Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade
Thus the English imagination is forever green.
Looking Backwards
Title page of William Byrd’s “Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety,” 1588
CHAPTER 51
Forging a Language
The art of forgery did not fully flower and prosper until the eighteenth century. It has been associated, in particular, with the emergence of the relatively new phenomenon of professional authorship as well as with the contextual arrangements of trade publishing and commercial marketing. But the single most important alignment has gone largely unremarked. The most significant connection is to be found between forgery and the burgeoning movement known as “romanticism.” The forged document and the “romantic” personality are manifestations of the same change in taste. We might advert here to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, in which the first “romantic” hero emerges out of faked conversations and dramatically staged encounters.
But there are more suggestive parallels. It is not inappropriate that the two greatest literary forgers of the eighteenth century, James Macpherson or “Ossian” and Thomas Chatterton or “Rowley,” have been said to herald or inspire the new romantic movement in letters; with their transcription of a respectively Celtic and medieval past, they created that enchanted landscape which became a dominant influence upon the romantic poets.
James Macpherson was a Scottish poet and teacher who in 1758, at the age of twenty-two, published a long poem entitled The Highlander in part as a response to the intense interest in Celtic literature and mythology. That burgeoning movement of taste has been denominated “the Celtic Revival” and can be taken to include Thomas Gray’s ode upon the “Bard,” Mason’s Caractacus and Evans’s Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards. It has been estimated that in the forty years from 1760 one volume was published each year upon Celtic myth. It is also the context in which James Macpherson perpetrated his forgeries. He was a Jacobite with a profound instinct, and love, for his native culture. It took only the enthusiasm of another literary nationalist, John Home, to unleash his powers of historical imagination and creative reinvention. His first faked production was “The Death of Oscar,” which he claimed to be a translation from the manuscript of a Gaelic original in his possession; it was immediately recognised as a work of primitive genius. A year later Macpherson was able to publish Fragments of Ancient Poetry, the preponderance of which were also his own inventions. The appetite for Celtic folklore and verse already existed; it was only natural that it should be fulfilled. Two years later, therefore, Macpherson brought to light six books of Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem composed by a bard named “Ossian” in the more remote stretches of Scottish history. A specimen of Ossian reads, “Our youth is like the dream of the hunter on the hill of the heath. . . . Her steps were the music of songs. He was the stolen sigh of her soul. . . . The horn of Fingal was heard; the sons of woody Albion returned.” Such plangent writing exerted an immediate and powerful effect, and Ossian was extensively quoted by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther. A cult sprang up closer to home, too, and various eminent literary tourists explored Ossian’s territory. Thomas Pennant discovered various Ossianic landmarks in the Scottish landscape, and the guide for Sir Joseph Banks on the island of Staffa pointed out “the cave of Fiuhn” or “ Fiuhn Mac Coul, whom the translator of Ossian’s works has called Fingal.” Oyster shells were dated with reference to the Ossianic fragments. So the forged poetry of Macpherson engendered caves and rocks and crustacea. Pennant wrote also of the local songs, which “vocal traditions state are the foundation of the works of Ossian.” A skilful faker had created a living communal tradition. It is testimony to the credulity of scholars and general readers alike, but it is also tribute to the creative power of Macpherson’s imagination. His forged words forged— in another sense—a new reality.
In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth records that “Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious” and from the lips of a “Phantom . . . begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition.” At some point after his childhood, however, Wordsworth seems to have changed his opinion. The first lines of his poem entitled “Glen-Almain; Or, The Narrow Glen” reflect that:
In this still place, remote from men, Sleeps Ossian, in the NARROW GLEN;
The poem ends thus:
And, therefore, was it rightly said That Ossian, last of all his race! Lies buried in the lonely place.
There is some ambiguity within the poem itself whether “Fancy” creates the presence of death, but Wordsworth’s overall ambivalence or confusion about Ossian reflects the general romantic sensibility. James Macpherson created a wild and sublime landscape of vision, from which emerged an ancient bard instilled with all the primitive simplicity of passion; here were romantic archetypes indeed. But if they were all faked or forged, what then? Could the products of the romantic sensibility themselves be fraudulent? Or, to put it in another manner, that which seems most genuine may be the most artificial.
In the same decade as James Macpherson was forging “fragments of ancient poetry . . . translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language,” Thomas Gray was in fact compiling his own authentic translations from Norse and Welsh poetry to add to his Poems of 1768; under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that Gray enthusiastically accepted the work of Ossian as that of a true original. Thus he joined William Blake and Johann Wolfgang Goethe in celebration of a notorious hoax which at the time satisfied the taste for the visionary sublime. The other most influential lyric poet of the period, William Collins, composed an “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” ten years before Ossian himself furnished precisely those superstitions to an admiring public. As Samuel Johnson wrote of Collins, “the grandeur of wildness, and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by him”; but of course they were also desired by the two generations of romantic poets who professed their own debt to Gray and to Collins, to “Ossian” and to Chatterton’s Rowley. If forgery or fakery seems endemic to the whole enterprise, we will find it also in Collins, whose “Persian Eclogue” is composed in the “pretense that he was translating from the Persian.”1 His “Song from Cymbelyne” has also been described by his editor as a “skillful pastiche.”2 In the same context Horace Walpole, the quondam friend and admirer of Thomas Gray, published his novel The Castle of Otranto as a relic of the sixteenth century some four years before the youthful Chatterton tentatively began his own forgeries.
It ought to be recalled that in the early years of the eighteenth century forgery could be celebrated as a form of masquerade or carnival, part of the endless shifting game of identities. It was nothing against the work of Defoe or Swift that they faked the character of the “authors” of Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver’s Travels; in that ostensibly more stable and assured world, the notion of identity was neither precarious nor ambiguous. Daniel Defoe can plausibly and happily become “Robinson Crusoe” in 1714 and “Moll Flanders” in 1722; in the last decades of the century the subterfuge involved in such impersonations would become a matter for camouflage or indignant denial.
The latter half of the eighteenth century, however, the seed-bed from which the romantic movement emerged into the full light of the English imagination, has been well described as “An Age of Forgery.” 3 The crime of forgery itself reached its apogee in the period 1750–80 but of more significance, in a literary context, was the passing of a Copyright Act in 1709 which confirmed the individual ownership of words as “intellectual property.” Since the notion of individual ownership led in turn to the development of the literary personality and to the affirmation of the romantic selfhood, this act of legislation had aestheti
c as well as economic consequences. It is often supposed that part of the “irritability” of the romantic genius sprang from its immersion in the literary market-place, and its prostitution in commercial trading, but this disquiet can be traced back to the recognition of individual “property” itself. It has been suggested by Paul Baines, an astute historian of forgery, that the new monetarism of the eighteenth century “threatened basic ideas of value, and the security of human exchanges and interactions.”4 Did not this new legislative sense of the individual, owning certain words and sets of words as private property, in turn threaten the old and more established ideas of selfhood as residing in a commonality of expression and perception? If the romantic self was first deemed to be a legal and financial unit, its origin might provoke deep unease and ambiguity in those who professed it. We will notice this in subsequent pages. If one anonymous discourse of the period can refer to “that chimerical ill-founded Medium, Paper Money,” then perhaps the individuality written upon paper might also possess a “fluctuating, abstract and possibly evanescent value.”5 As one historian has put it, “Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows.”6 It is interesting to observe in this light the assertion of personality in Wordsworth’s poetry, which emerges only to be assailed by doubt and anxiety as to its true nature. If there did indeed run “the need for a perfect, unassailable touchstone of human identity against which all falsifications could be measured,” 7 the romantic “I” offered only a tentative solution. If words as well as property have only “a symbolic value” expressed in the “coin or credit” which they obtain for their owner, then they too possess only a “fluctuating value” dependent upon the manner in which they are recognised or received as the true coin of feeling or imagination.
Yet of course the rise of the “individual author” long predates the work of Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Both Langland and Chaucer deliberately introduce themselves into their own narratives. The notion of individual authorship at this later time, however, extended beyond textual matters. It was also implicated in the relatively original notion of originality exemplified by Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), published two years after Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, to which it remains a natural and faithful companion. As one study of poetics has put it, the concern for sublimity of expression, that artistry beyond the familiar reach of art, “played no small part in the drift towards subjectivism . . . and ultimately in the rise of romanticism in poetry.”8 The obscure and the dark, the aweful and the mysterious, became legitimised by Burke’s enquiry in ways which he would have neither anticipated nor approved. They had a particular bearing, for example, upon Young’s affirmation of “original” composition. “Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land. . . . All eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road.” In a similar spirit he enjoins the writer, “Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad.” Young’s own interest is clearly aligned with the material and financial imperatives of his culture, with the encomium upon the original writer whose words “will stand distinguished; his the sole Property of them; which Property alone can confer the noble title of an Author.” But his sentiments are no less clearly related to the burgeoning romantic movement in which spontaneity and originality are to be preferred over laboured imitation. The nature and nurture of Thomas Chatterton may be invoked here.
Some three years before Wordsworth composed his encomium upon Ossian he completed a poem, “Resolution and Independence,” which paid tribute to that paradigm of the romantic movement:
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perish’d in his pride
Thomas Chatterton was the most celebrated faker of the eighteenth century, and he shares with James Macpherson the palm also of being the most successful. Chatterton was born, in Bristol, in the winter of 1752; his father, an antiquarian and a collector of old trifles, died before his son was born. That death had a crucial effect upon Chatterton, since all his life he was searching for his patrimony. It would be easy to say that he had inherited his father’s antiquarian passion, or that he identified antiquarianism with the invisible presence of his father. More significantly, however, he considered the past itself to be his true father. He learnt to read from sundry old folios scattered in his little house in Pyle Street, opposite the church of St. Mary Redcliffe; his passion for antiquity was such that, even before he left his charity school, he had started to compose “medieval” poetry. He may have been partly inspired by Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published when Chatterton had reached the age of thirteen; it is ironic, too, that upon closer examination certain of Percy’s own ballads were shown to be less than the genuine article. But the essential truth is that Chatterton was inspired and animated by the past; he devoured texts like a library cormorant and, when not reading or writing, devised genealogies and created heraldic emblems. He invented a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, who had resided in St. Mary Redcliffe and had written much poetry duly transcribed by the young Chatterton. On being challenged about the provenance of “Rowley’s” poems, Chatterton confessed that he had found them in an old chest within the muniment room of the church; he even managed to produce some stained antique documents to prove his assertions. His case was so plausible that, well into the nineteenth century, there were many who believed that no boy could have fashioned such masterpieces of an early date. But create them he did; the language of the past spoke through him, as it were, and his was a genius of assimilation and adaptation.
At the age of seventeen Chatterton travelled to London in order to find his fortune; he was noticeably successful, composing essays and satirical poetry on contemporary themes. Five months later, however, he was found dead in a Holborn attic with traces of arsenic poisoning in his teeth. It was necessary and inevitable that his death was deemed to be suicide, a last gesture to society from a doomed poet; more recent commentators have suggested that it was a botched effort to cure a bout of syphilis.
His apparent suicide added immeasurably to his stature, however, while his celebrity was maintained by the revelation that the “Rowley” poetry was an imposture. There were pamphlets, essays and tracts issued by various interested parties. Almost immediately after his death he had been considered to be akin only to Shakespeare in his prolificity; Horace Walpole had commended him as a “masterly genius” and Joseph Warton had described him as “a prodigy of genius.” In 1780, ten years after his death, an epistolary novel on his life was published under the title of Love and Madness; in the following year Jacob Bryant’s Observations Upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley: in which the Authenticity of those Poems is Ascertained were published in two volumes. Six hundred pages of scholarship and testimony led ineluctably to the conclusion that the poems were “written too much from the heart to be a forgery.” That conclusion may still stand, if we deem the heart to be a capacious organ which includes inspiration, invention and historical memory. Chatterton composed as many fine lines of medieval poetry as came out of the medieval period itself; the language instinctively propelled him to this restoration, whereby ancient words and images float naturally if unexpectedly to the surface of consciousness.
His career as a forger, whose work was eventually compared with a “forged note” presented to a banker, would certainly not be evident from the tributes lavished upon him by his romantic successors. Coleridge revised his poem “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” until his own surcease; he first began writing it at the age of thirteen, and the final text was not published until the year of his death. It began in Pindarics and ended in pentameters, all the while chanting in borrowed metres the fate of �
��that heaven-born Genius.” Coleridge compared himself explicitly to the young poet, dead in a garret at the age of eighteen; apparently unwanted and unhonoured, Coleridge laments his “kindred woes.” In his agonies he is possessed by “the Ghosts of Otway and Chatterton” (Otway another penurious and unsuccessful writer) as if to confirm his own sense of doomed genius. Yet can “Genius” subsist in forgery?
In his poem upon the death of Keats, Adonais, Shelley paid stately tribute to the “solemn agony” of Chatterton; he is one of the “inheritors of unfulfilled renown” who, in the unstated argument of the poem, will reach fruition by means of Shelley’s productive genius. At a later date a memorial of Shelley was sculpted by Onslow Ford in the manner of Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton. Whatever the circumstances of Chatterton’s compositions, that picturesque or theatrical pose survives as a token of romantic poetry itself. That is why Keats evinced the most effusive reaction to Chatterton’s unhappy fate. He composed a sonnet in 1815, “To Chatterton,” and lamented the “Dear child of sorrow—son of misery!” whose “Genius mildly flash’d.” Three years later he inscribed Endymion “to the memory of Thomas Chatterton” but, more significantly, in a letter of the following year he remarked that “the purest english I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s . . . Chatterton’s language is entirely northern” and free from “Chaucer’s gallicisms.” He went on to declare that “I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s cut by feet.” Keats was acquainted with the controversy surrounding Chatterton’s “medieval” poetry, but he considered it to be of little consequence beside the dead poet’s adoption and assimilation of a “native” or “northern” dialect—by which he means, in the context of Chaucer and Milton, an Anglo-Saxon cadence and vocabulary. In a letter of the same period he remarks that he has given up Hyperion because “there were too many Miltonic inversions in it,” but in the same paragraph he avers that Chatterton “is the purest writer in the English Language . . . ’tis genuine English Idiom in English words.” His abandonment of Hyperion suggests that he understood the dangers of imitation or plagiarism, but then how are we to estimate his praise of Chatterton’s forged verses as “genuine English Idiom”? Here lie mysteries which may or may not be resolved. It may be worth noting in this context that the poem in which Wordsworth celebrated the memory of Chatterton, “Resolution and Independence,” is written in the same metre as Chatterton’s fake medieval poem “An Excelente Balade of Charitie.” Wordsworth also owned a portrait of the dead poet, which was itself a forgery.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 49
