Th’ unconquerable Lightning struggles thro,’
Ragged and fierce, or in red whirling Balls,
And fires the Mountains with redoubled Rage.
Black from the Stroke, above, the smouldring Pine
Stands a sad shatter’d Trunk; and, stretch’d below,
A lifeless Groupe the blasted Cattle lie:
Here the soft Flocks, with that same harmless Look
They wore alive, and ruminating still
In Fancy’s Eye; and there the frowning Bull,
And Ox half-rais’d. Struck on the castled Cliff,
The venerable Tower and spiry Fane
Resign their aged Pride. The gloomy Woods
Start at the Flash, and from their deep Recess,
Wide-flaming out, their trembling Inmates shake. (Su, 1147–60)
Thomson’s depiction of the storm begins with what seem straightforward personifications: lightning is “fierce,” it “struggles” with “Rage”; a pine tree is “sad”; flocks wear a “harmless Look”; the Bull is “frowning”; a tower and fane “Resign” their “Pride”; woods “Start.” Using personification to identify tree and cattle and tower according to the ways in which they are acted upon by lightning, Thomson might appear to call attention to the difference between such personifications and the actual human persons who appear on the scene, or, between (onto)logical objects and (onto)logical subjects. But to read the section in this way is to make the same error as Celadon commits, when he assures his beloved Amelia that she need not fear the storm because she is a “‘Stranger to Offence’” (Su, 1205). Celadon reasons that because Amelia has committed no wrong, “‘HE, who yon Skies involves / In Frowns of Darkness, ever smiles on thee, / With kind Regard’” (Su, 1206–8). At that moment, Amelia is struck dead by lightning:
From his void Embrace,
(Mysterious Heaven!) that moment, to the Ground,
A blacken’d Corse, was struck the beauteous Maid.
But who can paint the Lover, as he stood,
Pierc’d by severe Amazement, hating Life,
Speechless, and fix’d in all the Death of Woe!
So, faint Resemblance, on the Marble-Tomb,
The well-dissembled Mourner stooping stands,
For ever silent, and for ever sad. (Su, 1214–22)
In this episode, Celadon is rebuked for the same error that Thomson makes in the torrid zone: for singling out individuals, and for doing so, in Celadon’s case, out of a sense of both species and individual exceptionalism. Celadon is rebuked, that is, for thinking that human beings in general and Amelia in particular are unique—for imagining that Heaven will spare Amelia as it does not spare other creatures, even though they are also, presumably, “Stranger to Offence.” To separate Thomson’s account of the storm’s effects on human beings from his account of its effects on other kinds of things is to echo Celadon’s ironic assurance that Amelia is different from a tree or a sheep or a tower. Thomson insists that she is not.
Celadon’s error should urge us to proceed carefully when we think about the work of personification in this scene. For throughout his description of lightning and its effects, Thomson’s syntax both complicates and intensifies the work of the figure, ultimately blurring rather than shoring up the distinction between human persons and personified things. To begin, Thomson’s lines often break between subject and verb, unsettling the relation between these terms and granting a degree of independence to action: “the smouldring Pine / Stands”; “The venerable Tower and spiry Fane / Resign”; “The gloomy woods / Start.” Moreover, before something is the subject of an action, it is the object of an act of lightning (the only autonomous—because heavenly—agent in the scene): the pine is “Black from the Stroke” and “smouldring” before it “Stands”; the cattle are “blasted” before they “lie”; the tower and fane are “Struck” before they “Resign.” Similarly, Thomson presents positions before the entities that occupy them: “above” before pine, “below” before cattle, “here” before flocks, “there” before bull or ox. Throughout his description of the storm, Thomson turns syntax and line to the task of his peculiar mode of personification, using both to attribute a form of agency that is again understood not as a Cartesian capacity for response, but rather as the capacity to be moved. In doing so, he proposes a radical leveling: suggesting that what something is proceeds from what something does, that what it does proceeds from what is done to it, and finally, that what is done to it proceeds from where it is. To put this another way: Thomson uses personification in this section to elevate the identity of qualities over and against the difference of subjects, to grant sentiment and agency to pine trees, towers, and sheep, and crucially, to Amelia and to Celadon as well. Thus, as Thomson charts the effect of lightning on Amelia, he proceeds both passively and in reverse, moving from position, to action, to “the beauteous maid.” Amelia is “struck” as the tower is “Struck,” “blacken’d” as the pine is “Black”; Celadon is “sad” as the tree trunk is “sad,” “Pierc’d” as the cattle are “blasted.”64
In this episode, Celadon is derided because he gets personification wrong, imagining that “Mysterious Heaven” acts like a person, and that persons act unlike things. In doing so, he not only mispersonifies heaven, imagining that it operates in the same manner and on the same plane as a person. He also mispersonifies Amelia, imagining that she operates in a different manner and on a different plane from a pine tree or a bull. Imagining human persons to be unique, prior to, and separable from the system that enables their individuation, Celadon enacts what Lévi-Strauss identifies as the characteristic transformation of human society:
All the members of the species Homo sapiens are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species. However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of varieties or of species, probably not found in nature … and which could be termed “mono-individual.” What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behaviour as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a politician or writer or artist moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifolia to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever.65
For Frances Ferguson, what Lévi-Strauss describes in this passage is one version of personification: an operation that transforms persons into exclusive and irreplaceable “personalities.”66 While Lévi-Strauss imagines that, at least in modern society, this transformation of person into personality is inevitable, Thomson wants to avoid the process of “mono-individuation” that affixes affection to any one “exclusive” personality. Apprehensive about the ethical implications of this affective exclusivity, he looks to Shaftesburian systematicity precisely for its capacity to resolve difference into equivalence, to make it possible, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, “both to define the status of persons within a group and to expand the group beyond its traditional confines.”67 But Thomson worries, in a way that Shaftesbury does not, about love.
Love is at once the prime mover of Thomson’s great social harmony and troubling threat to his domestic vision. Thomson repeatedly calls into doubt the smooth passage from self to society imagined by moral-sense philosophers like Shaftesbury or a poet like Pope, by way of the ever-widening concentric circles of the Essay on Man, moving “from individual to the whole” to finally “Take every creature in, of every kind” (4.362, 370). Picturing a self more squarely at odds with the whole of which it is nevertheless a part, Thomson conceives social love as a “Godlike Passion,” which, “the bounds of Self / Divinely