「ロマン主義の諸相」

大石和欣

第３回 感受性 ②
1. The Cult of Ossian
James Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,
and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760)
The “Homer of the North”
 Bleak Scottish landscape and weather
 Mysterious events behind tragic love affairs and murders Elegiac mood The great warriors and bards of the past
 The supernatural visitations of the past heroes The absence of gods
Poetic prose
Narrow is thy dwelling now; dark the place of thine abode. With three steps I compass
thy grave, O thou who wast so great before! Four stones, with their heads of moss, arethe only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass which whistles in thewind, mark to the hunter:s eye the grave of the mighty morar. Morar! Thou art low
indeed. Thou hast no mother to mourn thee; no maid with tears of love. Dead is she thatbrought thee forth. Fallen is the daughter of Morglan.
A combination of the ancient world of the Gaels with the moods of sensibility and the rhythmsof the Old Testament
Robert Lowth‟s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753)
on the structure of Hebrew verse in the Old Testament
2. Doubting the authenticity
Samuel Johnson: the poem is „as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with‟William Wordsworth: „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 volume imposed
upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew thatthe imagery was spurious.‟
3. Enthusiastic Responses(Germany)
Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock: Ossian is virtually German.
Celts = Gaels = Germans = Bards
Bürger translated several sections of Ossian.
Goethe: „The Songs of Selma‟ in Werther –Representing hopeless infatuation and self-regarding melancholyFriedrich Hölderlin (1787)
Something new! A beautiful, beautiful heart-stirring novelty! I have Ossian, the bard
like no one else, Homer‟s great rival I have actually in my hands. You must read him,friend – then your valleys will become Corna‟s valleys, your Engelberg a mountain ofMorven. Then so sweet and melancholy a feeling will slowly come over you.
(England)William Blake
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lord Byron

(France)
Jean-François Le Sueur, Ossia, ou Les Bardes (1804) Opera
Alphonse de Lamartine:
Above all, Ossian, that poet of vagueness, that mist of imagination, that inarticulatelamentation of the northern seas, that foam of the strand, that moaning of the shades,that rolling of the clouds around the stormy pines of Scotland, that northern Dante, asmajestic, as supernatural, as the Dante of Florence, more sensitive [sensible] than he,and who often wrests from his phantoms cries more human and more heart-rending
than those of Homer‟s heroes.
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, “Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes” (1801)
François Pascal Simon Gérard, "Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to theStrains of a Harp" (1801)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, "Ossian's Dream" (1813)?? Ossian in the U.S.A.
4. Some More Backgrounds [Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986)]
宗教
The Latitudinarians （広教会派）
Dissenters
Evangelical RevivalMethodism
哲学
Earl Shaftesbury
innate human virtue
Hutcheson
benevolence
Humeanti-rationalism, sceptic„Morality . . . is more properly felt than judged of . . . To have a sense of virtue
is nothing but to feel satisfaction of a particular kind.‟
Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
美学 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime andBeautiful (1757, revised and enlarged 1759)
The beautiful / the Sublime

5. Romanticism as a reaction against Sensibility
 Romanticism was an episode within the larger movement of Sensibility. ??
Coleridge: „Romanticism is not Benevolence. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling
misfortunes, it frequently prevents it and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness.‟ (1796)
Radical views on society and politics> the American Revolution and the French Revolution„Bildung‟ = inner cultivation (Shaftesbury and Schiller)
Feeling and reason are to be fused into one faculty.