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Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices
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novels. It was to have an enormous influence outside Britain: Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, who is one of the central figures of European literature
of the time, acknowledged the influence of Mackenzie’s novel on his Sorrows
of Young Werther (1774), which gave the figure of the sensitive, suffering
and finally suicidal hero both a universal dimension and lasting popularity.
Mackenzie’s novel takes the form of a mutilated manuscript – ‘scattered
chapters, and fragments of chapters’ – from which pages and whole sections
have been ‘lost’. The story is thus disjointed and episodic. In a sense, the
failure of the hero, Harley, in any of the traditional ways of worldly success
is echoed in this experimental abandoning of the traditional novel form.
The doubtful manuscript also features in the work of another Scottish
writer, who was to have a similarly enormous influence on Goethe and
on European literature for about a century. James Macpherson is practically
forgotten today, but, as the producer of Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763),
which purported to be translations of Gaelic epics by Ossian, he became
the favourite writer of characters as diverse as Young Werther and Napoleon
Bonaparte. More than a century later, the major Victorian critic and poet
Matthew Arnold wrote, of Ossian’s impact, ‘what an apparition of newness
and power [the works] must have been to the eighteenth century’.
Macpherson’s project was not, however, just an exercise in sentimental
primitivism, but part of a larger attempt – in which Thomas Gray and
Thomas Percy, editor of the highly influential Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry (1765), can also be seen to have taken part – to relocate the origins
of British literature in a Northern cultural context, as opposed to a Southern
classical context. As such, it was part of a nationalistic enterprise that touched
many aspects of literature and culture in the century and more after the
Union of the Parliaments in 1707; the making of the United Kingdom.
Matthew Arnold’s mid-Victorian epic Balder Dead (1855) continues this
Northern cultural shift of emphasis, almost a century after Ossian.
What created such an impact on the European imagination in the
1760s was the idea of the ‘primitive’; a return to simple, natural values,
as against the luxurious ‘city’ values of sophisticated society. To a certain
extent, this was also a reaction against neoclassical theory and practice,
a return to a time of innocence and goodness. Macpherson’s ‘newness
and power’ exactly caught the taste for elemental worlds, and for a
primitive local culture. However, the critics were not so easily persuaded.