The passion that Thomson celebrates under the name of “love”—the social passion of the Roman people, or of the ideal couple—is sharply distinguished from self-love, a passion that Thomson often denominates with the Virgilian “rage,” or simply qualifies as “wild.” The most extreme instance of this sort of self-directed love in Thomson is rape or enforced marriage: the kind of love he depicts as common in those “barbarous Nations, whose inhuman Love / Is wild Desire,” where a tyrannical and predatory lover is “meanly posses’d / Of a meer, lifeless violated Form” (Sp, 1130–31, 1133–34). Thomson wants to distinguish “The cruel Raptures of the Savage Kind” from the animating passion that composes domestic and civilized society (Sp, 826). But love repeatedly threatens to slide toward what Thomson calls wilderness—love as inhuman possession, a mode of lifelessness, inanimacy, or death. Spring thus closes its celebration of domestic love with a caution to youth to “beware of Love” (983), warning that “Love deludes into … thorny Wilds” (1108). It is for such wild delusion that Thomson faults “the guileless” Celadon and Amelia: “Devoting all / To Love, each was to each a dearer Self” (Su, 1183). Celadon and Amelia may be in some sense “guileless,” but Thomson insists they are also guilty—of imagining that their guilelessness matters, that nature is a personal order, that who and what persons are is, most fundamentally, singular selves.
For Thomson, the problem is that when love personifies in this way—when it singles out what Thomson calls a “self” and Lévi-Strauss calls a “personality”—it fractures rather than binds the social whole, constricts rather than enlarges its bounds. It becomes a principle of obstruction and rupture rather than motion and composition. This is the fate not only of the barbarian tyrant-lover but of the lovesick boy, whose beloved “alone / Heard, felt, and seen, possesses every Thought, / Fills every Sense, and pants in every Vein,” and who thus sits “amid the social Band … / Lonely, and unattentive” (Sp, 1013–18). When love is fixed on one person rather than directed in and by an ever expanding whole, Thomson warns that it leaves a “Semblance of a Lover, fix’d / In melancholy Site,” a “Wretch, / Exanimate by Love” (Sp, 1022–23, 1051–52). Thomson insists that it does not matter if love is fixed on oneself or on one’s “dearer Self.” Identifying the capacity to move with the capacity to be moved, Thomson understands the self not as the seat or source of agency but as its arrest: the lovesick boy is “fix’d / In melancholy Site” just as Celadon “stood / Pierc’d … and fix’d.” As these phrases indicate, Thomson decries self-love not because it misdirects emotion, but because it cuts emotion off from direction or motion altogether. If (e)motive forces become fixed in one personality or self, then movement stops and the form of personhood that grounds Thomson’s domestic society is suspended: one is made “Exanimate by Love.”
In his remarks on love, selfhood, and wilderness, Thomson acknowledges the troubling potential of personification to transform human beings into exclusive personalities, a petrified figure, on Thomson’s view, that undoes personhood and the forms of sociability with which it is associated. This is a potential that Thomson does not entirely contain in The Seasons, but to which he does provide an alternative. This comes in the form of yet another type of personification, which seeks to avoid the production of personality by transforming human beings into allegorical personifications. Personified thus, human persons appear not as unique individuals but as types, designated by common nouns instead of proper names: “A DRAKE,” “a BACON,” “a steady MORE,” “The generous Ashley,” “The gentle Spenser” (Su, 1495, 1535, 1488, 1551, 1573). The move from Thomson’s catalog of British patriots to his roll of allegorical virtues and passions like Love and Charity is a seamless one, because for Thomson, patriots are virtues: More is “steady,” Walsingham is “frugal, and wise,” Raleigh is “active,” Russel is “temper’d,” and Algernon Sidney is “fearless” (Su, 1488, 1494, 1505, 1523, 1528). Making persons grammatically identical to personified virtues, Thomson makes the final move in a poetic system that looks to personification to both constitute and expand the bounds of society: he composes persons into peoples or kinds, as he indicates when he praises classical luminaries as “First of your Kind! Society divine!” (W, 541). To make a person a people or kind is for Thomson to render him reproducible, a motive for the movement of others: like Socrates “the Sun, / From whose white Blaze emerg’d each various Sect / Took various Teints, but with diminish’d Beam,” or like Homer, “the FOUNTAIN-BARD, / When each Poetic Stream derives its Course” (Liberty, 2.223–25, 272–73). Rather than the sexual reproduction of erotic love, it is this sort of reproduction with which Thomson is most comfortable, as more reliably working against the exanimating logic of selfhood. In The Seasons as in Liberty, then, Thomson everywhere personifies human persons in order to produce other people, casting British heroes from and as classical types: More is “Like CATO firm, like ARISTIDES just, / Like rigid CINCINNATUS nobly poor”; Algernon Sidney is “the BRITISH CASSIUS”; Bacon is “in one rich Soul, / PLATO, the STAGYRITE, and TULLY join’d” (Su, 1491–92, 1528, 1541–42). The Seasons thus composes society as a dynamic system that proceeds from periphrastic to allegorical personification: a system in which persons and personifications are collapsed and constantly producing each other.68
Coda: Patient Persons
Throughout this chapter, I have argued that Thomson does not take the individual to be a primary ontological or even ethical term. He does, however, take individuality seriously as both an epistemological and an affective reality—one that he calls wild, and yet acknowledges at the center of his domestic vision. Thus while Thomson affirms, with Shaftesbury, that every being is fundamentally an element in some composition, he does not think that we experience ourselves (or others, at least beloved others) that way. In the end, wilderness is best understood to designate this limited or simply partial point of view: the point of view of the individual—whether human or no—that senses itself not as a part of a whole but as a particular life, even a unique personality. Thomson may be uncomfortable with the claims made from this point of view, but he does not entirely set them aside. Along with discomfort, there is sympathy for the guilelessness of Celadon and Amelia—for what it feels like to be part, or to care for one individual person. This sympathy is most powerfully expressed in The Seasons when individual persons are subject to violence at the hands of human beings.
In its own time, Thomson’s poem was probably most famous for its polemic against hunting, which centers on the personified figure of a solitary hunted stag.69 With this figure of an acutely singular individual, we encounter a form of individuation that Thomson presents not as an ethical problem, but as a good. Thomson’s hunt scene in some ways reprises the episode of the summer storm, which ended by indicting Celadon’s personification of Amelia as an ontological and ethical error. But Thomson’s depiction of the hunt replaces divine or natural forces like heaven and lightning—which Celadon wrongly imagined to act like persons, or to care about particular personalities—by human agents, who are themselves wholly dehumanized and pictured as natural forces. In this, the hunt scene picks up on Thomson’s wider effort, in The Seasons, to fundamentally recast the nature of action, ejecting useless, self-directed, or rapacious acts from the category altogether. It is to this end that Thomson figures as an “idle Blank” the “cruel Wretch” who “squander’d vile, / Upon his scoundrel Train, what might have chear’d / A drooping Family of modest Worth”; so too the “luxurious Men” who “pass / An idle Summer-Life in Fortune’s Shine,” who “flutter on / From Toy to Toy, from Vanity to Vice” (Su, 1635–40, 346–49). Thomson depicts hunting as the exemplary case of such idleness or inaction, using the conventions of the mock-heroic to send up the lowly status not of the hunted fox but of the predatory hunter: “O glorious he, beyond / His daring Peers!”