Hugh Blair

 

 

A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal.

 

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Editionsbericht
Literatur: Blair
Literatur: Ossian-Rezeption

 

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AMONG the monuments remaining of the ancient state of nations, few are more valuable than their poems or songs. History, when it treats of remote and dark ages, is seldom very instructive. The beginnings of society, in every country, are involved in fabulous confusion; and though they were not, they would furnish few events worth recording. But, in every period of society, human manners are a curious spectacle; and the most natural pictures of ancient manners are exhibited in the ancient poems of nations. These present to us, what is much more valuable than the history of such transactions as a rude age can afford. The history of human imagination and passion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow-creatures in the most artless ages; discovering what objects they admired, and what pleasures they pursued, before those refinements of society had taken place, which enlarge indeed, and diversify the transactions, but disguise the manners of mankind.

[2] Besides this merit, which ancient poems have with philosophical observers of human nature, they have another with persons of taste. They promise some of the highest beauties of poetical writing. Irregular and unpolished we may expect the productions of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the same time with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry. For many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favourable to the poetical spirit. That state, in which human nature shoots wild and free, though unfit for other improvements, certainly encourages the high exertions of fancy and passion.

In the infancy of societies, men live scattered and dispersed, in the midst of solitary rural scenes, where the beauties of nature are their chief entertainment. They meet with many objects, to them new and strange; their wonder and surprize are frequently excited; and by the sudden changes of fortune occurring in their unsettled state of life, their passions are raised to the utmost. Their passions have nothing to restrain them: their imagination has nothing to check it. They display themselves to one another without disguise; and converse and act in the uncovered simplicity of nature. As their feelings are strong, so their language, of itself, assumes a poetical turn. Prone to exaggerate, they describe every thing in the strongest colours; which of course renders their speech picturesque and figurative. Figurative language owes its rise chiefly to two causes; to the want of proper names for objects, and to the influence of imagination and passion over the form of expression. Both these causes concurr in the infancy of society. Figures are commonly considered as artificial modes of speech, devised by orators and poets, after the world had advanced to a refined state. The contrary of this is the truth. Men never have used so many figures of style, as in those rude ages, when, besides the power of a warm imagination to suggest lively images, the want of proper and precise terms for the ideas they would express, obliged them to have recourse to circumlocution, metaphor, comparison, and all those substituted forms of expression, which give a poetical air to language. An American chief, at this day, harangues at the head of his tribe, in a more bold metaphorical style, than a modern European would adventure to use in an Epic poem.

[3] In the progress of society, the genius and manners of men undergo a change more favourable to accuracy than to sprightliness and sublimity. As the world advances, the understanding gains ground upon the imagination; the understanding is more exercised; the imagination, less. Fewer objects occur that are new or surprizing. Men apply themselves to trace the causes of things; they correct and refine one another; they subdue or disguise their passions; they form their exterior manners upon one uniform standard of politeness and civility. Human nature is pruned according to method and rule. Language advances from sterility to copiousness, and at the same time, from fervour and enthusiasm, to correctness and precision. Style becomes more chaste; but less animated. The progress of the world in this respect resembles the progress of age in man. The powers of imagination are most vigorous and predominant in youth; those of the understanding ripen more slowly, and often attain not their maturity, till the imagination begin to flag. Hence, poetry, which is the child of imagination, is frequently most glowing and animated in the first ages of society. As the ideas of our youth are remembered with a peculiar pleasure on account of their liveliness and vivacity; so the most ancient poems have often proved the greatest favourites of nations.

Poetry has been said to be more ancient than prose: and however paradoxical such an assertion may seem, yet, in a qualified sense, it is true. Men certainly never conversed with one another in regular numbers; but even their ordinary language would in ancient times, for the reasons before assigned, approach to a poetical style; and the first compositions transmitted to posterity, beyond doubt, were, in a literal sense, poems; that is, compositions in which imagination had the chief hand, formed into some kind of numbers, and pronounced with a musical modulation or tone. Musick or song has been found coæval with society among the most barbarous nations. The only subjects which could prompt men, in their first rude state, to utter their thoughts in compositions of any length, were such as naturally assumed the tone of poetry; praises of their gods, or of their ancestors; commemorations of their own warlike exploits; or lamentations over their misfortunes. And before writing was invented, no other compositions, except songs or poems, could take such hold of the imagination and [4] memory, as to be preserved by oral tradition, and handed down from one race to another.

Hence we may expect to find poems among the antiquities of all nations. It is probable too, that an extensive search would discover a certain degree of resemblance among all the most ancient poetical productions, from whatever country they have proceeded. In a similar state of manners, similar objects and passions operating upon the imaginations of men, will stamp their productions with the same general character. Some diversity will, no doubt, be occasioned by climate and genius. But mankind never bear such resembling features, as they do in the beginnings of society. Its subsequent revolutions give rise to the principal distinctions among nations; and divert, into channels widely separated, that current of human genius and manners, which descends originally from one spring. What we have been long accustomed to call the oriental vein of poetry, because some of the earliest poetical productions have come to us from the East, is probably no more oriental than occidental; it is characteristical of an age rather than a country; and belongs, in some measure, to all nations at a certain period. Of this the works of Ossian seem to furnish a remarkable proof.

 

 

 

 

Erstdruck und Druckvorlage

A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal.
London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt 1763, S. 1-4.

URL: http://digital.nls.uk/early-gaelic-book-collections/archive/78747819
URL: https://archive.org/details/criticaldisserta00blai
URL: https://books.google.fr/books/about/A_critical_dissertation_on_the_poems_of.html?id=8Ckcn7V3Lp8C&

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).

 

 

 

Literatur: Blair

Battenfeld, Katja: Göttliches Empfinden. Sanfte Melancholie in der englischen und deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung. Berlin u. Boston 2013.

Connell, Philip: British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England. In: Historical Journal 49,1 (2006), S. 161-192.

Domsch, Sebastian: The Emergence of Literary Criticism in 18th-Century Britain. Discourse between Attacks and Authority. Berlin u. Boston 2014 (= Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series, 47).

Folkenflik, Robert: Folklore, Antiquarianism, Scholarship and High Literary Culture. In: The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660-1780. Hrsg. von John Richetti. Cambridge 2005, S. 602-621.

Krummacher, Hans-Henrik: Pindar – Horaz – Ossian. Zur Entwicklung von Herders Lyrikanschauung. In: Ders., Lyra. Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Lyrik vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin u.a. 2013, S. 125-179.

Macpherson, James: The Poems of Ossian and related works. Edited by Howard Gaskill with an introduction by Fiona Stafford. 4. Aufl. Edinburgh 2003.

McDowell, Paula: The Invention of the Oral. Print Commerce and Fugitive. Chicago u. London 2017.

Michler, Werner: Kulturen der Gattung. Poetik im Kontext, 1750 – 1950. Göttingen 2015.

Pott, Sandra: Internationale, nationale und transnationale Poetik: Hugh Blair auf dem Kontinent und einige Anmerkungen über den Transfer poetologischen Wissens seit 1790. In: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 56 (2006), S. 99-114.

Regan, John: Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790. London 2018.

 

 

Literatur: Ossian-Rezeption

Benne, Christian: Ossian: The Book History of an Anti-Book. In: Variants. The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 7 (2008), S. 179-201.

Cuillé, Tili B.: From myth to religion in Ossian's France. In: The Super-Enlightenment. Daring to know too much. Hrsg. von Dan Edelstein. Oxford 2010, S. 243-257.

Dawson, Deidre: Fingal Meets Vercingetorix: Ossianism, Celtomania, and the Transformation of French National Identity in Post-Revolutionary France. In: The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture. Hrsg. von Ralph McLean u.a. Lewisburg, PA 2017, S. 209-230.

Duncan, Ian: Spawn of Ossian. In: Global Romanticism. Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820. Hrsg. von Evan Gottlieb. Lewisburg, PA 2015, S. 3-18.

Gaskill, Howard (Hrsg.): The Reception of Ossian in Europe. London u.a. 2004 (= The Athlone Critical Traditions Series: The Reception of British Authors in Europe, 5).

Gaskill, Howard (Hrsg.): Versions of Ossian. Receptions, Responses, Translations [Special Issue]. In: Translation & Literature 22.3 (2013), S. 293-435.

Gidal, Eric: Ossianic Unconformities. Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age Charlottesville, VA 2015.

Lamport, Francis: Ossian and Ossianism in Britain and Germany. A Review Article. In: Modern Language Review 100 (2005), S. 740-746.

Moore, Dafydd (Hrsg.): Ossian and Ossianism. 4 Bde. London u.a. 2004 (= Subcultures and Subversions 1750 – 1850).
Bd. 1: Beginnings.
Bd. 2: The Poems of Ossian.
Bd. 3: Critical Writings.
Bd. 4: The Creative Response.


Ossian und die Kunst um 1800. Hamburger Kunsthalle, 9. Mai bis 23. Juni 1974 [Ausstellungskatalog]. München 1974.

Porter, James: Beyond Fingal's Cave. Ossian in the Musical Imagination. Rochester, NY 2019.

Schellenberg, Renata: The Impact of Ossian: Johann Gottfried Herder's Literary Legacy. In: The Voice of the People. Writing the European Folk Revival (1760-1914). Hrsg. von Matthew Campbell u.a. London 2012, S. 9-20.

Schmidt, Wolf G.: 'Homer des Nordens' und 'Mutter der Romantik'. James Macphersons Ossian und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur.
4 Bde. Berlin u.a. 2003/04.
Bd. 1: James Macphersons Ossian, zeitgenössische Diskurse und die Frühphase der deutschen Rezeption. 2003.
Bd. 2: Die Haupt- und Spätphase der deutschen Rezeption. Bibliographie internationaler Quellentexte und Forschungsliteratur. 2003.
Bd. 3: Kommentierte Neuausgabe deutscher Übersetzungen der Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1766), der Poems of Ossian (1782) sowie der Vorreden und Abhandlungen von Hugh Blair und James Macpherson. 2003.
Bd. 4: Kommentierte Neuausgabe wichtiger Texte zur deutschen Rezeption. Hrsg. von Howard Gaskill und Wolf G. Schmidt. 2004.


Schmidt, Wolf G.: Des "heiligen" Ossian "geweihtes Andenken": Kulturpoetische Refiguration als Movens der Moderne. In: Kulturelle Leitfiguren – Figurationen und Refigurationen. Hrsg. von Bernd Engler u.a. Berlin 2007 (= Schriften zur Literaturwissenschaft, 30), S. 133-147.

Stafford, Fiona / Gaskill, Howard (Hrsg.): From Gaelic to Romantic. Ossianic Translations. Amsterdam u.a. 1998.

Waltz, Sarah C. (Hrsg.): German Settings of Ossianic Texts, 1770 1815. Middleton, Wisconsin 2016.

 

 

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer