Churchill had no doubt a genuine passion for poetry and independence, but the saeva indignatio of the professed censor of public morals and manners cannot be conveyed to the reader through the medium of mechanical abstractions which, compared with the flesh-and-blood creations of Dryden and Pope, show clearly that for the time being the great line of English satire has all but come to an end.
Eighteenth century ethical poetry was represented at this stage by Johnson and Goldsmith, at whose work it will now be convenient to glance. The universal truths which Johnson as a stern, unbending moralist wished to illustrate in “London” (1738) and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), might easily have resulted in a swarm of the abstractions and personifications fashionable at the time.[203] From this danger Johnson was saved by the depth of feeling with which he unfolds the individual examples chosen to enforce his moral lessons. Not that he escapes entirely; “London” has a few faint abstractions (“Malice,” “Rapine,” “Oppression”); but though occasionally they are accompanied by epithets suggesting human attributes (“surly Virtue,” “persecuting Fate,” etc.), as a rule there is no attempt at definite personification, a remark which also applies to the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” In his odes to the different seasons he has not given, however, any elaborate personifications, but has contented himself with slight human touches, such as
Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow.
Of Johnson’s poetical style, regarded from our present point of view, it may be said to be well represented in the famous line from “London”:
Slow rises Worth by Poverty depressed,
where there is probably no intention or desire to personify at all, but which is a result of that tendency towards Latin condensation which the great Doctor and his contemporaries had introduced into English prose.
Goldsmith’s poetry has much in common with that of Johnson, in that both deal to some extent with what would now be called social problems. But it is significant of Goldsmith’s historical position in eighteenth century poetry as representing a sort of “half-way attitude,” in the matter of poetical style, between the classical conventional language and the free and unfettered diction advocated by Wordsworth, that there are few examples of personified abstractions in his works, and these confined mainly to one passage in “The Traveller”:
Hence Ostentation here with tawdry Art
Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart, etc.