or

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.