101 (#127) ############################################
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips.
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v10
Pantomime,
ballad-opera, burlesque and farce often oppose its progress. The
current of tragedy frequently flows from classical or Elizabethan
sources. The breath of the restoration spirit still, at times, ripples
the placid waters of formal comedy. Yet, moralised tragedy and
moralised comedy contribute alike to the stream of sentimental
drama. Even Lillo and Moore, who sturdily stemmed the tide
of conventional tragedy, were submerged in the waves of senti-
ment, and The Jealous Wife and The Clandestine Marriage
did not prevent the course of sentimental comedy from run-
ning smooth in Kelly's False Delicacy and Cumberland's West
Indian. Nevertheless, the undercurrent of reaction was gathering
strength. To the satirical attacks of burlesque upon sentimental
drama, Fielding had added his description in Tom Jones' of that
'very grave and solemn entertainment, without any low wit,
or humour, or jests,' in which there was not "anything which
could provoke a laugh. ' Goldsmith, who dared to challenge the
authority of the epithet 'low' with which critics were wont to
stigmatise comedy which was not 'genteel,' and who learned the
power of that 'single monosyllable' from the excision of his own
bailiffs' scene in The Good-Natur'd Man, was not to be daunted
in his attack upon this species of bastard tragedy' called senti-
mental drama. In his Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison
between Laughing and Sentimental Comedys, he put the pertinent
query : ‘Which deserves the preference,—the weeping sentimental
comedy so much in fashion at present, or the laughing, and even
low comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh
and Cibber? ' The answer was given in the comedies of Goldsmith
and of Sheridan,
1 Description of the puppet-show, The Provoked Husband, bk xii, chap. v.
? The Present State of Polite Learning, ed. 1759, p. 154.
3 The Westminster Magazine, December 1772.
## p. 93 (#119) #############################################
CHAPTER V
THOMSON AND NATURAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY
>
In a general estimate of the poetry of the earlier half of the
eighteenth century, Thomson's work, from the exceptional character
of its subject, may, perhaps, be apt to receive undue prominence.
It called attention to a field of verse which his contemporaries,
absorbed in the study of man, in ethical reflection and moral satire,
had ceased to cultivate; it looked back with admiration to models
which were almost forgotten, and, through its influence on the
poetry of Collins and Gray, it lent impulse to the progress which
was to culminate in the romantic movement. On the other hand,
Thomson was not the champion of an opposition or the apostle of
a new order, contending against prejudices and destroying barriers.
In essential qualities of thought, he was at one with the taste of
bis day; and, if his talent was most happily exercised in the obser-
vation and delineation of nature, his point of view was the very
antithesis of that emotional treatment of the subject which marked
the ultimate revolt against the limitations of eighteenth century
convention.
James Thomson was born at Ednam in Roxburghshire, where
his father was parish minister, in September 1700. In the following
year, his father obtained the cure of Southdean, at the head of the
Jed valley, and here Thomson spent his boyhood. For some time,
he went to school in the abbey church of Jedburgh, and, in 1715,
he entered Edinburgh university, intending, as it seems, to become
a presbyterian minister. His early surroundings could hardly fail
to disclose to him the natural charms of a district which, seventy
years later, kindled the romantic imagination of Scott; and they
duly received Thomson's tribute when he wrote
The Tweed (pure Parent-stream,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed,
With, silvan Jed, thy tributary brook).
In these early experiments, which show little promise, he was
· The Seasons, Autumn, 11. 913—15.
## p. 94 (#120) #############################################
94 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
2
his verse.
encouraged by a neighbour, Robert Riccaltoun, the author of a
poem called Winter. At Edinburgh, Thomson's talents developed,
and, after coming to London in 1725, he had his own Winter
ready for publication in March 1726. About this time, he gave
up all intention of a clerical career, and devoted himself to poetry,
earning a stipend as tutor in various noble families. His friend
David Mallet was tutor in the household of the duke of Montrose;
and it was, probably, through him that Thomson obtained intro-
ductions which brought him into the society of possible patrons of
He spared no pains to make himself agreeable to the
kindly disposed Aaron Hill; and the prose dedications of the first
three Seasons, which were fortunately cancelled in later editions
in favour of lines inserted in the poem, are remarkable examples
of the effusiveness of bad taste. Winter soon reached a second
edition. Sir Spencer Compton, to whom it was inscribed, showed a
tardy gratitude for the compliment; but George Bubb Dodington,
the patron of Summer (1727), proved a more useful friend.
Thomson visited Dodington's seat Eastbury park, near Blandford ;
and the acquaintance thus formed probably led to his friendship
with George Lyttelton and to his adhesion to the political party
which supported the prince of Wales. Britannia (1729) eulogised
the prince and condemned Walpole's policy. In the printed
copies, this monologue is said to have been written in 1727. In
that year, Thomson dedicated his Poem sacred to the Memory of
Sir Isaac Newton to Walpole himself. The sincerity of the
patriotism which was laboriously expressed in Liberty cannot be
doubted; but the patronage of Walpole, had it rewarded Thomson's
advances, might have curbed his enthusiasm for an aggressive
policy.
Meanwhile, Spring, inscribed to Frances countess of Hertford,
appeared in 1728. Autumn, dedicated to Arthur Onslow, speaker
of the House of Commons, completed the collected edition, under
the title of The Seasons, in 1730. Thomson began his career as a
dramatist with Sophonisba (1729). Of his plays, more will be said
later: they have a special historical interest, in that, for the most
part, their choice of subject and outspoken treatment were directed
against the court party on behalf of the prince. In 1730, he went
abroad as travelling tutor to a son of Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-
general and, afterwards, lord chancellor. He complained that the
muse did not cross the channel with him, and his ambitious poem
Liberty (1734–6), in which there are some touches due to his
foreign tour, confirms the accuracy of his judgment. Thrown out
## p. 95 (#121) #############################################
Thomson's Life and Literary Work
95
of employment by the death of his pupil in 1733, he received from
Talbot the sinecure secretaryship of briefs in chancery. He could
afford, on the failure of Liberty, to cancel generously his bargain with
the publisher, and, in 1736, to retire to a small house at Richmond,
where he was able to enjoy the society of Pope and other friends.
In these circumstances, he made a thorough revision of The Seasons,
the fruits of which are seen in the transformed text of 1744. A
copy of the 1738 edition in the British museum proves that he
sought and took the advice of a friend whose poetical skill was
considerable ; but whether this helper, as has been assumed, was
Pope or another, is a question upon which experts in handwriting
differ. The new text, while omitting a certain amount which may
be regretted, bears testimony to a judicious pruning of florid
diction; and passages hitherto enervated by excess of colour
gained in vigour what they lost in diffuseness. The poem, however, ,
was lengthened by the insertion of new matter, much of which
increased its general value. One personal feature of these additions
is the introduction of references to Amanda, the subject, also, of
the graceful lyric 'Unless with my Amanda blest. ' Too much may
be made of attachments expressed in verse; but there is no
doubt of Thomson's genuine affection for Elizabeth Young, a
sister-in-law of his friend Robertson, and this fact may be set
against one side of the charge of sensuality imputed to him by
Johnson, probably on the untrustworthy information of Savage.
The Castle of Indolence, published in May 1748, after a long period
of elaborate revision, may stand as the personal confession of a poet
whose industry was not proof against his love of ease and luxury.
Thomson's later days were not without reverses of fortune. The
story of his arrest for debt and delivery from the spunging-house by
Quin the actor may be a legend; but he lost his sinecure after
Talbot's death in 1737, through negligence (so it is said) in applying
for its renewal. Through the instrumentality of Lyttelton, who
was one of the lords of the treasury, he obtained the surveyorship-
general of the Leeward islands, a sinecure well suited to a poet
who had often surveyed the phenomena of nature from the pole
to the tropics in his easy chair. A pension from the prince of
Wales, who had received the dedication of Liberty and about 1737
heard from Thomson that his affairs were “in a more poetical
posture than formerly,' was stopped when Lyttelton fell into dis-
grace with the prince. This was not long before Thomson's death.
One evening in the summer of 1748, after a journey by boat from
Hammersmith to Richmond, he was attacked by a chill. A short
## p. 96 (#122) #############################################
96
Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
recovery was followed by a relapse, and he died on 27 August. His
tragedy Coriolanus was produced during the next year: the story
of the emotion shown by Quin in the delivery of the prologue is a
testimony to the affection which Thomson inspired in his friends.
The body of Thomson's poetry, excluding the dramas, is not
large, and, historically, The Seasons is his most important poem.
Its form of The Seasons was suggested by the example of Vergil's
Georgics: Thomson expressly reminds his readers of the similarity
of his themes to those of Vergil', of whom he imitated more than
one famous passage? In this respect, he had a conspicuous fore-
runner in John Philips, author of Cyder, and it is impossible to
overlook the debt which Thomson owed to the older writer.
Philips was an imitator of Milton's poetic manner, and it may
have been through Philips's poetry that Thomson first felt that
Miltonic influence which moulded his style and the characteristic
shape of his phrases. Johnson, it is true, denied the influence of
Milton upon Thomson :
As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode of
thinking, and of expressing his thoughts, is original. His blank verse is no
more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the rhymes of Prior
are the rhymes of Cowley. His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own
growth, without transcription, without imitation 3.
This criticism can be justified only to a limited extent. Thomson's
characteristic modes of thought were too much those of his age
to bear a very close resemblance to those of Milton. His choice of
blank verse, while sanctioned by Milton's authority, was, on the
other hand, natural to a poet whose language was too voluble and
ornate to be easily confined within the couplet. Its regular flow
and even beat imply a strictly limited command of those musical
resources of which Milton was master. Thomson's prosody is
adequate to the contents of his verse; but it would be difficult to
cite a passage of The Seasons in which the sound becomes a direct
echo of the sense. Yet, if we allow these differences and admit a
limitation of thought and a florid expansiveness of language which
afford a strong contrast to Milton's pregnancy of thought and
phrase, there cannot be any question as to the attraction which
Milton exercised upon the method of natural description and
upon the diction of The Seasons.
In the second of these relations, the likeness is at once evident.
Such passages as the contrast in Winter between the studious
a
1
E. g. Summer, 11. 1151 seq.
Spring, 11. 55–8: cf. 11. 446, 447.
3 Johnson, Life of Thomson.
## p. 97 (#123) #############################################
Thomson's Interest in Nature
97
retirement of the scholar and the diversions of the village and the
town are reminiscent in phrase, as in subject, of L'Allegro and
N Penseroso? The love of inversion which provoked Thomson's
boldest experiments in style, the constant and frequently adverbial
use of epithets derived from Latin sources, are Miltonic character-
istics. That rich literary imagery in which Milton excelled
quickened Thomson to bring into contrast with the more homely
scenes of his poem the unfamiliar scenery of the tropics, and to
enrich his verse with the ornament of carefully chosen proper
names. Lines such as these,
All that from the tract
Of woody mountains stretch'd throʻ gorgeous Ind
Fall on Cormandel's coast, or Malabar;
From Menam's orient stream, that nightly shines
With insect-lamps, to where Aurora sheds
On Indus' smiling banks the rosy shower,
are one instance out of many in which Thomson echoed harmonies
which Milton had awakened. To reproduce the full charm, the
magic melody of the original, was impossible for a poet who had no
great reserve of imagination on which to draw; but the imitation
is obvious and its effect is, to some extent, a success.
The poetry of Thomson's day had ceased to hold direct com-
munion with nature. Occasional contact, however, could not be
avoided. Dyer's Grongar Hill (1727) showed a spontaneous atti-
tude to nature which was too exceptional to capture the public
taste at once : the age preferred the conventional and generalised
descriptions in which poets not preoccupied with nature were
accustomed to indulge_descriptions on which the example of
Milton, who regarded nature through the medium of literary re-
miniscence, had a far-reaching effect. It is Thomson’s peculiarity
that the description of natural phenomena, in an age which over-
looked their artistic value, was his chief concern. His observation
was keen and intelligent. His eye, in the phrase of Wordsworth,
was 'steadily fixed upon his object'; his feelings 'urged him to
work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination? ' The spec-
tacles of books enlarged his range of vision ; but his commerce
2
with the more familiar aspects of nature was direct and unim-
peded. This process marks a point of departure from the fashion
set by the commanding genius of Milton, and a return to earlier
methods. But, for the expression of his genuine, though limited
a
1 Winter, ll. 424 seq.
2 Wordsworth, Essay, supplementary to the preface to Lyrical Ballads.
E. L. X. CH, V.
7
## p. 98 (#124) #############################################
98 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of his age.
imagination, he was bound by the necessities of a diction which
had become formal and stereotyped. What he saw with his own
eyes, he conventionalised in terms which were the common property
No one, however, since Milton had given so much
attention to the varied aspects of nature, and, consequently, Thom-
son's description of the stock elements of conventional scenery, of
hill and dale, and wood and lawn,
And verdant field, and darkening heath between,
And villages embosom’d soft in trees,
And spiry towns by surging columns mark'd
Of houshold smoak,
was governed by an accuracy of observation and depth of enjoy-
ment which, while perpetuating the Miltonic tradition in poetry,
distinguished Thomson from poets who, without observation and
feeling for nature, had passively accepted the superficial qualities
of that tradition.
At the same time, Thomson's obedience to the conventional
diction of poetry was in no sense reluctant. The broad view of the
general aspects of nature which such a diction reveals was essential
to his habit of mind. His observation, if accurate, shared the
tendency inherent in the art of the later seventeenth century to
group details in broad masses of colour and striking contrasts
of light and shadow. The pictorial medium through which he
approached scenery is indicated by a stanza in The Castle of
Indolence:
Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls,
Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise,
Or autumn's varied shades embrown the walls:
Now the black tempest strikes the astonish'd eyes;
Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;
The trembling sun now plays o'er ocean blue,
And now rude mountains frown amid the skies;
Whate'er Lorrain light-touch'd with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew 2.
Of such pictures, Thomson was the receptive recorder. His in-
telligence was not of that vigorous and active type which searches
in nature for a life instinct with emotions akin and responsive to
his owl. Nature, to him, is a succession of phenomena of varied
form and colour which compose a series of landscapes, as they
affect the senses with their charm. Beneath the changes of the
sky, he notes with delight the changes of colour of the earth. Over
the country-side in spring,
1 Spring, 11. 947-51.
9 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 38.
## p. 99 (#125) #############################################
Nature Pictures in The Seasons
99
6
One boundless blush, one white-empurpled shower
Of mingled blossoms,
rise the clouds, big with rain, 'a dusky wreath. . . scarce staining
ether,' gathering quickly until the massed vapour 'sits on th'
horizon round a settled gloom? ' At evening, the clouds lift; the
sunset casts its light on mountains and rivers, and tinges the mist
which rises from the soaked plain with yellow, while every blade
of grass sparkles with raindrops, and the rainbow is refracted from
the eastern sky: In summer, when night gathers over the hot
day, the glow-worm twinkles in the hedges, and the evening star
rises in the calm sky, as black vesper's pageants dissolvet. In
autumn, truthful observation notes the gathering mists through
which the sun ‘sheds, weak and blunt, his wide-refracted ray5,' the
shower of meteors in the night-time, the heavy dews of morning”,
and the ‘peculiar blue' of the midday sky. If, in winter, the rich
colours, congenial to Thomson's fancy, of 'Autumn beaming o'er
the yellow woods”, give place to more livid hues, yet there remain
the red sunset which precedes the frosty night, the 'blue film
breathed by the icy wind over pool and stream, the 'crystal pave-
ment' of the arrested water-course, the glitter of the stars, the
pallor of the dawn which reveals the 'dumb cascade' of icicles
hanging from the eaves and the arabesque of frostwork woven
over window-pane and frozen soil, the cold gleam of the icebound
brook and the 'plumy wave' of white snow on the forest trees 10.
Nor is sight the only sense which is alive to the charm of
the progress of the year in earth and sky. In the spring garden,
the violet, polyanthus, hyacinth and tulip, 'the yellow wall-flower,
stain'd with iron brown,' combine their bright colour with the
scent of the stock and jonquil, while sight and touch alike combine
in the note of
auriculas, enrich'd
With shining meal o'er all their velvet leaves 11.
Sensitive to perfume, Thomson invites Amanda to walk
Where the breeze blows from yon extended field
Of blossom'd beans 12,
or wanders in the spring morning from the fragrant garden into
country lanes, among sweet-briar hedges, or 'tastes the smell
of dairy' as he walks past a farm 13. The fisherman, when the
Spring, ll. 110, 111.
2 lbid. ll. 147-51.
3 Ibid. ll. 186 seq.
* Summer, 11. 1683 seq. O Autumn, 11. 623 seq.
6 Ibid. Il. 1019 seq.
7 Ibid. ll. 1081 seq.
8 Ibid. 1. 1130.
9 Ibid. 1. 969.
10 Winter, 11. 714 seq.
11 Spring, ll. 516 seq.
13 Ibid. 11, 499, 500.
13 Ibid. ll. 101 seq.
6
1
7-2
## p. 100 (#126) ############################################
100 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
noonday sun scatters the light clouds borne across the sky before
the west wind, may retire with a book to the shady bank where
sight is attracted by the purple violet, and the air is scented by
the 'balmy essence' of the lily of the valley, or beneath the shade
of a mountain ash where the sounding culver' builds its nest in
the cliff? . Few of Thomson's pictures are without their accom-
paniment of sound. The silence of the winter morning is broken
by the foot-fall of the shepherd on the hard crust of frozen snow? .
The song of birds in spring, which forms the subject of one of the
most attractive passages in The Seasons", intensifies, as it ceases,
the stillness of autumn, when the only sound is that of the distant
gun or of the woodman's axe in the 'sadden'd grove'' Such sounds
are used chiefly to give emphasis to quiet and solitude. His
happiest effects in this direction are summed up in a stanza of The
Castle of Indolence beginning
Join'd to the prattle of the purling rills,
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale5.
In all the scenes to which this stanza makes reference, the part
of man is incidental. The poet roams with 'eye excursive' for the
sake of the varied pleasure to be derived from his wanderings.
He has his own stock of readily awakened sentiment, susceptible
to the gloom and terror of storm, or to the coming of the Power
of Philosophic Melancholy' in autumn®; but there is no subjective
sense of revolt in his own breast to make his spirit at one with the
warring elements, no natural melancholy which colours Nature
with its own hue and translates her death into personal terms.
Similarly, man is introduced only so far as he forms a telling
feature in the landscape, just as the human element in Salvator
Rosa's pictures is subordinated to a position which gives scale to
nodding rocks and adds terror to frowning forests. The village
haymaking and sheepwashing in Summer are mild attempts at
genre pictures; the rural smell’of the harvest, the 'dusky wave'
of mown hay on the meadow, the ‘russet hay-cock' of the one, the
'pebbled shore’and 'flashing wave' of the washing-pool in the other,
meant more to Thomson than the perfunctory rustics who form part
of the scene? His one elaborate picture of the pursuits of his fellow-
men is the description of the feast after a day's hunting8; and this,
conceived in a spirit of heavy playfulness, was transferred by his
executor Lyttelton, as unworthy of The Seasons, to a place by itself
1 Spring, 11. 443 seq.
2 Winter, 11. 755—9.
3 Spring, ll. 582 seq.
• Autumn, 11. 886 seq. 8 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 4.
6 Autumn, 11. 920 seq. ? Summer, 11. 352 seq. 8 Autumn, 11. 488 seq.
## p.
101 (#127) ############################################
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips. More
characteristic is his introduction of the horseman, vainly awaited by
his wife and children, and perishing in the swamp, to heighten the
terrors of the marsh, lit by treacherous wildfire, on an autumn
night'. A parallel tragedy adds effect to the description of the
snowdrift? . The famous picture in Summer of the caravan
swallowed in the sandstorm ends with lines which, in pointing a
contrast to the scene described, are invested with an unusual
element of human interest an element which, in the scene itself,
is entirely subject to the irresistible power of nature.
In this objective attitude to nature, which, while recognising
her power, dissociates her from an active participation in the
terests and emotions of man, Thomson stands midway between
two periods. Milton, a lover of nature less for her own sake than
for the echoes of poetry and music which she aroused in him,
felt in her being the breath of an animating and sustaining
creative power. Twenty-one years after Thomson's death, Gray,
travelling in north-west Yorkshire, as he looked on Ingleborough
wrapped in clouds and stood ‘not without shuddering' in the
gloomy ravine of Gordale scar, felt the presence of a sentient life
in nature responding to his own thought and quickening his
emotions. The chief characteristic of this point of view is the
local colour which it lends to description, its attempt to register
every shade of subjective emotion by a definition of the spirit of
place which gives it its special hue. Thomson's descriptions of
individual scenes are guiltless of local colour. Most of them
were introduced into later editions of The Seasons, and, in
these, the thought of the patron or friend whose ‘hospitable genius'
presides over the landscape inspires the passage, while the details
of the landscape itself are characterised in the most general terms.
The prospect from Richmond hill is described with affection and
with a keen sense of its natural beauty4. From the hill above
Hagley park, the Welsh mountains are noted in the western
distances, and, at Stowe, the poet's eye is quick to mark the
autumnal colour of the woods. But it is precisely in such places,
with their memories of friendship and social pleasure, that
Thomson is most in harmony with the poetic taste of his day.
The landscape is merely the setting to a compliment or a tribute
1 Autumn, 11. 1061 seq.
3 Gray, Journal in the Lakes.
6 Spring, 11. 899 seq.
2 Winter, Il. 276 seq.
• Summer, 11. 1402 seq.
Autumn, 11. 953 seq.
B
## p. 102 (#128) ############################################
102 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
a
of personal regard. An enumeration of the general features of the
landscape, a ready perception of points of colour, the occasional
introduction of a place-name, are indicative of the poet's personal
enjoyment, but do not by themselves evoke the special qualities of
the prospect. And, if these passages have a certain prominence in
The Seasons, it must be owned that, as pictures of nature, they
are inferior to passages, such as that which describes the eagle
rearing its young 'on utmost Kilda's shore',' where Thomson's
imagination, although untouched by personal experience, is un-
fettered by the claims of man upon its object.
It is true that the poetry of nature, even where deeply imbued
with the spirit of place, frequently shows a tendency to vagueness
of description. Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey, or the sonnet Composed after a journey across
the Hambleton hills, are records not of the peculiar beauties of
particular spots, but of the emotions which they kindle in an
individual mind. With Thomson, the external aspect of nature
was never made sublime by intensity of spiritual feeling. We, who
have never known Lyttelton or held converse with Pitt, or had
the privilege of directing the downcast eyes of Amanda to the
dwelling of Pope or the shades where ‘the worthy Queensb'ry yet
laments his Gay,' may admire the pictures of Hagley or Stowe or
the Thames near Richmond as skilful arrangements of colour, but
cannot regard them as expressions of the permanent element in
nature. They are interesting landmarks in the history of poetic
taste; but their emotional quality, such as it is, is slight, and
typical of a state of mind which had not yet recognised in nature
the presence of a being independent of period and place. Never-
theless, in common with his generation, Thomson had his con-
ventional philosophy of nature. Just as Milton's habit of generalised
description had tinged the verse of his successors with a pale re-
flection, so his devout conception of a controlling Deity manifesting
Himself in nature had left its impression upon his imitators.
Thomson, with a reminiscence of Vergil, pays repeated tribute to
the Divine force which
pervades,
Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole 2,
and writes of it with a reverence which indicates the effect upon
his thought of the Miltonic idea of the Creator, limited by a general
agreement with the deism of his own day. The 'Source of Being'
1 Spring, ll. 750 seq.
2 Ibid. ll. 849, 850.
## p. 103 (#129) ############################################
2
Effective Digressions 103
has touched 'the great whole into perfection". ' Supreme Perfection
attracts 'life rising still on life, in higher tone? ' into Its own Being.
As we gaze on nature, we feel the present Deity 3,' and know it to
be full of a ‘mighty Breath“,' an 'inhaling spirit. ' The seasons
in their course embody this pervading energy, and 'are but the
varied God. ' The paragraphs of The Seasons which contain such
sentiments, or the hymn which is their most eloquent expression
at the end of the poem, leave us in doubt as to Thomson's actual ad-
herence to any connected system of religion or philosophy. Deism
alternates with a vague pantheism according to the feeling of the
moment; and, in one place, at any rate, there are signs of a leaning
towards Pythagorean doctrines”. Thomson himself might have
found it hard to define the religious emotion which nature excited
in him. His sincere gratitude to the Creator is at times prompted
by a sense of duty, when its terms unconsciously resemble those in
which he recognised the disposing hand of Lord Cobham at Stowe
or saw the 'pure Dorsetian downs' at Eastbury decorated by the
union of human graces in Bubb Dodington. The greater patron and
the wider area of power called for the more elaborate compliment.
Such temperate rhapsodies are, in fact, among the digressions of
The Seasons. Thomson felt the necessity of giving some relief to
description, and, in the successive revisions to which The Seasons
was subjected, the poem gained in arrangement and in variety
of surface. The most striking digressions are, undoubtedly, those
surveys of foreign scenery which provide necessary contrast to the
limited area of Thomson's own experience. The longest and best
of these, in Summers, was remodelled and transformed in the later
editions, when Thomson removed from it the eloquent and highly
coloured picture of the African city buried in the sandº-an
alteration which probably involved some self-sacrifice. We have
already noticed Lyttelton's treatment of the hunting episode in
Autumn, a digression which arises naturally out of the subject.
The most popular passages of The Seasons, which were long the
admiration of English readers and did much to gain the poem its
vogue on the continent, were those episodes which take the form
of sentimental anecdotes appropriate to the season under discussion.
Of these, three in number, two are in Summer. A description of
a thunderstorm suggests the story of Celadon and Amelia, the
1 Spring, 1, 560.
? The Castle of Indolence, canto 11, st. 48.
3 Spring, 1. 897.
• Ibid. l. 846.
• Summer, 1. 108.
* A Hymn, 1. 2.
7 Spring, U. 335 seq. 8 Summer, 11. 629 seq.
• Printed in the appendices to Tovey's edition of Thomson.
## p. 104 (#130) ############################################
104 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
lovers separated by a fatal thunderbolt? This is quickly succeeded
by a passage on summer bathing, illustrated by the tale of Damon
and Musidora, which, in its present form, is entirely altered, and
altered for the worse, from the form which it assumed in the
earliest draft of the poem? The episode of Palemon and Lavinia
.
in Autumn is a tale of harvest, modelled upon the history of Boaz
and Ruth At their best, these stories are merely elegant
decorations of Thomson's verse. Their popularity in their own day
was due to an artificial taste which sought in such poetry the
distractions of an unreal world, and tolerated the questionable
morality and spurious sentiment of the story of Damon and
Musidora, for the sake of its superficial prettiness.
Moral reflections, such as those upon love and jealousy suggested
by the song of the birds in spring“, are among the incidental
passages of The Seasons. No subject, however, was more congenial
to Thomson than the glory of his country, and the patriotic
enthusiasm excited by the prospect seen from Richmond hill in
Summer was more than a conventional sentiment exacted by duty
to the political sympathies of his friends and patrons. His con-
victions, on this head, found their earliest expression in the
monologue Britannia, and were developed at tedious length in
Liberty. In this poem, his art failed him, and the careful arrange-
ment of topics which gave much variety to The Seasons was
abandoned for the prolix discussion of a single theme. Stirred to
his subject by the sight of the ruins of Rome, he indulged in a
historical survey, related by Liberty herself, of her progress from
Greece to Italy, her temporary eclipse in ‘Gothic darkness, and
her revival at the renascence to find in Britain a field for her
untrammelled sway. In her autobiography, Liberty displays a
remarkable lack of modesty, and the width of her claims is the
only original feature of Thomson's political philosophy. The poet
himself plays the part of an admiring listener to her oration,
making, from time to time, respectful interruptions which serve to
let loose new floods of verbiage. He evidently grew weary of his
task. The prophecy contained in the fifth book, awaited by a
steadily decreasing number of subscribers, begins with an uninspired
adaptation to Britain of Vergil's famous tribute to Italy in the
second Georgic, and 'goes dispiritedly, glad to finish' to an abrupt
and hurried end. After Thomson's death, Lyttelton, following, as
he said, the author's own design, condensed the five books of
1 Summer, ll. 1170 seq.
6
9 Ibid. ll. 1270 seq.
Autumn, 11. 182 seq.
4 Spring, 11. 959 seq.
8
## p. 105 (#131) ############################################
The Castle of Indolence
105
Liberty into three. His rearrangement, when compared with the
earlier text, is a symptom of the loose construction and redundancy
of the original, which made such drastic treatment possible.
Thomson's friend Murdoch appears to have set his face against the
application of a similar process to The Seasons ; but it must be
owned that, even after all the revision which it underwent from
the author himself, The Seasons is not without a considerable
amount of repetition, which testifies to the limitations of Thomson's
material
Although Liberty was a failure, Thomson evidently intended
to try his fortune once more with a patriotic poem. The ominous
promise, recorded in The Castle of Indolence, was not fulfilled,
for a reason which must be found in The Castle of Indolence itself.
The elaboration of this short poem occupied many years, and, even
in its final condition, bears signs of incompleteness. Each of the
two cantos ends abruptly with a homely realistic simile which forms
an inappropriate conclusion to a romantic allegory. The poem
might, indeed, have been extended to an indefinite length : its
merit lies, not in the story which it contains, but in the polish of
its style and the success with which Thomson, following a fixed
model, contrived to display in it his own best qualities.
This poem (says the advertisement prefixed to it) being writ in the manner
of Spenser, the obsolete words, and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines,
which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more
perfect. And the stile of that admirable poet, as well as the measure in
which he wrote, are, as it were, appropriated by Custom to all allegorical
Poems writ in our language; just as in French the stile of Marot, who lived
under Francis i, has been used in tales, and familiar epistles, by the politest
writers of the age of Louis xiv.
Already, in 1742, Shenstone had attempted, in The School-Mistress,
to imitate Spenser's
language, his simplicity, his manner of description, and a peculiar tenderness
of sentiment remarkable throughout his works.
Thomson's poem, however, had been conceived at an earlier date
than Shenstone's. It shows, not merely an admiration of the
external qualities of Spenser's verse, but some intimacy with his
methods of description and personification. At the same time, the
use of the Spenserian stanza, of obsolete words and of a studied
simplicity of diction, could not repress the characteristic tastes of
the poet of The Seasons. In the habit of poetical inversion Milton
stood between Spenser and Thomson; and Thomson had assimilated
this habit so thoroughly that The Castle of Indolence could hardly
· The Castle of Indolence, canto I, st. 32.
## p. 106 (#132) ############################################
106 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
6
fail to be leavened with it. With Spenser, the employment of
obsolete words, if, primarily, an affectation, became an essential
feature of his poetry. With Thomson, it was purely a quaint
imitation of Spenser : his old-fashioned words were dragged in as
a necessity, and the poem would lose none of its attractiveness
without them.
The point at which Thomson most closely approaches Spenser
is in the deliberate movement and varied melody of his stanza.
Otherwise, it may fairly be claimed that his resemblance to his
model is of the most general kind. The landscape with which the
poem opens is his highest achievement in that type of description,
combining soft colour with suggestions of perfume and sound, with
which The Seasons has made us familiar. There is little emphasis
on small details : effects of colour, of light and shadow, are
conveyed in such general and inclusive phrases as
gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer-skyl.
If, in such passages, the luxurious beauty of Spenser's descriptions
is reflected, it is rather in their form than in their contents. Here,
once more, the influence of Milton in poetry, of 'savage Rosa' and
learned Poussin' in painting, are too strong to make insistence
on detail possible. In his personifications, Thomson comes nearer
to Spenser. The incidental persons, the comely full-spread porter? '
and his 'little roguish pages,' the diseases of body and mind in the
dungeon of the castle', 'the fiery-footed boy, benempt Dispatch','
who is page to the Knight of Arts and Industry, are portraits which
have Spenser's power of giving individual being to abstract qualities.
On the other hand, the chief portraits of The Castle of Indolence,
the sketches of the friends of the poet as inhabitants or visitors of
the castle, suggested though they may have been by Spenser's
habit of interweaving traits of his contemporaries with his per-
sonified abstractions, were drawn with a personal feeling which
owed little to imitation. Written by one who has himself fallen under
the dominion of the enchanter, the poem has a note of confession
and complaint which gives its contents a special interest, apart
from questions of derived form and style.
The slightness of The Castle of Indolence and its allegory do
not bear comparison with the sustained complication of the fable
which Spenser made the vehicle of his high philosophy. Thomson's
imagination was unrefined by exalted philosophical thought, and
>
6
>
.
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 6. 2 Ibid. st. 24. 3 Ibid. st. 25.
4 Ibid, st. 73 seg.
5 Ibid. canto II, st. 32. & Ibid. canto 1, st. 57 seq.
## p. 107 (#133) ############################################
6
The Castle of Indolence
107
his poem is certainly not improved by excursions into conventional
moralising. The eleven stanzas of perverted morality, which are
sung with an energy foreign to his character by Indolence as he
sits at the gate of his castle', do not add anything to the allegory,
but simply mark a breathing-space between the opening descrip-
tion and the admirable remainder of the first canto. With the
appearance, in the second canto, of the 'generous imp of fame? '
whose vigorous accomplishments are to be fatal to the wizard's
abode, Thomson was easily betrayed into paths which his muse had
trodden bare. After a life passed in varied climes, the Knight of
Arts and Industry has at length found his proper home in Britain,
encircled by the protection of Britannia's thunder on the main,
and aided in his efforts by Liberty, 'th' Eternal Patronº,' who
handsomely atones for her overpowering egoism in an earlier poem
by allowing him to encroach upon her extensive functions. The
mechanic arts, the learning, the constitution of Britain, meet with
due compliment. Threatened by the minions of Indolence, they
are protected by the knight, who sets out to overthrow the castle.
The song of the bard Philomelus, tuned to the British harp, stands
in contrast to the song of Indolence, and proceeds through its
fifteen stanzas with equal smoothness and fluency? . Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity. The examples of Greece
and Rome and of the great poets are cited to encourage the energy
which is the antithesis to slothful repose. A contrast is drawn
between health and disease, and a final exhortation to the use
of godlike reason has the desired effect of stirring the knight's
followers to the attack. While these sentiments are polished with
.
the care which distinguishes the whole poem, they are drawn from
a stock-in-trade which Thomson and his contemporaries had well-
nigh exhausted, and their commonplace nobility is at the very
opposite pole to the grave philosophy of Spenser or to Milton's
lofty morality.
Thomson's dramatic work consists of five tragedies and the
masque of Alfred, written in conjunction with Mallet. He had no
special talent for the stage, and, at a period when rhetoric was the
chief ambition of the dramatist, Thomson's rhetoric has no dis-
tinguishing excellence. His dramas are devoid of characterisation;
his characters are vehicles of lofty sentiment, the prevailing tone
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 9 seq.
3 Ibid. st. 23.
4 Ibid. st. 47 seg.
? Ibid. canto 11, st. 4.
## p. 108 (#134) ############################################
108 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of which is the belligerent patriotism of the party to which
Thomson was sincerely devoted. Sophonisba, however, the earliest
of the tragedies, is without noticeable political bias. It is simply
a classical drama of the conventional type. Its subject, to be sure,
is patriotic, and its choice of a queen who died for her country
may have been intended to spur the queen, to whom it was
dedicated, to free herself from an influence to which Thomson's
associates were bitterly opposed. There can be no question as to
the meaning of the later plays. Between Sophonisba and the
production of Agamemnon, there was an interval of nine years.
It is easy to read into the characters of Clytemnestra and Egisthus
the queen and the minister whom the prince's coterie was bent on
deposing. The Orestes of Agamemnon was flattered more openly
in Alfred, which was played before the prince and princess at
Cliveden in 1740; while the application of Edward and Eleonora
was so obvious that it was rejected for the stage. Agamemnon
and Edward were published with dedications to the princess of
Wales; the last of the political plays, Tancred and Sigismunda,
was inscribed to the prince himself. Coriolanus, posthumously
produced, is a return to pure tragedy without party bias. It may
fairly be said that not one of these plays has the least dramatic
interest. Their blank verse, however, is, as might be expected,
easy and fluent. Thomson, possibly in imitation of the constant
habit of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, permitted
himself a free use of weak endings to his lines, a practice which
may promote ease in delivery, but becomes monotonous to the
reader. His rhetoric is respectable; but the nobility of sentiment
which it clothes is not above the ordinary level of the conventional
sentiment of the classical drama of his day, and provokes no striking
bursts of eloquence. His subjects do not afford scope for his gift
of natural description, and there is only an occasional touch to
remind us that his true genius lay in his appreciation of natural
atmosphere and colour. His philosophy, on the other hand, is
frequently introduced, but without any material addition to the
contents of the passages in which its vague principles had been
embodied in The Seasons. On the whole, the main interest of
the plays is the debt which they owe directly to Greek tragedy,
and not merely to the antique drama through the medium of the
French stage. This virtue may, to some extent, be claimed for
Agamemnon ; it cannot be denied to Edward and Eleonora,
where the self-sacrifice of Eleanor of Castile is imitated at first
hand from the devotion of Alcestis, and the famous description of
## p. 109 (#135) ############################################
Influence of Thomson. .
ballad-opera, burlesque and farce often oppose its progress. The
current of tragedy frequently flows from classical or Elizabethan
sources. The breath of the restoration spirit still, at times, ripples
the placid waters of formal comedy. Yet, moralised tragedy and
moralised comedy contribute alike to the stream of sentimental
drama. Even Lillo and Moore, who sturdily stemmed the tide
of conventional tragedy, were submerged in the waves of senti-
ment, and The Jealous Wife and The Clandestine Marriage
did not prevent the course of sentimental comedy from run-
ning smooth in Kelly's False Delicacy and Cumberland's West
Indian. Nevertheless, the undercurrent of reaction was gathering
strength. To the satirical attacks of burlesque upon sentimental
drama, Fielding had added his description in Tom Jones' of that
'very grave and solemn entertainment, without any low wit,
or humour, or jests,' in which there was not "anything which
could provoke a laugh. ' Goldsmith, who dared to challenge the
authority of the epithet 'low' with which critics were wont to
stigmatise comedy which was not 'genteel,' and who learned the
power of that 'single monosyllable' from the excision of his own
bailiffs' scene in The Good-Natur'd Man, was not to be daunted
in his attack upon this species of bastard tragedy' called senti-
mental drama. In his Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison
between Laughing and Sentimental Comedys, he put the pertinent
query : ‘Which deserves the preference,—the weeping sentimental
comedy so much in fashion at present, or the laughing, and even
low comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh
and Cibber? ' The answer was given in the comedies of Goldsmith
and of Sheridan,
1 Description of the puppet-show, The Provoked Husband, bk xii, chap. v.
? The Present State of Polite Learning, ed. 1759, p. 154.
3 The Westminster Magazine, December 1772.
## p. 93 (#119) #############################################
CHAPTER V
THOMSON AND NATURAL DESCRIPTION IN POETRY
>
In a general estimate of the poetry of the earlier half of the
eighteenth century, Thomson's work, from the exceptional character
of its subject, may, perhaps, be apt to receive undue prominence.
It called attention to a field of verse which his contemporaries,
absorbed in the study of man, in ethical reflection and moral satire,
had ceased to cultivate; it looked back with admiration to models
which were almost forgotten, and, through its influence on the
poetry of Collins and Gray, it lent impulse to the progress which
was to culminate in the romantic movement. On the other hand,
Thomson was not the champion of an opposition or the apostle of
a new order, contending against prejudices and destroying barriers.
In essential qualities of thought, he was at one with the taste of
bis day; and, if his talent was most happily exercised in the obser-
vation and delineation of nature, his point of view was the very
antithesis of that emotional treatment of the subject which marked
the ultimate revolt against the limitations of eighteenth century
convention.
James Thomson was born at Ednam in Roxburghshire, where
his father was parish minister, in September 1700. In the following
year, his father obtained the cure of Southdean, at the head of the
Jed valley, and here Thomson spent his boyhood. For some time,
he went to school in the abbey church of Jedburgh, and, in 1715,
he entered Edinburgh university, intending, as it seems, to become
a presbyterian minister. His early surroundings could hardly fail
to disclose to him the natural charms of a district which, seventy
years later, kindled the romantic imagination of Scott; and they
duly received Thomson's tribute when he wrote
The Tweed (pure Parent-stream,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed,
With, silvan Jed, thy tributary brook).
In these early experiments, which show little promise, he was
· The Seasons, Autumn, 11. 913—15.
## p. 94 (#120) #############################################
94 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
2
his verse.
encouraged by a neighbour, Robert Riccaltoun, the author of a
poem called Winter. At Edinburgh, Thomson's talents developed,
and, after coming to London in 1725, he had his own Winter
ready for publication in March 1726. About this time, he gave
up all intention of a clerical career, and devoted himself to poetry,
earning a stipend as tutor in various noble families. His friend
David Mallet was tutor in the household of the duke of Montrose;
and it was, probably, through him that Thomson obtained intro-
ductions which brought him into the society of possible patrons of
He spared no pains to make himself agreeable to the
kindly disposed Aaron Hill; and the prose dedications of the first
three Seasons, which were fortunately cancelled in later editions
in favour of lines inserted in the poem, are remarkable examples
of the effusiveness of bad taste. Winter soon reached a second
edition. Sir Spencer Compton, to whom it was inscribed, showed a
tardy gratitude for the compliment; but George Bubb Dodington,
the patron of Summer (1727), proved a more useful friend.
Thomson visited Dodington's seat Eastbury park, near Blandford ;
and the acquaintance thus formed probably led to his friendship
with George Lyttelton and to his adhesion to the political party
which supported the prince of Wales. Britannia (1729) eulogised
the prince and condemned Walpole's policy. In the printed
copies, this monologue is said to have been written in 1727. In
that year, Thomson dedicated his Poem sacred to the Memory of
Sir Isaac Newton to Walpole himself. The sincerity of the
patriotism which was laboriously expressed in Liberty cannot be
doubted; but the patronage of Walpole, had it rewarded Thomson's
advances, might have curbed his enthusiasm for an aggressive
policy.
Meanwhile, Spring, inscribed to Frances countess of Hertford,
appeared in 1728. Autumn, dedicated to Arthur Onslow, speaker
of the House of Commons, completed the collected edition, under
the title of The Seasons, in 1730. Thomson began his career as a
dramatist with Sophonisba (1729). Of his plays, more will be said
later: they have a special historical interest, in that, for the most
part, their choice of subject and outspoken treatment were directed
against the court party on behalf of the prince. In 1730, he went
abroad as travelling tutor to a son of Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-
general and, afterwards, lord chancellor. He complained that the
muse did not cross the channel with him, and his ambitious poem
Liberty (1734–6), in which there are some touches due to his
foreign tour, confirms the accuracy of his judgment. Thrown out
## p. 95 (#121) #############################################
Thomson's Life and Literary Work
95
of employment by the death of his pupil in 1733, he received from
Talbot the sinecure secretaryship of briefs in chancery. He could
afford, on the failure of Liberty, to cancel generously his bargain with
the publisher, and, in 1736, to retire to a small house at Richmond,
where he was able to enjoy the society of Pope and other friends.
In these circumstances, he made a thorough revision of The Seasons,
the fruits of which are seen in the transformed text of 1744. A
copy of the 1738 edition in the British museum proves that he
sought and took the advice of a friend whose poetical skill was
considerable ; but whether this helper, as has been assumed, was
Pope or another, is a question upon which experts in handwriting
differ. The new text, while omitting a certain amount which may
be regretted, bears testimony to a judicious pruning of florid
diction; and passages hitherto enervated by excess of colour
gained in vigour what they lost in diffuseness. The poem, however, ,
was lengthened by the insertion of new matter, much of which
increased its general value. One personal feature of these additions
is the introduction of references to Amanda, the subject, also, of
the graceful lyric 'Unless with my Amanda blest. ' Too much may
be made of attachments expressed in verse; but there is no
doubt of Thomson's genuine affection for Elizabeth Young, a
sister-in-law of his friend Robertson, and this fact may be set
against one side of the charge of sensuality imputed to him by
Johnson, probably on the untrustworthy information of Savage.
The Castle of Indolence, published in May 1748, after a long period
of elaborate revision, may stand as the personal confession of a poet
whose industry was not proof against his love of ease and luxury.
Thomson's later days were not without reverses of fortune. The
story of his arrest for debt and delivery from the spunging-house by
Quin the actor may be a legend; but he lost his sinecure after
Talbot's death in 1737, through negligence (so it is said) in applying
for its renewal. Through the instrumentality of Lyttelton, who
was one of the lords of the treasury, he obtained the surveyorship-
general of the Leeward islands, a sinecure well suited to a poet
who had often surveyed the phenomena of nature from the pole
to the tropics in his easy chair. A pension from the prince of
Wales, who had received the dedication of Liberty and about 1737
heard from Thomson that his affairs were “in a more poetical
posture than formerly,' was stopped when Lyttelton fell into dis-
grace with the prince. This was not long before Thomson's death.
One evening in the summer of 1748, after a journey by boat from
Hammersmith to Richmond, he was attacked by a chill. A short
## p. 96 (#122) #############################################
96
Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
recovery was followed by a relapse, and he died on 27 August. His
tragedy Coriolanus was produced during the next year: the story
of the emotion shown by Quin in the delivery of the prologue is a
testimony to the affection which Thomson inspired in his friends.
The body of Thomson's poetry, excluding the dramas, is not
large, and, historically, The Seasons is his most important poem.
Its form of The Seasons was suggested by the example of Vergil's
Georgics: Thomson expressly reminds his readers of the similarity
of his themes to those of Vergil', of whom he imitated more than
one famous passage? In this respect, he had a conspicuous fore-
runner in John Philips, author of Cyder, and it is impossible to
overlook the debt which Thomson owed to the older writer.
Philips was an imitator of Milton's poetic manner, and it may
have been through Philips's poetry that Thomson first felt that
Miltonic influence which moulded his style and the characteristic
shape of his phrases. Johnson, it is true, denied the influence of
Milton upon Thomson :
As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode of
thinking, and of expressing his thoughts, is original. His blank verse is no
more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the rhymes of Prior
are the rhymes of Cowley. His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own
growth, without transcription, without imitation 3.
This criticism can be justified only to a limited extent. Thomson's
characteristic modes of thought were too much those of his age
to bear a very close resemblance to those of Milton. His choice of
blank verse, while sanctioned by Milton's authority, was, on the
other hand, natural to a poet whose language was too voluble and
ornate to be easily confined within the couplet. Its regular flow
and even beat imply a strictly limited command of those musical
resources of which Milton was master. Thomson's prosody is
adequate to the contents of his verse; but it would be difficult to
cite a passage of The Seasons in which the sound becomes a direct
echo of the sense. Yet, if we allow these differences and admit a
limitation of thought and a florid expansiveness of language which
afford a strong contrast to Milton's pregnancy of thought and
phrase, there cannot be any question as to the attraction which
Milton exercised upon the method of natural description and
upon the diction of The Seasons.
In the second of these relations, the likeness is at once evident.
Such passages as the contrast in Winter between the studious
a
1
E. g. Summer, 11. 1151 seq.
Spring, 11. 55–8: cf. 11. 446, 447.
3 Johnson, Life of Thomson.
## p. 97 (#123) #############################################
Thomson's Interest in Nature
97
retirement of the scholar and the diversions of the village and the
town are reminiscent in phrase, as in subject, of L'Allegro and
N Penseroso? The love of inversion which provoked Thomson's
boldest experiments in style, the constant and frequently adverbial
use of epithets derived from Latin sources, are Miltonic character-
istics. That rich literary imagery in which Milton excelled
quickened Thomson to bring into contrast with the more homely
scenes of his poem the unfamiliar scenery of the tropics, and to
enrich his verse with the ornament of carefully chosen proper
names. Lines such as these,
All that from the tract
Of woody mountains stretch'd throʻ gorgeous Ind
Fall on Cormandel's coast, or Malabar;
From Menam's orient stream, that nightly shines
With insect-lamps, to where Aurora sheds
On Indus' smiling banks the rosy shower,
are one instance out of many in which Thomson echoed harmonies
which Milton had awakened. To reproduce the full charm, the
magic melody of the original, was impossible for a poet who had no
great reserve of imagination on which to draw; but the imitation
is obvious and its effect is, to some extent, a success.
The poetry of Thomson's day had ceased to hold direct com-
munion with nature. Occasional contact, however, could not be
avoided. Dyer's Grongar Hill (1727) showed a spontaneous atti-
tude to nature which was too exceptional to capture the public
taste at once : the age preferred the conventional and generalised
descriptions in which poets not preoccupied with nature were
accustomed to indulge_descriptions on which the example of
Milton, who regarded nature through the medium of literary re-
miniscence, had a far-reaching effect. It is Thomson’s peculiarity
that the description of natural phenomena, in an age which over-
looked their artistic value, was his chief concern. His observation
was keen and intelligent. His eye, in the phrase of Wordsworth,
was 'steadily fixed upon his object'; his feelings 'urged him to
work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination? ' The spec-
tacles of books enlarged his range of vision ; but his commerce
2
with the more familiar aspects of nature was direct and unim-
peded. This process marks a point of departure from the fashion
set by the commanding genius of Milton, and a return to earlier
methods. But, for the expression of his genuine, though limited
a
1 Winter, ll. 424 seq.
2 Wordsworth, Essay, supplementary to the preface to Lyrical Ballads.
E. L. X. CH, V.
7
## p. 98 (#124) #############################################
98 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of his age.
imagination, he was bound by the necessities of a diction which
had become formal and stereotyped. What he saw with his own
eyes, he conventionalised in terms which were the common property
No one, however, since Milton had given so much
attention to the varied aspects of nature, and, consequently, Thom-
son's description of the stock elements of conventional scenery, of
hill and dale, and wood and lawn,
And verdant field, and darkening heath between,
And villages embosom’d soft in trees,
And spiry towns by surging columns mark'd
Of houshold smoak,
was governed by an accuracy of observation and depth of enjoy-
ment which, while perpetuating the Miltonic tradition in poetry,
distinguished Thomson from poets who, without observation and
feeling for nature, had passively accepted the superficial qualities
of that tradition.
At the same time, Thomson's obedience to the conventional
diction of poetry was in no sense reluctant. The broad view of the
general aspects of nature which such a diction reveals was essential
to his habit of mind. His observation, if accurate, shared the
tendency inherent in the art of the later seventeenth century to
group details in broad masses of colour and striking contrasts
of light and shadow. The pictorial medium through which he
approached scenery is indicated by a stanza in The Castle of
Indolence:
Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls,
Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise,
Or autumn's varied shades embrown the walls:
Now the black tempest strikes the astonish'd eyes;
Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;
The trembling sun now plays o'er ocean blue,
And now rude mountains frown amid the skies;
Whate'er Lorrain light-touch'd with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew 2.
Of such pictures, Thomson was the receptive recorder. His in-
telligence was not of that vigorous and active type which searches
in nature for a life instinct with emotions akin and responsive to
his owl. Nature, to him, is a succession of phenomena of varied
form and colour which compose a series of landscapes, as they
affect the senses with their charm. Beneath the changes of the
sky, he notes with delight the changes of colour of the earth. Over
the country-side in spring,
1 Spring, 11. 947-51.
9 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 38.
## p. 99 (#125) #############################################
Nature Pictures in The Seasons
99
6
One boundless blush, one white-empurpled shower
Of mingled blossoms,
rise the clouds, big with rain, 'a dusky wreath. . . scarce staining
ether,' gathering quickly until the massed vapour 'sits on th'
horizon round a settled gloom? ' At evening, the clouds lift; the
sunset casts its light on mountains and rivers, and tinges the mist
which rises from the soaked plain with yellow, while every blade
of grass sparkles with raindrops, and the rainbow is refracted from
the eastern sky: In summer, when night gathers over the hot
day, the glow-worm twinkles in the hedges, and the evening star
rises in the calm sky, as black vesper's pageants dissolvet. In
autumn, truthful observation notes the gathering mists through
which the sun ‘sheds, weak and blunt, his wide-refracted ray5,' the
shower of meteors in the night-time, the heavy dews of morning”,
and the ‘peculiar blue' of the midday sky. If, in winter, the rich
colours, congenial to Thomson's fancy, of 'Autumn beaming o'er
the yellow woods”, give place to more livid hues, yet there remain
the red sunset which precedes the frosty night, the 'blue film
breathed by the icy wind over pool and stream, the 'crystal pave-
ment' of the arrested water-course, the glitter of the stars, the
pallor of the dawn which reveals the 'dumb cascade' of icicles
hanging from the eaves and the arabesque of frostwork woven
over window-pane and frozen soil, the cold gleam of the icebound
brook and the 'plumy wave' of white snow on the forest trees 10.
Nor is sight the only sense which is alive to the charm of
the progress of the year in earth and sky. In the spring garden,
the violet, polyanthus, hyacinth and tulip, 'the yellow wall-flower,
stain'd with iron brown,' combine their bright colour with the
scent of the stock and jonquil, while sight and touch alike combine
in the note of
auriculas, enrich'd
With shining meal o'er all their velvet leaves 11.
Sensitive to perfume, Thomson invites Amanda to walk
Where the breeze blows from yon extended field
Of blossom'd beans 12,
or wanders in the spring morning from the fragrant garden into
country lanes, among sweet-briar hedges, or 'tastes the smell
of dairy' as he walks past a farm 13. The fisherman, when the
Spring, ll. 110, 111.
2 lbid. ll. 147-51.
3 Ibid. ll. 186 seq.
* Summer, 11. 1683 seq. O Autumn, 11. 623 seq.
6 Ibid. Il. 1019 seq.
7 Ibid. ll. 1081 seq.
8 Ibid. 1. 1130.
9 Ibid. 1. 969.
10 Winter, 11. 714 seq.
11 Spring, ll. 516 seq.
13 Ibid. 11, 499, 500.
13 Ibid. ll. 101 seq.
6
1
7-2
## p. 100 (#126) ############################################
100 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
noonday sun scatters the light clouds borne across the sky before
the west wind, may retire with a book to the shady bank where
sight is attracted by the purple violet, and the air is scented by
the 'balmy essence' of the lily of the valley, or beneath the shade
of a mountain ash where the sounding culver' builds its nest in
the cliff? . Few of Thomson's pictures are without their accom-
paniment of sound. The silence of the winter morning is broken
by the foot-fall of the shepherd on the hard crust of frozen snow? .
The song of birds in spring, which forms the subject of one of the
most attractive passages in The Seasons", intensifies, as it ceases,
the stillness of autumn, when the only sound is that of the distant
gun or of the woodman's axe in the 'sadden'd grove'' Such sounds
are used chiefly to give emphasis to quiet and solitude. His
happiest effects in this direction are summed up in a stanza of The
Castle of Indolence beginning
Join'd to the prattle of the purling rills,
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale5.
In all the scenes to which this stanza makes reference, the part
of man is incidental. The poet roams with 'eye excursive' for the
sake of the varied pleasure to be derived from his wanderings.
He has his own stock of readily awakened sentiment, susceptible
to the gloom and terror of storm, or to the coming of the Power
of Philosophic Melancholy' in autumn®; but there is no subjective
sense of revolt in his own breast to make his spirit at one with the
warring elements, no natural melancholy which colours Nature
with its own hue and translates her death into personal terms.
Similarly, man is introduced only so far as he forms a telling
feature in the landscape, just as the human element in Salvator
Rosa's pictures is subordinated to a position which gives scale to
nodding rocks and adds terror to frowning forests. The village
haymaking and sheepwashing in Summer are mild attempts at
genre pictures; the rural smell’of the harvest, the 'dusky wave'
of mown hay on the meadow, the ‘russet hay-cock' of the one, the
'pebbled shore’and 'flashing wave' of the washing-pool in the other,
meant more to Thomson than the perfunctory rustics who form part
of the scene? His one elaborate picture of the pursuits of his fellow-
men is the description of the feast after a day's hunting8; and this,
conceived in a spirit of heavy playfulness, was transferred by his
executor Lyttelton, as unworthy of The Seasons, to a place by itself
1 Spring, 11. 443 seq.
2 Winter, 11. 755—9.
3 Spring, ll. 582 seq.
• Autumn, 11. 886 seq. 8 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 4.
6 Autumn, 11. 920 seq. ? Summer, 11. 352 seq. 8 Autumn, 11. 488 seq.
## p.
101 (#127) ############################################
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips. More
characteristic is his introduction of the horseman, vainly awaited by
his wife and children, and perishing in the swamp, to heighten the
terrors of the marsh, lit by treacherous wildfire, on an autumn
night'. A parallel tragedy adds effect to the description of the
snowdrift? . The famous picture in Summer of the caravan
swallowed in the sandstorm ends with lines which, in pointing a
contrast to the scene described, are invested with an unusual
element of human interest an element which, in the scene itself,
is entirely subject to the irresistible power of nature.
In this objective attitude to nature, which, while recognising
her power, dissociates her from an active participation in the
terests and emotions of man, Thomson stands midway between
two periods. Milton, a lover of nature less for her own sake than
for the echoes of poetry and music which she aroused in him,
felt in her being the breath of an animating and sustaining
creative power. Twenty-one years after Thomson's death, Gray,
travelling in north-west Yorkshire, as he looked on Ingleborough
wrapped in clouds and stood ‘not without shuddering' in the
gloomy ravine of Gordale scar, felt the presence of a sentient life
in nature responding to his own thought and quickening his
emotions. The chief characteristic of this point of view is the
local colour which it lends to description, its attempt to register
every shade of subjective emotion by a definition of the spirit of
place which gives it its special hue. Thomson's descriptions of
individual scenes are guiltless of local colour. Most of them
were introduced into later editions of The Seasons, and, in
these, the thought of the patron or friend whose ‘hospitable genius'
presides over the landscape inspires the passage, while the details
of the landscape itself are characterised in the most general terms.
The prospect from Richmond hill is described with affection and
with a keen sense of its natural beauty4. From the hill above
Hagley park, the Welsh mountains are noted in the western
distances, and, at Stowe, the poet's eye is quick to mark the
autumnal colour of the woods. But it is precisely in such places,
with their memories of friendship and social pleasure, that
Thomson is most in harmony with the poetic taste of his day.
The landscape is merely the setting to a compliment or a tribute
1 Autumn, 11. 1061 seq.
3 Gray, Journal in the Lakes.
6 Spring, 11. 899 seq.
2 Winter, Il. 276 seq.
• Summer, 11. 1402 seq.
Autumn, 11. 953 seq.
B
## p. 102 (#128) ############################################
102 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
a
of personal regard. An enumeration of the general features of the
landscape, a ready perception of points of colour, the occasional
introduction of a place-name, are indicative of the poet's personal
enjoyment, but do not by themselves evoke the special qualities of
the prospect. And, if these passages have a certain prominence in
The Seasons, it must be owned that, as pictures of nature, they
are inferior to passages, such as that which describes the eagle
rearing its young 'on utmost Kilda's shore',' where Thomson's
imagination, although untouched by personal experience, is un-
fettered by the claims of man upon its object.
It is true that the poetry of nature, even where deeply imbued
with the spirit of place, frequently shows a tendency to vagueness
of description. Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey, or the sonnet Composed after a journey across
the Hambleton hills, are records not of the peculiar beauties of
particular spots, but of the emotions which they kindle in an
individual mind. With Thomson, the external aspect of nature
was never made sublime by intensity of spiritual feeling. We, who
have never known Lyttelton or held converse with Pitt, or had
the privilege of directing the downcast eyes of Amanda to the
dwelling of Pope or the shades where ‘the worthy Queensb'ry yet
laments his Gay,' may admire the pictures of Hagley or Stowe or
the Thames near Richmond as skilful arrangements of colour, but
cannot regard them as expressions of the permanent element in
nature. They are interesting landmarks in the history of poetic
taste; but their emotional quality, such as it is, is slight, and
typical of a state of mind which had not yet recognised in nature
the presence of a being independent of period and place. Never-
theless, in common with his generation, Thomson had his con-
ventional philosophy of nature. Just as Milton's habit of generalised
description had tinged the verse of his successors with a pale re-
flection, so his devout conception of a controlling Deity manifesting
Himself in nature had left its impression upon his imitators.
Thomson, with a reminiscence of Vergil, pays repeated tribute to
the Divine force which
pervades,
Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole 2,
and writes of it with a reverence which indicates the effect upon
his thought of the Miltonic idea of the Creator, limited by a general
agreement with the deism of his own day. The 'Source of Being'
1 Spring, ll. 750 seq.
2 Ibid. ll. 849, 850.
## p. 103 (#129) ############################################
2
Effective Digressions 103
has touched 'the great whole into perfection". ' Supreme Perfection
attracts 'life rising still on life, in higher tone? ' into Its own Being.
As we gaze on nature, we feel the present Deity 3,' and know it to
be full of a ‘mighty Breath“,' an 'inhaling spirit. ' The seasons
in their course embody this pervading energy, and 'are but the
varied God. ' The paragraphs of The Seasons which contain such
sentiments, or the hymn which is their most eloquent expression
at the end of the poem, leave us in doubt as to Thomson's actual ad-
herence to any connected system of religion or philosophy. Deism
alternates with a vague pantheism according to the feeling of the
moment; and, in one place, at any rate, there are signs of a leaning
towards Pythagorean doctrines”. Thomson himself might have
found it hard to define the religious emotion which nature excited
in him. His sincere gratitude to the Creator is at times prompted
by a sense of duty, when its terms unconsciously resemble those in
which he recognised the disposing hand of Lord Cobham at Stowe
or saw the 'pure Dorsetian downs' at Eastbury decorated by the
union of human graces in Bubb Dodington. The greater patron and
the wider area of power called for the more elaborate compliment.
Such temperate rhapsodies are, in fact, among the digressions of
The Seasons. Thomson felt the necessity of giving some relief to
description, and, in the successive revisions to which The Seasons
was subjected, the poem gained in arrangement and in variety
of surface. The most striking digressions are, undoubtedly, those
surveys of foreign scenery which provide necessary contrast to the
limited area of Thomson's own experience. The longest and best
of these, in Summers, was remodelled and transformed in the later
editions, when Thomson removed from it the eloquent and highly
coloured picture of the African city buried in the sandº-an
alteration which probably involved some self-sacrifice. We have
already noticed Lyttelton's treatment of the hunting episode in
Autumn, a digression which arises naturally out of the subject.
The most popular passages of The Seasons, which were long the
admiration of English readers and did much to gain the poem its
vogue on the continent, were those episodes which take the form
of sentimental anecdotes appropriate to the season under discussion.
Of these, three in number, two are in Summer. A description of
a thunderstorm suggests the story of Celadon and Amelia, the
1 Spring, 1, 560.
? The Castle of Indolence, canto 11, st. 48.
3 Spring, 1. 897.
• Ibid. l. 846.
• Summer, 1. 108.
* A Hymn, 1. 2.
7 Spring, U. 335 seq. 8 Summer, 11. 629 seq.
• Printed in the appendices to Tovey's edition of Thomson.
## p. 104 (#130) ############################################
104 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
lovers separated by a fatal thunderbolt? This is quickly succeeded
by a passage on summer bathing, illustrated by the tale of Damon
and Musidora, which, in its present form, is entirely altered, and
altered for the worse, from the form which it assumed in the
earliest draft of the poem? The episode of Palemon and Lavinia
.
in Autumn is a tale of harvest, modelled upon the history of Boaz
and Ruth At their best, these stories are merely elegant
decorations of Thomson's verse. Their popularity in their own day
was due to an artificial taste which sought in such poetry the
distractions of an unreal world, and tolerated the questionable
morality and spurious sentiment of the story of Damon and
Musidora, for the sake of its superficial prettiness.
Moral reflections, such as those upon love and jealousy suggested
by the song of the birds in spring“, are among the incidental
passages of The Seasons. No subject, however, was more congenial
to Thomson than the glory of his country, and the patriotic
enthusiasm excited by the prospect seen from Richmond hill in
Summer was more than a conventional sentiment exacted by duty
to the political sympathies of his friends and patrons. His con-
victions, on this head, found their earliest expression in the
monologue Britannia, and were developed at tedious length in
Liberty. In this poem, his art failed him, and the careful arrange-
ment of topics which gave much variety to The Seasons was
abandoned for the prolix discussion of a single theme. Stirred to
his subject by the sight of the ruins of Rome, he indulged in a
historical survey, related by Liberty herself, of her progress from
Greece to Italy, her temporary eclipse in ‘Gothic darkness, and
her revival at the renascence to find in Britain a field for her
untrammelled sway. In her autobiography, Liberty displays a
remarkable lack of modesty, and the width of her claims is the
only original feature of Thomson's political philosophy. The poet
himself plays the part of an admiring listener to her oration,
making, from time to time, respectful interruptions which serve to
let loose new floods of verbiage. He evidently grew weary of his
task. The prophecy contained in the fifth book, awaited by a
steadily decreasing number of subscribers, begins with an uninspired
adaptation to Britain of Vergil's famous tribute to Italy in the
second Georgic, and 'goes dispiritedly, glad to finish' to an abrupt
and hurried end. After Thomson's death, Lyttelton, following, as
he said, the author's own design, condensed the five books of
1 Summer, ll. 1170 seq.
6
9 Ibid. ll. 1270 seq.
Autumn, 11. 182 seq.
4 Spring, 11. 959 seq.
8
## p. 105 (#131) ############################################
The Castle of Indolence
105
Liberty into three. His rearrangement, when compared with the
earlier text, is a symptom of the loose construction and redundancy
of the original, which made such drastic treatment possible.
Thomson's friend Murdoch appears to have set his face against the
application of a similar process to The Seasons ; but it must be
owned that, even after all the revision which it underwent from
the author himself, The Seasons is not without a considerable
amount of repetition, which testifies to the limitations of Thomson's
material
Although Liberty was a failure, Thomson evidently intended
to try his fortune once more with a patriotic poem. The ominous
promise, recorded in The Castle of Indolence, was not fulfilled,
for a reason which must be found in The Castle of Indolence itself.
The elaboration of this short poem occupied many years, and, even
in its final condition, bears signs of incompleteness. Each of the
two cantos ends abruptly with a homely realistic simile which forms
an inappropriate conclusion to a romantic allegory. The poem
might, indeed, have been extended to an indefinite length : its
merit lies, not in the story which it contains, but in the polish of
its style and the success with which Thomson, following a fixed
model, contrived to display in it his own best qualities.
This poem (says the advertisement prefixed to it) being writ in the manner
of Spenser, the obsolete words, and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines,
which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more
perfect. And the stile of that admirable poet, as well as the measure in
which he wrote, are, as it were, appropriated by Custom to all allegorical
Poems writ in our language; just as in French the stile of Marot, who lived
under Francis i, has been used in tales, and familiar epistles, by the politest
writers of the age of Louis xiv.
Already, in 1742, Shenstone had attempted, in The School-Mistress,
to imitate Spenser's
language, his simplicity, his manner of description, and a peculiar tenderness
of sentiment remarkable throughout his works.
Thomson's poem, however, had been conceived at an earlier date
than Shenstone's. It shows, not merely an admiration of the
external qualities of Spenser's verse, but some intimacy with his
methods of description and personification. At the same time, the
use of the Spenserian stanza, of obsolete words and of a studied
simplicity of diction, could not repress the characteristic tastes of
the poet of The Seasons. In the habit of poetical inversion Milton
stood between Spenser and Thomson; and Thomson had assimilated
this habit so thoroughly that The Castle of Indolence could hardly
· The Castle of Indolence, canto I, st. 32.
## p. 106 (#132) ############################################
106 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
6
fail to be leavened with it. With Spenser, the employment of
obsolete words, if, primarily, an affectation, became an essential
feature of his poetry. With Thomson, it was purely a quaint
imitation of Spenser : his old-fashioned words were dragged in as
a necessity, and the poem would lose none of its attractiveness
without them.
The point at which Thomson most closely approaches Spenser
is in the deliberate movement and varied melody of his stanza.
Otherwise, it may fairly be claimed that his resemblance to his
model is of the most general kind. The landscape with which the
poem opens is his highest achievement in that type of description,
combining soft colour with suggestions of perfume and sound, with
which The Seasons has made us familiar. There is little emphasis
on small details : effects of colour, of light and shadow, are
conveyed in such general and inclusive phrases as
gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer-skyl.
If, in such passages, the luxurious beauty of Spenser's descriptions
is reflected, it is rather in their form than in their contents. Here,
once more, the influence of Milton in poetry, of 'savage Rosa' and
learned Poussin' in painting, are too strong to make insistence
on detail possible. In his personifications, Thomson comes nearer
to Spenser. The incidental persons, the comely full-spread porter? '
and his 'little roguish pages,' the diseases of body and mind in the
dungeon of the castle', 'the fiery-footed boy, benempt Dispatch','
who is page to the Knight of Arts and Industry, are portraits which
have Spenser's power of giving individual being to abstract qualities.
On the other hand, the chief portraits of The Castle of Indolence,
the sketches of the friends of the poet as inhabitants or visitors of
the castle, suggested though they may have been by Spenser's
habit of interweaving traits of his contemporaries with his per-
sonified abstractions, were drawn with a personal feeling which
owed little to imitation. Written by one who has himself fallen under
the dominion of the enchanter, the poem has a note of confession
and complaint which gives its contents a special interest, apart
from questions of derived form and style.
The slightness of The Castle of Indolence and its allegory do
not bear comparison with the sustained complication of the fable
which Spenser made the vehicle of his high philosophy. Thomson's
imagination was unrefined by exalted philosophical thought, and
>
6
>
.
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 6. 2 Ibid. st. 24. 3 Ibid. st. 25.
4 Ibid, st. 73 seg.
5 Ibid. canto II, st. 32. & Ibid. canto 1, st. 57 seq.
## p. 107 (#133) ############################################
6
The Castle of Indolence
107
his poem is certainly not improved by excursions into conventional
moralising. The eleven stanzas of perverted morality, which are
sung with an energy foreign to his character by Indolence as he
sits at the gate of his castle', do not add anything to the allegory,
but simply mark a breathing-space between the opening descrip-
tion and the admirable remainder of the first canto. With the
appearance, in the second canto, of the 'generous imp of fame? '
whose vigorous accomplishments are to be fatal to the wizard's
abode, Thomson was easily betrayed into paths which his muse had
trodden bare. After a life passed in varied climes, the Knight of
Arts and Industry has at length found his proper home in Britain,
encircled by the protection of Britannia's thunder on the main,
and aided in his efforts by Liberty, 'th' Eternal Patronº,' who
handsomely atones for her overpowering egoism in an earlier poem
by allowing him to encroach upon her extensive functions. The
mechanic arts, the learning, the constitution of Britain, meet with
due compliment. Threatened by the minions of Indolence, they
are protected by the knight, who sets out to overthrow the castle.
The song of the bard Philomelus, tuned to the British harp, stands
in contrast to the song of Indolence, and proceeds through its
fifteen stanzas with equal smoothness and fluency? . Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity. The examples of Greece
and Rome and of the great poets are cited to encourage the energy
which is the antithesis to slothful repose. A contrast is drawn
between health and disease, and a final exhortation to the use
of godlike reason has the desired effect of stirring the knight's
followers to the attack. While these sentiments are polished with
.
the care which distinguishes the whole poem, they are drawn from
a stock-in-trade which Thomson and his contemporaries had well-
nigh exhausted, and their commonplace nobility is at the very
opposite pole to the grave philosophy of Spenser or to Milton's
lofty morality.
Thomson's dramatic work consists of five tragedies and the
masque of Alfred, written in conjunction with Mallet. He had no
special talent for the stage, and, at a period when rhetoric was the
chief ambition of the dramatist, Thomson's rhetoric has no dis-
tinguishing excellence. His dramas are devoid of characterisation;
his characters are vehicles of lofty sentiment, the prevailing tone
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 9 seq.
3 Ibid. st. 23.
4 Ibid. st. 47 seg.
? Ibid. canto 11, st. 4.
## p. 108 (#134) ############################################
108 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of which is the belligerent patriotism of the party to which
Thomson was sincerely devoted. Sophonisba, however, the earliest
of the tragedies, is without noticeable political bias. It is simply
a classical drama of the conventional type. Its subject, to be sure,
is patriotic, and its choice of a queen who died for her country
may have been intended to spur the queen, to whom it was
dedicated, to free herself from an influence to which Thomson's
associates were bitterly opposed. There can be no question as to
the meaning of the later plays. Between Sophonisba and the
production of Agamemnon, there was an interval of nine years.
It is easy to read into the characters of Clytemnestra and Egisthus
the queen and the minister whom the prince's coterie was bent on
deposing. The Orestes of Agamemnon was flattered more openly
in Alfred, which was played before the prince and princess at
Cliveden in 1740; while the application of Edward and Eleonora
was so obvious that it was rejected for the stage. Agamemnon
and Edward were published with dedications to the princess of
Wales; the last of the political plays, Tancred and Sigismunda,
was inscribed to the prince himself. Coriolanus, posthumously
produced, is a return to pure tragedy without party bias. It may
fairly be said that not one of these plays has the least dramatic
interest. Their blank verse, however, is, as might be expected,
easy and fluent. Thomson, possibly in imitation of the constant
habit of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, permitted
himself a free use of weak endings to his lines, a practice which
may promote ease in delivery, but becomes monotonous to the
reader. His rhetoric is respectable; but the nobility of sentiment
which it clothes is not above the ordinary level of the conventional
sentiment of the classical drama of his day, and provokes no striking
bursts of eloquence. His subjects do not afford scope for his gift
of natural description, and there is only an occasional touch to
remind us that his true genius lay in his appreciation of natural
atmosphere and colour. His philosophy, on the other hand, is
frequently introduced, but without any material addition to the
contents of the passages in which its vague principles had been
embodied in The Seasons. On the whole, the main interest of
the plays is the debt which they owe directly to Greek tragedy,
and not merely to the antique drama through the medium of the
French stage. This virtue may, to some extent, be claimed for
Agamemnon ; it cannot be denied to Edward and Eleonora,
where the self-sacrifice of Eleanor of Castile is imitated at first
hand from the devotion of Alcestis, and the famous description of
## p. 109 (#135) ############################################
Influence of Thomson. .
