ISSN 1612-0442
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11.07.2023
Joseph Th. LeerssenOssian und kein Ende
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Between Scotland and Serbia: Cross-currents |
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European interest in the (hitherto unknown) literatures of the Balkans kicked off in the 1820s, when oral epic poetry from modern Greece and Serbia was disseminated across Europe in various translations and anthologies. Claude Fauriel, later to become Professor of Foreign Literature at the Sorbonne, published his Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne in the year that Byron died at Missolonghi; Jacob Grimm aided the German edition of Vuk Karadzic’s collections of Serb folk poetry; and all this was part of a massive upsurge, not only of European nationalism, but also of a rediscovery of the ethnic roots of Europe’s vernacular literatures reaching from Brittany (La Villemarqué’s Barzaz Breiz) to Finland (Lönnrot’s Kalevala). The rise of cultural nationalism and the rise of the idea of national literatures worked in tandem; and the name of Herder is often invoked to indicate the link. |
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The Balkan discovery started with a poem that became an evergreen across Europe: the Hasanaginica, which circulated in translations by Herder, by Goethe and by Therese von Jacob (»Talvj«, who in 1840 also intervened in the German Ossianic debates with an article »Die Unächtheit der Lieder Ossian’s«). The Hasanaginica was given in extenso in abbé Fortis’s 1770 description of Dalmatia, where he had travelled. If we compare the English and Italian editions, we find that one of Fortis’s sponsors was the Earl of Bute, and that one of the underlying aims of Fortis’s travels in the Balkans was... to find oral-epic material in the mode of Ossian (who had been translated into Italian by Cesarotti, again with support from Bute). |
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From Bute to Talvj, this episode illustrates the ongoing cross-currents of Ossian’s influence. Directly or indirectly, all of European literary historicism, all the national-romantic interest for the vernacular roots of literature, turns out to have been instigated by Macpherson’s Ossianic publications of the 1760s. Macpherson intervenes in European literature when the old Republic of Learning networks are still in place (witness the role of Bute), but in time to catch the mounting tide of sentimentalism and early romanticism; at a time, also, when the literary interests in antiquarianism and in oral balladry begin to mesh. |
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Forgery and beyond |
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For decades, Ossian’s impact on the European literary landscape was overshadowed by the forgery debate. Was Macpherson a counterfeiter, like William Ireland (the young man who had forged Shakespearean material) or Vaclav Hanka (the forger of the Königinhof MSS)? What Gaelic originals, written or oral, were there in Ireland and Scotland, how did they use the name and character of Oisín / Ossian, and how heavily or deliberately had Macphserson distorted these Gaelic traditions? |
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Such questions are often almost intractable in themselves; after a century of sniggering wholesale dismissal, critics are now more prepared to grant Macpherson a degree of bona fides and some acquaintance with a genuinely subsisting, fragmentary tradition in Gaelic. (All the same, he laboured under ignorance and misapprehensions, vastly overstated his case, and proceeded heedlessly in his textual arrangements and in his paraphrases). The provenance-and-authenticity debates have given to Ossian the flavour of a scandalous episode and have thus rendered him almost anecdotal, a ›flash in the pan‹. The familiar facts (Goethe’s incorporation of large chunks in Werther, Napoleon’s habit of taking a pocket edition along on his campaigns) further served to present the episode as an ephemeral, and, hence, almost trivial anecdote; a bit like the vogue for suicides triggered by Werther, or Dr. Johnson refuting Berkeley’s immaterialism by kicking a stone. |
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It must be said that the texts themselves are an acquired taste; Jane Austen it ain’t. The diction of the prose poems is relentlessly elegiac and ›sublime‹, and very much tethered to the later eighteenth century—like Fanny Burney or The Man of Feeling. Even Richardson will captivate only the more stalwart reader; and Macpherson is something like Richardson meeting the Silmarillion. Small wonder that the texts have remained known by reputation rather than as first-hand reading material. |
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Impact |
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The true literary-historical importance of Ossian lies beyond either the question of their authenticity, or their inherent literary appeal, and has to do with their impact on how people approached the literary ›roots‹ of Europe. Together with Herder and Vico, Macpherson is the main actor in something that can only be compared to a reversal of the Renaissance. Before 1760, all authors and readers traced their literary antecedents back to classical antiquity: Virgil and Homer. After 1840, the roots of Europe lie with the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Edda, and the folk epics of Finland and Serbia. The intervening decades witness a revolution that involved many actors in many countries (like abbé Fortis around the Adriatic), who in turn, all of them, acknowledged a debt of sorts to Macpherson and Ossian. As late as 1860, the old Jacob Grimm still outlined an appreciative essay on the Caledonian bard. In the meantime, Hegel in his Aesthetics had drawn on Ossian as a heuristic literary model and, very aptly, identified it as the prototype of the »romantic epic« (which at the time, when genre appellations were much stricter than they are nowadays, must have been almost an oxymoron). |
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The historical importance of Ossian’s impact and reception has recently emerged as a topic among literary historians. A new edition of the text appeared in 1996, and studies by British scholars such as Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford helped to place Macpherson on the agenda again. Ossian is, alongside Virginia Woolf, Walter Scott and Byron, among the select authors whose European reception is addressed by a series of studies commissioned by the British Academy. However, the ›influence‹ of Ossian cannot be traced in traditional terms. Traditionally, an author’s impact and reception is traced in translations, adaptations and imitations (think of Walter Scott and the spread of the historical novel). But while Macpherson gave rise to many such translations and adaptations, their vogue passed relatively soon; more important is his impact on literary taste, a way of viewing literary antiquity, and his standing godfather to a particular iconography and sensibility. |
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Schmidt’s achievement |
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This confronts reception historians with a particularly serious challenge. Macpherson’s influence ›flavours‹ the literary system like sugar in a cup of coffee, noticeable without being salient or egregious. The available textual record must be searched widely and deeply to bring out ossianic resonances. This is what Wolf Gerhard Schmidt has done for German literature in his extensive and painstaking study »Homer des Nordens« und »Mutter der Romantik«. Originally the author’s doctoral thesis, it runs to two volumes totalling more than 1400 pages. It addresses the totality of the German Ossianic reception. Indeed, the study is to be accompanied by two additional volumes of primary materials (which I have not seen), one giving a »Kommentierte Neuausgabe deutscher Übersetzungen [...] sowie der Abhandlungen von Hugh Blair und James Macpherson«, edited by Schmidt, the other giving a »Kommentierte Neuausgabe wichtiger Texte zur deutschen Rezeption«, edited by Schmidt and Howard Gaskill (ISBN 3–11–017923–7). Unlike Macpherson himself, Schmidt has no hesitation in showing his originals. |
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Schmidt’s study opens with a substantial introduction (stating topic, aims and status quaestionis); an equally substantial survey follows of Macpherson’s life and work and of the Ossianic controversy in Britain. The various ›themes‹ of the ossianic impact and of ossianist discourse are then traced (philological, poetical-aesthetic, moral and ethnic-cultural). It takes Schmidt almost 500 pages to ›set the scene‹, but much of this is of great value and stands almost by itself as a study of the investment of ossianism in eighteenth-century literature. (There are some points of overlap and occasional reiteration between this thematic section and the chronological survey that follows.) |
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Schmidt’s actual literary-historical survey ranges from early contemporary reactions to the present day. The second half of the first volume deals with initial responses (Klopstock, Gerstenberg). Volume two is dominated by a very extensive analysis of the Pre- and Early Romantics: Göttinger Hain, Herder, Goethe, with some briefer sections on Lenz, Moritz and Schiller. After that, the historical material appears to taper off. Romantics like Jean Paul, Hölderlin and Kleist are less massively preoccupied with the Caledonian bard, and the nineteenth-century reception from Schlegel and Novalis to Uhland and the elders Grimm offers a picture of further diminution. The reception in the period 1740–2000 is covered in slightly over 100 pages, as a »disperser Ausklang«. |
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Following Schmidt’s work, we may safely consider Ossian’s reception in German literature to have been exhaustively charted. Future scholars will work on the basis of, and in the margin of, this landmark book, which also in its bibliographies sets a benchmark. |
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Further perspectives |
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What can we ask more? Even the most fact-hungry literary historian must be sated. The gluttons among us may be tempted to request similarly exhaustive surveys for the other major literatures of Europe (yes, even after Van Tieghem), but even so, Germany occupies a special position, in that it was the first major literature to develop, programmatically, a ›national‹ literature in defiance of the canon and precepts of classicism. It was a process which, from Herder to Goethe and the Romantics, was witnessed with awe by other Europeans like Madame de Staël, and it ensured for German literature a special status for most of the nineteenth century. |
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Precisely in this respect future literary historians may use Schmidt’s study towards wider extrapolations. The materials presented here, and their distribution over time, suggest that Macpherson’s influence was, most of all, a maieutic one. Schmidt himself feels that an initial phase valorized Ossian as ›national poet‹, that subsequently he was ceberated mainly as a poet of nature, and that declining interest after 1800 or so was triggered, again, by a change in literary taste. It remains to be asked, how this poetical explanation of changing fashion relates to the fields of cultural politics. How did Ossian assist the national renaissance of German literature? It is precisely in the work of Herder and the Goethe of Werther that his presence is most prominently felt. Was his function as a foreign, non-classical inspiration taken over towards the end of the century by that other discovery, Shakespeare, heralded by Lessing, celebrated by the Schlegel / Tieck translation and, as a national genius, in A.W. Schlegel’s lectures? Is his declining fortune from High Romanticism onwards a measure of the fact that German literature no longer needed foreign lodestars? Or is it simply that the Ossianic debate has by then become a Europe-wide topic in which German critics passively follow the communis opinio of British antiquarians and academic philologists? |
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The historical questions are only beginning to be asked. They can be addressed all the more trenchantly because of the solid basis provided by this work. Wolf Gerhard Schmidt’s work is an excellent summary; in future decades it may prove equally valuable as a point of departure. |
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Prof. Dr. Joseph Th. Leerssen
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