Far from her sight flew Faction, Strife and Pride
And Envy did but look on
(“First Epistle”)
but his examples are mainly to be found in his modernizations or translations, where of necessity he takes them from his originals.[197]
Pope makes a greater use of the figure, but even here there is no excess. There is not a single personification in the four pastorals of “The Seasons,” a subject peculiarly adapted to such treatment. In “Eloisa to Abelard” there are two instances where some attempt at characterization is made.[198] More instances, though none very striking, are to be found in “Windsor Forest,” but the poem ends with a massed group, forming a veritable catalogue of the personified vices which had done so much service in poetry since the days of the Seven Deadly Sins.
In other poems Pope uses the device for humorous or satiric effect, as in the “Pain,” “Megrim,” and “Ill nature like an ancient maid” (l. 24) of “The Rape of the Lock;” or the “Science,” “Will,” “Logic,” etc., of “The Dunciad,” where all are invested with capital letters, but with little attempt to work up a definite picture, except, as was perhaps to be expected, in the case of “Dullness,” which is provided with a bodyguard (Bk. I, 45-52).
Though, as we have already said, there is no great use of such figures in the works of Pope, they are present in such numbers in his satiric and didactic works as to indicate one great reason for their prevalence in his contemporaries and successors. After the Restoration, when English literature entered on a new era, the changed and changing conditions of English life and thought soon impressed themselves on poetry. The keynote to the understanding of much that is characteristic of this new “classical” literature has been well summed up in the formula that “the saving process of human thought was forced for generations to beggar the sense of beauty.”[199] The result was an invasion of poetry by ideas, arguments, and abstractions which were regarded both as expressing admirably the new spirit of rationalism, as well as constituting in themselves dignified subjects and ornaments of poetry.
This is well illustrated in the case of several of Pope’s contemporaries. In the works of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) abstractions of the conventional type are plentiful, usually accompanied by a qualifying epithet: “Fortune fair-array’d” (“An Imitation”), “Impetuous Discord,” “Blind Mischief,” (“On Queen Anne’s Peace”), “the soft Pathetic” (“On the Different Styles of Poetry”). These are only a few of the examples of the types favoured by Parnell, where only here and there are human traits added by means of qualifying epithets or phrases. In one or two instances, however, there are more detailed personifications. Thus, in the “Epistle to Dr. Swift,” which abounds in shadowy abstractions, Eloquence is fully described for us:
Upon her cheek sits Beauty ever young