COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: D THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION? D PIERRE CARBONI ISSN 1392-0588 (spausdintas) ISSN 2335-8769 (internetinis) University of Nantes 2015. 63

SUMMARY. It is generally assumed that James Thomson’s poetic cycle The Seasons (1730–1746) is is a celebration of nature’s omnipotence interspersed with pastoral or georgic episodes in which human protagonists reflect the contemporary trend in landscape painting towards representing ide- alised shepherds and happy swains. However, a closer reading of Thomson’s numerous desciptions of countryfolk reveals that his peasant figures are not mere ‘figures in the landscape’. On the contrary, they appear as key elements in the poet’s physico-theology. Inspired by John Barrell’s analysis of the ambiguities of the depiction of the ‘rural poor’ in eighteenth-century English painting and by Tim Fulford’s discussion of ‘landscapes of authority’, this paper would like to show that the numerous episodes of rural life in The Seasonswere not intended as a superficial décor champêtre. Our argument is that Thomson uses countryfolk as emblems of the complex relationship between nature and mankind. This paper analyzes the way descriptive elements from contemporary country life serve alternatively as sad reminder of man’s frailty when confronted to natural elements and also as unconscious models of human integration in the superior order of things. Despite their conventional appearance, these poetic constructions show evidence of a sharp departure from earlier definitions of the pastoral and georgic modes. In poetic and philosophical project of Thomson’s Seasons, countryfolk are a reminder that man is not a dweller in (and even less the master of) nature, but a component of the biosphere. KEYWORDS: biosphere, Donelaitis, Enlightentment, georgic, landscape, nature, pastoral, poetry, seasons, Thomson.

Although included in a publication commemorating the three-hundredth anni- versary of of the birth of Kristijonas Donelaitis, this essay will not directly address the work of this poet, but will essentially focus on his Scottish precursor, James Thomson (1700–1748), whose pioneering cycle, The Seasons, was originally pub- lished in London between 1726 and 1730. For obvious chronological reasons as well for the lasting influence of his work, Thomson may safely be considered as the great initiator of the “Seasons” sub-genre in eighteenth-century European poetry. Donelaitis worked on his Seasons, eventually published in 1818, between 1765 and 1775, which might easily suggest the possibility of a literary debt on the part of the Lithuanian poet towards Thomson. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the vogue of “Seasons” poetry reached its climax in France, with such works as Les 83 PIERRE CARBONI

Quatre saisons, ou les Géorgiques françaises (1763) and Les Saisons et les jours (1764), both by François-Joachim de Pierre, Cardinal de Bernis; Les Saisons (1769), by Jean-François de Saint-Lambert; Les Mois (1779), by Jean-Antoine Roucher; as well as the whole work of Jacques Delille.1 As opposed to the Parisian imitators of Thomson, who lived in the Anglophile, often English-speaking environment of the French Academy and the Enlightenment salons, it is highly probable that Donelai- tis had no direct access to the original English poem. In an article published in the review Lituanus, Alfonsas Šešplaukis explains that the poet-pastor of Tolminkiemis spoke neither English nor French, a consideration which, according to the author of the article, is sufficient to conclude that “any direct influence from English or French literature can be excluded.”2 It is nevertheless highly probable that, by the time he arrived at Tolminkiemis, Donelaitis had had at least some knowledge, if not of Thomson’s work itself, then at least of its growing popularity in the Ger- man-speaking regions bordering the Baltic Sea. Caroline von Brandenburg-Ans- bach, the second Hanoverian Queen of Great Britain and one of the most distin- guished subscribers of the first complete edition of the Seasons in 1730, had still extensive links not only with her husband’s north German electorate, but also with the court of Brandenburg where she had been brought up and whose ruler had received the royal crown at Königsberg, East Prussia, Donelaitis’ native “Lithuania Minor.” Likewise, Donelaitis, who may not have read the Seasons in the original English text, cannot have overlooked the 1745 publication of the first complete German translation of Thomson’s poem by Barthold Heinrich Brockes in the Free Imperial City of Hamburg. Bearing in mind that the first German poem directly inspired by Thomson,Frühling (1749), was the work of an officer from Farther Pomerania, Ewald Christian von Kleist, born, like Donelaitis, in 1715 and again like Donelaitis, a student at the Collegium Albertinum of Königsberg in the 1730s, one may reasonably infer that there is a very high likelihood, if not of any direct influence, then at least of some kind of international connection between Thom- son’s and Donelaitis’s Seasons through the agency of one or several of the typical European culture brokers of the Enlightenment. One of the most striking elements in both works, although dealt with in extremely different ways by each poet, is the relationship between countryfolk and their natural environment. As a French Thomson scholar with no direct knowledge of the text of Metai in the original Lithuanian, the author of this essay will not run

1 Cameron M. M. L’Influence desSaisons sur la poésie descriptive en France, 1759–1810. Paris, Honoré Champion, 1927. 2 Šešplaukis A. A Question of Influences: Donelaitis and German Literature. Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 10–1: (1964), . 84 COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION?

the risk of comparing the familiar with the unfamiliar and leave to people more knowledgeable than himself the task of studying Donelaitis’s original handling of the same topic. Thomson’s Seasons is the work of a young Scot, born and bred in the rigid yet politically progressive background of Whig Presbyterianism in the first decade immediately following the political Union between his nation and Eng- land. In Thomson’s childhood environment, the Union meant political, economic, and even linguistic and cultural progress. It would enable Scotland to retain its own distinctive legal and educational systems and its national Reformed church traditions, while opening brand new opportunities through the joint-partnership started in 1707 with its prosperous neighbour. Linguistically speaking, Thomson was originally brought up in Scots, the vernacular language of Lowland Scotland. His biographer James Sambrook explains that “he spoke broad Scots all his life, his written English [being] an acquired language which retained to the end a slight strangeness.”3 Thomson’s characteristic Scots/English diglossia reached heteroglos­ - sia when he entered Jedburgh grammar school, a couple of miles away from the village where his father was in charge of the local Protestant parish. Jedburgh, Sambrook explains, was “‘a Latin school’, where Latin only was used during les- sons” (5). Similarly, the academic language of the University of Edinburgh, which Thomson joined in 1715 in preparation for the Presbyterian ministry, was Latin. As for the Bible used in class for reading and studying, it was the English Author- ized Version of 1611, which the Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical of 1636 had approved as the only translation to be used within the Church of Scotland. As a result, Thomson’s poetic language, whose first attempts consisted in paraphras- ing psalms and Gospel parables referring to nature and/or creation and exploring God’s handiwork with thanksgiving, does not reflect the Scottish vernacular of his childhood, but a rather idiosyncratic form of Latinate English. Unsurprisingly, Thomson’s first published poems and, more generally his great didactic poem The Seasons, were inspired by the English metrical adaptations of the psalms for a cap- pella singing during Presbyterian Church services. In prosodic terms also Thom- son’s model is English and Protestant. It is the iambic pentameter, or blank verse, popularised in the second half of the previous century by the heterodox Calvinist poet Milton, who describes his attempt in the Preface of Paradise Lost (1674) as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.”4 Although exclusively written in English, and entirely published in London after Thomson decided to abandon

3 Sambrook J. James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, 16. 4 Milton J. The Major Works, ed. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg. Oxford’s World Classics. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, 355. 85 PIERRE CARBONI

the prospect of becoming a minister of the word and sacrament, and to become instead, a master of words, it is obvious, therefore, that the Seasons, albeit an explic- itly English work, reflects a variety of different linguistic and cultural influences. Another complex issue is the generic definition the work may receive as a pioneer- ing instance of nature poetry. In the first half on the eighteenth century, the pastoral genre, modelled on the writings of Theocritus and Virgil, was still extremely fashionable in Scotland and England, as elsewhere throughout Europe. Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and Milton’s Lycidas (1637) found echoes in the contemporary works of Alexan- der Pope, John Gay, and Ambrose Philips. Pope, for instance, published his four pastorals, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter in 1709. Such poetry has been traditionally described as depicting idealized rustics in equally idealized settings (adapted from the Virgilian topos of the locus amoenus). In A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry published in 1717, Pope ascribes the origins of pastoral poetry to the fact that “the leisure of those ancient shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; . . . in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity.”5 Even though Thomson’sSeasons borrows several elements from the idyll mode, they are not limited to shepherds’ life. The poem also evokes agricultural workers or, more generally, country youths Thomson calls “swains,” following the expression used by Milton in his elegy Lyci- das (1638), thus fusing the shepherds’ pastoral with another generic modulation, the swains’ georgic. In keeping with georgic conventions, Thomson’s shepherds and swains are described as economic agents, whose hard work and invaluable expertise greatly contribute to British economic prosperity in producing wool and corn. Here, poetry reflects the great national cause of agriculture, whose pioneer- ing institution in Britain was the Georgical Committee of the Royal Society set up as early as 1664 under Charles II. The georgic poet adopts theethos of the celebrated English agricultural improvers of his age, such as, for instance, William Ellis, author of The Practical farmer, or the Hertfordshire Husbandman (1732), or Jethro Tull, whose Horse-Hoeing Husbandry (1733) was a bestseller. But Thomson’s poetic models for his modern countryfolk are the legendary statesmen-farmers of antiquity: “In ancient times, the sacred plow employ’d / The kings and fathers of mankind,” Sp 58–9; “Ye generous Britons, venerate the plow!” Sp 67).6 Similarly, after describing modern shepherds shearing their sheep at the beginning of sum- mer, Thomson concludes on their strategic economic role in the woollen trade:

5 Pope A. Pastoral Poetry and Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and A. Williams. London, Methuen, 1961, 23–24. 6 Thomson J. The Seasons, ed. J. Sambrook. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991. All future references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 86 COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION?

“A simple scene! Yet hence Britannia sees / Her solid grandeur rise,” Su 423–4. Thomson’s shepherds are not mere “figures in the landscape”7 adapted from the pictorial conventions of the great 17th-century French and Italian landscape artists. Such landscapes, he describes in his last work, the allegoric The Castle of Indolence (1748), as aesthetically pleasing, but spurious, and morally dubious illusions pro- jected by the wizard Indolence to exercise his control of the minds of his uncon- scious prisoners: “Whate’er Lorrain light-touch’d with softening hue, / Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew’ (II.341–2).8 Thomson’s shepherds and swains are flesh-and-blood creatures who also call for the reader’s social conscience: Ye masters, then, Be mindful of the rough laborious hand, That sinks you soft in elegance and ease; Be mindful of those limbs in russet clad, Whose toil to yours is warmth. Au 350–4.

In sharp contrast to the peasants’ industry, the modern poet laments the unhappy effects of modern corruption both on country life and on his own inspi- ration as a modern poet inspired by the Ancients: “those white, unblemish’d min- utes, whence / The fabling poets took their golden age / Are found no more amid these iron times / These dregs of life!” (Sp 272–5). Thomson’s rustics thus become a moral emblem of social virtue and general harmony: “While heard from dale to dale, / Waking the breeze, resounds the blended voice / Of happy labour, love, and social glee” (Su 368–70), “While, loose to festive joy, the country round / Laughs with the loud sincerity of mirth (Au 1221–2). Conversely, the unsocial passions are insistently associated with city life: Let [Avarice] thro’ cities work his eager way, By legal outrage, and establish’d guile, The social sense extinct; and that ferment Mad into tumult the seditious herd, Or melt them down to slavery. Au 1287–91

7 Hunt J. D. The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Landscape Gardening during the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 8 Thomson J. Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. J. Sambrook. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. 87 PIERRE CARBONI

A far cry from the ideal polis embodying order and harmony, Thomson’s mod- ern city inevitably leads to chaos: The city swarms intense. The public haunt, Full of each theme, and warm with mixt discourse, Hums indistinct. The sons of riot flow Down the loose stream of false inchanted joy, To swift destruction. Wi 630–4

As opposed to the city’s “sons of riots,” Thomson’s Arcadian shepherds and swains emblematize the necessity to redefine man’s relationship to nature in quickly changing socio-environmental conditions. They do so at a time when new agrarian techniques and trading systems are already changing the face of Britain, inevitably leading the Empire to its first industrial revolution. Paradoxically, in the eyes of the Enlightenment poet, improving agriculture and stockbreeding, and thereby expanding commerce as an alternative to international warfare is a necessary com- ponent of general human progress. As a matter of fact, Thomson calls for the gener- alization to Scotland of the major English agrarian, manufacturing and navigation technologies, entrusting the new generation of peaceful post-Union Scottish patri- ots with the task of producing: [...] that best, that godlike luxury . . . Of blessing thousands, thousands yet unborn, Thro’ late posterity? . . . To cheer dejected industry? to give A double harvest to the pining swain? And teach the labouring hand the sweets of toil? How, by the finest art, the native robe To weave; how, white as hyperborean snow, To form the lucid lawn; with venturous oar, How to dash wide the billow . . . Au 851–60

However, Thomson’s call for progress is underpinned by a typically Scottish civic-humanistic preoccupation with the moral consequences of structural changes on human nature and society. His analysis also shows a similar anxiety about the future of the organic relationship between human beings and their natural environ- ment in traditional country life. In the same prophetic vision of Scotland’s progress

88 COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION?

and economic achievements, the poet-prophet emphasizes the importance of the still existing organic relationship between the Scottish natural scene and the quali- ties of the people inhabiting the place: Her airy mountains, from the gelid main, Invested with a keen, diffusive sky, Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature’s hand Planted of old; her azure lakes between, Pour’d out extensive, and of watry wealth Full. [...] A generous race Of unsubmitting spirit, wise, and brave, Who still thro’ bleeding ages struggled hard, To hold a hapless, undiminish’d state. Au 825–31; 839–42

Anticipating Rousseau’s description, in the Preface of the Discourse on Inequality (1755), of the human soul, altered by social progress “like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea and storms had disfigured to such an extent that it looked less like a god than a wild beast,”9 Thomson expresses his deep concern about the negative effects of man’s increasing dominion over his environment as potentially leading to anti-human relationships between men, as between men and nature. On the contrary, by celebrating the very close relationship between countryfolk and their environment, the poet of the Seasons, while advocating progress, operates a spectac- ular and still largely unexplored paradigm shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric. As we have already seen, Thomson’s treatment of the human element, especially of country people in the Seasons, didn’t result so much in painting a series of pas- toral idylls as it did in praising, according to the georgic mode, man’s continued transformation of his environment. The poem’s unifying motif is its naturalistic celebration of the wonders of the created world, an integrated system of nature metaphorized by the circular “round of seasons” of which man’s own capacity for changing while being the same is an organic part, although in a very different way from the nonhuman protagonists of nature. Man, as a kind of archetypal descrip- tive poet of nature, is both the conscious observer and necessary interpreter of God’s poetic creation and should therefore act as a careful and respectful improver

9 Rousseau J.-J. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald Cress. Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, 11. 89 PIERRE CARBONI

of Nature’s poem. In Thomson’s Seasons, nature is not a simple framing device. The technological transformations introduced by men are not the poem’s only legitimate interest. In describing the subtle pattern of interaction originally estab- lished between nature and man in rural life, Thomson turns country people into philosophical emblems of ethical wisdom. Just as nature is constantly exposed to man’s oppression, through hunting, for instance, which Thomson describes as “this falsely cheerful, barbarous game of death” (Autumn, 284) or taming wild animals “by tyrant man / Inhuman caught, and in the narrow cage / From liberty confined, and boundless air” (Sp 700–2), so man “the worst monster that e’er roam’d the waste” (Au 393) and his works are constantly exposed to nature’s equally enor- mous potential of devastation. The poet describes exposure to elemental violence as constitutive of man’s symbiotic relationships with his environment. Even the most peaceful of men, the happy citizens of the Protestant Free State of the Three Leagues in Eastern Switzerland (Graubünden / Grisons), do experience nature’s superiority over men through fatal avalanche cases: Among those hilly regions where embrac’d In peaceful vales the happy Grisons dwell; Oft, rushing sudden from loaded cliffs, Mountains of snow their gathering terrors roll. Wi 414–7

But countryfolk in the Seasons are not just picturesque human characters in a lar- ge-scale natural memento mori, they more often serve as the archetypal embodiment of a life according to nature and nature’s laws which follows the famous precept of the Roman Stoic Seneca in Letter 5 of his Moral Letters to Lucilius: “Our motto, as you know, is ‘Live according to Nature’.”10 Thus, beyond his apparently conventional idealization of country life, Thomson in reality doesn’t obliterate “the dark side of the landscape” as the art historian John Barrell calls the unspeakable reality of hardship and pains concealed from 18th-century English painting.11 His “environmental ima- gination” (to quote John Buell’s famous title) depicts both nature and men as the dual protagonists of the same beautiful, yet awful organism. In one of the most beau- tiful poetic passages of the poem, the evocation of the “sons of Lapland” in Winter, is only a tribute to the literary ideal of the Noble Savage. The Sami people as they are more correctly referred to nowadays, described a couple of years earlier by the French Newtonian scientist Maupertuis in a Mémoire for the Académie des sciences,

10 Seneca. Moral Epistles, trans. R. M. Gummere. The Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1917, 23. 11 Barrell J. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980. 90 COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION?

are not allegoric figures introduced the sake of philosophic reflection, but described as unconscious, or “natural” philosophers themselves: “Wisely they / Despise th’in- sensate barbarous trade of war; / They ask no more than simple nature gives, / They love their mountains and enjoy their storms, / No false desires, no pride-created wants, / Disturb the peaceful current of their time” (843-8). After depicting in the powerful antithesis “Even in the depth of Polar night, they find / A wondrous day” (Winter, 863-4), the moral transvaluation operated by the humble peasant-philo- sophers of Lapland, Thomson contrasts their nature-inspired moderation with the excess of their distant ruler, Charles XII, a counter-example of the philosopher-king. The King of Sweden, a typical enlightened despot spectacularly praised by Voltaire in his Histoire de Charles XII (1731), is bluntly referred to here as “the frantic Alexander of the North” (Wi 980) because of his role in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), which ravaged the whole Baltic region, Lithuania included. Having analyzed the central role played by countryfolk in Thomson’s hymn to nature, The Seasons, one may perhaps regret that his protagonists’ voices should have remained silent and the diction of the poem kept so distant from what Wordsworth in the epoch-making Preface of the Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) called “the real language of men.”12 Three to four decades after Thomson’s death, in the second half of the 18th century, a new generation of Scottish poets such as Robert Fergusson in “The Farmer’s Ingle” (1779), published in a fashionable magazine of the Scottish capital, and Robert Burns in his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect(1786) published in Kilmarnock, a burgh of East Ayrshire, would, exactly like Donelaitis, although in a very different con- text from his, use the vernacular language to express their countrymen’s works and days in poetry. The popularity of The Seasons was so great, not only in the metropolitan and in the rural professional class, but among British agricultural workers themselves, that in 1806 the English farm labourer, John Clare, was confirmed in his poetic vocation after reading a battered copy of the work lent to him when he was thirteen by a humble cottage weaver of his native village, Helpston, East Northamptonshire. Similarly, in the same period, two leading figures of the English romantic movement, Coleridge and Hazlitt, were surprised to find “a little worn-out copy of the Seasons, lying in a window-seat” in a West Country village inn at Linton, North Devon.13 For such rea- sons at least, and perhaps more, although Thomson’s poetic language is anything but rural, his silent and anonymous countryfolk should be reappraised, together with their companion nature, as the joint heroes of the first environmental poem in the history of European literature.

12 Wordsworth W. and Coleridge S. T. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. M. Scofield.Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 2003, 22. 13 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 17. London and Toronto, Dent, 1920, 120. 91 PIERRE CARBONI

Pierre Carboni KAIMIEČIAI JAMESO THOMSONO METŲ LAIKUOSE: TAMSIOJI PEIZAŽO PUSĖ AR NATŪRALIOS INTEGRACIJOS EMBLEMOS?

SANTRAUKA. Jameso Thomsono poetinis ciklas „Metų laikai“ pirmąkart išleistas Londone 1726–1730 m. Dėl savaime aiškių chronologinių priežasčių ir dėl jo kūrinio ilgalaikės įtakos Thomsoną laisvai galima laikyti didžiuoju keturių metų laikų požanrio iniciatoriumi XVIII a. Europos poezijoje. Donelaitis savo „Metus“, išleistus tik 1818 m., kūrė 1765–1775 m., o tai ir kelia mintį, jog lietuvis poetas galėjo būti skolingas Thomsonui. Kitaip nei prancūziškie- ji Thomsono imitatoriai (Bernisas, Saint-Lambert’as, Roucher ir Delille’is), gyvenę Prancūzų akademijos anglofiliškoje aplinkoje ir veikę Švietimo amžiaus salonuose, Donelaitis tikriausiai neturėjo tiesioginio priėjimo prie angliškojo poemos originalo. Vis dėlto labai tikėtina, kad iki savo atvykimo į Tolminkiemį Donelaitis jau buvo šiek tiek susipažinęs, jei ne su pačiu Thom- sono kūriniu, tai bent žinojo apie jo didėjantį populiarumą vokiškai kalbančiuose kraštuose prie Baltijos jūros. Karolina von Brandenburg-Ansbach, antroji Didžiosios Britanijos karalienė iš Hanoverių dinastijos ir viena iškiliausiųjų pirmojo „Metų laikų“ leidimo 1730 m. prenu- meratorių, vis dar turėjo plačių ryšių ne tik su savo vyro elektoratu šiaurės Vokietijoje, bet ir su Brandenburgo dvaru, kuriame ji užaugo ir kurio valdovas karališkąją karūną gavo būtent Rytprūsių Karaliaučiuje, Donelaičio gimtosios Mažosios Lietuvos sostinėje. Donelaitis, galbūt nebuvo skaitęs originalios „Metų laikų“ angliškos versijos, visgi negalėjo nepastebėti 1745 m. išleisto pirmo pilno Thomsono poemos vertimo į vokiečių kalbą, kurį laisvajame imperijos mieste Hamburge atliko Bartholdas Heinrichas Brockesas. Atsimenant, kad pirmąją tiesiogiai Thomsono įkvėptą vokišką poemą „Frühling“ („Pavasaris“, 1749) sukūrė Pomeranijos karinin- kas Ewaldas Christianas von Kleistas, kaip ir Donelaitis gimęs 1715 m. ir vėlgi kaip Donelai- tis XVIII a. ketvirtą dešimtmetį studijavęs Karaliaučiaus Albertinos universitete, galima daryti tikėtiną prielaidą, jog tarp Thomsono ir Donelaičio „Metų laikų“ buvo užsimezgusi tam tikra tarptautinė sąsaja per vieną ar daugiau kultūrinių tarpininkų, tuomet būdingų Švietimo am- žiaus Europos kultūrai. Vienas įdomiausių Thomsono ir Donelaičio kūrybos bruožų (nors reiškiasi skirtingai) yra jų santykis su kaimiškąja liaudimi ir jos gamtine aplinka. Itin pabrėždamas valstiečių darbštumą moderniųjų laikų poetas aprauda moderniosios korupcijos nelemtą poveikį ne tik kaimiečių gyvenimui, bet ir jo paties, Antikos poetų pėdomis sekančio šiuolaikinio dainiaus, įkvėpimui. Paradoksaliu būdu, Švietimo amžiaus poeto akimis žiūrint, žemės ūkio ir gyvulininkystės lygio kėlimas ir tuo būdu prekybos, kaip alternatyvos tarptautiniams karams, plėtimas yra būtina visuotinės žmonijos pažangos sąlyga. Dėl to Thomsonas ir pasisako už pagrindinių Anglijos žemės ūkio, manufaktūros ir navigacijos technologijų įdiegimą Škotijoje, tuo įgalinant naująją taikią (po susijungimo su Anglija) škotų patriotų kartą atsidėti gamybos puoselėjimui. Tuo pačiu Thomsono raginimą siekti pažangos grindžia tipiškai škotiškas pilietinis ir humanistinis susirūpinimas dėl moralinių pasekmių ir poveikio, kurį struktūriniai pokyčiai gali turėti žmo- gaus prigimčiai ir visuomenei. Jis taip pat nerimauja, kaip ateityje tradiciniame kaimo gyvenime plėtosis organinis ryšys tarp žmonių ir jų gamtinės aplinkos. Šio darbo tezė yra ta, kad Thomsonui valstiečiai yra sudėtingų santykių tarp gamtos ir žmo- nių emblemos. Darbe analizuojama, kaip deskriptyviniai elementai, apibūdinantys šiuolaikinį kaimo gyvenimą, tarnauja arba kaip liūdnos nuorodos į žmogaus silpnumą gamtos stichijų aki- vaizdoje, arba kaip neįsisąmoninti žmogaus integravimosi į aukštesnę dalykų tvarką modeliai.

92 COUNTRYFOLK IN THOMSON’S SEASONS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LANDSCAPE, OR EMBLEMS OF NATURAL INTEGRATION?

Nepaisant jų konvencionalios regimybės, šios poetinės konstrukcijos liudija stiprų atotrūkį nuo ankstesnių pastoralinės poezijos ir georgikos apibrėžimų. Thomsono „Metų laikų“ poetiniame ir filosofiniame projekte kaimo gyventojai yra priminimas, kad žmogus nėra gamtos įnamis ar juo labiau valdovas, o tiesiog biosferos komponentas. RAKTAŽODŽIAI: biosfera, Donelaitis, Švietimo amžius, georgika, peizažas, gamta, pastoralė, metų laikai, Thomsonas.

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