Eighteenth-Century Studies

Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2000) 43-59

Heroic Incoherence in James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian

Dafydd Moore

When in 1805 Walter Scott characterized Fingal, the hero of Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1760-63), ¹ as combining "all the strength and bravery of Achilles, with the courtesy, sentiment, and high-breeding of Sir Charles Grandison," he put his finger on the ethical and aesthetic compromise which it has become increasingly fashionable to see at the heart of Ossian. ² Building on revisionist accounts of Macpherson's endeavors which stress the influence and assistance of the Scottish Enlightenment literati in the Ossian project, a coherent critical perspective has developed over recent years to explain the fascination exerted by Ossian over some of the greatest literary and philosophical minds of the age. ³ This view suggests that Ossian was in large part generated as a response to the fact that "the language of virtue in the eighteenth century was still tied to the essentially civic and masculine realm of the active and patriotic warrior-citizen" and that "on the face of it this language had little in common with the emerging discourse of passion, benevolence, and humanity." ⁴ In fact, "little in common" seems an understatement, given that the civic tradition at this time has been seen as explicitly oriented itself in contradistinction to the virtues of a refined society that it characterized as being "artificial, selfish, and effete." ⁵

Seen in these terms, Ossian emerges as a "cultural seam between two ethical domains," an answer to the "troubling ethical dialectic of progress and civic 'corruption'" as it was understood by eighteenth-century political philosophers. ⁶ [End Page 43] By presenting the eighteenth century with "noble deeds, but little bloodshed, rude manners mixed with lofty sentiments, much weeping and dying, but no physical pain" in poems which combine "the raw power and majesty of Homer with the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the neo-classical age," Ossian suggested that society did not have to choose between "strength and bravery" and "courtesy and sentiment," but could combine both within a system of what we might call civic sensibility. ⁷ That is to say, Ossian represents an originating myth for practical muscular sensibility by reconditioning the martial virtues of the civic tradition for the modern "polished" world, and at the same time it offers legitimization for the eighteenth century manifestations of that tradition, most immediately for the Scottish thinkers in question, the Scottish Militia campaign of the late 1750s. ⁸

This sophisticated account has much to recommend it, establishing both the nature of Ossian's appeal and the place of the poems within wider cultural trends. It also reestablishes Ossian as a serious endeavor, in contrast to a broadly Anglocentric literary historiography which tends to marginalize the poems as literary curios. However, I would like to problematize aspects of this interpretation by suggesting that, as an account of the Ossianic world we encounter when actually reading Ossian, it is unsatisfactory. Whatever we might think of his ranking of Ossian amongst the four greatest poets of Western cultural tradition, there is little denying William Hazlitt's claim that Ossian represents "the decay of life and the lag end of the world." ⁹ "There is," says Hazlitt, "one impression which [Ossian] conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country." ¹⁰ Hazlitt has in mind here primarily the image--the presiding one across the body of the poems--of the aged bard raking over the embers of a glorious past from which he is a lone, blind exile. Yet this "sense of privation" extends throughout the text and sums up the peculiar melancholy of Ossian's tales of doomed heroism. This article explores the implications of this atmosphere of defeat upon our sense of Ossian as cultural bridge. As such it will explore exactly how, and suggest reasons why, Ossian would seem to deny the utopian combination of modern and ancient virtue suggested for the poems...