L AS TENDENCIAS JURISPRUDENCIALES QUE MARCA EL FALLO

The poet, James Thomson, writes about the origin or source of natural phenomena that is concealed from view in his poem The Seasons. This is an example of the underground being out of sight, yet identified by way of its interconnects with other phenomena, in this case with the streams that flow from the base of mountains. Throughout the poem, Thomson pursues an empirical approach to the discovery of nature, though it is the sense of vision he commonly applies. He is aware of the underground though cannot see it. In the section, ‘Autumn,’ he writes about the source of spring water, the source of life:

Say, then, where lurk the vast eternal springs That, like creating Nature, lie concealed From mortal eye, yet with their lavish stores Refresh the globe and all its joyous tribes? (773 – 6)

126 The observation he seeks is concealed, with a suggestion here of an immortal underworld where it may be revealed, and rather than a physical or even imagined descent experience, he follows Burnet in imagining the hidden recesses of nature discovered and illuminated. It is the frustrated desire to see the whole unified system as one, not fragments of it. He wants knowledge of ‘the secrets of the dark abyss’ (778). In an imagined act of omnipotent natural philosophy, he bids the earth, ‘Oh! Lay the mountains bare, and wide display / Their hidden structure to the astonished view’ (779 – 80). Thomson is aware of the scale of the system and its essential obscurity, and knows that it is impossible to comprehend it in anything other than localised segments; hence the ‘astonishment’ at the thought of seeing it.

Thomson’s curious though detached perspective presents the objects of nature through the rhetorical and poetic sublime; he has mountainous surfaces from the Alps, through the Caucasus, the Andes and to Antarctica unfold ‘their ‘hideous deeps’ (806). The accumulation of mountains is intensified by the spatial adjectives he applies to them, ‘branching,’ ‘huge,’ ‘high,’ ‘farthest,’ ‘lofty,’ ‘wild,’ ‘wide,’ and amid this cataclysmic upheaval, he presents his exclamatory vision:

Amazing scene! Behold! The glooms disclose! I see the rivers in their infant beds!

Deep, deep I hear them labouring to get free! I see the leaning strata, artful ranged;

The gaping fissures, to receive the rains,

The melting snows, and ever dripping fogs. (807 – 12)

Here, Thomson again perceives the underground through its interactions with other natural phenomena and processes. He includes further description of the interrelated beds of earth,

127 rocks, and the drains, siphons and reservoirs (permeable chalk confined by impermeable clay) ‘united’ with the heat of the sun, the clouds of the air in continuous fresh water cycles, which draw downpours of rain. His vision is of an interdependent world of processes, of material relationships, ‘social commerce’ and ‘the harmony of things.’ Perhaps this is a nascent view of what is currently termed ecology, as he was reading the work of the natural philosophers, such as Burnet, and was clearly interested in a deist approach to nature, where the work of God could be ‘read’ in place of scripture. The underworld is not the place of death, eternal despair and torment, but in this enlightened eighteenth-century world, it has been inverted and is now the source of life.

However, the contingency of life and the hidden depths remain the reality. When snow falls and darkness intensifies of the storm, Thomson’s ‘swain’ in his struggle to get home across the trackless wilderness, finds himself in a sublime landscape, and equally sublime state of mind, that threatens to annihilate him:

While round him night resistless closes fast, And every tempest, howling o’er his head, Renders the savage wilderness more wild. Then throng the busy shapes into his mind Of covered pits, unfathomably deep, A dire descent! (294 – 99)

What threatens to overwhelm him is what he usually can see and avoid, the open shafts of caves, or potholes, which are now covered with blown snow, thin layers that will easily collapse under his weight. It is the sudden opening of the surface, the blind fall into darkness, the plunging experience of a single dimension, that of depth, that strikes apprehension into

128 his thoughts. The underground may be out of sight, but, as Thomson illustrates, it is never far away or entirely out of mind.

Thomson’s friend and collaborator, David Mallet, wrote a similar, though shorter poem that presented a view of the earth that owed much to the natural philosophers of the time: Burnet, Woodward, Hutchinson and Ray. In the poem, ‘The Excursion’ (1728),20 _Mallet

uses his imagination alongside his knowledge of earth processes: ‘Imagination travels with quick eye’ (I, 369); both are intensified by his use of the rhetorical sublime and the grand set- piece of the poem in Canto I, the earthquake and volcanic eruption caused by the unknown forces of the subterranean earth. As with Thomson, Mallet perceives subterranean systems only through interactions with visible phenomena.

The narrator imagines the earthquake beginning and shaking the surface of the earth from deep below it, presenting then one of the prime images of sublime terror, already suggested by Burnet and Thomson that the underworld is always closer than you suspect: the ground beneath the feet of unsuspecting people suddenly opens and reveals the depth and darkness below:

Sight full of fate! Up from the centre torn The ground yawns horrible a hundred mouths,

Flashing pale flames – down through the gulfs profound, Screaming, whole crowds of ev’ry age and rank,

With hands to heav’n rais’d high imploring aid, Prone to th’ abyss descend, and o’er their heads Earth shuts her pond’rous jaws. (441- 7)

129 Mallet presents the earth through a fusion of geography and anthropomorphism, fissures opening like jaws, and suggests that the fallen ‘lost in night’ and will not return. There is no anabatic climb back to the surface, no reflected narrative of visions of the underworld. However, Mallet does have some of the fallen return via subterranean rivers which carry them back to the surface:

Borne thro’ the darkness of the infernal world, Far distant rise, emerging with the flood, Pale as ascending ghosts cast back to day, A shuddering band! (449 – 52)

Their remarkable salvation is short lived; what they have seen and experienced in the underworld has driven them mad: staring wildly, they gasp for air and try to grasp anything to haul themselves from the flood waters but to no avail. Thomson’s view of the underground was a fantasy, and Mallet’s voyagers have returned insane, unable to narrate their story.

The concept of the descent narrative as part of an individual’s wider personal struggle finds expression in a poem by another of Thomson’s collaborators, Richard Savage. Savage imagines what it takes to descend and see the hidden recesses of nature, and return in his poem, ‘The Wanderer. A Vision’ (1729).21 _{The narrator, the exiled wanderer of the poem’s}

title, is like the narrator of Thomson’s The Seasons and Mallet’s ‘The Excursion’ presenting a view or survey of the natural world, through contemplation in seclusion. In searching for a place of seclusion to imagine exploring the remote and distant world, and ‘the Course of Things’ (Savage, p. 2), the interactions of natural phenomena, he falls upon a cave concealed beneath some trees:

130 Beneath appears a Place, all outward bare,

Inward the dreary Mansion of Despair! The Water of the Mountain-Road, half stray’d, Breaks o’er it wild, and falls a brown Cascade. Has Nature this rough, naked Piece design’d, To hold Inhabitant of mortal Kind?

She has. Approach’d, appears a deep Descent, Which opens in a Rock of large Extent! (Savage, p. 15)

The description of the cave carries the hallmarks of an entrance into the underworld, concealed by trees and behind a waterfall, yet it is also a place of habitation. The narrator descends into the cave and meets the Hermit who has made this ‘Mansion in a barren Mountain’ his home. The Hermit fled society after the death of his wife, Olympia, who in visions and dreams he tries to embrace but, like Aeneas’ attempts to embrace his father, Anchises in Hades, ‘the flitting shadow slipp’d away’ (VI, 950 – 2).22 _{He retires to the mountains}

and secures the cave after killing the previous inhabitant, a large snake, as Cadmus must do in Bk. III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, most recently translated by Joseph Addison (1717).23 _The

cave and woodland settings are remarkably similar. In a display of intertextuality, Savage’s friends are acknowledged in the cave as the Hermit has a small library which includes Thomson’s The Seasons, Mallet’s ‘The Excursion,’ and a collection of Alexander Pope’s poetry (another friend of Savage’s). The Hermit takes on the role of a guide for the Wanderer, as a Sibylline figure as the Wanderer refers to himself as ‘Aeneas-like’ (Savage, p. 72).

22 _{Virgil’s Aeneid trans. John Dryden (London: Penguin, 1997).}

23 _{Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books. Translated by the most Eminent Hands (London: Jacob}

131 The poem begins to conclude in Canto IV, when the Wanderer discovers a cave for his own secluded contemplation: ‘Here ancient Knowledge opens Nature’s Springs’ (Savage, p. 94). The achievement of the descent narrative, the rite of passage through an alien world and the gaining of privileged knowledge, appears within his grasp. However, just as he prepares to settle in and observe the value of his discoveries, the Hermit appears and upbraids him for his casual and thoughtless assumption:

Hear then! In this sequester’d Cave retir’d, Departed Saints converse with Men inspir’d, ‘Tis sacred Ground; nor can thy Mind endure,

Yet unprepared, an Intercourse so pure. (Savage, p. 96)

The Wanderer is not the chosen one; he has not been initiated. A simple descent and a desire to see everything is nothing but vanity. The underworld, the hidden recess of nature and all that it conceals, cannot be revealed through ordinary, idle curiosity. In the final Canto, the Hermit is chosen, and is transformed into the ‘Seraph-Bard’ and gains the light to see the ‘Form of things’ and ‘celestial Knowledge’ (Savage, p. 145); though for the Wanderer, ‘While Contemplation weigh’d the mystic View / The Lights all vanish’d, and the Vision flew’ (Savage, p. 149), he experiences a fleeting glimpse of the whole, a sense of the whole, but no realization of it. Like Thomson’s and Mallet’s narrators and characters, the dimension of caves, and the underworld, is too vast and complex to observe in local isolation.

The verse landscape narratives of Thomson, Mallet and Savage in the early eighteenth century make use of classical mythic allusions in relation to the descent narrative. However, they present the landscapes and caves not as allegories but as recognisable topographic phenomena. Their characters are ordinary, contemporary figures whose dreams and fears are played out in these landscapes.

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