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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Byron was actually the third Scotsman in about fifty years who awoke and found himself famous; the sudden rise from obscurity to international fame had been experienced earlier by two fellow countrymen, Sir Walter Scott and James Macpherson.
Scott tells us that in his youth he "devoured rather than perused" Ossian and that he could repeat whole duans "without remorse"; and, as I shall discuss later, Byron paid Macpherson the high compliment of writing an imitation of Ossian, which he published in Hours of Idleness.
The younger man at first protested that a translation "would give a very imperfect idea of the original," but Home "with some difficulty" persuaded him to try. In a "day or two" Macpherson brought him the poem that was to become "Fragment VII" in this collection; Home was so much pleased with it that he requested additional translations.[3]
When Home left Moffat he took his find to Edinburgh and showed the translations to the men who earned the city Smollett's sobriquet, a "hotbed of genius": Robertson, fresh from the considerable success of his two volume History of Scotland (1759); Robert Fergusson, recently appointed professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh; Lord Elibank, a learned aristocrat, who had been patron to Home and Robertson; and Hugh Blair, famous for the sermons that he delivered as rector of the High Church of St. Giles. Home was gratified that these men were "no less pleased" with Macpherson's
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Part of the appeal of the Fragments was obviously based on the presumption that they were, as Blair hastened to assure the reader, "genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry," and therefore provided a remarkable insight into a remote, primitive culture; here were maidens and warriors who lived in antiquity on the harsh, wind-swept wastes of the Highlands, but they were capable of highly refined and sensitive expressions of grief—they were the noblest savages of them all. For some readers the rumors of imposture served to dampen their initial enthusiasm, and such was the case with Hume,
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In 1819 Hazlitt felt that Ossian is "a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers," and he classed the work as one of the four prototypes of poetry along with the Bible, Homer, and Dante.
There is some justice in Macpherson's wry assertion that "those who have doubted my veracity have paid a compliment to my genius."[11]
For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique. Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: repetition, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and completion in which the second line picks up part of the sense of the first line and adds to
As E. H. W. Meyerstein pointed out, "Macpherson can, without extravagance, be regarded as the main originator (after the translators of the Authorized Version) of what's known as 'free verse."[13] Macpherson's work certainly served to stimulate prosodic experimentation during the next half century; it is certainly no coincidence that two of the boldest innovators, Blake and Coleridge, were admirers of Macpherson's work.
His practice was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life.
"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new…. Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized."
The Fragments was also a cause and a reflection of the rising appeal of the hero of sensibility, whose principal characteristic was that he could feel more intensely than the mass of humanity. The most common emotion that these acutely empathetic heroes felt was grief, the emotion that permeates the Fragments and the rest of Macpherson's work.
Macpherson, a frugal man, included many of the "Fragments" in his later work. Sometimes he introduced them into the notes as being later than Ossian but in the same spirit; at other times he introduced them as episodes in the longer narratives.
In a curious way, Macpherson's achievement has been overshadowed by the fact that many greater writers followed him and developed the artistic direction that he was among the first to take.
The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be exactly ascertained. Tradition, in the country where they were written, refers them to an æra of the most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas, and paint those manners, that belong to the most early state of society.
tradition, in a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them in a great measure incorrupted to this day.
Alone I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief for thee I expired. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.
Evening is grey on the hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends.
Thy family grew like an oak on the mountain, which meeteth the wind with its lofty head. But now it is torn from the earth.
Undisturbed you now sleep together; in the tomb of the mountain you rest alone.
Son of the noble Fingal, Oscian, Prince of men! what tears run down the cheeks of age? what shades thy mighty soul?
Mild was her blue rolling eye: but sorrow was big in her heart.
She fell as a wreath of snow before the sun in spring. Her bosom heaved in death; her soul came forth in blood.
His daughter was fair as the morn; mild as the beam of night. Her eyes, like two stars in a shower: her breath, the gale of spring: her breasts, as the new fallen snow floating on the moving heath.
They fought by the brook of the mountain; by the streams of Branno. Blood tinged the silvery stream, and crudled round the mossy stones. Dermid the graceful fell; fell, and smiled in death.
[Footnote A: Nothing was held by the ancient Highlanders more essential to their glory, than to die by the hand of some person worthy or renowned. This was the occasion of Oscur's contriving to be slain by his mistress, now that he was weary of life. In those early times suicide was utterly unknown among that people, and no traces of it are found in the old poetry. Whence the translator suspects the account that follows of the daughter of Dargo killing herself, to be the interpolation of some later Bard.]
