JAMES THOMSON
One of the most successful British poets of all time—in Pope’s terms of unit sales and vast editions—is James Thomson, the man who momentarily reinvented pastoral and is now read primarily by scholars who prefer dust to living dirt and by students puzzled by the reputed tedium of the eighteenth century. In English poetry nothing today is more enigmatic than Thomson’s huge and long success. Contemporary neglect of Spenser and Milton does not diminish them; the neglect of Thomson is eloquent.
Once he was the poetic equivalent of the Gideon Bible; his poems were to be found in every inn and cottage in the land. The verse was reassuring and instructive but never taxing.
What, what is virtue but repose of mind?
A pure ethereal calm that knows no storm,
Above the reach of wild ambition’s wind,
Above those passions that this world deform,
And torture man, a proud malignant worm!
His one immortal poem is “Rule Britannia,” though few remember to attribute it to him. He inspired respect from men as different as Doctor Johnson and William Wordsworth. His poetic antecedents—Milton above all—and his adoption of the fashionable scientific and philosophical thought of his time confine him to his age. Self-conscious modernity dates. Miltonic blank verse does not liberate but muffles his peculiar genius. His novelty is his subject matter: literal seasons, actual countryside, seen through wholly eighteenth-century eyes. His contemporaries did not sense this disparity between style and matter. Oliver Goldsmith reflects on these lines:
O vale of bliss! O softly swelling hills!
On which the power of contemplation lies,
And joys to see the wonder of his toil.
“We cannot conceive a more beautiful image than that of the Genius of Agriculture, distinguished by the implements of his art, imbrowned with labour, glowing with health, crowned with a garland of foliage, flowers, and fruit, lying stretched at his ease on the brow of a gently swelling hill, and contemplating with pleasure the happy effects of his own industry.” Donald Davie suggests that Oliver Goldsmith was adding very little to Thomson’s actual intention: it was natural for his readers to tease out—to unpack—meaning in this way, translating out of metaphoric code. Modern readers hardly recognize a happy peasant at all.
Thomson was born at Ednam, in the Borders, in 1700, the year of Dryden’s death, and reared in Southdean, a neighboring parish to which his father, a minister, was transferred. Educated at Jedburgh and at Edinburgh University, he studied divinity. He published poems in Edinburgh journals, and when his prose was deemed “too ornate” for the pulpit by his instructors, he left Edinburgh for London to become a writer. He was tutor to the son of the Earl of Haddington and was introduced into Pope’s circle. In 1726 he published a poem partly completed before he reached the capital. It was Winter, first of The Seasons, which were published together in 1730 and in various updated and revised forms between then and his death in 1748. The book was part of a program he enunciated in 1726: poetry should free itself from social satire. He abandoned heroic couplets, accepted what he took to be Milton’s disciplines, and looked for subject matter beyond the city gates.
Before 1730 he published shorter poems and Sophonisba, an ill-fated tragedy. He traveled to the Continent and received a sinecure on his return. In 1735 he published the poem Liberty, and thereafter composed plays and collected a further sinecure and a pension from the Prince of Wales. A bachelor, he settled comfortably in Richmond. In 1745 he wrote his most successful play, Tancred and Sigismunda. Three years later he composed The Castle of Indolence. He died of a fever and was memorialized in William Collins’s superb ode, the best thing Thomson ever occasioned:
In yonder grove a Druid lies,
Where slowly winds the stealing wave!
The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise
To deck its poet’s sylvan grave!
Doctor Johnson describes Thomson as of “gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance.” He admired the work and gave Thomson high marks for his original “mode of thinking, and of expressing his thoughts.” “His blank verse is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet... His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without imitation. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius.” What is more, he possesses “a mind that at once comprehends the vast and attends to the minute.”
Proximity to the subject and an enthusiasm for the novelty of Thomson’s subject matter in an age poor in novelty lead Johnson to this—what must seem to us—misvaluation. Thomson’s language in The Seasons owes debts to Milton in almost every line. The Castle of Indolence is indebted to Milton and Spenser for language and manner. His originality of form consists of reviving the georgic—which had been done by several of his immediate predecessors. He includes new science and new attitudes not original to him. His poetry reflects fashionable thought and springs from the discursive experimental activity of his time. He is skillful in handling blank verse, there are notable passages, but even Johnson had to admit, “The great defect of The Seasons is want of method.” Formal failure is masked by verbal exuberance. It’s hard at times to see through the adjectival undergrowth to a subject. Thomson continually revised his verse, both to perfect it and to keep it abreast of new scientific findings. To the original 4,000 lines Thomson added roughly 1,400 in successive revisions.
The Seasons, like Gower’s Confessio Amantis, is encyclopedic, a compendium of the wisdom, knowledge and bien pensant prejudice of the age, including zoological, botanical, meteorological and geological information, political and moral reflection, sentimental tales. It reflects a dissatisfaction with decorous and stylized poetry, but reacts without the radical passion of Smart, Blake or Wordsworth. Thomson plays acceptable music in a different key, with different themes, not new music. Milton was responsible for the change of key. Thomson did not adopt the dynamics of Milton’s language: he borrowed from the surface. He vulgarized Milton as he vulgarized new science. It suited his ends to blend the discoveries of Newton with the optimistic deism of Lord Shaftesbury.
Coleridge disliked the style but saluted the poet. “The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature: the other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction, however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been a born poet.” Thomson’s originality was to present a version of nature itself as subject. Wordsworth owes him a verbal and thematic debt. He can be convincing in the detail of his writing. In Winter the movement of birds foretells a storm:
Retiring from the downs, where all day long
They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train
Of clamorous rooks thick-urge their weary flight,
And seek the closing shelter of the grove.
Assiduous in his bower, the wailing owl
Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high
Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land.
Loud shrieks the soaring hern; and with wild wing
The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky clouds.
There is also a delicious luxury in some of his Summer effusions:
Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves;
To where the lemon and the piercing lime,
With the deep orange glowing through the green,
Their lighter glories blend. Lay me reclined
Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes
Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit.
But, by ascending from sensual observation to generalization, he forfeits our attention. In his optimism there is an aloofness that grates. Unlike Swift, he is not eager to rouse others—the humble, for example—to a sense of their potential. In Summer he reflects: “While thus laborious crowds / Ply the rough oar, Philosophy directs / The ruling helm.” Here is a poet Hobbes has left unmarked. He celebrates commerce, enterprise, ambition, in ways that would have been impossible half a century later. His is the Whig epic. He prefigures Walter Bagehot.
Thomson’s verse lives in its descriptions and in odd lines. He is a poet of fragments. His nature appears fragmentary because he celebrates a first cause through it, not—as Wordsworth does—a force latent within it. He lacks Wordsworth’s engagement. His is an enthusiasm of the various senses, but the whole man is withheld. Wordsworth’s imagination is continuous with the experienced world, Thomson’s tangential to it.
He tries to find poetic epithets for scientific terms and this mars the verse; and obsolete science disrupts certain passages. Even his most particular definitions answer no necessary poetic purpose. He screws his language up by heightened diction and elaborates syntax to produce the effect of poetry, but the poetic occasion remains at best nebulous. Gilbert White’s prose portrays a clearer nature than Thomson’s verse does. White addresses a subject, Thomson an audience. His most useful contribution—to William Cowper, George Crabbe and Wordsworth among others—was to show how landscape might be used for emotional projection, to reveal an observer’s mind as much as the thing observed.
In The Castle of Indolence he adopted Spenserian form and diction and wrote what some regard as his finest poem. Formally it is more coherent than The Seasons. The old wizard Indolence speaks persuasively. The poem is a smoothly satirical record of temptation overcome, with knights and witty transformations. Each sense is tempted in turn. Thomson pillories various human types and espouses various causes. There are memorable figures—for example, “A little, round, fat, oily man of God” with “a roguish twinkle in his eye,” who is a bit of a lecher and might be at home in a poem by Crabbe. We meet members of Thomson’s circle, which, in his later years, was distinguished chiefly for the presence of the occasionally incomparable poet William Collins. The poem’s Spenserian form imposes on Thomson tautologies, ill-considered similes and solecisms, but they do not destroy altogether the effect. In the allegory, Art and Industry in knightly form destroy the castle and its wizard lord. As in The Seasons, here is the verse of Whiggery, which, set beside Goldsmith’s or Johnson’s, remains rooted in period, class and place. No wonder it sold. It is the sort of verse that was modern in its time.