Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and ‘The Death of Arthur’
Identifieur interne : 000991 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000990; suivant : 000992Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and ‘The Death of Arthur’
Auteurs : Dafydd MooreSource :
- The Review of English Studies [ 0034-6551 ] ; 2006-06.
English descriptors
- KwdEn :
- Alfred tennyson, Anglo, Arthurian, Bardic nationalism, Bedivere, British image, Celt, Celtic, Celtic culture, Celtic identity, Celtic literature, Celtic voice, Century english epic, Charles tennyson, Christian providentialism, Christopher ricks, Complete works, Conditional hybridity, Cultural deracination, Cultural politics, Dafydd, Dafydd moore, David staines, Dramatic method, Early ossianics, Eighteenth century, Faint homeric echoes, Fingal, Fragment, Fragment viii, Full implications, Gaelic, Hallam tennyson, Henry mackenzie, Heroic poetry, Horace walpole, Howard gaskill, Idyll, James macpherson, King arthur, Macpherson, Malory, Matthew arnold, Mighty connal, Murray pittock, National identity, Nineteenth century, Northrop frye, Ossian, Ossianic, Ossianic fragment, Ossianic mode, Ossianic sensibility, Ossianic situation, Ossianic translations, Ossianic vision, Ossianic voice, Other minds, Other poems, Recent years, Robert crawford, Roger simpson, Tennyson.
- Teeft :
- Alfred tennyson, Anglo, Arthurian, Bardic nationalism, Bedivere, British image, Celt, Celtic, Celtic culture, Celtic identity, Celtic literature, Celtic voice, Century english epic, Charles tennyson, Christian providentialism, Christopher ricks, Complete works, Conditional hybridity, Cultural deracination, Cultural politics, Dafydd, Dafydd moore, David staines, Dramatic method, Early ossianics, Eighteenth century, Faint homeric echoes, Fingal, Fragment, Fragment viii, Full implications, Gaelic, Hallam tennyson, Henry mackenzie, Heroic poetry, Horace walpole, Howard gaskill, Idyll, James macpherson, King arthur, Macpherson, Malory, Matthew arnold, Mighty connal, Murray pittock, National identity, Nineteenth century, Northrop frye, Ossian, Ossianic, Ossianic fragment, Ossianic mode, Ossianic sensibility, Ossianic situation, Ossianic translations, Ossianic vision, Ossianic voice, Other minds, Other poems, Recent years, Robert crawford, Roger simpson, Tennyson.
Abstract
This article discusses Alfred Tennyson's deployment of the vocabulary of Ossianic poetry in his depictions of the death of King Arthur (1842 and 1869). The article establishes two areas in which the Ossianic mode operates in Tennyson's poems. The first is the mediation of the story of Arthur's passing as a framed narrative. In 1842 this frame is provided by the poem ‘The Epic’, and in 1869 by the figure of the last survivor poet Sir Bedivere. In each case, the article reads these framing devices Ossianically, and suggests ways in which recent commentary on Ossian can illuminate the Tennysonian method. The second area concerns Tennyson's rendering of Malory, and the article argues that the vocabulary and methods of Ossianism represent a vital filter through which Malory is passed in Tennyson's poems. The article suggests that in these two ways Ossian provides Tennyson with a way of writing heroic poetry in a modern age. The article concludes by considering some of the implications for the study of both Tennyson and Macpherson, and of the presence of a Celtic Ossianic voice at crucial moments in what is rightly seen as the epitome of Anglo-Saxon Arthurianism.
Url:
DOI: 10.1093/res/hgl043
Links to Exploration step
ISTEX:8D7127F19A276E24765336C3F87824DFC93B2610Le document en format XML
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The article establishes two areas in which the Ossianic mode operates in Tennyson's poems. The first is the mediation of the story of Arthur's passing as a framed narrative. In 1842 this frame is provided by the poem ‘The Epic’, and in 1869 by the figure of the last survivor poet Sir Bedivere. In each case, the article reads these framing devices Ossianically, and suggests ways in which recent commentary on Ossian can illuminate the Tennysonian method. The second area concerns Tennyson's rendering of Malory, and the article argues that the vocabulary and methods of Ossianism represent a vital filter through which Malory is passed in Tennyson's poems. The article suggests that in these two ways Ossian provides Tennyson with a way of writing heroic poetry in a modern age. 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The article establishes two areas in which the Ossianic mode operates in Tennyson's poems. The first is the mediation of the story of Arthur's passing as a framed narrative. In 1842 this frame is provided by the poem ‘The Epic’, and in 1869 by the figure of the last survivor poet Sir Bedivere. In each case, the article reads these framing devices Ossianically, and suggests ways in which recent commentary on Ossian can illuminate the Tennysonian method. The second area concerns Tennyson's rendering of Malory, and the article argues that the vocabulary and methods of Ossianism represent a vital filter through which Malory is passed in Tennyson's poems. The article suggests that in these two ways Ossian provides Tennyson with a way of writing heroic poetry in a modern age. The article concludes by considering some of the implications for the study of both Tennyson and Macpherson, and of the presence of a Celtic Ossianic voice at crucial moments in what is rightly seen as the epitome of Anglo-Saxon Arthurianism.</p></abstract></profileDesc><revisionDesc><change when="2006-06">Published</change><change xml:id="refBibs-istex" who="#ISTEX-API" when="2017-10-6">References added</change></revisionDesc></teiHeader></istex:fulltextTEI><json:item><extension>txt</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>text/plain</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/8D7127F19A276E24765336C3F87824DFC93B2610/fulltext/txt</uri></json:item></fulltext><metadata><istex:metadataXml wicri:clean="corpus oup, element #text not found" wicri:toSee="no header"><istex:xmlDeclaration>version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"</istex:xmlDeclaration><istex:docType PUBLIC="-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v2.3 20070202//EN" URI="journalpublishing.dtd" name="istex:docType"></istex:docType><istex:document><article xml:lang="en" article-type="research-article">
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<journal-title>The Review of English Studies</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">Review of English Studies</abbrev-journal-title>
<issn pub-type="ppub">0034-6551</issn>
<issn pub-type="epub">1471-6968</issn>
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<publisher-name>Oxford University Press</publisher-name>
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<article-id pub-id-type="other">hgl043</article-id>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1093/res/hgl043</article-id>
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<article-title>Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> and ‘The Death of Arthur’</article-title>
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<contrib contrib-type="author">
<name>
<surname>Moore</surname>
<given-names>Dafydd</given-names>
</name>
</contrib>
<aff>The University of Plymouth</aff>
</contrib-group>
<pub-date pub-type="ppub">
<month>June</month>
<year>2006</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>57</volume>
<issue>230</issue>
<fpage>374</fpage>
<lpage>391</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2006</copyright-year>
</permissions>
<abstract xml:lang="en">
<p>This article discusses Alfred Tennyson's deployment of the vocabulary of Ossianic poetry in his depictions of the death of King Arthur (1842 and 1869). The article establishes two areas in which the Ossianic mode operates in Tennyson's poems. The first is the mediation of the story of Arthur's passing as a framed narrative. In 1842 this frame is provided by the poem ‘The Epic’, and in 1869 by the figure of the last survivor poet Sir Bedivere. In each case, the article reads these framing devices Ossianically, and suggests ways in which recent commentary on <italic>Ossian</italic> can illuminate the Tennysonian method. The second area concerns Tennyson's rendering of Malory, and the article argues that the vocabulary and methods of Ossianism represent a vital filter through which Malory is passed in Tennyson's poems. The article suggests that in these two ways Ossian provides Tennyson with a way of writing heroic poetry in a modern age. The article concludes by considering some of the implications for the study of both Tennyson and Macpherson, and of the presence of a Celtic Ossianic voice at crucial moments in what is rightly seen as the epitome of Anglo-Saxon Arthurianism.</p>
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<p>On 19 March 1875, Alfred Tennyson escaped the crowds on his way home from the University boat race by calling on the Scottish writer George MacDonald. MacDonald's son recorded later that his father had been flattered that Tennyson borrowed from him:
<disp-quote><p>A splendid copy of the Gaelic <italic>Ossian</italic>, […] that he might read the prose Latin translation, which seems to be a literal one. He had never believed <italic>Ossian</italic> was a reality, but seemed a good deal more ready to believe in him when he had read a few lines, with which he was delighted.<xref rid="FN1"><sup>1</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
There are doubtless many reasons why it would be unwise to take this story on face value. Nevertheless, that Tennyson was still curious about, or even conscious of, <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> in 1875, and that this curiosity extended as far as reading <italic>Ossian</italic>'s Gaelic pseudo-source, in Latin, is suggestive. This article traces Tennyson's engagement with <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> in the two versions of his poem on the death of King Arthur, in 1842 and 1869. I will argue that the Ossianic situation provides part of an enabling strategy for Tennyson as he finds a way of mediating epic heroism to his nineteenth-century audience, and that the Ossianic sensibility is an important filter through which Thomas Malory's rendering of the events leading up to the death of Arthur are passed. The article concludes with a discussion of the significance of this engagement for our understanding of the cultural politics of both Tennyson's Arthur and <italic>Ossian</italic>. Having said all this, in making this case it is not my intention to claim an exclusive or exclusively important position for <italic>Ossian</italic> in relation to Tennyson. Furthermore, what Tennyson owes Macpherson is not the title of this article and should not be presumed to be its point. Indeed, even if the reductiveness of such arguments were attractive in itself, an essential part of this story is the fact that Tennyson's engagement with <italic>Ossian</italic> is not wholly consistent. As we shall see, there are many significant differences, in particular to do with matters of form and spiritual insight and purpose. In particular, there are elements of the Ossianic Celtic gloom that Tennyson explicitly resists, a resistance all the more striking within the context of the other similarities. It is perhaps best to begin however, with some words on <italic>Ossian</italic>.
<fn id="FN1" xml:lang="en"><p>1 Greville MacDonald, quoted in <italic>The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson</italic>, ed. by Cecil Y. Long and Edgar F. Shannon, 3 vols (Oxford, 1982–1990), vol. 3, p. 99 (note).</p></fn></p>
<p>Between 1760 and 1763, a young Scottish classicist and schoolmaster James Macpherson produced three books of poetry that shook the cultural world. <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> were presented as the poetic remains of Ossian, son of the great Celtic warrior Fingal (or Fionn as he is perhaps more commonly known), and as proof of a Scottish past of epic proportions and poetry.<xref rid="FN2"><sup>2</sup></xref> Ossian, the old, blind survivor of a race of heroes tells his tales of the days of his youth and the pomp of his father from the verge of personal and national extinction. The Northern Homer, as he was dubbed by Voltaire, proved influential the world over, from what was to become the United States to Russia. As is perhaps well-known, Ossian was Napoleon's favourite poet, while the <italic>Sturm und drang</italic> of the poems—melancholy sublime actions set in a moody, sublime landscape—and their image of bardic nationalism, held particular sway in Germany. It is scarce an exaggeration to say that <italic>Ossian</italic> provided one of the key notes for the movements of Sensibility and the Sublime, for Romanticism and for our image of the Celt. However, <italic>Ossian</italic> has come to share the fate of so many texts of the third quarter of the eighteenth century in being eclipsed by the movement of Romanticism it does so much to exemplify. This situation is exacerbated in the case of <italic>Ossian</italic> by the eye-catchingly bad-tempered controversy over the authenticity of the poems, with all the personal and cultural agenda this continues to represent, in some quarters at least, to this day.<xref rid="FN3"><sup>3</sup></xref>
<fn id="FN2" xml:lang="en"><p>2 What we know of as <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> were in fact three publications: <italic>Fragments of Ancient Poetry</italic> (1760), <italic>Fingal</italic> […] <italic>and Other Poems</italic> (1761/2) and <italic>Temora</italic> […] <italic>and Other Poems</italic> (1763), though Ossian is not named as the author of the <italic>Fragments</italic>.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN3" xml:lang="en"><p>3 For <italic>Ossian</italic> in general see, Fiona Stafford, <italic>The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian</italic> (Oxford, 1988); Paul deGategno, <italic>James Macpherson</italic> (Boston, 1989), Howard Gaskill (ed.), <italic>Ossian Revisited</italic> (Edinburgh, 1991); Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (eds), <italic>From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations</italic> (Amsterdam, 1998); Nick Groom, <italic>The Forger's Shadow</italic> (London, 2003); Dafydd Moore, <italic>Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian</italic> (Aldershot, 2003); Dafydd Moore (ed. and intro), <italic>Ossian and Ossianism</italic>, 4 vols (London, 2004); Howard Gaskill (ed.), <italic>The Reception of Ossian in Europe</italic> (London, 2004).</p></fn></p>
<p>Given this situation, it is not unexpected that a scholarly field that has busied itself uncovering all the ‘parallel references it is possible to adduce between Tennyson and every poet from Homer up to [Tom] Moore’ has had next to nothing to say about Tennyson and <italic>Ossian</italic>.<xref rid="FN4"><sup>4</sup></xref> However there is plenty of evidence, should one chose to look, for Tennyson's familiarity with <italic>Ossian</italic> in his early poetry. Charles Tennyson duly places Macpherson amongst the list of poets to whom Tennyson was exposed from a young age, and while neither Macpherson nor <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> merit an entry in the index of Hallam Tennyson's <italic>Memoir</italic>, he does record a conversation with his father ‘<italic>a propos</italic> possibly of the battle at the end of [<italic>The Princess</italic>]’ in which Tennyson ‘observed “Macpherson's Ossian is poor in most parts, but this is a grand image” ’.<xref rid="FN5"><sup>5</sup></xref> That said, the current obscurity of Macpherson probably tempts us to make more of such gleanings than is justified: such was the widespread popularity and cultural currency of <italic>Ossian</italic> between 1760 and 1830 that an absence of this kind of evidence would be the more surprising and significant. A similarly qualified point can be made about Tennyson's antiquarian interest in the poetry and culture of Wales and Cornwall, an interest that corroborates the engagement with <italic>Ossian</italic>. In 1848 he went to Cornwall, the highlight of which was a visit to Stephen Hawker, the elderly vicar of Morwenstow, and he came away, in good Macphersonian fashion, with books and manuscripts. In 1856 he took the family to Wales, hunting out antiquarians and aged harpers, and other such likely characters.<xref rid="FN6"><sup>6</sup></xref> While it would be rash to dismiss this as a fashionable pose, it would also be rash to ignore the slightly formulaic nature of these accounts. That is to say that we should be alive to the possibility that, in the wake of Macpherson, and more respectable figures (notably, of course, Walter Scott), this was the kind of activity that poets of a certain sort might engage in, particularly when amongst what Tennyson would term ‘fragments of forgotten peoples’. That notwithstanding, the idea that Tennyson might be considered a poet of this sort is in itself of some significance in the present context.
<fn id="FN4" xml:lang="en"><p>4 Robert Pattison, <italic>Tennyson and Tradition</italic> (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 5.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN5" xml:lang="en"><p>5 Charles Tennyson, <italic>Alfred Tennyson</italic> (London, 1949), p. 32; Hallam Tennyson, <italic>Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son</italic>, 2 vols (London, 1898), vol. 1, p. 256 (note).</p></fn>
<fn id="FN6" xml:lang="en"><p>6 David Staines, <italic>Tennyson's Camelot: The Idylls of the King and its Medieval Sources</italic> (Waterloo, Ont, 1982), pp. 25–6, 31. Staines quotes from Sir Charles Tennyson's biography, pp. 224–5, p. 301.</p></fn></p>
<p>What can be noted, however, is that Tennyson's 1827 <italic>Poems</italic> are full of identifiable Ossianic echoes, and that while none of the poems printed here were subsequently reprinted by Tennyson, their tone, method and, in particular, poetic persona are part of what is characteristically Tennysonian.<xref rid="FN7"><sup>7</sup></xref> It should be reiterated that the point of this observation is not to make wild claims for Macpherson's importance or to suggest, however backhandedly, that what it is conventional to think of as Tennysonian should actually be termed Ossianic. Rather it is to locate some of Tennyson's characteristic preoccupations in the same vicinity as his early interest in Ossian, and to make clear what might be meant by the Ossianic in poetry. For example, this is ‘I wander in darkness and sorrow’ from 1827:
<disp-quote><p>I wander in darkness and sorrow,</p><p>Uncheered by the moon's placid ray;</p><p>Not a friend that I loved but is dead,</p><p>Not a hope but has faded away!</p><p>Oh! when shall I rest in the tomb,</p><p>Wrapt about with the chill winding sheet?</p><p>For the roar of the wind is around me,</p><p>The leaves of the year at my feet.</p><p> (ll. 9–16)<xref rid="FN8"><sup>8</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
This is ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ in 1886:
<disp-quote><p>Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!</p><p>All I loved are vanished voices, all my steps are on the dead.</p><p>All the world is ghost to me, and as a phantom disappears,</p><p>Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years.</p><p> (ll. 251–4)</p></disp-quote>
Both might be compared with a couple of characteristic moments from <italic>Ossian</italic> (similar can be found in nearly every one of the 15 fragments and 23 poems in the ouvre):
<disp-quote><p>Such, Fingal! were thy words; but thy words I hear no more. Sightless I sit by thy tomb. I hear the wind in the wood; but no more I hear my friends. The cry of the hunter is over. The voice of war is ceased. (<italic>Fragment</italic> VIII, vol.I, p. 158)<xref rid="FN9"><sup>9</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
Or:
<disp-quote><p>Roll on, ye dark-brown years, for ye bring no joy on your course. Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of song are gone to rest: my voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid. (‘The Songs of Selma’, vol. II, p. 218)</p></disp-quote>
It seems to be the case that in his early Ossianics, Tennyson explores themes that become abiding ones in his mature verse. The poetic sensibility offered by the Ossianic situation and the image of the aged poet-speaker, diminished from his former glories, exiled from his friends and past and condemned to live on alone, is one that recurs, needless to say, in some of Tennyson's most assured verse, as does the troubled attempt to instate poetry as a force of redemptive power in the face of cultural deracination. Above all, both are animated by what Graham Hough memorably called the ‘siren song of the past’, ‘something about absence, distance, desolation, partings, forsakings; [whose] echoes can be heard in all his verse, from “Mariana” in 1830 to “Far, Far Away” almost sixty years later’.<xref rid="FN10"><sup>10</sup></xref> With this in mind it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of William Hazlett's famous characterisation of <italic>Ossian</italic>:
<disp-quote><p>There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country […] The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect.<xref rid="FN11"><sup>11</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
Having briefly set this scene, it is now appropriate to turn to Tennyson's poems on King Arthur to analyse further the nature and significance of his Ossianic voice.
<fn id="FN7" xml:lang="en"><p>7 For discussion of Tennyson's early Ossianics see Tom Peete Cross, ‘Alfred Tennyson as Celticist’, <italic>P.M.L.A</italic>. 18 (1920–1), 485–92 (pp. 149–50 n); Fiona Stafford, ‘“Dangerous Success”: Ossian, Wordsworth and English Romanticism’ in <italic>Ossian Revisited</italic>, ed. by Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 49–72.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN8" xml:lang="en"><p>8 All quotations from Tennyson are from the <italic>Poems of Tennyson</italic>, ed. Christopher Ricks, (London, 1968).</p></fn>
<fn id="FN9" xml:lang="en"><p>9 All quotations from Ossian are from <italic>Ossian and Ossianism</italic>, ed. Dafydd Moore (London, 2004), with spelling modernised. Volume and page numbers are to this edition.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN10" xml:lang="en"><p>10 Graham Hough, ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ in <italic>Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson</italic>, ed. by John Killham (London: Routledge, 1960), pp. 186–91, p. 191. Compare with Christopher Ricks’ comments that Tennyson ‘quarried his past and past poems even when he was too young to have had much of a past’, ‘Tennyson Inheriting the Earth’ in <italic>Studies in Tennyson</italic>, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London, 1981), 66–105, p. 71.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN11" xml:lang="en"><p>11 Hazlitt, “On Poetry in general”, in <italic>The Complete Works of William Hazlitt</italic>, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 volumes (London, 1930), vol. 5, 1–18, p. 15.</p></fn></p>
<sec>
<title>I</title>
<p><disp-quote><p>‘I should be crazed to attempt such a thing in the heart of the nineteenth century.’<xref rid="FN12"><sup>12</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
From what has been said of <italic>Ossian</italic> thus far, it should be clear that ‘The Passing of Arthur’ wears its Ossianic credentials on its sleeve, and on no more obvious occasion than in its opening lines:
<disp-quote><p>That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,</p><p>First made and latest left of all the knights,</p><p>Told, when the man was no more than a voice</p><p>In the white winter of his age, to those</p><p>With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.</p><p> (ll. 1–5)</p></disp-quote>
The similarity with the Ossianic situation, discussed earlier, is clear:
<disp-quote><p>By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees, old Oscian [sic] sat on the moss; the last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead.</p><p>How hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches round thee! Where is Fingal the king? (<italic>Fragment</italic> VIII, vol.I, p. 155)</p></disp-quote>
The close of book III of <italic>Fingal</italic> offers this process in reverse (and also includes the note of cultural isolation found in Bedivere):
<disp-quote><p>Often have I fought, and often won in battles of the spear. But blind, and tearful, and forlorn I now walk with little men. O Fingal, with thy race of battle I now behold thee not. The wild roes feed upon the green tomb of the mighty king of Morven—Blest be thy soul, thou king of swords, thou most renowned on the hills of Cona! (vol.II, p. 48)</p></disp-quote>
In fact, the very presence of the narrator Bedivere, regardless of from where he might owe his inspiration, is something worth pausing over. Although internal narrators play, as they do in fact in <italic>Ossian</italic>, a crucial part in what David Staines has called ‘an essentially dramatic method’ in the <italic>Idylls</italic> as a whole, only ‘Geraint and Enid’, which begins with a seven-line editorial, has anything approaching a narrating character.<xref rid="FN13"><sup>13</sup></xref> Indeed, the ‘essentially dramatic method’ of the <italic>Idylls</italic> generally works to weaken the reader's sense of a single controlling narrative voice. However, the need to mediate this story to and motivate it for the reader, to ‘author’ it, had struck Tennyson early, and the Ossianic upgrading of Bedivere can perhaps be seen as a response to one of the problems of integrating the 1842 poem on the Death of Arthur into the cycle of Idylls.
<fn id="FN12" xml:lang="en"><p>12 Quoted in Ricks, <italic>Tennyson</italic> (London, 1971), p. 264.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN13" xml:lang="en"><p>13 Staines, <italic>Tennyson's Camelot</italic>, p. 25.</p></fn></p>
<p>When the poem which would become the final part of <italic>Idylls of the King</italic> began life in 1842, it was accompanied by a short poetic preface entitled ‘The Epic’, a meta-statement about the business of heroic poetry. The poem represents the best known example of Tennyson's comment on his own method in relation to ‘Demeter and Persphone’, that ‘when I write an antique like this I must put it into a frame – something modern about it […] it is no use giving a mere réchauffé of old legends’.<xref rid="FN14"><sup>14</sup></xref> Everard Hall, a sometime poet, is prevailed upon to read the remaining fragment of his 12-book epic on King Arthur, a fragment rescued by the party's host Francis Allen from the fire to which Hall had consigned the complete work. In explaining why he had taken this drastic action, Hall voices some now-famous doubts about the viability of the epic in the modern age, doubts which had exercised Tennyson himself:
<disp-quote><p>Why take the style of those heroic times?</p><p>For nature brings not back the mastodon,</p><p>Nor we those times; and why should any man</p><p>Remodel models? these twelve books of mine</p><p>Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,</p><p>Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt</p><p> (ll. 35-40)</p></disp-quote></p>
<p>‘The Epic’ is usually treated as a self-reflexive disclaimer, a pre-emptive acknowledgement of the weaknesses of ‘faint Homeric echoes’ and a contribution to a debate about the location of heroism within modern poetry that in fact stretches back long before Macpherson's day. It is however possible to read it in another, more Ossianic way, both in terms of its deployment of the fragment form, and in terms of its role as an enabling strategy for the heroic, or perhaps even a redefinition of where the heroic may be seen to reside or be accessed. <italic>Ossian</italic>'s status as a fragmented text has been a major topic of scholarly discussion in recent years, and (or perhaps because) the notion of the Ossianic fragment offers a meeting ground within the field between those interested in <italic>Ossian</italic> as a Sentimental text and those interested in Macpherson's cultural politics and poetics. It is also amenable to a number of different, and indeed quite opposite, readings. Thus for Tom Keymer, fragmentation ‘serves […] as a presiding metaphor for the sense of disintegration and loss so pervasive’ in <italic>Ossian</italic>, but for Kate Trumpener, the fragment represents ‘not only the traces of a larger cultural world but also the tragic trials and triumphant survivals of its history’.<xref rid="FN15"><sup>15</sup></xref> Tennyson's ‘Epic’ fragment can also be fruitfully viewed within the terms of this debate.
<fn id="FN14" xml:lang="en"><p>14 Quoted (from Hallam's <italic>Memoir</italic>, ii, 364) in Staines, <italic>Tennyson's Camelot</italic>, p. 129.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN15" xml:lang="en"><p>15 Tom Keymer, ‘Narratives of Loss: <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> and <italic>Tristram Shandy</italic>’ in <italic>From Gaelic to Romantic</italic>, 79–96 (p. 87); Katie Trumpener, <italic>Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire</italic> (Princeton, 1997), p. 28. See also Susan Manning, ‘Henry Mackenzie and Ossian: Or, The Emotional Value of Asterisks’, in <italic>From Gaelic to Romantic</italic>, 132–52; Robert Crawford as cited at note 20, and more generally Leo Braudy, ‘The Form of the Sentimental Novel’ <italic>Novel</italic>, 7 no.1, 1974, 5–13.</p></fn></p>
<p>The preface in effect dramatises the reading of the poem that follows, down to the description of Hall reading it, apparently after the manner of Tennyson himself, by ‘mouthing out his hollow o's and a's, | Deep-chested music’. This dramatisation has the effect of setting the fragment of the poem within the context of individual lives and of motivating its existence. Hall's epic ambitions come, we learn, from a different personal time, a time ‘at college’ when he was naive enough to believe that such poetry was possible. The narrator of ‘The Epic’ (and part of the notional audience for Hall's rendition of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’) attends to the poem because he remembers the reputation Hall had as a poet when they were ‘Freshmen’, presumably a pun on both the stage of their University career and state of their minds.<xref rid="FN16"><sup>16</sup></xref> This playful but nevertheless wistful attitude is shared by the country priest, who laments that ‘all the old honour had from Christmas gone’ (l. 7) and of ‘the general decay of faith’ (l. 18). In other words these opening exchanges, urbane and knowing as they are, also represent a narrative of loss of ideals, of spiritual disillusionment. That is to say, the surviving piece of the epic poem represents a fragment from a time not beset by spiritual doubts and cultural decline, a time in which epic poetry could at least be imagined. That the fragment from a heroic poetic past itself recounts the fall of a heroic age, offers a mirroring that re-emphasises the theme of personal and poetic loss. The best-known and most immediate paratext for this structure may well be Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’, but this does not diminish the Ossianic context, not least because Coleridge was himself deeply read in <italic>Ossian</italic>, a reading that manifests itself forcefully in ‘Kubla Khan’.<xref rid="FN17"><sup>17</sup></xref>
<fn id="FN16" xml:lang="en"><p>16 According to the <italic>OED</italic> the word Freshman meaning first year University student dates to the end of the sixteenth century.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN17" xml:lang="en"><p>17 For Coleridge and Macpherson see John Dunn, ‘Coleridge's Debt to Macpherson’, <italic>Studies in Scottish Literature</italic>, 7 (1969), 76–89 (which focuses significantly on ‘Kubla Khan’) and the relevant chapter of ‘The Role of Macpherson's Ossian in the Development of British Romanticism’, (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Michigan, 1965).</p></fn></p>
<p>The dramatisation of the act of narration in ‘The Epic’ solves the problem of the nature of heroic poetry in a polished age by representing, to borrow a phrase from a commentator on <italic>Ossian</italic>, ‘a conception of the heroic past as a time when men and women could freely <italic>imagine</italic> a heroic past.’<xref rid="FN18"><sup>18</sup></xref> This is a retreat, a concession of defeat, but also a liberation, as the epilogue to the poem, in which the speaker recounts the effect of Hall's recital (‘in sleep I seemed | To sail with Arthur under looming shores’ (ll. 288–9)) makes clear. The fragment, albeit complete with its ‘modern touches’ (l. 278), somehow redeems the world of imagination, and heroism, however temporarily. In this way, the framing narrative represents an ‘assertion of at least the possibility of the project’ because ‘the present is reconnected to its past; the poet has found a role’.<xref rid="FN19"><sup>19</sup></xref> This observation about Tennyson parallels Robert Crawford's analysis of the Ossianic fragment:
<disp-quote><p>The fragment as a remnant of the earlier civilisation is an emblem both of destruction and continuity. To assemble fragments may be a way of salvaging something of creative worth in the midst of fragmentation, of making a healing gesture to a snapped culture.<xref rid="FN20"><sup>20</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
As such, fragmentation and belatedness come to provide an alibi for the epic in the modern world, giving the poem something to say to the modern by anchoring it in personal history or experience.
<fn id="FN18" xml:lang="en"><p>18 Frederic Bogel, <italic>Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England</italic> (Princeton, 1984), p. 100.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN19" xml:lang="en"><p>19 Chris Brooks and Inga Bryden, ‘The Arthurian Legacy’ in W.R.J.Barron, <italic>The Arthur of the English</italic> (Cardiff, 2001), 247–66, p. 250.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN20" xml:lang="en"><p>20 Robert Crawford, <italic>The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s</italic> (Oxford, 2001), p. 68.</p></fn></p>
<p>In the ‘Passing of Arthur’, Bedivere fulfills the author role played by the preamble in the earlier poem and, because he is much closer to the figure of Ossian in his narrative situation than Hall, underlines the similarities in narrative strategy between the three. In each case the fall of the heroic age is paralleled by a poet, alienated from the events he describes. But if Hall's charred manuscript represented a remnant from a shattered personal-cum-poetic past, old Sir Bedivere is a leave-over from the ‘true old times’ of heroism, a heroism absent in the modern era ushered in by the death of Arthur. That is to say, he functions in almost identical fashion to Ossian, who mediates between his youth, and the reign of his father, and the time of the ‘little men’, the ‘feeble’. This also effects a shift of mode, or genre, from epic/romance to what Northrop Frye has designated elegiac or perhaps <italic>penseroso</italic> romance, the first marked by a ‘diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one’, and the second by ‘the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure’, entertainment without confrontation thematically arranged around ‘lonely old men, the intimate group, and the reported tale.’<xref rid="FN21"><sup>21</sup></xref> More immediately, Susan Manning has isolated this very method of ‘ghost-writing’ as an influential Ossianic innovation. Ghost writing for Manning takes the form of post-mortem narrators, a sense of decrepitude, belatedness and loss within narrative personae, ‘a literary idiom haunted by the shades of a language that was repeatedly represented as belonging to a dying or fast-disappearing cultural authority’ and works as a ‘means by which the critic or editor [ie., in most instances, the author] may mediate between the past and the present (or perhaps the ideal and the real) for the reader.’<xref rid="FN22"><sup>22</sup></xref> Ossian, and I am arguing here, Bedivere, are then, in Manning's words ‘ambassador[s] from the edge of cultural memory, […] remembrancer[s] to the imagination of the present.’<xref rid="FN23"><sup>23</sup></xref> Again the Ossianic narrator device makes a virtue of a necessity, taking advantage of the very belatedness which may otherwise fatally disable the project of writing the heroic age for more advanced times.
<fn id="FN21" xml:lang="en"><p>21 Northrop Frye, <italic>Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays</italic> (Princeton, 1957), pp. 36–7, pp. 201–3.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN22" xml:lang="en"><p>22 Susan Manning, ‘Ghost-Writing the Tradition: Henry Mackenzie, Burns and Macpherson’, <italic>Scotlands</italic>, vol. 4, no.1 (1997), 86–107 (p. 104, p. 96).</p></fn>
<fn id="FN23" xml:lang="en"><p>23 Manning, ‘Ghost-Writing the Tradition’, p. 96.</p></fn></p>
<p>Bedivere had of course appeared in the earlier version, and had prepared for his more developed role in the later poem with his lament that:
<disp-quote><p>‘[…]I see that the true old times are dead,</p><p>When every morning brought a noble chance,</p><p>And every chance brought out a noble knight.’</p><p> (ll. 397–99)</p></disp-quote>
This reflection brings Bedivere to the following conclusion, which can be compared with Ossian's common lament that ‘my age is darkened with sorrow’, and his frequent description of the years as ‘dark-brown’:
<disp-quote><p>‘And I, the last, go forth companionless,</p><p>And the days darken around me, and the years,</p><p>Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’</p><p> (ll. 403–6)</p></disp-quote>
This speech is retained in ‘The Passing of Arthur’, but it now echoes the opening description of Bedivere. This gives the poem a circularity, a quasi-recursiveness, which creates the impression that the ‘Passing of Arthur’ is, like so many of Ossian's narratives, a compulsive retelling of the story whereby the current state of affairs came about.</p>
<p>However, Bedivere's final reflection also has some precedent in Malory's <italic>Morte d'Arthur</italic>, and I want to turn now to an examination of the way that Tennyson adapts Malory, and to argue that <italic>Ossian</italic> is a crucial filter in this process for Tennyson. This will not only heighten our awareness of Tennyson's deployment of the themes of age and isolation in peculiarly Ossianic ways, but will provide further corroboration for Tennyson's continued engagement with Macpherson in these poems.</p>
</sec>
<sec>
<title>II</title>
<p>Critical analysis of Tennyson's use of Malory usually seeks to identify those episodes Tennyson adapts, jettisons or to which he remains faithful.<xref rid="FN24"><sup>24</sup></xref> This section focuses on another dimension to adaptation, that of determining sensibility, and it will suggest that Tennyson's recreation of Malory is influenced by the Ossianic mode. A good example of the way Tennyson's sensibility differs from Malory's, and of <italic>Ossian</italic>'s possible role in it, is provide by Bedivere's comment on his abandonment by Arthur with which the previous section ended. After all, Malory's Bedyvere has slightly more prosaic considerations in mind when he observes ‘A, my lorde Arthur, what shall becom of me, now ye go frome me and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes’, a comment with little room for the Ossianic sentimentality of cultural alienation invested in Tennyson's version.<xref rid="FN25"><sup>25</sup></xref>
<fn id="FN24" xml:lang="en"><p>24 See Staines, <italic>Tennyson's Camelot</italic> and J.M. Gray, <italic>Thro' the Vision of the Night: A Study of Source, Evolution and Structure in Tennyson's Idylls of the</italic> King (Edinburgh, 1980) for a detailed and rewarding analysis in these terms.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN25" xml:lang="en"><p>25 <italic>Malory: Works</italic>, ed. by Eugene Vinaver (Oxford, 1971), p. 716.</p></fn></p>
<p>However, there is no more striking or important instance of the way Tennyson Ossianifies Malory than the episode of the visit of the ghost of Gawain to Arthur on the eve of the ‘last weird battle in the west’ (notice the retrospective ‘last’ here, a point to which we shall return). Malory presents Gawain in robust fashion, and his purpose is to advise Arthur not to fight until Lancelot arrives: ‘for and [ie if] ye fygyt as to-morne with sir Mordered, as ye both have assigned, doute ye nat ye shall be slayne’. Arthur's greeting to his nephew is equally matter-of-fact, a cool ‘Wellcom, my systers sonne, I wende ye had bene dede!’ (p. 712). This, in comparison, is Tennyson's rendering of the moment:
<disp-quote><p>There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed</p><p>In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown</p><p>Along a wandering wind, and past his ear</p><p>Went shrilling. ‘Hollow, hollow all delight!</p><p>Hail, King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away’</p><p>[…]</p><p>[…] Down the long wind the dream</p><p>Shrilled; but in going mingled with dim cries</p><p>Far in the moonlight haze among the hills,</p><p>As of some lonely city sacked by night,</p><p> (ll. 30–43)</p></disp-quote>
And Arthur's response to this is also rather different:
<disp-quote><p>‘Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,</p><p>Thine, Gawain, was the voice—are these dim cries</p><p>Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild</p><p>Mourn […]?’</p><p> (ll. 46–49)</p></disp-quote>
There are multiple allusions at play in this famous passage, but this should not lessen the significance of the fact that these exchanges also represent a distillation of much of the Ossianic supernatural, with its feeble ghosts, little more than snatches of voices on the wind, bringing portents of doom to the hapless participants. In particular, there is a common willful confusion of the status of ghosts and dreams, and, perhaps most important to note, Tennyson replaces Malory's genuine warning and offer of advice with a piece of Ossianic foredoom. Compare, for example, the appearance, message and manner of Crugal (the effect of which requires lengthy quotation):
<disp-quote><p>[Connal] saw in his rest a dark-red stream of fire coming down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the beam, a chief that lately fell […] His face is like the beam of the setting sun; his robes are of the clouds of the hill: his eyes like two decaying flames. Dark is the wound of his breast.</p><p>Crugal, said mighty Connal, son of Dedgal famed on the hill of deer. Why so pale and sad, thou breaker of shields? Thou hast never been pale for fear.—What disturbs the son of the hill?</p><p>Dim, and in tears, he stood and stretched his pale hand over the hero.—Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the gale of the reedy Lego.</p><p>My ghost, O Connal, is on my native hills; but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never talk with Crugal, or find his lone steps in the heath. I am light as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist. Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death: it hovers over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove from the field of ghosts.—Like the darkened moon he retired, in the midst of the whistling blast.</p><p>Stay, said the mighty Connal, stay my dark-red friend. […] What cave of the hill is thy lonely house? What green-headed hill is the place of thy rest? Shall we not hear thee in the storm? In the noise of the mountain-stream? When the feeble sons of the wind come forth, and ride on the blast of the desart. (<italic>Fingal</italic>, vol. II, p. 22)</p></disp-quote>
We might say that Tennyson catches the mood with far greater economy, reproducing, as it were, <italic>Ossian</italic> the way that <italic>Ossian</italic> lives on in the ear. It is perhaps no coincidence that the one Ossianic epigram Tennyson chose in his career (‘It is the great army of the dead returning on the northern blast’) concerned the supernatural, and that the poem it inspires, ‘Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave’, envisages the eponymous winds as bearing ‘the sighs of other worlds along’ (l. 6) and describes the ‘thin and feeble bands’ (l. 17), the ‘formless, misty sons of old’ (l. 20) who are carried ‘upon the eddying blasts’ (l. 16). Even without the epigram one might be forgiven for assuming that these were lifted directly from <italic>Ossian</italic>. In the early poem Tennyson mastered the Ossianic supernatural. In the later he deployed it in his own tale of a doomed king.</p>
<p>Gawain's shadowy visitation and the reconfiguration of what was originally a warning as evidence of foredoom sets the tone for the eerie battle in which Arthur falls. Even the land in which the battle is fought is doomed:
<disp-quote><p>A land of old upheaven from the abyss</p><p>By fire, to sink into the abyss again;</p><p>Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,</p><p>And the long mountains ended in a coast</p><p>Of ever shifting sand, and far away</p><p>The phantom moaning of the sea.</p><p> (l. 82–87)</p></disp-quote>
As in <italic>Ossian</italic>, the land is infinitely old, and infinitely tired. Also notable is the mixture of past, present and future in the battle, during which we are told that:
<disp-quote><p>[…] some had visions out of golden youth,</p><p>And some beheld the faces of old ghosts</p><p>Look in upon the battle</p><p> (ll. 102–4)</p></disp-quote>
Tennyson's descriptions are relatively more vivid than Macpherson's, but they share with Macpherson's a lack of actual details of fighting. Both also have in common an intense concentration on sound, on the ‘moans of the dying, and voices of the dead’ (compare, ‘here was the din of arms; and here the groans of the dying. Mournful are the wars of Fingal’ vol. I, p. 142). Tennyson's description of the eerie silence which follows the battle, as the tide rolls debris up and down the beach shares with <italic>Ossian</italic> an emphasis on aftermath, on the detritus human or otherwise that attends epic violence, and for good measure involves an archetypal Ossianic compression of time-frames in talking of ‘the voice of days of old and days to be’ which goes ‘rolling far along the gloomy shores’ (ll. 134–5), a comment that perhaps reminds readers of the vision in ‘Carric-thura’ of ‘the ghosts of the aged forming future wars.’ Even the setting is Ossianic: Malory's final battle on Salisbury Plain is replaced with a battle fought in mist on a sea shore. A suitably liminal setting no doubt, perhaps reminiscent of the ‘ringing plains of windy Troy’, but one that also accords with Ossian's battles, all fought on or near a coastline and almost always in what seems like night (indeed the distance between the airy Classicism of Ulysses's evocation of Troy and the dank claustrophobic sea-shore of Arthur's last battle underlines the Celtic, Ossianic mistiness of the latter). Consider, overall, Tennyson's battle in relation to this:
<disp-quote><p>As meet two troubled seas, with the rolling of all their waves, when they feel the wings of contending winds, in the rock-sided firth of Lumon; along the echoing hills is the dim course of ghosts: from the blast fall the torn groves on the deep, amidst the foamy path of whales.—So mixed the hosts!—Now Fingal; now Cathmor came abroad.—The dark tumbling of death is before them: the gleam of broken steel is rolled on their steps, as, loud, the high-bounding kings hewed down the ridge of shields. (<italic>Temora</italic>, vol. II, p. 145)</p></disp-quote>
It is possible to say then that when Tennyson comes to describe his apocalyptic battle he adopts cadences, rhetorical strategies, narrative and character tropes all identifiable in <italic>Ossian</italic>. This is firmly suggestive of what <italic>Ossian</italic> meant to the bulk of its readership through the nineteenth century and the sort of resources the poems offered: in a nutshell, a recognisable idiom for presenting warfare and particularly defeat (especially foredoomed defeat) in a polite, discreet and above all, pathetic way.<xref rid="FN26"><sup>26</sup></xref> It is perhaps ironic then that when it comes to the question of Arthur's passing, Tennyson blinks in the face of the full nihilism of the Ossianic mode.
<fn id="FN26" xml:lang="en"><p>26 For Macpherson's aesthetics of warfare see, amongst others, Adam Potkay, ‘Virtue and Manners in the <italic>Poems of Ossian</italic>’ <italic>PMLA</italic>, vol. 107 (1992), 120–31; and the Macpherson chapter in his <italic>The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume</italic> (Ithaca, 1992); and Moore, ‘Heroic Incoherence in <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic>’, <italic>Eighteenth-Century Studies</italic>, vol. 34 no.1, Fall 2000, 43–59.</p></fn></p>
<p>We noted earlier Bedevere's lament as he pictures himself as the last of the race and its Ossianic cadences. Arthur's response, however, strikes a different note:
<disp-quote><p>‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,</p><p>And God fulfills himself in many ways,</p><p>Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’</p><p> (ll. 407–9)</p></disp-quote>
Macpherson's Fingal is no less certain of the mutability of all things, but for Fingal there is none of the Christian providentialism implied in Arthur's vision. In fact Fingal's sense that nothing guarantees permanence is actually closer to the bitter reply of Malory's Arthur to Gawain, ‘do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in’ (p. 716), as in moments such as his retirement speech at the end of <italic>Temora</italic>:
<disp-quote><p>—My son, I hear the call of years; they take my spear as they pass along. Why does not Fingal, they seem to say, rest within his hall? Dost thou always delight in blood? In the tears of the sad?—No: ye darkly-rolling years, Fingal delights not in blood. Tears are wintry streams that waste away my soul. But, when I lie down to rest, then comes the mighty voice of war. It awakes me, in my hall, and calls forth all my steel.—It shall call it forth no more; (vol. II, p. 149)</p></disp-quote>
Equally, Tennyson introduces a note of transcendence into his descriptions of Arthur's actual passing. Bedivere fancies that he hears a great cry, ‘as if some fair city were one voice | Around a king returning from his wars’ (ll. 460–1), and sees, or thinks he sees ‘the speck that bare the king’:
<disp-quote><p>Down that long water opening on the deep</p><p>Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go</p><p>From less to less and vanishing into light.</p><p>And the new sun rose bringing the new year.</p><p> (ll. 466–9)</p></disp-quote>
The obvious comparison is with the close of ‘Berrathon’, the final poem in the <italic>Fingal</italic> edition and the poem placed last in the 1772 revised edition of the complete works. In death Fingal is no triumphant king returned home. The afterlife for Fingal is like life, only worse:
<disp-quote><p>O king, […] I behold thee sitting on mist, dimly gleaming in all thine arms. Thy form now is not the terror of the valiant: but like a watery cloud; when we see the stars behind it with their weeping eyes. Thy shield is like the aged moon: thy sword a vapour half-kindled with fire. Dim and feeble is the chief, who travelled in brightness before.— (vol. II, p. 268)</p></disp-quote>
Equally, the ghostly Fingal's vision of the cycle of history concentrates less on the new year as on the passing of the old (that the final metaphor can hardly be considered a coinage of Macpherson's is, as throughout, hardly the point):
<disp-quote><p>The chiefs of other times are departed; they have gone without their fame. The sons of future years shall pass away; and another race arise. The people are like the waves of ocean: like the leaves of woody Morven, they pass away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift their green heads.— (vol. II, p. 269)</p></disp-quote>
This message of finality, of the one overwhelming fact of human endeavour and existence, emerges consistently from <italic>Ossian</italic>. Importing a more optimistic sense of the cyclical forces of history, as Tennyson's does via the workings of Christian providentialism, deviates from the full implications of the Ossianic vision. It would seem that <italic>Ossian</italic> is unshrinking in its portrayal of cultural deracination in a way that makes its final position perhaps more unsettling and troubling than Tennyson is willing to contemplate or allow. This ultimate difference, for all the Ossianic inflection of the rest of the poem, is an important factor in any analysis of the wider significance of Tennyson's Ossianic Arthur, and it is with some such analysis that I want to conclude.</p>
</sec>
<sec>
<title>III</title>
<p><disp-quote><p>‘As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have <italic>we</italic> to do with him?’</p><p>‘The Arthur of the English was not the Arthur of the Welsh’<xref rid="FN27"><sup>27</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
In the concluding section, I want to consider in a perhaps more speculative vein what the presence of an Ossianic mode or voice in the death of Arthur poems might tell us about the cultural positioning and cultural politics of Tennyson, and to some extent Macpherson as well.
<fn id="FN27" xml:lang="en"><p>27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Table Talk’, 4 September 1833; in <italic>Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism</italic>, ed. Thomas Middleton Rayor (London, 1936), 429; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘The Celtic Tradition’ in <italic>The Arthur of the English</italic>, ed. W.R.J Barron (Cardiff, 2001), 1–9, p. 9.</p></fn></p>
<p>Tennyson's Arthurian poetry is conventionally seen as the apogee of English appropriation of Arthur, who from Geoffrey of Monmouth onwards is moving ever further away from Celtic warlord to Anglo-British monarch, playing a central role in ‘the ideology of a pan-British suzerainty’ and offering ‘the Celtic keystone in the architecture of British monarchical identity.’<xref rid="FN28"><sup>28</sup></xref> For example, Stephanie Barczewski and Roger Simpson have separately shown the double movement whereby Tennyson Teutonified Arthur not only in his depiction of the Arthurian world, its people and its places, but also in a more subtle but nonetheless pervasive way through his apotheosis of Malory as <italic>the</italic> great source of Arthurian matter, a move which helped reconfigure the Arthurian tradition as, historically speaking, an English one.<xref rid="FN29"><sup>29</sup></xref> Both critics point to the alternative traditions and colourings displaced by this Tennyson–Malory axis. It should be said that Barczewski's notion of a late eighteenth-century, ethnically hybrid ‘British’ Arthur destroyed by the pressures of nineteenth-century racial theory and the Irish Question probably underestimates the Anglocentricism (and Anglo-Saxon xenophonia towards the Celt) of the earlier period, and perhaps does not quite acknowledge that the positive image of patriotic British Celts in the mid-eighteenth century represents a ‘transient exception’ rather than the norm.<xref rid="FN30"><sup>30</sup></xref> Nevertheless, it offers a valuable corrective to earlier accounts which tend to rank the literary ‘genuineness’ of Romantic Arthurian literary activity in terms of adherence to a retrospectively constructed and applied Tennyson–Malory axis.
<fn id="FN28" xml:lang="en"><p>28 Murray G.H. Pittock, <italic>Celtic Identity and the British Image</italic> (Manchester, 1999), p. 16, p. 19.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN29" xml:lang="en"><p>29 See Stephanie L. Barczewski, <italic>Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood</italic> (Oxford, 2000) and Roger Simpson, <italic>Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson 1800–1849</italic> (Cambridge, 1990).</p></fn>
<fn id="FN30" xml:lang="en"><p>30 Sam Smiles, <italic>The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination</italic> (New Haven, 1994), p. 149. An example of this earlier critical perspective would be James Merriman's otherwise valuable study <italic>The Flower of Kings: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835</italic> (Lawrence Kansas, 1973). Barczewski's rather unproblematic sense of a later eighteenth-century hybrid Anglo-Celtic Britishness accords with the perspective of Linda Colley, encapsulated by her influential study <italic>Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837</italic> (London, 1996; first published 1992). This has been challenged by ‘four nations’ critics — see for example, Murray G.H. Pittock, <italic>Celtic Identity and the British Image</italic> and <italic>Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789</italic> (London, 1997) — and by Smiles.</p></fn></p>
<p>The Ossianic presence at the climatic point of Tennyson's Arthuriad need not necessarily do anything to unsettle this equation. Over the last 250 odd years, critical interpretation of <italic>Ossian</italic>'s cultural politics has done an almost complete about turn. Eighteenth-century English writers, most notably Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, saw <italic>Ossian</italic> as a dangerous instrument of Scottish cultural pretension, and a proof of Scottish attempts to hijack British culture. For example, writing to William Mason in February of 1781, Walpole predicted that ‘Milton, Addison, Prior and Gray are to make way for the dull forgeries of Ossian and such wights as Davy and Johnny Hume’, concluding ‘oh! if you have a drop of English ink in your veins, rouse and revenge your country’.<xref rid="FN31"><sup>31</sup></xref> While this tradition has lived on in some quarters, <italic>Ossian</italic> is today more likely to be seen as a weapon of Anglo-British assimilation, peddling a tearfully sentimental, vicarious and fundamentally nostalgic cultural nationalism in the place of a genuine Scottish and particularly Celtic identity. As a document of genuine national consciousness (whatever that might be), <italic>Ossian</italic> is today more likely to be interpreted as an attempt ‘more to anaesthetise than revitalise Gaelic tradition.’<xref rid="FN32"><sup>32</sup></xref>
<fn id="FN31" xml:lang="en"><p>31 <italic>The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole</italic>, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven, 1938–83), 38 vols, vol. 29, p. 105.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN32" xml:lang="en"><p>32 Allan I Macinnes, <italic>Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788</italic> (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 220. A different view is offered by Donald Meek in his ‘The Sublime Gael: The Impact of Macpherson's <italic>Ossian</italic> on Literary Creativity and Cultural Perception in Gaelic Scotland’ in Gaskill (ed.), <italic>The Reception of Ossian in Europe</italic>, pp. 40–66.</p></fn></p>
<p>This critical reorientation is in significant part down to the retrospective evidence afforded by <italic>Ossian</italic>'s place within Matthew Arnold's ideas of Celtic culture as expounded in his <italic>Lectures on Celtic Literature</italic>. Current scholarship tends to emphasise less the value Arnold placed on Celtic culture at a time when many were inclined to think it worthless than it does the thorough-going cultural imperialism of his position, in which that value only exists in terms of its contribution to English culture.<xref rid="FN33"><sup>33</sup></xref> Where contemporaries might have been inclined to see the Celt as biologically degenerate and sub-human, Arnold sees the race as essentially feminine, which according to the theory of the day ‘meant’ delicate, spiritual, sensitive and prone to hysteria. By means of this racial-cum-gender stereotype, Arnold creates a role simultaneously privileged and marginalised for the Celt within the English culture:
<disp-quote><p>England's ‘island race’ is possessed of a conditional hybridity of blood and spirit on this reading, an internalized marriage of gendered qualities which imprison the Celt in the British domestic body, which both vampirizes it and gives it life. Where it is found separately from this conjunction, Celticism is often weak, exhausted and effeminate.<xref rid="FN34"><sup>34</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
Arnold offers <italic>The Poems of Ossian</italic> as the major evidence of what he took to be the essential genius of the Celt. In this way Arnold's <italic>Lectures</italic> are taken as the most significant fruit by which it is possible to know the true nature of the Ossianic project, as here when Arnold famously mythologizes the decline of the Celt as both the inevitable movement of history and a genetic destiny:
<disp-quote><p>For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more, out of the Celt's grasp. “They went forth to the war” says Ossian most truly, “but they always fell.”<xref rid="FN35"><sup>35</sup></xref></p></disp-quote>
<fn id="FN33" xml:lang="en"><p>33 See Barczewski, <italic>Myth and National Identity</italic>, pp. 110–111.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN34" xml:lang="en"><p>34 Pittock, <italic>Celtic Identity</italic>, p. 67.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN35" xml:lang="en"><p>35 Arnold, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, <italic>The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold</italic>, edited by R.H. Super, vol. 3 (Ann Arbor, 1962; first published 1886), 291–386, p. 346. See Rachel Bromwich, <italic>Matthew Arnold and Celtic literature. A retrospect, 1865–1965</italic> (Oxford, 1965).</p></fn></p>
<p>The presence of an Ossianic voice in Tennyson's Arthurian poems might suggest then the presence of the feminised, sentimental, Arnoldian Celt within the otherwise thoroughly Teutonic Arthurian world of the <italic>Idylls</italic>. Given the politics of Arnold's Celt, to say as much is hardly to upset the ethnic troping of the poems in any spectacular way. Though it is to say something significant, nonetheless. After all, things Celtic are so thoroughly othered within the body of Tennyson's poetry and the <italic>Idylls</italic> themselves that the reader would be forgiven for assuming that Tennyson had no truck with even Arnold's ‘conditional hybridity’. Alan Sinfield cites a number of instances of Tennyson's disparagement of what he variously termed ‘that unstable Celtic blood’ (in ‘Hail Briton!’) and ‘the blind hysterics of the Celt’ (<italic>In Memoriam</italic>), and there can be few more striking examples of the short-lived nature of the English accommodation with heroic Celticism than that offered by the comparison of Cowper's ‘Boadicea’ (1782) with Tennyson's rabid hysteric in his ‘Bodicea’ (1859).<xref rid="FN36"><sup>36</sup></xref> Within the <italic>Idylls</italic>, the othering of the Celt is most extreme in the figure of the Cornish King Mark, a kind of anti-Arthur, and his Irish queen Iseult, a highly sexualised <italic>femme fatale</italic>, and perhaps most quietly significant in that reference to ‘fragments of forgotten peoples’ in ‘The Passing of Arthur’, which Tennyson himself glosses by referring to the Celts. In the context of all this, to register a Celtic voice, albeit an Anglo-centric, attenuated, sentimentalised, idea of a Celtic voice, might be to register some disturbance at the heart of the poems’ ethnic identity. This fact is all the more pressing when we consider the crucial places where that voice is, on the evidence of the previous discussion, most insistently to be heard: i.e. in the way the poems are mediations on the role of poetry and the poet, and in the way that the great nineteenth-century English epic of Arthur renders the great fifteenth-century English epic of Arthur.<xref rid="FN37"><sup>37</sup></xref>
<fn id="FN36" xml:lang="en"><p>36 Sinfield, <italic>Alfred Tennyson</italic> (Oxford, 1986), p. 52.</p></fn>
<fn id="FN37" xml:lang="en"><p>37 For Malory's canonisation as a quintessentially ‘English’ rendering of Arthur in the nineteenth century, despite his reliance on the ‘Frenssh bokes’ see Barczewski, <italic>Myth and National Identity</italic>, pp. 112–115.</p></fn></p>
<p>At the same time, however, this essay suggests that in the face of the vision of complete cultural annihilation offered by Macpherson, Tennyson blinks. The complicated, overlapping and at times contradictory moral, spiritual, cultural, political and scientific preoccupations, concerns and aspiration of the <italic>Idylls</italic> do not make the poems amenable to simple or generalised definition, yet it is possible to suggest some of the things that they are not or do not do. For example, however preoccupied by or anxious about racial degeneration some of the individual poems may be (for example, ‘The Last Tournament’), the <italic>Idylls</italic> as a whole do not represent any straightforward council of despair on the fate of Victorian Britain. Tennyson's ultimately selective deployment of the Ossianic sensibility in favour of the providentialism of the <italic>Idylls</italic>’ spiritual trajectory, his refusal to countenance the pagan nihilism at <italic>Ossian</italic>'s heart, is both a symptom of this complexity and a way of calibrating it.</p>
<p>Tennyson's ultimately limited engagement with <italic>Ossian</italic> might also tell us something about Macpherson's text and the full implications of the Ossianic mode. This is significant because it offers another way of isolating more precisely the nature of the Celtic identity offered by <italic>Ossian</italic>. Recent years have seen a number of attempts to read in Macpherson's work a balance between sentimental resignation and lingering defiance, to register the fact that the poems represent both an accommodation within and also a note of genuine resentment towards the Anglo-British state, the fact that the ‘continuing elusiveness of his work […] hints at a covert resistance, and a fugitive power hidden beneath the smooth surface of Macpherson's eighteenth-century English language’.<xref rid="FN38"><sup>38</sup></xref> Tennyson's partial engagement with the Ossianic demonstrates the uncompromising and uncomfortable vision of entropy Macpherson's poems offer, and represents an unexpected way of measuring the distance between the reality of the Ossianic vision and the sentimentalism of the Arnoldian re-reading. All in all, Tennyson's poetic interest in the Ossianic sensibility not only casts a mutually illuminating light on the practice of two poets meeting the challenge of writing heroic poetry in the modern age, but also offers an insight into the complicated ethnic make up of British literature and identity.
<fn id="FN38" xml:lang="en"><p>38 Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill, preface to <italic>From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations</italic> (Amsterdam, 1998), p. xiv. Works cited in this article by Stafford, Moore and Pittock address this question in various ways.</p></fn></p>
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</istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and ‘The Death of Arthur’</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and ‘The Death of Arthur’</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Dafydd</namePart><namePart type="family">Moore</namePart><affiliation>The University of Plymouth</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="research-article" displayLabel="research-article" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XTP-1JC4F85T-7">research-article</genre><originInfo><publisher>Oxford University Press</publisher><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">2006-06</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">2006</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><abstract lang="en">This article discusses Alfred Tennyson's deployment of the vocabulary of Ossianic poetry in his depictions of the death of King Arthur (1842 and 1869). The article establishes two areas in which the Ossianic mode operates in Tennyson's poems. The first is the mediation of the story of Arthur's passing as a framed narrative. In 1842 this frame is provided by the poem ‘The Epic’, and in 1869 by the figure of the last survivor poet Sir Bedivere. In each case, the article reads these framing devices Ossianically, and suggests ways in which recent commentary on Ossian can illuminate the Tennysonian method. The second area concerns Tennyson's rendering of Malory, and the article argues that the vocabulary and methods of Ossianism represent a vital filter through which Malory is passed in Tennyson's poems. The article suggests that in these two ways Ossian provides Tennyson with a way of writing heroic poetry in a modern age. The article concludes by considering some of the implications for the study of both Tennyson and Macpherson, and of the presence of a Celtic Ossianic voice at crucial moments in what is rightly seen as the epitome of Anglo-Saxon Arthurianism.</abstract><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>The Review of English Studies</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="abbreviated"><title>Review of English Studies</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/JMC-0GLKJH51-B">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0034-6551</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1471-6968</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">revesj</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">revesj</identifier><part><date>2006</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>57</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>230</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>374</start><end>391</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">8D7127F19A276E24765336C3F87824DFC93B2610</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1093/res/hgl043</identifier><identifier type="local">hgl043</identifier><accessCondition type="use and reproduction" contentType="copyright">© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved</accessCondition><recordInfo><recordContentSource authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XBH-GTWS0RDP-M">oup</recordContentSource><recordOrigin>© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved</recordOrigin></recordInfo></mods><json:item><extension>json</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>application/json</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/8D7127F19A276E24765336C3F87824DFC93B2610/metadata/json</uri></json:item></metadata><covers><json:item><extension>tiff</extension><original>true</original><mimetype>image/tiff</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/8D7127F19A276E24765336C3F87824DFC93B2610/covers/tiff</uri></json:item></covers><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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