Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
the general Choir. Even Mountains, Vales,
And Forests seem, impatient, to demand
The promis’d Sweetness. Man superior walks
Amid the glad Creation, musing Praise,
And looking lively Gratitude. (Sp, 159–72)
In this section, floods, mountains, vales, and forests seem “Forgetful” or “impatient” or “to demand.” By contrast, neither herds nor flocks nor humans seem to do, to think, or to feel: herds and flocks simply “mute-imploring eye” the verdure; man walks “musing Praise.” In such passages, Thomson accords different faculties to different kinds of beings. Describing the motions and emotions of both humans and animals, moreover, he locates the crucial line of difference not between human and nonhuman but between animate and inanimate beings. Forests only seem to demand; herds and humans actually do.
At other moments, however, Thomson suggests that even this difference is not certain. He makes this point as he pictures insects brought to life by the sun:
Swarming they pour; of all the vary’d Hues
Their Beauty-beaming Parent can disclose.
Ten thousand Forms! Ten thousand different Tribes!
People the Blaze. To sunny Waters some
By fatal Instinct fly; where on the Pool
They, sportive, wheel; or, sailing down the Stream,
Are snatch’d immediate by the quick-eyed Trout,
Or darting Salmon. Thro’ the green-wood Glade
Some love to stray; there lodg’d, amus’d and fed,
In the fresh Leaf. Luxurious, others make
The Meads their Choice, and visit every Flower,
And every latent Herb: for the sweet Task,
To propagate their Kinds, and where to wrap,
In what soft Beds, their Young yet undisclos’d,
Employs their tender Care. (Su, 247–61)
Many of the insectan actions that Thomson charts here might be easily explained by “fatal instinct,” while others—actions that involve faculties commonly reserved for human beings—might simply mix rhetorical modes. On this sort of reading, phrases like “They, sportive, wheel” or “Some love to stray,” embed personification (“sportive” or “love”) in natural description (“They wheel,” “Some stray”). Yet with the several terms for motion that he uses in this passage, Thomson hedges against this reading. Physical actions are not consistently kept separate from those that imply some higher or mental faculty, but often come together in single terms: terms like “stray” and “visit,” which describe physical motion—the path of insects from glade to flower—and, at the same time, faintly suggest the kind of intentionality that a word like “choice” asserts more directly. And just as terms like “stray” and “visit” unsettle clear distinctions between different modes of animation, other terms complicate even the basic divide between animate and inanimate: terms like “wheel,” “sail,” and “dart,” in which—with the contraction that transforms a phrase such as “move like a wheel” into “wheel”—nouns become verbs, things become actions. By confounding efforts to separate mind from motion or moving from being moved, Thomson reminds us that one cannot see love or amusement, know whether flocks “mute-imploring eye” or merely “eye,” whether man “walks / … musing Praise” or merely “walks.” In careful juxtapositions of human and nonhuman creatures and of perceptible and imperceptible actions, Thomson suggests that personification and natural description are not clear and distinct modes. Every action is in some sense an animation: something that is described by means of personification.
In part, this is an epistemological point about the perceptual difficulty of apprehending action. Thomson suggests that “seem” may not always need to be qualified by “only” (as in, forests only seem to demand, while humans actually do). Some things seem a certain way because that is simply what they are. In the case of animate beings in particular, appearance is the best indication of—or, simply is—essence. For Thomson, this is also a point about what action is: something less clearly agentive than we tend to think, and less clearly set apart from other modes of motion or movement. Thomson makes this point in part by using personification to do something besides attribute “human” or mental actions to other creatures—very often, to do something like the inverse. While birds sympathize and insects sport and make choices, Thomson’s humans often perform actions typically associated with other kinds. Like the “fluttering Wing” of a fly, men “flutter on / From Toy to Toy, from Vanity to Vice”; so too a fop is “a gay Insect … light-fluttering,” and a human mother holds her child “to her fluttering Breast” (Su, 278, 348–49; W, 644–45; Su, 933). Like the insects “Swarming” forth in Summer, a Village “swarms … o’er the jovial Mead”; again in Winter, “The City swarms intense” (Su, 247, 352; W, 630). Thomson’s terms do not only traverse the territory between humans and nonhuman animals; they also cut across other distinctions of kind. As insects and humans do elsewhere, birds “Thick-swarm” over floods, this time “Like vivid Blossoms” (Su, 734–35). Human agency is in turn often cast as vegetable growth: humankind begins, “With various Seeds of Art deep in the Mind / Implanted”; the Sun “rears and ripens Man, as well as Plants” (A, 50–51; W, 939). Parents are gardeners who cultivate a “human Blossom,” working “to rear the tender Thought, / To teach the young Idea how to shoot, / To pour the fresh Instruction o’er the Mind” (Sp, 1147, 1152–54). Like much of Thomson’s poem, these lines derive something of their logic from the second book of the Georgics, where Virgil uses terms of child rearing to instruct the husbandman on how to cultivate vines: advising, in Dryden’s translation, that he teach young plants how to “lift their Infant Head[s]”; use stakes as crutches to help them “learn to walk”; show tenderness to his “Nurseling[s]” in their “Nonage,” and “Indulge their childhood.”48 But Thomson does not counsel farmers to rear plants like children; rather, he advises parents to rear children (and ideas) like plants.
The crossings that Thomson enacts between human, animal, and vegetable begin to indicate the strangeness of what we might think of as Thomson’s philosophy of action, as well as the kind of ethical and social relations that he envisions. If blossoms swarm like humans and humans grow like blossoms, then humans, like flowers, frequently require external force to be moved. Man remained idle, Thomson declares, “till INDUSTRY approach’d / And rous’d him from his miserable Sloth,” “breathing high Ambition thro’ his Soul” (A, 72–73, 93). Even in Liberty and The Castle of Indolence, poems explicitly concerned with political action, Thomson depicts action not as the product of agentive individuals but as an effect of personified motives: of Liberty, “whose vital Radiance calls / From the brute Mass of Man an order’d World”; and of Industry, who stirs a crowd into action as the sun melts snow:
Strait, from the Croud,
The better Sort on Wings of Transport fly.
As when amid the lifeless Summits proud
Of alpine Cliffs, where to the gelid Sky Snows pil’d on Snows in wintry Torpor lie, The Rays divine of vernal Phoebus play; Th’ awaken’d Heaps, in Streamlets from on high, Rous’d into Action, lively leap away, Glad-warbling through the Vales, in their new Being gay.49
Moving human beings from without, allegorical personifications like Liberty and Industry might seem to dispersonify or to reify human beings, much as Stephen Knapp suggests in his study of eighteenth-century personification. Knapp argues that Milton’s personifications of Sin and Death troubled eighteenth-century readers because of the reversibility they risked. By permitting personifications to act like persons—by allowing Sin and Death to act like Adam and Eve—Milton threatened what Coleridge would later refer to as “the sacred distinction between things and persons.”50 As Knapp puts it, “Once the boundaries between literal and figurative agency were erased, it seemed that nothing