James Thomson
(11 September 1700 – 27 August 1748)
JAMES THOMSON, English poet, author of The Seasons,
was born at Ednam, in Roxburghshire, on the 11th
of September 1700 - the third son and fourth
child of Thomas Thomson, minister of that place.
His mother, Beatrix, was the daughter of Mr
Trotter of Fogo, whose wife, Margaret, was one
of the Homes of Bassenden. About 1701 Thomas
Thomson removed to Southdean near Jedburgh. Here
James was educated at first by Robert
Riccaltoun, to whose verses on Winter he owed
the suggestion of his own poem. In 1712 he
attended a school at Jedburgh, held in the aisle
of the parish church. He learnt there some
Latin, but with difficulty, and the earliest
recorded utterance of the future poet was
"Confound the building of Babel." He began very
soon to write verses, and we are told that every
January he destroyed almost all the productions
of the preceding year. And this was just as
well, for the little that has escaped the fire
contains no promise of his future powers.
In 1715 he went to the university of
Edinburgh. It is said that as soon as the
servant who brought him thither had quitted him,
he returned full speed to his father's house,
declaring that he could read just as well at
home; he went back, however. He made friends at
the university with David Mallock, who
afterwards called himself Mallet, and with
Patrick Murdoch, his Suture biographer. In 1719
he became a divinity student, and one of his
exercises so enchanted a certain Auditor Benson,
that he urged Thomson to go to London and there
make himself a reputation as a preacher. It was
partly with this object that Thomson left
Edinburgh without a degree in March 1725. His
mother saw him embark, and they never met again;
she died on the 10th of May of that year.
There is sufficient evidence that on his
arrival in London he was not in the extreme
destitution which Dr Johnson attributes to him;
and in July 1725 we find him engaged, as a
make-shift, in teaching "Lord Binning's son to
read." This son was the grandson of Lady Grizel
Baillie, a somewhat distant connexion of
Thomson's mother. She was the daughter of Sir
Patrick Home, whom, after the defeat of Argyll,
she fed in his concealment near his own castle;
she was also, like other Scottish ladies, a
writer of pretty ballads. This heroine and
poetess is supposed to have encouraged Thomson
to come to England, and it is certain that she
procured him a temporary home. But he had other
friends, especially Duncan Forbes of Culloden,
by whom he was recommended to the duke of
Argyll, the earl of Burlington, Sir Robert
Walpole, Arbuthnot, Pope and Gay. Some
introductions to the literary world he may have
owed to Mallet, then tutor in the family of the
duke of Montrose.
Thomson's Winter appeared in March 1726. It
was warmly praised by Aaron Hill, a man of
various interests and projects, and in his day a
sort of literary oracle. It was dedicated to Sir
Spencer Compton, the Speaker, who rewarded the
poet, to his great disgust, with a bare twenty
guineas. By the 11th of June 1727 a second
edition was called for. Meanwhile Thomson was
residing at Mr Watts's academy in Tower Street
as tutor to Lord George Graham, second son of
the duke of Montrose, and previously a pupil of
Mallet.
Summer appeared in 1727. It was dedicated in
prose, a compliment afterwards versified, to
Bubb Dodington. In the same year Thomson
published his Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac
Newton, with a fulsome dedication to Sir Robert
Walpole, which was afterwards omitted, and the
verses themselves remodelled when the poet began
to inveigh against the ministry as he did in
Britannia, published in 1729.
Spring appeared in 1728, published by Andrew
Millar, a man who, according to Johnson, dealt
handsomely by authors and "raised the price of
literature." It was dedicated to the countess of
Hertford, afterwards duchess of Somerset, a lady
devoted to letters and the patroness of the
unhappy Savage. In 1729 Thomson produced
Sophonisba, a tragedy now only remembered by the
line "O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O," and the
parody "O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O,"
which caused him to remodel the unhappy verse in
the form, "O Sophonisba, I am wholly thine." A
poem, anonymous but unquestionably Thomson's, to
the memory of Congreve who had died in January
1729, appeared in that year.
In 1730 Autumn was first published in a
collected edition of The Seasons. It was
dedicated to the Speaker, Onslow. In this year,
at the suggestion of Rundle, bishop of Derry,
one of his patrons, he accompanied the son of
Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-general, upon his
travels. In the course of these he projected his
Liberty as "a poetical landscape of countries,
mixed with moral observations on their
government and people." In December 1731 he
returned with his pupil to London. He probably
lived with his patrons the Talbots, leisurely
meditating his new poem, the first part of which
did not appear until the close of 1734 or the
beginning of 1735. But meanwhile his pupil died,
and in the opening lines of Liberty, Thomson
pays a tribute to his memory. Two months after
his son's death Sir Charles Talbot became
chancellor and gave Thomson a sinecure in the
court of chancery. About this time the poet
worked for the relief of Dennis, now old and in
extreme poverty, and induced even Pope to give a
half-contemptuous support to the bitter critic
of the Rape of the Lock.
Liberty was completed in five parts in 1736.
The poem was a failure; its execution did not
correspond with its design; in a sense indeed it
is a survey of countries and might have
anticipated Goldsmith's Traveller. It was not,
however, the poem which readers were expecting
from the author of The Seasons, who had taken
them from the town to the country, and from
social and political satire to the world of
nature. It is in the main a set of wearisome
declamations put in the mouth of the goddess,
and Johnson rightly enough remarks that "an
enumeration of examples to prove a position
which nobody denied as it was from the beginning
superfluous, must quickly grow disgusting." The
truth is that Thomson's poetical gift was for
many years perverted by the zeal of
partisanship.
He was established in May 1736 in a small
house at Richmond, but his patron died in
February 1737 and he lost his sinecure; he then
"whips and spurs" to finish his tragedy
Agamemnon, which appeared in April 1738, not
before he had been arrested for a debt of £70,
from which, according to a story which has been
discredited on quite insufficient grounds, Quin
relieved him in the most generous and tactful
manner. Quin, it is said, visited him in the
sponging-house and "balanced accounts with him"
by insisting on his accepting a hundred pounds
as a return for the pleasure which the actor had
received from the poet's works. The incident
took place probably a little before the
production of Agamemnon, in which Quin played
the leading part. The play is of course modelled
upon Aeschylus and owes whatever of dignity it
possesses to that fact; the part of Cassandra,
for instance, retains something of its original
force, pathos and terror. But most of the other
characters exist only for the purpose of
political innuendo. Agamemnon is too long absent
at Troy, as George is too long absent in
Germany; the arts of Aegisthus are the arts of
Walpole; the declamations of Arcus are the
declamations of Wyndham or Pulteney; Melisander,
consoling himself with the muses on his island
in Cyclades, is Bolingbroke in exile.
Thomson about this time was introduced to
Lyttelton, and by him to the prince of Wales,
and to one or the other of these, when he was
questioned as to the state of his affairs, he
made answer that they were "in a more poetical
posture than formerly." Agamemnon was put upon
the stage soon after the passing of Walpole's
bill for licensing plays, and its obvious bias
fixed the attention of the censorship and caused
Thomson's next venture, Edward and Eleanora,
which has the same covert aim, to be proscribed.
The fact has very generally escaped notice that,
like its predecessor, it follows a Greek
original, the Alcestis of Euripides. It has
also, what Agamemnon has not, some little place
in the history of literature, for it suggested
something to Lessing for Nathan der Weise, and
to Scott for the Talisman. The rejection of the
play was defended by one of the ministry on the
ground that Thomson had taken a Liberty which
was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season.
These circumstances sufficiently account for the
poet's next experiment, a preface to Milton's
Areopagitica.
He joined Mallet in composing the masque of
Alfred, represented at Clieveden on the Thames
before the prince of Wales, on the 1st of August
1740. There can be little question that "Rule
Britannia," a song in this drama, was the
production of Thomson. The music of the song, as
of the whole masque, was composed by Arne. In
1744 Thomson was appointed surveyor-general of
the Leeward Islands by Lyttelton with an income
of £500 a year; but his patron fell into
disfavour with the prince of Wales, and in
consequence Thomson lost, at the close of 1747,
the pension he received from that quarter. For a
while, however, he was in flourishing
circumstances, and whilst completing at his
leisure The Castle of Indolence produced Tancred
and Sigismunda at Drury Lane in 1745. The story
is found in Gil Blas, and is ultimately to be
traced to The Decameron. It owes much to Le Sage
in language, plot and sentiment, and the
conflict of emotion, in depicting which Thomson
had some little skill, is here effectively
exhibited. He was assisted herein by his own
experience. The "Amanda" of The Seasons is a
Miss Elizabeth Young, a lady of Scottish
parentage, whose mother was ambitious for her
and forbade her to marry the poet, anticipating
that she would be reduced to singing his ballads
in the streets. The last years of his life were
saddened by this disappointment.
The Castle of Indolence, after a gestation of
fifteen years, appeared in May 1748. It is in
the Spenserian stanza with the Spenserian
archaism, and is the first and last long effort
of Thomson in rhyme. It is not impossible that
his general choice of blank verse was partly due
to the fact that he had not the southron's ear
and took many years to acquire it. The great and
varied interest of the poem might well rescue it
from the neglect into which even The Seasons has
fallen. It was worthy of an age which was
fertile in character-sketches, and like Gay's
Welcome to Pope anticipates Goldsmith's
Retaliation in the lifelike presentation of a
noteworthy circle. There is in it the same
strain of gentle burlesque which appears in
Shenstone's Schoolmistress, whilst the tone and
diction of the poem harmonize with the hazy
landscape, the pleasant land of drowsyhead, in
which it is set. It is the last work by Thomson
which appeared in his lifetime.
In walking from London to his house at
Richmond he became heated and took a boat at
Hammersmith; he thus caught a chill with fatal
consequences and died on the 27th of August
1748. He was buried in Richmond churchyard. His
tragedy Coriolanus was acted for the first time
in January 1749. In itself a feeble performance,
it is noteworthy for the prologue which his
friend Lyttelton wrote for it, two lines of
which "He loved his friends - forgive the
gushing tear! Alas! I feel I am no actor here"
were recited by Quin with no simulated emotion.
It may be questioned whether Thomson himself
ever quite realized the distinctive significance
of his own achievement in The Seasons, or the
place which criticism assigns him as the pioneer
of a special literary movement and the precursor
of Cowper and Wordsworth. His avowed preference
was for great and worthy themes of which the
world of nature was but one. Both the choice and
the treatment of his next great subject,
Liberty, indicate that he was imperfectly
conscious of the gift that was in him, and might
have neglected it but that his readers were
wiser than himself. He has many audacities and
many felicities of expression, and enriched the
vocabulary even of the poets who have disparaged
him. Yet it is difficult to believe that he was
not the better for that training in refinement
of style which he partly owed to Pope, who
almost unquestionably contributed some passages
to The Seasons. And, except in The Castle of
Indolence, there is much that is conventional,
much that is even vicious or vulgar in taste
when Thomson's muse deals with that human life
which must be the background of descriptive as
of all other poetry; for example, his bumpkin
who chases the rainbow is as unreal a being as
Akenside's more sentimental rustic who has "the
form of beauty smiling at his heart."
But if Thomson sometimes lacks the true
vision for things human, he retains it always
for things mute and material, and whilst the
critical estimate of his powers and influence
will vary from age to age, all who have read him
will concur in the colloquial judgment which
only candour could have extorted from the
prejudice of Dr Johnson- "Thomson had as much of
the poet about him as most writers. Everything
appeared to him through the medium of his
favourite pursuit. He could not have viewed
those two candles burning but with a poetical
eye."
D. C. Tovey
