How Samuel Johnson and James Macpherson popularised Gaelic poetry

The hunter’s expert knowledge – of deer paths, habits and preferences, the mechanical co-ordination of his musket, the balance of human intuition and the gun’s reliable deadliness – is sharpened in the landscape of the mountain, its woods and slopes. The velocity in the verse catches the feel of the hunt, both mental and physical, a patience, wiliness and craftiness, enjoying itself without cruelty.

Drawing upon a traditional culture of ecological balance and social stability, it was composed in the aftermath of Culloden, and today the poem is also a lament, for the slopes of Ben Dorain now are treeless. No deer-hunts take place as described in the poem, no economy survives in the ways the poem suggests. Poem and mountain are testaments to a culture cut short.

In the immediate aftermath of Culloden, Rob Donn (1714-78), in “Song of the Black Cassocks” connects apocalyptic imagery with specific place and time:

I am heartsick for Scotland

The people, so badly divided:

Motives, desires, the mind of the country,

All split apart. Nothing binds us together.

And the Government reads this, starts

Fanning the flames: encouraging greed

And the worst competition. The flames will rise up.

We will tear each other’s throats out.

The poem is locked into its historical moment, a protest against the Disclothing Act of 1747, prohibiting the wearing of Highland dress. The poet’s clan Mackay had been on the Hanoverian side in the ’45, but here Rob Donn is asserting allegiance with all Highlanders, opposing the government’s tyranny. A universal sense of justice is required: “The lion will repay the pain. / Its season will come.”

William Ross (1762-c1791) also stands out in the later 18th century. Although he wrote in a range of forms and has been compared to his immediate contemporary Robert Burns, whose work he seems to have known, Ross is inimitable in the intensity of personal utterance, as in “Another Song”:

I am lost in my grief, a steep pass –

A dram can do nothing to please.

The maggot alive in my mind has

Ended good spirits and ease.

I see her no more, that beautiful girl –

As she walked in the street with such grace –

The gentlest eyes, the loveliest face –

My confidence, broken and fallen

Like leaves from the highest of trees.

As with Duncan Ban and Rob Donn, the individual voice of William Ross, in all its range, arises from a coherent social vision that characterised the Gaelic world before the 18th century, carrying through its ruins traces of what that social identity might yet be again, even in the evocation of its destruction.

We noted last week James Macintyre’s disdain for Samuel Johnson’s appraisal of the Highlands and Islands. Johnson seemed to enjoy the company of Highlanders generally, but not mountains, bogs, bad weather and filthy inns. Moreover, he held an intense animosity to James Macpherson, considering Macpherson’s Ossian no more than a fraud. Even though it was internationally popular and arguably one of the most influential works ever published, most people have followed Johnson. Among English-language readers, Johnson’s judgement maintains potent authority. But Johnson claimed that there were no Gaelic manuscripts above a few decades old, which was absolutely untrue. His perception that the Gaelic tradition was predominantly oral was correct, but that in itself could not disprove the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian.

Having been attacked, the honour of Macpherson’s Ossian became for many synonymous with the honour of Scotland, and the force of public opinion in Scotland turned against Johnson. He reacted by attacking Scotland itself: another bad move.

The legacy of Johnson’s encounter with Macpherson and Scotland remains an unsettled account, but it brought the persistence and presence of Gaelic literature to the attention of English-language readers. The longer, unintended, legacy of that has been a deepening interest in Gaelic itself.

Something similar could be said of Macpherson’s Ossian stories, too. They remain the most famous representation of Gaelic literature in the 18th century and one of the crucial episodes associated with Gaelic literature internationally. Fame is not everything, but they introduced many people to that literature’s very existence, prompting a healthy curiosity that extended and expressed itself in a multitude of art forms across generations and continents. Like Culloden itself, Macpherson marked a crucial watershed in the 18th century. We shall come back to him. But there is much, much more to be said. In terms of Gaelic literature, Macpherson is the last and least of it.

Hopefully over the last few weeks this series of essays has opened up some ideas about the Gaelic literary world beyond the clichés, caricatures and myths. Next week John Purser dispels some other myths. Which myths? Find out next week.

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