BOOKS AND WRITERS

THE SEASONS, it is safe to say, will never be the popular reading, the much-thumbed volume in hall, parlour and public house, that it once was. Yet there is so much in it whicli should, to use a phrase of Dryden's, delight the reasonable reader. What militates chiefly against it is its chaotic structure, not inherent in the original conception—the first version of " Winter" is a wholly coherent piece—but because of the various additions Thomson could not resist putting into it. He became lost and embrangled in a mass of material which excited him enormously, but not all of which he could intuitively apprehend. So as his knowledge grew—led by an ever-active curiosity—he fitted in new bits, and enlarged or corrected existing pieces ; and thus the poem swelled, not indeed so catastrophically as did in the next century Bailey's Festus or Tupper's Pioverbial Philosophy, but enough to destroy whatever organic unity the poem might have had. It became in the end the most extraordinary hotchpotch of.direct and sensitive observation and the poet's nervous response, landscape painting- " Whateer Lorrain light-touched with softening hue, Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew " perhaps adorned with figures ; of moralising, praises of that wedded love denied him by the obduracy of Miss Elizabeth Young, senti- mental anecdote and humanitarianism, light satire, history and geography, patriotism and panegyrics on politicians of the Opposi- tion, applied science, glances back to a golden age incompatible with an almost simultaneous anticipation of a similar future perfection of living (" What cannot active Government perform, New-moulding Man ? "). Added to these are the latest events and discoveries, the aurora borealis of March, 1716, Newton with prism and telescope, the plague at Marseilles, botanists with microscopes, prison reformers, travellers' reports and so on. The numberless details are fagoted together, you might say, by an extraordinary rope of difficult concepts and conflicting assumptions twisted close, with, as a dimly pervasive thread, especially in the " Hymn," a sentimental optimistic Deism, based partly on the Stoics, partly on the latest results of natural philosophy.

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The chief impulse which drove Thomson on was the excitement due to the discoveries of Newton and the scientists generally, the excitement of seeing how creative Nature worked, a fairly diffused state of mind which might well be called a Renaissance of wonder. Many asked as Thomson did in his admirable lines on Newton: "Did ever poet image aught so fair Dreaming in-whispering groves by the hoarse brook?

Or prophet, to whose rapture heaven descends? "

And he is only one of the many cosmic poets of the time. Yet wonder was not enough—it might do for a country bumpkin—ant the thinking man went beyond thts• to a conception of the moral governance of the universe, and a solution of the problem of evil.

With all this Thomson presents us in a sort of way that no other poet has done ; and he invites us to share the sensibility from which it all springs in a poem which has passages which are indubitable poetry.

* ' * * * You may, it is true, find his Miltonism tiresome ; you may find it even harder to get over some of his rocky latinisms and his pet words—his diffusives, effusives, amusives, and so on—or again his too frequent use of adjectives where we use adverbs. But once you get used to his idiom, the variation within it becomes fascinating and, what is more, expressive, as does such a departure from his sometimes monotonous prosody as the surprising and effective

"And shiver ev'ry feather with desire."

For he achieved freedom in his meiljum, breaking away from the occasionally too conscious " sublime," into colloquialism, sensi- tive description, warm friendliness, or generous argument. Often the word, the colouring, the rhythm are exquisitely adapted to what he wanted to say. Take, in " Autumn," his description of the breeding- places of sea-birds: "Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls

Boils round the naked melancholy isles Of farthest Thule, and th' Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."

The metric form—together with the borrowing from " Lycidas "- we feel is justified. Thomson moreover had learnt to vary and develop the metres, as we can see in continuing the passage: " Who can recount what transmigrations there

Are annual ddide? What nations come and go? And how the living clouds on clouds arise? Infinite wings! till all the plume-dark air, And white resounding shore are one wild cry." That superb iamb-spondee conclusion is certainly not Miltonic. But it is poetry of its own distinctive kind. * * The Seasons, a poem basically about climate and light, may have its longueurs, but it has its precious glories. Liberty, a poem about civilisation, has some memorable passages ; but Britannia, what we would call a war-mongering poems is to be read once only, to mark the few good lines that are worth going back to. The Castle of Indolence is the relish of in acquired taste ; the often gawky Spenserisms are, in the Johnsonian sense, disgusting ; and indeed it is only when Thomson forgets that he is imitating Spenser that he becomes attractively Spenserian. The liking for it grows ; it begins after a time to haunt the memory, and it is shot with humour.

* * * What this sociable poet was like to meet and know, the circle in which he *moved, his origins, his development, his unlucky love- affair, his dramas and all that belonged to the poet and his medium, are sympathetically, indeed more than sympathetically, put before us in the best. biography of Thomson that has yet been written.* Though Prof. Grant here eschews criticism, you cannot write about a poet without a good deal discussing his poetry, and Mr. Grant has skilfully and with great tact merged the two. His most important contribution to our knowledge is his publishing the letters Thomson wrote to Miss Young, and showing how Thomson's experiences are reflected in the later versions of The Seasons, and his play Tancred and Sigismunda. Unfortunate love here certainly helped the poet —though he was too "diffusive," and the play had to be drastically cut—as it did not when he wrote to Miss Young a poem which includes what must be one of the most execrable couplets in the language: " Father of Love, come on! and, as along Thy Pomp proceeds, I first begin the Song."

The poem, however, which has not been published before, "never falters in the tenderness and forthrightness of its sentiments," as Mr. Grant says, while deploring some of the rhymes and some of the metre, and is a biographical document of some importance.

Thomson moved easily in the setting Mr. Grant describes for us, in the main the cultured aristocracy which encouraged the arts but sometimes too heavily impressed its ideas upon its poets. Lyttelton, in long sessions at Hagley, tried unsuccessfully to remodel Thomson's diction and modify his Deism ; but the group, which also influenced Pope, with all its charm and graciousness, and in the main its high intellectual standard, too' easily ensnared its followers in its net of political propaganda. Mi. 'Grant himself is something of a victim, for though the patriotism of the author of " Rule Britannia " is beyond question, Fielding's jibe that "a patriot is one desirous of a place at Court " does not altogether miss the truth, of which we get no hint in this book.' It is, however, right for a biographer to be on the side of his sitter.

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It was possibly the conversation of the aristocratic intellectuals which to some extent diverted Thomson from his original path as a landscape painter, and made him the carrier of scientific theory to 'the reading masses. He twice altered a passage in The Seasons to conform with the varying theories as to the origins of hillside springs. But if Thomson had remained merely the descriptive writer, which his age would not have wholly approved, he would not have imparted the sense of wonder at how it all came about. He was in many ways indolent, a curious mixture of the almost-lethargic and the vivacious, warm and eager in his friendships, though sometimes lax in maintaining them. But for the intellectual spur of scientific discovery he might have lapsed into a merely musing poet, main- tained chiefly by sentimentality. As it is, he comes out differently in the humane portrait Mr. Grant gives us, lovable, alive, careless as to worldly matters, companionable—a solitude from which you could see the spires of London was his rural choice—and, though " more fat than bard beseems," very much a poet. • BONAMY DOBIttE.

• James Thomson. Poet of " The Seasons." By Douglas Grant. (Cressett Press. I8s.)