Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

that an early death is part of a romantic destiny. So, how can we define romanticism? The definition is difficult, precisely because we all know what it is. If I say “neo-romantic,” you know precisely what I mean, the same as if I talked about the flavor of coffee or wine; you know exactly what I am talking about, even if you couldn’t define it. It would be impossible to do so without employing a metaphor.
    I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of our own lives. There is a very important work of historical philosophy,
TheDecline of the West
, by the Prussian philosopherSpengler, and in this book, which he wrote during the tragic years of the First World War, Spengler names the great romantic poets of Europe. 1 And on that list, which includes Hölderlin,Goethe, Hugo, Byron, Wordsworth, is James Macpherson, an almost forgotten poet, and he heads the list. Probably some of you are hearing his name for the first time. But the entire romantic movement is inconceivable, unthinkable, without James Macpherson. Macpherson’s destiny is very curious, the destiny of a man who has been deliberately deleted for the greater glory of his homeland, Scotland.
    Macpherson was born in the Highlands of Scotland in 1736 and died in 1796. Now, the official date of the start of the romantic movement in England is 1798, that is, two years after Macpherson’s death. And in France, the official date would be 1830, the year of the
bataille de Harnani
, the year of the loud polemic between the partisans of the play
Hernani
, by Hugo, and its detractors. So, romanticism begins in Scotland and reaches England later—where it had been foreshadowed, but only foreshadowed, by the poet [Thomas]Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” admirably translated into Spanish by the ArgentineMiralla. 2 Then it reaches Germany through the work ofHerder, and spreads throughout all of Europe, reaching Spain fairly late. 3 We could almost say that Spain, a country that figures so strongly in the imagination of the romantic poets of other countries, produced only one poet who was essentially romantic, the others being merely orators in writing. The one I am referring to is, of course,Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, disciple of the great German-Jewish poet, Heine. 4 And not a disciple of all of Heine’s work, but rather of the beginning, of
Lyrisches Intermezzo
.
    But let us return to Macpherson. Macpherson’s father was a farmer; he was of humble origins, and his family, it seems, was not of Celtic but rather of English descent. (The English, even now, in Scotland, are scornfully called “the Saxons.” This word is common in the spoken language of Scotland and also of Ireland.) Macpherson was born and raised in a wild place in the north of Scotland where a Gaelic language was still spoken, that is, a Celtic language, similar of course to Welsh, Irish, and the Breton language carried to Brittany, or
Bretagne
—formerly called Armorica—by the British who took refuge there during the Saxon invasions in the fifth century. That is why people say Great Britain, to distinguish it from small Britain, or Brittany, in France. And in France they call that region of the country where the Breton language is spoken
Bretagne
; the language was thought to be like a patois for a long time, only because the French did not understand either language, so they assumed they were similar, which is part of a deep ideology.
    Now, Macpherson had only an oral knowledge of Gaelic. He could not read Gaelic manuscripts, which used a different alphabet. We can imagine an educated person from Corrientes, that is, a man with an oral knowledge of Guaraní, who cannot explain to us the language’s grammatical rules. 5 Macpherson studied at the primary school in his town, then at the University of Edinburgh. Many times he had heard the bards singing. I don’t know if I already talked about them. You know that Scotland was divided—and in a way it still is—into clans. This has been lamentable throughout Scotland’s history, because the Scots have fought not only against the English and the Danes but have waged war among themselves. So, someone who has visited Scotland, as I have, is drawn to the sight of small castles atop the long, rather than high, hills of Scotland. These ruins