Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of
literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some
of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things
subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they
imitated.
The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are
known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their
importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of
Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim
of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into
supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a
truer and deeper vein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples.
Collins's _Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland_
and Gray's _Bard_ show the literary world prepared to put itself to
school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry
which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his
history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once
famous tragedy of _Douglas_. In the summer of that year Home was
drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there
found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his
tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had
been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse.
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