Love-whisp’ring woods and lute-resounding waves
we may perhaps see that the free use of compound epithets was not compatible with the mechanism of the couplet as illustrated in the greater part of Pope’s practice; they would tend to weaken the balanced antithesis, and thus spoil the swing of the line.
The most formidable rival of the heroic couplet in the eighteenth century was blank verse, the advent of which marked the beginning of the Romantic reaction in form. Here Thomson may be regarded as the chief representative, and it is significant that the large number of compound epithets in his work are terms of natural description, which, in addition to their being a reflex of the revived attitude to natural scenery, were probably more or less consciously used to compensate readers for the absence of “the rhyme-stroke and flash” they were accustomed to look for in the contemporary couplet. “He utilizes periodically,” to quote Saintsbury again,[194] “the exacter nature-painting, which in general poetic history is his glory, by putting the distinctive words for colour and shape in notable places of the verse, so as to give it character and quality.” These “distinctive words for colour and shape” were, with Thomson, for the most part, compound epithets; almost by the time of “Yardley Oak,” and certainly by the time of “Tintern Abbey,” blank verse had been fully restored to its kingdom, and no longer needed such aid.
CHAPTER VII
PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY
In the Preface of 1798, when Wordsworth formulated his theories with regard to poetical language, the first “mechanical device of style” against which he directed his preliminary attack was the use of “personifications of abstract ideas.”[195] Such personifications, he urged, do not make any natural or regular part of “the very language of men,” and as he wished “to keep the reader in the company of flesh and blood,” he had endeavoured “utterly to reject them.” He was ready to admit that they were occasionally “prompted by passion,” but his predecessors had come to regard them as a sort of family language, upon which they had every right to draw. In short, in Wordsworth’s opinion, abstractions and personifications had become a conventional method of ornamenting verse, akin to the “vicious diction,” from the tyranny of which he wished to emancipate poetry. The specific point on which he thus challenged the practice of his predecessors could hardly be gainsaid, for he had indicted a literary device, or artifice, which was not only worked to death by the mere poetasters of the period, but which disfigures not a little the work of even the great poets of the century.
The literary use of abstraction and personification was not, it is needless to say, the invention of the eighteenth century. It is as old as literature itself, which has always reflected a tendency to interpret or explain natural phenomena or man’s relations with the invisible powers that direct or influence human conduct, by means of allegory, English poetry in the Middle Ages, especially that of Chaucer, Langland, and their immediate successors, fitly illustrates the great world of abstraction which had slowly come into being, a world peopled by personified states or qualities—the Seven Deadly Sins, the Virtues, Love, etc.—typifying or symbolizing the forces which help man, or beset and ensnare him as he makes his pilgrim’s progress through this world.
Already the original motive power of allegory was considerably diminished, even if it had not altogether disappeared, and, by the time of the “Faerie Queene,” the literary form which it had moulded for itself had become merely imitative and conventional, so that even the music and melody of Spenser’s verse could not altogether vitalize the shadowy abstractions of his didactic allegory. With “Paradise Lost” we come to the last great work in which personified abstractions reflect to any real extent the original allegorical motive in which they had their origin. Milton achieves his supreme effects in personification in that his figures are merely suggestive, strongly imagined impressions rather than clean-cut figures. For nothing can be more dangerous, from the poetic point of view, than the precise figures which attempt to depict every possible point of similarity between the abstract notion and the material representation imagined.[196]
It is sometimes considered that the mania for abstraction was due largely to the influence of the two poets who are claimed, or regarded, as the founders or leaders of the new classical school—Dryden and Pope. As a matter of fact, neither makes any great use of personification. Dryden has a few abstractions in his original works, such as,