The Pre-Ossianic Politics of James Macpherson

MELVIN KERSEY

In the field of eighteenth-century British literature, few authors have been dismissed or labelled in such a cursory manner as James Macpherson (1736-1796). ‘[Macpherson] is almost certainly a fabricator, plagiarist, and a scoundrel’, writes Howard Weinbrot. ‘His Ossian poems are Jacobite efforts to celebrate Scotland and its noble martial and moral past’.‘ Weinbrot is by no means alone in this conviction. In The House of Forgery in Eighteentii-Ceritur~ Britain, Paul Baines similarly depicts a double hazard in Macpherson’s poetry: forgery and Jacobitism.’ Murray Pittocli asserts that Macpherson ‘has largely been written off as a fake and a forger’, yet the layers of meaning in his poetry ‘alert his Scottish readers to Jacobite coded.3 Readers are thus cautioned against the form and the function of Macpherson’s work. Having been so comprehensively labelled as a forger and a Jacobite, we might be forgiven for thinking that there is little room left for discussion. If Macpherson scholarship has enjoyed a healthy renewal in recent years, then the problematic authen- ticity of his Ossianic ‘translations’ has often diverted attention from a more detailed analysis of his political philosophy.3 A recent study by Colin Kidd represents a noteworthy exception to this notion.? The idea that Macpher- son has been misread as a crypto-Jacobite invites further attention in the light of Kidd’s thoroughly documented research on Macpherson’s ideological contributions to Whig historiography. Building upon Kidd’s researches, this essay will examine a selection of Macpherson’s pre-Ossianic work, including ‘The Hunter’ and The Highlariilrr (two poems not covered by Kidd), to form a clearer assessment of his political dcveloprnent in these lesser-known poems.6 Toward that end, the persistent vision of Macpherson as a Jacobite will be outlined, followed by textual evidence which specifies the political nature ol his patriotism and the concept of nationhood with which he identified.

In Tliv Scottish Jacobite Moverwrit (1952), George Pratt Iiish situates Macpher- son’s childhood at the epicentre of Tacobitism, describing the following events in Ruthven after the Battle of Culloden:

Among the startled and wondering inhabitants of Ruthven who on that day gathered to watch the Jacobite flood from Drummossie surge round the green hill crowned with the dismantled barracks, was a tall fair-haired lad of ten years of age, sturdy and thickset. For lames Macpherson. the son of a Ruthven farmer, it was by no means the first glimpse of the coming and going of armies.

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In August of r745 he had watched the long column of General Cope’s army - scarlet-coated infantry and dragoons, artillery and supply train - moving in grim haste down Strathspey towards Aviemore and Inverness. [...I In February, 1746, after the Jacobite relreat to Inverness, Gordon of Glenbucket appeared before the barracks at Ruthven with three hundred infantry supported by artillery. [...I Gordon blew up the barraclts.7

Painting an evocative image of Highland life in the immediate wake of Culloden. Insh attempts to sweep his readers away on the ‘surge’ of this ‘Jacobite flood’. In doing so, he co-opts Macpherson into a narrative of Jacobite resistance. The ‘tall fair-haired lad’ may well have understood the grim significance of this retreat and feared violent reprisals by the returning British troops against his own Jacobite clan.x However, Macpherson should not be painted into this sentimental account when no evidence has yet been advanced that he was actually present, or that he directly witnessed it.9 If it is a factual account, publication of the evidence would be a welcome advance in Macpherson scholarship.

The misleading effects of this unsubstantiated story are easy to trace. In several din’erent studies, Murray Pittock has used it to support his appropriation of Macpherson to the Jacobite cause. ‘As a child of seven [sic] in Ruthven, Macpherson witnessed at least two of the events of the Rising: General Cope’s advance in 1745, and Major-General Gordon’s attack on the government forces in Ruthven Barracks in 1746’, he writes, paraphrasing his earlier thoughts on the same subject: ‘As a child during the Forty-Five, [Macpherson] had witnessed two of the events of the Rising at his home in Ruthven: the advance of Cope in 1745, and Clenbucltet’s attack on Ruthven barrack in 1746.”’ As Pittock observes, Fiona Stafford has also noted ‘the potential importance of Macpherson’s childhood experiences of the Jacobite Rising of 1745 in Badenoch’; this is true, yet as the word ‘potential’ suggests, her account is a more provisional one.” Paul deGategno alleges that Macpherson was a witness to this scene, but does not state his source.’L Leith Davis writes that Macpherson was ‘a direct witness to the English reprisals’ after the R i~ ing . ’~ For better or for worse, this questionable ‘Macpherson as witness’ motif has been formative in the production and reception of his life and works.

This issue suggests the difficulties in distinguishing between the conjectural and the textual Macpherson. Macpherson was a child of the Highlands, but he was also a young man of the Enlightenment. Consequently, the scope of his thought and his politics should not be posthumously narrowed or confincd in order to fit a sentimentalised ‘Highlander’ template. He attended the IJniversity of Aberdeen ( I 752-1 7 55) at a time when it was one of the most exciting intellectual centres of the Enlightenment.’4 Coming of age amidst that commercially thriving city would prove to be formative in his success as an author, but the experience also created internal tensions between himself and his ancestry in the Highlands. Leaving Aberdeen without a degree, he went to the University of Edinburgh for a few months, returning home in I 756 to a brief and unhappy job of teaching at the Ruthven Grammar School: his

Tlw Pre-Ossimic Politics of lames Macpherson 6 3

disaffection with life there was obvious to all who knew him.Ij Writing poetry appears to have offered some relief during this time,

His composition ‘The Hunter’ (1756) lacks coherence and is clumsily written, but it reflects his artistic frustration and holds clues to Macpherson’s intellectual development.’b ‘The Hunter’, 1680 lines in heroic couplets, was written by the same young man who had been known at the University of Aberdeen to ridicule his classmates in Hudibrastics and who ‘appears to have spent much of his time at university amusing himself with comic verse’.’ 7 Macpherson’s childhood friend Donald Macpherson recollects that ‘[wlhen he taught the Grammar School of Ruthven, near his father’s and my father’s Dwellings, I know he composed several ludicrous poems and catches upon Countrie emergencies, even one upon myself‘.’8 This reference may well be to ‘Donald‘ in ‘The Hunter’, whose opening lines establish both an autobiographical and an ideological subtext (I, lines 1-8):

Once on a time. cz7heii Liberty was seen To sport and revel on the northern plain, Immortal fair! and was supremely kind On Scotia’s hills to snuff the northern wind; There lived a youth, and Donald was his name. To chace the flying stag his highest aim: A gun, a plaid, a dog. his humble store: In these thrice happy, as he wants no more.

The power of primal ‘Liberty’ to ’snuff, or diminish the harshness of, the ‘northern wind’ immediately hints at the humour behind this scene. This sportive image of ‘Liberty’ ismore suggestive ofpolite recreation than necessity, yet its presence favours the simple life of the ‘thrice happy’ Donald. The rise of commercial trade and decrease of Scottish political autonomy after the lJnion of the Crowns (1603) and the Act of Union (1707) feature in this satirical caricature of Edinburgh (I, lines I 38-1 42):

On rocks a city stands. high-tower’d, unwall’d, And from its scite the hill of Edin call’d. Once the proud seat of royalty and state, Of kings, of heroes. and of all that’s great; But these are flown. and Edin’s only stores Are fops. and scriveners, and English’d whores.

Theidea that ‘kings’, ‘heroes‘ and virtue havedeparted from Edinburgh alludes to the exodus of James I for London in I 603 , leaving only an oversimplified distinction between virtuous Highlanders and ‘English’d’ Lowland ‘fops’. Here we find echoes of The Rape of the Lock, specifically Pope’s playful parody of Hampton Court (111. lines 1-18), and the pitfalls of luxury associated with British trade and Empire have seldom been portrayed with more mock-heroic success than in Belinda’s ‘Toilet’ scene (I, lines 121-148). Pope’s satiric vision of the insidious influence of imported luxuries evidently appealed to a young

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Highlander whose enjoyment of life in Aberdeen and Edinburgh had made his return to the Highlands untenable.

Thoughts of a life far removed from that of a Highland schoolmaster seem to have been stirring within Macpherson. Accordingly, ambition is a key topic in ‘The Hunter’. Donald has the misfortune to kill a fawn which belongs to the daughter of the Icing of the Fairies (I, lines 21-26):

It chanced the Fairie’s king a daughter had. A beauteous, blooming. and a sportive maid. She took delight, upon the flowery lawn ‘I’o frisk, transported, round a female fawn. The hunter aims the tube: the powder flies; The fawn falls, roars, and shakes her limbs, and dies.

Only in a mock-heroic work would a fawn ‘roar’ when shot. With this fateful mistake, Donald brings the wrath of the Fairies down on his head. Resolving to avenge the death of her fawn, the Fairy Princess flies to Edinburgh, where she finds a debauched courtier. With the sound of drunken ‘Meno’ (I, line i 49), snoring so loudly through the day that ‘the palace thundered round’ (I, line 152). Macpherson’s satirical tone is more assured. However, this scene is an imitation of the spirit Umbriel’s journey in TIM Rape ofthe Lock to ‘the cave of Spleen’ (IV, line 16), where he acquires a ‘vial’ (IV, line 85) of splenetic humours with which to torment Belinda (IV, lines 89-176). In a similar way, Xanthe extracts the ‘humour’ of ‘vile ambition’ from Meno and implants it in Donald. As a young man who had previously been ‘thrice happy’ with only his ‘humble store’ of gun, plaid and dog, Donald now finds himself discontented. melancholic, and racked with ambition to abandon the rustic simplicity which he had formerly embraced. This is an inversion of Pope’s portrayal of Belinda, who recants her vain ‘love of Courts’ (IV, line 152) and desires to escape to ’some lone isle, or distant Northern land’ (IV, line 154). Donald and Belinda wish to change places.

Macpherson could only admire the consummate skills of Pope in works such as Windsor-Forest (1713), where the glorious past and imperial future of ‘Albion’ are interwoven with references to the Jacobite cause. Pope depicts Britain’s imperial future through the visionary ‘Old Father Thames’, and Macpherson’s attempts to adopt this prophetic device pale in comparison to his sources; nevertheless, his efforts are instructive. Through a reference to the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, an episode in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of thrj King’s of Britain, ‘Scottish liberty’ (IV. line I 79) is exchanged in the future for ‘fusil gold’ (IV, line 184) and the Hanoverian succession will ‘sprout from Saxon trunk’ (IV, line 183), sealing the fate of Scotland’s independence. This prophetic denunciation of the House of Hanover may signal Macpherson’s awareness that in recent decades the voice of Merlin had served a variety of political agendas.’g With sources in ‘The Hunter’ veering awkwardly from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Pope, we find further evidence of young Macpherson looking unsuccessfully for a literary tradition in which to work.

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In the wake of Culloden, the Jacobite Chief Ewan Macpherson of Cluny was forced into a covert life in Highland caves for nine years, after which he escaped from Britain.’” Whether by coincidence or not, James Macpherson selects his own cave from which lo observe scenes of Highland life. ‘The Cave. Written in the Highlands’ is one of his shorter, more coherent pre-Ossianic poems, first published in 1805 by Malcolm Laing.z’ This pastoral idyll describes the view from a lofty cave, below which is a lalie ‘Skirted with shady forests round’ (line 30) , a Highland vision alive with the sounds of the wind in the woods, ‘the flood’ (line 6) rushing down the hillside, and the echoes of a woodman’s axe. Shepherds and fowlers, deer, eagles and ‘well-met hunters’ (line 26) add intcrest to the scene. A ‘ruin once renowned’ (line 32) clings to the ‘rocky height’ (line 3 1 ) of an island in the lalie, suggesting the modernity of the observer: lovers ‘laugh and kiss’ (line 44) on the grassy shore.

Departing for the sheltered fireside of his ‘homely hut’ (line 53), the poet loolis forward to returning to his cave ‘When storms are past, - and fair the sky’ (line 55). The view from the ‘Cave’ is a source of aesthetic pleasure. rather than a retreat from oppression. The world below is a utopian combination of productivity and enjoyment: the grazing of livestock and gathering of fuel coincides with hunting and boating, fishing and fowling: there is leisure for poetry, love-making and ‘Contemplation’ (line 3). Social upheaval and privation, hard labour and disaffection are excluded from the landscape, indicating a desire to transcend, rather than revisit, the violence of the 7745 Rising and its aftermath at Culloden. As depicted here, the Highlands constitute a demilitarised, de-politiciscd, pastoral ideal in the youthful mind of Macpherson: the ’45 is simply absent. The conventional symbols of Highland identity which were banned a h Cullodcn do not enter Macpherson’s picture, as though the landscape is about to be overwritten with a new national narrative.

Having moved from Ruthven to Edinburgh in 1758, Macpherson must have felt that leaving the Highlands was a fortuitous decision, because his epic The Highlander was published in April that year by Walter Ruddiman in Edinburgh. Although the poem received little critical notice, amomentous shift in Macpherson’s poetical abilities and his intellectual growth are evident in the differences between ‘The Hunter’ and The Highlander. When The Highlarider is read ‘through’ entrenched assumptions about the Ossian controversy, rather than as a pre-Ossianic text in its own right, it is easy to misinterpret the significance of his first published epic. Macpherson derived its narrative framework from Reruin Scoticnrum Historia (1582) by George Buchanan ( I 506- I j82).” That decision is worth noting, because Buchanan’s work was central to the eighteenth-century transformation of the Scottish Whig tradition.’<

Rather than identifying with Jacobitism, The Highlander attempts to dis- engage the Highland region from its Jacobite legacy. Unlike ‘The Hunter’, which depicts an Anglo-Scottish rivalry, the dramatic action of The Highlunder involves a series of battles between Scotland and ‘Scandinavia’s hostile pow’r’ (I, line 19), thus removing internal faction from the rhetorical unity of ‘Albion’

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(I, line 47). The poem opens with an interesting illustration of the protagonist, Albin, walking through a corridor filled with marble busts of the Fergusian line of Scottish kings (I, lines 39-48):

On either side the gate. in order stand The ancient kings of Caledonia’s land. The marble lives: they breathe within the stone. And still, as once, the royal warriors frown. The Pergusses are seen above the gate; This first created, that restor’d. the state. In warlike pomp the awful forms appear, And, bending. threaten from the stone the spear: While to their side young Albion seems to rise, And on her fathers turns her smiling eyes.

As Roger Mason writes, regarding the portraits of 111 Scottish kings which hang in Holyrood House, the historical authenticity of these ancient kings pales in comparison to their function as myth.’4 For Macpherson, this list of kings serves as a link to an ancient constitution in which monarchs were elected according to merit as well as birth.’i Accordingly, merit and birth share equal status for the election of monarchs in The Highlander. As the king Indulph says to Alpin (later revealed as his lost son Duffus, the heir to the throne), ‘Nobler the youth, who, though before unknown, / From merit mounts to virtue and renown, / Than he, set up by an illustrious race’ (V, lines 295-297).’h

If Buchanan provides the vision of the past in The Highlander, the task of seeing the future is allotted to an unnamed hermit whose language and political vision resemble the one created by two Scottish authors, James Thomson and David Mallet, in Afird: A Masque (1740), a seminal text in the literary nation-building of the Patriot Opposition to Walpole which was composed and first performed for Frederick Prince of Wales, the royal figure-head of the Patriot Whigs.’’ Thomson and Mallet’s Hermit sees with prophetic power into the future, employing a rhetoric which privileges Union over faction, and is designed to overwrite past, present and future problems of nationhood with a narrative of British patriotism.

We have already observed Merlin as a prophetic visionary in ‘The Hunter’. In the following verses from The Higlhrider , Macpherson reveals just how much his own political vision has subsequently changed (V, lines 14 5-148):

Thy blood. which rolling down from Fergus came. Passes through time, a pure untainted stream. Albion shall in her pristine glory shine, And, blessed herself, bless the Fergusian line.

This mythical ‘Fergusian line’ was considered a liability among Scottish Whig historiographers, and Macpherson would later repudiate it. In 1758, however, he was evidently attracted by its antiquarian appeal and thc Scottish focus of

Tlie Pro-Ossiaiiic Politics of lames Macyliersoii 6 7

Buchanan’s text. Linking Albin to Fergus, he envisages the future of Scotland within a wider national context of ‘Albion’ (V, lines 149-158):

But, ah! 1 see grim treason rear its head, Pale Albion trembling. and her monarch dead: The tyrant wield his sceptre smeared with blood - 0 base return! but still great Heaven is good: He falls, he falls: see how the tyrant lies! And Scotland brightens up her weeping eyes: The banished race again resume their own, Nor Syria boasts her royal saint alone. Its gloomy front the lowering season clears. And gently rolls a happy round of years.

In these lines, the Hermit describes the ‘treason’ of the Civil Wars and the regicide of Charles I, ‘her monarch dead’. The ‘tyrant’ Cromwell’s sceptre is ‘smeared with blood’, but ‘he falls’ and Scotland ‘brightens’. With the Restoration of Charles 11, the Stuarts ‘resume their own’.

The Hermit’s vision picks up the narrative of Scotland’s mythical history where Buchanan’s Reruin Scnticnnrrn Historia (1582) had stopped. Next he foretells the coming of the Revolution of 1688 (V, lines 159-170):

Again I see contending chiefs come on And, as they strive to mount, they tear the throne: To civil arms the horrid trumpet calls, And Caledonia by her children falls. The storm subsides to the calm flood of peace: The throne returns lo Pergus’ ancient race. Glad Caledonia owns their lawful sway: Happy in them, in her unhappy they! See each inwrapped untimely in his shroud, For ever sleeping in his generous blood! Who on thy mournful tomb refrains the tear.; 0 regal charms. unfortunately fair!

The Revolutionary factions ‘tear the throne’, and ‘civil arms’ fragment the nation. With an implicit reference to the Battle of I<illiecrankie (1689). Caledonia ‘falls’ by the divided Jacobite and Williamite loyalties of ‘her children’. James 11’s unpopularity. his vacation of the throne and the ‘Gloi-ious’ Revolution are all consistent with thc ancient constitutional concept of elective monarchy which Macpherson derived from the resurgence of Scottish Whig interest in Buchanan. The reference to Queen Anne, ‘unfortunately fair!’, is particularly poignant. It reflects upon the tragedy of the final Stuart monarch of Britain and her seventeen babies, none ofwhom survived beyond childhood. Each of them sleeps ‘For ever’ in the ‘generous blood’ of Fergus.

Queen Anne is oppressed by the forces of ‘Faction’ (V, lines 171-180) related to the Hanoverian succession, which had been secured by the Act of Settlement (170r), plus the escalating debates in Edinburgh and Westminster about the

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prospect ofunion. But the full impact of the Hermit’s vision is compressed into the following lines (V, lines 175-180):

Why mention him in whom th’ eternal fates Shall bind in peace the long-discording states? See Scot and Saxon, coalesced in one, Support the glory of the common crown. Britain no more shall shake with native storms, But o’er the trembling nations lift her arms.

Although Weinbrot notes these lines in Britannia’s Issue, he quickly dismisses them as incoherent pre-Ossianic juvenilia, perhaps for the very reason that they complicate any reading of Macpherson as a Jacobite.” However, the coherence of The Highlander is plain for all to see. The most revealing aspect of these verses is the way Macpherson refers to the exiled Stuart dynasty. The ‘native storms’ related to the Jacobite cause have no future in Macpherson’s vision of a unified ‘Britain’. The Pretender is finished: ‘Why mention him’ in a nation in which ‘Scot and Saxon’ are happily mixed. or ‘coalesced in one’? The Divine Right of Kings and its related Stuart claims upon the throne are dismissed, the Hanoverian succession is upheld, and Britain’s rights over ‘the trembling nations’ of its expanding empire are asserted, all with disarming simplicity. From the ‘prophecy of Merlin’ in ‘The Hunter’ to the Hermit’s vision in The Highlander, the Pope-inspired, Tory rhetoric can be seen to evolve into Whig ideology.

The evolution of Macpherson’s political beliefs continued to trace the footsteps of Pope in later years, and this trajectory can be detected in The Highlander. Like Pope, Macpherson increasingly became an admirer of the political philosophy which culminated in Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King (1738). In Celtic antiquity and the Highland clan system, Macpherson found an intriguing patriarchal framework for Bolingbroke’s ancient consti- tutionalism and the formative spirits of ‘liberty’, ‘faction’ and ‘patriotism’. In this Bolingbrolcean language of nationhood, ‘Celts, Goths, Saxons, and their accompanying mythologies could all find shelter under the same Gothic roof .‘Y For in Bolingbroke’s words, ‘The Normans and other strangers who settled here [...I were originally of Celtic, or Gothic extraction, call it which you please, as well as the people they subdued. They came out of the same northern hive’.j” Here was an ideal platform on which Ossian could emerge, complete with an ancient Celtic constitution. In Britarzrzia’s Issue, Weinbrot notes how Macpherson ‘blends the Britons, Gauls and most Germans into one supreme Celtic people’.3’ He then quotes from Macpherson’s Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland that the Celtic people ‘swarmed originally from the same hive’.3” Although the connection is not made by Weinbrot, there can be little doubt that Macpherson’s source is Bolingbroke’s heterogeneous Celtic ‘northern h i ~ e ’ . ~ 3

The Prf4)ssiunic Politics ofJames Macpherson 69

Having broken with the Divine Right of Kings and approved the Hanoverian succession, Macpherson’s use of oaks in The Highlaiider is more consistent with Patriot Whig iconography than with Jacobitism. As Pittock has noted,

In Ossian. [the comparison of heroes to trees] are frequent to the point of saturation, and are overwhelmingly made with one tree - the oak. As Marian McNeill outlines in The Silver Bough, the oak was the chief tree of the Druids. As such, Macpherson’s use of it can link thematically to both the Druid age which lies behind that of Fingal/Fionn, and also to the use of the Druid as a British patriot image in opposition Whig propaganda in the 1730s: it was in the Patriot Whig era that the oak’s symbolic association with the Stuarts was diluted into a more general image of British patriotic identity. <4

Here, Pittock shows how easily he can situate Macpherson’s poetry outside the discourse of Jacobitism, and within a Bolingbroltean language of British nationhood. This Patriot Whig reading is consistent with many scenes in The Highlander (111, lines 27-38):

The monarch rose. and leaning on the oak, Stretched out hi5 hand, and to the nobles spoke: ‘My lords! the Danes. for so just Heav’n decreed, Even on that shore they thought to conquer, bleed. In vain death wrapt our Fathers in his gloom. We raise them, i n our actions, from the tomb. Not infamous thcir aim, o’er lands afar To spread destruction and the plague of war: To meet the sons of battle as they roam, Content to ward them from their native home; To shew invaders that they dared to die, For barren rocks, for fame. and liberty.’

The ancestral spirits rise for the moral purpose of uniting their country against a foreign invader, not to tyrannise other nations; they are the spirits of patriotism and liberty personified. These lines spoken by Indulph among the ‘oaks’ of The Highlander contain ample engagements with the ancient constitution of ‘our fathers’, the factional forces of ‘destruction’ and ‘war’, the spirit of ‘liberty’, all of which help to clarify the direction of Macpherson’s evolution as a Whig. In the story of Alpin, who discovers ‘that blood, as merit, made him great’ (I, line 6), we witness the making of a British Patriot King.

When read in this light, Tlir Highlatider appears to be consistent in many ways with Colin Kidd’s argument that Macpherson actively participated in the advancement of ‘Scottish Whig hi~toriography’.’~ Kidd acknowledges that for most readers it seems odd ‘to characterise James Macpherson as a Whig’, mainly because ‘he has traditionally been described as a tory or as a “sentimental Jacobite”’.j‘ Macpherson’s rise to fame was made possible through the patronage of an influential circle of Scottish Whig historians, including Hugh Blair, Adam E’erguson, Alexander ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle, David Hume. Lord Hailes and LordKames. 37 The ideological and political investments

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of this group should not be discounted when considering Macpherson’s own intellectual development. These same men had sponsored the literary career of John Home, the author of the successful play Douglas (1756), who was instrumental in recruiting Macpherson into this Whig circle. He met Macpherson at Moffat in the autumn of 1759, and upon making his acquaintance expressed a keen interest in his knowledge of Highland Gaelic p0etry.3~ They were joined in Moffat by Adam Ferguson and Alexander Carlyle. Carlyle was instantly impressed, as were his friends, by the style and striking imaginative force of Macpherson’s ‘translations’, including that which would soon be published as ‘The Death of Oscar’ in Fragments ofAncient Poetry ( I 760).3Y After this initial action by Home, Ferguson and Carlyle, other members of the circle pitched in. In early April 1760, Thomas Gray professed to having ‘gone mad’ about ‘two specimens of Erse poetry’, describing himself as ‘exstasie with their infinite beauty’; they were sent in manuscript form by Horace Walpole, who in turn had received them from Lord Hailes.4” In this way, the rise of Macpherson’s literary career can be traced to this circle of Whigs: it seems unlikely that they would offer such support and encouragement to a Jacobite.

Murray Pittock has objected that ‘Celtic Whig’ is ‘too categorical’ a term for Macpherson, arguing that Jacobitism is a broader church than Whiggisrn.4’ If Macpherson was engaged as an author in the Jacobite cause, then it seems strange that he devoted so much energy to attacking the ideas of Father Thomas Innes, an influential Jacobite ideologue, historian and fabri~ator.4~ After demolishing the pedigree of the Fergusian line ofkings, Kidd writes, Innes proceeded to supplant it with his own fabricated Jacobite line of Pictish kings. ‘James Macpherson’s Celtic whiggism’, Kidd argues, ‘was the culmination of a tradition of Whig responses to the destructive scholarship of Father Innes which sidestepped the weak ground of diplomatic scholarship for alternative scholarly terrain, most notably linguistics’.‘? Macpherson’s antipathy for Innes is evident in The Highlander. While admiring the marble pantheon of Fergusian kings, Alpin relishes the following image: ‘Revenge still sparkles in the hero’s eye: / Around the Picts a nameless slaughter lye. / The youthful warrior thus reviews, with joy, / The godlike series of his ancestry’ (I, lines 55-58). It is ‘with joy’ that Alpin imagines the violent obliteration of the Pictish, Jacobite line of kings invented by Innes.

Macpherson does demonstrate a keen interest in the ways that linguistic arguments could be used to support historical frameworks and national identity myths. This can be seen in his controversial language-based argument that Ireland was originally populated from Scotland, an alarming inversion of the conventional wisdom on this subject. Sebastian Mitchell has recently considered this Scottish colonisation of Ireland debate as an extension of Macpherson’s own commitment to the expansion of the British Empire.44 However, the presence of this theme in The Highlander has not yet been placed in its wider ideological context: ‘And next appears Gregorius’ awful name, / Hibernia’s conqu’ror for a gen’rous fame’ (I, lines 49-50), an image that is

reinforced with ‘Hibernia’s spoils, Gregorius’ martial fire’ (V, line 307). These two references in The Highlander to the Scottish conquest and colonisation of Ireland indicate how carly such aspects of Whig ideology had taken root in his mind, and his distancing of himself from Jacobite positions in the poem further augments Kidd’s evidence of Macpherson’s material contributions to Whig historiography.

Macpherson did not invent this provocative response to Father Innes. but he was clearly formulating it in verse prior to April 1758. Kidd notes one channel through which Macpherson may have received the Scottish conquest of Ireland argument, and Macpherson himself reveals yet another. ‘That Ireland was first peopled from Britain is certain’, writes Macpherson, citing the authority ofthe historian Sir James Ware, who in turn had based his argument on William Camden’s Britannia (r586).4j ‘Sir James Ware’, states Macpherson, ‘was indefatigable in his researches’.4h Approached from this point of view, it is easier to see Macpherson’s argument that Ireland was originally populated from Scotland as a kind of Bolingbroliean paradigm in which the ‘factions’ of pre-Union Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales are all subjugated to a transcendent myth of Britishness. Two of Macpherson’s other substantial works, the epic Trrriora (r763) and the Introduction to the History oJ’Great Britain and Ireland (1771, 1772, 1773). serve to substantiate the argument that Ireland had originally been populated from and colonised by Scotland, but they fall beyond my discussion of his pre-Ossianic poetry.4’

In ‘Literary Anecdotes of James Macpherson, Esq.’, included in Laing’s edition of The Works ofOssian, we find the following description ofMacpherson:

To execute [The History of Grmt Britriin fi-0~71 the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover, 17751, he was furnished with the best and most authentic materials. the original papers of the families of Stuart and Hanover. together with those of King William: of which he made the most liberal and accurate use, without being either tinctured with the prejudices, or biassed by the parties and factions, which convulscd these kingdoms during the times of which he treats.4’

The emphasis on ‘authentic materials’ and ‘original papers’ almost over- shadows this rhetorical construct of Macpherson as a selfless servant of civic virtue who can reconcile ‘the families of Stuart and Hanover’ in a unifying narrative of British history. Macpherson is portrayed as not being ‘biassed’ by ‘parties and factions’. This elision of party divisions and distaste for political convulsion are consistent with Bolingbrolie’s rhetoric of Patriotism. Macpherson dedicated Fingal (1761, imprint 1762), Teniora (1763) and The Works of Ossian (1765) to Lord Rute, George 111’s leading minister. George 111 had been educated from his earliest days in the political philosophy of his father Frederick’s party, the Patriot Whigs, and Bute continued as his mentor in Patriotism.49 The relationship between Macpherson and Bute has often been misrepresented as two predatory Scots at large in London, rather than as two Britons who shared a common political ideology.’’ Bailey Saunders writes that

7 2 MELVIN KEKSEY

Sir John Macpherson joined the Whig opposition in order to ‘stand well with the Prince of Wales, and there are indications in the remainder of the letters to Robinson that [James] Macpherson followed the same course, probably for the same reason. He was pleased with the change’.i’ This suggestion that Macpherson joined the Whig opposition can hardly be described as new information, but when combined with the recent research of Kidd and the further evidence outlined in this essay, a different spirit of nationhood begins to inform the body of Macpherson’s poetry.

However, the tendency to dismiss or to label Macpherson’s work remains all too common among academics. In a recent review of The Forger’s Shadow (2001), John Mullan objects to the complexity that Nick Groom ascribes to Macpherson’s work. ‘Does Groom really want us to admire Macpher- son’s fabrications;’, he asks. ‘Once you Itnow that there is no original behind Macpherson’s “translations”, they dwindle into bathos.’” The tone of Mullan’s remarks throughout the review reveals a kind of Johnsonian assump- tion that literary merit is dependent upon some external ‘truth’, and that the act of fabrication is neither culturally instructive nor intellectually complex.i’ David Hall RadcliEe has noted that Wordsworth ‘attempt[ed] to retrieve Ossian by rejecting Macpherson’.’4 Yet Ossian and Macpherson remain inextricably linked: each gives voice to the other. In the eighteenth century as well as today, the fact that Macpherson lied about his Gaelic originals neither dimin- ishes the imaginative power of the ‘Spirit of Ossian’ nor delimits the political complexities of his Romanticism.j5 The purpose of this selective study of Macpherson’s pre-Ossianic poetry is not to divorce him entirely from Jacobite sentiments, but to highlight how Jacobitism is superseded and overwritten by other narratives of nationhood in the evolution of his own work. In the young Macpherson, we Iind an aspiring poet seeking a literary tradition in which to work, one whose anti-Hanoverian, anti-Saxon sentiments in ‘The Hunter’ give way in The Higlilander to a coherent Whig historiography based in part upon the writings of Buchanan and the political philosophy of Bolingbrolte.

NOTES

1. Howard Weiiibrol. Britaririiri’s Issue: Tlic Risr of British Litcvvturr from Drydm to Ossinn (Cambridge 1993). p.478.

2 . ‘ ln the wake of the, ‘45. and especially during Kute‘s ministry in the early 1760s. anything nationalistic from Scotland emerged into a climate of ready-made opposition. So it was with Ossian.‘ Paul Baines, The Houscj of Forger!] irr EinlitePritIi-Centirly Aritairi (Aldershot. UK and Brookfield, USA 1999). p.10.3.

3. Murray G. H. Pitlock. T h ? Inveritiori of’SccJtlririd: The Stirurt iU!jt/i and t l ic Scottish Idmt i ty . 1638 t o the Present (London r y q i ) . p.73.

4. See Northrop Frye. ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’, ELIT 23 (1956), p.144- 52; Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: J~iriies Macpherson m i d the Pocwis qf Ossian (Edinburgh I 988); Kenneth Simpson. The Pro tmi Scot: The Crisis OJ Identity in Eighteent l i -C~~ntur~~ Scottish Literatiire (Aberdeen 1988): Paul decategno. 7rirnc.s Macpliuson (Boston 1989): Ossinii Revisited, ed. Howard Gaslcill (Edinburgh 1991); Truditiori irr brrnsitiun: Miomeri Writers. Mctrgirial T c ~ t s , and the Eighteenth-Century Canon. ed. Alvaro Rideiro. S. J. and James Baslcer (Oxford 1996): Celticisni.

Tlle Prr-Ossimic Politics of J a m s Macplierson 73

ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam and Atlanta f 996); Katie Trumpener. Rardic Natiorinlisrri: Tlrc K o n i m t i c Noivl and tlfe British Enipiw (I'riiiceton 1997). p.67-127: E'roni Gacdic to Rornrrntic: Ossiariic Translations. ed. Fiona StalTord and Howard Gaskill (Amsterdam and Atlanta I 998). David Fairer. English PorJtrq oft / i t~I: ' igl i t t~cri t l i -C' t~ri t f ir~/ I 7oo-I 789 (Harlow 2003), p. I 70-73.

j. See Colin Kidd, Sirbwrting Suptlotid's Ptrst: Scottish W l i i g Historians and the Crccition r ! f mi Anglo-Brilisli Idenlit!g. I 689-c.1 830 (Cambridge f ~ 9 3 ) .

6. My reading of Kidd's work is partly informed by Uafydd Moore's forthcoming essay, 'James Macpherson and "Celtic Whiggism"'. and I am grateful to him for this and other helpful exchanges of information on Macpherson.

7 . George Pratt Insh. T/i(l Srottisli ]trc~cibito Moivniuit: A Stud:/ i n Er,cinr~niic, and S k i n / Form (Edinburgh and London 1~152). p.16X.

8. On the role of Ewan Macphcrson and the Clan Macpherson in the 1745 Rising and Culloden. see John Prebble. Cul/odcri (I larmondsworth 1996): StalTord. Tlic Sirblinir Smwge.. p.6-2.3.

9. l'heinost probable source is Bailey Saundcrs. whom lnsh citeselsewhcre in his argument. See Bailey Saunders. Tlv L+ ntid L(~ttc.l:o tif/~i~tios ~ n ~ , ~ ~ i [ , r s ~ ~ i i (London and New York 1894). P.37-39.

I o. Murray G. H. Pittock. Povlrg cintl / r icd j i l i , Polilics in I:iglif(~c,nflI-CPiitrrrY Rritrrin nrrd Irdririd (Cambridge 1994). p.17~): Pittock. T/ic h r i w i t i o r i c?fScotl,nid, p.74. Pittock's sources for this story appear to be lnsh and Saunders.

t i . See Murray G. H. Pittock. 'Jiiiiics Macpherson and the Jacobitc Code'. in From &dic to Romantic. ed. Stafrord and Gaslcill, p.41-50 Ip.41 J. For StaKord's remarks in question. see The Sirblinie Snvage, p . ~ 8. See also her modilied opinion on this point in Tlic Pocws qf Ossian nnrl R d a t d Works. cd. Howard Gaskill with an In~roduction by I%na Stafford (Edinburgh 1996). p.v-xviii Ip.viii).

I 2. deGategno. Jni71~s Macphorsori. p.2. I 3. Leith Davis. Acts of Union: Scotlarid rind t /w Litmry Nvgofiation of' the British Nafion,

r 707-r X j o (Stanford 1998). p.74-106 (p.77). r4. See Abarrkw and the EiiliglitPiiriic'iit. ed. Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeeo

I 987): Lois Whitney. 'English Primitivistic 'l'heorics of Epic Origins'. Mod(wi Pliilolngg 21 (May 1924). P.337-78.

ofOssiari ( T 8 0 . j ) . Macpherson did not intcnd this poem to be printed.

I 5. Stafford, The Sublirnr~ Saimge, p.40-60. 16. Posthumously named T h e Hunter' by Malcolm Laing when first published in The Pocws

17. StaKord. The Snblime Sa~aga. p.2 j. 18. Letter from Donald Macpherson lo Reverend J. Anderson oflaggan. October i 797; cited

by Stafford. T ~ P Sirblinie Savrige. p.40-41. 19. See Christine Gerard. T h Palriol O)pposition to Wa/po/e: Pditics. Pot.tr!/ and Nationd M!/t/i.

1 7 2 5 - 1 742 (Oxford 1994). p.169-77. 20. On Ewan Macpherson of Cluny. see Prebble. Cullodc~n. p.41, 3 34: see also Co11wtc.d Pnpm

on t l i~~Jac~cili i tc~ Risings. ed. Rupert C. Jarvis, 2 vols (Manchester and New York 1971). i.17-1'). 21. Tlia Poenis of Ossian. &. Contriiriirig tliu Poeticul Works 0 f J a r n ~ s Mncyherson, Gsq. in Prose

and Rh!gnicJ: witli Nott2s rind Illirstrrrtions h!/ Mdudni Laing. Esq.. 2 vols (Edinburgh and London

22. See John Macqueen's Introduction to ?'lw P O W I S O ~ O S S ~ ~ J I . cd. MalcolmLaing. 2 vols ( 180 j;

2 3. See Kidd. Sirbiwting Scotland's Past. p.7. 18-20. 24. Roger A. Mason. 'Scotching the Krut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-

Century Britain'. in Scotland arid E n g k i i i d : 1 2 x 6 - I 81.j. ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh 1987). p.60-84 (p.60).

25. On Buchanan's theory of ancient elective monarchy, see Colin Kidd. Bvitisli Idt7ntitir7s brforr Natioiialisrn: Etliriicity and Ncitionliood i n [lit' Atlinitic Wm-ld, r hoo-r 8oo (Cambridge I 999). p.rz.5-27.

77"'. Indulfus, brother of Milcolumbus': Mac(]ucen. The Works o$Ossinn ( 197 I ). Preface. i.x.

180j).

Edinburgh 1 ~ 7 1 ) . i.x.

26. DuKus. 'lost son of the 76th [Scoltishl king. Milcolumbus. and eventual su

27. See Gerard. Tha Patriot Opposiliori 1tJ %rii/pok. p.3, 15-18, 28. Weinbrot. Britannia's Isstw. p.540. 29. Gerard. The Patriot Opposition to b'(i/po/e, p.1 I 2. 30. Lord Bolingbroke: Historical Writings. ed. Isaac Kramniclr (Chicago 1972). p. r79. 31. Weinbrot. Britannia's Issup. p.516-17.

74 MELVIN KERSEY

32. James Macpherson. Iritrod~riTion to the Historg ofGrrat Brititin mid Irrlnnd. 3rd edn (London 17731, p.21-22.

33. Macpherson's claims about the unmixed state of the ancient Highland Celts clash with the reputed Germanic origins of the Clan Chattan, the confederation to which the Clan Macpherson belongs. The 'Literary Anecdotes of James Macpherson', attributed by Malcolm Laing to Macpherson. state that the Macphersons 'deduce their origin from the ancient Catti of Germany' (Laing. The Pocws of Ossimi. i.xlix). On Macpherson and the Clan Chattan, see also Kidd, British 7dmtities Btfore Nationalisr?i. p.201.

34. Pittock, 'The Jacobite Code', p.44-4 j. 35. Kidd. Subverting Scotland's Past. p.227. 36. Kidd. Subverting Srotlnrzd's Past, p.223. For his discussion of Macpherson's practical

engagement in Whig ideological debates. see p.219-35, 239. 245-46. 270-71, 279. 37. On the sociological Whigs. see Kidd, Subwrting Scotltrrid's Past, p.108. I I 7-22. 38. Saunders writes that this meeting was pre-arranged by Adam Ferguson (Life mid Letters

o/Jtzrnes Macphrrson, p.64-68). See also deGategno. Jurnrs Macyhcrsoiz. p.19. 24-2 j: Stafford. Tht. Suhlirw Savage, p. 77-79.

39. See Alexander Carlyle, Anrrdotes arid Cliamctws oj'tlie Times. ed. James Kinsley (London and New York r97.3). p.203. On 'The Death of Oscar'. see Donald Meek. 'The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland', in Ossian Revisited. p. 19-48 (p.37-40).

40. Correspondence of Thornas Gray. ed. Paget 'I'oynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols (Oxford 193j). ii.664-65,n.r. 2.

41. Pittock. 'James Macpherson and the Jacobite Code'. p.41. 42. 'The first domestic writers of the history of North Britain I...] found themselves obliged

to fill up the void in their antiquities with tales which had been growing in Ireland. [...I The ingenious father Innes was the first of the Scots who had the courage to attack that puerile system of their origin [...I. But Innes was more successful in destroying the undigested accounts oiothers. than in establishing a more rational system of his own' (Macpherson. An Introduction to the Hislor!! rfGroat Britain and Ireland, p.77-78).

43. ICidd, Subi~erting Scotland's Past, p.224. 44. Sebastian Mitchell, 'James Macpherson's Ossinn and the Empire oi' Sentiment'. in The

Rritisk~ournalof'Eighteeritli-Centicry Studies 22 (1999). p.155-71. See also Clare O'Halloran. 'Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past: The Challenge of Macpherson's Ossian'. Past arid Present 124

45. 'A Dissertation'. in The Works of Ossian. the Son qf Fingal. In TIW V~lurnc~s. Translatedfrorn the Galic I m g u a g e By Jtirnes Marpherson. 3rd edn (London r7hg), repr. in The Poems qf'Ossinn arid Related Works. p.205-24 (p.208-209).

46. See the 'Advertisement' to The Works qf Ossian. repr. in The PUEIJIS of Ossinri and Related Works. p.201-202 (p.201).

47. Ernest Mossner refers to Mncpliersun's Iiitrod~rctioti to tlir History rfGreat Britninand Ireland as 'a highhanded attempt to substantiate his earlier thesis that Ireland had been settled through Scotland' (The Forgottm Huine: Lc Bm David. New York 194-3, p.92).

48. See Laing, i.xlvix-liii. Laing speculates that this piece. originally published in Ruddirnan's Weekly Magazinr ( ~ 7 7 6 ) . was written by Macpherson himself.

49. Christopher Hibbert, George 111: A Persorial History (London 1998). p.11-12. 50. Adam Potltay has remarked that 'Fingal is - in a way that George 111 could never be -

the "Patriot King," the benevolent patriarch who unites all his people'; 'Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poerirs of0ssinn'. PhfLA 107 (1992). p.120-30.

(1989). P.69-95.

57. Saunders, Lifi'and Letters oJ'Jutnes Mucpherson. p.284-85. 52. See John Mullan, 'Great Fakes', The Guardian, r j April 2002 (http://books.

guardian.co.ult /reviews/polit icsphilosophyandsociel~~/~,6~~r.~8~~2~.oo.h1nl). a review of Nick Groom, The Forger's Sliadow: How Forger!/ Changed the Course, of J,iteraturp (London 2002).

53. On the politicised nature of 'authenticity'. see 'Rhetorics of Authenticity', in Ken Ruthven. Faxing Literature (Cambridge 2001). p.146-70.

54. David Hall Kadcliffe. 'Ossian and the Genres ofCulture'. Studies in Roinnriticisrn 3 I (Summer 1992). p.zi.3-3.2 (p.23r).

55. 'Spirit of Ossian! if imbound / Ln language thou may'st yet be found' (lines 1 7 - ~ 8 ) : William Wordsworth. 'Written in a Blank Leaf of Macpherson's Ossian' (1827). For Macpherson's influence on Wordsworth, see John Robert Moore, 'Wordsworth's lTnacltnowledged Debt to Macpherson's Ossian'. PMLA 40 (1925). p.362-78: Fiona Stafford. "'Dangerous Success": Ossian.

Wordsworth. and English Romantic Literattire', in Ossiari Rrvisittd p . 4 ~ ~ - 7 2 . On Macpherson's Gaelic originals, see Derick S. Thonison. Gtrc4ic Sorir-ccs of'Macplicrsori's 'Ossirrn' (Edinburgh and London I 952): Donald Meek. 'The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland: Creativity and Adaptation'. in Ossian Rrvis i l~t l , p.19-4X: Neil Ross, Htwiic, I'nctr-y $ ~ i i n tlir Book of' tlip D m i of 1,isrnorc.. The Scottish Texts Society (Edinburgh I<) I<)).