Personification for the People
Jonathan Swift did not care for Thomson’s Seasons because, as he put it, “they are all Descriptions and nothing is doing.”25 Contrary to Swift’s complaint, however, The Seasons is a poem in which everything is doing. Animation is the primary mode of being in and of Thomson’s poem, which presents an elaborate vision of the whole “Earth animated” (Su, 296). Critics have repeatedly noted that Thomson’s descriptions teem with verbs or verbs-made-adjectives (the first fifteen lines of the poem, for example, describe a “dropping Cloud,” “shadowing Roses,” a “howling Hill,” a “shatter’d Forest,” and a “ravag’d Vale”) (Sp, 2, 4, 13, 14). But most understand Thomson to animate his descriptions of natural objects in order to emphasize his own perception, focusing on the operations of his mind rather than on the world outside.26 This kind of reading can be traced back to Romantic critics like Hazlitt, who applauds Thomson because he “humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul.”27 On such readings, the life and soul of The Seasons are always the poet’s own, human attributes projected onto the natural world. Thus when John Barrell notes “the activity, the motion, of Thomson” (in particular, of Thomson’s syntax), he locates the source of this activity in the poet’s will to order the landscape and its objects, to act upon the landscape by composing it.28 The Thomsonian poet projects or forces his own animation onto the inert landscape as he works it into shape, “recognizing the stretch of land under [his] eye not, simply, as that—as an area of ground filled with various objects, trees, hills, fields—but as a complex of associations and meanings … in which each object bore a specific and analyzable relationship to others.”29 For Barrell, then, Thomson is not quite the poet that returned British poetry to nature. Instead, he is the poet that would overwrite human activity (poetic, political, economic) as natural process, disguising aesthetic and also social organization as natural order: to effect what Kevis Goodman has called “the pastoralization of the georgic.”30
Barrell’s is an especially compelling and acute recent reading of Thomson, and its account of the political implications of Thomson’s poetics has been rightly influential. Most basically, Barrell argues that Thomson’s “idea of landscape” subordinates sense and particularity to abstract or conventional form: “For the idea to have any concrete existence it has to be applied to, or discovered in, a tract of land, but this tract of land is to be understood as hostile to the notion of being thus organized. The synthesis Thomson arrives at is one in which the objects retain to some extent their individuality—each landscape is different from any other—and yet appear to be organized within a formal pattern.”31 In passages like this one, Barrell objects to Thomson’s idea of landscape because it fails to free a particular place from formal organization, to fully depict “individuality.” He thus dismisses as wrongheaded ideology the common eighteenth-century idea that “‘natural objects readily form themselves into groups’” (the phrase is Kames’s).32 Barrell’s sense that composition is always imposition marks a major difference with Thomson and (as Barrell himself makes clear) with much of eighteenth-century nature poetry. This difference is aesthetic, ideological, and perhaps most basically, ontological. Barrell’s Marxism—his alertness to systems that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor—entails viewing Thomson’s poetry in fundamentally humanist terms, insisting that there is no activity or association outside the social domain of human beings. To grant nonhuman beings a capacity for activity—a capacity for form or forming relations—is an act of personification as obfuscation, attributing to nonhuman nature something that properly belongs to human beings.
Curiously, Barrell critiques Thomson’s personifying poetics—and behind him, the mainstream of eighteenth-century poetic and landscape aesthetics—by invoking a vocabulary that often enacts its own kind of personification. Throughout Barrell’s reading of Thomson, the landscape and its objects “suffer,” “demand,” and “retaliate”; they are “hostile,” “subjected,” “governed,” “subordinated,” and “imposed” on; they are “prevent[ed] … from asserting themselves at all.”33 The logic and the stakes of Barrell’s personifications begin to come into focus when, quoting Kenneth Clark, Barrell remarks that Claude’s notebook drawings of trees “were not ‘ends in themselves … his mind was always looking forward to their use as part of a whole composition.’”34 This Kantian language begins to indicate something important about the way that Barrell’s personifications differ from Thomson’s. Taking the individual human person to be the primary unit of both reality and moral life, Barrell uses personification first to transform things into individuals or ends, and then to shift attention from vehicle to tenor, from particular places to particular human beings. Barrell makes this move explicit when he contends that poets like Thomson could abstract from particular places so effectively because they “had very little sense of what can perhaps be called the ‘content’ of a landscape—I mean, they gave little evidence of caring that the topography of a landscape was a representation of the needs of the people who had created it.”35 In a reading like Barrell’s, particular places represent and give way to particular human beings, those who actually “suffer,” “demand,” and “retaliate,” who are in fact “subjected,” “governed,” “imposed” on, and “subordinated.” By suppressing the individuality of a place, poets like Thomson support the oppression of its people; they “manipulated the objects in [the landscape] … without any reference to what the function of those objects might be, what their use might be to the people who lived among them.”36 Defining the individuality or identity of a place with its function, its use, or the “intellectual, emotional, historical associations evoked” by its features, Barrell ultimately returns to human beings as the proper subjects of ethics.37 It is these individuals that Barrell is ultimately concerned to portray and protect—not particular tracts of land, but the human beings who call them home.
I am reading Barrell’s account of Thomson somewhat against its own spirit and interests in order to suggest that Barrell’s quite modern and humanist ontology departs from Thomson’s in important and instructive ways. The basic unit of Thomson’s ontology is not the unique individual, and it is not necessarily human. As a result, Thomson’s personifications, unlike Barrell’s, do not begin (or end) with individual human persons. Instead, they start with the technique of periphrasis, which configures all kinds of beings as people—as well as, in Thomson’s other terms, as tribes, nations, troops, races, or kinds—rather than as persons in the sense of individuals, ends, or human beings. Critics who think about Thomson’s “people” have sometimes noted that the form of Thomson’s periphrases resembles the emerging form of natural-historical taxonomy. Ralph Cohen, for example, suggests that Thomson uses periphrasis to create a coherent binomial nomenclature, in