Rutherford’s Landscapes

David J. Parkinson

The literary affinities of the seventeenth-century Presbyterian apologist Samuel Rutherford emerge in his elaboration of some descriptive contrasts characteristic of late-medieval and early modern Scottish poetry. Significant connections appear be- tween the interweaving of the earthly and heavenly in Scottish depictions of the pleasant place and the enfolding of the anti-secular and maternal in Rutherford’s landscapes. At such junctures, Rutherford is participating in the shaping of a national literary canon, a project gaining momentum in seventeenth-century . Keywords: Patrick Anderson; George Buchanan; James Caldwell; Geoffrey Chaucer; The Complaynt of Scotland; ; Alexander Hume; Sir Patrick Hume; James VI; landscape; Sir ; Blessed Virgin Mary; ; James Melville; pastoral; Presbyterianism; Samuel Rutherford.

Despite ongoing renovations, a “historical Myth – that the Scottish consciousness was disastrously split by the Union with England” (Crawford 1979: 9) still obstructs our understanding of the literature written in Scotland between the two Unions of 1603 and 1707. By setting a limit in the study of (Jack 1997: x), this myth continues to serve a certain intellectual thrift, thanks to which, literary culture in seventeenth-century Scotland remains largely unex- amined. Beyond the same few names – notably the “unrepresentative” Drummond, Ayton, and Urquhart (Gribben 2006: 66) – the century is labelled retrospective, even stagnant (Riddy 1988: 51; Spiller 1988: 143). Such a representation has become untenable: in seventeenth- century Scotland, literary affiliations and continuities may be experi- mental but are seldom arid or nostalgic; they indicate the cultivation of sustainable rich grounds rather than the stoic endurance of loss upon loss. Stocked with themes and genres that have not withered but rather grown increasingly accessible and multi-layered during the unfolding Reformation, Scottish literary culture broadens, gaining readers and writers across the political, social, regional, and religious landscape. The gravitational pull of the court having weakened with its removal to London, textual communities and individual literary identities proliferate at home (Mapstone 2005: 414). A penchant for thematic and stylistic juxtapositions distinguishes this culture; during 178 David J. Parkinson

the seventeenth century, this penchant tends to extremes, not only in the places where it might be expected – Sir Thomas Urquhart’s version of Rabelais for example – but at least as much in Samuel Rutherford’s gendered depictions of the self and the deity in the beau- tiful landscape. In his sometimes outrageous variations on the pleasant landscape, this Presbyterian writer is working out a coherent pattern of mutual accessibility between the divine and the human, one deeply rooted in Scottish literary tradition.1 In Scottish literary studies, admittedly, the seventeenth century is rarely considered in terms of continuity, health, or abundance: instead, it is taken to epitomise George Gregory Smith’s whimsical “Cale- donian antisyzygy”, a coinage redolent more of pathology than literature (Chandler 1994: 218). Smith illustrates the clash of opposites implicit in the term: he produces two cultural villains, “the preaching and arguing Scot of the seventeenth century” and “the neo- classical Scot of the eighteenth” (Smith 1919: 37). Confronted with these decisive categories, the reader might be forgiven for forgetting Smith’s preceding, subtle investigation of “that prevailing sense of movement, that energy and variety” in Scottish literature (34). Smith owes this emphasis on the dynamic to William Hazlitt’s essay “On the Picturesque and Ideal”; the phenomenon of the picturesque, which Hazlitt investigates principally in the painting of landscape, involves “particular points or qualities of an object, projecting as it were be- yond the middle line of beauty, and catching the eye of the spectator”, and “may be considered as something like an excrescence on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and grotesque” (Hazlitt 1930–34: VIII: 317; cited in Smith 1919: 34). Hazlitt’s pictur- esque encourages Smith to assign a definitive value to description in Scottish literature, in which the interplay of sudden contrasts and gradual emergences provides the occasions for inventiveness. In this context, antisyzygy refers less usefully to Jekyll and Hyde than to Samuel Johnson’s definition of metaphysical wit as a “kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike” – and few would

1 I am grateful to Heather Giles, Michael Cichon, and Jamie Reid Baxter, who showed me how to improve this essay.