1 This is a refinement," adds Pemberton, "which seems to have arisen by time. In Homer we often find the commonest things expressed by their plain names.” 1 "The style of a didactic poem," Joseph Warton asserted a few years later, ..ought certainly to abound in the most bold and forcible metaphors, the most glowing and picturesque epithets; it ought to be elevated and enlivened by pomp of numbers, and majesty of words, and by every figure that can lift a language above the vulgar and current expressions. "2 As late as 1785 John Scott, himself a pleasing poet, criticized Thomson for using such a "wretched prosaism" as "to tempt the trout" or "stealing from the barn a straw," and for speaking of birds' "streaking their wings with oil" instead of "moistening their plumage with an oleaginous matter." Even Johnson, who hated blank verse and all its works, praised the diction of The Seasons, though he regarded it as "too exuberant." But how could he have condemned it in view of his own pompous Latinisms and the "relaxation of his gravity" caused by Shakespeare's use of the words "peep," "blanket,” "dun," and "knife" in a tragedy? 5 One contemporary reviewer asserted that Thomson excelled "in the real sublime, in a strength and justness both of thought and expression"; and the critical Swift, though "not over fond of " The Seasons "because . . . nothing is doing," did not mention its turgidity.' Many, to be sure, who approved of Thomson's general practice censured some of his expressions or thought he went too far. Thus we read in Cibber's Lives (1753), "Mr. Thomson's poetical diction in the Seasons is very peculiar to him. . . . He has introduced a number of compound words; converted substantives into verbs, and in short has created a kind of new language for himself. His stile has been blamed for its singularity and stiffness. . . yet is it admirably fitted for description," since, "though its exterior form should not be comely," it enables him to paint nature "in all its lustre." 1 Observations on Poetry, 86-7. 2 Works of Virgil (1753), i. 403-4. • Andrew Reid, Present State of the mine. 6 3 Critical Essays, 316, 309, 316, 301. 4 Lives (ed. Hill), iii. 300. 5 Rambler, no. 168. Republick of Letters (1728), i. 430. The italics are 7 Letter to Charles Wogan, Aug. 2, 1732. 8 Joseph Warton, for example, granted that "the diction of the Seasons is sometimes... turgid and obscure," but added immediately, "yet is this poem on the whole one of the most captivating . . . in our language (Essay on Pope, 4th ed., 1782, i. 43). In his blank-verse Enthusiast, which is itself not without turgidity, he praises Thomson as one "who strongly painted what he boldly thought" (Wooll's Biographical Memoirs of Warton, 1806, p. 117; cf. Autumn, 57–64). 9 v. 202-3. In the same paragraph there is a reference to "the tow'ring sublimity of Mr. Thomson's stile." 1 At this time, as we know, it was an accepted principle that the language of poetry should be widely separated from that of prose, that homely words like "blanket" or "knife," and 'terms appropriated to particular arts,' like "seam" or "mallet," "should be, sunk in general expressions." Pope and his contemporaries found Homer and the Bible much too simple and matter-of-fact, and therefore adorned them with tinsel and "raised" them with vague, highsounding, inappropriate words. Even prose, under the guidance of Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, and their followers, returned to the traditions of rhetorical elaboration, becoming Latinic and structurally involved. The Swan of Lichfield thought liberty "a thousand times preferable to the dispiriting fetters of an unimpassioned connexion,' and referred to language which "had every happiness of perspicuity, and always expressed rectitude of heart and susceptibility of taste.' That any human being, much less an important literary personage, could habitually express herself after this fashion, is far more difficult to understand than is the turgidity of The Seasons. 2 Even among Thomson's contemporaries, however, there were those who objected to his style and diction. Johnson, as we have seen, remarked mildly that it was "too exuberant," and Cibber acknowledged that it had been "blamed for its singularity and stiffness." Curiously enough, John Scott - he who favored "moistening their plumage with an oleaginous matter"-wrote that Thomson, "in attempting energy and dignity, produces bombast and obscurity; and in avoiding meanness, becomes guilty of affectation." Lyttelton and his friends were so much disturbed by the diction of The Seasons that in the edition of the poem which his lordship, as Thomson's literary executor, brought out in 1750 "great corrections" were made and "many redundancies . . . cut off." 4 The world, however, preferring the original with its redundancies, justified Patrick Murdoch, the poet's friend and biographer, in declaring, "Certain it is, that T[homson]'s language has been well receiv'd by the publick." " 1 Johnson, Rambler, no. 168; "Dryden," in Lives (ed. Hill), i. 433. 2 Letters, iv. 179; Memoirs of Dr. Darwin (1804), 110. 3 Critical Essays (1785), 296. ' Lyttelton's letter to Dr. Doddridge, quoted in Macaulay's Thomson, 75. See also above, p. 140, n. 2. • From an undated letter to Andrew Millar, in Wooll's Biographical Memoirs of Joseph Warton, 256-7. Murdoch recommended "my Lord's acquaintances . . . to read Milton with care, and the greatest part of their objections would vanish." So late as 1821 Rowland Freeman (Kentish Poets, Canterbury, 1821, ii. 113) quoted the whole of Thomas Curteis's egregiously stilted and distorted Eirenodia (see p. 112 above), because it "has in many parts great merit, and is a very good specimen of the Miltonic style." The truth of this assertion is borne out not only by the remarkable vogue of the poem, but by the adoption, with little conscious modification, of the language, diction, and style of The Seasons on the part of most contemporary writers of blank verse. Even the cold, fastidious Akenside made use of them, and in the unrimed work of Shenstone, who lacked neither taste nor discernment, their peculiarities are far more conspicuous than in The Seasons itself. To most writers of the time these mannerisms appeared attractive in themselves as well as an essential feature of all pleasing blank verse, since they solved a difficulty which had previously seemed insurmountable, — how to beat into ploughshare and pruning-hook the mighty sword and spear that had been forged for the combats of archangels. Previous writers, it was felt, had not done this, or, if they had, the results were uninteresting, which came to the same thing. Most of these adventurers had been wrecked either in the Charybdis of flat prose, near which protruded the rocks of the couplet prosody, or on the Scylla of epic bombast; the few who escaped had, with the exception of Philips, been lost in the great deep of oblivion. Before 1726, therefore, authors did not know what kind of blank verse to write, or if they did they were unable to write it effectively and for that reason usually left it alone. But as soon as it was generally recognized that Thomson had discovered a good course they promptly followed him, with the result that his vices came to be so firmly fastened upon blank verse that they persisted almost to the end of the century. Indeed, the development of the poetry written in the measure from his time to Wordsworth's is in the main a record of its gradual emancipation from the faults which The Seasons brought into vogue. But it is a mistake to attribute all that is objectionable in Thomson to the influence of the poetry of his day, since in point of fact his language and style are related to that poetry less as a result than as a cause. They are, as we have seen, in large part the outgrowth of his own natural predilections (which, it must not be forgotten, were of Scottish not English origin) and of the example of Milton. Something much like them, to be sure, is to be found in the work of his predecessors, in Cyder, the Splendid Shilling, and other burlesques, in translations of the classics, in epics, and in works in which the Deity is a character; but, aside from Cyder, such productions obviously form a class by themselves apart from most literature, and many of even these pieces are comparatively free from the exaggerated Miltonisms of later unrimed poems. It is possible, therefore, that if Thomson had adopted a simpler method of expres sion other writers would have done the same and eighteenth-century blank verse would have developed along quite different lines. Such a supposition, however, proceeds on the very dubious assumptions that a more natural blank verse could have been written effectively in 1726, and that, if written, it would have been popular. If Wordsworth's simplicity seemed stupidity in 1798, what would it have been thought in 1726? If the strains of Tintern Abbey, Michael, and Alastor fell on deaf ears in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, what chance would Winter, in equally unadorned verse, have had a hundred years earlier? Furthermore, Thomson himself used a more direct and natural form of expression in his first efforts, but apparently saw, as every one has seen since, that it was not a success. Who, then, shall say he was not right in deliberately adopting a more ornate manner? has "The blank verse of The Seasons," writes Mr. Beers, ".. been passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet."1 Admirers of the poem may at first resent this criticism, but they will find more and more evidence of its truth as they examine the prosody of Thomson. He did not have a delicate ear, and probably missed many of the finer harmonies of Milton's verse, which, it will be remembered, was in 1725 admired far more than it was understood. He repeatedly uses lines of the same marked cadence, has pauses in the same places in successive lines, and seems to have given no heed to inversions of accent, if indeed he was conscious of them. At the beginning of a line he, like Pope and the other classicists, frequently has a trochee, but with this exception there are only eleven inversions of the stress in the first three hundred lines of Summer.3 In the same passage there are, as I read it, but eighty run-over lines,* or less 1 2 1 English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (N. Y., 1899), 11I. 2 The oft-noted examples of this habit, And Cancer reddens with the solar blaze, And Mecca saddens at the long delay, And Thule bellows through her utmost isles, And the sky saddens with the gathered storm (Summer, 44, 821, 859, 979, 1168, Winter, 228), can hardly be used, as Mr. Saintsbury suggests (English Prosody, ii. 479), to emphasize the ends of paragraphs, since the first and last instances quoted occur near the beginnings of paragraphs. Cf. also Summer, 833, and Mr. Macaulay's discussion of the subject in his Thomson, 166–7. * So, at least, says Léon Morel in his James Thomson (Paris, 1895), 470. I find even fewer. • According to Robertson's edition, 108 lines are without punctuation at the end. than twenty-seven per cent, as against forty-five per cent in Paradise Lost and about six per cent in the Essay on Man. Much of the prosodic variety of The Seasons comes from a slighting of the stresses, one of which is passed over in nearly every line. The cesura is not managed so well; for, though it falls in or after the first foot more often than it does in Paradise Lost, it is usually near the middle of the line.1 Occasionally Thomson has such a line as or Flames through the nerves, and boils along the veins, Bright as the skies, and as the season keen,2 which might have come from Pope's Essay on Criticism. Much more common, however, are two or three lines that fall into unrimed couplets or triplets, a number of which now and then come together to form a passage like the following: Yet found no times, in all the long research, The truth seems to be that when off his guard Thomson relapsed into writing not metrical paragraphs but separate lines, and that he had to exert himself to vary his pauses and to avoid a slight break after every tenth syllable. The freer prosody was unquestionably what he preferred, but the end-stopped line with a medial cesura and rare trochaic substitutions was, so to speak, in his blood and inevitably showed itself. How well he succeeded in freeing himself from it we may see by comparing his juvenile blank verse, in which almost every line stands by itself, with his later work. He did much better than most writers of the time, because he had a clearer understanding of Milton's prosody and a heartier liking for it. Thomson's six or eight other unrimed poems - one of which, Liberty, contains nearly thirty-four hundred lines - need not detain 1 In the first fifty lines of Summer I find the cesuras occurring as follows: 1-5 (i. e. five times after the first syllable), 2-5, 3-3, 4-11, 5-12, 6-11, 7-5, 8-2, 9-0. Compare their distribution in the first fifty lines of the Essay on Man: 1-3, 2-7, 3-2, 4-11, 5-18, 6-7, 7-4, 8-4, 9–0. * Spring, 1104; Winter, 703 (cf. 485, 677, 836–7, and Liberty, ii. 24, 26, 31, 37, 40, etc.). 1 Summer, 1508-15. The prosody of the preceding forty lines is much the same. |