The first published collection of Collins’s work, “Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects” (1746), was, as we have seen, if not neglected or ignored by the public, at least received with marked indifference, owing largely no doubt to the abstract nature of his subjects, and the chiselled severity of his treatment.[219] In other words, Collins was pure classical and not neo-classical; he had gone direct back to the “gods of Hellas” for his inspiration, and his verse had a Hellenic austerity and beauty which could make little or no appeal to his own age. At the same time it was permeated through and through with new and striking qualities of feeling and emotion that at once aroused the suspicions of the neo-classicists, with Johnson as their mentor and spokesman. The “Odes” were then, we may say, classical in form and romantic in essence, and it is scarcely a matter for surprise that a lukewarm reception should have been their lot.[220]
Collins has received merited praise for the charm and precision of his diction generally, and the fondness for inverting the common order of his words—Johnson’s chief criticism of his poetical style[221]—is to the modern mind a venial offence compared with his use of personified abstractions. On this point Johnson has nothing to say, an omission which may be regarded as significant of the extent to which personification had invaded poetry, for the critic, if we may judge from his silence, seems to have considered it natural and legitimate for Collins also to have made abundant use of this stock and conventional device.
It is probable, however, that the extensive use which Collins makes of the figure is the result in a large measure of his predilection for the ode—a form of verse very fashionable towards the middle of the century. As has already been noted, odes were being turned out in large numbers by the poetasters of the time, in which virtues and vices, emotions and passions were invoked, apostrophized, and dismissed with appropriate gestures, and it is probable that the majority of these turgid and ineffective compositions owed their appearance to the prevalent mania for personification. Young remarked with truth[222] that an ode is, or ought to be, “more spontaneous and more remote from prose” than any other kind of poetry; and doubtless it was some vague recognition of this fact, and in the hope of “elevating” their style, that led the mere versifiers to adopt the trick. But as they worked the mechanical personification to death, they quickly robbed it of any impressiveness it may ever have had.
This might quite fairly be described as the state of affairs with regard to the use of personified abstraction when Collins was writing his “odes,” but while it is true that he indulges freely in personification, it is scarcely necessary to add that he does so with a difference; his Hellenic training and temperament naturally saved him from the inanities and otiosities of so much contemporary verse. To begin with, there are but few examples of the lifeless abstraction, and even in such cases there is usually present a happy epithet, or brief description that sets them on a higher level than those that swarm even in the odes of the Wartons. Thus in the “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “the shadowy tribes of mind,” which had been sadly overworked by Collins’s predecessors and contemporaries, are brought before us with a new and fresh beauty that wins instant acceptance for them:
But near it sat ecstatic Wonder
Listening the deep applauding thunder
And truth in sunny vest arrayed
By whom the tassel’s eyes were made
All the shadowy tribes of mind
In braided dance their murmurs joined.