THOMSON.
The return to Nature, begun by Ramsay in his “Gentle Shepherd,” was carried on by another Scot, though hardly a Scottish poet—Thomson, who a few years later (1728-30) published his poem of “The Seasons.” In this work, descriptive of scenery and country life through the four seasons, Thomson, it is alleged, was but working in a vein which was native to Scottish poets from the earliest time. Two centuries before, Gawain Douglas, in the prologues to his translation of the Æneid, abounds in description of rural things. I should hardly venture to say it myself, in case it might seem national prejudice, but a writer who is not a Scot, Mr. S. Brooke, has remarked that there is “a passionate, close, poetical observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the earliest times, such as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth.” In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of his poem, is there much savor of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject. It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, over-loaded with epithets, full of artificial invocations, “personified abstractions,” and insipid classicalities. It is a composite style of language formed from the recollection partly of Milton, partly of Virgil’s Georgics.
Yet in spite of all these obstructions which repel pure taste and natural feeling, no one can read the four books of the “Seasons” through, without seeing that Thomson, for all his false style, wrote with his eye upon Nature, and laid his finger on many a fact and image never before touched in poetry. In the first few lines of “Spring” he notes how, at its approach, the plover and other birds which have wintered by the sea leave the shores and set far inland to their summer haunts in moors and hills. Whilst the season is still hanging uncertain between winter and spring, he notes how
“Scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulfed
To shake the sounding marsh; or, from the shore,
The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.”
How true to nature this picture! how happily rendered! Then you have the plowman and his oxen beginning their work—
“Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.”
Again,—
“From the moist meadow to the withered hill,
Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs.”
That “withered hill!” Who that has ever looked on the mountains in March, just before the first finger of Spring has touched them, but will recognize the appropriateness of that epithet for their wan, bleached, decayed aspect!
Then you have the whole process of trout-fishing, in the “mossy-tinctured stream,” where “the dark brown water aids the grilse,” showing that, as Thomson wrote, his thoughts reverted from Richmond to the streams of the Merse; you have also the song-birds piping each from its proper haunt, the linnet from “the flowering furze,”—the various places where each bird builds his nest, given with an accuracy that every bird-nesting boy will recognize; and the scent of the bean-fields, noticed for the first time, as far as I know, in poetry.
As one longer example of Thomson’s close observation and peculiar manner, take the description of a spring shower:—
“At last
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields,
And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
In large effusion o’er the freshened world;
The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard
By such as wander through the forest walks,
Beneath the umbrageous multitude of leaves.
...
“Thus all day long the full-distended clouds
Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth
Is deep enriched with vegetable life;
Till in the western sky the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
Of broken clouds, gay shifting to his beam,
The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes
The illumined mountain; through the forest streams;
Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,
Far smoking o’er the interminable plain,
In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
Full swell the woods, their every music wakes,
Mixed in wild concert, with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
Whence, blending all, the sweetened zephyr springs.”
These are but a few samples from “Spring” showing the minute faithfulness with which Thomson had observed
“The negligence of Nature, wide and wild.”
Here are appearances of Nature, each accurately observed, and their succession truthfully rendered, but the whole is so overlaid with tawdry diction that it is hard to pierce below the enamel and feel the true pulse of Nature beating under it. And yet it does beat there, and in many another description in the “Seasons” now little heeded, because of their old-fashioned garb. And yet he who will read the “Seasons” through will find many a phrase true to Nature, many a felicitous expression cropping out from the even roll of his solemn pompous monotone. Thomson has been called the Claude of poets. And his way of handling Nature stands to that of Wordsworth or Tennyson much as Claude’s landscapes do to those of Turner or some of the other modern painters. It may be added that Thomson’s somewhat vapid digressions about Amelia and Lavinia have not more meaning than the conventional lay figures and the classic temples which Claude introduces into the foreground of his landscapes.
As to the sentiment which animates the “Seasons,” it is a revolt from the life of town and court to the simplicity and truth of rural life and feeling. It is almost the first time this revolt finds expression in English poetry, if we except some of the sylvan scenes in Shakespeare. As the French critic well says, “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had expressed all Rousseau’s sentiments, almost in the same style. Like him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him he contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries and corruption. Like him he exalted deep love, conjugal tenderness, the union of souls, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he combated contemporary frivolity and compared the ancient republics with modern states. Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose from the spectacle of Nature to the contemplation of God.... Like him, too, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous invocations, and oratorical tirades.” This passage gives truly, if with some exaggeration, the spirit with which the “Seasons” and all their outward imagery are informed. But while Thomson watched the ever-changing appearances and recorded them, what, it may be asked, was his thought about the Power which originates and upholds them? what did he conceive to be the relation of the things we see to the things we do not see? Everywhere his poem breathes a spirit of naturalistic piety. But if there is nothing in the “Seasons” inconsistent with Christian truth, there is little or nothing that directly affirms it. In “Winter” he breathes this prayer—
“Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
Oh teach me what is good! teach me thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit! and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!”
There is nothing in his amiable and placid life to throw doubt on the sincerity of that prayer. And yet Thomson’s piety seems to us now of that kind which is easily satisfied and thoughtlessly thankful!
There are many at the present day, and those the most thoughtful, who “not only see through but (as has been said) feel a strong revulsion against the well-meant but superficial attempt to describe the world as happy, and to see in God, as the Governor of it, only a sort of easy and shallow goodness.” They cannot be satisfied with such a view. “They have a complaining within—a sense of imperfection in and around them which rebels against so easy-going a view and demands another solution. It is not merely a benevolent God that they long for, but a God who sympathizes with man, and who in some way, of which only revelation can fully inform us, makes out of man’s misery and imperfection the way to something better for him.”
Thomson’s religion, no doubt, could hardly have escaped the infection of the Deism that was all around him in the literary and philosophic atmosphere of his time. In his beautiful “Hymn,” which may be regarded as the climax of the “Seasons,” and as summing up the devoutest thoughts which these suggested to him, there is nothing that goes beyond such a view:—
“These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of thee”—
unless perhaps in that more Christian strain where, hearing the bleating on the hills and the lowings in the vale, he breaks forth—
“For the Great Shepherd reigns,
And his unsuffering Kingdom yet will come.”
The prevailing spirit of the Hymn, as of most of his other addresses to the Deity, is that of optimism and the reign of universal benevolence:—
“I cannot go
Where Universal Love smiles not around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns,
From seeming evil still educing good.”
There is much benevolence in his poetry, much feeling for the miseries and wrongs of mankind, but no perception of that deeper mystery—that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for a deliverance. Neither is there any sense of the relation of the creation to the Creator other than that which the somewhat mechanical conception of a maker and a machine supply. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that Thomson does not seem to feel the inadequacy of this conception, for we in our own day, who have got to feel so profoundly its inadequacy, have not as yet gone far to supply its place with a worthier. Yet whatever may be his shortcomings, all honor to the poet of the “Seasons”! Genuine lover of the country as he was, he was the first English poet who led poetry back into the fields, and made her once more free of her own native region.