where Greek elements of race are absent, that the historical circumstances and local conditions of the English—a maritime people—have not been those of the Germans, and may have helped to differentiate English from German poetry, are facts which do not weigh with Mr Arnold. Our style, our melancholy, our natural magic, must all be due to an imperceptible strain of the blood and the inherited qualities of the Celt, though our Greek qualities are not derived from the blood of the Greeks. Such arguments as these need only to be stated. They are not scientific, they would not satisfy science, yet they have a pseudo-scientific ethnological air. In fact, they are Popular Science. It is impossible to disprove them we may have a Celtic drop in our veins, and that Celtic drop may carry with it Celtic qualities in poetry. But it is certain that these qualities are not exclusively Celtic, and if there be "Greek notes," it is certain that these may be developed by poets with no Greek blood or training. Thus Mr Arnold's Celtic theory, if not demonstrably untrue, is, at least, unproved and superfluous.

We now turn to Mr Arnold's successors, and first to Mr William Sharp as a critic and editor of Macpherson's 'Ossian.'1 Mr Arnold asserts that Macpherson's 'Ossian,' after all deductions, has "the very soul of the Celtic genius in it.' Wordsworth, despite his own "natural magic," denounced the book as worthless bombast, without any single truth to nature in it. We need not decide where poets disagree, but we may examine Mr Sharp's Introductory Essay. However low our opinion of Macpherson's 'Ossian' may be, it

1 Centenary Edition.

was a book with remarkable fortunes. A reprint edited by a Celtic scholar would have filled a place in the controversy on epic national poems. Macpherson really takes rank between Verkovitch for Bulgaria and Lönnrot for Finland, though nearer Verkovitch. A comparatively brief historical introduction might have explained the evolution of Macpherson's 'Ossian' both in the English and the Gaelic. Mr Sharp offers no such guide: his introduction is mainly an attempt to summarise the ideas of Mr Alfred Nutt, of Campbell of Islay, and of Mr Hector Maclean. We do not wish to press hard on an editor engaged in a work desirable in itself, and we shall not make sport out of the differences between Mr Sharp's account of Mr Nutt's views and the very necessary correction of his account in the corrigenda. Mr Nutt is alive to take care of himself, but Islay is dead, and we may be allowed to emend Mr Sharp's hurried, or confused, and certainly most bewildering, version of Islay's ideas.

For instance (p. xvii), Mr Sharp writes thus: "Professor O'Curry says" something not unimportant. Since O'Curry, as quoted by Mr Sharp, yields no meaning, we turn to Islay, whose Ossianic theory Mr Sharp is trying to summarise. Islay avers that O'Curry "nowhere" says what Mr Sharp makes him say. Again, Mr Sharp writes that the first book in the Irish characters was printed in 1571, and "so far it appears that Gaelic Scotland was ahead of Ireland in the literary race, for the first known Gaelic book was printed in Edinburgh."

We confess to having been totally puzzled by this argument.

The

first Irish book printed appeared in 1571; but Scotland must have been earlier in the field, because "the first Gaelic book was printed in Edinburgh." Where is "the therefore"? as Squire Western says. Mr Sharp is guiding the unlearned Sassenach into the Celtic Paradise, but the Sassenach flounders into this logical Slough of Despond. "Where is the therefore?" he asks. Well, Islay gives the date of the first Gaelic book, printed in Edinburgh, as 1567, whereas the first Irish book is of 1571. That is the reason why Islay thinks Gaelic was in print before Irish, but the date is exactly the fact which Mr Sharp omits.

Indeed, readers of Mr Sharp must be warned that, without Islay's essay in the hand, Mr Sharp's is absolutely unintelligible. Either he has failed to understand Islay (a writer who demands close attention), or he has summarised him with unfortunate haste and carelessness.

Here is a singular example. Mr Sharp observes: "At this day men still point out Dun Finn in Arran, and explain 'Ar-ainn' to mean Ar-fhinn,' Fin's land. . . . Inseabh-Gall, the Hebrides, were so called from their Norse masters. This, then, proves that Scotland was considered to be the land of Fionn eighty years before Macpherson published anything." Where is the proof?

The explanation, given by Islay, but omitted by Mr Sharp, is simply that the Fairy Minister, Mr Kirk of Aberfoyle, quotes or composes, in his Gaelic translation of the Psalms (1684), four lines in which the Highlands are called generous land of Fionn." Kirk "flourished at the time of the Revolution of 1688. His quatrain

"the

proves the point. Mr Sharp omits the proof.

Islay's final opinion, or one of his final opinions, is given thus: "I do not assert that the poet's name [the poet of the Gaelic 'Ossian' printed in 1807] was Ossian. F deny on good grounds that it was James Macpherson. I maintain that a poet, and a Scotch Highlander, composed all these Gaelic lines separately, if not together; and . . . it is possible that there may be fragments of sentimental poetry, different from the popular ballads, more modern, but certainly older than 1730,"this in spite of "modern language, and English idioms."

Mr Sharp does not add Islay's statement (he really wavered in a candid, if confusing way), that "this is my own opinion," but that, as no man "is a fair judge of a written language in which he does not think," he "prefers the opinion" of a Highland shoemaker. He says, "This is not the old stuff"

We agree with the shoemaker. Macpherson's 'Ossian' "is not the old stuff," nor anything like it. The truth is that Islay, in 1872, withdrew from the half-hearted hankering after authenticity in Macpherson's 'Ossian' which he allowed to appear in his essay of 1862. No one could guess this from Mr Sharp's text, and in his corrigenda he tells the reader that the essay of 1862 is "adequate and more easily procurable." But he does not say that Islay, in 1872, declared that his later studies had "turned the authenticity upside down." 1

We offer another instance of Mr Sharp's odd summary of Islay's ideas: "If the statement of Mr MacGilvray, given at page 50 of

the dissertation prefixed to the large edition of 'Ossian' (1807), is not a deliberate falsehood, there is an end of the argument which makes Macpherson the author." Now, what is Mr MacGilvray's statement? Mr Sharp does not tell us. Mr MacGilvray had said (according to Islay) that "the very poems which were translated and published, 'Fingal,' 'Temora,' and many others, were collected in Gaelic in Scotland, from the people, long before 1760, and these were subsequently compared with Macpherson's published translations at Douay, by Mr Farquharson, the collector of the Gaelic, who did not know Macpherson, and the translations were found ... to be, in the main, translations as far as they went."

Then where is Mr Farquharson's manuscript? "It was torn, and leaves were used by the Douay students to light their fires." It is like the poll-book of the disputed Irish election. "It fell into the broth, and the dog ate it." So much for the statement of Mr MacGilvray, which Mr Sharp might have given, it is so deliciously Celtic.

In fact, there are old ballads about Ossianic heroes, but no epic has ever been found. Morven, the kingdom thereof, is unknown outside Macpherson's book, unknown in traditional songs or stories. As to style, Islay gives a correct rendering of a Gaelic "run" or conventional passage, and then does it into Macpherson's peculiar species of fustian.2 "The difficulty," he says, "would be to find an audience nowadays" for such trash. Into fragments of a gen

66

uine old ballad, Macpherson (or, if you please, an unknown predecessor about 1680 1730) foisted a vague but masterly word-picture of a landscape "à la Mr Whistler -" through which stalk the halfdescribed indistinct features of gloomy warriors. . . . The ballad is simple and natural; the epic [Macpherson's 'Ossian'] is laboured and artificial, and it is no translation, according to my definition of the word, but it is like something elaborated and built up out of the materials of one or more ballads." As the shoemaker said of this very piece, Temora,' "Cha' n' e so an seann stugh ("It is not the old stuff"). The stuff is, in place of the genuine mythical opening of the ballad, "The blue waves of Erin roll in light. The mountains are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams," &c., K.T.., u.s.w. Macpherson, or some other impostor, gave us this, while cribbing his outline and some materials, from the old ballad. Macpherson's character for probity, in the affair of the Stuart Papers in the Scots College, does not enable us to place much confidence in his assertions.

Mr Sharp admits that the 'Ossian' of Macpherson is not a genuine rendering of ancient originals, that he "works incoherently" upon a "genuine but unsystematised, unsifted, and fragmentary basis," and adds that "if he were the sole author he would be one of the few poetic creators of the first rank,"-a class of men who never wrote fustian, we may add, never produced what Mr

Sharp justly censures as "clumsily constructed, self-contradictory, and sometimes grotesquely impossible." Yet this Ossian' is informed by "the antique spirit," which "gives it enduring life, charm, and all the spell of cosmic imagination." Mr Sharp also commits himself to the sentiment that "no single work in our literature has had so widereaching, so potent, and so enduring an influence." But, among his curious errata, he hedges his statement thus, "no single work of its kind." There is no other work "of its kind" in English (except Ireland's Shakespearian forgeries, or Chatterton's sham Old English); in Bulgarian we believe that M. Verkovitch supplied an example. Leaving Mr Sharp and Mr Arnold on one side, Words worth and Islay on the other, to settle the question of the literary value of 'Ossian' "as she is wrote" by James Macpherson, we may surely say that Mr Sharp is not very lucid or logical in his introduction. Yet nowhere are logic and lucidity more necessary than in an attempt to make the public understand what Macpherson's 'Ossian' really is. And we may add that the influence of Macpherson's 'Ossian,' turgid and windy as it is, cannot be of value to young Neo-Celtic writers, whether they "have the good Gaelic" or no Gaelic at all. Mr Hector Maclean, quoted by Islay, says vagueness and obscurity abound everywhere, such lines prove to be nonsense when closely examined," whereas, in the genuine traditional Gaelic ballads, Mr Maclean finds "no vagueness, no mistiness, no obscurity." Now, the essence of Macpherson's 'Ossian' is vagueness, mistiness, obscurity. To imitate this, as some Neo-Celts do, is not to Celticise, but to Macphersonise.

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVI.

We next examine the whimsical Neo-Celtic endeavours to claim all that is best and rarest in English literature as due to the Celtic element. A grotesque example was lately presented by Mr George Moore, by whom Swift, the most English of men, was applauded for "Celtic" qualities. Sir Walter Scott and Mr Louis Stevenson were denominated Scottish Celts, and Fielding was criticised in a style which demonstrated Mr Moore's ignorance of Fielding's works.

Mr Sharp is more cautious than Mr Moore, in his Lyra Celtica,' which is, in every way, a curious production,-a first specimen, as we learn, of an 'Anthologia Celtica,' a future rival, perhaps, of the Greek Anthology. We begin with. Amergin and Taliesin, and come down to unpublished minor young poets. It is as if we ranged, in Greek, from Orpheus and Musæus, through Marcus Argentarius and Paulus Silentiarius, to the last Romaic bard in an Athenian newspaper's Poet's Corner.

To the poems we shall return after examining the editor's ideas. Like ourselves, Mr Sharp goes back to Mr Arnold's Lectures of 1867. Mr Sharp, innocently, seems to think that Islay's 'Popular Tales of the West Highlands' were unpublished when Mr Arnold lectured, yet he calls Mr Arnold "superficial." He goes on to meet the objectors who say that Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley are English, Byron, Burns, and Sir Walter, Scotch, "not distinctively AngloCeltic." Byron's mother was а Gordon of Gight; he did not reckon himself a Scot, exactly. However, Mr Sharp talks of his "Celtic blood." He might as well talk of Oliver Cromwell's Celtic blood, Mrs Cromwell mère being

a Stuart. Shakespeare's Celtic blood has to be given up, as beyond proof. Milton was Welsh on the mother's side; "Keats is a Celtic name (compare Maquet, who called himself Auguste MacKeat in 1830), and Keats's genius is convincingly Celtic. So is Wordsworth's in places, Wordsworth from whom "a modern Anglo-Celtic poet," unnamed, borrows the ideas in a "haunting quatrain," yet Wordsworth's ancestry was as English as Hereward the Wake's. Coleridge and Shelley, so "Celtic" in genius, are admitted to be of "unmixed English blood, so far as we know," yet Mr Sharp hankers after something atavistically Celtic in their genius. Why not in Edgar Poe's? he was of Irish origin. Meanwhile he admits the possibility, in Scotland, "of an older race still, than even the Picts." Are these our Finnish friends? If so, why not go back to the beginning, and have a Finnish Renascence at once? It is just as cheap as a Celtic Renascence, and about as plausible. As to Burns, we presume that the Celtophiles believe in the fables of his Celtic descent from Campbell of Burnhouse (Burnus, Burnes, Burns). "Scott, as it happens, was of the ancient stock" (Celtic?) and not "the typical Lowlander he is so often designated." Mr Sharp may consult the quarterings on the roof of the hall at Abbotsford. Scotts, Rutherfords, Swintons, and Haliburtons speak for themselves. Sir Walter could only rake up a Campbell great-grandmother, and wore the dark-green Campbell tartan, when George IV. clad his broad German acres in the tartan of the Stuarts. Let Mr Sharp claim Celtic genius for the House of Hanover! As for Mr Stevenson, "who that has studied his genius can question

the Celtic strain in him?" The old fallacy! Mr Stevenson was as purely Lowland as James Hogg, and the genius of the one was as Celtic as that of the other. The said "genius" is found in men without a traceable drop of Celtic blood-Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Stevenson, Hogg. It is almost absent in the more or less Celtic Tom Moore (Mr Sharp admits), and wholly in the very Celtic Tom Macaulay. Indeed Mr Sharp allows that it is impossible "to limit this charm of exquisite regret and longing to Celtic poetry." Of course it is impossible! more perfect and beautiful example of this "charm "exists than in a love song by a Red Indian squaw, who could not read, published, with a translation, by Dr Brinton.

No

"Fleas are not lobsters, damn their souls,"

as the poet says, and Algonquins are not Celts.

"They went forth to the war, but they always fell," says Mr James Macpherson. The Celts, in this argument, always fall. They admit, what is wholly undeniable, that certain poetic qualities are not peculiar to the Celtic peoples. Then when they find, or fancy, these qualities in the work of men without a traceable drop of Celtic blood in their veins, they make the qualities, common to many literatures, a presumption in favour of the presence of Celtic blood. In the same way "second sight" is averred to be a Celtic gift. You might as well call epilepsy a Celtic gift. Every savage the Maori, the Red Indian, the Zulu-is as full of second sight as any man of Moidart. What is called "Celtic" in poetry or in superstition is really early human, and may become re