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:—