No Thomson, No Wordsworth:

The Importance of Scottish Literature

 

Jeffrey W. Timmons, Ph.D.

 

 

There is probably no more an English poet than William Wordsworth, and though he is, unfortunately, not a Scot, his importance to the literature of Britain is second only to Milton.  I begin this chat with Wordsworth because he represents the culmination of a number of aesthetic trends dating back to the mid-eighteenth century; I choose Wordsworth, and not Sir Walter Scott, for instance, because Scott, being a Scot, cannot embody what I want to suggest to night: that the importance of Scottish literature, especially that of the mid and later eighteenth century, is its influence upon the development of English, indeed, British literature. 

When Wordsworth is recognized as Poet Laureate (1843), it marks his marks his place at the heart of British 19^th century letters.  As a writer who initially supported the revolution in France and who called for a revolution in poetic language, Wordsworth moves from the radical margins to the very center of literary taste; he embodies the changes that took place in literature between 1750 and 1800: the turn away from the general to the particular, from abstract nature to nature itself, from an artificial poetic language to an unaffected, natural language, and from generalized impressions to the  direct representation of human thought and emotion.

It’s obviously problematic to refer to Scotland as “less civilized,” yet for all the Humes, Boswells, and Smiths that Scotland turned out, when Samuel Johnson takes his tour of the north near the end of his life, it is clear that he goes in search of those particular qualities that have been lost to a modern, urban society that he is so much a part of.  Johnson seeks into the last corners of an increasingly remote past and into the vestiges of an older way of life.  Thus, while it may seem insulting to refer to the Scots as less civilized, or their culture as “primitive,” and while English eighteenth-century writing clearly did mean to suggest an a certain inferiority, there is also a reification or a new valuation placed on those qualities: primitivism, in other words, was not derogatory so much as it was a new aesthetic value, one that came to replace the neo-classical elegance and decorum.  At the same time, however, it would a mistake to say that “Scottish” values became the literary aesthetic; instead, I would claim that Scotland and writers from Scotland were a primary source for these new literary tastes–and, hence, its importance.

Now let’s look at some of the particular Scottish writers and works that exerted influence on eighteenth-century British literature.  Anyone familiar with Scots’ writing will tell you that there is a sizable body of literature dating back to the medieval period; however, I want to focus attention on the writers of the middle and later  eighteenth century 1) because this is my area of expertise; 2) because it is during this period that the modern nation-state comes into being; and 3) because it is during this period that national literatures, as such, also begin to coalesce.

Arguably the single most important  poem of the eighteenth century is James Thomson’s Winter (1726); followed up by Spring and  Autumn (1727) and The Seasons (1730), these poems are  can be seen as defining the dominant literary aesthetic of the subsequent 125 years.  In its turn away from high neo-classicism to nature,  to the sublime and spiritual, to the personal, almost confessional voice, and to a retreat from the corruptions of civil society, Thomson’s poem is paradigmatic.

Although a Scot by birth, Thomson migrated south to London when he was 25, apparently to pursue the literary life and the pleasures that derived from it.  He’s what we might call an Anglo-Scot: born in the north but culturally identified with the values and institutions of the south.  What else would you call someone who writes some of the most patriotic songs of the British eighteenth century: “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; / Britons never will be slaves.”  Thomson’s identification with Greater Britain is understandable, though, given the historical relationship between Scotland and England, and in view of the opportunities London provided, especially patronage.  It’s also understandable since the period emphasized a certain cosmopolitanism, rather than provincialism.  Yet Thomson does bring a new emphasis into the poetry of the period–and whether we want to attribute this to an encompassing cultural shift,  a result of Thomson’s Scottish background, some combination of the two, or some other factor, I’m not entirely sure.  What is certain, however, is that what Thomson wrote appealed to and defined the literary sensibilities of the period, and that these sensibilities were increasingly synonymous with places like Scotland.

Typical of this new aesthetic, Thomson’s poem focuses on nature.  Interesting, though, is the way that it straddles neo-classical and romantic dispositions: on the one hand, you have, in the title itself--The Seasons–the allusion to an over-arching, divine order that gives meaning and unity to the diversity of the weather: nature, in this view, is an ordered and orderly process that, when examined rationally, reveals God’s excellent planning skills; on the other hand, we have a poem that, in its sheer volume and profuseness, threatens to overwhelm that order with its particularity, with its picturesque detail. 

As Samuel Johnson observed of the poem, “The great defect of The Seasons is its want of method”–its obvious lack of a self-evident, logical structure.  Yet, as many have pointed out, this “want of method,” makes it possible for Thomson to keep nature and its vicissitudes at the center of the poem; more importantly, though, “want of method” allowed Thomson to keep nature at the center of his narrator’s consciousness: his reflections on nature, the actions of his mind in the act of reflecting and commenting on nature, become a method that Johnson did not–or could not yet–appreciate.  These reflections on nature are the unique contribution of Thomson’s poem to the emerging literary aesthetic.  The poem is important precisely because it marks a turn towards nature as a sort of spiritual retreat  where an internal, isolated voice communes with the processes of the natural world:

See! Winter comes, to rule the varied year,

Sullen and sad; with all his rising train,

Vapors, and clouds, and storms.  Be these my theme,

These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought,

And heavenly musing.  Welcome kindred glooms! 

Wished, wintery horrors, hail! With frequent foot,

Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life,

When nursed by careless solitude I lived,

And sung of Nature with unceasing joy.... (1-9)

........................................................................

Sometimes a fleece

Of clouds, wide-scattering, with a lucid veil,

Soft, shadow o’er th’unruffled face of heaven;

And, through their dewy sluices, shed the sun,

With tempered influence down.  Then is the time,

For those, who Wisdom, and who Nature charm,

To steal themselves from the degenerate crowd,

And soar above this little scene of things:

To tread low-thoughted Vice beneath their feet:

To lay their passions in a gentle calm,

And woo lone Quiet, in her silent walks. (29-39)

Although the syntax (word order) strikes our ears as more representative of an 18^th century disposition, the poem looks forward in its emotional register: the fairly ordinary language, which highlights the personal tone of the speaker,  the cultivation of personal isolation, and the turn away from society towards a redemptive nature evokes obvious parallels with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”: “oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to [nature] / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart...” (26-29).  I draw attention to the similarities  to suggest that it is Thomson who is largely responsible for what we might call a Wordsworthian attitude.  Without a Thomson, no Wordsworth.

Lest we overemphasize a single figure like Thomson, though, let me also mention a number of other ways the influence of Scottish writers was important to literary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Allan Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany and The Ever-Green  (issued from 1724-37) were  the first of several influential collections of songs and ballads; including the medieval Scots poets Dunbar and Henryson, these collections contributed much to the revival of vernacular Scottish poetry and, by extension, Scottish national identity.  They helped to reinforce a Scottish linguistic presence and, in the process, reinforced a sense of national identity.

The influence of these collections is epitomized by the (sorry, non-Scot) Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765); Percy developed the work from a manuscript that he found “lying dirty on the floor” and “being used by the maids to light the fires” (Longman 299).  To this manuscript he added other traditional ballads, minstrelry, alliterative verse, and Norse poetry.  Although the Reliques was not “Scottish” it did contain works that evoked the medieval world–the sort of world  many believed the contemporary Scots still lived in. Including such works as  “Sir Patrick Spens,” collections like Ramsay’s and Percy’s became popular during the eighteenth century precisely because they were an alternative to the prevailing norms of neo-classical elegance and decorum: the ballads’ simplicity, directness, common sense, and their ability to conjure the ancient world, where such manners and attitudes prevailed, became an increasingly popular literary taste. 

Sir Walter Scott’s own interest in ballads owes primarily to the Reliques, which stimulated his own explorations of the Border country and its tales.  From these explorations came the three volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3).  Significantly, Scott’s first original work, showing the clear influence of his explorations, was entitled “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805).

Perhaps no one  was quite as important to the importance of Scottish literature in the eighteenth century, though, as James MacPherson and, of course, Robert Burns.^[1]  MacPherson took Europe by storm in 1762 with his publication Fingal and other supposed versions of oral epics by the Celtic bard Ossian; I say supposed because, of course, MacPherson largely fabricated the works. Taken initially as authentic works of an ancient celtic bard, MacPherson’s poems were enormously popular; their epic tales of a heroic past evoked comparisons to Homer, the Bible, and to Milton.  Apparently, though, those parallels were a bit too close to be accidental, and their authenticity became increasingly suspect. 

Instead of delving into the particulars of these poems, let me comment on their popularity–which is, actually, probably more interesting than the works themselves.  Even after questions arose about their authenticity, the poems continued to be popular well into the nineteenth century. [Matthew Arnold took them seriously enough to comment on their elegiac tone, for instance]. 

One reason for their popularity was their “primitivism,” their representation of a noble, heroic past, and their depiction of a vanished way of life; in this sense, the poems were representative of the shift away from the literary values of neo-classicism.  Another reason is that  these poems played into the public demand for such works.  In fact, it is not too far from the truth to suggest that MacPherson’s manufactured epics represent precisely what the reading public was after and, in the effect they had on subsequent writing, helped to reinforce.  MacPherson, aware of the demand for native primitivism and an epic past, was more than ready to supply the products.  As well, the popularity of these poems even after Johnson and others challenged their authenticity, attests to the strength of aesthetic taste; it’s not so much that the authenticity matters as much as the work conforms to a particular set of popular aesthetic criteria.  And while we might consider this pandering to his audience and even deceiving his audience, MacPherson’s work is interesting precisely because he does pander and deceive them–and in doing so gives us insight into the literary sensibilities of the period, and the market dynamics that drove such tastes.  One begins to wonder if Wilde is not on to something.

Such taste and its popular emergence also made possible the success of writers like Burns, who was called a “striking example of native genius bursting forth.”  “Native genius,”of course, should be read as an oxymoron in the eighteenth century: the idea that “native,” that is rural, poor, illiterate Scotland, could produce a person capable of poetry was somewhat a surprise.  Again, at precisely the moment literary taste needed a living embodiment of a Cincinnatus from the fields capable of turning to the civilized pursuits of poetry, Burns appears.  Burns is promoted as a sort of poetic idiot-savant: a “heaven-taught plow-man.”  The oxymorons are endless, and the truth of Burns’ background not exactly “heaven-taught”: his father was a poor tenant farmer but he was determined that his sons should be well educated; Burns had thorough grounding in English, including classic authors from Shakespeare onwards, a knowledge of French, and mathematics.  My point here, of course, is that public taste and demand expected a “low and rustic” poet and that is what Burns gave them–even if it didn’t quite square with the facts.

But Burns’ work is important, in part, because he may be credited with preserving and creating the presence of a Scottish language and literature at the tail end of the eighteenth century, without which it would be hard  to distinguish a Scottish literature.  Clearly Burns was not the only poet working in Scottish dialects but it is his voice that becomes representative of Scotland during the late eighteenth century.  Burns is also important because without him the values, themes,  forms, and language of Romantics like Wordsworth could not have gained the acceptance that they did.

Let me briefly mention one more figure before I close, and who will allow me to re-capitulate:  Like Thomson, James Boswell is a significant figure of British letters; note that I say British and not Scottish: it may be rather perverse, especially in front of this group, to say this, but Boswell’s importance is precisely his oblique relationship to England as a Scot: without the Scottish Boswell, who maintained relations with his country and England all his life, we would not have the Johnson that we do.  Without Boswell we may well, in fact, have a less substantial Johnson do–and if you know how large Johnson was, he was substantial to begin with, so you can imagine.....

This is, as I said, a rather perverse assertion to make and I do it at risk of personal injury, I’m sure . . . but hear me out: this does not make Boswell or Scottish literature less important but, rather, more important.  As a Scot, we can call Boswell an embodiment of the relationship between these countries during the eighteenth century and point out that without Scots and Scots’ writing, English, British literature would be much less significant than it is.

Finally, let me leave you with some questions about Scottish Literature.  Although we often refer to “Scottish” literature, to “English” literature, “American” literature, many literary scholars today are intent on thinking about what it means to categorize works of art within these fairly artificial boundaries.  When we talk about a national literature, we are most commonly referring to a body of writing that evokes the shared geographic, ethnic, cultural, historical, and especially, linguistic dispositions of a particular group of people. 

Perhaps the most important of these features is the linguistic–since a distinctly national literature is, in many respects, determined by linguistic difference.  Of course, this raises the question of how and to what degree a Literature–with a capital L–can be in a dialect, especially in a dialect whose use was actively discouraged; essentially, this is to ask, given the historical relationship between England and Scotland, how to define a Scottish literature separate and distinct from its entanglements with England and, especially, with English.  Can a Scottish literature, whose writers have often chosen to use English as their vernacular, truly be a national literature, when it frequently lacks the linguistic determinant?

Scotland has a substantial body of writing in its dialects, and from this work we can talk about a sufficient national literature.  In fact, it’s even possible to argue that literature is a vital means of articulating a national identity among otherwise disconnected individuals; without this body of writing, a people struggling to unify themselves cannot begin to establish a collective point of view.  But the situation becomes more complicated when we deal with writers like Boswell and Thomson, who speak mainstream, eighteenth-century English, and whose values and interests were not primarily Scottish.  To what degree are they or are they not Scottish writers?  When does one stop being a Scot and become English or British?  Does one have to write directly of Scotland or in support of Scotland to be a Scot?  How are we to define, and what are the criteria for a Scottish national literature?  Do we include Boswell, based on his geographical choices, and exclude Thomson because of his?  Is it possible to call these writers Scottish even as they do not write in a Scots dialect? 

Nevertheless, even with such questions, we can point to a historically significant body of writing and an influential group of writers who, in numerous ways, reflect the clear importance of Scottish  Literature in the eighteenth century.