Part 4

Throughout the whole of this period, however, there existed, side by side with this printed religious literature, another literature in the popular poetry of the uncultivated native bards, removed from the influence of Irish training, whose compositions were expressed in the pure idiom of the spoken dialect; and in the poems of Ian Lom, the Lochaber poet of the Wars of Montrose; Duncan Ban Macintyre, whose exquisite poem of Bendoran is a beautiful specimen of pure Gaelic, and whose poems were printed in 1778; Ailen Buidhe Macdougall, W. Ross, and Allan Dall Macdougall--all natives of the central districts of the Highlands,--we find ample evidence of the existence and character of a vernacular dialect, in which the people interchanged their homely ideas, and their favourite bards composed their poems which found an immediate access to the hearts and imagination of the people; while the language in which their scriptures and formularies were conveyed was looked upon as a sort of sacred dialect, through which they received their religious teaching.

There was thus, throughout, a double influence exercised upon the language and literature of the Highlands. One from Ireland, which was associated with the written and cultivated dialect of Gaelic which had there been formed, and brought over with Christianity to Scotland. With it came the Irish orthography. It was mainly connected with learning and religious teaching, and its influence was most powerful in the western districts and islands, and the territories subject to the power of the Lord of the Isles. The other, indigenous and antagonistic to it, falling back upon a literary influence from the south and east, when not predominant, and associated more with the popular poetry of the Highlands. Its orthography seems to have resembled that of the other Celtic languages, the Welsh and the Manx; and its influence prevailed in the central and north Highlands, where the best and purest type of the Scotch Gaelic is still to be found.[26]

[26] Mr. Donald Macintosh, the Keeper of the Highland Society’s MSS., in his list of MSS. then existing in Scotland in 1806, mentions that “Mr. Matheson of Fernaig has a paper MS., written in the Roman character, and in an _orthography like that of the Dean of Lismore_, containing songs and hymns, some by Bishop Carsewell.” This MS. has not been recovered; but if we had it, we might find that, while the Bishop resorted to Ireland for his prose translation of Knox’s Liturgy, his original poetry was in a different dialect and orthography.

The literary history of the Highlands falls into periods as these influences respectively prevailed.

The first period is prior to the seventh century, when there was no political separation between Ireland and Gaelic Scotland. The great divisions of the people were regulated by race rather than by geographical distribution. The Cruithne everywhere were united by common origin and ties of race; and the Scots, wherever settled, owned the Milesian Ardrigh in Ireland. The countries were simply viewed as the east and the west, and were known as Erin and Alban, and the communication between them was free and unrestrained. The second period commences with the separation of the Scotch Dalriada from the Irish in 573, and of the Irish Cruithne from the present race, some thirty years later, when a political as well as a geographical separation between the Celtic tribes of the two countries took place; but, for upwards of a century afterwards, the church and clergy of the Highlands were Irish, and the written Irish dialect imported by them must still have remained in use, and exercised its accustomed influence on the spoken language.

After the expulsion of the Scotch clergy in 717, a period of great obscurity in the history of Scotland occurs, extending to nearly a century and a half, during which the ecclesiastical influence exercised was from the south, taking its origin from the Anglic kingdom of Northumbria; some revolution also took place, which placed a Scottish royal family upon the throne of a kingdom consisting of the united tribes situated to the north of the Forth and Clyde. But during the same period another event took place, of great significance in the literary history of the country; the Monastery of Icholumkill or Iona, the time-honoured seat of Gaelic learning, went down amidst the troubled waters of Scandinavian piracy, and its position, as head of the learning and religion of the country, was gone for ever.

During the fourth period, which lasted for three hundred years, the Norwegian kingdom of Man and the Isles, which likewise embraced the western seaboard of the Highlands, interposed itself between the Highlands and Ireland; and the influence from the latter country must for the time have been paralysed, while the indigenous and native influence maintained itself in the extensive Highland province of Moray.

At the close of this period we have a hint of the existence of an Albanic dialect of Gaelic in the Life of St. Kentigern, first Bishop of Glasgow, by Jocelyn, the biographer also of St. Patrick, who wrote in the year 1180. He says that the name of Kentigern was justly given to one who might be called their dominus capitaneus; “nam _ken_ caput Latine, _tyern Albanice_, dominus Latine interpretatur.” This is nearly a phonetic orthography, and not unlike that of the Dean of Lismore’s MS. In Irish orthography the words would be _cend_, signifying caput, or a head; _tigerna_, dominus, or lord; but in pronunciation the _d_ in _cend_ is quiescent, and the aspirated _g_ in _tigerna_, so that the sound is exactly represented even as now pronounced. Jocelyn seems to recognise the existence of a native dialect designated by _Albanice_; and one of the peculiarities of Scotch Gaelic is also present in the omission of the final _a_ from the word _tigerna_.[27]

[27] In the older life of St. Kentigern, written prior to 1164, it is said that Servanus, at Culross, when he heard of Kentigern’s birth, exclaimed, “_A dia cur fir sin_, quod sonat Latine O utinam sic esset.” In modern Scotch Gaelic the phrase would be, _A dhia gur fior sin_.

The fate of the great Celtic earldom of Moray, and the decay of the Norwegian power in the Isles, was followed by the powerful sway of the Celtic Lords of the Isles, who, during the fifth period, extending from three to four centuries, were dominant in the western districts; and, as far as their sway extended, the spirit, influence, and literature were all Irish, and it was only when the fall of the almost independent kingdom of the Isles, and the Reformation again separated the country from Ireland, that a reaction towards the vernacular and spoken Scotch Gaelic took place, which has resulted in a clear development of its grammatical rules and construction, and the establishment of a fixed orthography.

It was at the close of the fifth period, during which the Lords of the Isles were all-powerful in the west, and just before the middle of the sixteenth century ushered in the Reformation, that the collection, of which selections are now published, was made by the Vicar of Fortingal, who was also Dean of Lismore. It is a collection, formed upwards of three hundred years ago, from all quarters, and presents to us a specimen of the literature which was current in the Highlands during this period. There are poems by the Irish bards, whose schools extended also to the Highlands, by the O’Dalys, who lived during the fifteenth century; by Teague og O’Higgin, who died in 1448; by Dermod O’Hiffernan; and by Turn O’Meilchonair, Ollav of the Sil Murray, who died in 1468. There are poems by Allan M’Ruadrie and Gillecallum Mac an Olla, who seem to have been native bards; by John of Knoydart, who celebrates the murder of the young Lord of the Isles by his Irish harper in 1490; by Finlay M’Nab, called the Good Poet; and by the transcriber of the greater part of the manuscript, Duncan, the Dean’s brother, who wrote in praise of the M’Gregors.

The great value of this collection, as regards the language, arises from the peculiar orthography used, which presents it as it must have been pronounced, and affords a means of testing one of the chief differences which characterize the different provincial dialects, the vowel and consonantal sounds, and the presence or absence of eclipsis and aspiration.

It has been found impossible to print the whole of the contents of the MS., but the selection which has been made, chiefly with reference to the literature of the Highlands, will also afford a fair specimen of the shades of difference which characterized the language in which the poems are written. Some are in pure Irish, and must have been transferred from the Irish orthography into that used in the MS. Others are in pure Scotch Gaelic, as the poems of Duncan, son of Dougall Maol, Finlay M’Nab, the bard roy, and John of Knoydart. Others are in a mixed dialect, in some of which the Irish idiom, in others the Scotch, predominates.

In general, it will be found that the language approaches more or less nearly to the Irish, as the writers appear to have had more or less cultivation in the written language, or were more or less removed from Irish influence; and the MS. may be viewed as the only known record of those vernacular dialects of Gaelic in the sixteenth century which differed in any degree from the written and cultivated language.

But while the Dean of Lismore’s MS. has in this respect a philological value, it has likewise no mean literary value, from the circumstance that it contains no fewer than twenty-eight Ossianic poems, extending to upwards of 2500 lines, nine directly attributed to Ossian, two to Farris or Ferghus Filidh, and one to Caolte M’Ronan, the three bards of the Feine; two to Allan M’Ruadri, and one to Gillecallum Mac an Olla, bards hitherto unknown; and eleven poems, Ossianic in their style and subject, to which no author’s name is attached.

The circumstances under which the controversy regarding the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, published by James Macpherson, arose, and the extent to which it for the time agitated the minds of the _literati_ of England and Scotland, are well known.

In the summer of 1759, Mr. John Home, the author of Douglas, met Mr. James Macpherson, then a tutor in the family of Graham of Balgowan, at Moffat. Mr. Home had previously been told by Professor Adam Fergusson, a native of Atholl, and acquainted with Gaelic, that there existed in the country some remains of ancient Gaelic poetry. Mr. Home mentioned the circumstance to James Macpherson, also a Highlander, and a native of Badenoch, and was told by him that he had some pieces of ancient Gaelic poetry in his possession. After some difficulty, Mr. Home obtained translations of them from Macpherson, and took them to Edinburgh, and showed the translations to Drs. Blair, Fergusson, and Robertson, by whom they were much admired. Macpherson was importuned to translate all he had, and the translations furnished by him were published in a little volume in June 1760, under the title of “Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland.”

There seems little reason to doubt that these translations were made from genuine fragments in Macpherson’s possession. If they existed at all, they were in his possession before any talk had arisen of translating Gaelic poetry. There was no pretext of going to the Highlands to collect them. There was no idea, at the time the translations were produced, that such poetry could have any value in the eyes of the literary world, and there seems no motive for any deception. In the fragments, or rather short poems, contained in this little work, the proper names are smoothed down from their original Gaelic form to suit English ears; and Macpherson had already hit upon that happy prose version, the conception of which has great merit, and had no little share in the popularity which immediately attached to them; but, in other respects, they have every appearance of having been translations from short Gaelic poems which really existed. The admiration which they excited in the minds of men of the great literary reputation of Home, Blair, Fergusson, and Robertson, must have first astonished, and then greatly flattered, a man of the disposition of Macpherson. He was urged to undertake a journey to the Highlands, to collect all that remained of poetry of this description, and a subscription was raised to defray the expense. This proposal must have raised a prospect sufficiently dazzling before the poor Highland tutor, who seemed likely to exchange a life of poverty, obscurity, and irksome duty, for one of comparative independence and literary fame; and he acceded to it with affected reluctance. At that time, anything like that spirit of severe and critical antiquarianism, which attaches the chief value to the relics of past ages from their being genuine fragments of a past literature, and demands a rigid and literal adherence to the form and shape in which they are found, was totally unknown. That feeling is the creation of subsequent times. At that time literary excellence was mainly looked to, their authority was usually taken on trust, and it was thought that the claims of such criticism were sufficiently satisfied when the remains of the past were woven into an elegant and flowing narrative. With Homer and other classical epics before him, such a proposal as the publication of the ancient poetry of the Highlands, assuming, as we now know to be the fact, that Ossianic poetry of some kind did exist, and looking to the high expectations formed, must have at once suggested to him the idea that he should not do justice to the task he had undertaken if he could not likewise produce a Gaelic epic. This idea seems early to have suggested itself to Macpherson’s mind; it is obscurely hinted at in the preface to the Fragments; and Macpherson seems to have started on his tour with the preconceived determination to view any short poems and fragments he might find as parts of longer poems, and, if possible, by welding them together, to produce a national epic which should do honour to his country, and confirm his own reputation as its recoverer and translator. He was accompanied, in the earlier part of his journey, by a countryman of his own, Mr. Lachlan Macpherson of Strathmashie, who was a better Gaelic scholar than he was himself, and an excellent Gaelic poet. It is certain that, in this tour, a number of MSS. were collected by them, and poetry taken down from recitation; and that he was joined in it by another Gaelic scholar, Captain Alexander Morrison, who likewise assisted him. On his return, he proceeded to Badenoch, his native place and that of Lachlan Macpherson, and here he remained till January 1761, engaged, with the assistance of Lachlan Macpherson and Alexander Morrison, in preparing the materials for the next publication of Ossian; and then proceeded to Edinburgh, from whence he writes to the Rev. James M’Lagan, in a letter dated 16th January 1761,--“I have been lucky enough to lay my hands on a pretty complete poem, and truly epic, concerning Fingal.... I have some thoughts of publishing the original, if it will not clog the work too much.”

His task, whatever it was, had then been accomplished; and after remaining some time in Edinburgh, engaged in preparing the English version for the press, he went to London, and early in 1762 issued a quarto volume, containing the epic poem of Fingal, in six books, and sixteen other poems. In the following year another quarto appeared, containing another epic poem in eight books, called Temora, and five other poems. This volume also contained what was called “a specimen of the original of Temora,” being a Gaelic version of the seventh book, and the only Gaelic bearing to be the original of any of the poems which appeared.

The English version, contained in these two quartos, possessed the same character as the English of the Fragments; the same accommodation of the Gaelic proper names to the supposed requirements of English ears, and the prose style, originated by Macpherson, sustained with equal spirit; the poems, however, were longer, and more elaborate.

The literary public, who had welcomed the Fragments with admiration, received the volume containing the epic of Fingal with startled but silent acquiescence, and exploded under the eight books of Temora. It seemed incredible that poems such as these could have been handed down by oral recitation from the supposed age of Ossian; the refined manners described, and the allusions to the Roman Emperors, awakened suspicion, and a storm of adverse criticism and questioning incredulity arose, in which Dr. Johnson--at that time in the zenith of his reputation--took the lead.

Macpherson, who found the fair breeze of flattery and laudation, before which he had been sailing so smoothly on his heavy quartos, without a suspicion that he had not attained the full success he aimed at, so suddenly changed into an adverse storm of criticism and depreciation, knew not how to meet the crisis. He had not courage to avow the truth, and state candidly to the world how much of his work was based on original authority, and to what extent he had carried the process of adapting, interpolating, and weaving into epic poems. He took refuge first in sulky silence, and eventually seemed to find a sort of compensation for his denunciation, as a detected forger, in the necessary alternative, the credit of having been a successful composer, and by half hints encouraged that view.[28]

[28] In 1778 and 1780 a collection of Ossianic poems, in the original Gaelic, was made by Duncan Kennedy, schoolmaster. His MS. collection was purchased by the Highland Society, and is now in the collection of MSS. in the Advocates’ Library. There is appended to it a list of the persons from whose recitations the poems were taken down.

In 1780, Dr. Smith, of Campbellton, published a quarto volume, entitled Gaelic Antiquities, containing versions in English of poems attributed to Ossian, Ullin, etc.; and in 1787 the originals were published under the title of Sean Dana.

Unhappily, Dr. Smith, instead of publishing the poems as he got them, with a literal English version, was ambitious of shining, like Macpherson, as an editor of Ossian, and of sharing in his notoriety; but the poems of the latter had already lost their lustre, and Smith did not possess the wonderful tact and originality Macpherson really showed in producing his English version, and which alone made them bearable; his version was diffuse, heavy, and turgid, and his book fell dead from the press.

The Sean Dana showed that he had largely made use of Kennedy’s collection.

Kennedy, with the strange desire that all of these collectors of Ossianic poems showed to be supposed capable of composing them, and thus to acquire literary credit at the expense of their honesty, laid claim to the authorship of part of them, and furnished the Highland Society with a statement of those parts of the poems he had really taken down from recitation, and those he claimed to have composed.

It is strange that the passages he claimed as his own composition are just those which have been most clearly established to be genuine.

Thus, lines which Kennedy marked as his own composition, are found _verbatim_ in the Dean’s MS.

I believe that there was little or no truth in Kennedy’s assertion, which was dictated by vanity, and that his collection is, on the whole, genuine.

The journey which Dr. Johnson took to the Hebrides, in order to examine the question, and of his Journal of which, one passage seems to have adhered to men’s recollections almost as pertinaciously as that of Ossian’s Address to the Sun did to the Highland reciters of his poems--the celebrated description of Iona--was not likely to do much in the way of solving the question.

A man of the obstinate prejudices and overbearing temper of Dr. Johnson, with a firm belief that no Ossianic poems really existed, and that Gaelic was not a written language, with an entire ignorance of that language, and a colossal reputation as a critic, bursting suddenly among the frightened Highland ministers, who believed in him, and trembled before him, could hardly return with any other result than that he had found no poems of Ossian, and no one bold enough to avow, in his presence, that he believed in their existence; and most men now subsided into the conviction that the whole thing was an imposture, an opinion embodied and elaborately worked out by Malcolm Laing.

This led to the Highland Society of Scotland undertaking an inquiry into the authenticity of the poems of Ossian published by Macpherson, which involved the subsidiary inquiry of whether such poems existed in the Highlands in the original Gaelic. The result of this inquiry is contained in the elaborate report prepared by Henry Mackenzie, the author of the Man of Feeling, and published in 1806.

The inquiry was conducted with much candour. The committee were aided by receiving from Mr. John Mackenzie, Secretary of the Highland Society of London, and executor of Mr. James Macpherson, all the Gaelic MSS. in his possession, including those which Macpherson had left behind him; and they resorted to every means within their reach to obtain information.

The whole of the materials for forming a judgment which they had collected were placed impartially before the public; and the subject, so far as such materials then existed or were at their command, is really exhausted by this report.

The committee were cautious in giving an opinion, but the result they arrived at seems to have been--

_1st_, That the characters introduced into Macpherson’s poems were not invented, but were really the subjects of tradition in the Highlands; and that poems certainly existed which might be called Ossianic, as relating to the persons and events of that mythic age.

_2d_, That such poems, though usually either entire poems of no very great length, or fragments, had been handed down from an unknown period by oral recitation, and that there existed many persons in the Highlands who could repeat them.

_3d_, That such poems had likewise been committed to writing, and were to be found to some extent in MSS.

_4th_, That Macpherson had used many such poems in his work; but by joining separated pieces together, and by adding a connecting narrative of his own, had woven them into longer poems, and into the so-called epics.

No materials existed, however, to show the extent to which this process had been carried, and the amount of genuine matter the poems, as published by Macpherson, contained.[29]

[29] A comparison of the poems in the Fragments, with those in the first quarto, containing the epic of Fingal, shows indications of the mode in which Macpherson dealt with his materials.

There are sixteen poems in the Fragments, all short; and some bearing the usual mark of a complete poem, by the first line being repeated at the end.

Thus, the second fragment begins with the sentence, “I sit by the mossy fountain; on the top of the hill of winds.” And the same expression is introduced at the end--“By the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds;” marking a complete poem.

The first and fourth fragments we find in the quarto volume, containing Fingal, forming part of a longer poem termed Carrickthura, and here they are joined together by intermediate passages of some length, evidently interpolated by Macpherson.