Even the figures, seen as it were but for a moment, are flashed before us in this manner:

and

and the vision of hope with “eyes so fair” who

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:

and, with its tinge of probably unconscious humour—

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”:

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:

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

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,”

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

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

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

or the beautiful vision in the “Bard,”

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:

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,

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:

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:

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

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),

while Patience stands

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:

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]:

But the evocation of the seasons themselves, as in “Ælla” (32),

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:

whilst others are clearly Elizabethan reminiscences, like

or

“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:

An instance of personification raised to a higher power is found in Blake’s letter to Butts[234] beginning

whilst elsewhere personified abstractions appear with new epithets, the most striking example being in “Earth’s Answer,” from the “Songs of Experience”:

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:

and

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

of summer with

of the “jolly autumn,”

and of winter,

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:

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

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,

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

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:

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:

“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”:

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

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:

The darkness soon to fall over the landscape is suggested in the added appeal to Evening to come

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:

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,

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: