The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification

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.