Part 11

Macpherson had previously published some English verse of little merit and which attracted no notice. But the appearance of his Ossianic translations at once made him famous. The Poems of Ossian not only became popular in this country, but were translated into the more important languages of the Continent.

In studying the landscape of Macpherson's Ossian we soon learn that it belongs unmistakably to Western Argyleshire. Its union of mountain, glen, and sea removes it at once from the interior to the coast. Even if it had been more or less inaccurately drawn, its prominence and consistency all through the poems would have been remarkable in the productions of a lad of four-and-twenty, who had spent his youth in the inland region of Badenoch, where the scenery is of another kind. But when we discover that the endless allusions to topographical features are faithful delineations, which give the very spirit and essence of the scenery, we feel sure that whether they were written in the eighteenth century or in the third, they display a poetic genius of no mean order.

The grandeur and gloom of the Highland mountains, the spectral mists that sweep round the crags, the roar of the torrents, the gleam of sunlight on moor and lake, the wail of the breeze among the cairns of the dead, the unspeakable sadness that seems to brood over the landscape whether the sky be clear or clouded--these features of West Highland scenery were first revealed by Macpherson to the modern world. This revelation quickened the change of feeling, already begun, in regard to the prevailing horror of mountain scenery. It brought before men's eyes some of the fascination of the mountain-world, more especially in regard to the atmospheric effects that play so large a part in its landscape. It showed the titanic forces of storm and tempest in full activity. And yet there ran through all the poems a vein of infinite melancholy. The pathos of life manifested itself everywhere, now in the tenderness of unavailing devotion, now in the courage of hopeless despair.

Ossian fascinated some of the greatest men of the time. These Celtic poems, in the words of Matthew Arnold, passed 'like a flood of lava through Europe.' In the deliberate judgement of this acute critic, they revealed 'the very soul of the Celtic genius, and have the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.' There can at least be no doubt that they gave a new and powerful impulse to the appreciation of the wilder aspects of nature, and did much to prepare the way for that love of mountain-scenery which has been one of the characteristic developments of the nineteenth century. It is not that in Ossian Highland landscape was deliberately described, but it formed a continually visible and changing background. The prevalent character of the whole range of scenery in the region, and the general impression made by it on the eye and mind, were so vividly conveyed that no one familiar with the country can fail to recognise how faithfully the innermost soul of the West Highlands is rendered.

Never before or since have the endless changes of sky and atmosphere been more powerfully portrayed. In the tempestuous climate of the west of Scotland these changes succeed each other with a rapidity and energy such as the dweller on the southern lowlands can hardly realise. They are faithfully, if somewhat monotonously, reflected in Ossian. All through the poems the air seems ever astir around us. Sometimes it is only a gently-breathing zephyr which

'Chases round and round The hoary beard of thistle old, Dark-moving over grassy mounds.'

We mark the graves of dead heroes by

'Their long grass waving in the wind,'

and we move onwards 'in the robe of the misty glen' past

'Branches and brown tufts of grass Which tremble and whistle in the breeze.'

But when the full Atlantic gale sweeps over the land, and the rain-clouds rush in swift procession across the half-hidden hills, the moaning and shrieking of the storm come like sounds from another world. We seem to hear the tread, and almost to see the forms, of the ghosts of the Ossianic heroes,

'Chasing spectre-boars of mist On wings of great winds on the cairn. When bursts the cloud in Cona of the glens, A thousand spirits wildly shriek On the waste wind that sweeps around the cairn.'

Nor is the turmoil of the tempest on the sea less vividly depicted. We are shown the

'Waves surging onward in mist, When their crests are seen in foam Over smoke and haze widespread.'

In the midst of the gloom we descry a shore-stack against which the ocean

'Dashes the force of billows cold; White spray is high around its throat, And cairns resound on the heathery steep.'

With these pictures of tumult on land and sea, there come glimpses of those cherished interludes of bright sunshine, when the western hills and firths are seen at their loveliest. But whether radiant or gloomy the landscape is in unison with the human emotion described--

'Pleasing the tale of the time which has gone; Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild, On the brake and knoll of roes, When slowly rises the sun On the silent flank of hoary Bens-- The loch, unruffled, far away, Calm and blue on the floor of the glens.'

As a final sample of the Ossianic landscape, with its kaleidoscopic play of atmospheric effect, answering to the changes of human feeling, let me cite some lines from Fingal:--

'Morna, most lovely among women, Why by thyself in the circle of stones, In hollow of the rock on the hill alone? Rivers are sounding around thee; The aged tree is moaning in the wind; Turmoil is on yonder loch; Clouds darken round the tops of Cairns [mountains]; Thyself art like snow on the hill-- Thy waving hair like mist of Cromla, Curling upward on the Ben, 'Neath gleaming of the sun from the west; Thy soft bosom like the white rock On bank of Brano of white streams.'

Though Macpherson roused the interest of the world in the rugged scenery and boisterous climates of the west, it was some time before any other writer followed his lead among the highlands of this country. It is singular to reflect that though the mountain-world, more than any other part of the land, appeals to the imagination, by revealing all that is most impressive in form and colour, and all that is most vigorous in the elemental warfare of nature, it was the last part of the terrestrial surface to meet with due appreciation. Little more than a century has passed since men began to visit the Scottish Highlands for the pleasure of admiring their scenery. Previous to the suppression of the Jacobite rising, that mountainous region was regarded as the abode of a half-savage race, into whose wilds few lowlanders would venture without the most urgent reasons. Even after military roads had been made across it, the accommodation for travellers was still generally of the most wretched kind. Those who had occasion to traverse it gave such an account of their experiences as one would hardly now expect to receive from the heart of Africa. The poet Gray during his visit to Scotland in the year 1765, made a brief excursion into the Perthshire Highlands, and, in spite of the discomforts of travel at that time, came away with a vivid impression of the grandeur and beauty of the scenery. But the only record that remains of this impression is to be found in a few sentences in his letters.

Eight years after Gray's visit, Samuel Johnson in 1773 made his more adventurous journey to the Hebrides. When we consider what were the discomforts, and sometimes the actual dangers which he had to undergo, we cannot but admire the quiet courage with which he endured them, and the reticence with which he refers to them in his narrative. But Johnson could see no charm in the Highland mountains. In his poem on London he had asked many years before:

'For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?'

Yet when at last he set foot in Scotland, he showed no disposition to prefer its rocks to his haunts in London. Travelling through some of the finest scenery in Western Inverness-shire, this is the language he uses regarding it: 'The hills exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only by one sullen power of useless vegetation.'

While such was the attitude of the man of letters in this country, influences were at work on the Continent which powerfully affected the relations of literature to the whole realm of outer nature, and more especially to mountain-scenery. Rousseau's descriptions, followed by the more detailed and scientific narrative of De Saussure, drew the attention of society to the fascinations of Switzerland and the Alps. But these influences had hardly had time to exert much sway in their application to the scenery of our own country when the genius of Scott suddenly brought the features of the Scottish Highlands into the most popular literature of his day. In his youth the future poet and novelist had paid some visits to the glens and lakes of Perthshire, where he found many a primitive custom still remaining, which has since vanished before roads, railways, and tourists. In the year 1810 his Lady of the Lake appeared. Thenceforward the stream of summer visitors set in, which has poured in an ever-increasing flood into the Highlands of Scotland. The general interest thus awakened in the glens and mountains of the north was still further intensified by the advent of the Lord of the Isles, and of Waverley, Rob Roy, and the other novels that depict scenes in the Highlands. Certainly no man ever did so much as Walter Scott to make the natural features of his native country familiar to the whole world. The literary charm which he threw over the hills and glens of Perthshire kindled a wide-spread enthusiasm for the more rugged aspects of nature, and gave a powerful stimulus to the slowly-growing appreciation of the beauty and grandeur of mountain-scenery.

Nevertheless it must be admitted that Scott's highland landscapes, though more prominent and detailed than those in his descriptions of the lowlands and uplands, were also more laboured and less spontaneous. His pictures are no doubt faithful and graphic, and each of them leaves on the mind a clear impression of the scene depicted. But their effect is produced rather by a multiplicity of touches than by a few masterstrokes of poetic insight and graphic delineation. Moreover they are all in one tone of colour, and lack that changeful diversity so characteristic of mountains. They are chiefly fine-weather portraits, as if the poet loved only summer sunshine among the hills, and had either never seen or cared not to portray their gloom, cloud, and storm. We are bound of course to remember that, after all, he was only an occasional visitor to the Highlands. He had not been born among them, and never lived long enough in their solitudes to become intimately versed in all their alternations of mood under changes of sky and season. He writes of them as an admiring and even enthusiastic spectator, but not as one into whose very soul the power of the mountains had entered. He never warms among them into that fervent glow of affectionate appreciation which kindles within him in sight of the landscapes of his native Border.

One other mountainous district in Britain--that of the English Lakes--claims our attention for its influence on the progress of the national literature. Of all the isolated tracts of higher ground in these islands, that of the Lake District is the most eminently highland in character. It is divisible into two entirely distinct portions by a line drawn in a north-easterly direction from Duddon Sands to Shap Fells. South of that line the hills are comparatively low and featureless, though they enclose the largest of the lakes. They are there built up of ancient sedimentary strata, like those that form so much of the similar scenery in the uplands of Wales and the South of Scotland. But to the north of the line, most of the rocks are of a different nature, and have given rise to a totally distinct character of landscape. They consist of various volcanic materials which in early Palaeozoic time were piled up around submarine vents, and accumulated over the sea-floor to a thickness of many thousand feet. They were subsequently buried under the sediments that lie to the south, but, in after ages uplifted into land, their now diversified topography has been carved out of them by the meteoric agents of denudation. Thus pike and fell, crag and scar, mere and dale, owe their several forms to the varied degrees of resistance to the general waste offered by the ancient lavas and ashes. The upheaval of the district seems to have produced a dome-shaped elevation, culminating in a summit that lay somewhere between Helvellyn and Grasmere. At least from that centre the several dales diverge, like the ribs from the top of a half-opened umbrella.

The mountainous tract of the Lakes, though it measures only some thirty-two miles from west to east by twenty-three from north to south, rises to heights of more than 3,000 feet, and as it springs almost directly from the margin of the Irish Sea, it loses none of the full effect of its elevation. Its fells present a thoroughly highland type of scenery, and have much of the dignity of far loftier mountains. Their sky-line often displays notched crests and rocky peaks, while their craggy sides have been carved into dark cliff-girt recesses, often filled with tarns, and into precipitous scars, which send long trails of purple scree down the grassy slopes.