A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him
to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he
perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh
bringing with him _Fingal_, a complete epic poem in six books. This was
followed by _Temora_, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic
bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established.
These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced
the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is
less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by
the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and
theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age
concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry,
so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive
society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern
civilization. Its most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the
epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the
epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University,
were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without
suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly
from himself.
The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally
melancholy,--a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold,
also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian.
Pages:
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68