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The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Earl R. Wasserman
Earl R. Wasserman*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore 18, Md.
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Extract

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , June 1950 , pp. 435 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

1 “Personification Reconsidered”, ELE, xIv (1947), 163-177. In some of the themes of the following paper I have been anticipated by A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Collins and the Creative Imagination”, Studies in English by Members of University College, Toronto (Toronto, Canada, 1931). However, since Woodhouse's intention in examining concepts of personification was to illuminate the poetry of Collins, it has appeared appropriate to repeat and elaborate his comments on the association of personification and the creative imagination and on the pictorial quality of the figure, in order to present as full an account as possible of the 18th-century understanding of personification.

2 Philosophical and Critical Observations (1774), II, 184. Unless otherwise indicated, London will be understood as the place of publication.

3 Letter to Butts, 6 July 1803.

4 Poetry and Prose, ed. Keynes, pp. 828-829.438

5 See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, Ill., 1944), passim.

6 Dialogues Concerning Education, 4th ed. (Cork, 1755), II, 270.

7 Published, however, as “by a student of Oxford.”

8 Prodicus' allegory was paraphrased by Shenstone as The Judgment of Hercules (1741), by [Thomas Cooke] as The Tryal of Hercules (1752), and by William Dunkin as “The Judgment of Hercules” (Poetical Works, Dublin, 1769). A prose paraphrase appears in Dodsley's Museum, II (1746), 48-49. Other poems patterned after Prodicus are Robert Bedingfield's Spenserian-stanza poem, “The Education of Achilles” (in Dodsley's Museum, III [1747], 127-131), Samuel Boyce's Paris; or the Force of Beauty (1755), John Lawson's “Judgment of Plato” (Lectures Concerning Oratory, 2nd ed. [Dublin, 1759], pp. 339 ff.), James Beattie's Judgment of Paris (1765), and P. Layng's Judgment of Hercules (Eton, 1749).

9 Among the translators were John Davies, Jeremy Collier, Samuel Boyce, Joseph Spence, and Thomas Scott. Also paraphrased in [?Lawrence Jackson] Occasional Letters on Several Subjects (1745), pp. 387-395; and imitated, ibid., pp. 45-48.

10 For further evidence of the significance of Cebes and Prodicus in 18th-century thought, see John Hughes' edition of Spenser (1715), i, liv; William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767), pp. 184-185; Joseph Priestley, “A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism” (1777), in Theological and Miscellaneous Works (1824), xxIII, 442; James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (Dublin, 1783), II, 237-238. John Ogilvie (op. cit., II, 182) referred to the works of Prodicus and Cebes as “two of the most beautiful pieces of antiquity”; and John Baillie (Essay on the Sublime [1747], pp. 15, 37) described Prodicus' allegory as “universally allow'd noble and sublime.”

11 Op. cit., i, lvi-lvii. See also Catherine Talbot, Works (“new edition”, 1780), p. 303.

12 A Dissertation on Reading the Classics, 3rd ed. (1718), pp. 82-83.

13 Essays upon Several Subjects (1716), p. 92.

14 See also John Lawson, Lectures Concerning Oratory, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 17S9), pp. 249- 253.

15 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Ix, ii, 29-37; Cicero, Orator, xxv, 85. See also Quin-tilian, viII, vi, 11: “ … when inanimate things are exalted by a bold and daring figure, and when we give energy and feeling to objects that are without them, extraordinary sublimity is produced.”

16 Treatise of the Figures of Grammar and Rhetorike [1555], fol. xlvi.

17 See also The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. J. Langhorne (1781), pp. 137 ff.

18 Essays: on Poetry and Music, 3rd ed. (1779), pp. 251, 258. See also “Illustrations on Sublimity”, in Dissertations Moral and Critical (Dublin, 1783), II, 392. Bishop Robert Lowth, who felt that personification was sufficiently significant a device to justify an entire chapter of his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, described personification of “fictitious, irrational, or even inanimate objects” as “by far the boldest and most daring” form of metaphor (Andover, Mass., 1829, p. 104; first published in Latin, 1753).

19 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2nd ed. (London, 1785), I, 407, 410, 415, 417. See also Joseph Spence, An Essay on Mr. Pope's Odyssey, 2nd ed. (1737), p. 224.

20 Observations on Poetry (1738), p. 92.

21 The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. Mrs. Barbauld (1797), p. vii. Lang- horne, in his edition of Collins (p. xi), described “allegorical and abstracted poetry” as “the highest efforts of imagination.”

22 Philosophical and Critical Observations (1774), II, 164.

23 “An Essay on Sublimity of Writing”, in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, I (1787).

24 A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), in Theological and Miscellaneous Works (1824), xxIIi, 439. Lord Karnes, however, although giving personification first place among the figures, and although granting that “passionate” personification, as distinct from “descriptive”, creates momentary conviction of life and intelligence, denied this power to the personified abstraction (Elements of Criticism, 3rd ed. [Edinburgh, 1765], n, 234). Nevertheless, Karnes attributed to all personifications some warmth of imagination, if not strong passion; otherwise the personification is forced and mechanical. It is “at any rate a bold figure” (p. 241), and the mind must be prepared for it by being “warmed at least, if not inflamed” (p. 245).

25 William Collins may well have thought differently. See Woodhouse, op. cit.

26 Maurice Morgann (Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, ed. W. A. Gill [1912], pp. 71-74) also related personification to “the regions of Poetic magic.” However, he held that personification of abstract ideas, such as virtue and beauty, are the products of the understanding alone, which materializes the ideas solely to make them intelligible. On the other hand, personifications of the passions are of an imaginative, not intellectual, order, for “passion is the dupe of its own artifice and realises the image it had formed.” Hence these belong to the regions of magic, for they are the products of passions and fancy, which “extend far beyond into the obscure”, unlike reason, which “is confined to the line of visible existence.”

27 Adventurer 57. For the relation of personification to Warton's general esthetics, see Hoyt Trowbridge, “Joseph Warton on the Imagination”, MP, xxxv (1937), 73-87.

28 An Essay on Original Genius (1767), pp. 172,174,177, 179. See also J. Husbands, A Miscellany of Poems by Several Hands (Oxford, 1731), preface; John Aikin, Essays on Song-Writing, 2nd ed. (Warrington, 1774), pp. 6-7; and his Essays Literary and Miscel- laneous (1811), p. 215.445

29 Essays Literary and Miscellaneous, p. 333.

30 Poems on Several Occasions (1769), p. ci.

31 Preface to “An Essay on the Different Styles of Poetry.”

32 “An Essay on the Different Styles of Poetry.” Parnell contributed a number of alle- gorical visions in prose to the Spectator and Guardian.

33 Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser (1715), I, xxxi. See also Pope's Preface to his transla‐tion of Homer. Although Pope had reference to the kind of symbolic allegory that can be read into Homer, his comments obviously apply equally well to a theory of personified abstractions: “How fertile will that imagination appear, which was able to clothe all the properties of elements, the qualifications of the mind, the virtues and vices, in forms and persons; and to introduce them into actions agreeable to the nature of the things they shadowed!” It was “no unhappy circumstance for Virgil”, he adds, “that there was not in his time that demand upon him of so great an invention as might be capable of furnishing all those allegorical parts of a poem.” See also [? Alexander Bicknell], Prince Arthur (1779); and Arthur Browne, Miscellaneous Sketches (1798), i, 24. [? Robert Andrews], Eidyllia (Edinburgh, 1757), divides descriptions into three categories: “of objects as they appear to exist in fact … of objects that were never known to exist, but similar to those that we see do exist; which kind permit me to call imaginary description. … of objects that never at all exist but in the poet's imagination, as … the Virtues and Vices personified … which I beg leave to call creative description.” The author, however, breaks down the distinction between imagination and creation when, like Fordyce (see below), he recognizes the essential analogy of the moral and physical realms: “[Personified abstractions] … do yet bear a near analogy to human things; so near, that I begin to be out of humour with the distinction of the imaginary and creative kinds, and am willing to retain only the former of these terms, including in it the idea of both.”

34 Ibid., i, xxxiii-xxxiv. See also The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Cunningham (New York, 1881), in, 342, 353; and [PAlexander Bicknell] Prince Arthur; an Allegorical Romance (1779), I, i.

35 For other examples of dream allegories in prose, see e.g. [?Lawrence Jackson], Occasional Letters on Several Subjects (1745); The Adventurer; Dodsley's Museum; David Fordyce, The Temple of Virtue, a Dream (1757). On the ethical and allegorical tendency of dreams, see James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh, 1790), I, 121-22.

36 Poems on Several Occasions (1769), i, xcv-xcvi.

37 The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. Mrs. Barbauld (1797), pp. iv-v, vi.

38 Ogilvie, Poems, p. xcix. See also George Gregory, Letters on Literature, Taste, and Composition (1808), I, 182: “This figure is the soul of poetry, and of lyric poetry in particu- lar.” He also writes that “Poetry admits of more and stronger figures than prose; and particularly the prosopopoeia” (II, 117). Gregory's comments first appeared in his notes to Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787).

39 Johnson's frequent attacks upon personification have to do, not with its value, but with bad personification. His complaint is that Milton and others have failed to maintain perfect fusion of the abstract and concrete in their personifications; that when allegorical personages are required to perform the acts of real agents, their allegorical and physical properties are falsely divorced. No doubt Johnson accepted the general views of his friend David Fordyce on the nature and educational function of personification. At any rate, in editing The Preceptor (1748) he devoted the section on “Human Life and Manners” to Lowth's Choice of Hercules, Spence's translation of Cebes, and his own allegorical essay, The Vision of Theodore, which he is reported to have considered the best thing he ever wrote.

40 John More, Strictures, Critical and Sentimental, on Thomson's Seasons (1777), p. 107.

41 Peter Browne, The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding, 2nd ed. (1729), p. 53.

42 William Duncan, The Elements of Logick, 8th ed. (1787), p. 40.

43 Elements of Criticism, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1765), II, 524, 526.

44 Essays on Human Knowledge, in Works (Philadelphia, 1841), IIi, 119, 124, 128.

45 William Duncan, p. 69.

46 E. g., [John Langhorne], Letters on the Eloquence of the Pulpit (1765), p. 21 : “The power of abstracted thinking is the lot of few; and attention to moral instruction, conveyed in a series of sentiments, is generally vain.” See also ibid., pp. 33-34.452

47 Principles of Taste, or the Elements of Beauty, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1786), pp. 55, 56, 58, 162, 167-168, 169.

48 [David Fordyce], Dialogues Concerning Education (1745), p. 366. Fordyce's book enjoyed considerable popularity. A second volume appeared in 1748. An edition described as the fourth was published in Cork in 1755; and a London edition described as the third in 1757. Fordyce put his theories of personification into practice in his sixteenth dialogue and in his prose Temple of Virtue, a Dream (2nd ed., 1775). The heart of Fordyce's argu- ment lies in the following passage (i, 370) : “But I would fain hope, that our fabulous and allegorical Fabric, has a real Foundation in Nature, and may be of admirable Use both to store up and convey Truth; nay, that it is not unworthy of Philosophers to take some Pains to raise up and support the Fabric. . . . Were we pure Intelligences, I believe Truth would be so familiar and congenial to us, that we could both contemplate it ourselves, and com- municate it to each other, in the most simple and undisguised Form; and we should then perhaps be best pleased, when we saw it quite naked, or least encumbered with material

49 Ibid., pp. 370, 371, 376. The seeds of this theory are perceptible in the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of Francis Hutcheson, who, in demonstrating that the chief source of our pleasure in poetry is our “moral sense”, singled out prosopopoeia, “that great Beauty in Poetry”, for special consideration. Essentially, his argument is that the pleasure of poetry is basically a moral pleasure: the perception of moral beauty is more delightful than the perception of physical beauty, and, since the “moral sense” operates intuitively, it needs only “judicious, natural, and lively” representations (2nd ed., 1726, p. 262). But in praising personification, he adds that the poet by this means not only affects “the Hearer in a more lively manner with the Affections describ'd, by representing them as Persons” but also joins “the Contemplation of moral Circumstances and Qualitys, along with natural Objects, to increase their Beauty or Deformity” (p. 263). In other words, by personification the beauty of virtue or the ugliness of vice is reinforced correspondingly by the beauty of physical harmony or the ugliness of physical disorder.455

50 A Course of Lectures (1777), in Theological and Miscellaneous Works (1824), xxIII, 436-437.

51 Poems (1749), p. iv.

52 Op. cit., p. 434.

53 Of Poetry and Music, in Essays, 3rd ed. (1779), p. 256. See also Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), lecture 16.

54 Blair, loc. cit. See also Joseph Spence, An Essay on Mr. Pope's Odyssey, 2nd ed. (1737), p. 228.

55 Loves of the Plants, Interlude I. See also David Hartley, Observations on Man, Proposi- tion 61.

56 Op. cit., II, 234.

57 Essays, pp. 256-257. Some few critics, however, required a degree of obscurity in personifications to create the necessary sublimity; or, like Erasmus Darwin, argued that such obscurity removes some of the improbability of the figure.458

58 Poems, i, ci-ciii, cv.459

59 Op. cit., pp. 368-369.

60 Essays Literary and Miscellaneous (1811), p. 278.

61 “A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules”, 1713.

62 Essays; Read to a Literary Society (Glasgow, 1759). For further evidence of fastidious interest in the pictorial details of allegorical portraits, see Joseph Spence, Polymetis (1747), especially Dialogues 18 and 19.

63 Gentleman's Magazine, LII (1782), 22.

64 Op. cit., p. xli.

65 Great Expectations, Ch. 7.

66 The English appear to have taken a patriotic pride in personification. Many critics theorized that the figure is peculiarly English, for the English noun, unlike the nouns of other languages, has no gender unless it directly refers to one of the sexes. Therefore, the abstractions can be personified merely by being given a gender. See James Harris, Hermes (1751), i, iv; Robert Lowth, Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), p. 84; Kames, op. cit., ii, 233 n.; Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh, 1773-76), II, 315; Joseph Priestley, op. cit., pp. 435,445; Blair, op. cit., lecture 16; Beattie, Theory of Language (1788), pp. 143-144; Erasmus Darwin, Loves of the Plants (1789), Interlude iII, and The Temple of Nature (1803), note 14.461

67 Statesman's Manual, in Complete Works, ed. Shedd (New York, 1854), i, 437, 438.

68 Poems, i, c.

69 The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. Langhome (1781), p. 138.

70 Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 44.463

71 S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (New York, 1946), p. 74.

72 Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh, 1793), II, 474.