Eighteenth-Century Life

James Macpherson has proved as difficult and troublesome a figure within recent revisionism as he was back in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand he has been portrayed as a perfidious Scottish chance, an "insolent pretender" and "sensual bully" (in the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper) who "forged" a Scottish past in order to make up for Scotland's complete barbarity before 1707.¹ Such an interpretation forms part of a tradition within English scholarship that extends from Samuel Johnson right through the 1990s in the more subtle and sophisticated work of Howard Weinbrot.² Yet on the other hand, there is deep unease about Macpherson amongst "four nations" revisionists who see his "invented tradition" of the Highlands not as Scottish cultural nationalism but as Anglo-British cultural imperialism. This apparent sellout enables Weinbrot to talk about the rise of a "British"—by which he avowedly means an English—literature and national culture.³ Both camps see Macpherson as in some way responsible for the "museumalizing" of Scottish history, for the tartaned Disney world of the Royal Mile. But where one side attacks him in order to demolish his perceived nationalism, the other seeks to debunk his nationalist potential, its damaging false consciousness about Scotland and its past. The one thing both camps share is a disdain and suspicion regarding Macpherson, the charlatan Scottish (crypto-)Jacobite nationalist who is also a totem of Anglocentric suppression and incorporation. [End Page 1]

"Demythologizing" Macpherson and his vision of the Scottish past has been a busy cottage industry, but within this general discussion a small number of commentators have wondered about this unlikely—not to say unholy—alliance between critics equally wedded to and hostile towards notions of a Scottish cultural identity in the eighteenth century. As early as 1984 Andrew Hook wondered whether regarding The Poems of Ossian as a source of everything "corrupt and debilitating, sham and distorting in the Scottish cultural tradition" might not "unwittingly be conniving at the kind of English cultural imperialism which, in other contexts, [we] are all too eager to deny."⁴ Ten years later Murray Pittock observed that all too often the "destruction of myths is itself a manifestation of the values of a centring British history," and warned that demolishing the object along with the myth that surrounds it achieves only "an equality of misrepresentation."⁵ In another context he has noted that Macpherson may have "detached the Scottish past from the present by locating it in the historyless zone of epic heritage," but in doing so he "promoted it as superior and heroic." Pittock concludes that "Macpherson, a complex man, was thus the defender of the traditions he exploited: though it might be claimed that he exploited them only to defend them."⁶ Indeed, based on the evidence of the Gaelic poetry actually written in the decades following Ossian, Donald Meek has gone so far as to question the commonplace assumption that Macpherson's brand of sentimental Celticism was "a uniformly baleful cloud on the Gaelic landscape, rather than a creative shower" and has suggested that the Ossianic vision "offered a new sense of spiritual and cultural aspiration."⁷

So Macpherson is troublesome and troubling, a figure who unsettles easy assumptions and alignments (for every Meek there have been three commentators willing to see Macpherson as a "baleful cloud"). What do responsible commentators, keen to examine the damage that may have been done by Macpherson to Gaelic culture, nevertheless do with Linda Colley's matter-of-fact observation that Macpherson "invented" Ossian?⁸ This essay will not offer any straightforward solution, nor will it dwell on Macpherson's critical fate or the cultural agendas behind an unwillingness to credit him with being "a complex man."⁹ Rather it will explore the implications of considering Macpherson as "Celtic Whig" associated primarily with the work of Colin Kidd. It will also attempt to cast some light on the debate outlined above, and consider some of the larger issues at stake in The Poems of Ossian and his major work of conjectural history, An Introduction to the History of Britain and Ireland (1771).^10...