… Because of its inherent discretion the urbane sublime is able to tolerate many apparent paradoxes. It is both high and light, sophisticated and primitive, liberal and aristocratic, elevated and capable of describing the most mundane phenomena, innovative and doggedly conventional.¹⁷ It is perhaps the presence of these contradictory impulses, rather than its unnatural inflation, that often makes modern readers ill at ease with eighteenth-century poetry, and it is certainly the persistence of contradictory impulses that makes the history of eighteenth-century poetry so baffling to write. Having used the Eton College ode to illustrate the style, I should like to turn to Thomson's Seasons in order to demonstrate the intellectual coherence underneath the superficial inconsistencies and seemingly ill-defined ideology of this poetry.

The issue is the way form constrains style. Poetic diction, in particular, has generally been studied in historical perspective, at the expense of its contextual function.¹⁸ Often, in serious as in satiric verse, a principle of com-pensation applies. Thus the Eton College ode spends its most rotund Latinity on the children's games and falls back on monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon adjectives for its more sublime and visionary moments. The passage on birds' nests in Thomson's "Spring," lines 631-86, offers an even more obvious example of this reverse decorum. On the one hand, there is a clear vertical hierarchy, with "humble" nests on the ground and the various other types sorted by altitude; the sense of propriety is strengthened by the repetition "kind Concealment," "kind Duty," "kindly Care," where "kind" has the connotation "appropriate to the species." Yet on the other hand, the tree birds build simple "Nests"; the somewhat less dignified, thievish swallow erects a somewhat more pretentious "Habitation," while the ground-nesting species are granted the noblest oratory: "humble Texture," "artful Fabrick," and even, surprisingly, "Domes" (Latin domus). Similarly, while the idle male bird, who "takes his Stand / High," is described in generally simple diction, his menial better half "assiduous sits," a bad etymological pun that elevates even as it ridicules.¹⁹

One of Thomson's hesitations illuminates the impulse behind this reverse decorum. The first version of "Win-ter" describes how cattle, when they return at evening, "ask, with meaning Low, their wonted Stalls" (line 124).²⁰ The revision, made a few months later, reveals the concealed lexical and grammatical ambiguities so typical of the urbane sublime: it changes the capitalization to "with Meaning low," thus inverting the hierarchy of adjective and noun. By means of this metamorphosis the animal noise is shown to be a meaningful speech act. The transformation is paradigmatic of the style as a whole. The urbane sublime cannot condescend to an object without elevating it. Yet neither can it express sympathy without taking cognizance of difference: the Low may have a meaning, but it is a "Meaning low." No matter how egalitarian the gestures, the sense of hierarchy is inescapable. Indeed, both leveling and gradation are implicit in the adjective-noun structure that forms the backbone of the style. Whether the adjective and noun are related as species to genus, abstract to concrete, or figurative to literal, the pairing of words almost always implies a divided perspective and yet also works to moderate the rigid stratifications of "classical" decorum.²¹

The pacing and structure of The Seasons exhibit a comparable differentiated moderation, or "art of discrimination" as Ralph Cohen has called it.²² The poem was most carefully composed and the contribution of each word duly weighed. Yet as methodically as Thom-son went to work, the constant effect is one of wandering and of choices still to be made; the tone remains deliberative rather than decisive. The poet sustains his slow progress through the year by nourishing a permanent sense of anticipation, and he typically resists temptations toward culmination.

Just as the rejection of prophecy characterizes Gray's poetry from the early "Latin Verses at Eton" ("Fata obstant; metam Parcae posuere sciendi," line 79) to the late "Descent of Odin" (where the prophetess herself commands in lines 88-89, "That never shall enquirer come / To break my iron sleep again"), so too The Seasons regularly retreats from transcendence. Thus after finding himself "in airy Vision rapt," Thomson's "every Sense / Wakes from the Charm of Thought: swift-shrinking back, / I check my Steps" ("Summer," lines 585-89; this version has been toned down from the earlier, "I stand aghast"). After a passing enthusiasm for "visionary Vales," he draws back with the line, "Or is this Gloom too much?" ("Autumn," lines 1030-37). After hymning nature's stunning impact on his "ravish'd Eye," he concedes, "But if to that unequal" (lines 1365, 1367). Most notably, the end of the whole poem subsides from present epiphany ("Winter," lines 1041-43: "And see! / 'Tis come, the glorious Morn! the second Birth / Of Heaven, and Earth") to merely predicted epiphany (1068-69: "The Storms of WINTRY TIME will quickly pass, / And one unbounded SPRING encircle All"). To the eighteenth-century rhymester, even "ecstasies" arrive "by degrees."²³ We are faced with a great intensity of ver bal energy at every point, but with a diffuse and enervating whole.

Concomitantly, the forms preferred by the age are the georgic, the progress, and the loco-descriptive poem. Each of these combines steady movement with an affectionate dwelling on particulars, and in consequence a rhetoric develops in which the compactness of the classical period is compromised by excessive itemization. The many diffuse catalogues in The Seasons are obviously deficient in rhetorical unity and focus, but even in the Eton College ode the strict triadic cadences of the opening stanzas succumb as the excitement grows:

This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.²⁴

In The Seasons this technique of discrimination by means of superfluous enumeration is related to an emphasis on gradual, deliberate order, presided over by a host of mild, intermediate divinities, each with its own realm, and with no universal controlling power in evidence. In lieu of the fixed, sculptural "stationing" that Keats praised in Milton, there is a flexible positioning; the mind tries to assign each spirit "to his Rank," but the perceptions are indistinct and changing, "ever rising with the rising Mind" ("Summer," lines 1793, 1805). Evening, that mild spirit that so entranced men's minds later in the century (see Hartman, "Evening Star"), best represents Thomson's moderation as well:

Confess'd from yonder slow-extinguish'd Clouds,
All Ether softening, sober Evening takes
Her wonted Station in the middle Air;
A thousand Shadows at her Beck. First This
She sends on Earth; then That of deeper Dye
Steals soft behind; and then a Deeper still,
In Circle following Circle, gathers round,
To close the Face of Things. A fresher Gale
Begins to wave the Wood, and stir the Stream,
Sweeping with shadowy Gust the Fields of Corn;
While the Quail clamours for his running Mate.
Wide o'er the thistly Lawn, as swells the Breeze,
A whitening Shower of vegetable Down
Amusive floats. The kind impartial Care
Of Nature nought disdains: thoughtful to feed
Her lowest Sons, and clothe the coming Year,
From Field to Field the feather'd Seeds she wings.
("Summer," lines 1647-63)

In so gentle a matriarchy as that of nature, how could life help but be pleasant? Little in Thomson's world is firm and earthbound or surging and fiery; instead, when summer's heat is not simply "Exuberant Spring," then it is almost always a liquid, "dazling Deluge" that (punningly?) "reigns" ("Summer," lines 697, 435). Indeed, Thomson is fascinated, as in the lines on Evening, with air and water, the ambient elements that allow suspended substances to move easily up and down through the many levels of existence. Above all, as the multiple puns of the lines on the mock snowfall show, air and water are "amusive," intrinsically poetical because they imitate the "musing," deliberate course of thought itself. Thomson's early Preface to "Winter" harps on this theme as it describes the temperate pleasures of his poem's "calm, wide, Survey" of nature. Poetry, he says, is associated with "the most charming Power of Imagination, the most exalting Force of Thought, the most affecting Touch of Sentiment"; it displays "a finer, and more amusing, Scene of Things"; it can "amuse the Fancy, enlighten the Head, and warm the Heart."²⁵

What passes for artifice and inconsistency is thus more adequately understood, at least in the better poetry of the century, as the easy, "musing" acceptance of shifting orders and fluid hierarchies.²⁶ This applies to politics as well as to poetic forms. Thomson, like Gray, Akenside, and the Wartons, can startle the present-day reader by simultaneously praising modern liberty and ancient privilege without any sense of strain:

Yet there is no inconsistency to such a political vision; its viability is demonstrated equally by the examples of ancient Rome and of modern Britain with her "BOUNDED KINGS" (4.1146).²⁷ Nor is there any greater inconsistency to the century's flexible conception of formal structure and poetic style. These, like the politics, reflect the poets' view of the nature of society. For if we ask what determines both the tone and the organizational sense of the urbane sublime, the answer is its social basis.

"Social" is the word that resolves the apparent paradoxes of the urbane sublime: "I believe there was never so reserved a solitary, but felt some degree of pleasure at the first glimpse of an human figure. The soul, however, unconscious of its social bias in a crowd, will in solitude feel some attraction towards the first person that we meet" (Shenstone, Men and Manners, entry 75, p. 150). The Muse, as Thomson says, is "most delighted, when she social sees / The whole mix'd Animal-Creation round / Alive, and happy" ("Autumn," lines 381-83). In the best of all possible worlds even the vegetable kingdom would be social: "Great Spring, before, / Green'd all the Year; and Fruits and Blossoms blush'd, / In social Sweetness, on the self-same Bough" ("Spring," lines 320-22). In these lines the very alliterations are sociably sorted, as often in Thomson, into neighboring pairs.²⁸ The word's range—from the nobly societal to the collegially sociable—reflects the range of the style itself, yet all the variations are reducible to a single concept, the continuous give-and-take of social intercourse….

Notes

¹⁷ … Cf. Pope's letter to Walsh, July 2, 1706: "To bestow heightening on every part is monstrous: Some parts ought to be lower than the rest," etc. (Correspondence 1:19). Similarly, in commenting on the proper way to translate Homer, Pope states in the Postscript to his translation of the Odyssey: "To read thro' a whole work in this strain is like traveling all along on the ridge of a hill; which is not half so agreeable as sometimes gradually to rise, and sometimes gently to descend, as the way leads, and as the end of the journey directs" (Poems 10: 388).

¹⁸ Perhaps this deficient attention to immediate context may excuse the insensitive attack on Thomson in Sherbo, English Poetic Diction 158-80.

¹⁹ There has still not been enough attention paid to the "deeply buried and always reticent" puns in Pope's nonsatiric verse. (The phrase is Mack's, "Wit and Poetry and Pope" 32.) Like one of Thomson's inverse decorums, for instance, the sublime, neoplatonizing treatment of nature in the Essay on Criticism is prepared by a rarefied pun that suggests the mutuality of high and low: "Would all but stoop to what they under-stand" (line 67, hyphen added). This principle of compensation is ubiquitous in the verse of the period; see, for one instance, the humble graves that "heave the crumbled Ground" in Parnell's "A Night-Piece on Death" (line 30), while the monuments of the rich are undermined by hollowness and irony; for another, see the theology of Smart's Seatonian Prize hymns, where, as Donald Marshall has written, "The style is sublimely obscure, but courteously explicates itself" ("The Development of Blank-Verse Poetry" 222).

²⁰ This line is misleadingly emended in Sambrook's text but correctly reported in his Appendix D.

²¹ "One of the more permanent functions of the word [honest] … was to soften the assertion of class, or contrariwise to maintain the assertion in a softened form" (Empson, Structure 200).

²² Cohen, The Art of Discrimination. More useful in application to literary works is Cohen's essay "On the Interrelations of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms."

²³ Thomas Warton, "Ode on the Approach of Summer," in Chalmers, English Poets 18: 106.

²⁴ For some additional remarks on the historical significance of Gray's enumerations see Tillotson, "Methods of Description." Siskin's Historicity 94-124 is a nice discussion of the way that eighteenth-century additive organization turns into romantic temporal flow and development, which he aptly calls a "positing of growth as continuous revision" (103). Where, how-ever, he sees "epistemological and ultimately spiritual limitations" in eighteenth-century "fragments whose sum approaches but cannot equal the whole" (102), I see a "middle state" that is not impelled toward totalizations.

²⁵ Thomson, Seasons, pp. 303-5. See Cohen's valuable discussions of Thomson's punning, which he calls "illusive allusion," in The Unfolding of "The Seasons " 39-40 and passim (consult index). I will not detail here all my points of agreement and disagreement with Cohen's commentary, but I would like to call attention to the excellent pages on sociability (252-92) and to what seems a misleading treatment of summer as a fiery season.

²⁶ Typical of the poets' conscious preference for loose over rigid forms is Gray's criticism of Buffon's "Love of System,… the most contrary Thing in the World to a Science, entirely grounded upon experiments, & that has nothing to do with Vivacity of Imagination" (letter to Wharton, Aug. 9, 1750, Correspondence 1:329). For more documentation see Greene's witty essay "Logical Structure."

²⁷ Cf. also Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, letter 50 (Collected Works 2: 212), which praises the "ductility of the laws" in England. Goldsmith argues that there can be more liberty and looser enforcement of the laws in aristocratic England than in a democracy because the state is stronger by nature. Barrell, in English Literature in History, gives a fine account of the flexible comprehensiveness of politics, society, and language in the period and of the unsettling dynamic that eventually bequeathed to the romantics a "crisis of social knowledge" (209); chap. 2 (51-109) concerns Thomson and John Dyer.

²⁸ In Graces of Harmony (118-36) Percy G. Adams comments copiously on Thomson's "attractive," "ear appealing," "pleasing" sound effects….