Johnson didn't come back from Scotland with his arse painted
blue&white screaming "Scotland for ever" now did he? Easy to be
sentimental about the losers if you're on the victor's side.
As for Johnson's attack, even from my sketchy reading, it seems that
his desire to prove Ossian a fake lasted quite a while, and with some
intensity. Some have suggested that Johnson's motive for going to
Scotland was to help in his mission to debunk Ossian.
It would be interesting to explore Johnsons' motives for this intense
dislike - just a hatred of bad writing? Whatever, his activities, for
me, fit within the framework of the victorious trampling over the
defeated, in this case, helping to kill a myth that might contribute
to a resurgent independant Scottish culture which would be
antithetical to the English. In this case, the usual methods of
suppressing the defeated culture - burning, declaring works as
"barbarous", the"devils work" etc - were clearly of no use against an
author who was wrote several other scholarly works, whose epic was
clearly very popular. Hence, the attacks via the "fake" aspect. Any
work based on fragments and oral history is bound to have some
"fictional" aspects, and MacPherson certainly stretched the limits.
But how "genuine" is oral history anyway? How "genuine" are any of the
works that form the foundations of national myths. One could say that
the original Arthurian cycles were "invented" to justify the
Anglo-Norman Empire. Even the original compilation of the mighty
Kalevala has some fictional sections in it, although admittedly far
less than Ossian, and this is before we go into any subtler shaping of
the narrative. So it seems to me that the Scottish equivalent of the
Kalevala, Beowulf, Mort d'Arthur etc, was fatally wounded but not
before it had time to influence a lot of other work.
Roger
On 04/07/06, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Johnson was a Hanoverian loyalist, but he wasn't a fool. His quips
> about Scotland as recorded by Boswell are in large part the jibes of
> a friend needling a friend. You might want to read his A Journey to
> the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), and Boswell's Journal of a
> Tour to the Hebrides (1785)--two records of the same trip, which
> Boswell arranged to introduce Johnson to his homeland. Both books
> include accounts of their visit with the Jacobite heroine Flora
> MacDonald. Johnson wasn't immune to Jacobite sentimentalism. Both
> books are pretty wonderful.
>
> Boswell's family seat, Auchinleck, is or was somewhere on the western
> shore of Loch Lomond. I tried to find it with no luck. Any help much
> appreciated.
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