Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and IrelandSamuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Thomas M. Curley. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x+338.

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Previous articleNext article FreeThomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Thomas M. Curley. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. x+338.Matthew WickmanMatthew WickmanBrigham Young University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThomas Curley has written a consummately Johnsonian book—one that takes up a topic about which Johnson spoke vehemently, that defends Johnson’s position, and that makes a rousing case for the equation of that position with unequivocal truth. But one might also label the book “Johnsonian” with an eye to that category in the index of Helen Deutsch’s book Loving Dr. Johnson , whose subheadings include “and communion…(see also Johnsonianism as secular religion).”1 There is, indeed, a kind of cult of Johnson, both within and outside the academy. I first encountered it when one of my undergraduate teachers at Brigham Young University proclaimed to his lower-division survey course that he had two heroes: a recently deceased religious leader and Samuel Johnson. He paused and raised an eyebrow before speaking Johnson’s name. The lesson was presumably clear: Johnson keeps exalted company.Curley is not addressing callow undergraduates at a religious university; he is speaking, mostly, to other Johnsonians, although he also has things to say to those of us who have written about or been persuaded by the importance of James “Ossian” Macpherson to literary studies of the long eighteenth century. His argument, stated most simply, is that Johnson was right in declaring that Macpherson invented rather than translated the Ossian poems and that no degree of critical sophistry can or should obscure the blunt fact of Macpherson’s “literary lying.” In a seven-chapter defense of this position, Curley undertakes an impressive review of the growing mountain of scholarship on Macpherson; presents the best evidence we have of exactly how much Macpherson “translated,” “adapted,” and otherwise “authored” the Ossianic material; rehearses the ugly dispute that erupted between Macpherson and Johnson; documents Johnson’s support of Thomas Percy (of Reliques [1765] fame) and especially of Irish antiquarianism as the antitheses of Macpherson’s fraudulent enterprise; and follows the debate between the quarreling men into the work of their acolytes William Shaw and John Clark.To adopt one of Curley’s favorite words, I would be “lying” if I said I was wholly persuaded by his argument. I did, however, find it illuminating and often gratifyingly rigorous. For example, in chapter 2, the book’s first body chapter, Curley distinguishes between Macpherson’s “three principal modes of literary creation”: “(1) sheer invention; (2) lavish invention with varying correspondence to a single identifiable Gaelic source; and (3) lavish invention with varying correspondence to multiple amalgamated Gaelic sources” (32). Curley then applies these categories with mathematical precision to Macpherson’s work: “Out of seventeen individual titles, only Fingal and five shorter pieces have ties to genuine Gaelic literature. The other eleven are totally make-believe—category (1) above—despite Macpherson’s misleading assurance[s].…Four of the five short works have some sort of Gaelic basis in a single source—category (2) above” (33), and so on. The rhetoric is polemical: the “lavish[ness]” of Macpherson’s “invention” connotes mendacity more than imagination in Curley’s Johnsonian universe. However, his survey of Macpherson’s sources represents a considerable expansion on Derick S. Thomson’s landmark 1952 study and challenges the hazy scholarly assumption, my own included, that Macpherson creatively adapted extant Gaelic traditions.2The book makes other important contributions to our understanding of Johnson’s role in the Celtic revival. In chapters 3, 5, and 6, Curley situates Johnson in the interesting company of both well- and lesser-known antiquarian movements. Curley focuses particularly on Johnson’s connections to Percy, “the century’s foremost authority on English ballads” (64), whose work has come to the fore in the spate of exciting new scholarship on balladry. He also provocatively connects Johnson to such eighteenth-century Irish historians as Charles O’Conor and Thomas Campbell (only two of several whom Curley addresses), whose work has generated far less attention. Curley’s point is that Johnson was neither uniformly skeptical of oral literary traditions nor a simple John Bull; indeed, Curley audaciously asserts that “Johnson can justly lay claim to being one of the [Irish] movement’s prime promoters” (123). I find that claim somewhat problematic and will return to it below, but Curley’s disclosure of Johnson’s place in that constellation is eye-opening; he reminds us, for example, that the “now-clichéd title of ‘Doctor’ Johnson did not exist until Trinity College bestowed on [ Johnson] its doctorate in canon and civil law on 8 July 1765” (156). And in chapters 4 and 7 Curley helpfully unpacks the events of the debate between Johnson, Macpherson, and their supporters, including not only Shaw, Clark, and such well-known figures as Hugh Blair and Adam Ferguson but also some of Johnson’s most virulent detractors like Donald M’Nicol, whose “noteworthy Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides [1780], an unremittingly hostile critique[, was] almost as long as the Journey itself ” (121).While much of the book takes up the Macpherson oeuvre and controversy, many of its finest insights concern Johnson himself. Curley champions an admirable standard of forthrightness to which he holds even Johnson accountable. For instance, he criticizes Johnson for his dabbling in the Parliamentary Debates of 1740–43, “a work of almost complete fabrication” that “duped” the public and garnered the young, opportunistic Johnson some of the attention he craved for his writing (22). And when Curley deems Johnson wrong or obtuse in his assessment of oral literary traditions, he calls him on it: while Johnson “did not believe that Gaelic counterparts close to most of Ossian could be retrieved…he wrongly supposed that Macpherson’s pretense to a faithful adherence to authentic sources meant his depending on manuscripts solely. That mistake played into Johnson’s more egregious error of discounting both oral tradition and a venerable body of surviving written documents, older than a hundred years, conserving a rich literary heritage in Gaelic” (38). Curley is most eloquent and insightful when explaining the Johnsonian conception of truth: “Famous for his fierce advocacy of integrity, Johnson demanded truth in life and literature. He possessed a Renaissance faith in the ability of reason and conscience to comprehend moral and religious principles of God’s natural and revealed law. This older rationale for cognition he merged with the newer Enlightenment drive for empirical and inductive enquiry in all areas of endeavour, where fact-based knowledge led to larger generalizations about the human condition. Truth might be difficult to grasp as well as to bear, but it was prerequisite for all that was humanly worthwhile” (45). There is a heroic character to these sentiments that captures not only what truth meant to Johnson but also what Johnson has come to mean historically to many Johnsonian scholars—a sector that, in defiance of historicism and its apologetic recuperation of disgraced and/or forgotten charlatans, still seethes, apparently, at Macpherson’s deceptions.And yet, while truth is one thing, taste is another, and there are moments when Curley’s zeal bludgeons his judgment. Early in the book, for example, he engages Dafydd Moore’s authoritative study of Macpherson by quoting it at length and then subjecting it to a series of finger-wagging interpolations: “‘If Ossian is a fraud,’ Moore observes, ‘if it is not “real,” then it is not literature or art’ [it is literature and art {Curley remarks} fraudulently publicized as literal translation],” and so on (5).3 Elsewhere, he exhibits an opacity toward Scottish linguistic difference and cultural autonomy, condescendingly observing that in “coming to a newfound openness toward his homeland’s diversity, Johnson concluded” the narrative of his journey to Scotland “by complimenting Lowlanders on their improved use of English” (88). The book is equally benighted in its defense of “authentic” Celtic literatures (whose ontological purity Curley neither defines nor discusses—no Alasdair mac Mhaigstir Alasdair, no Donnchadh Bàn Mac-an-t-Saoir, no consideration of the hybrid nature of most Gaelic poetry in the eighteenth century) and nomination of Johnson as a founder of Irish studies. Referring to “the generally neglected but significant Irish literary renaissance commencing in the eighteenth century,” Curley contends that “Johnson can justly lay claim to being one of the movement’s prime promoters through his ties to Charles O’Conor” (123). After repeating this refrain several times, Curley ups the ante by stating that Johnson’s goal in the Ossian controversy was not only to “expos[e] Macpherson’s fraud” but also to “advance[e] Gaelic studies” (192).While it is a fair point, and probably an underappreciated one, that Johnson both defended Ireland and Irish Catholics from heavy-handed British policies and that he also expressed enthusiasm for Irish antiquarianism, it is a leap from there to patron sainthood over the field. There is a difference, for one thing, between the expressions of support Johnson offered and actual antiquarian labor, and then there is the gulf between the eighteenth-century movement and its later nineteenth-century avatar, which reformulated what “Celtic Revival” even meant, let alone the twentieth-century “Irish studies ” model to which Curley repeatedly and anachronistically refers. Johnson wears this modern Hibernian garb about as well as he did the Highland getup that prompted Boswell to proclaim him a “venerable senachi ” (or Highland bard) in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides .4 For Boswell, Johnson’s masquerade represented the mating of the sublime with the ridiculous, and Curley’s advocacy of Johnson’s Celtic bona fides would be more convincing, actually, if it exhibited a larger share of Boswellian irony.And yet, I must admit that I admire Curley for the boldness of his claim. It bears the structure, élan, and at least partial documentation (in recounting the correspondence with O’Conor, Johnson’s expressed esteem for a host of Irish literati, and the circle of Johnson’s Irish acquaintances) of rigorous argument. By this same token, the book inspires the thought that literary studies might be due for a reassessment of the category of truth in literature: “creative works had value for Johnson only if they represented reality faithfully for the sake of our improved practical living, our moral betterment, and, above all, our spiritual fulfillment” (46–47). This sounds like the burden of proof increasingly laid on the humanities for the justification of their continued funding, especially in Britain. And a figure like Johnson, whose moral gravitas and human pathos sit cheek by jowl with his outrageous biases, rapier wit, and sideshow eccentricities (to say nothing of his physical deformities), and whose legacy in cultural memory is wonderfully strange (as Deutsch brilliantly captures), might sit provocatively at the center of a large-scale examination of this subject.Ultimately, however, Curley’s book makes a more limited and even brutish case, essentially contenting itself with the argument that Macpherson was a deceitful wretch. Curley seems to regard this assertion as a moral fact, which may explain the book’s heavy-handedness. For example, he follows Johnson’s witty fillip to Macpherson in the Life of Johnson —“if [Macpherson] does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons”—with a dully emulative repetition of the book’s black-and-white theme: “And when we retire to our houses to read Ossian , let us be on our guard about the author’s honesty and the work’s integrity” (83). (Many academics might well ask, “We retire to our houses to read Ossian ?” Others, perhaps newer to a profession of declining financial health, might wonder, “We have houses?”) It is a shame, really, that Curley’s book was not a bit more ambitious in its conception. For in recent years, the Ossian phenomenon has helped frame powerful scholarly projects on topics ranging from romance and Romanticism to oral literature, media theory, intellectual history, and more. Literary studies are richer because of this work. By comparison, Curley’s book is unlikely to prove nearly as fertile. It possesses a kind of countercultural quality in its refusal if not to cite this new material (which it actually does quite copiously, especially in its early chapters), then fully to engage with it critically. As a result, and ironically, the image the book conjures for itself is something akin to that of the lone Ossian, strumming his lyre and singing of former days. Curley would probably dislike this association, but it follows almost intuitively from his lament at the state of an academic world that has embraced Macpherson’s “imposture” more enthusiastically than Johnson’s animus. Notes 1Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 316.2Derick S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s “Ossian” (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd for the University of Aberdeen, 1952).3Dafydd Moore, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s “The Poems of Ossian”: Myth, Genre, and Cultural Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).4James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides , ed. Peter Levi (New York: Penguin, 1984), 360. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 4May 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/669967 Views: 346Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.