iful but somewhat unabashed heroines of the saga into sentimental
personages, who suited the taste of an age poised between the bewigged
and powdered formalism of the eighteenth century, and the outburst of
new ideals which was to follow. His _Ossian_ is a cross between Pope's
_Homer_ and Byron's _Childe Harold_. His heroes and heroines are not on
their native heath, and are uncertain whether to mince and strut with
Pope or to follow nature with Rousseau's noble savages and Saint
Pierre's Paul and Virginia. The time has gone when it was heresy to cast
doubt upon the genuineness of MacPherson's epic, but if any one is still
doubtful, let him read it and then turn to the existing versions,
ballads, and tales. He will find himself in a totally different
atmosphere, and will recognise in the latter the true epic note--the
warrior's rage and the warrior's generosity, dire cruelty yet infinite
tenderness, wild lust yet also true love, a world of magic
supernaturalism, but an exact copy of things as they were in that
far-off age. The barbarism of the time is in these old tales--deeds
which make one shiver, customs regarding the relations of the sexes now
found only among savages, social and domestic arrangements which are
somewhat lurid and disgusting. And yet, withal, the note of bravery, of
passion, of authentic life is there; we are held in the grip of genuine
manhood and womanhood. MacPherson gives a picture of the Ossianic age as
he conceived it, an age of Celtic history that "never was on sea or
land." Even his ghosts are un-Celtic, misty and unsubstantial phantasms,
unlike the embodied _revenants_ of the saga which are in agreement with
the Celtic belief that the soul assumed a body in the other world.
MacPherson makes Fionn invariably successful, but in the saga tales he
is often defeated. He mingles the Cuchulainn and Ossianic cycles, but
these, save in a few casual instances, are quite distinct in the old
literature. Yet had not his poem been so great as it is, though so
un-Celtic, it could not have influenced all European literature. But
those who care for genuine Celtic literature, the product of a people
who loved nature, romance, doughty deeds, the beauty of the world, the
music of the sea and the birds, the mountains, valour in men, beauty in
women, will find all these in the saga, whether in its literary or its
popular forms. And through it all sounds the undertone of Celtic pathos
and melancholy, the distant ech