SOURCE: "Observer and Observed in Eighteenth-Century Literature," in The Self Observed: Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972, pp. 7-32.

While James Thomson shares with Pope such contemporary aspirations as synthesis, civilization, and universal harmony, he necessarily shaped them into a different vision. Thomson seems to have been neither alienated nor overtly idiosyncratic. Aside from a line in Winter about his boyhood joys in storms and a stanza or two in The Castle of Indolence on his poetic ambitions, he did not break the generic limitations of the poeta to speak of his own career or condition. He left few letters or documents, and these reveal no more about obvious mental patterns than we can gather from the anecdotes of his friends about his laziness, his mild sensuality, or his eager good nature. For us, the idiosyncratic elements in his poetic imagination must be derived mainly from the poems themselves. In his two main poems, The Seasons and Castle of Indolence, those personal characteristics become, I think, major principles of organization; and Thomson can be evidence that we do not need oddities verging on neurosis to provide critically useful patterns of self-vision in the poetry.

Perhaps because Thomson is much less pressed than Pope by reveries of aggression, eminence, and opposition, he can more directly use fiction to convey the peculiar tensions which characterized the life of the poet, and therefore the life of the self. In the "allegory" of The Castle of Indolence, Thomson develops two competing roles of the poet, Magician and Knight, between whom the narrative persona must choose. Their opposition takes place both in the mind of the poet-everyman and in society, as Thomson's projection of the self separates into self-indulgent dreamer and adventuring doer, sensualist and craftsman, hedonist and social reformer. Like Fielding in Tom Jones, Thomson tries to synthesize those divisions by urging the artist to send his fancies out in shaped art to show mankind its proper study and, in the process, to improve the health of his own mind. In opposing reverie and social reality, Thomson maintains his extraordinary representativeness. Almost all eighteenth-century English literature implies that the public and private are equivalents or parallels of the real outer world and the world of fantasy, and only in the greatest works—The Rape of the Lock, Tom Jones, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Emma—does fusion occur. More usually, as in other periods, its art suffers from the didactic fission of Thomson's Canto II, of Gray's Progress of Poesy, or of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.

In his letters, in the formal lecture of Canto II, and in general where he speaks as a moral observer, Thomson endorses the vision of man assuming social obligations rather than withdrawing into dreams, of didactic art and not selfish reverie. But as a poet and pilgrim in a painful world, the acting self finds the pleasures of the imagination seductive. In The Castle of Indolence, the setting and the castle itself serve as the seed ground for the imagination, which provides its own appurtenances: the silent shadowy forms which move about the valley, cousins of Pope's shimmering sylphs and uncles of Gray's bards, here as elsewhere Thomson's suggestions of poetic inspiration; the visions that come before half-closed eyes; the sanctum itself, "Close-hid … mid embowering Trees" (st. vii), the retired and dreaming mind which draws struggling mankind into pilgrimage. Since the Poet-Magician openly feeds man's secret wish, indolent reverie, he affects the pilgrims compulsively (st. xxii); he plays on them, our substitutes, like a hot seducer on a half-reluctant girl (st. xxiii), to melt her to his will and her own pleasurable loss.

Beginning with stanza xxviii, the self-conscious author uses the castle, a refuge in the mind for the indulgence of fantasies, as a device by which to maintain his control over alternative selves and worlds, to move back and forth between fantasy and actuality. The Hebridean shepherd (st. xxx), a figure in the persona's imagination like the other surrounding images of withdrawal into the self, has visions like the persona's, even refining the filminess of reverie. Pinched by his responsible universal self (sts. xxxi and xxxii), the persona promises to resume his social obligations as a poet, but he is drawn back by the castle's seductions, which include tapestries, music, cushions, even a fleeting tickle of sexuality in the reference to the harem bard. The culminating symbol of this sequence, a response to the sound effects of sublimely titillating storms (st. xliii), neatly and ironically contrasts with similar scenes at the center of Winter: the warm poet feeding on his imagination indoors, refusing to deal with insistent reality outside. Lulled to sleep by the noise of the storm, the mind has withdrawn to voluptuous, incoherent dreams beyond the power of poetry to follow (st. xlv); in the figure of man before us, activity in the world has been abandoned along with the capacity to evaluate the world.

But the persona has only been speculating on his sleeping condition and observing a contingency that he can still choose to avoid. Immediately (sts. xlvi-xlviii), the world of moral responsibility warns him that the reveries stirred by art, except for elegiac and pastoral memories, are hollow. They waste life as thoroughly, though not as obviously, as the busy mindlessness that repudiates imagination and therefore make us insects. From stanzas xlix to lv, Thomson uses the mirror of folly to satirize the activities repellent to any form of poetic temperament: the self-seeking routine of affairs which provides neither beauty nor improvement, the extreme practicality that balances the sterile imaginings of sleep. As a reminder of these last, and a return to the choices actually open to the persona, the blocked poeta of stanzas lvii-lx is a case study of the inability to break from visions to their expression, an artist who suffers awake from dreams that he cannot objectify. The same impotence appears in the last two stanzas in the canto by Thomson (lxxii and Ixxiii), which show a further sense of the real dangers of indolence: the gangrene in the secret mind, where self-indulgence has eroded the will and the reason. As most of Thomson's contemporaries would have agreed, the final horror is the self-imprisoned mind.

In Canto II the poet chooses the preeminently social self, dedicated from birth to labor for civilization, improvement, and fruitfulness, as his representative. The Knight of Arts and Industry, whose celebration is to constitute the return to vigor of the persona's imagination (st. iv), grew up close to nature, but under the rigorous tutelage of Minerva and the muses he learned to practice all the arts and sciences. Like a poet from Scotland facing the challenge of England.

Accomplish'd thus he from the Woods issu'd,
Full of great Aims, and bent on bold Emprize….
To-wit, a barbarous World to civilize.
(st. xiv)

Naturally, the Knight makes his seat in Britain, the symbol and ideal vision of a human society that opposes the Magician's castle of solipsism. As the Magician lures the active energies to languish and fester inwards, so the Knight (with the help of his bard Philomelus) brings them out to healthy involvement. In a major attack (sts. xlvii lxiii), the old bard balances the Magician's song in the first canto, by calling for light, air, nature, and adventure; by repudiating the alternative as capitulating to death; and by advocating a great spurt from one's central will to overcome inertia. On another front, the Knight waves his wand to show the confirmed indolent the delusiveness of their happiness, the rottenness of their private withdrawal, and the inevitability of destruction unless they reform immediately. The last stanzas, lxxviii-lxxxi, show the hell that awaits the incurable, a vision of the true Castle of Indolence: a wasteland ruled by Beggary and Scorn, the bogeys of the conscientious bourgeoisie. The wavering self—the persona, the pilgrims, all those not totally drugged by routine activities—must renounce fruitless reverie and seek social art if it is to save itself, do its duty, and please the observing self which stands for the judgment of universal man.

Thomson's sympathy with the archetypal adventure into the world and the corollary pattern of release of energies—at least a parallel of his movement from Scotland to poetic achievement in England, if not its direct image—is central also in The Seasons (particularly in Spring) and notable in Liberty and the less ambitious poems. His good consists in the principle of expansion, excursion, flowing out into the world. As in The Castle of Indolence he conceives the imagination as containing treasures deep within the self, so he everywhere senses potentialities, hidden possibilities awaiting light and flower, and he therefore affirms the value of piercing into the essence, leading it out, allowing it to radiate and create. Any agent for bringing it out, for fructifying or civilizing, imitates the sun or God. In Spring, for example, Thomson implies a fertile cycle, a hope of the future to come from the present, in his parallel of the hidden flower manifesting its energies as it blooms and the poet, "me," leaving the town for the country, where

the raptured eye
Hurries from joy to joy, and, hid beneath
The fair profusion, yellow Autumn spies….
(ll. 111-13)

Heaven "sheds" various plants on nature, and "Swift fancy fired anticipates their growth" (l. 183), the seed within the mind responding to the hidden potentiality outside. The sun is the prototype of those who seize hidden truths (ll. 394-95); a fisherman brings treasures out of the depths (l. 396 ff.); a beloved girl has "looks demure that deeply pierce the soul" (l. 486), awakening its vital responses. From line 578 to the concluding domestic ideal, a number of images of drawing out, pouring in, and gripping the core convey the surge to life and growth in spring, within men as in external nature.

The complex of piercing into and leading out, of hidden value and treasure (and sometimes mystery or danger) is too fundamental in Thomson's imaginative vision of the world, too congenial for his mind in its attempts to grasp phenomena, to be limited to one season, and we find many examples of it elsewhere. In Summer, the dominating sun appears fully, after having been covered, a treasure released to man's and nature's benefit (l. 81 ff.). Its "quickening glance" brings the planets to life (l. 105), causes the vegetable world to ripen, and even, as its vital energy penetrates deep, impregnates rocks to fill diamonds with light (ll. 140-44). When the secret recess of one lover evokes and responds to messages from the other, man participates in the divinely Shaftesburian attributes of union, as in a central episode of Summer, a story in which a girl is revealed in awesome nudity to a boy who loves her (ll. 1269-1370). In Autumn, the emergence of pastoral love develops as myth, the story of Palemon and Lavinia hinting of Ceres and Persephone as well as its more direct model in the Book of Ruth (ll. 177-310). Cycles, implied in these myths, are central to Thomson's presentation of Winter as part of a hopeful world, and so in the last part of The Seasons

The front-concocted glebe
Draws in abundant vegetable soul,
And gathers vigour for the coming year.
(ll. 706-8)

Near the seat of Winter, Peter the Great adventured forth like Thomson and the Knight of Arts and Industry, found the needed knowledge, and out of mingled love, courage, and duty nurtured the seeds of civilization in his subjects.

At the center of Spring, as at the center of the world's living activities, is the impelling force, the eager excursive energy, of love, a form taken by the divine Adventurer which can provide worthy man with the core of motivation. When tracing "Nature's great command" (l. 634) to increase and multiply, Thomson presents the elements of this force that man can comprehend, a complex latent in the whole poem: all creation is driven by Spring, which connects fertility, adventurous explorations, even the sex and warfare of raging bulls (direct from a similar engagement in Virgil's third Georgic), and indescribably violent sea monsters, to show that all movement feeds life. Though not so extensively as Spring (the poem of birth), the other Seasons and the lesser poems also reflect a universe of fertility, movement, and variety. Even Winter shows life everywhere but at the seat of the god, with birds in all the skies, peasants on Dutch canals, and wolves and bears prowling across polar regions. As against Pope's universe of careful shadings, Thomson's is a harmony of profusion and bold contrasts. Though he shares with Pope a perfectly artistic universe, he adores not the subtle Manipulator of light and shade but the brave, spectacular Impresario.

Thomson's social and psychological corollary of his vision of a universe harmonized by love is fruitful and serene civilization: both for him and for Pope, civilization is imaged as an eminence constantly endangered by barbarism. In Summer, as in The Castle of Indolence and Liberty, England is the hope and nourishment of the world, an emblem of the divinely fruitful (ll. 1400 ff., 1440), an island which sheds benevolence and humanity through encircling storms (ll. 1595-1601). In the middle of Autumn (l. 480 ff.), idyllically busy peasants at harvest, awakened Scottish industry, poets in their inspiring groves, and the learned man superior to superstition and folly (l. 1135), all must replace the preceding vision of the brutal days and sordid nights of hunters. Winter, like Canto II of The Castle, celebrates the civilizers who can bring warmth to the frozen soul: natural philosophers like Newton, social scientists humanely investigating prisons, Lords Wilmington and Chesterfield, Peter the Great, and the central roll call of the great cultural heroes of history, all hoping to draw truth and harmony out of the mixed confusion of phenomena. The Knight of Arts and Industry may not be our ideal, but in the vision of progress, in Thomson's lecture to himself to assume his social obligations, he is Thomson's. Ranging the world for visions of man acting in it, Thomson's warm-hearted and open-natured observer in The Seasons, as in The Castle of Indolence, chooses the acting, outgoing, social self.

As might be expected, evil for Thomson is everywhere the perversion or negation of the good, the Castle's poles of the sleeping mind and the barbarous aggressions in the mirror of folly. The images are similar to those of civilizing adventure but carry opposing implications, Thomson's mind apprehending the pattern of a darting force (analogous perhaps to gravity) in the moral universe. In Spring, Thomson shows that while God educes harmony from nature, the fallen human mind is the seat of chaos, which activates a series of painful passions (l. 272 ff.). Decay is now erosion, "inward-eating change," as against creative piercing to the core (l. 334). Summer, celebrating a "sublime" seasons when God's might is more visible than his love, manifests brutality in man and nature. After barbarous man, the hidden snake, and the roar of the lion, the sublimity of Africa culminates in the archetypal horror of the shipwrecked solitary (l. 939), a horror sharpened for Thomson because it subverts adventurous hopes. Moving out of the self, out of the protected past, one may reap expressiveness, discovery, and social usefulness, but one may also founder in bitter isolation. Winter shrouds the last agonies of death as Summer heated the passions of barbarism, and man's own core suffers superlative agony:

The soul of man dies in him, loathing life,
And black with more than melancholy views.
(ll. 61-62)

From its lair, "Then issues forth the storm with sudden burst" (l. 154), mocking the loving movement of the springtime sun, or the latent seeds of life, or the hidden truth, or the poet's vision. Horrible ghosts howl out of groves (l. 192), which in earlier sections had been inspiring shades. From the east and north,

Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb
A vapoury deluge lies, to snow congealed.
(l. 225)

The heart of winter's domain shoots out wolves to perpetrate a series of horrors, which culminate in their digging up and eating the most sublime of forbidden treasure, recently buried corpses (l. 410). At the North Pole itself, the god holds his court of death (l. 895)—an absolute zero of activity, in contrast with the divine center, the world's source of energy and intensity.

Although Thomson usually seeks the hearts of moral nature and of social man, he at times raises his search to the divine, which he characteristically apprehends as a creative point. In Spring, for example, the apostrophe to God conceives of Him as a secret element in the center of being:

Hail, Source of Being! Universal Soul
Of heaven and earth! Essential Presence, hail!
(ll. 556-57)

Summer ends in a vision of Philosophy darting through the universe, ranging from matter to the idea of God, to the "ideal kingdom," through the imagination to "notion quite abstract," finally to the indefinable mystery. A Hymn on the Seasons, like the end of Summer, conceives the highest sense as silent rapture: contemplating God,

I lose
Myself in him, in light ineffable!

In A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, Thomson is equally at home with the sublimity appropriate to visions of the earth and heavens. He reveres Newton, he says, because it was he

whose well-purg'd penetrating Eye,
The mystic Veil transpiercing, inly scan'd
The rising, moving, wide-establish'd Frame.

His soul transcended the human; it surveyed the universe at large, reached toward its source (l. 130), and imitated God's position as observer and motivator above and beyond the local. As Spring (ll. 210-12) and Summer (l. 805 ff.) also suggest, such adventuring over space and time is parallel to the divine, particularly in piercing, discovering, and showing forth the millennially obscured; and in Autumn, Thomson asks where "the vast eternal springs" are hidden, "like creating Nature" from the mortal eye, and he wants the answer provided by

the pervading genius, given to man
To trace the secrets of the dark abyss.
(ll. 777-79)

Using what has been brought back, on the other hand, is the province of the ambiguously human arts and industry. While purging man of the brutal and the indolent, the civilizing process also endangers the innocent, the personal, and the imaginative.

Since the step before the Fall, the setting out from within the self to seek the divinely hidden core, is free of such destructive tendencies, for Thomson it constitutes the purest movement of which man is capable: fusing the scientific and the artistic in the imaginative in imitation of God. Both alternative motives that he sensed in his nature—the pulls to imaginative withdrawal and to adventurous involvement—can draw together in the divine art of civilizing. In this very process of uniting the imaginative and the practical, the civilizer (every man's Knight of Arts and Industry) must moderate the divine for a fallen world. Bringing the earthly into his view, man becomes a judge not only of it but also of the divine within himself….