Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
might confer, agency is peculiarly unsettling. By according agency indiscriminately to all kinds of beings, personification threatens accounts of personhood that depend on distinguishing human action from the movements of other kinds.
For Thomson, this is precisely personification’s promise: the capacity to reconfigure agency as animation, and thus to distribute it more widely. Like Knapp, Thomson understands personification to confer agency, and like Kames, Beattie, Priestley, and Blair, he connects this agency to sentiment: to mental actions or affections like imploring or musing or being amused. For Thomson, however, these attributes are proper not to human beings but to persons and to peoples—proper, in other words, not to some given natural kind, but to beings constituted by means of personification. Further, Thomson does not define the agency of persons with a Cartesian capacity for response, the capacity to move with meaning. Instead, he runs agency and sentiment together, defining persons by a capacity to be moved. In this, he identifies persons with something that looks very much like animal motion: a mode of action in which moving and being moved is difficult to parse, because its source straddles the line commonly drawn between individual and species, between inside and out.
The eighteenth-century term for this mode of both motion and feeling is passion; it is a type of agency that is not exactly agentive.52 Thomson thus depicts the central passion of The Seasons—Love—less as an internal feeling than as an external force, an animating principle that extends from God to bind “this complex stupendous Scheme of Things” (Sp, 858). In Spring, “the Soul of Love is sent abroad”; it moves “Warm thro’ the vital Air, and on the Heart / Harmonious seizes” (Sp, 582–84). Love first seizes on the hearts of birds, who are bound by this “soft Infusion” into pairs and then to the offspring they produce: “O what Passions then, / What melting Sentiments of kindly Care, / On the new Parents seize!” (Sp, 588, 674–76). Love proceeds to “seize” on the hearts of bulls, sea creatures, and finally, human beings, who are similarly moved by “th’infusive Force of Spring” (Sp, 868). In his turn with the theme of the passions of the groves, Thomson once again both draws on and departs from a Virgilian model. In the Georgics, Virgil also pictures the influence of love over “every Creature, and of every Kind”; as in Thomson, “Love is Lord of all; and is in all the same.”53 Yet if the reach of love is similar in both poets, the nature and effects of the passion differ widely. In Virgil, love is a “rage” that affects one creature after another, turning each away from family and its fellows: he relates that “with this rage, the Mother Lion stung / Scours o’er the Plain; regardless of her Young”; and that “to battle Tygers move; / … enrag’d with love.”54 In Thomson, by contrast, the primary effect of love is homemaking. Thomson describes a bird under the more gentle and sociable sway of this animal passion, moved not to battle or the plain but “to build his hanging House,” to construct his “Habitation” and “airy City” (Sp, 655, 660, 769). The proper work of love, in Thomson, is to construct social relations conceived in explicitly domestic terms: the poet thus takes up his “rural Seat” that he “might the various Polity survey / Of the mixt Houshold-Kind” (766, 771–72). This “polity” of “mixt Houshold-Kind” is the crux of Thomson’s social vision: a domestic society that extends well beyond humanity to include all the beings under the influence of “Love.”
Thomson’s domestic society is composed of the affective ties of couple, kin, and kind. This is the work of love, as Thomson conceives it. This society is also composed of commercial and economic relations, in both a narrow and an expansive sense. This is the work of industry, a passion that Thomson aligns closely with love. (Indeed, Autumn—the book devoted to Industry, as Spring is to Love—opens with a tale that unites these passions in the persons of Palemon and Lavinia, a farmer and the maid who gleans in his fields. Their industry gives rise to love, which in turn gives rise to industry.) For Thomson, industry and love are both forces of domestication. Without industry, Thomson writes, man is “Naked, and helpless, out amid the Woods, / And Wilds,” nothing more than a “sad Barbarian, roving / … / For Home he had not” (A, 48–49, 57, 65). If love gives rise to the couple and so to the household, then industry gives rise to commerce, which Thomson pictures as an expanded domestic sphere, a household that might incorporate all of nature. In Liberty, for example, Thomson celebrates the Roman and British empires for enlarging domestic relations, for moving “Round social Earth to circle fair Exchange, / And bind the Nations in a golden Chain” (4.436–38); in The Castle of Indolence, he lauds the Knight of Industry because he “Bade social Commerce raise renowned Marts, / Join Land to Land, and marry Soil to Soil, Unite the Poles” (2.174–76). The Seasons similarly extols the civilizing force of empire, as that which in “generous Commerce binds / The Round of Nations in a golden Chain,” which “in unbounded Commerce mix’d the World” (Su, 138–39, 1012).
In such passages, Thomson invokes the image of the great chain of being to describe and to justify empire.55 He is often and understandably charged with thereby attempting to naturalize social relations. At the same time, the relationship between the natural and the social is complicated in Thomson, and his effort moves equally in the opposite direction: Thomson seeks to socialize nature, to constitute the whole of the earth as one great domestic society. The same attitude that underwrites his praise of “generous” or “social” empire thus informs his critique of those who act against the ethos of his domestic vision. These include agents of human empire that Thomson sees as neither generous nor social—those who “Rush into Blood, the Sack of Cities seek; / … / By legal Outrage, and establish’d Guile, / The social Sense extinct” (A, 1281, 1288–89). They also include “the guilty Nations” of human beings that plunder “the busy Nations” of bees, gathering honey by robbery and murder rather than the more peaceable relations of commercial exchange (Sp, 510; Su, 1711). The same principle directs Thomson’s polemic against mistreating and even eating domestic animals:
The Beast of Prey,
Blood-stain’d, deserves to bleed: but you, ye Flocks,
What have you done; ye peaceful People, What,
To merit Death? You, who have given us Milk
In luscious Streams, and lent us your own Coat
Against the Winter’s Cold? And the plain Ox,
That harmless, honest, guileless Animal,
In What has he offended? He whose Toil,
Patient and ever-ready, clothes the Land
With all the Pomp of Harvest; shall he bleed,
And struggling groan beneath the cruel Hands
Even of the Clowns he feeds? And That, perhaps,
To swell the Riot of th’autumnal Feast,
Won by his Labour? (Sp, 357–70)
Thomson contends that because “peaceful People” like sheep and oxen contribute to human well-being (with milk and coats and labor), human beings are bound to contribute to the well-being of sheep and oxen. In Thomson’s configuration, sheep shearing becomes a model act, replacing “the Knife / Of horrid Slaughter” with an instrument of industry and commerce, “the tender Swain’s well-guided Shears” (Su, 417–18). As Thomson explains to the “dumb complaining” sheep, this is a fair trade: the swain, “to pay his annual Care, / Borrow’d your Fleece, to you a cumbrous Load” (Su, 416, 419–20).
In such moments, Thomson’s domestic system brings humans and animals together on a model that resembles contract, as he explains the terms of agreement to sheep. But more often, Thomson’s mixed household polity is composed not by the consent of discrete individuals (whether human or no), but by allegorical personifications like Love and Industry—passions that bind all sorts of beings in affective and economic relations that very often exceed one’s assent or even knowledge. For all that such personifications are clearly and conspicuously figurative, they create real obligations in Thomson. At least, they register the fact that, like sheep who do not consent to trade fleece for care nor even understand that they do, humans may be obliged to all kinds of things from which they unknowingly benefit. Thomson’s description of “The various