James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary

285 Pages·2000·3.658 MB·English

by  Richard Terry

JAMES THOMSON
Essays for the Tercentenary
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James Thomson:
Essays for the Tercentenary
*
Edited by
RICHARD TERRY
University of Sunderland
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2000 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool L69 7ZU
©2000 Liverpool University Press
The right of Richard Terry
to be identified as the editor of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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ISBN 0-85323-954-1 (hardback)
0-85323-964-9 (paperback)
Typeset in Stempel Garamond
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Printed by Bell &Bain, Glasgow
Contents
Introduction: Thomson’s ‘fame’ Richard Terry 1
Part 1: Works
‘O Sophonisba! Sophonisbao!’: Thomson the Tragedian
Brean S. Hammond 15
‘Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?’:
Thomson’s Landscape Poetry W. B. Hutchings 35
Thomson and Shaftesbury Robert Inglesfield 67
The Seasonsand the Politics of Opposition
Glynis Ridley 93
James Thomson and the Progress of the Progress Poem:
From Libertyto The Castle of Indolence Robin Dix 117
Part 2: Posterity
Thomson and the Druids Richard Terry 141
James Thomson and Eighteenth-Century Scottish
LiteraryIdentity Gerard Carruthers 165
Britannia’s Heart of Oak: Thomson, Garrick and the
Language of Eighteenth-Century Patriotism
Tim Fulford 191
Thomson in the 1790s John Barrell and
Harriet Guest 217
‘Thatis true fame’: A Few Words about Thomson’s
Romantic Period Popularity John Strachan 247
Notes on Contributors 271
Index 275
Illustrations
1. Print of Queen Caroline. ‘Britain’s best hope!!
England’sSheet Anchor!!!’ Courtesy Public Record
OfficerefTS 11/115 no. 55 209
2. Cartoon of ‘Queen Caroline Running Down the Royal
George’ Courtesy British Museum 211
3. Engraving of Michael Sprang’s Monument to Thomson
inWestminsterAbbey 223
4. Illustration of an obelisk to Thomson, from
The Seasons, 1793 224
5. Paternal Instruction, from The Seasons, 1794 237
6. ‘Spring’ from The Seasons, 1797 238
Introduction: Thomson’s ‘fame’
RICHARD TERRY
Thomson’s life, unlike that of some of his literary contempo-
raries, did not generate a great number of anecdotes, and the
most famous one in which his name figures relates to a post-
humous incident concerning not so much the author himself as
his most celebrated literary work, The Seasons. Hazlitt tells of
how, rambling in North Devon with Coleridge, the two of them
stopped off at a country inn. Finding a battered copy of The
Seasons lying in the parlour, Coleridge, so Hazlitt recounts,
picked it up with a flourish and then pronounced: ‘That is true
fame’.1 Coleridge’s meaning is not entirely certain, since fame at
this time was something of an amphibian concept, but he is prob-
ably paying homage both to the breadth and to the longevity of
Thomson’s post-mortal reputation. Although Coleridge’s excla-
mation springs directly from a palpable piece of evidence for the
book’s endurance and wide dissemination, it also caps a sequence
of early critical responses to Thomson in which the poet’s fame is
prophesied, remarked upon or celebrated.
The prediction of Thomson’s fame goes back even to the
appearance of ‘Winter’ in 1726, an event which led Aaron Hill,
later the poet’s friend, to inform him of his premonition that
‘Time … shall lend her soundless depth, to float your fame’.2
When Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, an early patron of Thomson’s,
received a copy of the first edition of The Seasons, he also felt
sufficient confidence to assert that ‘There’s a book that will make
him famous all over the world, and his name immortal’.3After his
death, and in large part due to the wide or ‘universal’ appeal of
The Seasons, Thomson acquired the reputation of a poet almost
uniquely gifted with poetic fame. In 1785, John Pinkerton, for
example, regrets that The Seasons should be the most incorrect
‘of any works which have obtained considerable applause’,
and forecasts that this shortcoming will ultimately see to it
1
2 James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary
that ‘the fame of The Seasons will not be of long existence’.4 Yet
three years later, William Cowper, in a letter to a Mrs King,
states, again notwithstanding certain frailties of poetic style,
that Thomson ‘was however a true poet and his lasting fame has
proved it’.5Moreover, only five years later, Percival Stockdale can
look back at Thomson’s posterity and declare that ‘Perhaps no
poems have been read more generally, or with more pleasure,
than the Seasons of Thomson’.6
There is no evidence that Thomson courted the poetic fame
with which he was posthumously to be blessed. The supposition
of an innate authorial desire for fame was, even by the late seven-
teenth century, a tired conceit; and, in the following century, the
topos is in large part supplanted by poets’ publicly disavowing
the desire for, or pouring scorn on the feasibility of, a lasting
fame. Thomson, himself, seems to have been of this party: in
Liberty, for instance, he calls upon the direct inspiration of the
Goddess Liberty as he aspires to an objective ‘nobler than Poetic
fame’.7Similarly, in The Castle of Indolence, the occupants of the
wizard’s vale entertain themselves by gazing into a ‘Mirror of
Vanity’ in which one of the groups held up as epitomizing the
‘Vanity of Life’ are authors feverish for post-mortal renown:
Why, Authors, all this Scrawl and Scribbling sore?
To lose the present, gain the future Age,
Praisèd to be when you can hear no more,
And much enrich’d with Fame when useless worldly Store.8
This rebuke to fame, it should be said, figures as part of a more
general cynicism, spread by the wizard’s spell, towards energetic
pursuits of all kinds; but the suggestion that the quest for fame
must ultimately terminate in self-defeat, its possession always
deferred past the point at which it can be enjoyed by its recipient,
had already become a commonplace. Ironically, this recognition
is returned back on Thomson by Lord Lyttelton in the Prologue
he supplied for the posthumous 1749 production of Coriolanus.
Where one might have expected some rhapsodizing of the poet’s
immortal name, instead Lyttelton chooses to admonish the
growing cult of Thomson’s fame, cautioning that the poet
‘superior now to Praise or Blame,/ Hears not the feeble Voice of
Thomson’s ‘fame’ 3
Human Fame’.9 The very same point had been made in Edward
Young’s seminal poem Love of Fame: the Universal Passion
(1725–28), which mocked poets ‘who thirst for glory, strive/ To
grasp, what no man can possess alive!’; and the irony intrinsic to
posthumous applause (‘of being celebrated by generations to
come with praises which we shall not hear’) was only a year after
Lyttelton’s Prologue to be vexed over at length in Johnson’s
Rambler49 (4 September 1750).10
So much for Thomson’s fame in the fifty years or so after his
death: in our own century, his posterity has not been so uninter-
ruptedly gratifying. The tendency, evident in his own time, for
him to be identified with one work alone has become even more
pronounced. In 1951, for example, Douglas Grant entitled his
biography of the poet James Thomson: Poet of ‘The Seasons’,
capitalizing on, but also entrenching, this restrictive association.
The near erasure of Thomson as a playwright is evident perhaps
in nothing so much as the difficulty of obtaining the standard
scholarly edition of his dramatic works, John Greene’s Plays of
James Thomson; and, while Liberty and The Castle of Indolence
have received intermittent attention, the tendency has always
been to approach them as historical or biographical documents,
of interest less for themselves than for the ideas they contain.
Moreover, even The Seasonsfailed to avoid being tarnished by the
disparagement of mid-eighteenth-century verse meted out by
T.S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Leavis, for example, in his Revaluation
(1936) classes Thomson’s poetry amongst that of Gray, Dyer,
Akenside and Shenstone as not ‘bearing a serious relation to the
life of its time’, and as merely trading in the ‘literary and conven-
tional’.11
Yet on the whole the last fifty years have been buoyant ones
for the reputation of The Seasons, if not for the rest of Thom-
son’s oeuvre. Contrary to Leavis’s remark above, The Seasonshas
come to be seen as a poem remarkable for its intersection with
numerous shaping issues and phenomena of its own time. Its
appreciation in these terms is sealed as early as Alan Dugald
McKillop’s The Background of Thomson’s Seasons (1942), which
sets the poem in a range of intellectual contexts, and Marjorie
Hope Nicolson’s seminal study of literary and scientific relations
4 James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary
‘Newton Demands the Muse’: Newton’s ‘Opticks’ and the
Eighteenth Century Poets (1946) in which Thomson commands
more coverage than any other author. In a similar way, The
Seasons has proved an automatic resort for critics wanting to
analyse the language of nature description, the aesthetic category
of the sublime, the genre of georgic, the influence of Paradise
Loston Augustan verse, eighteenth-century theodicy, the idea of
‘pre-Romanticism’ and even, very recently, contemporary agri-
cultural practices.12This sense of the poem’s being multifaceted,
and therefore reflecting a multiplicity of different lights, is
further apparent in one of the landmark treatments of it, Ralph
Cohen’s The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ and
the Language of Criticism(1964), a voluminous explication not of
the poem but of the history of its interpretation. The poem, and
its reception, is used to bear witness to an unfolding literary
critical tradition.
The impression given by most criticism of The Seasons before
the 1970s is that of a poem that yields itself to a multiplicity of
perspectives but that lacks an overall coherence or ‘unifying
vision’. This question of the poem’s unity, the coherence of its
viewpoint regarding the materials it contains, has indeed become
the main point at issue in recent criticism. Ralph Cohen, for
example, in his The Unfolding of ‘The Seasons’ (1970) sees the
artistry of the work as a matter of how the poem ‘holds together’
and harmonizes the diversity and changeability of its scenes. As
the issue is posed by him, it is both an aesthetic and a philoso-
phical one: how does the poem cohere as a literary artifact? and
in what ways does it envision harmony in a world made up of
human vicissitude and natural diffuseness?
Cohen’s optimism that The Seasons does contain a unifying
vision has been the point of departure for John Barrell’s
sustained engagement with the poem.13 In his English Literature
in History, 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (1983) Barrell
reads the poem as intent on a strategy of harmonization, con-
veying to the reader the grounds on which society can be seen
as concordant and providentially disposed. This strategy is
mediated by the prospect-view, where Thomson depicts the
rural landscape as seen from the houses of the landed ‘great’.