Interitum, montesque feri sylvæque loquuntur.
Eclogue v. 27.
Again,
Pinifer illum etiam sola sub rupe jacentem
Mænalus, et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi.
Eclogue x. 13.
Again,
Responder per pietate i sassi e l’onde;
E sospirar le fronde
Ho visto al pianto mio.
Ma non ho visto mai,
Ne spero di vedere
Compassion ne la crudele, e bella.
Aminta di Tasso, act 1. sc. 2.
Earl Rivers carried to execution, says,
King Richard having got intelligence of Bolingbroke’s invasion, says, upon his landing in England from his Irish expedition, in a mixture of joy and resentment,
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses hoofs.
As a long parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting;
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee my earth,
And do thee favour with my royal hands.
Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his rav’nous sense:
But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom,
And heavy-gaited toads, lie in their way;
Doing annoyance to the treach’rous feet,
Which with usurping steps do trample thee.
Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
And, when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pr’ythee, with a lurking adder;
Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies.
Mock not my senseless conjuration, Lords:
This earth shall have a feeling; and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall faulter under foul rebellious arms.
Richard II. act 3. sc. 2.
Among the ancients, it was customary after a long voyage to salute the natal soil. A long voyage, was of old a greater enterprise than at present: the safe return to one’s country after much fatigue and danger, was a circumstance extremely delightful; and it was natural to give the natal soil a temporary life, in order to sympathise with the traveller. See an example, Agamemnon of Æschilus, act 3. in the beginning. Regret for leaving a place one has been accustomed to has the same effect[16].
Terror produceth the same effect. A man, to gratify this passion, extends it to every thing around, even to things inanimate:
Speaking of Polyphemus,
And heaves huge surges to the trembling shores.
Iliad ii. 249.
Iliad ii. 549.
Iliad v. 431.
Racine, in the tragedy of Phedra, describing the sea-monster that destroy’d Hippolitus, conceives the sea itself to be inspired with terror as well as the spectators; or more accurately transfers from the spectators their terror to the sea, with which they were connected:
A man also naturally communicates his joy to all objects around, animate or inanimate:
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odour from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest; with such delay
Well pleas’d, they slack their course, and many a league
Chear’d with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.
Paradise Lost, b. 4.
I have been profuse of examples, to show what power many passions have to animate their objects. In all the foregoing examples, the personification, if I mistake not, is so complete as to be derived from an actual conviction, momentary indeed, of life and intelligence. But it is evident from numberless instances, that personification is not always so complete. Personification is a common figure in descriptive poetry, understood to be the language of the writer, and not of any of his personages in a fit of passion. In this case, it seldom or never comes up to a conviction, even momentary, of life and intelligence. I give the following examples.
Regent of day, and all th’ horizon round
Invested with bright rays; jocund to run
His longitude through heav’n’s high road: the gray
Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danc’d,
Shedding sweet influence. Less bright the moon
But opposite, in levell’d west was set
His mirror, with full face borrowing her light
From him; for other light she needed none.
Paradise Lost, b. 7. l. 370.[17]
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.
Romeo and Juliet, act 3. sc. 7.
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
Hamlet, act 1. sc. 1.
It may, I presume, be taken for granted, that, in the foregoing instances, the personification, either with the poet or his reader, amounts not to a conviction of intelligence; nor that the sun, the moon, the day, the morn, are here understood to be sensible beings. What then is the nature of this personification? Upon considering the matter attentively, I discover that this species of personification must be referred to the imagination. The inanimate object is imagined to be a sensible being, but without any conviction, even for a moment, that it really is so. Ideas or fictions of imagination have power to raise emotions in the mind[18]; and when any thing inanimate is, in imagination, supposed to be a sensible being, it makes by that means a greater figure than when an idea is formed of it according to truth. The elevation however in this case, is far from being so great as when the personification arises to an actual conviction; and therefore must be considered as of a lower or inferior sort. Thus personification is of two kinds. The first or nobler, may be termed passionate personification: the other, or more humble, descriptive personification; because seldom or never is personification in a description carried the length of conviction.
The imagination is so lively and active, that its images are raised with very little effort; and this justifies the frequent use of descriptive personification. This figure abounds in Milton’s Allegro and Penseroso.
Abstract and general terms, as well as particular objects, are often necessary in poetry. Such terms however are not well adapted to poetry, because they suggest not any image to the mind: I can readily form an image of Alexander or Achilles in wrath; but I cannot form an image of wrath in the abstract, or of wrath independent of a person. Upon that account, in works addressed to the imagination, abstract terms are frequently personified. But this personification never goes farther than the imagination.
Thus, to explain the effects of slander, it is imagined to be a voluntary agent:
Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue
Out venoms all the worms of Nile; whose breath
Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie
All corners of the world, kings, queens, and states,
Maids, matrons: nay, the secrets of the grave
This viperous Slander enters.
Shakespear, Cymbeline, act. 3. sc. 4.
As also human passions. Take the following example.
Have ears more deaf than adders, to the voice
Of any true decision.
Troilus and Cressida, act 2. sc. 4.
Virgil explains fame and its effects by a still greater variety of action[19]. And Shakespear personifies death and its operations in a manner extremely fanciful:
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if his flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and humour’d thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle-walls, and farewell king!
Richard II. act 3. sc. 4.
Not less successfully is life and action given even to sleep:
Are at this hour asleep! O gentle Sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eye-lids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, Sleep, ly’st thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber;
Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sounds of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why ly’st thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leav’st the kingly couch,
A watch-case to a common larum-bell?
Wilt thou, upon the high and giddy mast,
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge;
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deaf’ning clamours in the slipp’ry shrouds,
That, with the hurly, Death itself awakes:
Can’st thou, O partial Sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And, in the calmest and the stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low! lie down;
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Second Part Henry IV. act 3. sc. 1.
I shall add one example more, to show that descriptive personification may be used with propriety, even where the purpose of the discourse is instruction merely:
How they advance into a dangerous world;
Our duty only can conduct us safe:
Our passions are seducers: but of all,
The strongest Love: he first approaches us,
In childish play, wantoning in our walks:
If heedlessly we wander after him,
As he will pick out all the dancing way,
We’re lost, and hardly to return again.
We should take warning: he is painted blind,
To show us, if we fondly follow him,
The precipices we may fall into.
Therefore let Virtue take him by the hand:
Directed so, he leads to certain joy.
Southern.
Hitherto our progress has been upon firm ground. Whether we shall be so lucky in the remaining part of the journey, seems doubtful. For after acquiring some knowledge of the subject, when we now look back to the expressions mentioned in the beginning, thirsty ground, furious dart, and such like, it seems as difficult as at first to say what sort of personification it is. Such expressions evidently raise not the slighted conviction of sensibility. Nor do I think they amount to descriptive personification: in the expressions mentioned, we do not so much as figure the ground or the dart to be animated; and if so, they cannot at all come under the present subject. And to show this more clearly, I shall endeavour to explain what effect such expressions have naturally upon the mind. In the expression angry ocean, for example, do we not tacitly compare the ocean in a storm, to a man in wrath? It is by this tacit comparison, that the expression acquires a force or elevation, beyond what is found when an epithet is used proper to the object: for I have had occasion to show[20], that a thing inanimate acquires a certain elevation by being compared to a sensible being. And this very comparison is itself a demonstration, that there is no personification in such expressions. For, by the very nature of a comparison, the things compared are kept distinct, and the native appearance of each is preserved. It will be shown afterward, that expressions of this kind belong to another figure, which I term a figure of speech, and which employs the seventh section of the present chapter.
Though thus in general we can precisely distinguish descriptive personification from what is merely a figure of speech, it is however often difficult to say, with respect to some expressions, whether they are of the one kind or of the other. Take the following instances.
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise; in such a night,
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan wall,
And sigh’d his soul towards the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.
Merchant of Venice, act 5. sc. 1.
Th’ ambitious ocean swell, and rage, and foam,
To be exalted with the threat’ning clouds.
Julius Cæsar, act 1. sc. 6.
The scene of beauty and delight is chang’d,
No roses bloom upon my fading cheek,
No laughing graces wanton in my eyes;
But haggard Grief, lean-looking sallow Care,
And pining Discontent, a rueful train,
Dwell on my brow, all hideous and forlorn.
Jane Shore, act 1. sc. 2.
With respect to these and numberless other instances of the same kind, whether they be examples of personification or of a figure of speech merely, seems to be an arbitrary question. They will be ranged under the former class by those only who are endued with a sprightly imagination. Nor will the judgement even of the same person be steady: it will vary with the present state of the spirits, lively or composed.
Having thus at large explained the present figure, its different kinds, and the principles from whence derived; what comes next in order is to ascertain its proper province, by showing in what cases it is suitable, in what unsuitable. I begin with observing, upon passionate personification, that this figure is not promoted by every passion indifferently. All dispiriting passions are averse to it. Remorse, in particular, is too serious and severe, to be gratified by a phantom of the mind. I cannot therefore approve the following speech of Enobarbus, who had deserted his master Antony.
When men revolted shall upon record
Bear hateful memory, poor Enobarbus did
Before thy face repent————
Oh sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night dispunge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me.
Antony and Cleopatra, act 4. sc. 7.
If this can be justified, it must be upon the Heathen system of theology, which converted into deities the sun, moon, and stars.
Secondly, After a passionate personification is properly introduced, it ought to be confined strictly to its proper province, that of gratifying the passion; and no sentiment nor action ought to be exerted by the animated object, but what answers that purpose. Personification is at any rate a bold figure, and ought to be employed with great reserve. The passion of love, for example, in a plaintive tone, may give a momentary life to woods and rocks, that the lover may vent his distress to them: but no passion will support a conviction so far stretched, as that these woods and rocks should be living witnesses to report the distress to others:
Se tu nol fai, crudele,
Chiedilo a queste selve,
Che te’l diranno, et te’l diran con esso
Le fere loro e i duri sterpi, e i sassi
Di questi alpestri monti,
Ch’i’ ho si spesse volte
Inteneriti al suon de’ miei lamenti.
Pastor fido, act 3. sc. 3.
No lover who is not crazed will utter such a sentiment: it is plainly the operation of the writer, indulging his imagination without regard to nature. The same observation is applicable to the following passage.
With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales
Of woful ages, long ago betid:
And ere thou bid goodnight, to quiet their grief,
Tell them the lamentable fall of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.
For why! the senseless brands will sympathise
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue,
And in compassion weep the fire out.
Richard II. act 5. sc. 1.
One must read this passage very seriously to avoid laughing. The following passage is quite extravagant: the different parts of the human body are too intimately connected with self, to be personified by the power of any passion; and after converting such a part into a sensible being, it is still worse to make it be conceived as rising in rebellion against self.
Coward flesh————
Would’st thou conspire with Cæsar, to betray me,
As thou wert none of mine? I’ll force thee to’t.
Dryden, All for Love, act 5.
Next comes descriptive personification; upon which I must observe in general, that it ought to be cautiously used. A personage in a tragedy, agitated by a strong passion, deals in strong sentiments; and the reader, catching fire by sympathy, relishes the boldest personifications. But a writer, even in the most lively description, ought to take a lower flight, and content himself with such easy personifications as agree with the tone of mind inspired by the description. In plain narrative, again, the mind, serious and sedate, rejects personification altogether. Strada, in his history of the Belgic wars, has the following passage, which, by a strained elevation above the tone of the subject, deviates into burlesk. “Vix descenderat a prætoria navi Cæsar; cum fœda illico exorta in portu tempestas, classem impetu disjecit, prætoriam hausit: quasi non vecturam amplius Cæsarem, Cæsarisque fortunam[21].” Neither do I approve, in Shakespear, the speech of King John, gravely exhorting the citizens of Angiers to a surrender; though a tragic writer has much greater latitude than a historian. Take the following specimen of this speech.
And ready mounted are they to spit forth
Their iron-indignation ’gainst your walls.
Act 2. sc. 3.
Secondly, If extraordinary marks of respect put upon a person of the lowest rank be ridiculous, not less so is the personification of a mean object. This rule chiefly regards descriptive personification: for an object can hardly be mean that is the cause of a violent passion; in that circumstance, at least, it must be an object of importance. With respect to this point, it would be in vain to set limits to personification: taste is the only rule. A poet of superior genius hath more than others the command of this figure; because he hath more than others the power of inflaming the mind. Homer appears not extravagant in animating his darts and arrows: nor Thomson in animating the seasons, the winds, the rains, the dews. He even ventures to animate the diamond, and doth it with propriety.
And all its native lustre let abroad,
Dares, as it sparkles on the fair-one’s breast,
With vain ambition emulate her eyes.
But there are things familiar and base, to which personification cannot descend. In a composed state of mind, to animate a lump of matter even in the most rapid flight of fancy, degenerates into burlesk.
That wounds th’ unresisting postern with these strokes.
Shakespear, Measure for Measure, act 4. sc. 6.
The following little better:
The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the list’ning waste.
Thomson, Spring, l. 23.
Speaking of a man’s hand cut off in battle:
The personification here of a hand is insufferable, especially in a plain narration; not to mention that such a trivial incident is too minutely described.
The same observation is applicable to abstract terms, which ought not to be animated unless they have some natural dignity. Thomson, in this article, is quite licentious. Witness the following instances out of many.
On which the power of cultivation lies,
And joys to see the wonders of his toil.
Summer, l. 1423.
Produce the mighty bowl:
Nor wanting is the brown October, drawn
Mature and perfect, from his dark retreat
Of thirty years; and now his honest front
Flames in the light refulgent.
Autumn, l. 516.
Thirdly, it is not sufficient to avoid improper subjects. Some preparation is necessary, in order to rouze the mind. The imagination refuses its aid, till it be warmed at least, if not inflamed. Yet Thomson, without the least ceremony or preparation, introduceth each season as a sensible being:
Child of the sun, refulgent Summer comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature’s depth.
He comes attended by the sultry hours,
And ever-fanning breezes, on his way,
While from his ardent look, the turning Spring
Averts her blushful face, and earth and skies
All-smiling, to his hot dominion leaves.
Summer, l. 1.
Sullen and sad with all his rising train,
Vapours, and clouds, and storms.
Winter, l. 1.
This has violently the air of writing mechanically without taste. It is not natural, that the imagination of a writer should be so much heated at the very commencement; and, at any rate, he cannot expect such ductility in his readers: but if this practice can be justified by authority, Thomson has one of no mean note: Vida begins his first eclogue in the following words.
Dicite; nam motas ipsas ad carmina cautes
Et requiesse suos perhibent vaga flumina cursus.
Even Shakespear is not always careful to prepare the mind for this bold figure. Take the following instance:
The clothiers all, not able to maintain
The many to them ’longing, have put off
The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers; who,
Unfit for other life, compell’d by hunger
And lack of other means, in desp’rate manner
Daring th’ event to th’ teeth, are all in uproar,
And Danger serves among them.
Henry VIII. act 1. sc. 4.
Fourthly, Descriptive personification ought never to be carried farther than barely to animate the subject: and yet poets are not easily restrained from making this phantom of their own creating behave and act in every respect as if it were really a sensible being. By such licence we lose sight of the subject; and the description is rendered obscure or unintelligible, instead of being more lively and striking. In this view, the following passage, describing Cleopatra on shipboard, appears to me exceptionable.
Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love sick with ’em.
Antony and Cleopatra, act 2. sc. 3.
Let the winds be personified; I make no objection. But to make them love-sick, is too far stretched; having no resemblance to any natural action of wind. In another passage, where Cleopatra is also the subject, the personification of the air is carried beyond all bounds:
The following personification of the earth or soil is not less wild.
To bear my Lady’s train; lest the base earth
Should from her vesture chance to steal a kiss;
And of so great a favour growing proud,
Disdain to root the summer swelling flower,
And make rough winter everlastingly.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 2. sc. 7.
Shakespear, far from approving such intemperance of imagination, puts this speech in the mouth of a ranting lover. Neither can I relish what follows.
Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros,
Ille canit.
Virgil, Buc. vi. 82.
The chearfulness singly of a pastoral song, will scarce support personification in the lowest degree. But admitting, that a river gently flowing may be imagined a sensible being listening to a song, I cannot enter into the conceit of the river’s ordering his laurels to learn the song. Here all resemblance to any thing real is quite lost. This however is copied literally by one of our greatest poets; early indeed, before maturity of taste or judgement.
And bade his willows learn the moving song.
Pope’s Pastorals, past. 4. l. 13.
This author, in riper years, is guilty of a much greater deviation from the rule. Dullness may be imagined a deity or idol, to be worshipped by bad writers: but then some sort of disguise is requisite, some bastard virtue must be bestowed, to give this idol a plausible appearance. Yet in the Dunciad, dullness, without the least disguise, is made the object of worship. The mind rejects such a fiction as unnatural; for dullness is a defect, of which even the dullest mortal is ashamed:
Book i. 163.
The following instance is stretched beyond all resemblance. It is bold to take a part or member of a living creature, and to bestow upon it life, volition, and action: after animating two such members, it is still bolder to make them envy each other; for this is wide of any resemblance to reality:
Meritamente sia giudice quella, &c.
Pastor Fido, act 2. sc. 1.
Fifthly, The enthusiasm of passion may have the effect to prolong passionate personification: but descriptive personification cannot be dispatched in too few words. A minute description dissolves the charm, and makes the attempt to personify appear ridiculous. Homer succeeds in animating his darts and arrows: but such personification spun out in a French translation, is mere burlesk:
Part, vole à lui, l’atteint, et lui perce le flanc.
Horace says happily, “Post equitem sedet atra Cura.” See how this thought degenerates by being divided, like the former, into a number of minute parts:
Et malade à la ville ainsi qu’à la campagne,
En vain monte à cheval pour tromper son ennui,
Le Chagrin monte en croupe et galope avec lui.
The following passage is, if possible, still more faulty.
And told in sighs to all the trembling trees;
The trembling trees, in ev’ry plain and wood,
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood;
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears
Swell’d with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;
The winds, and trees, and floods, her death deplore,
Daphne, our grief! our glory! now no more.
Pope’s Pastorals, iv. 61.
Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single expression. Even in that case, the figure seldom has a good effect; because grief or love of the pastoral kind, are causes rather too faint for so violent an effect as imagining the winds, trees, or floods, to be sensible beings. But when this figure is deliberately spread out with great regularity and accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relishing it, is struck with its ridiculous appearance.
SECT. II.
APOSTROPHE.
THIS figure and the former are derived from the same principle. If, to gratify a plaintive passion, we can bestow a momentary sensibility upon an inanimate object, it is not more difficult to bestow a momentary presence upon a sensible being who is absent.
Accipit. Hic, pelagi tot tempestatibus actus,
Heu! genitorem, omnis curæ casusque levamen,
Amitto Anchisen: hic me pater optime fessum
Deseris, heu! tantis nequiequam erepte periclis.
Nec vates Helenus, cum multa horrenda moneret,
Hos mihi prædixit luctus; non dira Celæno.
Æneid. iii. 707.
This figure is sometimes joined with the former: things inanimate, to qualify them for listening to a passionate expostulation, are not only personified, but also conceived to be present.
Impulerat ferro Argolicas fœdare latebras:
Trojaque nunc stares, Priamique arx alta maneres.
Æneid. ii. 54.