to Ossian's writings. Kames, quoting extensively from Ossian, bases his argument on the fidelity of Ossian's 'pictures' to life as it must have been experienced in early times: the appeal is a critical one, not a circumstantial, historical, or sociological one. Ossian is true to what life must have been like; therefore, it is great literature, because its narratological strategy embraces and enforces verisimilitude.⁵

Both Kames and Smith express views which can be traced back to Hugh Blair, who is often associated more with the authenticity dispute than with the critical fortunes of Ossian's poems. His seventy-five page quarto pamphlet, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), is probably the pre-eminent document both in the authenticity dispute and in contemporary critical analysis of the poetry. Associating the origin of language with strong, primitive emotions, Blair produces, for a stuffy, clerical professor of literature, a rather astonishing criterion for defining poetry: uncultivated ages nevertheless have the 'vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry'.⁶ Blair begs a number of questions in this description, but he nails his critical colours emphatically to the mast of society's origin:

Hence, poetry, which is the child of 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 favourite of nations [3; WO, 2:316]

This rather curious species of analogical reasoning is no more valid than the programmatic primitivism that Blair invokes as a critical topos, but it does abundantly illustrate the context in which he wishes Ossian's poems to be seen at the same time that it promulgates a critical vocabulary that depends on metaphors for its aesthetic valorization of the poems. That 'vehemence and fire … the soul of poetry' that one finds in uncultivated ages is reciprocated in the works of Ossian, which have the 'fire and enthusiasm of the most early times' as well as 'an amazing degree of regularity and art' (11; WO, 2:332).

Throughout his discussion, Blair has constantly before himself and his readers the examples of Homer and Virgil: the critical principles that are suitable for them are suitable for Ossian. Although Blair regrets that the poetry fails to discover 'some knowledge of a supream Being' since the 'most august and lofty ideas that can embellish poetry are derived from the belief of a divine administration of the universe' (40; WO, 2:378-9), these theological encroachments upon aesthetic criteria do not last for long. At the end of his tract, Blair concludes that: 'if to feel strongly, and to describe naturally, be the two chief ingredients in poetical genius, Ossian must, after fair examination, be held to possess that genius in a high degree.' Captious critics may dwell upon slight defects, but Ossian can 'make his readers glow', and if he 'flows not always like a clear stream, yet he breaks forth like a torrent of fire' and no 'reader can rise from him, without being warmed with the sentiments of humanity, virtue and honour' (74; WO, 2:440-1). Blair's critical vocabulary, with its curious, if conventional, genuflection in the direction of a Supreme Being, programmatically invokes one of those elemental features of nature that a primitive society would have most valued—fire—in order to provide a criterion that the judicious reader can aggregate to himself and to his own time.

There is a certain amount of cunning, then, in Blair's analysis of Ossian, since he will not be side-tracked by the authenticity issue, and insists on bringing Ossian into the canon by the sort of rigorous critical examination that he was giving to the epics of Homer and Virgil in his lectures. Blair's literary criticism is often thought to be a little simple, lacking the subtlety found in David Hume or Adam Smith, and the theoretical ambitiousness of Edmund Burke or Lord Kames. Blair is, in comparison, simple, but not so much so when he is seen as a practising and practical literary critic rather than as a theorist. The consideration of Ossian is very shrewdly judged (though not ultimately convincing), and the emotional language that he deploys in attempting to canonize Ossian is addressed to that larger audience that was buying and enjoying the poetry, and which seemed, at worst, indifferent to the question of its authenticity.

When Blair came to publish his lectures in 1783 he seems to have been sufficiently rattled by the authenticity controversy—and perhaps by recently publicized suspicions of his own complicity in the deception—to diminish his enthusiasm for Ossian. In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, Ossian's 'chief excellency lies in painting to the heart' (BL, 2:380); he repeats, briefly, what he had said in the Critical Dissertation about the sublime in Ossian, but now the primitive fire has been deposed by 'beautiful and correct Metaphors' (BL, 1:307), 'the most beautiful instances' of apostrophes (BL, 1:339), and a 'happy and delicate' simile (BL, 1:345). Blair adjusts his critical vocabulary, if not his aesthetic principles, in order to embrace aesthetic features sufficiently universal to validate the place of Ossian in the canon.

Even when he published his lectures, Blair had not abandoned his contention that part of Ossian's appeal lay in his representation of the sublime. William Smith's popular translation of Longinus' treatise on the sublime had first been published in 1739, and in 1757 Burke's even more influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared.⁷ Intellectual history could be nicely codified if one were able to prove that Macpherson had in fact read Burke and had then reconstructed his source material in a way that would make the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Fingal, and Temora appeal in concrete terms to those readers who had responded enthusiastically to Burke's abstract discussion of the sublime. There is no concrete evidence to prove that Macpherson did read Burke, though he may have learned of Burke's theories from Blair. As is well known, the reviews in the Annual Register, which Burke edited at the time, in 1760 of the Fragments and Fingal in 1761 drew attention to the works' 'sublime' features. It would be pleasant to think that Burke wrote the review and thus took the opportunity to expand the boundaries of his genre by adding Ossian's poetry to it, but there seems to be no confirmation that he could have. Nevertheless, the reviews in the Annual Register had the effect of setting a pattern, since most of its admirers and defenders made use of the revitalized mode of writing that Burke had done much to popularize.⁸ The association of Ossian's poems with the idea of the sublime thus occurs early in the critical history of the poetry and is undoubtedly one of the features that pushed the work, however temporarily, into the canon. Samuel Holt Monk, in The Sublime (1935), points out that the review of Fingal in the Annual Register for 1761 drew analogies between Homer and Milton,⁹ and that kind of typological description very quickly composes its own taxonomy. More recently, Leah Leneman has asserted that Macpherson 'knew that what the literati wanted was a polished work which exemplified the sublime according to the rules they had formulated from their study of the ancients, and that is what he gave them'.¹⁰ This might have the effect of suggesting that the canon is fixed and immutable, and that writers try to adapt their talents and abilities to fit into a recognized canon rather than trying to change, expand, or develop the canon.

The canon of literature is, of course, neither fixed nor fixable; its very instability is one of its vitalizing characteristics. In the case of Ossian, it may be possible to think that Burke's influential and much reprinted treatise did give readers a taste for a mode of expression that was not catered for in contemporary English literature: Milton was the great English poet of the sublime, but his most important immediate successors—Dryden and Pope—did not offer much in the way of poetry that produced the ineffable feelings to which the sublime was said to give rise.

In emphasizing the sublime, early discussions of Ossian may have drawn attention away from the genre to which the poetry was often assigned: the epic. The conflation of the epic and the sublime is not, however, without its problems critically, since it raises a question about what 'the sublime' is. Even if one could dispense with the 'authenticity' issue, which, in purely critical terms, is perhaps irrelevant, a reader would still be confronted with a generic anomaly. Writing about modes and subgenre, Alastair Fowler observes that

Although genre terms are notoriously inconsistent, they exhibit at least one regularity. The terms for kinds, perhaps in keeping with their obvious external em-bodiment, can always be put in noun form ('epigram'; 'epic'), whereas modal terms tend to be adjectival. But the adjectival use of generic terms is a little com-plicated.¹¹

'Sublime' can be either a noun or an adjective, and commentators on Ossian refer either to 'the sublime' in it or point out passages which are 'sublime'. Is the sublime a sub-genre? or a mode? or both? Contemporary readers had little doubt that the work was both epic and sublime, terms which can be classed as either noun or adjective ('sublimity' as a noun makes only infrequent appearances in analyses of Ossian).

In preparing a translation of the ancient texts that he had professed to find, Macpherson was not unaware that his public was expecting something fairly spectacular. As Fiona Stafford points out, Macpherson 'had preconceived ideas about the genre of the new poem, influenced by the knowledge that his patrons were expecting him to have retrieved an epic' (Stafford, 125). What Macpherson had found did not have epic proportions or features that could unambiguously be regarded as sublime, so the decision about the genre to which the poetry could aspire was largely his, and he set about constructing, or re-constructing, an epic. That its early critical history also emphasized its 'sublime' qualities had both an adverse as well as a positive effect on its canonical status.

Ossian also burst upon the literary world at a time when Scotland was just beginning to be aware of its intellectual giants, its new political status, and its prospects for improvements in culture, education, society, and economic welfare. David Hume was suspicious of their authenticity when the Fragments were first published, but he was willing to be persuaded by reasoned arguments and documentary evidence. Writing to Sir David Dalrymple on 16 August 1760, he noted that 'Adam Smith … told me, that the piper of the Argyleshire Militia repeated to him all those poems which Mr Macpherson has translated, and many more of equal beauty.' Referring to Thomas Gray's admiration for the poems, in spite of his doubts about their authenticity, he thought such approval 'may convince us, that our fondness of them is not altogether founded on national prepossessions, which, however, you know to be a little strong' (HL, 1:329, 331). Hume's readiness to find in his country's cultural aspirations an inclination to accept unquestioningly something that might prove to be spurious is a measure not only of his scepticism but also of Scotland's increasing sense of its national identity, if not its cultural hegemony; and of its need to have a literature in whose antiquity could be found a hitherto unknown literary masterpiece.

One of the most enthusiastic proponents of the merits of Ossian was a slightly obscure Scottish minister in Aber-deenshire, William Duff (1732-1815), whose first critical work was An Essay on Original Genius and its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, particularly in Poetry (1767). Duffs obscurity is partially due to the seeming simplicity of his ideas, a misleading simplicity because the ideas were absorbed into late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary theory and aesthetics, without Duffs receiving much cre-dit or attention. Doubtless some of his observations and ideas are derivative, as, for example, when he writes in the Essay on Original Genius, that 'Homer wrote his Iliad and Odyssey, when there was not a single picture to be seen in Greece; and Ossian composed Fingal and Temora, when none of the Arts, whether liberal or mechanical, were known in his country.¹² This cultural primitivism can, of course, be readily or easily traced back to Blair, but it nevertheless bespeaks not only a certitude about Ossian's genius and his value to the arts in general and literature in particular but also proclaims Ossian's right to be associated with the greatest names in creative achievement. The genius of Ossian and his resonances with Homer provide the basis for Duffs cultural primitivism:

While the Works of Homer and Ossian however are in our hands, these, without any other examples, will be sufficient to establish the truth of the first part of our assertion, That in the early periods of society, original Poetic Genius will in general be exerted in its utmost vigour. [286]

Unfortunately, the truth of Duff s assertion is partially invalidated by our subsequent knowledge that Ossian owed at least as much to Macpherson as it did to his sources. Duffs unhesitating conflation of the two poets does not, however, entirely subvert his observation, since whatever original genius 'Ossian' possessed survived throughout the ages or provided at least an inspiration for Mac-pherson's reworkings of his source material.

Duff rather spoiled his argument for posterity by inscribing other names in the archives of poetical genius: 'The names of Young, Gray, Ogilvie, Collins, Akenside, and Mason, as they do honour to the present age, will probably be transmitted with reputation to posterity' (288). Again, one would not be able to accuse Duff of being entirely incorrect, since at least the writings of Young, Gray, and Collins are reread in the late twentieth century with pleasure and enthusiasm, and have some place, not entirely tenuous, in the literary canon. Akenside, Ogilvie, and Mason are unlikely to be read by anyone except postgraduate students in English literature, or their supervisors, but their exclusion from the canon might be as difficult to justify as the inclusion of Young, Gray, and Collins. That is to say, the criteria for inclusion/exclusion would need to be the same: one cannot jettison the latter three by proclaiming them to be defective in critical terms that are substantially different from those which affirm the affectiveness and effectiveness of the poetry of the former.

Having outlined a theory of original genius in 1767, Duff followed it up with a practical demonstration of its manifestations in 1770, Critical Observations on the Writings of the most celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry. In the intervening years, Duff's certitude about Ossian's genius had not waned; if anything it is stronger: 'The next great original Genius in Poetry [after Homer], occurring in order of time is Ossian', though this assertion is somewhat qualified by a note shortly later in the text:

The reader will perhaps suspect, that by attributing any defects that may appear in the poetry of Ossian to the manners of the age of the state of society in which he lived, the author has contradicted a position he laid down, and endeavoured to prove, in the last section of a preceding work, that the early and uncultivated pe-riods of society in which the age of Ossian must doubtless be ranked, were the most favourable to the display of original Poetic Genius.¹³

Duff's primitivistic sentiments are still with him, but a society which is merely 'favourable' to original genius is rather different from one lacking liberal or mechanical arts, and a 'display' of original genius lacks the cogency of an original genius 'exerted in its utmost vigour'. In spite of the scepticism that authors like Hume harboured about Blair's defence of Ossian's authenticity and other doubts about Macpherson's text and his honesty, of which Duff may not have been aware, he endorses a primitivistic source for Ossian's genius, which at the same time nicely accounts for Ossian's genius.

It is easy to become impatient with Duff's seemingly constant begging of essential critical questions, and just when one feels that an argument is about to emerge, Duff's assumptions about the nature of primitive societies interpose:

Ossian has presented us with … characters not fictitious, any more than the events they are employed to effectuate, but real; for as the manners and spirit of the times had a natural tendency to propagate generosity of sentiment, and martial virtue, the person most eminent in these, became by undoubted right the hero of his poems, and he had no occasion for inventing one altogether imaginary. [Critical Observations, 71]

The criterion enunciated here—that of 'reality'—is assumed to be essential for any work proclaiming its admissibility into the canon. Indeed, one could easily argue that Duff's appeal to the 'manners and spirit of the times' is irrelevant: Duff is arguing that the way in which Os-sian's characters imitate reality is what gives them aesthetic vitality. Ossian was writing about people who really existed, or who were even known to him, and their virtues and accomplishments naturally gave rise to their embodiment in artistic form.

This is not to suggest that Duff has denied to Ossian the imaginative creativity that one would associate with other canonical authors. The primitivism that has so often seemed to be only a cultural spasm can be incorporated into an argument, and Duff makes clear that he has had his reasons for declaring the features of primitive society to be vitally functional in the poetry of Ossian:

There are certain original, and if we may be allowed the expression, radical passions, deeply implanted in the human mind, which, though variously modified by the shifting scenes of successive ages, exist under one form or another in every period of society. There are other passions wholly adventitious, which like smothered fire lie slumbering in the human heart, perhaps for many centuries, till the destined hour arrive when the breath of ambition, the instigations of avarice, and the allurements of sensual pleasure kindle the hidden sparks, and blow them into a flame. [Critical Observations, 75-6]

Duff is clearly pleased by having his theories about original poetic genius confirmed by the appearance of the Ossianic poems, and he almost revels in the alleged superiority of primitive genius to that found in refined and developed times. Hugh Blair's metaphors about Ossian's 'fire' also seem to add to the critical conflagration, but the determinism inherent in 'destined hour' imposes necessity upon the literary canon. The remainder of Duff's language emphasizes the heightened and excited emotions that must be present to bring forth the creative genius that he so much admires. Exactly what function 'the instigations of avarice' have is not clear. Nor, indeed, is it clear what Duff means by this term, but yoking together ambition, avarice, and sensual pleasure in the service of poetry, genius, and the canon at least illustrates the extent to which Duff was trying to give voice to new ideas about literary merit and a reader's response to 'new' literature.

Duff's two works seem to me unjustly neglected in any study of the Scottish Enlightenment, but, since the history of the concept of 'genius' itself has received very little scholarly or critical attention, perhaps it is not surprising that Duff has not received his due.¹⁴ One would think, however, that at least his contemporaries writing on the same subject and living in the same area of Scotland might have commented on, or at least alluded to, his writings on 'genius', especially since he devoted so much attention to the Ossianic cause cèlébre. Alas, when Alexander Gerard came to write the sequel to his Essay on Taste (1759), An Essay on Genius (1774), he took no notice of Duff's work; Ossian is mentioned directly only once and Blair's Dissertation is quoted once. Yet this one mention of Ossian does betray the means by which other writers and readers were attempting to canonize Ossian:

Ossian's imagery is so different from what would be suggested by the present state of things, that a modern writer could scarce bring himself to run into it, much less to preserve it uniformly, by the utmost efforts of study, or even by designed imitation; but it is perfectly agreeable to all that we can conceive of the face of nature and the state of society in the times when that author is supposed to have lived.¹⁵

In other words, the poems of Ossian could not have been written by modern, refined, and correct authors, but the poetry is perfectly consistent with the literary achievements of a rude, uncultivated age.

Without committing himself one way or the other with regard to the question of Ossian's authenticity, Gerard has nevertheless inscribed a sub-text for any attempted canonization of the poems. The primitivism apparent (though perhaps not inherent) in Macpherson's fragments and tales provides, or at least seems to provide, a sharp and telling contrast with the advance of civilization in Scotland in the eighteenth century. It is not difficult to find Scots who felt that the new discoveries and advances in philosophy and the sciences were supplanting older and better values: the eighteenth century was no different from our own in that respect. The literary canon required both stability and innovation, and Ossian could supply both. Here was an author, otherwise unknown, who spoke across the ages to a culture vastly different from his own and yet who managed to impart some of the values of an older culture to one unaware of the existence of so accomplished a literary exponent in ancient times. While Gerard feels that it would be impossible in late eighteenth-century Scotland for a writer to produce the kind of poetry attributed to Ossian, he could readily appreciate not only its artistic qualities but could approve of the sentiments and values on display. Duff goes further and asserts that only in such a primitive culture would we be likely to find so ringing an endorsement of eternal truths.

The somewhat crude anthropology that was thus called forth to serve as justification for incorporating Ossian into the canon ultimately involves itself in false syllogisms: ancient cultures produces poets like Ossian, because his poems incorporate those values that we know to have been found in ancient societies. Asserting that historical facts were handed down to posterity in poetry before the invention of writing, or in countries where it was not known, John Gardiner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in his Essays, Literary, Political and Oeconomical (1803), argued that the strongest proof of this lay in the

preservation of the poems of Ossian in the Highlands of Scotland, without the assistance of manuscript; for many who sung or recited some of these poems, could neither read nor write their own language. The trans-mission, however, of these poems from parents to children, for upwards of sixteen hundred years, is a circumstance scarcely to be paralleled in the history of any other country in the world.¹⁶

By joining cultural primitivism with the uniqueness of Highland culture, Gardiner is able to find, if not create, ample evidence to suggest that the admission of Ossian to the written canon is only a confirmation of a centuries-old tradition. Gardiner's mixture of speculation, generalization, and question-begging would drive a logician to other products of the Highlands, but imbedded in his half-baked sociology/anthropology is a certain amount of clarity about the way an oral tradition has been incorporated into a larger literary tradition:

Mankind, in general, are naturally inclined to solace their hours of labour by singing of sonnets; and, in their hours of festivity, the song goes round, each singing, according to his humour, the comic, historical war, or love song. No nation, I am acquainted with, is more addicted to this kind of amusement, than the inhabitants of the Highlands of Scotland, to which they are induced by their social, cheerful disposition; the long evenings in the winter; and, till of late, the want of manufactures to employ those hours which were given up to mirth. The sequestered situation of that country, the inhabitants remaining pure and unmixed, and their continuing to speak to this day nearly the same language that Fingal and Ossian spoke, have favoured exceedingly the tra-dition recorded of these poems. But the society of bards, which subsisted in the Highlands from the most ancient times to the last century, and whose education and profession was not only to compose poems, but to recite those of the ancient bards, has contributed more to the preservation of them, than any other circumstance. [477-8]

The poems of Ossian were thus in some sense 'canonical' long before they were discovered by Macpherson, translated into English, and thus offered as a 'new' expansion of the traditional canon of English literature. Gardiner's rhapsodic, if not romanticized, account of Highland society does not obscure the existence of an oral tradition in which poems like those Macpherson claimed to have discovered could have existed. Macpherson's presentation of them merely brings into the canon poetry that would have been traditionally canonical if its existence had been known.

The arguments and assertions put forward by enthusiasts such as Duff and Gardiner are at their best theoretical, but more often sentimentally nationalistic. The most obvious objection is one that David Hume made on several occasions, perhaps most cogently when he wrote to Edward Gibbon, on 18 March 1776, to congratulate him on the publication of the first volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon had himself expressed some doubts about the authenticity of the poems, and Hume agreed that he was right in doing so. Hume's succinct comment judiciously combines speculation and experience:

It is, indeed, strange, that any men of Sense coud have imagin'd it possible, that above twenty thousand Verses, along with numberless historical Facts, coud have been preservd by oral Tradition during fifty Generations, by the rudest, perhaps, of all European Nations; the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled. Where a Supposition is so contrary to common Sense, any positive Evidence of it ought never to be regarded. [HL, 2:310-11]

Hume is, perhaps, rather hard on his own country, but Macpherson had done a burgeoning Scottish literary tradition more harm by his evasions and misrepresentations than any criticism of him could have done.

Hume's letter to Gibbon is one of the documents that the historian Malcolm Laing quotes with approval in his criticism of the authenticity of the Ossianic poems. Like Hume, but probably more so, Laing had originally believed in the authenticity of Macpherson's claims, but later rejected them in what was the most telling and scholarly examination of the poems to be published before the report by Mackenzie's Committee. Laing, however, was convinced of the literary merit of the poems and argued that they should be treated as original compositions by Macpherson, though perhaps derived from some unspecified, or generalized, Celtic sources. Laing neatly identified the nationalistic urges which would have rejoiced in the discovery of an ancient poet worthy to be ranked with Homer:

The origin of the poems may be distinctly traced. On awaking from a long lethargy that succeeded the union, the Scots, with their national ardour, sprung forward towards industry and commerce, and began to vie with the English in every literary pursuit. In philosophy and history Hume and Robertson had acquired an unrivalled excellence. The laurels of Thomson were recent. Home, whose Douglas was overvalued by his countrymen, had produced a promising specimen of tragedy, from which much was expected; and nothing was wanting under a Scottish minister [i.e. Lord Bute], the patron of genius, but an epic poet to emulate Milton. We know that Homer and Milton were blind, but a third blind bard, like them the author of two epic poems, must be ascribed to imitation not to chance.¹⁷

Laing's sense of humour in that last sentence comes as welcome relief to some rather strident denunciations of Macpherson: his claims might have been more effectively exposed by humour and wit instead of the often leaden and ponderous comments that the poems elicited.

Laing's argument is, however, no more specious than any Macpherson or his defenders had produced to justify the authenticity of the poems; nor, for that matter, is it any more cogent, and he is often merely splenetic when he could be critical. Other authors had, in contrast to Macpherson's work, tried to oblige the felt need for a national, epic poem, which William Wilkie attempted with The Epigoniad (1757). Hume admired it extravagantly, but it failed to give much satisfaction to most of its other readers and its claims for admission to the canon were not seriously considered. Wilkie's choice of a Grecian theme for his epic probably ensured that it would not be recognized as a genuine Scottish classic, while Macpherson's ingenious combination of the old and the new in an ineluctably Scottish context would have predisposed his audience to accept the work as genuine. Laing, while decisively rejecting Macpherson's claims for the authenticity, nevertheless seems to feel that Scotland had produced a great national poet. Macpherson, Laing claimed, was the author of three epic or heroic poems, the first being Macpherson's The Highlander (1758), and the other two being, of course, Fingal and Temora. In various comments by Macpherson in his introductions to the poems, Laing detects several tacit admissions that the poems are not genuine, but Macpherson's own compositions, and his bewilderment at Macpherson's attributing them to Ossian and giving them an origin in the third century, seem genuine. What reasons could Macpherson have had for such a deception?

The mediocrity of his other productions is not sufficient; for the style of Ossian may convince the world, that he must creep on the earth unless he soars sublime. It discovers bold experiments in language, rich sentimental description, if sometimes pathetic, more frequently turgid than sublime; but contains no accurate delineation of character, no observations on human nature, no research into human actions, no artful transitions, nor talent for narration or plot; nothing in fact, either chaste or sober, that could be transferred to the historical page … he might have acquired a more durable and legitimate reputation, had he trusted, like Thomson in the same obscure situation, to the native force of his own genius [2:452-3]

Whatever shortcomings Macpherson had as a fabricator, he seems to have more than made up for them by the 'force of his own genius'. One cannot, of course, discount the possibility that Laing is being ironic, or simply sarcastic, but he went to an inordinate amount of trouble to produce an edition of the Poems of Ossian.

While neither so popular nor so influential as Robertson's History of Scotland, Laing's History was nevertheless full of useful research and displayed a breadth of knowledge that Robertson might not have commanded. In the third edition (1819), he noted, almost with some malign satisfaction, that no manuscripts had yet been produced to substantiate Macpherson's claims. His edition of Ossian in 1805, the textual accuracy of which was attacked by an anonymous editor in a London edition of 1806, examined Macpherson's text line by line, pointing out borrowings from, and similarities to, almost one hundred other authors. Laing succeeded perhaps too well in demolishing any claims to authenticity that the poems might have had, a failure that seems critically at odds with his affirmations of Macpherson's genius and his admiration for the poems. What he admires, however, is Macpherson's polished cadences, and seems contemptuous of the alleged 'originals'; indeed, Laing's marked lack of enthusiasm for primitive poetry and his preference for polished and refined works of literature lead him into rather vivid denunciations of what he sees as Macpherson's perversion of his own genius.

Duff and Laing made substantial, if very different, arguments for the quality of Ossian, but there is a certain amount of common ground in their critical approaches. Where other writers had linked Ossian to the sublime, Duff and Laing claimed for him that peculiarly eighteenth century qualification, genius. This is not the place for a digression into the critical meaning of that word in eighteenth century aesthetic discourse, but its uneasy vacillation between aesthetics and epistemology does not disguise its empirical origin and qualities. John Ogilvie, for example, in his 'Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients', first published in 1762 with his Poems, claimed that 'Genius is the offspring of Reason and Imagination, properly moderated, and co-operating with united influence, to promote the discovery of the illustration of truth.'¹⁸

The historical context of Ogilvie's comment is relevant. First made in 1762, just as the Ossianic poems were being published, it nevertheless identifies several of the elements that gave Macpherson's restructurings their appeal, while at the same time indicating one obstacle to their public or canonical acceptance. Few would be prepared to argue that the Ossianic poetry, as published by Macpherson, is not to a considerable extent the offspring of Macpherson's imagination, though a rather less strong claim could be made for his reason. What the poems discovered was not truth but the illusion of truth: however much the enlightened Scots of Macpherson's age wished to have an ancient native poet of genius and greatness, he also had to have credibility. Duff and Laing were thus 'right', at least aesthetically, to insist on Ossian's genius, but it had to be genuine. Laing does, to be sure, complain of the lack of genius in some of Macpherson's other works, but his exasperation at Macpherson's failure to credit himself with the inspiration that produced Ossian is both a lament and an indictment.

Laing published his study of Ossian after Macpherson's death in February 1796, and his work may have prompted the formation of the Committee headed by Henry Mackenzie which eventually produced the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian. With a Copious Appendix, containing some of the principal documents on which the report is founded in 1805. The Committee aimed to be, in their words, both impartial and impersonal, without casting any aspersions on Macpherson. However, the Committee began its inquiry on the premise that stories of a great hero or chief—Fion, Fion na Gael, or Fingal—had existed for a long time in the Highlands of Scotland; that this hero was also believed to be a genuine historical personage, and 'that certain poems or ballads, containing the exploits of him and his associate heroes, were the favourite lore of the natives of those districts' (HSR, 16). This contention, carried to its logical conclusion, would inevitably lead one to infer that Macpherson was only bringing into the larger literary canon a work of 'literature' that had long been canonical in one part of the British Isles. And, indeed, the documentary evidence collected by the Committee pointed to that conclusion, but the Committee may have given greater weight to the evidence than it warranted.

A more striking example of the apparent canonization of Ossian can be found, somewhat later, in school textbooks, for example, one by Alexander Jamieson, A Grammar of Rhetoric, and Polite Literature; comprehending the Principles of Language and Style, the Elements of Taste and Criticism: With Rules for the Study of Composition and Eloquence; Illustrated by Appropriate Examples, selected chiefly from the British Classics, for the use of schools, or private instruction, published in London in 1818. By this time, the question of the authenticity of Ossian had more or less been bypassed (though not settled), and Ossian secures his place in the putative canon by virtue of his exemplary deployment of the sublime: 'The works of Ossian abound with examples of the sublime. The subject of which that author treats, and the manner in which he writes, are particularly favourable to it' (248). As the full title of Jamieson's book indicates, the work is intended to define, describe, or at least inscribe the canon, and Ossian is admitted because of its obvious triumphs in matters sublime. The designation of the Ossianic poems as 'sublime' was, as I have noted, a feature of their critical history from their very first publication. As it happens, Jamieson's comment derives almost word-for-word from Blair's Lectures (BL, 1:65), as if Blair's words have an intertextual status sufficient for Jamieson's purpose in canonizing Ossian. Jamieson's appraisal of the literary merits of Ossian in terms of its sublimity also expresses a critical topos that we would be more likely to find as a commonplace endorsement in 1818 than we would in 1762.

The poems of Ossian were published at a time when aesthetic theory was first being developed. As Jeffrey Bar-nouw remarks: 'Aesthetics, in the broad and loose sense of theory about art of natural beauty, may have existed since Plato, but it was not conceived as a discipline or field in its own right until the eighteenth century.¹⁹ Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the term 'aesthetics' in 1735, in his Meditationes Philosophicae de Non-nullis ad Poema Pertinentibus and later developed the idea in Aesthetica (1750). In Britain, Kames's Elements of Criticism (1762) is arguably the first, certainly the longest, systematic structuring of aesthetic theory, and its popularity is only one measure of the taste for aesthetic theory in the Age of Enlightenment. Readers could thus feel that they had not only new methodologies and criteria for the correct assessment of art but in the case of Ossian they had a hitherto unknown poetic genius upon whom they could exercise their new discipline. Duff and Laing chose to do so by interpreting the poetry, irrespective of the identity of the author, as a manifestation of genius, a quality that could arise in unexpected places in unexpected ways. Genius was one of the signs, in a whole hierarchy of signs, which contributed to, or even determined, the aesthetic durability or greatness of a work of art; the exact position of genius within that hierarchy of signs was a matter for heuristic enquiry.

The effort made by Scottish authors in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment to bring Ossian into the literary canon is only a small part of the landscape of the literary canon in the eighteenth century. Many readers were not immediately or apparently troubled by the authenticity issue or Macpherson's seeming lack of truthfulness. By insisting on the verisimilitude of the poems, Macpherson undoubtedly harmed his case, since admirers of Ossian did not seem overly concerned about whether the representations of third-century life were accurate or not. The number of editions, the translations, and even anecdotal evidence all suggest that Ossian was a hit with readers, if rather less so with literary theorists and critics. When George Chalmers wrote to the publisher Archibald Constable on 17 July 1805 asking if 'anybody at Edinburgh trouble[s] himself about Ossian except Mr Laing? Except the Bible and Shakespeare, there is not any book that sells better than Ossian. This sale seems to me to arise from the intrinsic merit of the book, and not from the talk about it',²⁰ he conflated literary theory and the market-place in a way that one would not be surprised to see in a publisher, but one which troubled, and continues to trouble, many readers. Indeed, the ultimate failure of Ossian to become even a small part of the canon may be attributable to an unarticulated, but genuinely felt, disposition on the part of readers to distrust anything that smacks of deceit or even plagiarism. According to Spence, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complained that 'I admired Mr Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics and did not know that it was all stolen',²¹ and while neither readers nor critics share Lady Mary's sentiment and admire Pope's poem for many other reasons, Macpherson's Ossianic publications were not presented to the public in quite the same way nor under quite the same conditions. Had Macpherson offered Fingal and Temora to the eighteenth-century reader as epic poems based upon his readings in Gaelic literature, or his hearing of traditional tales and ballads, he might have enjoyed literary fame, and the works might have enjoyed as much canonical status as the epics to which they were compared in the eighteenth century and which Macpherson seems to have taken as his model. Or the works might have gone the way that Wilkie's Epigoniad did when the author honestly admitted basing his work upon a Greek source. Macpherson's dishonesty may have given the works a spurious charm that kept them briefly in the canon and which even today ensures that, whatever their merely literary qualities, they are not entirely neglected, though they may very well remain unread and Macpherson reviled because of his deceptions.²²

The popularity of Macpherson's Ossian in the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth century, particularly in Europe, indicates that as literacy increased, so did a willingness to expand the canon. Indeed, if we ignore Macpherson's intentions and take a charitable view towards the motives that impelled him, in publishing the Fragments and the later Ossianic poems, to sustain the scribal and scriptory nuances inherent in the ambiguous word 'originals', then we might have a different view of his achievement. Macpherson was a young man on the make in a literary economy which was growing at an almost exponential rate. In Scotland in particular, readers felt that their national culture, to say nothing of their national identity, had been validated by Macpherson's 'discoveries'. Ossianic publications proved that the formation and reformation of the canon was an important, and perhaps hitherto only dimly perceived, literary, even philosophical, issue. New works, particularly novels, were clamouring for admission to the canon all the time, but the works of Ossian seemed to have, by virtue of their antiquity, a more authoritative claim than recent writings. Given the readiness with which readers sought and bought the latest novels and poems, Macpherson might have ensured his incorporation into the canon had he proclaimed the creation of a new literary form—one that conflated the epic, lyric, sublime, and dramatic. The epic was already beginning to lose its grip on the canon when Macpherson published his Ossianic material. It is perhaps not unduly idle to wonder what might have happened to the works if he had published them as a 'new' genre, the historical novel, rather than as 'translations' of ancient poetry: Sir James Macpherson, author of the 'Ossian' novels.

Ossian continues to elicit the attention of scholars and literary critics for other reasons as well. Here was a work that was both old and new: it could thus be canonized by linking it to the oldest, or one of the oldest, of literary genres, the epic. It was also sublime, and Burke's discourse had given new authority and new dimensions to Longinus' representation of this concept. It was also new, in that it had just been 'discovered' by Macpherson and taken up by the literati: it could thus be incorporated into the canon because it could be seen to belong to a very 'new' (or at least extensively redefined) genre or sub-genre, the sublime. These theoretical endorsements could be further enhanced or supported by the revelations the works contained of the phenomenology of genius. Ossian commanded a place in the canon by virtue of unique qualities: it was old, it was new, and it was a sublime work of genius.

The writings of Ossian/Macpherson thus provide an unusual, if not unique, example of works which encroach upon the canon without ever quite acquiring a permanent place in it as a result of their artistic merit. Interest in, or appreciation of, the poetry is often tangential to other issues. Reading commentaries, essays, and books on Ossian, one is often struck by how infrequently readers, or at least readers writing in English, confess that they actually enjoy Fingal and Temora. I am only too happy to admit that I get no real literary pleasure from reading the works, but do derive a great deal of satisfaction from the mystery that surrounded their early publication, the recriminations that followed, and the implications that the issues raised have for the way in which canons are generated. Macpherson's conflations have a certain amount of phenomenological interest, but they will never satisfy, perhaps not even respond to, hermeneutical discourse. Inside the fat genre of the epic an even fatter genre of historical fiction was struggling to get out. What continues to intrigue scholars and critics is much the same thing that would intrigue a sociologist or psychologist: the willingness of a large body of readers to participate in a literary deception, as well as their collective intuition that Macpherson had stumbled onto a kind of literature whose features called forth responses from its readers at almost the kind of primitive level that the works themselves professed to recapitulate. Readers are able to bring certain imaginative works readily into the canon by their willingness to indulge this phenomenon and to send signals to other authors of a desire to have certain prescriptive typologies given form and substance in literature. The canon of literature expands and contracts, but in the case of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry, the circumstances of its publication have continued to impose a different kind of barrier upon its acceptance into the canon. Neither Literary scholarship, nor literary theory, nor sympathetic criticism can do for Macpherson what a bit of candid acknowledgement might have done two hundred and twenty-five years ago. If Scottish readers, critics, and theorists in Scotland's age of Enlightenment had occasionally resisted enlightenment, later readers did not. Readers enjoy suspending disbelief, enter willingly and enthusiastically into fictional representations of 'real life', and accept, often with pleasure, transparent improbabilities, unlikely events, and impossible characterizations, so long as they know, or at least feel, that an author does not deliberately intend to deceive them about the source or inspiration of the words on the page. Deceptions which are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be intentional, wilful, and persistent do not sit well with anybody, even mere readers. The literary canon responds by withholding its imprimatur from the writings of authors judged guilty of such deception.

Notes

¹ Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985), 254. See also his '"Those Scotch Imposters and Their Cabal": Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment', in Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 1, ed. Roger Emerson et al. (London, Ont., 1982): 55-63.

² John Murray archives. I am grateful to Dr William Zachs for this reference.

³ Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 2nd edition (Edinburgh, 1778), 1:424.

⁴ John Smith, Galic Antiquities (Edinburgh, 1780), 90.

⁵ See Arthur E. McGuinness, 'Lord Kames on the Ossian Poems: Anthropology and Criticism', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10 (1968): 65-75.

⁶ Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, The Son of Fingal (London, 1763), 2; WO, 2:314.

⁷ Smith and Burke were not, of course, the first authors to comment on the sublime in the eighteenth century. Addison and Hutcheson had also written on the topic, and the Longinus had been capably translated by Leonard Welsted in 1712.

⁸ See Stafford, 174: also Larry L. Stewart, 'Ossian, Burke, and the "Joy of Grief", English Language Notes 15 (1977): 29-32.

⁹ Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime, new edition (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), 120n.

¹⁰ Leah Leneman, 'Ossian and the Enlightenment', Scotia 11 (1987): 16.

¹¹ Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 106.

¹² William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 264.

¹³ William Duff, Critical Observations on the Writings of the most celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (London, 1770), 64, 66n.

¹⁴ Jochen Schmidt's Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750-1945, 1: Von der Aujkclarung bis zum Idealismus (Darmstadt, 1985), surveys the literature on genius, but naturally gives more weight to the usage of the term by German theorists.

¹⁵ Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774), 100.

¹⁶ John Gardiner, Essays, Literary, Political and Oeconomical (London, 1803), 477.

¹⁷ Malcolm Laing, The History of Scotland (London and Edinburgh, 1800), 2:399.

¹⁸ John Ogilvie, Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1769), xxi.

¹⁹ Jeffrey Barnouw, 'Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics', in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. John W. Yolton and Leslie Ellen Brown (East Lansing), 18:323.

²⁰ T. Constable, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondence. A Memorial (Edinburgh, 1873), 1:41; cited in Stafford, 171.

²¹ Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), 1:304.

²² See Howard Gaskill, '"Ossian" Macpherson: Towards a Rehabilitation', Comparative Criticism 8 (1986): 113-46.