Becoming artists of ourselves: James Thomson on love's civilising power
A love poem that embodies Enlightenment rationalism
Though the Enlightenment was a revolt against superstition, arbitrary hierarchy and clerical presumption, it was nonetheless an appeal to authority and certainty—only that authority and certainty was of an alternative kind. Rather than look to God’s law or theological claims for the truths of existence and human nature, Enlightenment thinkers sought truth in the timeless and discoverable laws of science and the universal faculty of human reason. After centuries of Romanticism and many decades of postmodernism, human reason for us today is a dubious kind of authority—at best a pragmatic fiction. But in the eighteenth century, reason was an emancipating force. Authority and certainty still existed, but they were arrived at not by tradition and social habit, by by independent thought.
As Isaiah Berlin has noted of the European Enlightenment:
‘…[it] rested on an acceptance of what was, in effect, a secular version of the old natural law doctrine according to which the nature of things possessed a permanent, unalterable structure, differences and changes in the world being subject to universal and immutable laws. These laws were discoverable in principle by the use of reason and controlled observation, of which the methods of the natural sciences constituted the most successful application.’
This worldview led to the basic assumption that ‘all statements with claims to truth must be public, communicable, testable—capable of verification or falsification by methods open to accepted by any rational investigator.’
So what marked out the Enlightenment from previous ages was not a repudiation of objective structure and authority, but rather a new vision of how a human being relates to that structure and reality. Though people are fallible and only very rarely rational, the Enlightenment rebelled against the idea that we should simply accept our lot and rely on the external power of divine salvation. On the contrary, what was needed was the cultivation of our natural reason, in order to rise above our suffering, self-inflicted or otherwise. If science had shown in the seventeenth century that human beings could exert control over nature through engineering and exploration, then there is no reason, thought the thinkers of the Enlightenment, that we could not find similar progress in the realm of values, politics and morality. As Steven Pinker writes in Enlightenment Now:
‘If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was the insistence that we energetically apply the standard or reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion, like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic passing of sacred texts.’
Or as Immanuel Kant said in famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, the path to truth is free thought, rather than blind obedience. Kant wrote:
‘Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.’
James Thomson’s love poem ‘Gifts’ places human passion in just this scientific and material worldview, showing it as the final stage in the growth and triumph of human self-conquest. In three quatrains of loose iambic tetrameter (more song-like than strict verse) which rhyme only on the second line, Thomson sets human love in a rational hierarchy of Enlightenment civilisation.
Thomson was born near Kelso in the borders of Scotland, and educated at Jedburgh School and Edinburgh University. However, he made his name by being a tutor to London aristocrats and writing the famous ‘Seasons’ poems in 1731 and being the author of ‘Rule Britannia.’ Though he became famous for his poetry of the natural world, it was not the quasi-religious nature poetry of Wordsworth (who was influenced by Thomson), but the poetry of landscape and observation proper to an admirer or Alexander Pope and Isaac Newton. Thomson was a man of the early eighteenth century, but his poem ‘Gifts’ embodies the spirit of rationality that would characterise the latter half of that century.
In the first stanza, Thomson deals with the ‘gifts’ which allow man to maintain his basic dignity in the face of change and life’s frailty. These are material and utilitarian, the first and necessary steps towards human civilisation. For an Enlightenment thinker like Thomson, civilisation means simply the ability to rise above appetite and contingency, the ability of human beings to assert some kind of agency in the world and not be tossed on the whims of chance and circumstance. That is why the relationship between the man and the gift-object is emphasised by Thomson. When he has a ‘horse he can ride’ or a ‘boat he can sail,’ says Thomson, both his ‘rank and wealth’ and his ‘strength and health’ are preserved ‘on shore and land.’
In the next stanza, Thomson turns to the ‘gifts’ of mental nourishment. If a man has a book to read and pipe to smoke, then ‘his home is bright with a calm delight’ even when ‘the room be poor indeed.’ The objects of book and pipe seem trite and even elitist to us, the embodiments of eighteenth century gentilism, but for Thomson they are symbols and markers of contemplation, of the human being’s ability to place a space between action and reaction, between input and output. These gifts are not just the decorations of culture, but they are the simple signs of a view of human nature that sees human beings as being more than just complex animals. Human beings for a man like Thomson were indeed parts of a whole that is defined by cause and effect and subject to the laws of reason. But what marks out human beings from animals and other organisms is a hierarchy of mental faculty.
In the third stanza, Thomson reveals the true structure of the poem. Until this point, it seems merely abstract. A disembodied voice declaring factual assertions. But we see in the final verse that the poet is a definite individual addressing the ‘girl’ he loves. And this love comes as the final level in a hierarchy of civilising ‘gifts’ which elevate the human being above the appetitive and primitive. If we ‘Give a man a girl he can love’, says Thomson, ‘his heart is great with the pulse of fate.’ This is an important line, because it captures the meaning of the whole poem. Love is indeed an elevating force, a power, a ‘gift’ which raises the man above the mechanical and inevitable. However, it is not a spiritual force for Thomson, a path to the primal unconscious forces of the unknown—as love and desire would be for the Romantics that would come after Thomson. Rather, this simple, almost pastoral love is a means by which the lover expands his vision and rises above narrowness and self-interest and which helps him to embrace the facts of life. To be ‘great with the pulse of fate’ is at once to be passionately grandiose as well as humble and practical. Love does not offer us transcendence or escape from death. But it broadens and deepens us enough, says Thomson, to face reality whether ‘At home, on land or sea.’
What is remarkable about this poem is that it captures with elegant concision a whole worldview, the Enlightenment optimism of the French philosophes who thought that while man is not a spiritual being, he is still capable of becoming something more than just a creature of instincts, desires and survival. And the fact that Thomson is able to place love squarely at the centre of this worldview, without falling back into folkish sentimentalism, defies any easy stereotyping criticism of ‘Western rationalism’ or ‘deadening classicism.’ Thomson’s vision of love is indeed utilitarian and pragmatic, but it is practical in an upward-looking and forward-looking manner, it is a force which affirms human agency and our ability to overcome ourselves.