Chapter IV

Perhaps Macpherson's most important innovation was to cast his work into what his contemporaries called "measured prose," and it was recognized early that this new form contributed greatly to their appeal. In discussing the _Fragments_, Ramsey of Ochtertyre commented,

"Nothing could be more happy or judicious than his translating in measured prose; for had he attempted it in verse, much of the spirit of the original would have evaporated, supposing him to have had talents and industry to perform that very arduous task upon a great scale. This small publication drew the attention of the literary world to a new species of poetry."[12]

For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique. Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: _repetition_, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and _completion_ in which the second line picks up part of the sense of the first line and adds to it. These are both common in the _Fragments_, but a few examples may be useful. I have rearranged the following lines and in the other passages relating to the structure of the poems in order to call attention to the binary quality of Macpherson's verse:

_Repetition_

Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal?
And who recount thy Fathers? ("Fragment V")

Oscur my son came down;
The mighty in battle descended. ("Fragment VI")

Oscur stood forth to meet him;
My son would meet the foe. ("Fragment VIII")

Future times shall hear of thee;
They shall hear of the fallen Morar. ("Fragment XII")

_Completion_

What voice is that I hear?
That voice like the summer wind. ("Fragment I")

The warriours saw her, and loved;
Their souls were fixed on the maid.
Each loved her, as his fame;
Each must possess her or die.
But her soul was fixed on Oscur;
My son was the youth of her love. ("Fragment VII")

Macpherson also used grammatical parallelism as a structural device; a series of simple sentences is often used to describe a landscape:

Autumn is dark on the mountains;
Grey mist rests on the hills.
The whirlwind is heard on the heath.
Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. ("Fragment V")

The poems also have a discernible rhythmical pattern; the tendency of the lines to form pairs is obvious enough when there is semantic or grammatical parallelism, but there is a general binary pattern throughout. Typically, the first unit is a simple sentence, the second almost any grammatical structure--an appositive, a prepositional phrase, a participle, the second element of a compound verb, a dependent clause. A simile--in grammatical terms, an adverbial phrase--sometimes constitutes the second element. These pairs are often balanced roughly by the presence of two, three, or four accents in each constituent; there are a large number of imbedded iambic and anapestic feet, which give the rhythm an ascending quality:

The da/ughter of R/inval was n/ear;

Crim/ora, br/ight in the arm/our of m/an;

Her ha/ir loose beh/ind,

Her b/ow in her h/and.

She f/ollowed the y/outh to w/ar,

Co/nnal her m/uch bel/oved.

She dr/ew the st/ring on D/argo;

But e/rring pi/erced her C/onnal. ("Fragment V")

As E. H. W. Meyerstein pointed out, "Macpherson can, without extravagance, be regarded as the main originator (after the translators of the Authorized Version) of what's known as 'free verse."[13] Macpherson's work certainly served to stimulate prosodic experimentation during the next half century; it is certainly no coincidence that two of the boldest innovators, Blake and Coleridge, were admirers of Macpherson's work.

Macpherson's diction must have also appealed to the growing taste for poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life. A simple listing of the common nouns from the opening of "Fragment I" will serve to illustrate this tendency: _love, son, hill, deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream, rushes, mist, oak, friends_. Such diction bears an obvious kinship to what was to become the staple diction of the romantic lyric; for example, a similar listing from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" would be this: _slumber, spirit, fears, thing, touch, years, motion, force, course, rocks, stones, trees_.

The untamed power of Macpherson's wild natural settings is also striking. Samuel H. Monk has made the point well:

"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions carried with them the thrill of the genuine and of naïvely archaic."

And Monk adds, "imperceptibly the Ossianic poems contributed toward converting Britons, nay, Europeans, into enthusiastic admirers of nature in her wilder moments."[14]

Ghosts are habitually present in the poems, and Macpherson is able to present them convincingly because they are described by a poet who treats them as though they were part of his and his audience's habitual experience. The supernatural world is so familiar, in fact, that it can be used to describe the natural; thus Minvane in "Fragment VII" is called as fair "as the spirits of the hill when at silent noon they glide along the heath." As Patricia M. Spacks has observed, the supernatural seems to be a "genuine part of the poetic texture"; and she adds that

"within this poetic context, the supernatural seems convincing because believed in: it is part of the fabric of life for the characters of the poem. Ghosts in the Ossianic poems, almost uniquely in the mid-eighteenth century, seem genuinely to belong; to this particular poetic conception the supernatural does not seem extraneous."[15]

The _Fragments_ was also a cause and a reflection of the rising appeal of the hero of sensibility, whose principal characteristic was that he could feel more intensely than the mass of humanity. The most common emotion that these acutely empathetic heroes felt was grief, the emotion that permeates the _Fragments_ and the rest of Macpherson's work. It was the exquisite sensibility of Macpherson's heroes and heroines that the young Goethe was struck by; Werther, an Ossianic hero in his own way, comments,

"You should see what a silly figure I cut when she is mentioned in society! And then if I am even asked how I like her--Like! I hate that word like death. What sort of person must that be who likes Lotte, in whom all senses, all emotions are not completely filled up by her! Like! Recently someone asked me how I like Ossian!"[16]

That Macpherson chose to call his poems "fragments" is indicative of another quality that made them unusual in their day. The poems have a spontaneity that is suggested by the fact that the poets seem to be creating their songs as the direct reflection of an emotional experience. In contrast to the image of the poet as the orderer, the craftsman, the poets of the _Fragments_ have a kind of artlessness (to us a very studied one, to be sure) that gave them an aura of sincerity and honesty. The poems are fragmentary in the sense that they do not follow any orderly, rational plan but seem to take the form that corresponds to the development of an emotional experience. As Macpherson told Blair they are very different from "modern, connected, and polished poetry."