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83 Countryfolk in Thomson's Seasons 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), <http://www.lituanus.org/1964/64_1_04_Sesplaukis. html#foots>. 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; .
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