Chapter VII: Personification and Abstraction in Eighteenth Century Poetry (2)

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.