Ossian Collection > Scottish eccentrics

MACPHERSON 235
was not translated until 1924 and has never been properly
annotated yet; and about a third of the poems printed here
have never been previously annotated at all. Though such
a state of affairs may be considered an extenuation for the
pronouncement of such opinions as are quoted above, it
still remains in itself a gross reflection upon Scottish
scholarship and the methods of Scottish historians. It is
very little to their credit that so much interesting and
important material has for so long been permitted to go
unworked and neglected. To refer again to the remarks
of Professor Hume Brown, 'The dominating idea in the
mind of the average Highlander . . .'It would be interest-
ing to know where Professor Hume Brown obtained the
insight into the mind of the average middle-eighteenth-
century Highlander that would qualify him to make this
sweeping assertion. It cannot have been from a first or
even a second-hand source; and it would not be going far
wrong to say that this statement, like others of the same
kind, owes its conscious or unconscious genesis to what
would now be described as the influence of anti- Gaelic
propaganda. In its unenlightened aspect it was repre-
sented by the dread of English mothers that the Prince's
followers would devour their children alive."
It was against that background of ignorance and pre-
judice that the Ossian controversy ran its furious course;
and it is against a very similar background of ignorance
and prejudice to-day that the questions of a Scottish
Renaissance, the re-writing of Scottish History, and the
literary potentialities of Scots and Scottish Gaelic are
being posed — alike by those who are opposed to them
and by almost all of those who are advocating them. I
have used the word barbarism, and my attitude, and the
tissue of misconceptions in which these issues are involved
to-day on all sides are ably described in a recent editorial
in The Modern Scot. "The modern world, the world
of the modern history of the text-books, is a post-Re-
naissance world, and it is a matter of profound and far-
reaching significance that every thriving national culture