In his 1781 ‘Life of Thomson’, Samuel Johnson remarked:
The great defect of the Seasons is want of method; but for this I know not that there was any remedy. Of many appearances subsisting all at once, no rule can be given why one should be mentioned before another; yet the memory wants the help of order, and the curiosity is not excited by suspense or expectation.
Here Johnson makes several of the points that Joseph Frank was to make nearly two hundred years later: not only that a text can depict things that exist simultaneously, but that in doing so its parts lose the ‘rule’ of narrative time that gives meaning to the chronological order in which the poet has arranged them. Johnson states this more explicitly in his commentary on Pope’s ‘Windsor-Forest’: ‘the scenes, which [descriptive poems] must exhibit successively, are all subsisting at the same time, [so that] the order in which they are shown must by necessity be arbitrary, and more is not to be expected from the last part than from the first.’
In his 1807 lecture on Thomson, Percival Stockdale quoted Johnson’s above assessment and remarked that it ‘is absolute nonsense’. In ‘Summer’, Stockdale argued,
The Poet surveys, paints, and enforces … a summer’s morning; noon; evening; and night; as they succeed one another, in the course of nature; (for surely the many appearances, in any season, do not subsist all at once.) – If this is not method, I know not what is.
Even the interpolated tales, he claims, do not disrupt the flow of the poem: ‘The most admired poems have their episodes, which by no means destroy, or confuse, the order of the principal fable.’ As for the lack of suspense or expectation, Stockdale retorted, the mind reading The Seasons ‘proceeds with a delightful expectation; for it expects to meet with most excellent poetry; and it is never disappointed; with poetry which flows, in a natural, and easy succession of sentiments, and imagery’.
Thomson’s first biographer, Robert Shiels, had made a similar comment to Johnson in his 1753 life of the poet, observing that within each book of The Seasons, ‘There appears no particular design; the parts are not subservient to one another; nor is there any dependance [sic] or connection throughout; but this perhaps is a fault almost inseparable from a subject in itself so diversified’.