The Latest Edition of Thomson [46]
[46] The Poetical Works of James Thomson. A New Edition, with Memoir and Critical Appendices, by the Rev. D. C. Tovey. 2 vols. London.
"Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts"—a forgotten poet of the eighteenth century—such is the title of a recent monograph on the author of The Seasons by Dr. G. Schmeding. Dr. G. Schmeding is, however, so obliging as to pronounce that, in his opinion, this ought not to be Thomson's fate; that there remains in his work, especially in The Seasons merit enough to entitle him to be "enrolled among poets," and to find appreciation, at all events in schools and reading societies. Dr. Schmeding may rest assured that Thomson's fame is quite safe. It has no doubt suffered, as that of all the poets of the eighteenth century has suffered, by the great revolution which has, in the course of the last ninety years, passed over literary tastes and fashions. But during the present century there have been no less than twenty editions of his poems, to say nothing of separate editions of The Seasons; while his works, or portions of them, have been translated into German, Italian, modern Greek, and Russian. Only two years ago M. Léon Morel, in his J. Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres, published an elaborate and admirable monograph on this "forgotten poet." And now Mr. Tovey, who, we are glad to see, has been appointed Clarke Lecturer at Cambridge, has given us a new biography of him and a new edition of his works, making, if we are not mistaken, the thirty-second memoir of him and the twenty-first edition of his works which have appeared since the beginning of the century. This is pretty well for a forgotten poet!
Mr. Tovey's name is a sufficient guarantee for accurate and scholarly work. But it might naturally be asked, what is there to justify another edition of this poet, when so many editions are already in the field and so easily accessible? We have little difficulty in answering this question. The special features of Mr. Tovey's edition are as important as they are interesting. In the first place, he has given us a much fuller biography than has hitherto appeared in English; in the second place, he has thrown much interesting light on the political bearing of Thomson's dramas; and, in the third place, he has given, what no other editor of Thomson has given, a full collation of Thomson's own MS. corrections, preserved in Mitford's copy, now deposited in the British Museum. The critical notes have cost him, he says, and we can quite believe it, much time and labour, and in his preface he half apologizes for what may seem "a ridiculous travesty of more important labours." There was no necessity for such an apology: he observes justly that he has "not spent more pains on Thomson's text than so many of our scholars bestow upon some Greek and Latin poets whose intrinsic merit is no greater than Thomson's."
To serious readers these critical notes will constitute the most valuable part of Mr. Tovey's labours; they are, in truth, the speciality of this particular edition, and will make it indispensable to all students of this most interesting poet. And now Mr. Tovey will, we trust, forgive us if, with due deference, we point out what seem to us to be defects in his work. The first thing that might have been expected from so learned and careful an editor of Thomson was an adequate discussion of the great problem of the authorship of Rule Britannia, and the second an exposure of one of the most extraordinary "mare's-nests" to be found in English literature. But nothing, we regret to say, can be more perfunctory and inadequate than the two notes in which the first question is hurried over with references to Notes and Queries, and nothing more irritating than the confusion worse confounded in which Mr. Tovey leaves the second. We shall therefore make no apology for entering somewhat at length into both these questions.
And first for the authorship of Rule Britannia. The facts are these. In 1740 Thomson and Mallet wrote, in conjunction, a masque entitled Alfred, which, on 1st August in that year, was represented before the Prince and Princess of Wales at Clifden. It was in two acts, and it contained six lyrics, the last being Rule Britannia, which is entitled an "Ode," the music being by Dr. Arne. In 1745 Arne turned the piece into an opera, and also into "a musical drama." By this time the lyric had become very popular, but there is no evidence to show that it had been definitely attributed to either of the coadjutors. In 1748 Thomson died. In 1751 Mallet re-issued Alfred, but in another form. It was entirely remodelled, and almost entirely re-written, and, in an advertisement prefixed to the work, he says: "According to the present arrangement of the fable I was obliged to reject a great deal of what I had written in the other: neither could I retain, of my friend's part, more than three or four speeches, and a part of one song." Now, of the parts retained from the former work, there were the first three stanzas of Rule Britannia, the three others being excised, and their place supplied by three stanzas written by Lord Bolingbroke. If Mallet is to be believed, then, "part of one song" must refer, either to a song in the third scene of the second act, beginning "From those eternal regions bright," or to Rule Britannia, for these are the only lyrics in which portions of the lyrics in the former edition are retained. Rule Britannia is, it is true, entitled "An Ode" in the former edition, and the other lyric "A Song," so that Mallet would certainly seem to imply that what he had retained of his friend's work was the portion of the song referred to, and not Rule Britannia. But, as Mallet was notoriously a man who could not be believed on oath, and was an adept in all those bad arts by which little men filch honours which do not belong to them, if he is to be allowed to have any title to the honour of composing this lyric, it ought to rest on something better than the ambiguity between the word "Ode" and the word "Song."
There is no evidence that, while both were alive, either Thomson or Mallet claimed the authorship; but this is certain, it was printed at Edinburgh, during Mallet's lifetime, in the second edition of a well-known song book, entitled The Charmer, with Thomson's initials appended to it. It is certain that Mallet had friends in Edinburgh, and it is equally certain that neither he nor any of his friends raised any objection to its ascription to Thomson. In 1743, in 1759, and in 1762 Mallet published collections of poems, but in none of these collections does he lay claim to Rule Britannia, and, though it was printed in song-books in 1749, 1750, and 1761, it is in no case assigned to Mallet. None of his contemporaries, so far as we know, attributed it to him, and it is remarkable that, in a brief obituary notice of him which appeared in the Scots Magazine in 1765, he is spoken of as the author of the famous ballad William and Margaret, but not a word is said about Rule Britannia. A further presumption in Thomson's favour is this: in all probability Dr. Arne, who set it to music, knew the authorship, and he survived both Thomson and Mallet, dying in 1778. The song had become very popular and celebrated, so that if Mallet had desired to have the credit of its composition, it is strange that he should not have laid claim to it, had his claim been a good one. But if his claim was not good, he could hardly have ventured to claim the authorship, as Dr. Arne would have been in his way. It is quite possible that the ambiguity in the advertisement to the recension of 1751 was designed; it certainly left the question open, and we cannot but think there is something very suspicious in what follows the sentence in Mallet's advertisement, where he speaks of his having used so little of his friend's work. "I mention this expressly," he adds, "that, whatever faults are found in the present performance, they may be charged, as they ought to be, entirely to my account." A vainer and more unscrupulous man than Mallet never existed; and, while it is simply incredible that he should not have claimed what would have constituted his chief title to popularity as a poet, had he been able to do so, it is in exact accordance with his established character that he should, as he did in the advertisement of 1751, have left himself an opportunity of asserting that claim, should those who were privy to the secret have predeceased him, and thus enabled him to do so with impunity.
The internal evidence—and on this alone the question must now be argued—seems to us conclusive in Thomson's favour. The Ode is simply a translation into lyrics of what finds embodiment in Thomson's Britannia, in the fourth and fifth parts of Liberty, and in his Verses to the Prince of Wales. Coming to details, there can be no doubt that the third stanza—
"Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak"—
was suggested by Horace's
"Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damna, per cædes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro."
Now, not only was Horace, as innumerable imitations and reminiscences prove, one of Thomson's favourite poets, but Thomson has, in the third part of Liberty translated this very passage:—
"Like an oak,
Nurs'd on feracious Algidum, whose boughs
Still stronger shoot beneath the rigid axe
By loss, by slaughter, from the steel itself
E'en force and spirit drew."
He has, elsewhere, two other reminiscences of the same passage, once in the third part of Liberty—
"Every tempest sung
Innoxious by, or bade it firmer stand"—
and once in Sophonisba (Act V. sc. ii.):—
"Thy rooted worth
Has stood these wintry blasts, grown stronger by them."
The epithet "azure" employed in the first stanza is, with "cerulean" and "aerial," one of the three commonest epithets in Thomson, the three occurring at least twenty times in his poetry. A somewhat cursory examination of his works has enabled us to find that "azure" or "azured" alone occurs ten times. "Generous," too, in the Latin sense of the term, is another of his favourite words, it being used no less than sixteen times in Britannia and Liberty alone. Another of his favourite allusions is to England's "native oaks." Thus in Britannia he speaks of—
"Your oaks, peculiar harden'd, shoot
Strong into sturdy growth;"
in the last part of Liberty we find "Let her own naval oak be basely torn," and in the same part of the poem he speaks of the "venerable oaks" and "kindred floods." The epithet "manly" and the phrase "the fair"—"manly hearts to guard the fair"—are also peculiarly Thomsonian, being repeatedly employed by him, the phrase "the fair" occurring in his poetry at least six times, if not oftener. "Flame," too, is another of his favourite words.
"All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse," etc.,
is exactly the sentiment in Britannia.
"Your hearts
Swell with a sudden courage, growing still
As danger grows."
The stanza beginning "To thee belongs," etc., is simply a lyrical paraphrase of the passage in Britannia commencing "Oh first of human blessings," and of a couplet in the last part of Liberty:—
"The winds and seas are Britain's wide domain;
And not a sail but by permission spreads."
The couplet
"All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine"
is simply the echo of a couplet in the fifth part of Liberty—
"All ocean is her own, and every land
To whom her ruling thunder ocean bears."
The phrase "blessed isle," as applied to England, he employs three times in Liberty. Again, the stanza in which Rule Britannia is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson's minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his.
Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as his ballad William and Margaret, his Edwin and Emma, and his Birks of Invermay sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in the vein of Rule Britannia. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few lines in his Tyburn and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled A Fragment, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson's poems, and which glow so intensely in Rule Britannia, he has absolutely nothing. Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric either in form—for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the stanza in which it is written—or in imagery, or phraseology. Like Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely imitates, he is fond of the words "azure" and "aerial"; and the word "azure" is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too, that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as Britannia, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke's stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing Rule Britannia belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble.
But to return to Mr. Tovey and the "mare's-nest" to which we have referred. This mare's-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson in revising The Seasons. Since Robert Bell's edition this has come to be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.
There is, in the British Museum, an interleaved copy of the first volume of the London edition of Thomson's works, dated 1738, and the part of the volume which contains The Seasons is full of manuscript deletions, corrections, and additions. These are in two handwritings, the one being unmistakably the handwriting of Thomson, the other beyond all question the handwriting of some one else. Almost all these corrections were inserted in the edition prepared for the press in 1744, and now, consequently, form part of the present text. The corrections in the hand which is not the hand of Thomson are, in many cases, of extraordinary merit, showing a fineness of ear and delicacy of touch quite above the reach of Thomson himself. We will give two or three samples. Thomson had written in Autumn 290 seqq.:—
"With harvest shining all these fields are thine,
And if my rustics may presume so far,
Their master, too, who then indeed were blest
To make the daughter of Acasto so."
The unknown corrector substitutes the present reading:—
"The fields, the master, all, my fair, are thine;
If to the various blessings which thy house
Has lavished on me thou wilt add that bliss,
That dearest bliss, the power of blessing thee!"
The other is famous. Thomson had written:—
"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self,
Recluse among the woods, if City-dames
Will deign their faith. And thus she went compell'd
By strong necessity, with as serene
And pleased a look as patience can put on,
To glean Palemon's fields."
For these vapid and dissonant verses is substituted by the corrector, who very properly retains the first verse, what is now the text:—
"Recluse amid the close embow'ring woods,
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild.
So flourished blooming, and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia," etc.
The transformation of a single line is often most felicitous: thus in Winter the flat line
"Through the lone night that bids the waves arise"
is grandly altered into
"Through the black night that sits immense around."
Thus, in Spring, Thomson had merely written
"Whose aged oaks and venerable gloom
Invite the noisy rooks;"
but his corrector alters and extends the passage into
"Whose aged elms and venerable oaks
Invite the rooks, who high amid the boughs
In early spring their airy city build,
And caw with ceaseless clamour."
Indeed, throughout The Seasons Thomson's indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. "It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of The Seasons. Our original authority is, we suppose, Warton." The truth is that our original authority for this statement is neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but simply the conjecture of Mitford—in other words, Mitford's mere assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,—for Mitford may have given earlier currency to it in some other place—the conjecture appeared for the first time in Mitford's edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement by two assertions and references: "That Pope saw some pieces of Thomson's in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles's Supplement, page 194" (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the references all that we find is—it is in a letter dated February 1738/9—"I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson's, but I am told, and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic"; the reference is plainly to Thomson's tragedy, Edward and Eleonora. Again, Mitford writes: "On Thomson's submitting his poems to Pope" (see Warton's edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All that Pope says is, "I am just taken up"—he is writing to Aaron Hill under date November 1732—"by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem he has brought me;" this new poem being almost certainly Liberty, in the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his Essay on Pope he gives an elaborate account of The Seasons, and he has more than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word, either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope's Works, about Pope having corrected Thomson's poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope. Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm. With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for forming an opinion on this point. Pope's autograph MSS. are abundant, illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, "if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope's, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not." Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr. Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy, and indeed goes so far as to say that "it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope's handwriting could ever have been confidently" (the italics are his) "entertained"; and yet in his notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope's initials.
We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other stupid revisions of Thomson's verses sufficiently show, have been Lyttleton. Mallet's blank verse is conclusive against his having had any hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the touch and rhythm of Armstrong.
What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact—namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of The Seasons—rests not, as all Thomson's modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson's own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.