POPULAR TALES OF THE WEST HIGHLANDS.* Tin last two volumes
of Mr. Campbell's collection of Highland tales will probably a little disappoint the general reader. They have not the peculiar charm of the nursery tales which he first edited, and many pages are unavoidably taken up with critical disquisitions. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to over-estimate their value to scholars. The rude fragments which they contain, bearing chiefly on the Ossianic cycle, have much the same relation to the more ela- borate narratives of the earlier series, which the remains of lake cities in Switzerland have to Druidical circles and fragments of Roman wall. In the first two volumes we were in a world where there were still traces of fetichism and unholy superstition, but every story had its modern analogue in Norse or German, or was interpolated with bits of Greek mythology or passages from modern history. Without denying that there is something of the same composite character in the present fragments, they are yet evidently of incalculable antiquity, and it is difficult to believe that we shall ever discover trustworthy traditions of a more remote period. Warriors who are armed with pointed sticks and to whom the smith is still a bloodthirsty magician ; women who fatten during a famine on the green tops of the hazel; palaces of wattled rods plastered with clay; castles whose only mag- nificence is a table covered with food; a society which is still strug- gling for existence against the wild beasts of the forest, which views love as an enchantment, and has no law but the law of arms, and apparently no religion—all these are facts which it is impossible to mistake. They are not history in the technical sense, for they cannot be arranged symmetrically according to maps and chrono- logical tables. If the incidents recorded are in themselves based upon fact, as is most probable, they have none the less been tampered with, amplified by one hand, assigned by another to different per- sonages, connected by a third with a wrong topography, and inter- woven with later legend by a fourth. We must take them with all these drawbacks, and enough will still remain to make them in- estimable. Geology has taught us that there was a time when the whale gambolled m the waters of the Clyde, when the tiger and hyaena haunted the caves of England, and when three-fourths of the land were fen or forest. How our ancestors, armed only with large bones, or with stakes pointed in the fire, were able to slay the whale in the water, and to follow the wild beast to his lair, has been among the most interesting of problems, and is now partially solved. The sheer greatness of man at his lowest, above the brute at his highest, can hardly be more vividly set forth than in the fragments Mr. Campbell has brought together, and in those we lately noticed by Mr. McLachlan. They are the epic as it were of the first men's struggle for existence. Diarmaid slaying the, boar, Amadan Mor running down the deer, Manus catching the wild sheep in pits, are the true Adams of humanity with the destinies of the unborn world upon them. Side by side with them are the representatives of a more spiritual civil- ization : Conan, the Thersites of the infant society, and Ossian, its Homer. Yet the face of earth is bleak, and we instinctively per- ceive how immeasurably the Biblical patriarch had already, when we first meet him, outgrown the savage.
Why the Ossiamc stories should even now be told in the High- lands, when men and women meet together round the winter hearth, is a problem of curious interest. Many bc,enerations have been born and died in the land since Fingal hunted the deer or fought against the northern sea-rovers. The very birthplace of the Gaelic chief is unknown, and Ireland claims him as a native prince of Leinster. The most probable accounts place him in the times when the Romans held Britain as a province. Since then the Gael of Scotland have fought fierce battles with the Pict, and have not cared to record them. They have given a royal line to Scotland, and the task of writing its history has been left to the Saxons of the Lowlands. They have fought under Bruce at Bannockburn, and no ballad of their own tongue commemorates their triumph. They swept down under the standard of Montrose to do battle for a king who repre- sented the last claims of Highland royalty, and battle and foray remain unwritten and unsung. The march under Charles Edward to Derby was the most romantic adventure of the prosaic eighteenth century, but the grandsons of the men who marched only read of it in English books. Wherein, we may well ask, is the singular magic that has made the names of Fingal and Ossian deathless among a people so careless of their own great deeds? It is not any charm of narrative, for the songs and tales are now mere fragments which no antiquarian lore can properly piece together. It is not the solace that the conquered feel in commemorating old victories, for the Gad have been absorbed rather than subdued, and the triumphs of Fingal and his followers were over the beast of the forest or the * Popular Tales of the Wad Highlands, orally collected, with a 7hasala1lea, by J. F. Campbell. Vols. IIL and IV. Edinburgh : Edmonton and Douglas.
men of Lochlann, whose race and country are uncertain. Some- thing, no doubt, depends on the large admixture of the supernatural. Heroes, who can spring at a leap to the highest window of a castle, or walk under the waves as freely as on the heather; the sea-horse; the one-eyed, one-legged smith; and the man covered with green scales, who can carry off seventeen boys on a rod slung over his shoulder, are all circumstances that may well rivet the curiosity of a child-like people, and which could not be told of any but a remote period. Yet the explanation is not altogether sufficient, for under the rationalizing tendencies of modern times, these wild mythological legends are precisely the first to disappear, or be transmuted. Men are too well educated to believe, and too little educated to understand the really high value of impossible narratives. It is to be feared that this tendency has operated for centuries past against the literal pre- servation of traditions.
We suspect the actual reason of the permanent interest of the Ossianic cycle lies in the fact that it was first formed in the critical time when the Gaelic nationality separated for ever from its Welsh kindred, and asserted its claims to individual existence against all enemies—Roman or Scandinavian. There is much in the stories handed down to us that belongs to the mythology of all nations, and much more than is held in common with the Welsh. Mr. Campbell, in an ingenious dissertation, has pointed out how Oscar resembles Arthur, how Conan is the Kay of the Mode d'Arthur, Amadan Mor the Peredur or Perceval, Diarmaid the Lancelot, and Grainne the Guenever. Again, in the story of Diarmaid, the friend of Fingal, who elopes with his wife, kills a monstrous boar, and dies from a bristle piercing him in his only vulnerable part, the sole of the foot, there seem to be reminiscences of Paris, Meleager, and Achilles. Examine the stories more closely, and these resemblances, strong at first sight, will appear to be either delusive or unimportant. The hunt of a wild beast, and the seduction of a chief's wife, are events which might naturally obtain record among an infant society. Good luck in war would be interpreted as a charm of invulnerability, and death, when it came at last, accounted for so as to do least violence to the first hypothesis ; while the union of simplicity with great strength, and of scoffing critical intellect with ill-success, are facts which still find their counterpart everywhere, and which barbarians would especially notice and interpret by their own standard. It must, therefore, we think, remain an open question whether these stories in their sim- plest form were common to all the Aryan tribes before their migra- tions began, or whether they have grown up separately in every country out of the facts of a common humanity. A few incidents, such as that of the magic caldron, may indicate a derivative super- stition, and a few names, such as Taliesin and Ossian (Oisein), may have a common etymological root, pointing to a com- mon ancestry. The times before Ceesar and Agricola, when Gael and Kymri were mixed together in Britain, and the years during the Roman and Saxon conquests, when the Bri- tons fled into the North, or crossed the Channel to Ireland, would easily account for this interpenetration of legends formed at similar stages of national life. Yet it would not be safe to ascribe much to this cause, considering how little Gaelic legend has been coloured by English and Scotch history during the last fifteen hun- dred years. Above all, the essential distinctness of Arthurian and Ossianic epics cannot be too strongly insisted on. Whether Arthur lived or not, he is yet for all practical purposes the type of British nationality, warring in the south-western counties against the Saxon; and his story crystallized at a time when the Britons were semi- Christian, when the tradition of Roman empire was present to every man's mind, when Roman generals and tyrants were still something more than a name, and when Briton, Roman, and Saxon, were mingled confusedly in the streets and on the battle-field. Whether Fingal lived or not, the songs that relate to him describe a country in which there was as yet no trace of Christian faith or Roman civili- zation, and in which the great objects of a man's life were to find food, and save himself from being made a slave. It has been the singular fortune of these poems, that setting aside Macpherson's tamperings, which are easily detected, they have come down to us mutilated indeed, but yet in comparative purity. It is impossible to regret the medieeval adaptations -which transformed Arthur from a British prince to a knight in the century of the Crusades, but there is reason to deplore bitterly that the older Welsh and Breton poems were never collected before Geoffry of Monmouth superseded them.
It may seem ungrateful to call for more when Mr. Campbell and Mr. McLachlan have given us so much and so well. But we still want a collection of every existing Ossianic fragment, no matter of what age, with careful historical and philological notes. The dialogues of Ossian and Patrick are instances of the great value which fragments not of the very highest antiquity may have. The conflicting Scotch and Irish topographies ought to be care- fully compared. It is needless to say that the time for histories like that of Boetins, where the long line of kings is arranged in unbroken order and with faultless pedigrees, has passed away for ever. But it is in our power to construct a history of the moral culture and political 'organization of the family lives and household arts of our ancestors, which may go far to correct the imper- fect notices of Roman historians. It is something, for instance, that among stories which speak of a conqueror filling seven huts with heads, there is no trace of the fouler barbarism of promia- cgous intercourse between the sexes, which Clesar and Xiphilinus ascribe to the British clans. It is interesting to find allusions which seem to bear on a rude form of the metempsychosis, while there are none, however remote, to the worship of the sun and
powers of nature. With a higher reverence for the facts we have, I IongmansA Latin English Dictionary. and a greater distrust of d priori scepticism, disinterring a cell here and picking up a story there, we may add a new chapter to the earth's history, and catch as it were by refraction the last light of an extinguished starry world.
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