PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY
In the Preface of 1798, when Wordsworth formulated his theories with
regard to poetical language, the first “mechanical device of style”
against which he directed his preliminary attack was the use of
“personifications of abstract ideas.”[195] Such personifications, he
urged, do not make any natural or regular part of “the very language
of men,” and as he wished “to keep the reader in the company of flesh
and blood,” he had endeavoured “utterly to reject them.” He was ready
to admit that they were occasionally “prompted by passion,” but his
predecessors had come to regard them as a sort of family language, upon
which they had every right to draw. In short, in Wordsworth’s opinion,
abstractions and personifications had become a conventional method of
ornamenting verse, akin to the “vicious diction,” from the tyranny of
which he wished to emancipate poetry. The specific point on which he thus
challenged the practice of his predecessors could hardly be gainsaid, for
he had indicted a literary device, or artifice, which was not only worked
to death by the mere poetasters of the period, but which disfigures not a
little the work of even the great poets of the century.
The literary use of abstraction and personification was not, it is
needless to say, the invention of the eighteenth century. It is as old
as literature itself, which has always reflected a tendency to interpret
or explain natural phenomena or man’s relations with the invisible
powers that direct or influence human conduct, by means of allegory,
English poetry in the Middle Ages, especially that of Chaucer, Langland,
and their immediate successors, fitly illustrates the great world
of abstraction which had slowly come into being, a world peopled by
personified states or qualities—the Seven Deadly Sins, the Virtues, Love,
etc.—typifying or symbolizing the forces which help man, or beset and
ensnare him as he makes his pilgrim’s progress through this world.
Already the original motive power of allegory was considerably
diminished, even if it had not altogether disappeared, and, by the time
of the “Faerie Queene,” the literary form which it had moulded for itself
had become merely imitative and conventional, so that even the music
and melody of Spenser’s verse could not altogether vitalize the shadowy
abstractions of his didactic allegory. With “Paradise Lost” we come to
the last great work in which personified abstractions reflect to any real
extent the original allegorical motive in which they had their origin.
Milton achieves his supreme effects in personification in that his
figures are merely suggestive, strongly imagined impressions rather than
clean-cut figures. For nothing can be more dangerous, from the poetic
point of view, than the precise figures which attempt to depict every
possible point of similarity between the abstract notion and the material
representation imagined.[196]
It is sometimes considered that the mania for abstraction was due
largely to the influence of the two poets who are claimed, or regarded,
as the founders or leaders of the new classical school—Dryden and Pope.
As a matter of fact, neither makes any great use of personification.
Dryden has a few abstractions in his original works, such as,
Far from her sight flew Faction, Strife and Pride
And Envy did but look on
(“First Epistle”)
but his examples are mainly to be found in his modernizations or
translations, where of necessity he takes them from his originals.[197]
Pope makes a greater use of the figure, but even here there is no excess.
There is not a single personification in the four pastorals of “The
Seasons,” a subject peculiarly adapted to such treatment. In “Eloisa to
Abelard” there are two instances where some attempt at characterization
is made.[198] More instances, though none very striking, are to be found
in “Windsor Forest,” but the poem ends with a massed group, forming a
veritable catalogue of the personified vices which had done so much
service in poetry since the days of the Seven Deadly Sins.
In other poems Pope uses the device for humorous or satiric effect, as in
the “Pain,” “Megrim,” and “Ill nature like an ancient maid” (l. 24) of
“The Rape of the Lock;” or the “Science,” “Will,” “Logic,” etc., of “The
Dunciad,” where all are invested with capital letters, but with little
attempt to work up a definite picture, except, as was perhaps to be
expected, in the case of “Dullness,” which is provided with a bodyguard
(Bk. I, 45-52).
Though, as we have already said, there is no great use of such figures in
the works of Pope, they are present in such numbers in his satiric and
didactic works as to indicate one great reason for their prevalence in
his contemporaries and successors. After the Restoration, when English
literature entered on a new era, the changed and changing conditions
of English life and thought soon impressed themselves on poetry. The
keynote to the understanding of much that is characteristic of this new
“classical” literature has been well summed up in the formula that “the
saving process of human thought was forced for generations to beggar the
sense of beauty.”[199] The result was an invasion of poetry by ideas,
arguments, and abstractions which were regarded both as expressing
admirably the new spirit of rationalism, as well as constituting in
themselves dignified subjects and ornaments of poetry.
This is well illustrated in the case of several of Pope’s contemporaries.
In the works of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) abstractions of the
conventional type are plentiful, usually accompanied by a qualifying
epithet: “Fortune fair-array’d” (“An Imitation”), “Impetuous Discord,”
“Blind Mischief,” (“On Queen Anne’s Peace”), “the soft Pathetic” (“On
the Different Styles of Poetry”). These are only a few of the examples
of the types favoured by Parnell, where only here and there are human
traits added by means of qualifying epithets or phrases. In one or two
instances, however, there are more detailed personifications. Thus,
in the “Epistle to Dr. Swift,” which abounds in shadowy abstractions,
Eloquence is fully described for us:
Upon her cheek sits Beauty ever young
The soul of music warbles on her tongue.
Moreover, already in Parnell it is evident that the influence of Milton
is responsible for some of his personifications. In the same poem we get
the invocation:
Come! country Goddess come, nor thou suffice
But bring thy mountain-sister Exercise,
figures which derive obviously from “L’Allegro.”
In the case of Richard Savage (1696-1743) there is still greater freedom
in the use of personified abstractions, which, as here the creative
instinct is everywhere subjected to the didactic purpose, become very
wearisome. The “Wanderer” contains long catalogues of them, in some
instances pursued for over fifty lines.[200]
The device continued to be very popular throughout the eighteenth
century, especially by those who continue or represent the “Ethical”
school of Pope. First amongst these may be mentioned Edward Young
(1681-1765), whose “Night Thoughts” was first published between
1742-1744. Young, like his contemporaries, has recourse to
personifications, both for didactic purposes and apparently to add
dignity to his style. It is probable, too, that in this respect he owes
something to “Paradise Lost”; from Milton no doubt he borrowed his
figure of Death, which, though poetically not very impressive, seems to
have captured the imagination of Blake and other artists who have tried
to depict it. The figure is at first only casually referred to in the
Fourth Book (l. 96), where there is a brief and commonplace reference to
“Death, that mighty hunter”; but it is not until the fifth book that the
figure is developed. Yet, though the characterization is carried to great
length, there is no very striking personification: we are given, instead,
a long-drawn-out series of abstractions, with an attempt now and then to
portray a definite human figure. Thus
Like princes unconfessed in foreign courts
Who travel under cover, Death assumes
The name and look of life, and dwells among us.
And then the poet describes Death as being present always and everywhere,
and especially
Gaily carousing, to his gay compeers
Inly he laughs to see them laugh at him
As absent far.
But Young has not, like Milton, been able to conjure up a definite and
convincing vision, and thus he never achieves anything approaching the
overwhelming effect produced by the phantom of Death in “Paradise Lost,”
called before us in a single verse:
So spake the grisly Terror.
(P.L., II. 704)
For the rest, Young’s personifications, considering the nature of his
subject, are fewer than might be expected. Where they occur they often
seem to owe their presence to a desire to vary the monotony of his moral
reflections; as a result we get a number of abstractions, which may be
called personifications only because they are sometimes accompanied by
human attributes.
Young has also certain other evocations which can scarcely be called
abstractions, but which are really indistinct, shadowy beings, like the
figures of a dream, as when he describes the phantom of the past:
The spirit walks of every day deceased
And smiles an angel, or a fury frowns
(ll. 180-181)
or the grief of the poet as he ever meets the shades of joys gone for
ever:
The ghosts
Of my departed joys: a numerous train.
Here the poet has come near to achieving that effect which in the hands
of the greatest poets justifies the use of personification as a poetic
figure. The more delicate process just illustrated is distinct both from
the lifeless abstraction and the detailed personification, for in these
cases there is a tinge of personal emotion which invests these shadowy
figures with something of a true lyrical effect.
The tendency, illustrated in the “Night Thoughts,” to make a purely
didactic use of personification and abstraction is found to a much
greater extent in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” first
published in 1744, to be considerably enlarged in 1767. The nature of
Akenside’s subject freely admitted of the use of these devices, and he
has not been slow to avail himself of them.
Large portions of the “Pleasures of the Imagination” resolve themselves
into one long procession of abstract figures. Very often Akenside
contents himself with the usual type of abstraction, accompanied by a
conventional epithet: “Wisdom’s form celestial” (I, 69), “sullen Pomp”
(III, 216), etc., though sometimes by means of human attributes or
characteristics we are given partial personifications such as:
Power’s purple robes nor Pleasure’s flowery lap.
(l. 216)
And occasionally there are traces of a little more imagination:
thy lonely whispering voice
O faithful Nature![201]
But on the whole it is clear that with Akenside abstraction and
personification are used simply and solely for moral and didactic
purposes, and not because of any perception of their potential artistic
value. Incidentally, an interesting side-light on this point is revealed
by one of the changes introduced by the poet into his revision of his
chief work. In the original edition of 1740 there is an invocation to
Harmony (Bk. I, ll. 20 foll.), with her companion,
Majestic Truth; and where Truth deigns to come
Her sister Liberty will not be far.
Before the publication of the revised edition, Akenside, who at one time
had espoused the cause of liberty with such ardour as to lead to his
being suspected of republicanism, received a Court appointment. In the
revised edition the concluding lines of the invocation became
for with thee comes
The guide, the guardian of their majestic rites
Wise Order and where Order deigns to come
Her sister Liberty will not be far.
(138 foll.)
The same lavish use of abstractions is seen, not only in the philosophic
poetry proper, but also in other works, which might perhaps have been
expected to escape the contagion. Charles Churchill (1731-1764), if we
set aside Johnson and Canning, may be regarded as representing eighteenth
century satire in its decline, after the great figures of Pope and Swift
have disappeared from the scene, and among the causes which prevent his
verse from having but little of the fiery force and sting of the great
masters of satire is that, instead of the strongly depicted, individual
types of Pope, for example, we are given a heterogeneous collection
of human virtues, vices, and characteristics, most often in the form
of mere abstractions, sometimes personified into stiff, mechanical
figures.[202] Only once has Churchill attempted anything novel in the
way of personification, and this in humorous vein, when he describes the
social virtues:
With belly round and full fat face,
Which on the house reflected grace,
Full of good fare and honest glee,
The steward Hospitality.
Churchill had no doubt a genuine passion for poetry and independence,
but the _saeva indignatio_ of the professed censor of public morals and
manners cannot be conveyed to the reader through the medium of mechanical
abstractions which, compared with the flesh-and-blood creations of Dryden
and Pope, show clearly that for the time being the great line of English
satire has all but come to an end.
Eighteenth century ethical poetry was represented at this stage by
Johnson and Goldsmith, at whose work it will now be convenient to
glance. The universal truths which Johnson as a stern, unbending
moralist wished to illustrate in “London” (1738) and “The Vanity of
Human Wishes” (1749), might easily have resulted in a swarm of the
abstractions and personifications fashionable at the time.[203] From this
danger Johnson was saved by the depth of feeling with which he unfolds
the individual examples chosen to enforce his moral lessons. Not that
he escapes entirely; “London” has a few faint abstractions (“Malice,”
“Rapine,” “Oppression”); but though occasionally they are accompanied
by epithets suggesting human attributes (“surly Virtue,” “persecuting
Fate,” etc.), as a rule there is no attempt at definite personification,
a remark which also applies to the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” In his
odes to the different seasons he has not given, however, any elaborate
personifications, but has contented himself with slight human touches,
such as
Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow.
Of Johnson’s poetical style, regarded from our present point of view, it
may be said to be well represented in the famous line from “London”:
Slow rises Worth by Poverty depressed,
where there is probably no intention or desire to personify at all, but
which is a result of that tendency towards Latin condensation which the
great Doctor and his contemporaries had introduced into English prose.
Goldsmith’s poetry has much in common with that of Johnson, in that both
deal to some extent with what would now be called social problems. But it
is significant of Goldsmith’s historical position in eighteenth century
poetry as representing a sort of “half-way attitude,” in the matter of
poetical style, between the classical conventional language and the
free and unfettered diction advocated by Wordsworth, that there are few
examples of personified abstractions in his works, and these confined
mainly to one passage in “The Traveller”:
Hence Ostentation here with tawdry Art
Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart, etc.
At this point it is necessary to hark back for the purpose of considering
other works which had been appearing alongside of the works just
discussed. It has already been remarked that in this matter of the use of
abstraction and personification the influence of Milton early asserted
itself, and there can be no doubt that a good deal of it may be traced
to the influence more especially of the early poems. Indeed, the blank
verse poems, which attempted to imitate or parody the “grand style” of
the great epics, furnish few examples of the personified abstraction.
The first of these, the “Splendid Shilling” and “Cyder” of John Philips
(1705-1706) contains but few instances. In Somerville’s “Chase” there is
occasionally a commonplace example, such as “brazen-fisted Time,” though
in his ode “To Marlborough” he falls into the conventional style quickly
enough. In the rest of the blank verse poems Mallet’s “Excursion” (1738),
and his “Amyntor and Theodora” (1744), comparatively little use is made
of the device, a remark also applicable to Dyer’s “Ruins of Rome” (1740),
and to Grainger’s “Sugar Cane” (1764).
The fashion for all these blank verse poems had been started largely by
the success of “The Seasons,” which appeared in its original form from
1726 to 1730, to undergo more than one revision and augmentation until
the final edition of 1744. Though Thomson’s work shows very many traces
of the influence of Milton, there is no direct external evidence that
his adoption of blank verse was a result of that influence. Perhaps, as
has been suggested,[204] he was weary of the monotony of the couplet,
or at least considered its correct and polished form incapable of any
further development. At the same time it is clear that having adopted
“rhyme-unfettered verse,” he chose to regard Milton as a model of
diction and style, though he was by no means a slavish imitator.
With regard to the special problems with which we are here concerned,
it must be noted that when Thomson was first writing “The Seasons,” the
device of personified abstraction had not become quite so conventional
and forced in its use as at a later date. Nevertheless examples of the
typical abstraction are not infrequent; thus, in an enumeration of the
passions which, since the end of the “first fresh dawn,” have invaded
the hearts and minds of men, we are given “Base Envy,” withering at
another’s joy; “Convulsive Anger,” storming at large; and “Desponding
Fear,” full of feeble fancies, etc. (“Spring,” 280-306). Other examples
are somewhat redeemed by the use of a felicitous compound epithet, “Art
imagination-flushed” (“Autumn,” 140), “the lonesome Muse, low-whispering”
(_ibid._, 955), etc. In “Summer” (ll. 1605 foll.) the poet presents one
of the usual lists of abstract qualities (“White Peace, Social Love,”
etc.), but there are imaginative touches present that help to vitalize
some at least of the company into living beings:
The tender-looking Charity intent
On gentle deeds, and shedding tears through smiles—
and the passage is thus a curious mixture of mechanical abstractions with
more vivid and inspired conceptions.
Occasionally Thomson employs the figure with ironical or humorous
intention, and sometimes not ineffectively, as in the couplet,
Then sated Hunger bids his brother Thirst
Produce the mighty bowl.
(“Autumn,” 512)
He is also fond of the apostrophic personification, often feebly, as
when, acting upon a suggestion from Mallet,[205] he writes:
Comes, Inspiration, from thy hermit seat,
By mortal seldom found, etc.
(“Summer,” l. 15)
As for the seasons themselves, we do not find any very successful
attempts at personification. Thomson gives descriptive impressions rather
than abstractions: “gentle Spring, ethereal mildness” (“Spring,” 1),
“various-blossomed Spring” (“Autumn,” 5); or borrowing, as often, an
epithet from Milton, “refulgent Summer” (“Summer,” 2); or “surly Winter”
(“Spring,” 11).
But in these, and similar passages, the seasons can hardly be said
to be distinctly pictured or personified. In “Winter,” however,
there is perhaps a more successful attempt at vague but suggestive
personification:[206]
See Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train
Vapours, and clouds and storms.
But on the whole Thomson’s personifications of the seasons are not,
poetically, very impressive. There is little or no approach to the
triumphant evocation with which Keats conjures up Autumn for us, with
all its varied sights and sounds, and its human activities vividly
personified in the gleaner and the winnower
sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,
or the couplet in which Coleridge brings before us a subtle suggestion
of the spring beauty, to which the storms and snows are but a prelude:
And winter, slumbering in the open air
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring.
(“Work without Hope”)
Yet Thomson, as might be expected in a forerunner of the Romantic school,
is not altogether without a gift for these embryonic personifications,
as they have been called, when by means of a felicitous term or epithet
the whole conception which the poet has in mind is suddenly galvanized
into life and endowed with human feelings and emotions. Such evocations
are of the very stuff of which poetry is made, and at their highest
they possess the supreme power of stirring or awakening in the mind of
the reader other pictures or visions than those suggested by the mere
personification.[207]
Though some of Thomson’s instances are conventional or commonplace, as in
the description of
the grey grown oaks
That the calm village in their verdant arms
Sheltering, embrace,
(“Summer,” 225-227)
and others merely imitative, as,
the rosy-footed May
Steals blushing on,
(“Spring,” 489-490)
yet there are many which call up by a single word a vivid and picturesque
expression, such as the “hollow-whispering breeze” (“Summer,” 919) or the
poet’s description of the dismal solitude of a winter landscape
It freezes on
Till Morn, late rising o’er the drooping world
Lifts her pale eyes unjoyous
(“Winter,” 744)
or the beautiful description of a spring dawn:
The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews
At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east.
(“Summer,” 48-49)
Adverting to the question of Milton’s influence on the prevalent mania
for personification, it is undoubted that the early poems may be held
largely responsible. Their influence first began noticeably to make
itself felt in the fifth decade of the century, when their inspiration
is to be traced in a great deal of the poetic output of the period,
including that of Joseph and Thomas Warton, as well as of Collins and
Gray. Neglecting for the moment the greater poets who drew inspiration
from this source, it will be as well briefly to consider first the
influence of Milton’s minor poems on the obscure versifiers, for it
is very often the case that the minor poetry of an age reflects most
distinctly the peculiarities of a passing literary fashion. As early as
1739 William Hamilton of Bangour[208] imitated Milton in his octosyllabic
poem “Contemplation,” and by his predilection for abstraction
foreshadowed one of the main characteristics of the Miltonic revival
among the lesser lights. A single passage shows this clearly enough:
Anger with wild disordered pace
And malice pale of famish’d face:
Loud-tongued Clamour get thee far
Hence, to wrangle at the bar:
and so on.
Five or six years later Mason’s Miltonic imitations appeared—“Il
Bellicoso” and “Il Pacifico”—which follow even more slavishly the style
of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” so that there is no need for Mason’s
footnote to “Il Bellicoso” describing the poem with its companion piece
as this “very, very juvenile imitation.”[209] “Il Bellicoso” begins with
the usual dismissal:
Hence, dull lethargic Peace
Born in some hoary beadsman’s cell obscure,
and subsequently we are introduced to Pleasure, Courage, Victory, Fancy,
etc. There is a similar exorcism in “Il Pacifico,” followed by a faint
personification of the subject of the ode, attended by a “social smiling
train” of lifeless abstractions.
The pages of Dodsley[210] furnish abundant testimony to the prevalence
of this kind of thing. Thus “Penshurst”[211] by F. Coventry is
another close imitation of Milton’s companion poems, with the usual
crowd of abstractions. The same thing is met with in the anonymous
“Vacation,”[212] and in the “Valetudinarian,” said to be written by Dr.
Marriott.[213]
It is unnecessary to illustrate further the Milton vogue, which thus
produced so large a crop of imitations,[214] except to say that there is
significant testimony to the widespread prevalence of the fashion in the
fact that a parody written “in the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative,
Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style of our
modern Ode writers and monody-mongers”[215] soon appeared. This was
the anonymous “Ode to Horror,” a humorous burlesque, especially of the
“Pleasures of Melancholy.” The Wartons stand high above the versifiers at
whose productions we have just looked, but nevertheless there was some
justification for the good-humoured parody called forth by their works.
In 1746 there appeared a small volume entitled “Odes on Various
Subjects,” a collection of fourteen odes by Joseph Warton.[216] The
influence of Milton is especially seen in the odes “To Fancy,” “To
Health,” and to “The Nightingale,” but all betray definitely the source
of their inspiration. Thus in the first named:
Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead
Sometimes thro’ the yellow mead
Where Joy and White-robed Peace resort
And Venus keeps her festive court.
All the odes of Warton betray an abundant use of abstractions, in the
midst of which he rarely displays anything suggestive of spontaneous
inspiration. His few personifications of natural powers are clearly
imitative. “Evening” is “the meek-eyed Maiden clad in sober gray” and
Spring comes
array’d in primrose colour’d robe.
We feel all the time that the poet drags in his stock of personified
abstractions only because he is writing odes, and considers that such
devices add dignity to his subject.
At the same time it is worth noting that almost the same lavish use of
these lay figures occurs in his blank verse poem, “The Enthusiast,” or
“The Lover of Nature” (1740), likewise written in imitation of Milton,
and yet in its prophetic insight so important a poem in the history of
the Romantic revival.[217] Lines such as
Famine, Want and Pain
Sunk to their graves their fainting limbs
are frequent, while there is a regular procession of qualities, more
or less sharply defined, but not poetically suggestive enough to be
effective.
The younger of the two brothers, Thomas Warton, who by his critical
appreciation of Spenser did much in that manner to help forward the
Romantic movement, was perhaps still more influenced by Milton. His ode
on “The Approach of Summer” shows to what extent he had taken possession
of the verse, language, and imagery of Milton:
Haste thee, nymph, and hand in hand
With thee lead a buxom band
Bring fantastic-footed Joy
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy;
Leisure, that through the balmy sky,
Chases a crimson butterfly.
But nearly all his poems provide numerous instances of personified
abstraction, especially the lines “Written at Vale Abbey,” which seems
to exhaust, and present as thin abstractions, the whole gamut of human
virtues and vices, emotions and desires.[218]
There is a certain irony in the fact that the two men who, crudely,
perhaps, but nevertheless unmistakably, adumbrated the Romantic doctrine,
should have been among the foremost to indulge in an excess against
which later the avowed champion of Romanticism was to inveigh with all
his power. This defect was perhaps the inevitable result of the fact
that the Wartons had apparently been content in this respect to follow
a contemporary fashion as revealed in the swarm of merely mechanical
imitations of Milton’s early poems. But their subjects were on the whole
distinctly romantic, and this fact, added to their critical utterances,
gives them real historical importance. Above all, it is to be remembered
that they have for contemporaries the two great poets in whom the
Romantic movement was for the first time adequately exemplified—William
Collins and Thomas Gray.
The first published collection of Collins’s work, “Odes on Several
Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects” (1746), was, as we have seen, if
not neglected or ignored by the public, at least received with marked
indifference, owing largely no doubt to the abstract nature of his
subjects, and the chiselled severity of his treatment.[219] In other
words, Collins was pure classical and not neo-classical; he had gone
direct back to the “gods of Hellas” for his inspiration, and his verse
had a Hellenic austerity and beauty which could make little or no appeal
to his own age. At the same time it was permeated through and through
with new and striking qualities of feeling and emotion that at once
aroused the suspicions of the neo-classicists, with Johnson as their
mentor and spokesman. The “Odes” were then, we may say, classical in form
and romantic in essence, and it is scarcely a matter for surprise that a
lukewarm reception should have been their lot.[220]
Collins has received merited praise for the charm and precision of his
diction generally, and the fondness for inverting the common order of
his words—Johnson’s chief criticism of his poetical style[221]—is to
the modern mind a venial offence compared with his use of personified
abstractions. On this point Johnson has nothing to say, an omission which
may be regarded as significant of the extent to which personification had
invaded poetry, for the critic, if we may judge from his silence, seems
to have considered it natural and legitimate for Collins also to have
made abundant use of this stock and conventional device.
It is probable, however, that the extensive use which Collins makes of
the figure is the result in a large measure of his predilection for the
ode—a form of verse very fashionable towards the middle of the century.
As has already been noted, odes were being turned out in large numbers
by the poetasters of the time, in which virtues and vices, emotions and
passions were invoked, apostrophized, and dismissed with appropriate
gestures, and it is probable that the majority of these turgid and
ineffective compositions owed their appearance to the prevalent mania for
personification. Young remarked with truth[222] that an ode is, or ought
to be, “more spontaneous and more remote from prose” than any other kind
of poetry; and doubtless it was some vague recognition of this fact, and
in the hope of “elevating” their style, that led the mere versifiers to
adopt the trick. But as they worked the mechanical personification to
death, they quickly robbed it of any impressiveness it may ever have had.
This might quite fairly be described as the state of affairs with regard
to the use of personified abstraction when Collins was writing his
“odes,” but while it is true that he indulges freely in personification,
it is scarcely necessary to add that he does so with a difference; his
Hellenic training and temperament naturally saved him from the inanities
and otiosities of so much contemporary verse. To begin with, there are
but few examples of the lifeless abstraction, and even in such cases
there is usually present a happy epithet, or brief description that sets
them on a higher level than those that swarm even in the odes of the
Wartons. Thus in the “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “the shadowy tribes
of mind,” which had been sadly overworked by Collins’s predecessors and
contemporaries, are brought before us with a new and fresh beauty that
wins instant acceptance for them:
But near it sat ecstatic Wonder
Listening the deep applauding thunder
And truth in sunny vest arrayed
By whom the tassel’s eyes were made
All the shadowy tribes of mind
In braided dance their murmurs joined.
Instances of the mechanical type so much in favour are, however, not
lacking, as in this stanza from the “Verses” written about bride-cake:
Ambiguous looks that scorn and yet relent,
Denial mild and firm unaltered truth,
Reluctant pride and amorous faint consent
And melting ardours and exulting youth.[223]
The majority of Collins’s personified abstractions are, however, vague
in outline, that is to say, they suggest, but do not define, and are
therefore the more effective in that the resulting images are almost
evanescent in their delicacy. Thus in the “Ode to Pity” the subject is
presented to us in magic words:
Long pity, let the nations view
Thy sky-worn robes of tender blue
And eyes of dewy light,
whilst still another imaginative conception is that of “Mercy”:
who sitt’st a smiling bride
By Valour’s armed and awful side
Gentlest of sky-born forms and best adorned.
The “Ode to the Passions” is in itself almost an epitome of the various
ways in which Collins makes use of personification. It is first to be
noted that he rarely attempts to clothe his personifications in long and
elaborate descriptions; most often they are given life and reality by
being depicted, so to speak, moving and acting:
Revenge impatient rose,
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And with a withering look
The war-denouncing trumpet took;
Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien
Whilst his strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head.
Even the figures, seen as it were but for a moment, are flashed before us
in this manner:
With woful measures wan Despair
Low sullen sounds his grief beguiled
and
Dejected Pity at his side
Her soul-subduing voice applied
and the vision of hope with “eyes so fair” who
smiled and waved her golden hair.
In this ode Collins gives us also imaginative cameos, we might call them,
vividly delineated and presented like the figures on the Grecian urn that
inspired Keats. Thus:
While as his flying fingers kissed the strings,
Love framed with mirth a gay fantastic round.
and, with its tinge of probably unconscious humour—
Brown exercise rejoiced to hear,
And Sport leapt up and seized his beechen spear.
From these and similar instances, we receive a definite impression of
that motion, which is at the same time repose, so characteristic of
classical sculptuary.
Most of the odes considered above are addressed to abstractions. In the
few instances where Collins invokes the orders or powers of nature even
greater felicity is shown in the art with which he calls up and clothes
in perfect expression his abstract images. The first of the seasons is
vaguely but subtly suggested to us in the beautiful ode beginning “How
sleep the brave”:
When Spring with dewy fingers cold
Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than fancy’s feet have ever trod.
This is rather a simile than a personification, but yet there is conveyed
to us a definite impression of a shadowy figure that comes to deck the
earth with beauty, like a young girl scattering flowers as she walks
along.
But the workmanship of Collins in this respect is seen in its perfection
in the “Ode to Evening.” There is no attempt to draw a portrait or chisel
a statue; the calm, restful influence of evening, its sights and sounds
that radiate peace and contentment, even the very soul of the landscape
as the shades of night gather around, are suggested by master touches,
whilst the slow infiltration of the twilight is beautifully suggested:
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.
The central figure is still the same evanescent being, the vision of a
maiden, endowed with all the grace of beauty and dignity, into whose lap
“sallow Autumn” is pouring his falling leaves, or who now goes her way
slowly through the tempest, while
Winter, yelling through the troublous air
Affrights thy shrinking train,
And rudely rends thy robe.
If we had no other evidence before us, Collins’s use of personified
abstraction would be sufficient in itself to announce that the new poetry
had begun. He makes use of the device as freely, and even now and then
as mechanically, as the inferior versifiers of his period, but instead
of the bloodless abstractions, his genius enabled him to present human
qualities and states in almost ethereal form. Into them he has breathed
such poetic life and inspiration that in their suggestive beauty and
felicity of expression they stand as supreme examples of personification
used as a legitimate poetical device, as distinct from a mere rhetorical
figure or embellishment.
This cannot be said of Gray, in whose verse mechanical personifications
crowd so thickly that, as Coleridge observed in his remarks on the lines
from “The Bard,”
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes
Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm
it depends “wholly on the compositors putting or not putting a small
Capital, both in this and in many other passages of the same poet,
whether the words should be personifications or mere abstractions.”[224]
It is difficult to account for this devotion of Gray to the “new
Olympus,” thickly crowded with “moral deities” that his age had brought
into being, except on the assumption that contemporary usage in this
respect was too strong for him to resist. For it cannot be denied that
very many of the beings that swarm in his odes do not differ in their
essential character from the mechanical figures worked to death by the
ode-makers of his days; even his genius was not able to clothe them
all in flesh and blood. In the “Eton College” ode there is a whole
stanza given over to a conventional catalogue of the “fury passions,”
the “vultures of the mind”; and similar thin abstractions people all
the other odes. Nothing is visualized: we see no real image before
us.[225] Even the famous “Elegy” is not without its examples of stiff
personification, though they are not present in anything like the excess
found elsewhere. The best that can be said for abstractions of this kind
is that in their condensation they represent an economy of expression
that is not without dignity and effectiveness, and they thus sometimes
give an added emphasis to the sentiment, as in the oft-quoted
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny secure,
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
Gray rarely attempts to characterize his figures other than by the
occasional use of a conventional epithet, and only here and there has the
personification been to any extent filled in so as to form at least an
outline picture. In the “Hymn to Adversity,” Wisdom is depicted
in sable garb arrayed
Immersed in rapturous thought profound,
whilst other slight human touches are to be found here and there: as
in “Moody Madness, laughing wild” (“Ode on a Distant Prospect”). His
personifications, however, have seldom the clear-cut outlines we find
in Collins, nor do they possess more than a tinge of the vividness and
vitality the latter could breathe into his abstractions. Yet now and then
we come across instances of the friezes in which Collins excels, moving
figures depicted as in Greek plastic art
Antic sports and blue-eyed Pleasures,
Frisking light in frolic measures
(“Progress of Poesy”)
or the beautiful vision in the “Bard,”
Bright Rapture calls and soaring as she sings,
Waves in the eyes of heaven her many-coloured wings.
And in the “Ode on Vicissitude” Gray has one supreme example of the
embryonic personification, when the powers or orders of nature are
invested with human attributes, and thus brought before us as living
beings, in the form of vague but suggestive impressions that leave to the
imagination the task of filling in the details:
Now the golden Morn aloft
Waves her dew-bespangled wing
With vernal cheek and whisper soft
She woos the tardy spring.
But in the main, and much more than the poet with whom his name is
generally coupled, it is perhaps not too much to say that Gray was
content to handle the device in the same manner as the uninspired
imitators of the “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Not that he was
unaware of the danger of such a tendency in himself and others. “I
had rather,” he wrote to Mason[226] when criticizing the latter’s
“Caractacus,” “some of the personages—‘Resignation,’ ‘Peace,’ ‘Revenge,’
‘Slaughter,’ ‘Ambition’—were stripped of their allegorical garb. A
little simplicity here and there in the expression would better prepare
the high and fantastic harpings that follow.” In the light of this most
salutary remark, Gray’s own procedure is only the more astonishing. His
innumerable personifications may not have been regarded by Johnson as
contributory to “the kind of cumbrous splendour” he wished away from the
odes, but the fact that they are scarce in the “Elegy” is not without
significance. The romantic feeling which asserts itself clearly in the
odes, the new imaginative conceptions which these stock figures were
called upon to convey, the perfection of the workmanship—these qualities
were more than sufficient to counterweigh Gray’s licence of indulgence in
a mere rhetorical device. Yet Coleridge was right in calling attention
to this defect of Gray’s style, especially as his censure is no mere
diatribe against the use of personified abstraction: it is firmly and
justly based on the undeniable fact that Gray’s personifications are for
the most part cold and lifeless, that they are mere verbal abstractions,
utterly devoid of the redeeming vitality, which Collins gives to his
figures.[227] It is for this reason perhaps that his poetry in the
mass has never been really popular, and that the average reader, with
his impatience of abstractions, has been content, with Dr. Johnson, to
pronounce boldly for “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
Before proceeding to examine the works of the other great poets who
announce or exemplify the Romantic revival, it will be convenient at
this point to look at some of the Spenserian imitations, which helped to
inspire and vitalize the revival.
Spenser was the poet of mediaeval allegory. In the “Faerie Queene,”
for the first time a real poet, endowed with the highest powers of
imagination and expression, was able to present the old traditional
abstractions wonderfully decked up in a new and captivating guise. The
personages that move like dream figures through the cantos of the poem
are thus no mere personified abstractions: they are rather pictorial
emblems, many of which are limned for us with such grandeur of conception
and beauty of execution as to secure for the allegorical picture a
“willing suspension of disbelief,” whilst the essentially romantic
atmosphere more than atones for the cumbrous and obsolete machinery
adopted by Spenser to inculcate the lessons of “virtuous and gentle
discipline.”
Though the eighteenth century Spenserians make a plentiful use of
personified abstraction, on the whole their employment of this device
differs widely from its mechanical use by most of their contemporaries:
in the best of the imitations there are few examples of the lifeless
abstraction. Faint traces at least of the music and melody of the “Faerie
Queene” have been caught and utilized to give a poetic charm even to
the personified virtues and vices that naturally appear in the work of
Spenser’s imitators. Thus in William Thompson’s “Epithalamium” (1736),
while many of the old figures appear before us, they have something of
the new charm with which Collins was soon to invest them. Thus,
Liberty, the fairest nymph on ground
The flowing plenty of her growing hair
Diffusing lavishly ambrosia round
Earth smil’d, and Gladness danc’d along the sky.
The epithets which accompany the abstractions are no longer conventional
(“Chastity meek-ey’d,” “Modesty sweet-blushing”) and help to give touches
of animation to otherwise inanimate figures. In the “Nativity” (1757)
there is a freer use of the mere abstraction that calls up no distinct
picture, but even here there are happy touches that give relief:
Faith led the van, her mantle dipt in blue,
Steady her ken, and gaining on the skies.
In the “Hymn to May” (1787) Thompson personified the month whose charms
he is singing, the result being a radiant figure, having much in common
with the classical personifications of the orders or powers of nature:
A silken camus, em’rald green
Gracefully loose, adown her shoulder flow.
In Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” (1737-1742) instances of personification
are rare, and, where they do occur, are merely faint abstractions like
“Learning near her little dome.” It is noteworthy that one of the most
successful of the Spenserian imitations should have dispensed with the
cumbrous machinery of abstract beings that, on the model of the “Faerie
Queene,” might naturally have been drawn upon. The homely atmosphere of
the “Schoolmistress,” with its idyllic pictures and its gentle pathos,
would, indeed, have been fatally marred by their introduction.
The same sparing use of personification is evident in the greatest of
the imitations, James Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence” (1748). A theme
of this nature afforded plenty of opportunity to indulge in the device,
and Thomson, judging from its use of the figure in some of his blank
verse poems, might have been expected to take full advantage. But there
are less than a score of examples in the whole of the poem. Only vague
references are made to the eponymous hero: he is simply “Indolence” or
“tender Indolence” or “the demon Indolence.” For the rest Thomson’s few
abstractions are of the stock type, though occasionally more realistic
touches result, we may suppose, from the poet’s sense of humour as
The sleepless Gout here counts the crowing cock.
Only here and there has Thomson attempted full-length portraits in the
Spenserian manner, as when Lethargy, Hydropsy, and Hypochondria are
described with drastic realism.[228]
The works of the minor Spenserians show a greater use of personified
abstraction, but even with them there is no great excess. Moreover,
where instances do occur, they show imaginative touches foreign to the
prevalent types. Thus in the “Vision of Patience” by Samuel Boyce (d.
1778),
Silence sits on her untroubled throne
As if she left the world to live and reign alone,
while Patience stands
In robes of morning grey.
Occasionally the personified abstractions, though occurring in
avowedly Spenserian imitations, obviously owe more to the influence of
“L’Allegro”; as in William Whitehead’s “Vision of Solomon” (1730), where
the embroidered personifications are much more frequent than the detailed
images given by Spenser.[229]
The work of Chatterton represents another aspect of this revival of the
past, but it is curious to find that, in his acknowledged “original”
verse there are not many instances of the personified abstraction,
whilst they are freely used in the Rowley poems. Where they do occur
in his avowedly original work they are of the usual type, though more
imaginative power is revealed in his personification of Winter:
Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew:
His eyes a dusky light congealed and dead,
His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue.
From our special point of view the “antiquarianism” of the Rowley
poems might almost be disproved by the prevalence of abstractions and
personifications, which in most instances are either unmistakably of
the eighteenth century or which testify to the new Romantic atmosphere
now manifesting itself. The stock types of frigid abstraction are all
brought on the stage in the manner of the old Moralities, and each is
given an ample speaking part in order to describe his own characteristics.
But in addition to these lifeless abstractions, there are to be
found in the Rowley poems a large number of detailed and elaborate
personifications. Some of these are full length portraits in the
Spenserian manner, and now and then the resulting personification is
striking and beautiful, as when, in “Ælla” (59), Celmond apostrophizes
Hope, or the evocation of Truth in “The Storie of William Canynge.”
Chatterton has also in these poems a few personifications of natural
powers, but these are mainly imitative as in the lines (“Ælla,” 94)
reminiscent of Milton and Pope[230]:
Bright sun had in his ruddy robes been dight
From the red east he flitted with his train,
The hours drew away the robe of night,
Her subtle tapestry was rent in twain.
But the evocation of the seasons themselves, as in “Ælla” (32),
When Autumn sere and sunburnt doth appear
With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf
Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year
Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf,
conveys a fresh and distinct picture that belongs to the new poetry, and
has in it a faint forecast of Keats.
It remains to look at the work of the later eighteenth century poets,
who announce that if the Romantic outburst is not yet, it is close at
hand. The first and greatest of these is William Blake. His use of
personification in the narrower sense which is our topic, is, of course,
formally connected with the large and vital question of his symbolism, to
treat of which here in any detail is not part of our scheme.
In its widest sense, however, Blake’s mysticism may be connected with
the great mediaeval world of allegory: it is “an eddy of that flood-tide
of symbolism which attained its tide-mark in the magic of the Middle
Ages.”[231] But the poet himself unconsciously indicates the vital
distinction between the new symbolism, which he inaugurates, and the
old, of which the personified abstractions of his eighteenth century
predecessors may be regarded as faint and faded relics. “Allegory
addressed to the intellectual powers,” he wrote to Thomas Butts,[232]
“while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my
definition of the most surprising poetry.”
On its formal side, and reduced to its simplest expression, we may narrow
down for our present purpose the whole system to the further distinction
drawn by Blake between Allegory and Vision. Allegory is “formed by the
daughters of Memory” or the deliberate reason; Vision “is surrounded by
the daughters of Inspiration.” Here we have a key to the classification
of personified abstractions in the eighteenth century, and, for that
matter, at any and every period. Abstractions formed by the deliberate
reason are usually more or less rhetorical embellishments of poetry, and
to this category belong the great majority of the personifications of
eighteenth century verse. They are “things that relate to moral virtues”
or vices, but they cannot truly be called allegorical, for allegory is a
living thing only so long as the ideas it embodies are real forces that
control our conduct. The inspired personification, which embodies or
brings with it a real vision, is the truly poetical figure.
In Blake’s own practice we find only a few instances of the typical
eighteenth century abstraction. In the early “Imitation of Spenser” there
are one or two examples:
Such is sweet Eloquence that does dispel
Envy and Hate that thirst for human gore,
whilst others are clearly Elizabethan reminiscences, like
Mournful lean Despair
Brings me yew to deck my grave,
or
Memory, hither come
And tune your merry notes.
“The Island in the Moon” furnishes grotesque instances, such as that
of old Corruption dressed in yellow vest. In “The Divine Image,” from
the “Songs of Innocence,” while commonplace virtues are personified,
the simple direct manner of the process distinguishes them from their
prototypes in the earlier moral and didactic poetry of the century:
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity a human face
And Love, the human form divine
And Peace the human dress.[233]
An instance of personification raised to a higher power is found in
Blake’s letter to Butts[234] beginning
With Happiness stretch’d across the hills,
In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils,
whilst elsewhere personified abstractions appear with new epithets, the
most striking example being in “Earth’s Answer,” from the “Songs of
Experience”:
Prison’d on watry shore
_Starry_ Jealousy does keep my den.
Moreover, Blake’s figures are often presented in an imaginative guise
that helps to emphasize the gulf fixed between him and the majority of
his contemporaries and predecessors. Thus “Joy” is twice depicted as a
bird:
Joys upon our branches sit
Chirping loud and singing sweet
(“Song”—“Poetical Sketches”)
and
Welcome, stranger, to this place
Where Joy doth sit on every bough.
(“Song by a Shepherd”)
In Blake’s youthful work the personifications of natural powers, though
in most cases clearly imitative are yet striking in their beauty and
power of suggestion. The influence of “Ossian” is seen in such “prose”
personifications as “The Veiled Evening walked solitary down the Western
hills and Silence reposed in the valley” (“The Couch of Death”), and
“Who is this that with unerring step dares to tempt the wild where only
Nature’s foot has trod, ’Tis Contemplation, daughter of the Grey Morning”
(“Contemplation”). Here also are evocations of the seasons which,
whatever they may owe to Thomson or Collins, are new in that we actually
get a picture of Spring with “dewy locks” as she looks down
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning
of summer with
ruddy limbs and flourishing hair,
of the “jolly autumn,”
laden with fruits and stained
With the blood of the grape;
and of winter,
a dreadful monster whose skin clings
To her strong bones.
Thomson, we have seen, had not been altogether successful in his
personification of the seasons: here they are brought vividly and
fittingly before us. When we think of the hosts of puppets that in the
guise of personified abstractions move mechanically through so much of
eighteenth century verse, and compare them with the beautiful visions
evoked by Blake, we know from this evidence alone that the reign of
one of the chief excesses of the poetical language of the time is near
its end. It is not that Blake’s conceptions are all flesh and blood
creations: often they are rather ethereal beings, having something in
common with the evanescent images of Collins. But the rich and lofty
imagination that has given them birth is more than sufficient to secure
their acceptance as realities capable of living and moving before us; the
classical abstraction, cold and lifeless, has now become the Romantic
personification clothed in beauty and animated with life and inner
meaning.
In the year of the “Poetical Sketches” (1783) George Crabbe published
“The Village,” his first work to meet with any success. But whilst Blake
gloriously announces the emancipation of English poetry, Crabbe for the
most part is still writing on in the old dead style. The heroic couplets
of his earliest works have all the rhetorical devices of his predecessors
in that measure, and amongst these the prevalence of personified
abstractions is not the least noteworthy. The subject of his first poem
of any length, “Inebriety” (1775), afforded him plenty of scope in this
direction, and he availed himself fully of the opportunity.[235] The
absence of capital letters from some of the instances in this poem may
perhaps be taken to reflect a confusion in the poet’s mind as to whether
he was indulging in personification or in mere abstraction, to adopt
Coleridge’s remark anent Gray’s use of this figure.[236]
In “The Village,” Crabbe’s first poem of any real merit, there is a
more sparing use, yet instances are even here plentiful, whilst his
employment of the device had not died out when in the early years of the
nineteenth century he resumed his literary activities. Among the poems
published in the 1807 volume there is a stiff and cumbrous allegory
entitled “The Birth of Flattery,” which, introduced by three Spenserian
stanzas, depicts Flattery as the child of Poverty and Cunning, attended
by guardian satellites, “Care,” “Torture,” “Misery,” _et hoc omne genus_.
They linger on to the time of the “Posthumous Tales,” where there is a
sad, slow procession of them, almost, we might imagine, as if they were
conscious of the doom pronounced years before, and of the fact that they
were strangers in a strange land:
Yet Resignation in the house is seen
Subdued Affliction, Piety serene,
And Hope, for ever striving to instil
The balm for grief, “It is the heavenly will.”
(XVIII, 299 foll.)
It is not perhaps too fanciful to see in this lament a palinode of the
personifications themselves, sadly resigning themselves to an inevitable
fate.
Towards the ultimate triumph of the new poetry the work of William Cowper
represents perhaps the most important contribution, judging at least from
the viewpoint both of its significance as indicating new tendencies in
literature, and of its immediate influence on readers and writers. In
the narrow sense of style the “simplicity” which was Cowper’s ideal was
only occasionally marred by the conventional phraseology and bombastic
diction which he himself laid to the charge of the “classical” school,
and his gradual emancipation from the tenets and practices of that school
is reflected in his steady advance towards the purity of expression for
which he craved. And in this advance it is to be noted that the gradual
disappearance of personified abstractions is one of the minor landmarks.
The earlier work furnishes instances of the common type of mere
abstraction where there is no attempt to give any real personification.
Even in the “Olney Hymns” (1779) such verses as
But unbelief, self-will
Self-righteousness and pride,
How often do they steal
My weapon from my side
only seem to present the old mechanical figures in a new setting.[237]
The long series of satiric poems that followed draw freely upon the same
“mythology,” and indeed the satires that appear in this 1782 volume
recall to some extent the style of Churchill.[238] There is a somewhat
similar, though more restricted, use of personified abstraction, and, as
in Churchill’s satires, virtues and vices are invested with slight human
qualities and utilized to enforce moral and didactic truths. Thus,
Peace follows Virtue as its sure reward
And Pleasure brings as surely in her train
Remorse and Sorrow and Vindictive Pain.
(“Progress of Error”)
Among the short pieces in this volume are the famous lines put into
the mouth of Alexander Selkirk, which contain a fine example of the
apostrophic personification, the oft-quoted
O Solitude! where are thy charms
That sages have seen in thy face,
where the passion and sincerity of the appeal give dignity and animation
to an otherwise lifeless abstraction, and, despite the absence of detail,
really call up a definite picture.
From the blank verse of his most famous work nearly every trace of the
mechanical abstraction has disappeared—a great advance when we remember
that “The Task” is in the direct line of the moral and didactic verse
that had occupied so many of Cowper’s predecessors.
The first Books (“The Sofa”) contain but one instance and that in a
playful manner:
Ingenious Fancy, never better pleased
Than when employed to accommodate the fair.
(ll. 72 foll.)
The Fourth Book (“The Winter Evening”) is entirely free from instances of
the mechanical abstraction, but the vision of Oriental Empire, and the
fascination of the East, is effectively evoked in the personification of
the land of the Moguls:
Is India free? and does she wear her plumed
And jewelled turban with a smile of peace.
(ll. 28-9)
“The Task,” however, has two examples of the detailed personification.
The first is an attempt, in the manner of Spenser, to give a full length
portrait of “a sage called Discipline”:
His eye was meek and gentle and a smile
Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard
Paternal sweetness
(Bk. II, l. 702 foll.)
where there is a depth of feeling, as well as a gentle satiric touch in
the delineation, that animate it into something more than a mere stock
image; it embodies perhaps a reminiscence of one who at some time or
other had guided the destinies of the youthful Cowper.
The second instance is of a more imaginative kind. It is the
presentation, in the Fourth Book, of Winter, with
forehead wrapt in cloud
A leafless branch thy sceptre,
almost the only occasion on which Cowper, despite the nature of his
subject, has personified the powers and orders of nature.[239] Cowper
has also invested the Evening with human attributes, and despite the
imitative ring of the lines,[240] and the “quaintness” of the images
employed, there is a new beauty in the evocation:
Come, Evening, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!
Methinks I see thee in the streaky west
With matron step slow-moving, while the night
Treads on thy sweeping train.
The darkness soon to fall over the landscape is suggested in the added
appeal to Evening to come
Not sumptuously adorned, nor needing aid
Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems,
where the compound epithet emphasizes the contrast between the quiet
beauty of the twilight skyscape and the star-sprinkled gloom of the night.
Finally, one of the last instances of the personified abstraction to be
found in the work of Cowper may perhaps be taken to reflect something of
the changes that have been silently working underneath. This is in the
lines that suddenly bring “Yardley Oak” to an end:
History not wanted yet
Leaned on her elbow watching Time whose course
Eventful should supply her with a theme.
At first glance we seem to have here but the old conventional figures,
but there is an imaginative touch that helps to suggest a new world of
romance. “History leaning on her elbow” has something at least of that
mysterious power of suggestion that Wordsworth himself was to convey by
means of the romantic personification, such as those shadowy figures—Fear
and Trembling Hope, and Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow—which
gathered round and hallowed the shade of the yew trees in Borrowdale.
But even while the old poetry was in its death agony a champion was at
hand, daring to maintain a lost cause both by precept and example. This
was Erasmus Darwin, whose once-famous work “The Botanic Garden,” with
its two parts, “The Loves of the Plants” (1789), and “The Economy of
Vegetation” (1791), has earlier been mentioned.
It met with immediate success. Darwin seems to have fascinated his
contemporaries, so that even Coleridge was constrained in 1802 to call
him “the first literary character in Europe.”[241] He had, however,
little real admiration for “The Botanic Garden,” and later expressed
his opinion unmistakably.[242] “The Botanic Garden” soon died a natural
death, hastened no doubt by the ridicule it excited, but inevitably
because of the fact that the poem is an unconscious _reductio ad
absurdum_ of a style already doomed.[243] The special matter with which
we are concerned in this chapter had for Darwin a marked significance,
since it fitted in admirably with his general doctrine or dogma that
nothing is strictly poetic except what is presented in visual image. His
“theory” was that, just as the old mythologies had created a whole world
of personified abstractions to explain or interpret natural phenomena
of every description, exactly by the same method the scientific thought
and developments of his own age could be poetically expounded so as
to captivate both the hearts and minds of his readers. It was his
ambition, he said, “to enlist imagination under the banner of science.”
This “theory” is expounded in one of the interludes placed between the
different cantos. “The poet writes principally to the eye,” and allegory
and personifications are to be commended because they give visible
form to abstract conceptions.[244] Putting his theory into practice,
Darwin then proceeds with great zeal to personify the varied and various
scientific facts or hypotheses of physics, botany, etc., metamorphosing
the forces of the air and other elements into sylphs and gnomes and so
on. Thus,
Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered
Steam afar
Drag the slow barge or drive the
Rapid car.
(E.V., Canto I, 289, 290)
In the same way all the plants, as classified by Linnæus, are personified
as “swains” or “belles” who “love” and quarrel, and finally make it up
just as ordinary mortals do:
All wan and shivering in the leafless glade
The sad Anemone reclin’d her head
(L.P., Canto I, 315-6)
or
Retiring Lichen climbs the topmost stone
And drinks the aerial solitude alone.
(_Ibid._, 347-8)
The whole poem is thus one long series of mechanical personifications
which baffle and bewilder and finally wear out the reader. It is strange
now to think that “The Botanic Garden” was at the height of its vogue
when the “Lyrical Ballads” were being planned and written, but the
easy-flowing couplets of Darwin, and the “tinsel and glitter” of his
diction, together with most of the “science” he was at such pains to
expound (though he was a shrewd and even prophetic inquirer in certain
branches, such as medicine and biology), have now little more than a
faint historical interest. Yet his theory and practice of poetry—the
“painted mists that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of
Parnassus,” Coleridge called them—so dominated the literature of the last
decade of the eighteenth century as to be capable of captivating the mind
of the poet who was about to sound their death-knell.
While Wordsworth inveighed against “personification” in the great
manifesto, his earliest poetry shows clearly, as has been noted, that in
this as in other respects he had fallen under the spell and influence of
“The Botanic Garden.” The “Evening Walk” and the “Descriptive Sketches”
swarm with instances of personifications of the type that had flourished
apace for a hundred years, “Impatience,” “Pain,” “Independence,” “Hope,”
“Oppression,” and dozens similar.[245] There is thus a certain comic
irony in the fact that the poet, who was the first to sound the revolt
against “personifications” and similar “heightenings” of style, should
have embarked on his literary career with the theft of a good deal of
the thunder of the enemy. Later, when Wordsworth’s true ideal of style
had evolved itself, this feature of the two poems was in great measure
discarded. The first (1793) draft of the “Descriptive Sketches” contains
over seventy examples of more or less frigid abstractions; in the final
draft of the poem these have dwindled down to about a score.[246]
In our detailed examination of personification in eighteenth century
poetry we have seen that in general it includes three main types. There
is first the mere abstraction, whose distinctive sign is the presence
of a capital letter; it may be, and often is, qualified by epithets
suggestive of human attributes, but there is little or no attempt to give
a definite picture or evoke a distinctive image. This is the prevalent
type, and it is against these invertebrates that the criticism of
Wordsworth and Coleridge was really directed.
Their widespread use in the eighteenth century is due to various causes.
In the first place they represent a survival, however artificial and
lifeless, of the great mediaeval world of allegory, with its symbolic
representation derived from the pagan and classical mythologies, of
the attributes of the divine nature, and of the qualities of the human
mind, as living entities. But by now the life had departed from them;
they were hopelessly effete and had become consciously conventional and
fictitious.[247]
They also owed their appearance, as indicated above, to more definite
literary causes and “fashions”; they swarm especially, for instance, in
the odes of the mid-century, the appearance of which was mainly due to
the influence of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” The virtues and vices,
the “shadowy tribes of the mind,” which are there unceasingly invoked
and dismissed are mechanical imitations of the figures that the genius
of Milton had been able to inspire with real poetic value and life. They
play their part similarly and just as mechanically in the didactic and
satirical verse characteristic of the period.
But whether regarded as a sort of literary flotsam and jetsam, or as one
of the symptoms of “Milton-mad” verse, these personifications are nearly
all enfeebled by weaknesses inherent in their very genesis. Only a deep
and intense conception of a mental abstraction can justify any attempt
to personify it poetically; otherwise the inevitable result is a mere
rhetorical ornament, which fails because it conveys neither the “vast
vagueness” of the abstract, nor any clear-cut pictorial conception of the
person. Even with Gray, as with the mere poetasters who used this figure
to excess, it has the effect of a dull and wearisome mannerism; only
here and there, as in the sonorous lines in which Johnson personified
Worth held down by Poverty, does the display of personal emotion give any
dignity and depth to the image.
Again, the very freedom with which the conventional abstractions are
employed, allowing them to be introduced on every possible occasion,
tends to render the device absurd, if not ludicrous. For the versifiers
seemed to have at their beck and call a whole phantom army upon which
they could draw whenever they chose; for them they are veritable gods
from the machines. But so mechanical are their entrances and exits
that the reader rarely suspects them to be intended for “flesh and
blood creations,” though, it may be added, the poetaster himself
would be slow to make any such claim. To him they are merely part of
his stock-in-trade, like the old extravagances, the “conceits,” and
far-fetched similes of the Metaphysical school.
The second type of personification found in eighteenth century verse
needs but brief mention here. It is the detailed personification where
a full-length portrait is attempted. Like the mere abstraction it, too,
is a survival of mediaeval allegory, and it is also most often a merely
mechanical literary process, reflecting no real image in the poet’s mind.
It is not found to any large extent, and in a certain measure owes its
presence to the renewed interest in Spenser. The Spenserian imitations
themselves are comparatively free from this type, a sort of negative
indication of the part played by the revival in the new Romantic movement.
The third type is perhaps best described as the embryonic
personification. It consists in the attributing of an individual and
living existence to the visible forms and invisible powers of nature, a
disposition, deeply implanted in the human mind from the very dawn of
existence, which has left in the mythologies and creeds of the world a
permanent impress of its power. In eighteenth century literature this
type received its first true expression in the work of Thompson and
Collins, whilst its progress, until it becomes merged and fused in the
pantheism of Wordsworth and Shelley, may be taken as a measure of the
advance of the Romantic movement in one of its most vital aspects.
Regarded on its purely formal side, that is, as part and parcel of the
_language_ of poetry, the use of personification may then be naturally
linked up with the generally literary development of the period. In the
“classical” verse proper the figure employed is, as it were, a mere word
and no more; it is the reflex of precisely as much individual imagination
as the stock phrases of descriptive verse, _the flowery meads_, _painted
birds_, and so on. There was no writing with the inner eye on the
object, and the abstraction as a result was a mere rhetorical label,
corresponding to no real vision of things.
The broad line of advance in this, as in other aspects of eighteenth
century literature, passes through the work of those who are now looked
upon as the forerunners of the Romantic revolt. The frigid abstraction,
a mere word distinguished by a capital letter, is to be found in “The
Seasons,” but alongside there is also an approach to definite pictorial
representation of the object personified. In the odes of Collins the
advent of the pictorial image is definitely and triumphantly announced,
and though the mechanical abstractions linger on even until the new
poetry has well established itself, they are only to be found in the
work of those who either, like Johnson and Crabbe, belong definitely as
regards style to the old order, or like Goldsmith and, to a less extent,
Cowper, reflect as it were sort of half-way attitude towards the old and
the new.
With Blake the supremacy of the artistic personification is assured. His
mystical philosophy in its widest aspect leads him to an identification
of the divine nature with the human, but sometimes this signification
is to be seen merging into a more conscious symbolism, or even sinking
into that “totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry” known as
allegory. Yet with Blake the poet, as well as Blake the artist, the
use of personified abstraction is an integral part of the symbolism he
desired to perpetuate. His imagination ran strongly in that direction,
and it has been aptly pointed out that his most intense mental and
emotional experiences became for him spiritual persons. But even where
the presence of a capital letter is still the only distinguishing mark
of the personification, he is able, either by the mere context or by
the addition of a suggestive epithet, to transform and transfigure the
abstraction into a poetical emblem of the doctrine whose apostle he
believed himself to be.
It is hardly necessary to say that the use of personification and
abstraction, even in their narrower applications as rhetorical ornaments
or artifices of verse, were not banished from English poetry as a result
of Wordsworth’s criticism. Ruskin has drawn a penetrating distinction
between personification and symbolism,[248] and it was in this direction
perhaps that Wordsworth’s protest may be said to have been of the
highest value. His successors, for the most part, distrustful of mere
abstractions, and impatient of allegory, with its attendant dangers of
lifeless and mechanical personification, were not slow to recognize
the inherent possibilities of symbolism as an artistic medium for the
expression of individual moods and emotions, and it is not too much to
say that in its successful employment English poetry has since won some
of its greatest triumphs.