Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age

By Eric Gidal

In a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's "translations," they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world.

Gidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dál Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813938189

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University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gidal, Eric

Ossianic unconformities : bardic poetry in the industrial age / Eric Gidal.

pages cm.—(Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3817-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-8139-3818-9 (e-book)

1. Macpherson, James, 1736-1796--Authorship. 2. Ossian, active 3rd century. 3. Literary forgeries and mystifications—History—18th century. 4. Place (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title.

PR3544.G54 2015

821’.6—dc23

2015005229

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Editors

Michael P. Branch, SueEllen Campbell, John Tallmadge

Series Consultants

Lawrence Buell, John Elder, Scott Slovic

Series Advisory Board

Michael P. Cohen, Richard Kerridge, Gretchen Legler, Ian Marshall, Dan Peck, Jennifer Price, Kent Ryden, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Whiston Spirn, Hertha D. Sweet Wong

For Lottie, Sylvia, and Jennie

Mes Voyageuses Extraordinaires

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on the Texts

Introduction: Ossianic Unconformities

1. The Songs of Ancient Peoples

2. Statistical Analyses

3. Topographical Labours

4. The Testimony of the Rocks

5. Extraordinary Voyages

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

As with any project that involves extensive research and composition, this book has benefited from a large number of auditors, readers, and conversationalists, to whom I owe great debts for historical information, literary allusions, and conceptual developments. I first forwarded the core ideas in this book at a meeting of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society in Aberdeen in 2011, a wonderfully collegial gathering where I received invaluable and generous leads from Howard Gaskill, Dafydd Moore, Eamonn O’Flaherty, and Fiona Stafford. Guinn Batten, Tili Boon Cuillé, Rebecca Messbarger, and the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon at Washington University in St. Louis invited me to share this work soon after, when it was in relative infancy and helped me to conceptualize further the directions I wished to take. For supportive and engaging environments where I was able to compose most of the original manuscript, I thank Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and Teresa Mangum and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Alan Bewell, Vincent Duscol, Barbara Eckstein, Tom Furniss, Adelaide Morris, Jeffrey Robinson, and Stephen Voyce all provided engaging conversation and important challenges at various stages of this work. I owe much as well to the anonymous readers for the University of Virginia Press for their insightful critiques and productive encouragement, to the editors of the series Under the Sign of Nature for their support of this project, and to the editorial staff at the press for the hard work of bringing it to completion. I thank Belinda Bates and Glenn Ehrstine for help with translations from the Italian and the German respectively. The Department of Special Collections at the University of Iowa and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, provided assistance in reproducing some of the maps and pages presented in this book, and I thank the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Iowa for a subvention to cover the costs of the illustrations. Finally, thanks are owed to my wife, Jackie, and our daughters, Lottie, Sylvia, and Jennie, who patiently accompanied me on a highly idiosyncratic Scottish tour and tolerated my absence while on subsequent travel in Belfast and Glasgow. They have learned to smile generously whenever the topic of Ossian comes up, yet again, and have reminded me always of what really matters.

Note on the Texts

Though I attend to textual details of a range of original publications, all citations from Macpherson’s Ossian refer to the University of Edinburgh edition of The Poems of Ossian, edited by Howard Gaskill, for ease of reference and in recognition of the authoritative scholarship of that edition.

All quotations from Homer use Alexander Pope’s translation. Although Macpherson himself produced a translation of the Iliad, neither he nor the many commentators on Ossian and Homer whom I study use it as a point of reference. John Keats’s preference for Chapman notwithstanding, Pope’s was the normative translation throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.

Introduction

Ossianic Unconformities

THIS BOOK PRESENTS and explores a uniquely modern quest to locate vestiges of ancient poetry in the rapidly changing landscapes of an industrial world. It introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry, they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world. In the chapters that follow, I explore the details of their imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland—whose perimeters form both the sixth-century kingdom of Dál Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception history of the poems of Ossian, I aim to unite literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology so as to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

What were the poems of Ossian? Macpherson had claimed them to be translations from epic lays composed in the third century by the blind bard Ossian, son of the Caledonian warrior-king Fingal. The poems celebrate Fingal’s exploits repelling Scandinavian invaders from Ireland, fighting back the Romans at the time of Septimus Severus, and ruling over a twilight period of Celtic glory. They are foreboding and gloomy works, suffused with a tragic sense of inevitable loss that overshadows the military victories and amorous connections they narrate. They are also almost entirely Macpherson’s own creations, though based loosely on ballads still circulating in the Highlands in the early eighteenth century, mostly dating to the twelfth through fifteenth centuries and of primarily Irish provenance. Macpherson, an aspiring poet and schoolteacher in his native Ruthven, south of Inverness in the central Highlands, had witnessed, during his youth, the destruction of the Scottish clans and the forced clearances of their lands in the wake of the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–46. No doubt traumatized by the military occupation of his country, Macpherson was also inspired by the contemporary renaissance of philosophy and letters in the universities and city centers of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, where he had been a student at Marischal College in the 1750s. Under the encouragement of the poet John Home, the moral philosopher Adam Ferguson, and the rhetorician Hugh Blair, Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), a small octavo volume that offered brief prose translations of Gaelic verse for the benefit of a Lowland literati who were instantly captivated by the notion that a poetry of profound feeling and imaginative depth might be traced to the antiquity of their own nation. The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry, Blair informed the volume’s readers in his anonymous preface, speculating that they might be coeval with the very infancy of Christianity in Scotland. Just as suggestively, Blair argued that though the poems now published appear as detached pieces in this collection, there is ground to believe that most of them were originally episodes of a greater work which related to the wars of Fingal.¹ This sense of a lost epic poem available only in fragments to a contemporary reading public certainly accounts for part of the volume’s appeal to the cultural aspirations of a militarily subordinated Scottish nation, an appeal matched by the poignant voice the poems give to an elegiac sense of collective loss.

By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees, old Oscian sat on the moss; the last of the race of Fingal, reads the opening of the eighth fragment, using a variant spelling of the bard’s name. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead. . . . How hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches round thee! Where is Fingal the King? Where is Oscur my son? Where are all my race? Alas! In the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou bringest back the memory of the past.² Captivated by such plaints, a long list of sponsors and subscribers sent Macpherson on a tour of the Highlands in search of further episodes and remains. The fruits of his labors were printed at the end of the following year in the handsome quarto volume, Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books, followed only a year later by a second companion volume, Temora: An Ancient Epic Poem, in Eight Books. The whole collection was revised and printed as a two-volume Works of Ossian in 1765, this time accompanied by Blair’s influential Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, first published separately in 1763, which placed the poems within a conjectural history of civil society and poetic form.

Despite the controversies that surrounded the poems from their beginning—skepticism from English critics, most famously Samuel Johnson, as to their antiquity and outrage from Irish antiquarians as to their origin—the poems were a European-wide sensation, republished in numerous English editions and adaptations and translated into French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Russian, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Latin, and Classical Greek. Their mix of martial bombast, elegiac sentiment, and visionary hallucination helped shape a strain of romantic antiquarianism throughout the continent and beyond. Writers from Goethe and Schiller to Mme de Staël and Melchiore Cesarotti acclaimed Ossian’s poems as rivaling those of Homer for sublimity of thought and dignity of expression, and leaders as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte claimed him as their inspiration.³ The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder celebrated the poems as exemplary of the songs of ancient peoples, the Volkslieder, as he put it in his essay on Ossian, in which he coined the term. The more remote a people is from an artificial, scientific manner of thinking, speaking, and writing, he argued, the less its songs are made for paper and print, the less its verses are written for the dead letter. The purpose, the nature, the miraculous power of these songs as the delight, the driving-force, the traditional chant and everlasting joy of the people—all this depends on the lyrical, living, dance-like quality of the song, on the living presence of the images . . . and on a hundred other things which belong to the living world, to the gnomic song of the nation, and vanish with it.⁴

Herder expressed a strong desire to travel to Scotland so as to unite his enthusiastic appraisal of traditional societies with the lands in which they once had dwelled, and Macpherson’s publications motivated many travelers to tour the Scottish Highlands in search of the fabled haunts of the kings, bards, and maidens of a distant time. Whether tying their journeys to specific passages in the poetry or indulging in a more diffuse antiquarian sentimentality, travelers in Scotland seemed to find Ossian in every glen, Fingal in every promontory, with or without the indulgence of local place names or tourist traps.⁵ But the publications I explore in this book stand out from these fashionable enthusiasms in both the scale of their obsessive productions and their ambition to use the poems as a storehouse of indigenous knowledge to help chart the deep history of a rapidly changing land. Inspired by contemporary efforts in Homeric archaeology and increasingly influenced by developments in the earth sciences, the statistical geographer and agriculturalist John Sinclair, the poet and antiquarian Hugh Campbell, and the Free Church minister Peter Hately Waddell all sought to reclaim a noble Scottish heritage through increasingly elaborate forms of speculative geography. Yet these writers were forced to reckon with the enormous social and environmental changes brought about by agricultural reform; military clearances; and, most pertinently, the industrialization of the Atlantic archipelago by steamboats, railways, mining, and manufactures. Their conjectural mappings of bardic poetry combined science and sentiment with an increasingly poignant sense of loss as they came to echo Ossian’s lamentations not only for a culture passed out of time but for a natural environment whose permanence could no longer be assured.

In Ossianic Unconformities, I tell the story of these imaginary worlds so as to consider the power of the book and the map to represent, imagine, and reckon with industrialized space. Despite, or perhaps because of, the quixotic nature of their quests, the poets, statisticians, historians, novelists, and ministers whose works I examine give expression to a distinctively modern experience of environmental change. To underscore the historical poignancy of their geographical fantasies, I read through the pages of their idiosyncratic and elaborate publications alongside contemporary developments in Homeric archaeology, industrial history, and Scottish geology. The result is an experiment in ecocritical book studies, presenting a neglected tradition of mythic geography in Scottish and European literature in relation to current environmental concerns. I aim to contribute to the reception history of the poems of Ossian insofar as I attend with sympathetic yet critical care to a range of neglected works in that tradition and establish the pertinence of environmental history to the curious fate of Macpherson’s imaginative productions. But I also hope to contribute to conversations in ecological critique regarding the mediation of regional histories, literary identities, and natural environments. By presenting a detailed case study of how oral traditions and indigenous knowledge are reinvented by industrial print culture in response to environmental degradation, my goal is to place literary history, book studies, and critical cartography in conversation with historical geography and ecological thought.

While the first descriptor in my title signifies a curious literary phenomenon of romantic antiquarianism, the second derives from the earth sciences and references angular disjunctions in the stratigraphic record that demonstrate breaks in the geological history of a region. Unconformities are physical manifestations of heterogeneous time, compressions of distinct eras of sedimentation caused by orogenic shifts and subsequent erosions that have produced radically discordant appearances in the layering, or superposition, of strata. In Edinburgh, James Hutton made these unconformities the basis of his 1795 Theory of the Earth, and the demonstrative engraving he commissioned for his text (figure 1) has become one of the most frequently reproduced images in the history of the earth sciences, a compelling illustration of the high antiquity and great revolutions of the globe underlying the quotidian existence of human affairs. Unconformities reveal in spatial form what Hutton’s friend and disciple John Playfair famously referred to as the abyss of time, the vertigo-inducing timescale necessary for such ongoing development and decay.⁶ It affords no presumption against the reality of this progress, Playfair argued in his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), that, in respect of man, it is too slow to be immediately perceived: the utmost portion of it to which our experience can extend, is evanescent, in comparison with the whole, and must be regarded as the momentary increment of a vast progression, circumscribed by no other limits than the duration of the world.⁷ Hutton’s destabilizing theory of a world with no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end was as revolutionary for its account of time as of space, serving notice of the vast scale of geohistory to a rapidly modernizing world.⁸ The imagination was first fatigued and overpowered by endeavouring to conceive the immensity of time required for the annihilation of whole continents by so insensible a process, wrote Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830) regarding Hutton’s innovations. The oldest rocks were represented to be of a derivative nature, the last of an antecedent series, and that perhaps one of many pre-existing worlds.⁹ Unconformities, those annals of a former world, in Hutton’s suggestive phrase, helped to increase the scale of reference for humanity’s evanescent sojourn on the planet’s constantly shifting lands.¹⁰

FIGURE 1. From James Hutton, Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations (Edinburgh, 1795). (Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

A more poetic perception of unconformities characterized the presentation of Ossian in the 1760s as both Macpherson and Blair foregrounded the paradoxical articulation of modern moral sentiments by the heroes of a barbaric age, the fire and enthusiasm of the most early times, combined with an amazing degree of regularity and art.¹¹ The sentimental anachronisms of the poems, their highly reflexive language of loss and recuperation, posed a problem to dominant eighteenth-century models of historical progress. Scottish economic and social theorists at the time understood all societies as passing through distinct phases on the road from barbarism to civilization and considered changes in manners and mores as correlative with the development from nomadic to agrarian to commercial existence. In these models of stadial history, moral sentiments develop alongside social formations as the division of labor and expansion of individual freedoms promote an increasingly affective relation to codes of social behavior. This distinction in manners between primitive and advanced societies was said to obtain as well in their poetic traditions. Whereas the heroes of ancient poetry proceed[] on the maxims of animosity and hostile passion, reasoned Adam Ferguson in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), the hero of modern romance professes a contempt of stratagem, as well as of danger, and unites in the same person, characters and dispositions seemingly opposite; ferocity with gentleness, and the love of blood with sentiments of tenderness and pity.¹² In the context of such conjectural histories, the poems of Ossian presented a type of poetic unconformity, for Fingal and his heroes, though primitive warriors, spend far more time engaging in emotional reflection than they do in martial valor and are motivated far more by sentimental ethics than they are by the promise of conquest or the necessities of survival. When we open the works of Ossian, wrote Hugh Blair, we find tenderness, and even delicacy of sentiment, greatly predominant over fierceness and barbarity. Our hearts are melted with the softest feelings, and at the same time elevated with the highest ideas of magnanimity, generosity, and true heroism. . . . How is this to be accounted for? Or by what means to be reconciled with the remote antiquity attributed to these poems?¹³

For Ossian’s critics, the answer to such questions was obvious. These unconformities were proof positive of Macpherson’s fraud. David Hume observed that throughout the poetry we see nothing but the affected generosity and gallantry of chivalry, which are quite unknown, not only to all savage people, but to every nation not trained in these artificial modes of thinking.¹⁴ Sir Walter Scott suggested that Macpherson had attempted to recast epic poetry as a sentimental novel and quipped that Fingal has all the strength and bravery of Achilles, with the courtesy, sentiment, and high-breeding of Sir Charles Grandison.¹⁵ And René de Chateaubriand claimed that Macpherson was guilty of mistakes in Natural History: He has planted oaks where nothing but gorse ever grew, and made eagles scream, where nothing was ever heard but the voice of the barnacle, or the whistling of the curlew. . . . The man of the eighteenth century peeps through the thin veil at every moment.¹⁶ But for Ossian’s enthusiasts, the sentimental qualities of the verse signaled a unique moment of transition between two distinct epochs and reaffirmed their faith in the transformative power of poetry itself. Following Thomas Blackwell’s theories of Homeric epic, Blair conceived the poems to have emerged out of the historical fissure consequent upon the decay of a heroic era, products of a classical age, enlightened by the memorials of former times, which were conveyed in the songs of bards; and . . . a period of darkness and ignorance which lay beyond the reach of tradition.¹⁷ Combining a progressive vision of stadial history with a nostalgic valorization of primitive society, Blair imagined Ossian, both warrior and poet, as a bardic unconformity who combined valor with reflection, sublimity with understanding, in both his deeds and his songs. In turn, by both Macpherson and Blair’s accounts, Ossianic poetry had provided an emulative model for the Caledonian chiefs, a pattern of principled sentiments that, continuing, formed at last the general character of the nation, happily compounded of what is noble in barbarity, and virtuous and generous in a polished people.¹⁸

This romantic construction of bardic poetry as a literature of cultural recovery and moral progress established idealized terms for the poetry’s reception by Scotland’s modern commercial society. Just as Ossian was said to have offered his contemporary auditors a model of language and custom that simultaneously memorialized the heroic past and established the ethical foundation for social development, Macpherson’s publications valorized the localized cadences of bardic song even as they reconstituted its conventions within the textual devices and circulating apparatuses of modern print culture. The poems of Ossian are far less Herder’s traditional chant and everlasting joy of the people than they are an elaborate exercise in textual mediation. The modern genius of these works, and a large part of the reason for their appeal, derives from the mechanisms by which they embody a belated relation to the bardic past in both content and form. Even as the poetry evokes a rich tapestry of communal values, traditions, and relations, it also expresses an interiorized and subjective relation to that self-identified culture, primarily through the figure of Ossian himself, who models an aesthetic response for his auditors, now readers. The superposition of heroic narrative, noble lament, and ethnographic reflection assembled in the cross-sections of Macpherson’s pages reproduce this bardic function as philological collation. Ossian might claim to feel the tombs with his hands and to hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones, but for Macpherson’s readers, such direct contact with the locations of fallen heroes remained a purely figurative experience.

The critical connections between Ossian and the earth were in many ways overdetermined by early literary and scientific surveys of Scotland, which persistently conflated antiquarian and natural curiosities to draw out the deep history of these northern lands. Sir Joseph Banks’s 1772 celebration of Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa united Ossian with the sublime forms of nature as both anterior and superior to the works of modern man and established the island as a pilgrimage site for geologists and Ossian enthusiasts alike (figure 2). Informed by a local guide that the cavern that the ocean has carved into the island’s basaltic columns was known as the cave of Fhinn, or Fhinn Mac Coul, whom the translator of Ossian’s works has called Fingal, Banks expressed his satisfaction that in this cave we should meet with the remembrance of that chief, whose existence, as well as that of the whole Epic poem is almost doubted in England.¹⁹ Thomas Pennant, who first printed Banks’s account in his Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides (1772), was unable to reach this wondrous isle due to inclement weather.²⁰ Nor was Samuel Johnson.²¹ But the former’s enthusiasm and the latter’s skepticism helped publicize the island to an even wider audience keen to experience through travel the emotional sublimity of Ossianic verse side by side with the wondrous remains of volcanic eruption and oceanic erosion. Fingal’s Cave came to occupy a privileged space in the popular geological literature of the nineteenth century, as it perfectly combined folkloric romance, sublime aesthetics, and scientific curiosity in a remote and difficult-to-access location at the margins of the British archipelago. The French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Voyage en Angleterre (1797) culminates in a voyage to Staffa, where Ossianic chants and basaltic columns inspire the naturalist’s wonder, even as he corrects Banks’s interpretation, noting the site’s proper Earse name as the melodious cave, an-ua-vine and an-ua-fine being aurally interchangeable.²² Earth sounds and bardic verse are likewise conflated in Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave, Opus 26, 1830), inspired by his visit to Staffa (though he was seasick from the voyage), and in notable if minor poems by Wordsworth, Scott, Keats, and Tennyson, all based on their experience of the cave under the aegis of Ossianic toponymy. A host of paintings and engravings also sought to capture (and produce) the spectacle of the columnar cavern, and it appeared as the cover image for such popular works as Granville Penn’s Conversations on Geology (1828) and Peter Parley’s Wonders of the Earth, Sea, and Sky (1837) and even in simulacrum form in William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in London alongside mammoth bones, sea fossils, and Egyptian mummies.²³ All of these representations speak to the means by which the earth sciences, in Ralph O’Connor’s words, helped to forg[e] a new Creationmyth for an imperial age, exhibiting prehistoric wonders alongside vanished cultures on a substructure of human conquest and racial extirpation, filtered and romanticized through the lens of Ossianic sensibility.²⁴

But for our purposes it may be J. M. W. Turner’s painting of the island (figure 3), obscured in equal parts by oceanic mist and by the smoke of a steamship, that best renders Ossian’s capacity to speak both to the deep time of geological history and to the rapid temporal shifts of the industrial age. The contrast in proportion between the ship and the cave, apparent when compared to the illustration that accompanied Pennant’s Tour, introduces a third