The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674435803, 9780674435797

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THE INSISTENCE OF HORROR Aspects oj the Supernatural Eighteenth-Century

Poetry

in

THE INSISTENCE OF HORROR Aspects of the Supernatural Eighteenth-Century

PATRICIA

MEYER

in

Poetry

SPACKS

But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names. — COLERIDGE

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts ' 1962

© Copyright 1962 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-202 ¡2 Printed in the United States of America

FOR

BARRY

Preface omething perhaps should be said about the organization of this book. It seemed to me at the outset that a study of supernatural horror in the poetry of an age still sometime mistakenly considered one of pure rationality would provide a useful contribution toward a less artificially stylized vision of the eighteenth century and its literature. The mass and variety of supernatural material, however, far exceeded my expectations, and it became increasingly clear that a strictly chronological organization would not be adequate to the complexity of the evidence. I adopted, consequently, a slightly less straightforward approach, beginning with a chapter on the intellectual and theological developments of attitudes toward the supernatural, followed by three chapters which trace the theme of supernatural horror in poetry and criticism from 1700 to 1800. Finally, two chapters treat in detail the development of the horrorpersonification, the significant special case and mainstay of the supernatural poetry of the era.

S

I am much indebted to Aubrey L. Williams, who first convinced me that this study should be a book rather than a short monograph. For his acute criticism and sustained interest I am very grateful. M y thanks are also due David Ferry, who read and commented on part of the manuscript, David and Virginia Fanger, in whose home and with whose encouragement much of the work on the book was done, Miss Hannah French and Mrs. Hazel Godfrey, of

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PREFACE

the Wellesley College Library Special Collections, and the library staffs of the University of Florida, the University of Michigan, Wellesley College, and Widener and Houghton libraries of Harvard University. Norman B. Meyer was of invaluable assistance in proofreading. The greatest debt of all is acknowledged in my dedication. P.M.S.

Contents INTRODUCTION

Witches, Ghosts, Critics, and Poets CHAPTER

ONE

Supernatural Horror: The Atmosphere of Belief CHAPTER

67

1781-1800

103

1700-1750

132

1751-1800

165

SIX

Personification, CHAPTER

1741-1780

FIVE

Personification, CHAPTER

29

FOUR

Supernatural Horror, CHAPTER

1700-1740

THREE

Supernatural Horror, CHAPTER

7

TWO

Supernatural Horror in Poetry, CHAPTER

i

SEVEN

Conclusions

194

Bibliography

207

Notes

219

Index

241

INTRODUCTION

Witches, Ghosts, Critics, and Poets he rational temper which has dismissed ghosts from our lives, if not from our children's, began, one tends to assume, in the eighteenth century. It is easy — and vaguely satisfying — to see western intellectual history as a steady progression from faith to reason. And faith implies belief in Satan as well as G o d ; it implies a mythology of evil. Witches flourished and were burned through the seventeenth century in England. T h e y flourished no longer after 1736: an act of George I then declared all witchcraft imaginary. Once the very possibility of witches was officially denied, such beings might have been expected to disappear completely. Indeed, James Sutherland remarks, "One result of the growing rationalism of the last decades of the seventeenth century was the disappearance from poetry of all that may be comprehensively labelled the supernatural." 1 Again: " T h e Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, separated by a comfortable gap of time from such hideous outbreaks of superstition, could afford to toy happily with demonology and witchcraft, and were not above reproaching the eighteenth century for its rationalism. But the eighteenth century had been too recently delivered from a genuine belief in witchcraft and similar occult phenomena to encourage any 'willing suspension of dis-

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belief' of this kind among its poets. It held, precariously enough, to its newly won sanity" (page 7). It is true, certainly, that the poetry of Pope, of Dr. Johnson, even of Cowper, reveals little interest in the supernatural for its own sake, that before the time of Blake and the young Coleridge one finds such interest more frequently among inferior poets: in Anna Seward, "the Swan of Lichfield," or William Hayley, who wanted to improve upon Pope, or Nicholas Rowe and the century's other laureates. But among such figures there is indeed an extensive use of the supernatural, and a surprising range and intensity of supernatural reference, though the "willing suspension of disbelief" may frequently be another matter altogether. It would be a bit too simple, however, to suggest that the best poets of the eighteenth century did not rely heavily on the supernatural, whereas the worst poets were fond of such material. Pope and Johnson were both quite capable of utilizing the symbolism of the supernatural; Warton and Collins and Gray found vital poetic resources in the legends of ghosts and demonic forces; many bad poets, on the other hand, completely ignored such possibilities. The situation is so complex as to demand detailed analysis; the need for such analysis becomes more apparent when one discovers that almost all the best critics of this great period of criticism considered quite explicitly the place of the supernatural in poetry: many of them, increasingly many, justified the unearthly as subject. The obvious questions are: W h y , first of all, was the supernatural used more openly in minor than in major poetry? H o w may the modes of its usage be defined? And why did good critics obviously feel it a central subject for discussion? If this was an age of rationality, what, precisely, accounts for the importance in its literature of supernatural subject matter?

INTRODUCTION

3

The answers to such questions, of course, belong somewhat to the realm of speculation, but possible answers do occur. If one reads Dr. Johnson's comments on the function and value of the supernatural in poetry, and then investigates his attitudes toward the supernatural in his own life, it becomes immediately apparent that belief in ghosts has nothing necessarily to do with approval or disapproval of them as figures in poetry. Johnson might talk scornfully of supernatural personages in Thomas Tickell's poetry as "exploded beings"; he might explain that Shakespeare's use of witches is justified by the fact that he lived in a superstitious age. But he could also observe, "with solemn vehemence," that the question of ghosts is one which, "after five thousand years, is yet undecided; a question, whether in theology or philosophy, one of the most important that can come before the human understanding." 2 Or again, a dialogue with Boswell on witches: "I mentioned witches and asked what they properly meant. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, they properly mean those who make use of the aid of evil spirits.' I said I believed their having existed, as there was a general report and belief of it. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you have not only the general report and belief, but you have the confessions of many of them.'" 3 The existence of ghosts in reality might be a question of major importance, but the issue of whether ghosts should be used in poetry was one of propriety. In the real world, witches and demons might flourish or not, but the fact of their reality would not automatically justify them as poetic subject matter, nor would their nonexistence necessarily disqualify them for poetic use. The question of their value for poetry was complex; it touched on many vital issues of critical concern. So the interest of the critics is, after all, relatively easy

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to comprehend. Part of the responsibility of the eighteenthcentury critic was understood to be that of definition, of establishing the proper functions of literature. Was the poet to instruct, or to please, or to attempt to do both? Was he to follow the Ancients or the Moderns? Was he to use his own experience or to rely on tradition? Was sublimity the highest goal of poetry, or was beauty, or was it something quite different? These were questions of major importance, and all of them bear on the place of the supernatural in literature: discussions of the supernatural tend to resolve themselves in terms of one or another of these problems. The issue was thus in a very real sense a major one, since consideration of it led inevitably to consideration of the central problems of poetry. The weight of critical opinion, as we shall see, was on the side of using the supernatural, although justifications were variously qualified. But even when critics had sanctioned the unearthly, the problem for poets was by no means solved. It was all very well to say that the supernatural was proper in literature, but how, exactly, was it to be used? What was to be the poet's attitude toward it, how could he make it convincing, or did he, perhaps, not need to make it convincing? And how could the nature of the supernatural be conveyed in eighteenth-century terms, how could it be related to the other concerns of contemporary poetry? The answer of many minor poets was comparatively simple: they merely imitated what had gone before, sometimes with singular lack of poetic tact. There were, after all, a good many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century models available, Spenser and Milton and Shakespeare the major ones. Paradise Lost provided a guide for dealing with devils; Spenser offered the entire paraphernalia of romance; Shakespeare had, most importantly, the witches in Macbeth and the ghost of Hamlet

INTRODUCTION

5

to inspire imitators. A n d then there were Tasso and Ariosto, and Homer and Virgil, all of whom had their descents into hell, their supernatural interferers, their occasional ghost. Sometimes the models multiply to the point of chaos, even in one poem: While clouds impetuous burst with horrid roar, And spectres shriek, and ghosts unholy yell, And mutt'ring in the black and turbid air, Daemons and fiends of hell, Array'd in livid flames, terrific glare.4 This is from a piece rejected for the Seatonian Prize at Cambridge in 1763. It purports to be modeled metrically upon "Lycidas," but its content and diction come, clearly, from a variety of sources: everything here is secondhand, and singularly uninteresting. T h e same might be said of much of the supernatural poetry of the century: one piece is appallingly like another, and in almost all one senses a sort of snippet-composition, a poem made up of bits from greater poems, often misunderstood and misused. For the better poets of the century, of course, this sort of solution was not available; and it was difficult to find a more successful one. Many solved the problem by evading it. If no convenient mode existed for supernatural poetry, neither did any pressing necessity exist for writing it. Poets might feel some regret at being cut off from the use of such material: Crabbe, in an early poem, writes nostalgically of the days when he could live by the heart and consequently value and use the supernatural; Boswell reports on Johnson's early delight in romances. But they could still get along without it. T h e exceptions — Thomson, Allan Ramsay, Collins, Blake, Coleridge — provide a sequence of experimentation which demonstrates vividly the extent to which this particular problem demanded new solutions. In the early poems of the century, even the good ones, right

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through to the Gothic ballads, one senses writers groping to find the appropriate media for making new use of old material. T h e progression of supernatural poetry through the eighteenth century is partly a progression in purpose: new reasons kept developing to justify the use of the supernatural, to make it important. But not until Coleridge were the problems of purpose and method simultaneously solved. In this respect, as in so many others, Lyrical Ballads marks the end of an eighteenth-century development. T h e study of the supernatural poetry of the eighteenth century, then, illuminates many of its central problems both of thought and of poetics. It is a study partly of a process of rationalization by which the superstitious and vulgar were made respectable; but a study also of a process of more or less unconscious analysis and introspection about the purposes of poetry and the real meaning and value of the assertion that the proper study of mankind is man. It is to a large extent a study of bad poetry, poetry that is not ordinarily read today. But such poetry includes much of the most popular work of its own time. William Duff, in an essay on original genius, lists the poetry of his period which he considers most likely to survive, the best and most original of modern times. This includes the work of Young, Gray, and Collins — but also of John Ogilvie, Mark Akenside, and William Mason. 5 T h e most popular poet of the 1780's was William Hayley. Richard Hole, who is not even mentioned in Baugh's literary history, was the subject of numerous panegyrics by his contemporaries. B y analyzing the productions of such figures, in short, w e may learn only negatively about the nature of poetic excellence, but we learn a good deal about the nature of the eighteenth century.

C H A P T E R O N E gg»

Supernatural Horror: The Atmosphere of Belief o one has to believe in ghosts in order to write poems about them, but it would be a mistake to assume that eighteenth-century supernatural poetry evokes a realm of unreality unconnected with the belief of the people who wrote it. Even the well-ordered universe which Pope outlines in the "Essay on M a n " has room f o r a Borgia or a Catiline; a slight extension of the principle allows room also for witches, demons, and ghosts. A n atmosphere of controversy clung persistently to the subject, however. Boswell wrote, of Dr. Johnson's attitude toward witches, " H e did not affirm anything positively upon a subject which it is the fashion of the times to laugh at as a matter of absurd credulity. H e only seemed willing, as a candid enquirer after truth, however strange and inexplicable, to shew that he understood what might be urged for it." 1 T h e tone here is characteristic of thinkers who felt that something might be urged for the reality of the supernatural: often one senses a note of apology, of consciousness that to believe in such things was not quite in tune with the times. A s early as 1 7 1 3 , Anthony Collins wrote, " T h e devil is entirely banished the United Provinces, where freethinking is in the greatest perfection"; 2 in 1 7 9 1 , giving " A n Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable W o r l d , " Hannah More

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observed, "The locality of hell and the existence of an evil spirit are annihilated, or considered as abstract ideas." 3 Such topics, she continues, are considered too vulgar for the polished, too illiberal for the learned, and too credulous for the enlightened. Throughout the century, public utterances on the supernatural tended to emphasize the fact that the enlightened did not believe in such phenomena. Yet contrary evidence abounds. Despite the Act of 1736, which declared that witchcraft could only be imaginary or pretended, an enraged mob as late as 1751 murdered a woman for being a witch.4 The first volume of the Gentleman's Magazine ( 1 7 3 1 ) observes that "Apparitions, Genii, Demons, Hobgoblins, Sorcerers, and Magicians, are now reckon'd idle Stories." 5 But it also contains an account of two contemporary witch ordeals in England and one in France (pages 29-30) and a ghost story presented as true and authenticated (pages 31-32). The confusions of attitude one finds throughout the century come partly from problems of definition. What were the limits of the natural; at what point could one be sure that supernatural interposition had actually taken place? The rational man could never be sure, in any specific instance; but it was difficult for him to reject categorically the possibility of the supernatural. Indeed, many secular writers throughout the century testify to the fascination of ghosts and witches. In 1 7 1 1 , in The Spectator, Addison confessed to his pleasure in strolling of an evening through a "haunted walk." "When Night heightens the Awfulness of the Place, and pours out her supernumerary Horrors upon every thing in it, I do not at all wonder that weak Minds fill it with Spectres and Apparitions." 6 No one would suppose his to be a weak mind; but the fact that others have imagined specters in this walk clearly height-

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ens its charm for him. " A Person who is thus terrify'd with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres is much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless" (II, 109). Continuing the discussion a week later, Addison explains that the universal testimony to the existence of witchcraft convinces him that the phenomenon is possible, but the fact that the ignorant and credulous are the deepest believers makes him suspicious. (Hume was later to stress the same point.) "I believe in general," Addison concludes, "that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it." 7 This moderate and somewhat ambiguous attitude seems to be characteristic of the literary periodicals in the early century. The Censor, for example, devotes most of a 1715 number to bemoaning the belief in "Fairies, Daemons, Spectres, the Powers of natural Magick, and the Terrors of Witchcraft" 8 among the uneducated, a belief which has spread (I, 76) "from the Cottage to the Farm, from the Farm to the Squire's Hall." Yet two issues later (Number 13, May 9) the essay is followed by a letter which regrets on the one hand that "Children should be bred up in an early Acquaintance and Horror of Phantoms" (I, 89), but still insists on the reality of spirits, belief in which is bolstered by numerous classical examples. Like The Guardian and The Plain dealer, The Censor sometimes mocks simpleminded superstition, but its attitude is not altogether unequivocal.9 "All argument is against it; but all belief is for it," 10 said Dr. Johnson of the appearance of departed spirits, and his summation would hold true for many. Boswell, concerned

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to defend his great preceptor against the charge of superstition, wrote: The real fact then is, that Johnson had a very philosophical mind, and such a rational respect for testimony, as to make him submit his understanding to what was authentically proved, though he could not comprehend why it was so. Being thus disposed, he was willing to inquire into the truth of any relation of supernatural agency, a general belief of which has prevailed in all nations and ages. But so far was he from being the dupe of implicit faith, that he examined the matter with a jealous attention, and no man was more ready to refute its falsehood when he had discovered it. 11 The results of such inquiries as Johnson's, however, seemed to depend ultimately upon the temper of the inquirer's mind. Many men said the same things about the supernatural, yet they said them with subtly significant differences of emphasis. Goldsmith, for example, writes: Many have been condemned as witches and dealers with the devil, for no other reason but their knowing more than those who accused, tried, and passed sentence upon them. In these cases, credulity is a much greater error than infidelity, and it is safer to believe nothing than too much . . . W e have a wondering quality within us, which finds huge gratification when we see strange feats done, and cannot at the same time see the doer, or the cause. Such actions are sure to be attributed to some witch or daemon . . . It is, therefore, one of the most unthankful offices in the world, to go about to expose the mistaken notions of witchcraft and spirits; it is robbing mankind of a valuable imagination, and of the privilege of being deceived.12 Goldsmith sounds, in some respects, like Addison: there is here the same implicit attribution of belief in the supernatural to "weak minds," combined with the recognition of imaginative value in such belief. But the conclusion and the implicit stress are different: Goldsmith is quite sure that

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it is safer to believe nothing than too much, whereas Addison could dally with the temptation to see ghosts himself. Although aware that total disbelief might be as reprehensible as total belief, 13 Goldsmith never considers the possibility or the appeal of sharing in the superstition he deplores. The points of view that have been considered so far are those of certain secular intellectuals who provided, on the whole, a balanced perspective on the subject. Much less balanced views were available, and the poet who wished to deal with the supernatural could readily find in print a good deal of lurid material, supplied equally by the debunkers and the proponents of the unearthly. It was not necessary to depend upon oral tradition for the details of ancient superstition, the horrors of "personal experience" ghost stories. Not only were there vast funds of seventeenthcentury material on the subject, from lyrics to prose treatises (the Daemonologie of King James I, for example, or Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphattis, twice reprinted in the eighteenth century), but eighteenth-century popular writers continued a lively controversy about the nature of the supernatural. And even those concerned to refute superstitious belief often did so by presenting detailed accounts of happenings presumed to be supernatural, their vivid presentation frequently overshadowing their comparatively colorless refutation. For example, Francis Hutchinson, whose attacks on witchcraft produced much discussion early in the century, organizes his Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft in chapters dealing extensively with individual witches and their doings. He states his basic position unequivocally: "I think it a Point very certain, That tho' the sober Belief of good and bad Spirits is an essential Part of every good Christian's Faith, yet imaginary Com-

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munications with them, have been the Spring both of the worst Corruption of Religion, and the greatest Perversions of Justice." 14 Yet the tales which he rejects are convincingly permeated with horror, and his preliminary list of books attesting the reality of witchcraft (twenty-four of them published since the Restoration) indicates that belief in the supernatural had not been dissipated. Hutchinson's refutations, however, are very thorough indeed, and although many champions appeared to defend this eloquent unbeliever, he had left little for them to do besides repeat his contentions and occasionally elaborate them. More typically, popular writers on witchcraft were ambiguous about the supernatural, claiming to believe in some of its manifestations, rejecting others. Thus the French Augustine Calmet, who believes in magic and the possibility of diabolic possession, writes that the witches' Sabbath "has no existence and never has existed," 1 5 denies the reality of witches' marks, and maintains (I, 149) that many apparent possessions or obsessions by devils were merely "maladies, or fantastic fancies." On the other hand, he accepts on the authority of the Church the theoretical reality of diabolic possession, and writes exhaustively on the nature of various kinds of spirits. Defoe hedges also, although one senses in him some essential commitment to the reality of the supernatural. His True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal is familiar; less commonly known is the fact that his hack work included treatises on magic and on the devil. In one of them he denounces the notion that witches and wizards sign contracts with the devil in blood. Although he believes in the devil, he says sadly that magic at present is almost entirely deception and trickery. 16 But his choice of objects for skepticism seems arbitrary; he is quite willing to believe in phenomena equally improbable. He insists that Satan can

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assume human shape, and, most interestingly, that the devil "carries on his Game" even "in spite of Heaven itself" (page 357) — a thoroughly heretical view, even by Protestant standards. On the side of total credulity are ranged such popular writers as John Beaumont and Nathaniel Crouch, who, with varying scholarly pretension, testify abundantly to the extent of Satan's activities. Beaumont begins a book with the sweeping assumption that all accounts of unworldly manifestations are true. His material is almost entirely secondhand: he gives extensive summaries of Glanvil and of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. The only original thinking in the book emerges in his energetic refutation of nonbelievers.17 Crouch, on the other hand, writing under one of his many pseudonyms in The Kingdom of Darkness, uses a wider range of sources and claims only to "relate bare Matters of Fact." 18 He gives a broad picture of supernatural activity, concentrating on its annoying rather than sinister manifestations. The book, however, conveys rather clearly what was expected of witches; its extensive account of their activities and limitations might have provided a source for many eighteenth-century poems. To come to the most serious context for discussion of the supernatural, the religious and philosophical, we find that theological positions on the question of ghosts and demons were as perplexed as secular ones. In general it was true that the Methodist and Evangelical movements, with their appeal to the middle and lower classes, insisted upon a literal interpretation of the Bible and consequently upon the constant activity in the world of Satan and his agents. The Church of England, on the other hand, strove, as Sir Leslie Stephen puts it, "to keep to the via media between superstition and fanaticism." 19 But the lines of belief did

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not necessarily correspond with those of church affiliation. One important subject for theological dispute in the early and middle years of the century was the nature of violations of the natural order, or miracles. And the question of divine miracles suggested the related one of diabolical miracles. Did the devil indeed have power to upset the ordinary course of events? If so, was his power directly derived from God? Or was he to be considered, in Manichaean fashion, a figure with self-derived power opposed to God? The note of doubt, of consciousness that human reason is ultimately incapable of dealing with such problems, creeps again and again into discussions of them. " 'Tis impossible for us to know with any certainty," wrote Samuel Clarke in his Boyle Lectures, "either that the natural Power of good Angels, or of evil ones, extends not beyond such or such a certain Limit; or that God always restrains them from exercising their natural Powers in producing such or such particular Effects." 20 John Jortin, who recognizes that "fraud, and fiction, and credulity, and ignorance of natural powers, and a strong imagination, and a disordered understanding, and misguided zeal" have been responsible for many apparently supernatural phenomena, nevertheless concludes that "It seems to be rashness for us, who know so little of the power of intellectual and spiritual agents . . . to affirm that . . . God never wrought any, or never suffered any to be wrought by spirits good or evil." 21 Even with their consciousness of inadequacy, however, many eighteenth-century thinkers arrived at solutions which apparently satisfied them. The most rationalistic of these solutions was Thomas Woolston's. In a series of discourses published during the 1720's, Woolston developed an allegorical interpretation of the Bible, and particularly of the miracles of Christ. His

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tone is colloquial and defiant: "If after Ages have departed from the true and original Doctrine of Devils, making a literal story of that, which is only mystical and cabalistical; and have formed to themselves Ideas of hideous and horrible Fiends, Mormos and Hobgoblins, it shall not disturb me." 22 Yet there is something peculiarly touching about these essays. Their author initially assumes that by following the methods of the Church Fathers he is solving some of the most perplexing problems of Christianity and that his fellow Christians must necessarily be grateful. In each successive discourse, the note of bewilderment and pique becomes more apparent: for his fellow Christians, far from being grateful, attacked him ferociously, and finally prosecuted him as an atheist. In certain respects, it seems, his argument — which assumes that Satan is merely the principle of evil in man, and ends by denying the literal truth of Christ's resurrection -— was more disturbing even than that of someone like Hume, who makes it quite apparent that he is consciously attacking Christianity and other sources of belief in the supernatural for the sake of clearly established psychological and philosophical principles. Woolston was attempting, like Bishop Butler after him, to make Christianity itself into a totally rational system; the attempt aroused the wrath of even his rational contemporaries to an extent which suggests that it was important to eighteenth-century men to preserve some faith in the superhuman even at the cost of irrationality. Those who rejected the supernatural frequently did so with full consciousness of its imaginative potency; nor was such consciousness necessarily specifically literary. Men like Hobbes recognized the depths of human nature appealed to by the notion of ghosts and witches, and recognized that the appeal was so profound that no rational refu-

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tation could weaken it. Imagination, says Hobbes, is the faculty of making images; apparitions and phantoms are among its products.23 Fancy and dreams produce visions of "spirits and dead mens Ghosts walking in Churchyards" (page 14); such visions could be lessened by proper education, Hobbes points out, but it is hard to imagine that they could be eliminated. Almost a century later, Hume, attacking superstition, comments repeatedly on "the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and the marvellous." 24 "Though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning," he observes, "it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature" (page 125). It was, of course, consciousness of this "strong propensity" that caused many poets to write about the marvelous even without believing in it. Further, despite his skepticism, Hobbes, in his denial of the supernatural, was not so categorical as to deny its possibility. "There is no doubt," he says, "but God can make unnaturall Apparitions: But that he does it so often, as men need to feare such things, more than they feare the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and change, is no point of Christian faith." 25 Many eighteenth-century denials of the power of the devil are made in favor of the greater power of God. Conyers Middleton, who also stirred up a good deal of controversy, had this as his avowed aim in his essay on miracles (which, according to Hume, eclipsed his own Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding in public attention): "by a right use of our reason and judgement, to raise our minds above the low prejudices, and childish superstitions, of the credulous vulgar." 26 But his major argument against the power of evil spirits to work true miracles is that "pious Christians" who believe in the miracles of evil spirits are obliged by their

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piety also "to admit as miraculous whatever is pretended to be wrought in the defense o f " the Gospel and in opposition to the evil miracles (I, 196). The notion of so much credulity obviously horrifies him, but he insists on the actuality of miracles performed in apostolic times, although he is skeptical about all later ones. He manages to suggest, in other words, that argument against the power of devils is argument for a stricter belief in the power of God. Similarly, Bishop Smalbroke, primarily concerned to refute Woolston, does so not by attempting to restore belief in the power of Satan, but by insisting on the divine government of God. "Whatever Performances evil Spirits can naturally, and independently of God, exert, they must be mere Signs and Wonders, and inferiour to true Miracles." 27 He is willing to accept as literally true Jesus' casting out of devils, a sign of His divine authority (I, 194) (Middleton, among others, suggested that those "possessed" by devils were merely epileptic or insane),28 but he is unwilling to admit that those devils could have any real power. His fellow bishop, Warburton, was less specific, but after arguing that human frailties cause most reports of supernatural prodigies he insists finally that supernatural interposition is possible, and even probable.29 He is discreetly vague, however, about the nature of such interposition. Many of the arguments against the power of the devil were, implicitly or explicitly, arguments about results. Belief in the potency of Satan tended to have unfortunate effects. "Most melancholy is it to reflect, how much the general principle we are here opposing, viz. the power of Satan to work miracles, and the various superstitions grounded upon it; have contributed in all ages, and in all nations, to the disquiet and corruption of the human race, and to the extinction of rational piety. This consideration

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alone, were there no other, should check the zeal of Christians to maintain an opinion, so destructive to our virtue and happiness." 30 So wrote Hugh Farmer, an active participant in the disputes over miracles, and many others struck the same note. Yet the general tenor of these arguments against the diabolical, however rational their piety, was to defend the reality of the divine supernatural while denying its opposite. Some theologians, more subtle, felt that the divine and the diabolical must be defended simultaneously. William Fleetwood's Collected Sermons contain " A n Essay Upon Miracles," arguing that the devil and all witches and sorcerers can perform miracles only through the power of God, because otherwise the devil's power would be equal to God's. 31 Fleetwood is clearly puzzled about the whole question, and tentative in his assertions, for he also has a lively sense of the potency of Satan: "The Devil can never be harmless, because his Intentions are evermore malicious, and bent on the doing Mischief to Mankind" (page 140). John Jortin, whose confession of human ignorance was quoted earlier, is convinced that the demoniacs of the N e w Testament really were possessed by devils, but that the activity of evil spirits, who were then allowed "to exert their malignant powers" extensively, was part of divine purpose — perhaps "to give a check to Sadduceism amongst the Jews, and to Epicurean atheism amongst the Gentiles, and to remove in some measure these two great impediments to the reception of the Gospel." 32 On the other hand, he suggests that the ancient Christians may also have considered the mad, the melancholy, and the epileptic to be possessed, and the number of so-called demoniacs would thus have been greatly increased. Samuel Clarke argues even more eloquently for the reality of diabolical power:

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For if the Devil has any natural Power of doing any thing at all, even but so much as the meanest of Men; and be not restrained by God from exercising that natural Power; 'tis evident he will be able, by reason of his Invisibility, to work true and real Miracles. Neither is it a right Distinction, to suppose the Miracles of Evil Spirits, not to be real Effects in the things where they appear, but Impositions upon the Senses of the Spectators: For, to impose in this manner upon the Senses of Men, (not by Sleights and Delusions; but by really so affecting the Organs of Sense, as to make things appear what they are not;) is to all Intents and Purposes as true a Miracle, and as great an one, as making real Changes in the Things themselves.33 T h e devil's miracles can be distinguished from God's, Clarke concludes, by their encouragement of vicious rather than good doctrines. In his willingness to commit himself wholly to belief in the reality of devilish power, Clarke stands almost alone. More typical, as we have seen, is some mixture of faith and skepticism, some form of qualified assent. But if Clarke is rare in emphasizing diabolical potency, it is almost equally rare to find complete rejection of the supernatural — W o o l ston and Hume are the only notable examples of such rejection. T h e most popular theological solution was an uneasy compromise which corresponds rather precisely to the sort of attitude toward witches and ghosts that we have seen already in such secular thinkers as Addison and Johnson. Compromise was made easier for theologians by the fact that the discussion of miracles, whether divine or diabolic, centered on the past. Almost all the controversialists we have considered assumed that the problem was no longer a very real one, that no one was possessed by devils in the present. A conspicuous characteristic of many Dissenters,

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particularly the early ones, on the other hand, was their insistence that Satan was as active in the present as he ever was. Especially vociferous was John Wesley, who demonstrates throughout his sermons his belief in the work of evil spirits, who "well understand the very springs of thought." 34 "It is . . . an unquestionable truth," he says, "that the god and prince of this world still possesses all who know not God. Only the manner wherein he possesses them now, differs from that wherein he did it of old time. Then he frequently tormented their bodies, as well as souls, and that openly, without any disguise; now he torments their souls only, (unless in some rare cases,) and that as covertly as possible" (I, 338). This change in tactics has come about, Wesley explains, because formerly the devil wanted to produce superstition, but now he concentrates on infidelity, which breeds best in secret. Still, Satan works as before in savage countries: " T o Laplanders, he appears barefaced; because he is to fix them in superstition and gross idolatry." 35 In a famous passage of his journal, Wesley makes explicit his convictions about the supernatural. "The English in general," he writes, "and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it . . . They well know . . . that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible." 36 The common vice of Nonconformists and Churchmen alike, according to the most thorough historians of the eighteenth century church, was a "stiff and cold insistence upon morals and reasonable considerations." 37 It is true, of course, that the "reasoned" approach (which argues that if there is no after-life, one loses nothing by being good; if there is a life beyond death, the advantages of virtue are obvious) shows up in sermons by men of all persuasions.

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Philip Doddridge, an eminent Nonconformist, is most apologetic when he explains that he plans to appeal to the hearts of his listeners even at the risk of being called an enthusiast.38 But on the whole the Methodists and Evangelists, as might be expected, were less reluctant than their conforming contemporaries to harrow the emotions. The theme of the Last Judgment recurs in sermons as in poetry, but more subtle evocations of terror were also employed. So, for example, John Newton, friend of William Cowper and collaborator with him on the Olney Hymns: "Their visible foes are numerous; but if we could look into the invisible world and take a view of the subtilty, malice, machinations, and assiduity of the powers of darkness who are incessantly watching for opportunities of annoying them, we should have a most striking conviction, that a flock so defenceless and feeble in themselves, and against which such a combination is formed, can only be kept by the power of God." 39 The famous preacher George Whitefield has a similar view of the situation of the faithful: "though they may be highly favored, and wrapped up in communion with God, even to the third heavens, yet a messenger of Satan is often sent to buffet them, lest they should be puffed up with the abundance of revelations . . . In heaven the wicked one shall cease from troubling you." 40 In what might be a summary of these views, the Cornish Evangelical Samuel Walker writes that the devil's relation to us in our natural state "is very plain from the titles given him in scripture; where he is called the Prince of this World, the God of this World, and the like: Expressions which evidently set him out as having dominion over the world, that is, over the men of the world, all of us by nature, who, while we are in our natural state, are of this world, and as such of the Devil, his actual, real subjects." 41 The devil

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maintains his power on earth, Walker continues, by "all kind of superstitious usages" (I, 45). William Romaine, a popular Nonconformist preacher, is at least equally emphatic, and frequently so. "Satan will use all his wiles and fiery darts, and all carnal professors will be on his side, and they will have close allies in thine own breast." 42 Or, again, "When the enemy sees them thus strong in the Lord thro' faith, it stirs up his devilish malice, and makes him burn with envious rage. He leaves no temptation untried to draw them from Christ. He is well skilled in cunning wiles and sly devices for this purpose" (page 152). These ideas and the form in which they were stated are important to eighteenth-century poetry, however, for other reasons than the fact that the Dissenters kept alive a strong belief in the reality of the unpleasant supernatural. Roland Frye has written of Milton's poetry, "The demonic symbolism provides not a 'mere' mythology, however beautiful or frightful or impressive or accurate, but a strategy for understanding, and so for dealing with, certain inescapable aspects of the reality living men must face." 43 The effort of poets who dealt with the supernatural in the eighteenth century was partly an attempt to find a way of making unearthly figures serve some such purpose, of giving the supernatural human validity. The Nonconformist preachers provided an important clue for doing this. None of the sermons quoted above are intended to suggest that Satan is an allegorical or symbolic figure — indeed, quite the contrary. Yet all of them do hint an intimate connection between immediate human problems and Satan and his messengers. As the struggle with temptation remains a fundamental human problem, so the most vividly expressed devilish function, in these passages, is to tempt. Such connection between the supernatural and the psychological is

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often strongly hinted. Whitefield, in a sermon on "Soul Dejection," writes, "But, say you: . . . not only my God is departed from me, but an evil spirit is come upon me to torment me; I am haunted with this and that evil suggestion, that I am a terror to myself" (page 512). Evil spirits of this sort are easy to believe in, and they are natural material for poetry. Toward the end of the century, poets began to follow the lead of preachers by giving diabolic figures real and immediate human meaning. When they did so, one of the most important problems of eighteenth-century supernatural poetry was solved. Aside from the psychological effects of devilish intervention, the precise nature of Satanic activity is not clearly defined by the Nonconformist preachers. When it comes to specific interventions of Satan in the world — more precisely, to the subject of witches and ghosts — the Dissenters are far less definite than they are about insisting on the reality of the devil's power. Charles Simeon writes, apropos the Witch of Endor, "That such a thing as witchcraft has existed, we cannot doubt: but what were the incantations used, or what power Satan had to work with and by them, we know not." In ancient times, Satan was allowed more latitude, in order to demonstrate the magnitude of Christ's power. But as for "the various instances of witchcraft recorded in uninspired books, we can place no dependence whatever upon them. . . But what is recorded in the Scriptures we may well believe; because it is revealed by One who cannot err." 4 4 On this point other nonorthodox thinkers express a more complex view. Samuel Clarke explains that witchcraft, in Biblical times, signified "the following of Divinations and Inchantments, which were Superstitions forbidden with the severest Penalties under the Law; and were justly looked upon as a renouncing of

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God, by having recourse to other real or imaginary Powers in opposition to Him." 45 This is ambiguous enough, but he defends his own ambiguity by explaining that witchcraft is a particularly diabolical sin, whether it is real or unreal. If it is unreal, its activities are "Cheats, Delusions, and Impositions upon Mankind" — and to cheat is diabolical.46 He at least preserves the possibility that witchcraft is something real; many others (Jortin and Farmer are particularly emphatic) reject it categorically. Conyers Middleton, whose theological loyalties are ambiguous, is perfectly sure that witches have never existed; he refutes the argument which perplexed Dr. Johnson, that of the prevalence of testimony in all ages to the reality of witchcraft, in much the same way that Hume refuted the testimony of miracles: Now to deny the reality of Facts, so solemnly attested, and so universally believed, seems to give the lie to the sense and experience of all Christendom; to the wisest and best of every nation, to public monuments subsisting to our own times: yet the incredibility of the thing prevailed, and was found at last too strong for all this force of human testimony: so that the belief of witches is now utterly extinct, and quietly buried without involving history in its ruin, or leaving even the least disgrace and censure on it.47 Yet his argument is in some sense an evasion of the issue: he assumes that the fact (and as we have already seen, it is not really a fact) that no one any longer believes in witches is itself a proof that they have never existed. The Nonconformists were generally readier to believe in ghosts, though their attitudes, too, were capable of qualification. Even when they denied the reality of wandering spirits, however, their imaginative sympathy is apparent. The Reverend James Hervey would have felt obliged to condemn — though he would well understand — Boswell's

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terror that the ghost of an executed client would appear to him at night. Hervey explains that timid people are frightened of "imaginary Horrors of the N i g h t " when they should be afraid of God. This explanation, however, follows a long imaginative excursion in which he elaborately evokes ghostly figures to embellish the atmosphere of darkness. A n d the conclusion of his argument is not that one should disbelieve in apparitions — their reality is, after all, he points out, attested by the Book of Job. It is, specifically, a mistake to assume that ghosts can appear for trivial reasons.48 A slightly different sort of emotional ambiguity appears in the comments of Samuel Walker, who speculates about the condition of the soul after death: "wilt thou wander up and down at the will of other more powerful spirits, visiting tombs, and hovering about the solitary places where bodies sleep?" H e concludes that Jesus' death and resurrection prove that there is no possibility of misery from the state of death,49 but his fearful fascination with the notion is easy to detect. There is a sharp contrast between the imaginative involvement of the Nonconformists with the idea of the ghosts, which parallels that of many poets, and the clearheaded rejection of apparitions by many orthodox preachers. Bishop Atterbury, f o r example, delivered on October 28, 1705, a sermon entitled " A Standing Revelation the best Means of Conviction." It considers the possibility of the appearance of ghosts. "Men, upon the near Approach of Death," Atterbury observes, "have been rouz'd up into such a lively Sense of their Guilt, such a passionate Degree of Concern and Remorse, that, if ten thousand Ghosts had appeared to them, and Hell itself had been laid upon flaming to their view, they scarce could have had a fuller Conviction, or a greater Dread of their Danger." 50 He

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continues to theorize that if ghosts did appear, the horror and astonishment they aroused would wear off by degrees. Moreover, their victims would tend to believe the ghosts an illusion. "It is no ways congruous," he concludes, "that God should always be frightening and astonishing Men into an Acknowledgement of the Truth" (I, 283). In a sermon on " T h e Terrors of Conscience," he makes his position clearer. Herod's thinking he saw the ghost of John the Baptist came merely from a guilty conscience. Tales of ghosts are not merely inventions, or products of religious fear, "but wicked Men, haunted with a Sense of their own Guilt . . . were used to affright themselves with such Phantoms as these, and often mistook strong and terrible Imaginations for real Apparitions" (II, 269). Parishioners of the Church of England, in short, were unlikely to be disturbed by too vivid mentions of hell-fire, or too literal insistence upon the constant and fearful activities of Satan. The Deists had had their effect; the appeal to reason articulated by such men as Locke, John Toland, and Matthew Tindal was a compelling one. So the sermons of Jonathan Swift, for example, demonstrate scorn for the Roman Church because of its "trading in mysteries." 5 1 If Swift mentions the devil, as when he sees the possibility of men being the instruments of the devil in betraying their neighbors (page 204), that devil seems rather an abstract representation of the power of human evil than a real diabolic being. Swift refers only vaguely to hell; he makes no attempt to give the supernatural reality. In a large collection of popular eighteenth-century sermons published in 1775, 52 only one recognizes the existence of evil spirits. Negative evidence, in short, abounds: most orthodox ministers simply failed to mention diabolic activity of any kind. The sense that religion should be ultimately rational is

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fj

nowhere more clearly manifested than in the sermons of Hugh Blair, perhaps the most famous orthodox preacher of the late century. His religion is, in his own words, preeminently a "regular and well-connected system." 53 His emphasis is on conduct, on moderation; his sermons abound with derogatory references toward "superstition." He, too, suspects the man with a guilty conscience: "His troubled mind beholds forms, which other men see not; and hears voices, which sound only in the ear of guilt" (I, 220). A "spectre" to him is an imaginary distress (for example, II, 1 1 1 ) . H e looks " f o r w a r d to a known succession of events" (II, 59), and will admit the possibility of nothing which might violate that succession. Besides, he feels, the ordinary incidents of life often seem like divine judgments, so they have the same effect "as if they were supernatural interpositions" (I, 227). Sir Leslie Stephen comments (I, 372) on the "strange decline of speculative energy" in the last half of the eighteenth century, when "Theology was paralysed. T h e deist railed no longer; and the orthodox were lapped in drowsy indifference." T h e Evangelical and Methodist movements had flourished during the middle years of the century; by its end they had lost much of their force. Only an occasional Dissenter still fulminated: "Amazing reverence is shown to Satan in a pulpit; it seems the privy closet of his highness. W e never hear his name or habitation mentioned in a modern sermon; which make some people fancy that the devil sure is dead, and that hell-fire is quite burnt out." 54 In general the movement against the supernatural had made its way. But this generalization is as much in need of qualification as most others about eighteenth-century attitudes toward the unearthly. It is possible to find believers late in the cen-

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tury as well as early. As soon as one generalizes that belief in the power of Satan and his emissaries was not really fashionable at any point in the century, names begin occurring of fashionable figures in the literary world who were willing to confess their faith in the supernatural, although usually not without hedging. The truth is that there existed spokesmen, throughout the century, for virtually every conceivable attitude toward the supernatural. The clearest fact about the eighteenth-century position — and an important fact it is for any treatment of the supernatural in imaginative literature — is that throughout the period the supernatural was a matter for discussion; the question of belief or nonbelief was a real and lively issue. On the popular level, as I have pointed out, lurid details of supernatural activity were as easily garnered from those concerned to debunk superstition as from its defenders. Much the same thing is true, in a more complicated way, of abstract theological discussion. Samuel Walker may reject the reality of ghosts, but he leaves his readers with a vivid consciousness of the problem. Even Bishop Atterbury would produce in his auditors or readers dramatic awareness that demons, ghosts, and witches demand consideration by the rational Christian. Such awareness never died out in eighteenth-century England, and it represented potential material for poetry, although its poetic use was necessarily complicated by the extraordinary complexity of the attitudes of the age toward the supernatural.

C H A P T E R TWO &

Supernatural Horror in Poetry 1700-1740 f belief in ghosts, witches, and demons was, as many educated men felt, the exclusive property of the ignorant and superstitious, it was difficult to see how the supernatural could be justified as poetic material. "Nothing that is unreasonable can please Reason," wrote Sir Richard Blackmore, "and nothing that is unnatural and therefore incredible can be acceptable to a discerning Taste." 1 From Blackmore's point of view, such slippery, undefined words as unreasonable and unnatural apply especially to "Monsters and Necromancers . . .. and . . . incredible Effects of Magick Power." He denounces the writers of the period immediately after the Dark Ages for "having Decency and Probability in Contempt," and claims that from these writers "the Imaginations of the modern Poets, who were the best qualify'd to attempt the sublime Manner, imbib'd a strong Tincture of the Romantick Contagion, which corrupted their Taste, and occasion'd their neglect of Probability" ( 1 , 3 1 - 3 2 ) .

I

In his own Christian epics, Blackmore avoided the improbabilities of magic in favor of the machinery of angels and demons. He thereby incurred the strictures of John Dennis. In "Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem" (1696), Dennis confesses that he has never been delighted by Christian machinery. Poetry, he

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says, safely, "pleases by an imitation of Nature," and "Christian Machines are quite out of Nature, and consequently cannot delight." 2 Devils in particular, "tho' Passions and Inclinations are ascrib'd to them; yet by reason that they have no good Qualities, they do not come so near to humane Nature as the infernal Gods of the Heathen; and since by reason that they have all of them infernal Rage and diabolical Malice, and bear an immortal Hatred to Man, the good as well as the bad, which the infernal Powers of the Heathens, no, not even the Furies do not; they rather appear to be horrible and odious, than they seem to be terrible" (I, 106). Yet Dennis was, as w e shall see, by no means opposed to all introduction of the supernaturally horrible into poetry; he was, perhaps, merely opposed to Blackmore. In any case, the dilemma was considerable for poets convinced that true sublimity demanded the introduction of the marvelous. "Monsters and monster-lands were never more in request," 3 remarked Shaftesbury disapprovingly in 1710; fourteen years later The Plain dealer commented, " T h e W o r l d is already wearied with Stories of Witches, Fairies, &c. and begins to see through, and reject, the Imposture," 4 but the rest of the paper contradicts this hopeful dictum, since it consists largely of condemnation of the Masons for their stories of supernatural horror, which impose upon the public. Such stories continued to circulate, but were they proper for poetic use? Writers of the epic, with abundant classical precedent for the exploitation of supernatural material, were perhaps most strongly tempted to employ it, but Henry Pemberton had a flat prohibition for them. "Indeed nothing supernatural can well be admitted into the plan of any such poem at present," he says. "For it is impossible, that men should be seriously affected by such representations, unless they have some proportion

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to their real opinions." 5 And again, "the fabulous ages are now past, and if a poet must not at present pretend to amuse us with stories of gigantic cannibals, or of sorceresses, who can transform men into the shape of beasts; neither must he expect us to indulge him in affected imitations of any other incredible marvels, wherewith ignorant and superstitious generations were seduced" (page 161). He specifically forbids ghosts, since "the revival of any such incredible incidents" as the appearance of ghosts would be treated now "with the utmost contempt and disdain" (page 163). The modern author is to attain the heights of epic poetry as Homer did: "by just representations of life and manners, by sublime descriptions of natural objects." But there was a way out for poets who recognized the potential emotional force of supernatural material although they realized that it was not respectable matter for belief. Their recourse was suggested by Thomas Tickell, for example, in his famous essays on pastorals in The Guardian.6 He was, to be sure, concerned only with pastoral poetry, but the technique he suggested could be used, as the poets of the early eighteenth century abundantly proved, in other genres as well. " A third Sign of a Swain," Tickell wrote, "is, that something of Religion, and even Superstition, is part of his Character. . . Nor does this Humour prevail less now than of old: Our Peasants as sincerely believe the Tales of Goblins and Fairies, as the Heathens those of Fawns, Nymphs, and Satyrs. Hence we find the Works of Virgil and Theocritus sprinkled with left-handed Ravens, blasted Oaks, Witch-crafts, Evil Eyes, and the like. And I observe with great Pleasure, that our English Author of the Pastorals I have quoted [Ambrose Philips] hath practised this Secret with admirable Judgment." 7 It is a simple secret enough, but effective: one attributes superstition to the

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superstitious, establishes personae to bear any onus of credulity. Thus the poet could not be accused, by even the most rational critic, of failing to imitate nature: nature surely included people less rational than the critic. He might use his supernatural material to emphasize his own intellectual superiority to those who believed in it; or he might have it both ways, and capture something of the authentic thrill of horror without committing himself to superstition. The pastoral, obviously, lent itself admirably to the technique of introducing superstition as the property of someone other than the poet. Perhaps the most extended use of the device during the first forty years of the eighteenth century is in Allan Ramsay's "The Gentle Shepherd," the action of which depends largely on a witch, a ghost, and a sorcerer. At the end of the pastoral drama it turns out that all evidence of the supernatural has been illusory, but it has not seemed illusory. Considerable frightening detail describes the witch's activities, for example, before we discover that she is not a witch at all. Here Mausy lives, a Witch, that f o r sma' Price Can cast her Cantraips, and give me Advice. She can o'ercast the Night, and cloud the Moon, And mak the Deils obedient to her Crune. A t Midnight Hours, o'er the Kirk-yards she raves, And howks unchristen'd We'ans out of their Graves; Boils up their Livers in a Warlock's Pow, Rins withershins about the Hemlock Low; A n d seven Times does her Prayers backward pray, Till Plotcock comes with Lumps of Lapland Clay, Mixt with the Venom of black Taids and Snakes; Of this unsonsy Pictures aft she makes Of ony ane she hates — and gars expire W i t h slaw and racking Pains afore a Fire; Stuck fu' of Prins, the devilish Pictures melt, The Pain, b y Fowk they represent, is felt. 8

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T h e final effect of the play is to make a satiric comment on the credulity that permits such a description, but it is a deliberately delayed effect. N o more richly detailed account of witch-activity exists in eighteenth-century poetry; its immediate purpose, surely, is to titillate imaginations that found joy in the weird sisters of Macbeth. " T h e Gentle Shepherd," probably more than any other single w o r k , demonstrates h o w compelling are the details of the supernatural. T h e mind may reject the reality of witches and demons, but the emotions unfailingly accept it; and the tension between intellect and emotion shapes many of the supernatural poems f r o m the early eighteenth century. It is impossible to doubt that Ramsay enjoyed the notion of witches and ghosts; throughout the play one feels his impulse to experiment, to make the most of his material. W h e n , at the v e r y end, Sir William announces firmly Whate'er's in Spells, or if there Witches be, Such Whimsies seem the most absurd to me, he speaks, of course, f o r Ramsay. But his comment suggests the full ambiguity of the poet's position, f o r it comes only at the end of his long account of what witches are likely to do, and he himself has pretended to be a fortuneteller and sorcerer with second sight w h o has made a pact with the devil. Sir William, like Ramsay himself, perceives the rich appeal of spell-casting and ghost-seeing, and communicates that appeal as well as the rational rejection of it. T n e real value to the poet of Tickell's advice is that it makes possible the expression of the eighteenth-century position in its full complexity. M a n y nonpastoral poets took advantage of this approach, attributing superstitious belief to some ignorant character in order to exploit the resultant narrative possibilities. T h e i r perception that this is the ma-

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terial of genuinely exciting fiction emerges vividly even in the worst of poetry. John Armstrong, for example, writes of musty legends, and ear-pathing tales Of giants, and black necromantic bards . . . Of church-yards belching flames at dead of night, Of walking statues, ghosts unaffable, Haunting the dark waste tower or airless dungeon.9

Or James Thomson, with equal enthusiasm and less strained diction: Then too, they say, through all the burdened air Long groans are heard, shrill sounds, and distant sighs, That, uttered by the demons of the night, W a r n the devoted wretch of woe and death. 10

"They say" is for him, clearly, but a mild qualifier, which makes it possible to introduce exciting notions without being responsible for them. Given the superstition which makes belief in ghosts possible, the immediate cause of ghost-seeing was likely to be dream, fancy, or, as Hobbes had suggested, spleen. These explanations for supernatural phenomena enabled poets to evoke immediately convincing scenes and episodes and then to escape gracefully from their implications. So John Gay writes "A True Story of an Apparition," which begins with a passage insisting upon the reality of ghosts: Sceptics (whose strength of argument makes out That Wisdom's deep inquiries end in doubt) Hold this assertion positive and clear, That sprites are pure delusions raised by fear . . . Oh, might some ghost at dead of night appear, And make you own conviction by your fear! I know your sneers my easy faith accuse . . . Yet . . . can we doubt that horrid ghosts ascend,

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Which on the conscious murd'rer's steps attend? Hear, then, and let attested truth prevail, From faithful lips I learnt the dreadful tale.

Gay thus introduces his tale of a traveler in a stormy wood who stops at an old house converted into an inn. The inn is full, so he agrees to stay in its "haunted room." He goes to bed, then hears the sound of chains. In human form the ghastful Phantom stood, Exposed his mangled bosom dyed with blood, Then silent pointing to his wounded breast, Thrice waved his hand.

The phantom tells the traveler that he was murdered there three years before for the sake of his money, and that he is willing to lead the guest to buried treasure. W h e n his quaking victim follows him to a field, the specter suddenly ascends in flames — and the traveler wakes up. Gay immediately appends this pair of couplets: What is the statesman's vast ambitious scheme, But a short vision, and a golden dream? Power, wealth, and title elevate his hope; He wakes. But for a garter finds a rope. 11

A more inappropriate moral is hard to imagine — but its very inappropriateness is revealing. The story itself has been told with vigor and with obvious relish; one can feel Gay's pleasure in such details as the mangled bosom or the ascent in flames. And the poet has made considerable effort to establish an atmosphere of belief, beginning with his preamble. He is telling a good story primarily because it is a good story, yet he cannot fully commit himself to it. Finally he denies its authenticity, perfunctorily enough, with no effort to make his language or its application convincing. Still, the disclaimer is necessary: although it is far less

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believable than the tale, it is the proper gesture under the circumstances, the demonstration that the poet is not so captivated as to forget all reason. In most cases, no such wide gap exists between the supernatural material and the explanation which makes it tolerable. A s preachers developed the details of hell with rich embellishment largely f o r the sake of emotional emphasis, so poets early perceived that the supernatural could provide atmosphere without being considered real. A group of examples, from three different poems, will demonstrate the point: Night hears from where, wide-hovering in mid-sky, She rules the sable hour: and calls her train Of visionary fears; the shrouded ghost, The dream distressful, and th'incumbent hag, That rise to Fancy's eye in horrid forms, While Reason slumbering lies.12 . . . from Envy's Darts Remote he lives, nor knows the nightly Pangs Of Conscience, nor with Spectre's grisly Forms, Daemons, and injur'd Souls, at Close of Day Annoy'd, sad interrupted Slumbers finds.13 N o w homeward as she hopeless wept The church-yard path along, The blast blew cold, the dark owl scream'd Her lover's funeral song. Amid the falling gloom of night, Her startling fancy found In every bush his hovering shade, His groan in every sound.14 In all three cases, the imaginary nature of these terrors is stressed. Y e t the terrors function nonetheless: to establish the atmosphere of night, to provide an intense equivalent for

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the pangs of conscience, to suggest the overwrought state of a bereft girl and the essential horror of her situation. T h e y supply tonal effects and are appreciated for their tonal value although rejected as realities. This sort of experimentation with the uses of the supernatural was to bear fruit only later in the century, when it became possible again to use such subject matter more freely. Even in its early forms, however, it testifies to the fact that poets, including those too rational to believe in the supernatural, continued to realize that it might provide exciting subjects for narrative or a convincing atmosphere of fearfulness, or symbolic emphasis for emotional states. T h e fullest and most brilliant uses of the supernatural during the eighteenth century were to be based on precisely the same perceptions. These deprecatory uses of supernatural material, in other words, are not entirely deprecatory in effect: attributing the unearthly to the imagination or to dream does not remove its power, nor is it intended to. And other forms of qualification could also emphasize the special imaginative value of such material. Pope, for example, even when relegating ghosts and witches to metaphorical status, does so with a precision which insists upon their special value as metaphors: As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight, So these their merry, miserable Night; Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide, And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd. 15 H e defines the special pathos and horror of outworn coquettes with force and freshness through his unsentimental recognition that witches and ghosts are beings of pathos as well as horror. Using them as emotional counters, he forces recognition of their special emotional potency.

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In The Dunciad, as Aubrey Williams has pointed out, a structure of diabolical reference provides a major source of strength and complexity. "The Devil, Sin, and Death, along with the entire host of rebel angels, are drawn into the action of the Dunciad and are made to impart some of their infernality to the dunces. The world of dulness is infiltrated by powers of darkness, so that the comedy is constantly jostled by more serious implications." 16 The devils in this poem, like the ghosts and witches of the shorter one, are metaphoric: but the fact in no way qualifies the intensity with which the diabolic is invoked, the seriousness with which its implications are recognized. Metaphoric references to the supernatural, then, need be neither casual nor meaningless. And they are fairly frequent in the early eighteenth century, even in the verse of the rational Swift. Other "light" uses of the supernatural are also abundant: passing mention of country superstition, often affectionately humorous in tone; satiric developments aimed either against belief in spirits or against political opponents; verse of the fabliau type in which devils and magicians provide narrative framework. The abundance and variety of reference is itself a testimony to the imaginative force of the supernatural; close examination of even the most casual references tends to suggest that this force was in some sense recognized. II Often, then, the poets of the early eighteenth century used supernatural horror only in a qualified way, implicit or explicit. By attributing belief in ghosts and demons to the ignorant, superstitious, or fanciful, or by assuming a humorous attitude toward such belief, they protected

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themselves from apparent commitment to superstition. Some critics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, suggested that protection was not really needed, that high justification might be found for the use of the unearthly. The case for free use of the supernatural is most eloquently and logically stated by Dryden, in "Of Heroic Plays" (1672): For my part, I am of opinion, that neither Homer, Virgil, Statius, Ariosto, Tasso, nor our English Spencer, could have formed their poems half so beautiful, without those gods and spirits, and those enthusiastic parts of poetry, which compose the most noble parts of all their writings . . . And if any man object the improbabilities of a spirit appearing, or of a palace raised by magic; I boldly answer him, that an heroic poet is not tied to a bare representation of what is true, or exceeding probable; but that he may let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representation of such things as depending not on sense, and therefore not to be comprehended by knowledge, may give him a freer scope for imagination. 'Tis enough that, in all ages and religions, the greatest part of mankind have believed the power of magic, and that there are spirits or spectres which have appeared . . . Some men think they have raised a great argument against the use of spectres and magic in heroic poetry, by saying they are unnatural; but whether they or I believe there are such things, is not material; 'tis enough that, for aught we know, they may be in Nature; and whatever is, or may be, is not properly unnatural. 17

The problem of belief is thus resolved: the poet's credulity or incredulity becomes totally irrelevant. Those who would "first follow Nature" are reassured: nothing which may be in nature is properly unnatural. Moreover, lofty precedents are adduced for introduction of the supernatural. It is all, to be sure, a matter of emphasis: Henry Pemberton, as we

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have seen, dismisses lightly Homer's Circe and Polyphemus, and implies that the Greek poet's real genius lay in his accurate depiction of human nature; D r y den suggests that Homer's supernatural passages are the most noble of his writings. Dryden is thus comforting to those who yearn to exceed the bounds of strict realism, and many followed his lead. Some critics, indeed, did not even feel obliged to justify their assumption that ghosts and prodigies were essential, particularly in drama. Thomas Rymer, in his strictures on The Tragedy of Rollo Duke of Normandy, observes that it is morally unnatural for two brothers to kill each other on stage without some preliminary prodigies in heaven and earth to prepare the audience. T h e first scene, he remarks, should have showed the usurper's ghost from hell, "full of horror for his crime, cursing his Sons, and sending some infernal fury amongst them." 1 8 In " A Short V i e w of Tragedy" (1692), offering suggestions for an ideal tragedy on the Spanish Armada, "after the model of Aeschylus' Persians," Rymer would have "some old Dames of the Court, us'd to dream Dreams, and to see Sprights, . . . to alarm our Gentlemen with new apprehensions, which make distraction and disorders sufficient to furnish out this A c t " (page 92). (In justice to Rymer, it should be remarked that his next act was to include a wise discourse against dreams and hobgoblins.) Almost twenty years later, The Spectator tells us, "There is nothing which delights and terrifies our English Theatre so much as a Ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody Shirt. A Spectre has very often saved a Play." 19 Proprieties, however, must be observed. T h e same Spectator continues: "There may be a proper Season for these several Terrors; and when they only come in as Aids and

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Assistances to the Poet, they are not only to be excused, but to be applauded" (I, 1 7 1 ) ; and, later, "I do not therefore find Fault with the Artifices above mentioned when they are introduced with Skill, and accompanied by proportionable Sentiments and Expressions in the Writing" (I, 172). A similar point, with reverse emphasis, was made in the same journal a few months later, in a letter on The Lancashire Witches-. "I cannot conceive what Relation the Sacrifice of the Black Lamb, and the Ceremonies of their Worship to the Devil, have to the Business of Mirth and Humour," writes the critic. "The Gentleman who writ this Play . . . appears to have been misled in his Witchcraft by an unwary following the inimitable Shakespear. The Incantations in Mackbeth have a Solemnity admirably adapted to the Occasion of that Tragedy, and fill the Mind with a suitable Horror. . . This therefore is a proper Machine where the Business is dark, horrid, and bloody; but is extremely foreign from the Affair of Comedy." 20 Such criticism clearly recognizes the emotional force of serious poetic — or dramatic — presentation of ghosts and witches. Even if such beings are merely machines (or, as the earlier Spectator critic puts it, aids and assistances to the poet), they must be recognized as evoking terror, charged with emotional power, not only appropriate to serious poetry, but perhaps even necessary to it. "Little need be said about the Machinery of epic poetry," wrote Joseph Trapp, "its Beauty and Magnificence being well known. The Dignity of an Heroic Poem would scarce be kept up without it, especially since . . . the Marvellous depends on it." 2 1 He makes subtle distinctions between the wonderful and the improbable-, many phenomena would be improbable if performed by human agency, but not if the supernatural is admitted, as it certainly should be. "In such Cases

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as these, whatsoever is possible is probable: If you determine otherwise, Poetry is depriv'd of one of its best Ornaments, its greatest Fund of Surprize" (page 339). Trapp is not willing to allow the poet perfect freedom in this realm — Tasso and Spenser, he feels, both overuse the supernatural (page 351). Yet the terms of his defense make it clear that he feels that other-worldly beings provide vital poetic material. All these critics, it will be noted, are directly concerned either with heroic drama or with heroic poetry, exalted genres for which the classics provided the accepted models; their approval of supernatural machinery in such works is merely a following of precedent. Critics might be a trifle defensive about it, but many were convinced that the supernatural could be justified in heroic contexts. Edward Bysshe, for example, in a 1710 manual of poetry, says, "Let it not here be objected, that I have from the Translators of the Greek and Roman Poets, taken some Descriptions meerly fabulous: for the well-invented Fables of the Antients were design'd only to inculcate the Truth with more Delight, and to make it shine with greater Splendour." 22 His "Collection of the Most Natural and Sublime Thoughts, of the best English Poets" ("When you are at a Loss therefore for proper Epithets or Synonymes, look into this Alphabetical Collection for any Word under which the Subject of your Thought may most probably be rang'd; and you will find what have been imploy'd by our best Writers, and in what Manner.") includes such categories as Alecto, Avernus, Cerberus, Furies, Ghost, Necromancer, and Witch; Charles Gildon's slightly later manual 23 has all of these, plus Giant, Hell, Monster, and Pluto's Dominions. Pope's plan for an epic poem, although reliance on the supernatural does not seem central to its proposals, con-

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tains a justification of good and evil spirits as characters in heroic verse. Pope observes, reported The Annual Register, "that both scripture and common opinion agree in authorizing the operation of . . . [good and evil] spirits, as these employed for good ends, to advance the worship of the deity and virtue; and those for evil, to promote superstition and vice: and he adds, that they may be equally admitted under any dispensation, either ethic or christian." 24 If he does not sound enthusiastic about angels or demons, he does appear to recognize them as important poetic figures. It remained, however, for John Dennis, with his exalted conception of the essentially religious function of poetry, to provide really potent justification for the use of the supernaturally terrible. His justification depended basically on his concept of sublimity. Longinus, he says, makes it clear that "Enthusiastick Terror contributes extremely to the Sublime; and, secondly, that it is most produced by Religious Ideas." Dennis elaborates further: . . . every Man's Reason will inform him, that every thing that is terrible in Religion, is the most terrible thing in the World. But that we may set this in a clearer Light, let us lay before the Reader the several Ideas which are capable of producing this enthusiastick Terror; which seem to me to be those which follow, viz. Gods, Daemons, Hell, Spirits and Souls of Men, Miracles, Prodigies, Enchantments, Witchcrafts, Thunder, Tempests . . . N o w of all these Ideas none are so terrible as those which shew the W r a t h and Vengeance of an angry God; for nothing is so wonderful in its Effects: and consequently the Images or Ideas of those Effects must carry a great deal of T e r r o r with them, which we may see was Longinus1 s Opinion, by the Examples which he brings in his Chapter of the Sublimity of the Thoughts. N o w of things which are terrible, those are the

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most terrible which are the most wonderful; because that seeing them both threatning and powerful, and not being able to fathom the Greatness and Extent of their Power, we know not how far and how soon they may hurt us.25 In an earlier passage of the same work (I, 347), Dennis defines "wonderful": " W e name those things wonderful, which we admire with fear." The terrifying supernatural, in other words, seems to him to function as no other poetic device can. And it depends for its effect on belief: "The Machines are the very Life and Soul of Poetry; now the Machines would be absurd and ridiculous without the Belief of a God, and a particular Providence." 26 Again, Dennis refutes Jeremy Collier, who remarked that they who bring devils on the stage can hardly believe them anywhere else. On the contrary, says Dennis (I, 185-186), the showing of devils arouses terror, and nothing that moves terror can do a disservice to religion. He does not, in other words, attempt to decide whether the modern world is to believe in the whole paraphernalia of demons, apparitions, witches, ghosts, and enchantments; his important point is merely that an audience which believes in God must be moved by any evidence of the mysterious power of that God. Whether that evidence be taken as symbolic or actual seems finally irrelevant; the fact remains that it has "an immediate Relation to the Wonders of another World" (I, 347). Dennis, then, is alone in calling for a sort of heroic poetry which would use supernatural machinery not because it was traditional (as even Blackmore, for example, did, concerned as he was with the religious purposes of poetry: he transformed pagan machinery into Christian quite mechanically), but because it was significantly functional. If a heroic poet were to be truly sublime, he must concern himself with the terrible; the highest form of terror derives

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from perception of the overwhelming power of God. Longinus had made many of the same points long before, but Dennis's clear articulation of them in modern terms had important implications for nonheroic as well as epic poetry. The recognition that special power could be derived from the supernatural, that all supernatural reference properly used touches the essential religious nature of man, was to have its effect on many kinds of verse, to create new sources of sublimity and, perhaps unavoidably, of bathos. T w o early eighteenth-century practitioners of heroic poetry will alone suggest the range of theories and influences under which would-be writers of epic might operate. One is Richard Glover, author of Leonidas (1737), which Pemberton takes as text in his strictures on heroic poetry; the other is Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. Pemberton, as we have seen, was opposed to any use of the supernatural in modern epic poetry; he felt that sublimity could be attained without it, and that Leonidas offered proof for his contention. It is true indeed that Glover never introduces the supernatural directly, although he does use the sort of indirect reference so characteristic of many of his contemporaries: N o t less amaz'd A barb'rous nation, whom the chearful dawn Of science ne'er illumin'd, view on high A meteor waving with portentous blaze; Where oft, as superstition vainly dreams, Some daemon sits amid the baneful fires, Dispersing plagues and desolation round. 27

Or, again, in a similar mode: As the hearts Of anxious nations menac'd with the waste

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Of meager famine, and the ruthless sword Sink in their frozen bosoms, while despair Sees fear-ingender'd fantoms in the sky, Aerial hosts amid the clouds array'd, Which seem to shake the firmament with war, Portending woe and death . . . (Book IX, lines 16-23; pages 293-294) His most elaborate use of the supernatural simile, in the first edition, is a comparison to the machinations of fabled sorceresses who raised the dead (Book V I , lines 338-392, page 225). In another passage, Leonidas has a mystic dream, involving dead and living giants. But technically, it is true, Glover never admits straightforward use of supernatural material. The popularity of Leonidas (largely due to its political relevance) led to its expansion from nine books to twelve, with a corresponding expansion in some of the metaphoric references to the supernatural, but there were still only indirect uses of the material: Glover seemed a confirmed rationalist. Yet it is surely significant that his attempt at sublimity could not rest entirely on universally accepted reality, that he employed, though deviously and briefly, the same sort of supernatural material that he found in the classics. In his second attempt at epic, The Athenaid, a sequel to its predecessor, written late in his life, he abandoned the pose of the rational modern man thoroughly illumined by "the chearful dawn Of science," and made, as we shall see in a later chapter, fairly heavy and direct use of supernatural horror. In Leonidas, however, Glover does demonstrate one extreme attitude of the writer of heroic verse in the early eighteenth century. His primary model is clearly The Aeneid, which he tries to imitate in order to communicate political ideas relevant to his own time and place. T o the

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extent that he is conscious of the problem of credibility raised f o r the modern reader b y free use of supernatural machinery, he is coping with the special difficulties of writing an epic which would seem essentially contemporary. H e solves his problems, however, only b y eliminating, not b y substituting fresher machinery: his procedure is f a r removed f r o m the one Dennis called for. Elizabeth R o w e , on the other hand, is representative of the experimenters w h o tried to use more truly modern mac h i n e r y — Christian machinery — while still achieving the special power of the classic epic. Influenced more b y Milton and Tasso than b y H o m e r and Virgil, she appeared to have difficulty finding the proper subject matter. W i t h moderate success, she attempted various verse-essays on religious subjects, including a lurid piece on the last judgment entitled " T h e Conflagration." H e r most extended effort, however, is in the epic mode; f o r it she selects a Biblical theme, but makes significant additions to her Old Testament r a w material. " T h e History of Joseph" follows, in its main outlines, the O l d Testament story. T h e changes made b y Mrs. R o w e insist on supernatural intervention, and emphasis is on the terrible. Thus, there is an infernal council: In Hinnoris vale a fane to Moloch stood . . . Pale tapers hung around in equal rows, The mansion of the sullen king disclose; Seven brazen gates its horrid entrance guard; Within the cries of infant ghosts were heard; On seven high altars rise polluted fires, While human victims feed the ruddy spires. The place, Gehenna call'd, resembled well The native gloom and dismal vaults of hell. 'Twas night, and goblins in the darkness danc'd, The priests in frantick visions lay entranc'd; While here conven'd the Pagan terrors sat . . , 28

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When one recalls that Mrs. Rowe translated the beginning of the fourth book of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, the account of an infernal council, the source of this passage becomes clear. The "pagan terrors," plotters against Joseph, serve precisely the same function in this heroic piece as the forces of hell in Tasso. Mrs. Rowe also translated part of the thirteenth book of Tasso, including the description of the wizard's dwelling, and that, too, finds its analogue in her epic, in a long and significant passage. Potiphar's wife sends a servant to a sorcerer to obtain a spell for extorting Joseph's love: Harpinus there an uncouth dwelling own'd, Planted with yew and mournful Cyprus round; Whose shadows every pleasing thought control, And fill with deep anxiety the soul. Hither black fiends at dead of night advance, The horned Serim thro' the darkness dance: From earth, from air, and from the briny deep They come, and here nocturnal revels keep. From gloomy Acherusa, and the fen Of Serbon, and the forest of Birdene; From Ophiodes, the serpent isle, they come, And Syrtes, where fantastick spectres roam; From Chabnus, and the wild Psebarian peak, Whose hoary cliffs the clouds long order break. In hellish banquets, and obscene delights, The curst assembly here consume the nights. The sick'ning moon her feeble light withholds, In sable clouds her argent horns she folds; The constellations quench their glimm'ring fire, And frighted far to distant skies retire. Amidst these horrors, in his echoing cells, And winding vaults, the Necromancer dwells: Passing from room to room, the brazen doors Resound, as when exploded thunder roars. The day excluded thence, blue sulphur burns,

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With frightful splendour, in a thousand urns. The wizard here employs his mighty spells, And great events by divination tells; Inscribing mystick figures on the ground, And mutt'ring words of an unlawful sound; Which from their tombs the shiv'ring ghosts compel, And force them future secrets to reveal. (II, 42-43) T h e poet here is clearly making a concerted effort to master the techniques of her two great models: to exploit the values of exotic names as Milton does, to capitalize on the contrast between hellish depravity and Joseph's purity as Tasso does. A n d if her technique and her choice of detail are largely derivative, the fact remains that she uses them to rather telling purpose. Remembering the Biblical story, which achieves narrative success without demons or sorcerers, one may feel that Mrs. R o w e has gone to unnecessary length. Considering her epic as a piece in itself, however, one is forced to admit that her supernatural horrors function with singular effectiveness. There is a certain disproportion in forcing Potiphar's wife to go to such lengths in her attempted seduction; yet the necromancer's lair is indeed established as a place of terror. T h e sense of powers of darkness massing from the farthest reaches of the earth in enmity to the good is forcefully conveyed; the supernaturally terrible, in other words, is significantly placed in a religious context, as Dennis would have it. T h e demons are essential in the total conception of the poem, and in a total vision of the universe. T h e y are not merely translated from pagan into Christian terms and placed in the epic because heroic poetry demands such machinery; this poem depends on them f o r its import and effect. Mrs. R o w e , of course, was not the first to write a Christian epic, nor is she even close to being the best. " T h e His-

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tory of Joseph," however, does demonstrate that the heroic poetry of even an age often described as rational could use, effectively and without embarrassment, the machinery of Christian belief. Ill The process of rationalizing the supernatural in poetry went farther still. Addison's famous Spectator paper on "The Fairy W a y of Writing" suggests clearly that the supernatural, considered as literary material, creates its own laws. It makes special demands upon the author, but as long as he is willing to submit to them, he is put into possession of a realm of great emotional power. There is a kind of Writing, wherein the Poet quite loses Sight of Nature, and entertains his Reader's Imagination with the Characters and Actions of such Persons as have many of them no Existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits. This Mr. Dry den calls the Fairy Way of Writing, which is, indeed, more difficult than any other that depends on the Poet's Fancy, because he has no Pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own invention. There is a very odd Turn of Thought required for this sort of Writing, and it is impossible for a Poet to succeed in it, who has not a particular Cast of Fancy, and an Imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious. Besides this, he ought to be very well versed in Legends and Fables, antiquated Romances, and the Traditions of Nurses and old Women, that he may fall in with our natural Prejudices, and humour those Notions which we have imbibed in our Infancy. For otherwise he will be apt to make his Fairies talk like People of his own Species, and not like other Sets of Beings, who converse with different Objects, and think in a different Manner from that of Mankind . . . Those Descriptions raise a pleasing kind of Horror in the Mind of the Reader, and amuse his Imagination with the

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51 Strangeness and Novelty of the Persons who are represented in them. They bring up into our Memory the Stories we have heard in our Childhood, and favour those secret Terrors and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject. 29 Treating the question of belief, Addison follows Dryden's lead in saying that the existence of supernatural beings is not impossible in reality, and that a matter of such common belief is a reasonable subject for imitation. Our forefathers, he continues, "look'd upon Nature with more Reverence and Horror," finding ghosts and witches everywhere, but the British character in all ages is predisposed toward this sort of belief because it is naturally fanciful and gloomy. Best of all at presenting these objects of superstition was Shakespeare, whose "noble Extravagance of F a n c y " enabled him to give pictures of ghosts, witches, and fairies so natural that readers are convinced that if such beings existed, they would be as Shakespeare describes them; the same point, of course, was to be made again by Dr. Johnson. Addison here seems to recognize the possibility that supernatural material may provide a center for a literary work, not merely decoration. H e is aware that the appeal of such material lies deep, that its emotional springs are in the secret reaches of the mind of man. Incidentally, he demonstrates his awareness that "extravagance of f a n c y " may be "noble," and implies that nobility is not limited to heroic verse. A s the references to Shakespeare indicate, Addison recognized that the kind of poetry he here justifies was nothing new to the English literary scene: no more than the Christian epic of Mrs. R o w e would it represent an innovation; it would be merely a return to earlier national models. Yet the late seventeenth-century interpretations of classic standards seemed to limit the legitimate possibilities for such

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poetic subject matter and approach; Addison was offering traditional justification, then, for wider poetic scope. The fact that so many writers of nonheroic verse developed the possibilities he hinted at is one more indication of the fact that the rationalism of the Augustan Age can easily be overestimated as a restrictive force on the nature of Augustan poetic practices and conventions. In their serious exploitation of the material of supernatural horror in nonheroic verse, the poets of the early eighteenth century concentrated mainly on three areas of emotional appeal. The first is closely related to the sentimental revival that was of growing importance in the drama of the time. David Mallet's famous ballad, "William and Margaret," indicates the way in which ghosts could be used to suggest pathos as well as horror, and its critical reception by Aaron Hill, who reprinted it in The Plain dealer in 1724 under the impression that it was an old ballad, is an indication of how deeply such material could move an eighteenthcentury audience. Almost a whole issue of The Plain dealer is occupied by the poem and comments on it. It is introduced with these words: "I . . . fell, unexpectedly, upon a Work . . . that deserves to live for Ever! And which . . . is so powerfully filled, throughout, with that Bloodcurdling, chilling Influence, of Nature, working on our Passions (which Criticks call the Sublime) that I never met it stronger in Homer himself; nor even in that prodigious English Genius, who has made the Greek our Countryman." 30 These remarks are followed by a version of the poem rich in abstractions: When Hope lay hush'd in silent Night, And Woe was wrapp'd in Sleep, In glided Margaret's pale ey'd Ghost, And stood at William's Feet.

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Her Face was like an April Sky, Dimm'd by a scatt'ring Cloud: Her clay cold, lilly Hand, Knee-high, Held up her sable Shroud. So shall the fairest Face appear; When Youthful Years are flown! Such the last Robe, that Kings must wear, When Death deprives their Crown! 31 T h e narrative part of the ballad continues through Margaret's extensive plaint to her forsworn lover; William goes to her grave in the morning and himself expires there. The Plain dealer finds all this rather heady; in his comments on the text of the poem itself, Hill goes so far as to suggest a possible attribution to Shakespeare, largely because of the "peculiar solemn Power to touch this Church-Yard Terror, very visible in the Ghost of this Ballad." He is also particularly moved by the pathetic contrast between the sable shroud and the "lilly" hand. Setting aside the fact that Hill's enthusiasm for such verse seems to us nothing short of ludicrous, it is important to note that for him as for Addison, Shakespeare appears to be the model of poetic power in dealing with supernatural material, and that he considers the ability to touch "churchyard terror" a very high talent indeed, one which few possess. T h e very fact that Hill is able to mention the ballad's author in the same breath with Homer is significant: the limits of genre-criticism are breaking down; value is being attached to pure emotional power; the bloodcurdling, temporarily at least, equals the sublime. But there is more here than the bloodcurdling. Hill's insistence upon the importance of the shroud-hand motif suggests that he was moved also by the atmosphere of pathos clinging around the ghostly Margaret. It is the at-

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mosphere of Thomas Tickell's "Colin and L u c y , " also frequently reprinted in the eighteenth century; the atmosphere, as a matter of fact, that Pope made use of in his "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," which begins with the vision of a beckoning ghost in the moonlight displaying a "bleeding bosom gor'd." Pope, of course, capitalizes upon the momentary reaction of horror thus aroused to intensify the pathos of the lady's fate; the ghost provides a pretext for his further reflections, rather than a true imaginative center for the poem. The combination of sentimentality, morality, and horror is characteristic of many poems from the Collection of Old Ballads published in 1723 and 1725. In the verse from this collection, which is difficult to date individually, sentimental pathos comes most frequently from emphasis, implicit or explicit, on a serious injustice and its effects on its perpetrator or its victim. A ghost may punish a woman for being false to him: in one of these pieces the spirit of a deserted lover appears "With pale and ghastly Face" to carry his forsworn betrothed from childbed.82 A moral is appended: girls should be true to their lovers, or " G o d that hears all secret Oaths,/ Will dreadful Vengeance take." This particular ghost is a vague and unrealized figure; the poet depends simply on the power of the idea of ghosts. Even when specters appear surrounded by fiery flame, they are singularly unconvincing. In "The Lovers Tragedy," the spirit is that of a seduced maiden who has been deserted in her pregnancy by the false Sir William. He gets his just deserts, of course: But once above all a strange Groaning he heard, And strait with a Child in her Arms she appear'd, Which then on his Bed she lay close on his side, It frighted him so, that he sicken'd and dy'd.33

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The ludicrous economy of this resolution points up the poet's lack of concern with dramatic plausibility: sentimental morality is his dominant theme, and all else is comparatively insignificant. The combination of the macabre and the sentimental, without any intrusion of morality, is prominent in a ghost poem of the early eighteenth century which was probably second in fame only to "William and Margaret": William Hamilton's "The Braes of Yarrow." A young girl's lover is killed by her family, and his spirit appears to her. Ah me! what ghastly Spectre's yon, Comes, in his pale Shroud, bleeding after? Pale as he is, here lay him, lay him down, O lay his cold Head on my Pillow . . . Pale tho' thou art, yet best, yet best belov'd, O could my Warmth to Life restore thee; Yet lie all Night between my Breasts; No Youth lay ever there before thee.34

Here pathos is obviously more important than horror, but the pathetic effect depends upon the contrast between the softness of love and the terrible harshness of death. Because of the girl's devotion, the "ghastly Spectre" is not frightening to her; she accepts it readily as the symbol of her lover and apparently takes a sort of necrophilic pleasure in lying with it. The emotional power of the piece, then, derives largely from the implicit tension between innocence and corruption. Like the other ballads quoted, it does not attempt to attain "sublimity" by reference to the supernatural; it strives for less exalted, more sentimental effects. The sentimental shows up often in connection with ghosts. One typical sort of specter revels in self-pity. Nich-

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olas Rowe's "Colin's Complaint. A Song, to the Tune of 'Grim King of the Ghosts'" is typical: Then . . . let her . . . frolic it all the long Day; While COLIN, forgotten and gone, N o more shall be talk'd of, or seen, Unless when beneath the pale Moon, His Ghost shall glide over the Green.35

Occasionally one finds living lovers anticipating with glee their future ghostly state, in which they may reproach or frighten their hard-hearted mistresses: And when a Ghost I am, I'll visit thee; O thou deceitful Dame, Whose Cruelty Has kill'd the kindest Heart, That e'er felt Cupid's Dart, And never can desert From loving thee.36 When in thy lonely bed My ghost its moan shall make, With saddest signs that I am dead, And dead for thy dear sake; Struck with that conscious blow, Thy very soul will start: Pale as my shadow thou wilt grow, And cold as is thy heart.37

The ghost, in such pieces as these, has become no more than a literary device, a token symbol of intense emotion which, however, conveys no real emotional strength. The emotional suggestion is far removed from horror or terror or sublimity; the ghost is connected with a soft sort of sadness, rather than with supernatural mystery or power.

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In a second important mode of capitalizing on the emotional strength of supernatural material, the early eighteenth century returned to the basic idea that the unearthly was essentially terrible, but in a very special sense. A large group of poems from the period make use of the horrors of Christian eschatology f o r primarily religious purpose, depending heavily on the traditional emotional reactions to the details of supernatural horror. So Isaac Watts, on " T h e Day of Judgment": Hark, the shrill Outcries of the guilty Wretches! Lively bright Horror, and amazing Anguish, Stare thro' their Eye-lids, while the living Worm lies Gnawing within them.38 Even his "Songs for Children" insist There is a dreadful Hell, And everlasting pains; There sinners must with devils dwell In darkness, fire, and chains. (Chalmers, XII, 39) Thomas Parnell, in " T h e G i f t of Poetry," includes some twenty-two lines of lurid description of the wrath of an angry God. A n early piece by Edward Young, " T h e Last D a y " ( 1 7 1 3 ) , exemplifies the mode followed by many eighteenth-century Christian poets: 39 Horrours, beneath, darkness in darkness, Hell Of Hell, where torments behind torments dwell; . . . Enclos'd with horrours, and transfix'd with pain, Rolling in vengeance, struggling with his chain: T o talk to fiery tempests; to implore The raging flame to give its burnings o'er; T o toss, to writhe, to pant beneath his load, And bear the weight of an offended God. (Chalmers, XIII, 375-376)

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By using such material, poets could escape some of the problems raised by theologically ambiguous beings like witches and ghosts. The Last Judgment was much more clearly a matter for Christian faith than was the reality of witches; the poet dealing with it operated with the security of strong religious sanctions. W e have seen that poets writing of witches and ghosts frequently avoided theological reference altogether; only rarely do ghosts function as instruments of an angry God. More typically, supernatural creatures are important, in serious poetry, primarily for emotional effect: they help to create an atmosphere of sorrow, or a sense of sublimity. The emphasis in these eschatological pieces, however, is quite different. Didactic in basic intent, they are concerned, more or less explicitly, with warning the sinner away from his sin. To achieve this purpose, however, they must depend upon effects almost identical to those attained by insistence on the activities of sorcerers, or the horrors of their residences, or the appearance of a wrathful ghost. The immediate reaction to a successful poem on the Last Day is one of horror, which may or may not be tempered by the smugness of self-conscious virtue. Moreover, this horror is given an added dimension: it has potential reality, its details are lent authority by the solid religious tradition behind it. Thus the wrath of God supplied for the early eighteenth century a poetic subject providing more intense emotion than that achieved from ghosts or witches, but emotion of precisely the same kind. This stress that poets had been placing on the terrors of the next world had one interesting offshoot: there developed a genre of satiric poetry which has been used to demonstrate the irreligious temper of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There are many examples of light treatment of the descent to Hades. In them, usually

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no effort is made toward pseudorealistic horrific detail; the poet's purpose is simply to convey his message. Benjamin Boyce observes, in his " N e w s from Hell," that, just as the humorous use of Hades came to Greek literature only after faith in the gods had weakened, so it came to English literature in its most rationalistic period. 40 On the other hand, however, it is also true that the casual evocation of hell and its denizens for satiric purposes may demonstrate the continued force of religious tradition in an age that was largely irreligious in temper. Poets might mock hell, but they could appeal to it as a universal reference. It would not appear so often if it were not an imaginative reality. Closely related to the news from hell tradition is a long satiric poem called The Apparition,41 in which the careful characterization of Satan suggests more than perfunctory interest in the machinery, despite the fact that its frightening aspects are not stressed. Although in it Milton is damned (for his theology) along with Hobbes and Spinoza, this anti-Tindal satire contains an account of the Devil almost Miltonic in conception. the Fiend, with other Passions fraught Exulting, on his mighty Conquests thought: Wide, to his View, the lovely Prospect lay, But still with J o y malign he ey'd the Prey; F o r some escaping, made his Madness rise, Low'ring he Scowl'd and Darken'd all the Skies: Unmindful of the Many, Satan stood, Revenge against those flying Few he Vow'd: Then toss'd the Vipers round his horrid Head, And thus indignant to himself he said, 'These Kingdoms of the Earth of Old were giv'n, 'If I mistake not, in Exchange for Heav'n: 'Their Pozv'r, their Wealth and Glory, all are Mine, 'I hold 'em from Above by Grant Divine . . .' (page 3)

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Much of the elaborate characterization serves no verysharp satiric purpose, but its vivid evocation of the central figure largely accounts for the satiric force of the poem. When, in The Second Part of the Apparition, such clarity of conception is altogether lost, the satiric effect becomes predictably muddied and pedestrian. T o be sure, the stress on the character of Satan in The Apparition has only indirect relevance to the usual presentations of supernatural horror in the early eighteenth century. If Satan's personality projects horror, it is of a rather complex kind — deriving not from the physical details of hell, but from the creation of a subtle and malignant being. The Devil here is a satiric agent, by no means the object of satire; some of the authentic spirit of the fallen angel breathes from him. A surprisingly large group of early eighteenth-century poems makes unqualified and unashamed use of supernatural horror, demanding direct response to its terrifying aspects. Unlike the pieces with sentimental emphasis, poems in this third category do not use the supernatural merely as narrative framework; unlike the poems about the terrors of hell or the Last Judgment, they do not justify their material as an essential part of the Christian scheme. T h e y use the supernatural quite openly for its own sake. In the third book of The Dunciad, Pope attacked the extravagances of presenting fiends, dragons, and giants on the stage; in Epistle III of the "Essay on Man" he commented on the creation of gods and fiends as the operation of Superstition; in " T h e Rape of the L o c k " he used the supernatural with a hint of parody. But in his "Ode for Music on St. Cecilia's D a y , " an earlier piece than any of these (1708), one stanza demonstrates his ability to use the

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horrors of another world for serious emotional effect. This evocation of Orpheus' visit to hell stresses sound (the screams, shrieks, moans, groans, and cries of the damned), and in this respect it differs from most eighteenth-century attempts at equivalent effects: although the cries of tortured ghosts are common enough in this sort of poetry, more typically the evocation of the terrible depends heavily on the visual. Pope attempted this direct mode only fleetingly in his youth; his minor contemporaries reveled in it. Mallet, for example, returns frequently to the theme of supernatural horror in works lacking the justification of ballad-tradition which he had had in "William and Margaret." "The Excursion" contains numerous comparatively brief treatments of spirits, demons, and sorcerers, and at least one extended passage (Chalmers, X I V , 19) representative of the sort of material to which eighteenth-century poets might make easy reference. It is a narrative — rather than a description — of the nightly Sabbath of "The secret hag and sorcerer unblest," who compose potent spells, use the spoils of violated graves, revel in the company of "griesly spectres," and dance in a circle, while meteors blaze and thunder rolls. Most of the established elements of horror evocation are combined; although the account lacks specificity, it depends heavily on the preconceptions about diabolical activity encouraged by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose treatments of magic-workers. The piling up of material, vague as it is, is clearly intended to have an atmospheric effect, to establish quickly the mood of horror which will be as quickly dispelled when Mallet moves on to a new subject. In material and atmosphere, certainly, but also in approach, the Mallet passage is typical of a large and singu-

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larly monotonous group of poetic references to the supernatural. They rest in common on the assumption that witches and ghosts function as automatic counters to create what Mallet calls, in " A Winter's Day," another piece rich in the same sort of material, "a welcome horrour." The most perfunctory attempts at evocation will serve: James Ralph's Night (1726), mocked by Pope in The Dunciad, abounds in such offhand references as "thro' the midnight air,/ Long-sounding groans of injur'd ghosts are heard," 42 and lines of precisely the same sort recur fairly frequently in Thomson's The Seasons. No attempt apparently is made to give the ghosts individuality of import or effect, to imply their moral function, to make them meaningful in action. They serve merely as easy devices for evoking an atmosphere of melancholy, horror, or some mixture of the two. When Richard Savage wishes to suggest a hermit's sufferings after the death of his wife, he refers frequently to phantoms and spirits which shed baneful damps and whisper and sigh through the air. Mallet presents shadows who stalk around and mix their yells with his, thus presumably establishing the emotional atmosphere appropriate to winter. William Broome, in "Melancholy: An Ode" (1723), describes himself as walking by tombs where sullen spirits stalk, in mournful familiarity with the dead. And so on. The ease with which the supernatural atmosphere could apparently be summoned and dismissed recalls a memorable stage direction from "The British Enchanters": " A sudden sound of instruments expressing terrour and horrour, with thunder at the same time. Monsters and demons rise from under the stage, while others fly down from above crossing to and fro in confusion, during which the stage is darkened. On a sudden a flourish of contrary music succeeds; the sky clears, and the whole scene changes to a delightful vale"

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(Chalmers, XI, 47). Most of the poets making straightforward use of the supernatural without direct religious authority seem to have shared with Granville the assumption that monsters and demons were merely scenic conveniences. A minority group succeed in focusing supernatural material to greater purpose by reference, implicit or explicit, to a special moral or theological context. Ralph's greater success, given moral justification for his specters, is striking. In a fairly extensive passage in Night (pages 66-67) he employs ghosts whose hideous yells have some purpose: the spirits are preparing " T o bind the Sinner in eternal chains." As they hover around the dying man's couch, tremendous either in size or in emotional effect -— the point is left ambiguous — with burning brands held in their icy hands, they are justified as instruments of God. So, too, the conventional accompanying natural details — the owls emitting portentous screams, the gale, the vague sounds of midnight — function in their totality as equivalent to "the horrid call of Death." The resolution of the scene is not arbitrary, as in most of the passages we have been considering; there is, on the contrary, a real sense of time passing, and the horrors disappear when their excuse for being passes: the sinner dies, the soul departs, "And waiting Demons seize the guilty freight,/ And howl exulting thro' the dusky air." The moral purpose of the passage is simple enough, but it provides a meaning for supernatural details which was all too frequently missing. Isaac Watts, as we might expect, is also adept at this technique in the rare instances where he strays from strictly Biblical material. In "The Mourning-Piece" he presents a brief and moving vision of a universe in which " A Flight of Daemons sit/ On every sailing Cloud with fatal Purpose,"

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shooting into the world ten thousand unseen arrows which bring pain, sorrow, infamy, disease, and death. Fleeting as the description is, it bears the stamp of originality: Watts has infused real meaning into a supernatural image for which no Christian authority exists. More surprising are some of the effects that James Thomson achieves in " T h e Castle of Indolence," lacking even a background of Christian justification. The poem, of course, though it has elements of jeu d'esprit, is largely moral in purpose, and Thomson repeatedly uses ominous references to the infernal to suggest the lack of permanence in the luxurious life of indolence. Thus, in Canto I: for those fiends whom blood and broils delight, Who hurl the wretch as if to hell outright Down, down black gulfs where sullen waters sleep, Or hold him clambering all the fearful night On beetling cliffs, or pent in ruins deep — They, till due time should serve, were bid far hence to keep.43 The reminiscences of Christian tradition are inescapable, although there are no explicitly Christian references; the lack of established theological context actually strengthens the effect, because it forces the poet to create his own details rather than allowing him to rely on the easy references typical of contemporary mentions of hell. Given this background, it is no surprise when, in the second canto, the destruction of the castle is signaled by the shrieks of demons and, from beneath, vague wailing sounds, "As of infernal sprights in caverns bound." The tradition of hell as a place of punishment is an ancient and powerful one; when Thomson concludes his description of the beginning of infernal activities, "And lightnings flashed, and horror rocked the ground," horror seems a real and inevitable force. Again, the implicit moral context gives both focus and power to description of the supernatural.

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In a few rare instances, early eighteenth-century poets succeeded in deriving imaginative power from the supernatural by virtue of essentially personal conceptions which, however, recall a certain vague theological context. T w o examples of very different emotional tone will demonstrate the strength to be derived from such freshness. In a brief passage from "Dryades," William Diaper places fiends in an unusual environment: But oft curs'd Fiends quit their infernal Home, And (hated Guests) in gloomy Forrests roam, With glaring Eyes affright the howling Beasts, And little Birds shrink closer in their Nests. Earth would be Heav'n, if we might here enjoy Pleasures unmixt, and leave the base Alloy. 4 4

The effect here depends upon the shock of perceiving infernal beings in a natural context — not establishing the mood of melancholy, not warning the sinner or bearing away the souls of the dead, but simply roaming in the forest, for no particular reason. The little birds, epitomes of innocence, are touching in their fright, but their emotional reaction is given additional weight by the implicit suggestion, emphasized by the moral tag of the final couplet, that this apparent disruption of the natural order is a symbolic representation of the fallen state of Nature and of man. For one last example, the same theme is hinted in a poem which seems superficially light in tone: Allan Ramsay's "Up in the Air." Ramsay, of course, used the supernatural freely, but almost always with some qualifier to make it clear that he is dealing with native Scot superstition, not with his own. In this piece there is no such qualification; the question of belief simply does not present itself. Now the Sun's gane out o' Sight, Beet the Ingle, and snuff the Light:

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In Glens the Fairies skip and dance, And Witches wallop o'er to France, Up in the Air On my bonny grey Mare, And I see her yet, and I see her yet. The Wind's drifting Hail and Sna' O'er frozen Hags like a Foot Ba', Nae Starns keek throw the Azure Slit, 'Tis cauld and mirk as ony Pit, The Man i' the Moon Is carowsing aboon, D'ye see, d'ye see, d'ye see him yet. 45 The atmosphere of vigor and excitement in the first stanza makes witch-revels seem a joyous affair. There is a sense of anticipation in the opening couplet, an aura of jollity about the fairy dancing, the witches' walloping. The narrator seems totally involved himself in the mood; the lilt with which the lines move, like the informal quality of the dialect, suggests universal light-heartedness. In the second stanza, however, the effect becomes far more complicated. The verse continues to move with its former energy, but the atmosphere has changed: a disruption of nature, again, has been effected by the supernatural activity. To be sure, the natural chaos affects the witches — the hags are frozen — but it also extends to the man in the moon, who has been infected by the carousing of witches and fairies to the point where he participates himself. The change in mood is subtle, but significant; by the end, the suggestions are almost sinister. The image of the pit hints a reminder of the murky pit of hell, and the strong emphasis of the last line suggests even the frightening possibility that the moon itself may disappear, insists on the reader's strong attention to this possibility. Once again, more forcefully than ever, we are reminded that nature is fallen.

CHAPTER

THREE

Supernatural Horror 1741-1780 ritics and poets alike, as the century aged, found more reason to take the problem of the poetic supernatural seriously. T h e growing desire to evaluate native literary tradition forced the realization that Shakespeare, for example, had found vital poetic material in the supernatural, and it was not possible to dismiss the witches in Macbeth so easily as the giants or sorceresses of The Odyssey. Allegorical explanation of the classics had long been popular, and the same approach was obviously appropriate for Spenser, but the Shakespearean hags were clearly real beings, not merely embodiments of moral flaws. It was true, of course, that Shakespeare had written in a less polished, less "enlightened" time than the eighteenth century; in introducing witches and ghosts into his plays, he was, as Dr. Johnson, among others, pointed out, merely dealing with matter of common belief. His scenes of enchantment, "however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting." 1 Johnson makes it quite clear (for example, I X , 3 1 2 ) that a modern poet or dramatist who attempted to use the supernatural as Shakespeare did would be rightly censured; his attitude toward Collins, who reveled in "those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence

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in popular traditions" (IV, 206), is a specific demonstration of his feelings on the matter. But few critics had Johnson's intellectual rigor, or his implicit scorn for the poet capable of passive acquiescence in popular tradition. The argument that ghosts in poetry are justified by their existence in popular superstition became increasingly widespread. " A n y national superstition which credulity has consecrated" is proper for the poet, wrote Mrs. Montagu. 2 The defense which exonerated Shakespeare from the charge of impropriety could be extended to the eighteenth century itself. "Shakespeare was too well read in human nature not to know, that, though Reason may expel the superstitions of the nursery, the Imagination does not so entirely free itself from their dominion, as not to re-admit them, if occasion presents them, in the very shape in which they were once revered" (page 199). The power of superstition over the imagination, in other words, makes it a valuable poetic resource, and the prevalence of superstition in popular culture makes it a permissible one. Among critics, opinion varied as to the precise relevance of popular superstition as a modern justification; one even finds individual critics supporting contradictory opinions. Thus, William Melmoth remarks at one point: " N o w that this superstition is no longer supported by vulgar opinion, it has lost its principal grace and efficacy, and seems to be, in general, the most cold and uninteresting method in which a poet can work up his sentiments." 3 In another passage (page 2 2 ) he regrets that the ancient poets should be considered as models for restricting the imagination, and insists that "they ought rather to be looked upon . . . as encouragements to a full and uncontrouled exertion of her faculties." Thomas Warton projects, on occasion, a superior tone

toward the superstitions of the past, which accounted for the witches of Spenser, the ghosts of Shakespeare. But the complexity of his position can be seen in his discussion of the middle ages: "Ignorance and superstition, so opposite to the real interests of human society, are the parents of imagination." 4 So opposite to the real interests of society, yet so conducive to imagination: critical values become uncertain, ambiguous. A page later, Warton makes it clear that he finds no hope for the present: " W e have lost a set of manners, and a system of machinery, more suitable to the purposes of poetry, than those which have been adopted in their place. W e have parted with extravagances that are above propriety, with incredibilities that are more acceptable than truth, and with fictions that are more valuable than reality" (II, 463). A nostalgia for a period in which propriety, reality, and truth were not such exalted criteria sounds clearly here; the same note is struck by Richard Hurd, who felt that the epic was no longer writable in his own time, because the marvelous is necessary to the epic, and an age in which the marvelous is not credited is unlikely to use it effectively in poetry. 5 Yet in a different context, he suggests that the modern poet has considerable resources. Poets are liars by profession, and they do not expect to have their lies believed. "They think it enough, if they can but bring you to imagine the possibility of them. And how small a matter will serve for this? A legend, a tale, a tradition, a rumour, a superstition; in short, anything is enough to be the basis of their air-formed visions." (Letter X, page 136). The reader does not trouble himself about truth; he is pleased when he is made to conceive of what reason tells him does not exist. Popular belief and the belief of the reader are not the same, but given the first, to lend substantiality, the poet can dispense with the second.

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If critics were not entirely sure that popular superstition made the supernatural a legitimate subject for eighteenthcentury poetry, many poets did not share their doubts. W e have seen already that early in the century some poets justified their use of supernatural material by attributing it to popular tradition or superstition; they could thus provide a built-in defense for dealing with unearthly horrors. As the century wore on, this device became more popular, frequently more elaborate, and occasionally extraordinarily ambiguous in the attitude toward the supernatural that it projected. Most ambiguous, and most involved in the question, was William Collins. Dr. Johnson oversimplified a bit in accusing him of "passive acquiescence" in popular tradition: it would be truer to say that he longed for such acquiescence, but never totally achieved it. His dilemma is the true subject of the "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," which is framed as an address to the Scottish poet John Home and concerns itself with the problem of defining poetic subject. Toward Home Collins appears to feel something close to envy: Thou need'st but take thy pencil to thy hand, And paint what all believe, who own thy genial land.6

The choice of subject, in other words, is perfectly simple for the northern poet, who needs only observe and record. It is not so simple for Collins himself, who customarily feels free to deal at length with the supernatural only within some such elaborate framework as is here set up: he removes himself one extra degree from his material by treating it not directly, not even as potential subject matter for himself, but as hypothetical poetic material for someone else. In some sense he succeeds in pretending that he is not writ-

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ing about ghosts or wizards at all: he has found the ideal eighteenth-century mode of gaining the advantages of interest in dubious material without the disadvantages. But the ambiguity of his attitude is far deeper than this; it pervades the very texture of the poem. On the one hand, he offers the critical justifications we have already encountered for the validity of the supernatural as poetic subject matter, and goes farther than most critics in his enthusiasm. His language and tone, however, frequently suggest personal doubts about the ultimate value of the supernatural, and no reconciliation between the opposed points of view is ever achieved. As a special pleader for this material, Collins is eloquent. He explains (stanza xi) that Home need not be embarrassed to be moved by popular superstitions, for not only do they "touch the village breast": "in elder time" they engaged Shakespeare himself; a detailed reminder of the witches in Macbeth follows. He recalls Dryden's justification for the supernatural in literature, by referring to scenes like these, which, daring to depart From sober truth, are still to nature true, And call forth fresh delight to Fancy's view. (pages 75-76) But his most emphatic point, and the one most often repeated, is that the supernatural offers special imaginative power: These are the themes of simple, sure effect, That add new conquests to her [the muse's] boundless reign, And fill, with double force, her heart-commanding strain. (page 67) Again, more wistfully, with implicit emphasis on the contrast between "me" and "thee":

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Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle . . . (page 73) Exploitation of popular superstitions, in other words, offers Home poetic resources comparable to the power of nature itself. And Collins even goes so far as to suggest that poetic power can be increased if the poet himself believes in the supernatural phenomena he relates: after explaining that Tasso "Believ'd the magic wonders which he sung," the poet suggests an interesting cause-and-effect relationship: "Hence at each sound imagination glows" (italics mine). But precisely here, after all, is one source of his dilemma: he himself is cut off from believing in any simple and straightforward way, and he cannot avoid the realization that those who do believe are, after all, by and large merely "untutor'd swains." Even when he adjures Home not to neglect the "homelier thoughts" of such swains, he is full of the consciousness that these thoughts are homelier: more fundamental, perhaps, but also more uncouth. And he cannot quite escape some sense of superiority to even the "welltaught hind": his language reminds us over and over that a social as well as an imaginative hierarchy is involved, and as long as social values contradict imaginative ones, total commitment to the life of the imagination seems to be impossible for Collins. In the first stanza of the poem, but also, significantly, in the last, he adopts the tone and diction of perfect Augustan cultivation; he is very much the civilized gentleman, and it is from the vantage point of civilization that he speaks. This vantage point he cannot quite abandon. Moreover, there is an emotional as well as a social problem. T w o important themes of the ode are the imaginative

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value of the supernatural, even of belief in it, and the interestingly paradoxical relation between romantic legends and prosaic lives. This conjunction is emphasized again and again: the "trim lass," representative of the propriety and order of civilization, "skims the milky store," thus performing her appropriate symbolic function as a country maiden — but she performs this function for the sake of the "swart tribes," who embody quite opposite values: the vaguely sinister, incomprehensible, disordered values of the supernatural. T h e "luckless swain," a country man like any other, is drowned not as a result of natural forces but b y the activity of a "fiend, in angry mood." Although his anxious w i f e and children await him in as conventional a fashion as their counterparts in G r a y ' s churchyard elegy, the emphasis of Collins's vignette is significantly different: the emotional effect here is not simple pathos but a mingling of pathos and horror resulting f r o m the fact that the ghost of the drowned man visits his w i f e in her sleep. T h e special value of each episode depends upon its insistent contrasts between the realm of dull normality and that of the exciting and unusual. A n d the world of the supernatural is always presented as more intrinsically valuable than that of reality — not merely f o r rude swains, even f o r kings. T h e "mighty kings of three fair realms" n o w sleep together where " N o slaves revere them, and no wars invade." N o w , instead of the evils of life, they have the glories of death: Collins's tone makes perfectly clear the extent of his romantic participation in the image he provides: Yet frequent now, at midnight's solemn hour, The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power, In pageant robes, and wreath'd with sheeny gold, And on their twilight tombs aerial council held. (page 74)

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Yet with all his consciousness of the emotional richness of the supernatural, Collins remains conscious also of emotional dangers in commitment to such material. He speaks of How they, whose sight such dreary dreams engross, With their own visions oft astonish'd droop; (page 69) and again, also referring to wizards, of the fact that they heartless, oft like moody madness, stare To see the phantom train their secret work prepare. (page 69) Participation in the realm of the supernatural, in other words, produces "dreary dreams," causes the "drooping" of the participants, and is somehow related to madness. The same attitude is suggested in the "Ode to Fear," where the opposed emotional reactions are central to the poem: Fear looks "madly wild" and causes those who succumb to her power to look the same; she provides a "withering power" which is nonetheless, mysteriously, an inspirational power; she blasts the view. Yet fear, too, is seen in the poem as a major source of imaginative richness. Neither to the power of fear nor, more specifically, to that of the supernatural, however, can Collins offer unqualified assent. He is, in his waverings, his complexities, his efforts at passion and at control, a magnificent symbolic figure of the poets of his time who tried to expand their imaginative range by the use of supernatural material. Few of his contemporaries, of course, succeeded like Collins in projecting rather than merely asserting the imaginative value of the supernatural. Yet it is notable how often the attribution of unearthly visions to mere super-

75 stition began to appear a purely mechanical disclaimer. The trappings of superstition, like the ghosts created by fear, guilt, or unhealthiness (all frequently made responsible in poetry for supernatural appearances), often seemed — if not convincing — at least profoundly interesting to the poet. Here is an example, from Mark Akenside: Though Superstition, tyranness abhorr'd . . . Though at length Haply she plunge him into cloister'd cells, And mansions unrelenting as the grave, But void of quiet, there to watch the hours Of midnight; there, amid the screaming owls Dire song, with spectres or with guilty shades To talk of pangs and everlasting woe; Yet be not ye dismay'd.7 Without the first line, this treatment of the haunted mansion would seem perfectly straightforward — nor does the initial hint that the terrors are imaginary in any significant way qualify the effect. The conventional atmosphere of cloistered cells, mansions, midnight hours, screaming owls, prepares tonally for the ghosts, which are not casually employed. "Mansions unrelenting as the grave,/But void of quiet" suggests the essential seriousness with which they are to be treated: not merely to supply "horror," but to indicate possibilities of the after-life. These cells and mansions, like the grave itself, terrify by suggesting images of a fearful eternity. The weight of Akenside's emphasis, then, despite his disclaimer, is literally on the terror of the supernatural. Moreover, the emphasis seems to be deliberate. Compare the version of the passage we have considered, from the 1757 first book of The Pleasures of the Imagination, with its precursor from the first published version of 1744:

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HORROR

Though the poisonous charms Of baleful Superstition . . . leave the wretched pilgrim all forlorn T o muse at last, amid the ghostly gloom Of graves, and hoary vaults, and cloister'd cells; T o walk with spectres through the midnight shade . . . (Chalmers, X I V , 63) N o t h i n g lies beneath the trappings here: the expanded version of the passage suggests Akenside's later recognition that belief in the supernatural might have intellectual as well as emotional overtones. Jeffrey Hart, in a detailed study of the revision of The Pleasures of Imagination, has pointed out that many of the changes in the first book "reflect a g r o w i n g sympathy with Spenser and an interest in the 'fairy w a y of w r i t i n g . ' " 8 T h e 1757 passage above is clearly relevant: in it the supernatural is invested with significance before being conventionally rejected; indeed, significance emerges in the v e r y process of rejection. T h i s is a poetic demonstration of the truth of W a r t o n ' s suggestion that superstition, although not socially or intellectually acceptable, is imaginatively powerful. 9 T h e frequently used explanation that fancy is responsible for the presence of ghosts also implies poetic recognition of their imaginative value. Still, still unweary'd, restless fancy roams, On swelling waves of wild vagary tost, Calls sheeted spectres from the op'ning tombs, And fills the tow'r with many a grisly ghost. Pensive they stalk in melancholy state, And to pale Cynthia bare their gaping wounds. 10 These lines are b y James Graeme, w h o writes elsewhere of the fancy-created sullen ghost w h o "In sheeted grandeur

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through the churchyard stalks,/ Horrendous, mutt'ring to the sick'ning moon." 11 His ghosts have grandeur; they stalk in melancholy state, romantically associated with pale Cynthia, and pensive as pining lovers. T h e y are not in any w a y terrible: such terms as "grisly ghost," "gaping wounds," and "horrendous" hardly counteract the general atmosphere of pleasant melancholy. The spirits have become adjuncts to human moods rather than creators of them. T h e y could supply, for example, appropriate symbols of emotional self-indulgence: one poem evokes in some detail the personally-perceived atmosphere of horror, only to reject it with ease: "Jesus, to thee I'll fly for aid." 12 Ghosts are to be banished by religion, but their existence in the first place may depend not simply on fear, but on some more complicated psychological state, morbid, introspective, imaginative. For this self-absorbed condition, faintly guilty in its self-absorption — for this condition, ravens, specters, vague midnight terrors, all associated with guilt, all, like the emotional state itself, evanescent, provide fitting emblems. Yet, though the attitude toward the supernatural which emerges among such poets is founded on clear recognition of its emotional significance, recognition of the fact that the mystery of death and the dead evokes an engulfing terror for which no substitute image is adequate — this despite denial of ghosts' reality by conventional Protestant Christianity — the genuine importance of the supernatural is in a sense denied by its relegation to imagery. As image it retains full potency — many poets relied on it to convey the atmosphere of such states as melancholy and addiction to vice 13 — but once it is made a concomitant of purely psychological reality, its theological, and to a large extent its intellectual, significance is destroyed.

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Another conventional disclaimer, the relegation of the supernatural to popular legend, appears importantly in the 1744 version of The Pleasures of Imagination, where Akenside included a long account of the tales told by the "villagematron" around the fire, tales of witches, evil spirits, ghosts that "clank their chains, and wave/ The torch of Hell around the murderer's bed." In the final description of the audience-reaction, we find "Each trembling heart with grateful terrours quell'd." 14 Thirty years later, James Beattie published, in The Minstrel, another account of such stories; he, too, clearly wished to arouse "grateful terrours." The paradoxical phrase, with its implicit recognition of the supernatural's imaginative power, suggests the goal of most eighteenth-century literary dabblers in the unearthly. They might try, like Akenside, to arouse emotional response by mere reference to witches and ghosts, or, like Beattie, experiment more fully with details intended to evoke the mystery and power of witches. At either extreme, the result of allusions heavily qualified by the poet's explicit dissociation from belief in them tended to be second-rate (or third- or fourth-rate) poetry, interesting only in the evidence it provides for the persistence of poetic efforts to find legitimate means of exploiting the supernatural. Yet one frequently feels the poet's nostalgia for an era in which the fantastic could be more freely and immediately used. Romantic Fancy still, that lov'd . . . To hear of Giants gorg'd with human blood, . . Of walking Ghosts in iron durance bound, Of fiery walls to Demon-Guards assign'd, Of labouring Fiends to hollow mines confin'd, Of warning voices sent from opening graves . . . Fancy, that erst on dreams like these repos'd, Unwilling sees the Fairy Vision clos'd.15

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II Critics who opposed literature of the supernatural seemed motivated, during the middle years of the century, largely by a sense that contemporary poets employed ghosts and demons as essentially superfluous decoration rather than as material integral to poetry. Supernatural machinery, wrote an anonymous reviewer in 1752, "when introduced with sobriety and discretion, serves to present agreeable scenery to the mind." 1 6 But machinery for the sake of agreeable scenery did not seem adequate to the most serious critics of the time. "Fictions of that nature may amuse by their novelty and singularity; but they never move the sympathetic passions, because they cannot impose on the mind any perception of reality," wrote Lord Kames, 17 whose ultimate scorn for poetic ghosts and demons is indicated by the fact that he would permit them in ludicrous pieces only. Dr. Johnson's objections are similar: Shakespeare might be justified in his use of the unearthly (and justified precisely because he makes the unearthly seem real), 18 but for most modern practitioners, such devices were signs of laziness. " H e that forsakes the probable may always find the marvelous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined." 19 Supernatural beings are essentially remote from mankind. "Grecian Deities and Gothic Fairies" Johnson dismisses as "exploded Beings" ("Life of Tickell," III, 236); but there is little more to be said, from his point of view, for Christian machinery. He refers to Boileau's remark, "that in a contest between heaven and hell we know at the beginning which is to prevail" ("Life of Dryden," II, 356), and expresses his agreement: all machinery is essentially unreal.

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The ultimate unreality, and hence irrelevance, of the supernatural is the ground, too, of Goldsmith's objection to it in poetry. "Poets, like flatterers," he writes, "are only heard with pleasure when they themselves seem persuaded of the truth of all they deliver." 20 Homer wrote in "an age of ignorance, and consequently of credulity": he may be assumed to have believed what he wrote. For the modern poet, however, there can be no such excuse. The supernatural must seem equally unreal to the poet and to his readers; this fact is enough to make it improper material for literature. An editor of Collins, writing about the same time as Goldsmith, feels himself forced to apologize for his subject on identical grounds. Although he speaks, with explicit reference to the fiends, of the "horrible grandeur of the imagery" 2 1 in the "Ode to Fear," he continues that the passion for the wild and magnificent in nature, which Collins felt, "seduces the imagination to attend to all that is extravagant, however unnatural" (page 153). Milton, he adds, was "notoriously fond" of romance and "gothic diableries," and Collins "was wholly carried away by the same attachments" (page 153). The implication, of course, is that the eighteenth-century poet was led astray by devotion to a seventeenth-century master. The bulk of the supernatural poetry of this period, however, offers every justification for the strictures of Johnson, Lord Kames, and Goldsmith. Singular unreality is the chief characteristic of its witches and ghosts. With an increasing sense of boredom one reads the great mass of narrative and lyric pieces in which the abundant supernatural figures are totally undistinguishable from one another. As early as 1750, a journal called The Student printed an "Ode to Horror," "In the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Di-

abolical Style of our modern Ode-Wrights and MonodyMongers." Intended, as the subtitle suggests, to ridicule the school of Warton, the piece includes these lines: O f t wont f r o m charnels damp and dim, T o call the sheeted spectre grim, While, as his loose chains loudly clink, Thou ad'st a length to ev'ry link: O thou, that lov'st at eve to seek The pensive pacing pilgrim meek, And sett'st before his shudd'ring eyes Strange forms, and fiends of giant-size . . P

Considered in its historical context, the passage contains few details of diction or subject to insist that its intent is satiric: the same language, the same conjunction of material occur quite seriously in too many poems. Warton himself at the age of seventeen, wrote, with no satiric purpose: But when the world Is clad in Midnight's raven colour'd robe, 'Mid hollow charnel let me watch the flame Of taper dim, shedding a livid glare O'er the wan heaps; while airy voices talk Along the glimm'ring walls; or ghostly shape A t distance seen, invites with beck'ning hand M y lonesome steps, thro' the far-winding vaults. 23

There is little essential difference between the two passages; the details seem now so automatic that it is as difficult to take them seriously in Warton as in his mocker. The difficulty increases as examples are multiplied. Most often, as in Warton, the purpose served by ghosts is simply atmospheric: charnels, ruins, owls, midnight, specters — all merely function to evoke conventional melancholy. Such evocation might be detailed, but usually through multiplication rather than elaboration of paraphernalia. Edward Young's Night Thoughts and Robert Blair's The

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Grave were both published in 1743; neither relies heavily upon supernatural counters. The "graveyard school," one might expect, would encourage poetic addiction to the other-worldly; yet a serious religious context seems to prevent frequent reference even to ghosts. Blair qualifies his few supernatural moments by making them depend upon "what the neighbors say"; only in one four-line passage does he present ghosts straightforwardly.24 Young, however, expresses his sense of ambiguity directly: By visits (if there are) from darker scenes, The gliding spectre! and the groaning grave! (Chalmers, XIII, 490)

"It is not the people who really believe in hell who are troubled over it," 25 observes Eleanor Sickels of another aspect of the supernatural in eighteenth-century poetry. And the writers whose genuine concern about the life after death emerges most clearly from their poetry seem on the whole to have avoided the poetic use of ghosts and demons. Cowper, in one of the Olney Hymns, describes demons rising like a smoky cloud from a burning lake to shoot at the sinner, but neither ghosts nor spirits appear importantly elsewhere in his work. The characteristic attitude of Protestant religious poetry is aptly expressed by Cowper's friend, the Evangelist preacher John Newton: What mighty agents have access, What friends from heav'n, or foes from hell, Our minds to comfort, or distress, When we are sleeping, who can tell? 28

Who can tell, indeed — and since the subject is a matter for theological speculation, it is more safely omitted from genuinely religious poetry. But if there was little room for the unpleasant super-

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natural in serious religious poetry, where was such material to find a legitimate medium? The attribution of all otherworldly reference to disturbed minds or superstition was a device of obvious limitations, and avoided the real issue. It is the very difficulty of finding a better solution that helps account for the fact that so much of the supernatural poetry of the mid-eighteenth century was bad poetry. T h e bulk of allusion to the supernatural seems to have increased steadily as the century progressed; its quality showed no such consistent development. But experimentation was going on, new approaches were being attempted; bad poets made false starts which may have helped to warn good poets away, or, in some cases, even to provide them valuable clues. Again and again there are indications that poets discovered more fruitful uses for supernatural material, if little ability to make use of such realizations. Robert Dodsley, for example, writes a poem entitled "Melpomene: or the Regions of Terrour and P i t y " (Chalmers, X V , 349). His subject, indirectly approached, is the proper material for tragic poetry, and he suggests that terrors, horror, panic may be ingredients of imaginative elevation. If the specters and necromantic shores intended to achieve these emotions seem in no way real or convincing, the difficulty lay in conveying, rather than merely stating, their significance. Thomas Chatterton, for one, made a good many attempts in this direction, and his failures are illuminating. Ye ghosts! that leave the silent tomb, T o wander in the midnight gloom, Unseen by mortal eye: Garlands of yew and cypress bring, Adorn his tomb, his praises sing, And swell the gen'ral sigh. ("Elegy, on the Death of Mr. John Tandey, Sen."; Chalmers, X V , 475)

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When from the erthe the sonnes hulstred, Then from the flouretts straughte with dewe; Mie leege manne makes yee awhaped, And wytches theyre wytchencref doe. Then ryse the sprytes ugsome and rore, And take theyre walke the letten throwe. ("The Parlyamente of Sprytes"; Chalmers, X V , 385-386) T h e two passages, far removed as they may seem, have something in common with most of the ghost poetry of their time. T h e eccentric spellings, the word-coinages of the second, "medieval," example do not obscure the fact that in this passage as in so many others we have seen, the supernatural beings are essentially functionless. T h e spirits are "ugsome" and they "rore" and walk about in the churchyard; the witches do their witchcraft, but they have no real reason for existing, no meaning. In the elegy, on the other hand, the ghosts are given a function, but a strangely inappropriate one. W h y should ghosts mourn for one presumably newly become a ghost himself? T h e purpose of "adding horror to the gloom," suggested by the Dodsley poem, was virtually the only valid function of the supernatural in nonnarrative verse. It might evoke horror or melancholy, but neither emotion is likely to be convincing when the spirits' roles as emotional counters are their only roles. Closely connected with the problem of finding a convincing function for supernatural personages was that of finding convincing diction for describing them. It is difficult to distinguish among much minor eighteenth-century supernatural poetry partly because the words of one poem tend to seem precisely those of another: the reader comes to feel that the act of writing such a piece consists mainly

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of making new arrangements of the same adjective-noun combinations, the same verbs. Lo! rising f r o m yon dreary tomb, W h a t spectres stalk across the gloom! W i t h haggard eyes, and visage pale, And voice that moans with feeble wail! O'er yon long resounding plain Slowly moves the solemn train; Wailing wild with shrieks of woe O'er the bones that rest below! W h i l e the dull Night's startled ear Shrinks, aghast with thrilling fear! Or stand with thin robes wasting soon, A n d eyes that blast the sick'ning moon!

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This development is more detailed than that of the typical poem of the time, but no more convincing for that: tombs are too often dreary in the eighteenth century; specters always stalk, wail, moan, and frequently have "eyes that blast the sick'ning moon." The increase of detail, in other words, is not compelling because it is not compellingly expressed. The diction is dead not only to a modern ear; it does not make meaningful use of any established tradition, does not suggest a world-view or a context of any kind. The specific activities of the ghosts are justified by tradition, but the language with which they are described is singularly empty. The Ossian poems seemed in their own time remarkable partly because they appeared to have solved precisely these problems. Blair's famous panegyric on them emphasizes the important function of ghosts in the poetry: "Ossian" introduced spirits, Blair suggests, not only because "it is likely he believed them himself," but, more importantly, "because they gave his poems that solemn and marvellous cast, which suited his genius." 2 8 The marvelous must be employed

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with discretion, must be adjusted properly with the probable, and in the Ossianic pieces it is appropriately used: it does not interfere with the display of human nature, it has less of the incredible than most supernatural machinery, and it serves "to diversify the scene, and to heighten the subject by an awful grandeur, which is the great design of machinery" (page 34). But Blair, like many of his contemporaries, was under the illusion that these were genuinely ancient poems, and the illusion made a great deal of difference. The first page of his treatise points out that ancient poetry is most valuable for presenting "the history of human imagination and passion"; this assumption is the foundation of his work. One wonders how he would have felt about the spirits if he hadrtt thought it likely that the poet believed in them himself and that their introduction was justified by the superstitions of the time. One doubts, too, that Macpherson would have dared use ghosts as he does — in a sense solving the eighteenth-century problems of dealing with the supernatural in poetry — without the disguise of pseudoantiquity. Although the principal function of spirits, in the Ossian poems as in most of the other pieces we have examined, is atmospheric, the supernatural seems here genuinely part of the poetic texture. References appear on page after page, hundreds of them, casual metaphoric references ("He dimly gleamed like the form of a ghost, which meets a traveller, by night, on the dark-skirted heath" 29 ), narrative bits, allusions which make spirits seem almost part of the natural scene ("Has some ghost, from his dusky cloud, bent forward to thine ear; to frighten Cathmore from the field with the tales of old? Dwellers of the folds of night, your voice is but a blast to me; which takes the grey thistle's head, and strews its beard on streams" [page 91]). When

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the ghosts are described, it is often with a certain freshness: "His face is like the beam of the setting moon; his robes are of the clouds of the hill: his eyes are like two decaying flames. Dark is the wound of his breast." 30 The poet is partly concerned, clearly, to insist upon the relation of the spiritual to the natural; but he has managed, as a result of this concern, to find a new sort of language for dealing with the supernatural. It is, to be sure, pretentious enough; but at least it is pretentious in a new way. And the ghosts are made functionally convincing by their role in the exotic narrative, in which events and characterization seem necessarily remote. Within this poetic context, the supernatural seems convincing because believed in: it is part of the fabric of life for the characters of the poem. Ghosts in the Ossianic poems, almost uniquely in the mid-eighteenth century, seem genuinely to belong; to this particular poetic conception the supernatural does not seem extraneous. The two central devices used by Macpherson were to be exploited in many poetic contexts: provision of a narrative framework within which supernatural beings might function, and a sufficiently exotic setting, remote in place or time or both, made it easier for poets to use the unearthly without great self-consciousness, and with less excuse for triteness. "Thy necromantic forms, in vain, "Haunt us on the tented plain: "We bid those spectre-shapes avaunt, "Ashtaroth, and Termagaunt! "With many a demon, pale of hue, "Doom'd to drink the bitter dew "That drops from Macon's sooty tree, "Mid the dread grove of ebony. "Nor magic charms, nor fiends of hell, "The christian's holy courage quell." 3 1

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The true incantatory note is struck, at least briefly, in this piece by Thomas Warton: obvious as one may find the Miltonic device of exploiting such names as "Ashtaroth" and "Termagaunt," one senses also some genuine poetic fascination with the supernatural for its own sake. So far distant from ordinary reality, so exotic, is the action of the poem that the supernatural comes to seem in it essentially natural. 32 One of the most elaborate developments of a narrative framework for supernatural detail in this period occurs in a poem by William Mickle called " T h e Sorceress," written at the request of a friend to illustrate "Mortimer's picture of Incantation." Its relation to a painting, obviously, justifies great concentration on the pictorial: Around the tomb, in mystic lore, Were forms of various mien, And efts, and foul-wing'd serpents, bore The altar's base obscene. Eyeless and huge a starv'd toad sat In corner murk aloof, And many a snake and famish'd bat Clung to the crevic'd roof . . . T h e poem has, however, extensive narrative as well as descriptive elements; it tells how the sorceress summons the corpse of Wolfwold's father, producing in the maiden Ulla an overwhelming reaction: Oh cold, down Ulla's snow-like face, The trembling sweat-drops fell, And borne by sprites of gliding pace, The corpse approach'd the cell. (Chalmers, XVII, 531) T h e girl's horror is described in great detail; finally she dies when the specter of her lover appears.

Mickle calls the piece a ballad, and the fact that this lavish supernatural detail should occur in such a context is significant. The rediscovery of the ballad supplied a structural and dramatic device for effectively employing the unearthly. Within the ballad framework it was easy to achieve the chronological remoteness so useful for making the unearthly convincing; and the ancient ballads often suggested excuses for the introduction of ghosts and demons. Moreover, in ballads poets might escape the traps of hackneyed diction — although not, perhaps, so completely as one might expect. Josephine Miles has valuably documented the ways in which the ballad was "domesticated" in the eighteenth century. She points out that the modified ballads in Percy's Reliques, for example, contain fewer words of color and more of explicit emotion, fewer nouns of family relation and more of setting, fewer active verbs than the traditional versions.83 And she explains that one reason for the eighteenth-century interest in the ballad was that the form seemed to offer a solution to the problem of writing heroic poetry in a nonheroic age: the characters of the ballad, if not its language, "were of the highest" (page 6). For the special case of the supernatural ballad, both these points are relevant. W e have seen already, in connection with the earlier years of the century, the extent to which the strong simplicity of the ballad might be blurred for the sake of sentimentality. The sentimentalization of the supernatural ballad continued throughout the century. As in Mickle's ballad the ultimate center of interest is the girl's horror and dismay, so in many contemporary pieces stress fell on the emotional reactions of characters within the poem: the effect achieved is a sense of sympathy in the reader rather than a direct apprehension of horror. Emotion, in short, is diluted and softened. Yet the other, apparently contradic-

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tory, suggestion made by Miss Miles is also clearly significant. Despite the fact that eighteenth-century poets often managed to negate in their own poetry the very qualities they admitted in their models, it is quite clear that the material of the ballads indeed seemed to them the stuff of heroic and dramatic poetry: they merely shifted the emphasis, in many cases, from the drama of action to that of emotion. T h e supernatural poems in Percy's Reliques are not numerous. There is the song of a lunatic lover, including an appeal to the "Grim king of the ghosts" to come to the afflicted one along with witches and night-hags to hug him close in their arms. This comes, says Percy, from an old copy in the British Museum. " T h e Wandering Prince of T r o y , " from the famous folio volume, ends with Dido's "Ghastly ghost" appearing to Aeneas and " A multitude of uglye fiends" bearing him away. "Fair Margaret and Sweet William" is, Percy thinks, the old song quoted by Fletcher, and he takes "Sweet William's Ghost" from Allan Ramsay's collection. These four comprise half the pieces in the collection dealing to considerable extent with the unpleasant supernatural. T h e other half are all eighteenth-century works, and three of the four, from the number of times they were reprinted, appear to have been among the most popular poems of the century. "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" is here again, and "Margaret's Ghost," Mallet's famous piece, and " T h e Braes of Yarrow." The fourth eighteenthcentury supernatural poem is " T h e W i t c h of W o k e y , " identified in later editions of Percy as having been written in 1748 " b y the ingenious Dr. Harrington, of Bath." It is not a close ballad-imitation, but the ballad-influence is apparent, and it is an excellent demonstration of Miss Miles' contentions. There is the clear influence of Spenser, which

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9i she insists upon as central to the eighteenth-century modifications of the ballad, and there is a great deal of emphasis on setting: Deep in the dreary dismall cell, Which seem'd and was ycleped hell, This blear-eyed hag did hide: Nine wicked elves, as legends sayne, She chose to form her guardian trayne, And kennel near her side. Here screeching owls oft made their nest, While wolves its craggy sides possest, Night-howling thro' the rock: N o wholesome herb could here be found; She blasted every plant around, And blister'd every flock.34

And the sentimental point is here, too, in a more blatant form than usual. The witch, who is eventually turned to stone by a "learned wight," leaves a curse on the girls of the locale that no man should woo them. Sure enough, says the poet, to this day there is a shortage of men in the vicinity. He pleads first for youths from "Oxenford" to come courting, but then concludes comfortably: W e only wait to find sich men, As best deserve your choice

— this after a brief panegyric on the virtue of the local girls. The nature of the witch is established with full emphasis on the horrific details of her personality and her surroundings. Yet her function has nothing to do with horror: she exists in the poem in order to make a sentimental point and to give that point dramatic interest. The sentimentalization of the horrible supernatural may be documented in all the great collections of the century's middle years. David Herd's (1776) duplicates Bishop

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Percy's to a considerable extent: we find again " T h e Braes of Y a r r o w , " "William's Ghost," "William and Margaret," and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William." There is also a piece called "Kenneth," which depends heavily for sentimental effect on elaborate presentation of various omens of death.35 Dodsley's 1763 collection, weak in ballad material, nonetheless includes Tickell's "Colin and L u c y , " one of the early ballad imitations making use of supernatural atmosphere in sentimental context. And the verse tales of this part of the century, whether or not they stray from ballad form, tend to evoke melancholy rather than horror, even when they stress horrible material. John Logan, for example, produced a poem entitled, like William Hamilton's earlier one, " T h e Braes of Yarrow," which fairly wallows in emotion. Clasp'd in his arms, I little thought That I should never more behold him! Scarce was he gone, I saw his ghost; It vanish'd with a shriek of sorrow; Thrice did the water-wraith ascend, And gave a doleful groan thro' Yarrow! (Chalmers, XVIII, 53) The dolefulness, the sorrow, the "never more" -— these are the important elements here, and the ghost and waterwraith emphasize them. Michael Bruce writes of a lover who sees at times " T h e dear, the dreary ghost of her he lov'd." 36 The line suggests the singular lack of drama —- what could be less dramatic than a dreary ghost? — and the inappropriately tender emotion often associated with the supernatural. It comes at the end of a poem about a maiden who steals a plant, thus arousing the "angry demon of the isle" and causing him to send a whirlwind which drowns her. But

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the angry demon has no reality; he is merely a device for turning girl into ghost — a dear ghost, a dreary ghost — and thus making her a more forceful emotional counter than she could otherwise be. The usual themes of ghost poetry were betrayed, or otherwise truncated, love. These might be varied: William Richardson, for example, offers a "rural tale" in which the heroine is unjustly persecuted by a ghost who thinks she has betrayed him.37 But the tone remains that of gentle grief, even though the ghost has a "bosom gor'd/With welling wounds." These poets clearly felt the emotional possibilities of the supernatural, but they had not discovered yet exactly what those possibilities were. Solving the problem of giving ghosts or witches a function by putting them into a narrative, they had not yet grasped that the function of such beings must be a special one. The typical eighteenth-century ghost poem, one feels, would be much the same without the ghost. Ill W e have not discovered thus far, in dealing with the middle years of the century, wholehearted commitment, on the part of either critics or poets, to the value of the supernatural. The tendency to hedge has been demonstrated in various ways: by the critics through appeals to the benighted English past or to classic precedent, by poets through references to superstition or through sentimental emphasis. But some critics followed the logic of their arguments further than we have yet seen, and produced a rationale which totally justified the poetic supernatural. It made use partly of arguments that had been employed as early as Dryden, but in tone and emphasis these eighteenth-century critics are conspicuously different from their predecessors.

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Poetic truth is not the same as philosophical and historic truth.38 This far-reaching judgment is made by Richard Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance and elaborated in his discourse "On the Idea of Universal Poetry." Poetry is in some sense divine, because it lifts the mind, through fiction, to exalted conceptions. It "impersonates the virtues and vices; peoples all creation with new and living forms; calls up infernal spectres to terrify, or brings down celestial natures to astonish, the imagination; assembles, combines, or connects its ideas, at pleasure; in short, prefers not only the agreeable, and the graceful, but as occasion calls upon her, the vast, the incredible, I had almost said, the impossible, to the obvious truth and nature of things." 39 The poet must follow nature, to be sure, but this does not mean only the known events and course of this world: the poet's world — this is the point reiterated again and again — is the world of the imagination.40 It follows, consequently, that the nation whose religious system is readily adapted to the "extravagant turn of the human mind" is likely to produce good poetry. "Whence it cannot seem strange that, of all the forms in which poetry has appeared, that of pagan fable, and gothic romance, should, in their turns, be found the most alluring to the true poet." Lacking the advantage of an appropriate religious system, the poet will invent supernatural beings to suit his high purpose: "he will mould every system, and convert every subject, into the most amazing and miraculous form." 4 1 Hurd's primary assumption is that the end of poetry is not to instruct, not even to instruct and delight, but solely to give pleasure. From that rather startling assumption the rest follows almost by necessity. It had long been clear that the supernatural was imaginatively stimulating, but not that

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the stimulation of the imagination could be considered an end in itself.42 Five years after the first publication of Letters on Chivalry and Romance, William Duff restated Hurd's position yet more emphatically in An Essay on Original Genius (1767), where he insists, without qualification, that the highest achievement of original genius is the creation of supernatural beings. "The ideal region is indeed the proper sphere of Fancy, in which she may range with a loose rein, without suffering restraint from the severe checks of Judgment; for Judgment has very little jurisdiction in this province of Fable. The invention of . . . supernatural characters . . ., and the exhibition of them, with their proper attributes and offices, are the highest efforts and the most pregnant proofs of truly ORIGINAL GENIUS." 4 3 Although the restrictions of judgment upon fancy are necessary, Duff maintains, in all other areas of imaginative creation, the only requirement for supernatural personages in poetry is that the incidents in which they are involved must be "possible, and consonant to the general analogy of their nature; an analogy, founded not upon truth or strict probability, but upon common tradition or popular opinion" (page 142). " T h e wildest and most exuberant imagination will succeed best in excursions of this kind"; for an imagination of this sort, put to such use, Duff has nothing but praise (page 140). T o support his contention that adequate use of the supernatural demands great genius, Duff observes that Shakespeare was the only English writer who had really explored the supernatural. Mrs. Montagu, on the other hand, starts by assuming that Shakespeare is matchless in all respects and deduces from this notion various principles about the proper function of the imagination and the place of the

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supernatural in poetry. Her conclusions are much the same as Duff's basic assumptions. She admires Shakespeare for his "peculiar felicity in those fictions and inventions, from which Poetry derives its highest distinction, and from whence it first assumed its pretensions to divine inspiration, and appeared the associate of Religion." 44 For his use of "praeternatural beings," she has only praise; like Hurd and Duff, she clearly believes that the imagination must be the arbiter of poetry. Reason is ultimately irrelevant; the test of the tolerable is what the imagination will accept (pages 141-142). And the imagination is strongly aroused by the supernatural, if it is connected with "the August and the Terrible" (page 164). "The agency of Witches and Spirits excites a species of terror, that cannot be effected by the operation of human agency, or by any form or disposition of human things. For the known limits of their powers and capacities set certain bounds to our apprehensions; mysterious horrors, undefined terrors, are raised by the intervention of beings, whose nature we do not understand, whose actions we cannot control, and whose influence we know not how to escape" (pages 175-176). The same implicit assumption that imaginative elevation is the ultimate criterion of poetry underlies the interest in the sublime which runs through the eighteenth century. "Whatever is in any sort terrible . . . or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." 45 So wrote Burke, and again, even more emphatically: "Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime" (page 58). The notion of sublimity as an aesthetic criterion depends, of course, on the idea that elevation of emotion is in some sense an end in itself. Terror is the most

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exalted emotion; it must, then, be connected with the most exalted poetry. And obscurity is a concomitant of terror: this view is suggested by Mrs. Montagu's "mysterious horrors, undefined terrors," and stated directly by Burke, who remarks that ghosts and goblins are the very types of terror-provoking beings, and consequently the most obvious sources of poetic sublimity.48 He was echoed by many of his successors: John Aikin, for example, considers the wellnigh universal interest in such matters as ghosts and goblins, the shades of the dead, and furies, and Gothic romances, convincing evidence of the human love for terror.47 " A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced . . . our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers" (page 125). Moreover, there is a direct relation, Aikin feels, between the luridness of an event and the pleasure it induces: "the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it." 48 Alexander Gerard, far more restrained in statement, implies the same attitude: "Objects exciting terror are . . . in general sublime; for terror always implies astonishment, occupies the whole soul, and suspends all its motions." 49 Such emphasis on the intrinsic value of the emotions derived from contemplation of the supernatural makes finally irrelevant the problem of whether the unearthly can be believed in. True or not, the notion of ghosts was compelling. Critics had now come to a profound realization of this fact; it remained for the poets to catch up with them. Yet few poets, in these middle years of the century, were successful in using the supernatural with full seriousness and force.

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It was not, of course, necessary to assent to superstition in order to use it with maximum power. Evidence is provided by the Spenserian William Thompson, who, writing of spring, exploits several superstitions while denying their validity. In this blest season, pregnant with delight, Ne may the boading owl with screeches wound The solemn silence of the quiet night, Ne croaking raven, with unhallowed sound, Ne damned ghost affray with deadly yell The waking lover, rais'd by mighty spell To pale the stars, till Hesper shine it back to Hell. Ne witches rifle gibbets, by the Moon (With horrour winking, trembling all with fear) Of many a clinking chain, and canker'd bone: Nor imp in visionary shape appear, To blast the thriving verdure of the plain; Ne let hobgoblin, ne the ponk, profane With shadowy glare the light, and mad the bursting brain.50 The poem depends, obviously, on the contrast between what is denied and what is affirmed: between the "pregnant," "blest," "solemn," "thriving" season and the "unhallowed" beings who might profane it — beings, one feels, only precariously kept at bay. The details connected with the ghosts and witches and imps are totally familiar but unexpectedly effective — since the poet knows precisely w h y he is using these figures. He makes no effort to create original monsters; his effect depends upon evocation of tradition. This evocation recognizes and exploits the fact that literary terror is an emotion both pleasant and unpleasant, that one both wishes and fears that ghosts should exist. On the one hand, it is strangely appealing to contemplate the possibility of witches and hobgoblins; on the other, it is reassuring to have their present existence (but

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not their potential reality) rejected: the freshness, the sweetness, the blessedness of May may be more fully realized as a result. Similarly centered on tonal ambiguities is Collins's "Ode to Fear." Like some of his most effective contemporaries, Collins here makes the assumption that the imaginative elevation provided by the supernatural is undeniably a positive value. He sees, however, a whole series of problems deriving from this assumption. Given that the supernatural is conducive to imaginative insight — where, precisely, does truth lie, and what is its relation to imagination? The poem begins with an invocation to Fear as Thou, to whom the world unknown, With all its shadowy shapes, is shown.51 The "world unknown," one would suspect, is a real, if unfamiliar, realm; but the next line describes it as "the unreal scene." And this dilemma of whether the world revealed by Fear — which is, as the poem makes abundantly clear, primarily the world of the supernatural — the dilemma of whether this world is or is not real runs through the entire ode. It is necessary to submit one's mind quite consciously to the power of fear: but then, "with shuddering meek submitted thought," one gains the power of vision. The bards who have in this way submitted are termed "thy awakening bards"; Shakespeare is the "prophet" of Fear, who spoke in fear's "divine emotions." Proper submission to fear involves believing "devoutly" in the truth of the strange tales of superstition; but if the result is the divine insight and feeling of a Shakespeare, such belief is obviously valuable. The "Ode to Fear" places full weight on both sides, on the dangers of belief in the supernatural and the riches such belief has to offer. It ends with an unqualified

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statement that the values outweigh the dangers, and the statement is fully supported by the power generated in the ode itself through consideration of supernatural phenomena, embodied both directly (in fiends, ghosts, goblins) and indirectly in a wonderful series of personifications. Less ambiguous in his commitment to the value of supernatural material was Thomas Gray, who went to some lengths a good deal before Macpherson in using similar methods to demonstrate his enthusiasm for the material of Germanic mythology. As a result he had to contend with the charge not only of obscurity, but of impropriety. Percival Stockdale, for example, wrote of him: "whether misled by a whimsical, and extravagant taste, or palled with the luxuriance of classical ground; he often deserts the elegant, and sublime objects of Greece, and Italy, and England; and chuses for the themes, and ornaments of his Muse, the dreary heaths, the howling caves; the warp and woof, and vile webs of the North." Gray's "preposterous love of these disgusting, and squalid subjects," Stockdale continues, is a prime source of weakness in his work. 52 In his use of the supernatural in the Norse odes, Gray indeed tends to emphasize the "disgusting and squalid": his typical defining adjective is "griesly." Like Macpherson, though without his pretense of authentic antiquity, Gray attempts to employ the supernatural as an integral part of his narrative structure. But he goes farther than Macpherson in trying also to make the supernatural bear a weight of serious meaning. The "griesly band" of murdered bards who sit on the cliff in "The Bard" provide the prophetic vision and voices ("in dreadful harmony" with the living bard who also speaks) of the poem; their status as ghosts becomes increasingly important as the evils which lie in store for the living are increasingly emphasized. When the

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living bard mourns that the dead have melted, vanished from his eyes, leaving him "unbless'd, unpitied, here to mourn," w e are prepared for his subsequent suicide as an act of escape as well as of defiance. T h e ghosts perceived in the beginning as "griesly" and "dreadful" are by the end of the poem seen in quite a different light, as symbols of the prophetic poetic insight and power (they are weavers at the loom of fate) only fully to be achieved after liberation from life. T h e "fatal sisters," those other weavers of "the warp and woof, and vile webs of the N o r t h , " are given different but equally intense symbolic value. T h e y are, of course, images of horror: See the griesly texture grow! ('Tis of human entrails made) And the weights, that play below, Each a gasping Warriour's head.53 But it is functional rather than merely "decorative" horror; " T h e Fatal Sisters" presents a vision of war which stresses its evils in terms of human values and experience. T h e dreadful web which the sisters weave has, after all, "the woof of victory," and the paradox is central to the poem: the splendor of victory is inseparable from its dreadfulness; the horror of the supernatural is in this instance essentially the same as the "natural" horror of war. Versification of northern mythology was becoming increasingly common in this period; Stockdale's comments, published in 1778, sound a decidedly old-fashioned note. Y e t Gray's attempts to incorporate the material of such mythology into his own poetic texture seemed revolutionary and not altogether satisfactory; he soon abandoned it although he, like Collins, clearly had a deep sense of the imaginative possibilities of the unearthly, recognized its

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fundamental appeal, and was capable of using it without apology. In the last quarter of the century, one starts to find more and more unashamed and genuinely striking use of such material — even, occasionally, material not based on any obvious tradition: Oft here the fiend his grisly visage shows, His limbs of giant form in vesture clad Of dread collected ice and stiffen'd snow, The same he wore a thousand years ago, That thwarts the sunbeam and endures the day. 54

The last line strikes the genuine note of poetry: an imagination is working here upon the idea of the supernatural in a way almost unknown earlier in the century.

m C H A P T E R FOUR gp

Supernatural Horror 1 7 8 1 - 1 8 0 0

ere is an excerpt from a poem by Mallet written in the second decade of the eighteenth century, followed by a passage composed by Richard Polwhele some seventy years later:

H

Night hears from where, wide-hovering in mid-sky, She rules the sable hour: and calls her train Of visionary fears; the shrouded ghost, The dream distressful, and th'incumbent hag, That rise to Fancy's eye in horrid forms, While Reason slumbering lies.1 W h e n spectres clad in sable shrouds, Gleam'd from the chambers of the clouds; When slow, along the midnight heath, Mov'd the prophetic pomp of death; . . . 'Twas then I deem'd some danger near, And own'd my bosom chill'd with fear. 2

It is hard to feel that much poetic progress has been made in seven decades. There is, to be sure, some difference in tone between the two pieces: Mallet's sense of rational superiority combined with nonrational fascination has disappeared in Polwhele, who commits himself gleefully to the enjoyment of fear. Polwhele's specters are somewhat more convincing, but hardly more specifically described than Mallet's. The later poet's tetrameter lines have an in-

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appropriate jauntiness; Mallet's efforts to sound the Miltonic note seem advanced by comparison. Polwhele's career extended from the very last years of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth; he was, in short, precisely contemporary with Blake and Coleridge. The Romantic Movement was well under way: scholars and literary amateurs alike were doing research in Germanic folklore; ballads became even more popular; collections were made of English and Scottish traditional poetry. The justifications for the unearthly in poetry became increasingly obvious: yet for every poetic treatment of ghosts or demons that might conceivably arouse a genuine emotional response, there are dozens which seem completely dead or frivolous, at the end of the eighteenth century as at its beginning. The critics, too, had little new to say. Only occasionally did evidence appear of a continuing concern with the requirements of epic. The prolific William Hayley produced an extended versified discussion of the subject, in which he rejects the notion that supernatural agencies are necessary to epic, but promptly qualifies this position in notes which suggest that machinery or the lack of it does not necessarily have anything to do with quality. 3 John Scott disposes firmly of the question of classic machinery: "Mythological machinery is managed with so much difficulty that in modern composition it seldom fails to disgust." 4 But lively discussion centered more typically on the place and value of "Gothic" (that is, Norse, Icelandic, Germanic) paraphernalia, a far more immediate problem. Although there was a general atmosphere of enthusiasm for this fresh source of supernatural material, the note of reserve is not absent from critical discussion of it. The German ballad "Lenore," for example, frequently trans-

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lated and received with widespread enthusiasm, could not quite stand on its own merits. In the Advertisement of his translation, the laureate Pye remarks: "This little poem, from the singularity of the incidents, and the wild horror of the images, is certainly an object of curiosity, but is by no means held up as a pattern for imitation." 5 T . J. Mathias observes "that the Pagan Fable is now exhausted, and the specious miracles of Gothic Romance have never of late years produced a poet." 6 " N o German nonsense sways my English heart,/ Unus'd at ghosts and rattling bones to start," he writes (page 229). T o be sure, a few pages later he inquires, after pointing out that wizards no longer hold their revels, "Say, are the days of blest delusion fled?/ Must fiction rear no more her languid head?" (page 232). Even the apologists for the Gothic tend to qualify their enthusiasm. " W e must not expect that justness of sentiment, or that purity of diction, which is to be met with in the poets of Greece and Rome-, hurried on by the impetuosity of his genius . . . [the bard] forgets the mechanics of poetry, and passing the bounds of probability, creates a new world for himself." 7 It is, of course, the creation of that new world that made bardic poetry so attractive to eighteenth-century poets and critics. It was a world of the imagination, in which manners and sentiment were not so overwhelmingly important. Above all, it was a fresh world. "The old Gothic fables exhibit a peculiarity of manners and situation, which, if not from their intrinsic excellence, may, from their being less hackneyed, afford more materials for the writer's imagination, and contribute more to the reader's entertainment." 8 This explanation is by Richard Hole, who was apparently thought by his contemporaries to be a master of supernatural poetry. Again, he writes, of his own poem "Arthur," " T h e delineation

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. . . of . . . manners, has been but a secondary consideration. This performance is chiefly referred to the tribunal of Fancy, and if there condemned, it makes no farther appeal" (page xvii). T o Nathan Drake, an ardent defender of the Gothic, Hole's "Arthur" seems a failure: a failure because its machinery was not sufficiently awful, and did not awaken pity and terror.9 More systematically than most of his contemporaries, Drake outlined the precise values of Gothic superstition: It has been however too much the fashion among critical writers to condemn the introduction of any kind of supernatural agency although perfectly consonant with the common feelings of mankind; and the simple, yet powerful superstitions recommended to the poet of this paper, seem to bid fair for sharing the fate of more complex systems; but whilst they are thus formed to influence the people, to surprize, elevate, and delight, with a willing admiration, every faculty of the human mind, how shall criticism with impunity dare to expunge them? Genius has ever had a predilection for such imagery, and I may venture, I think, to predict, that if at any time these romantic legends be totally laid aside, our national poetry will degenerate into mere morality, criticism, and satire; and that the sublime, the terrible, and the fanciful in poetry, will no longer exist (page 93). A genuine shift in sensibility seems evidenced here: when a critic can speak scornfully of "mere morality," he obviously feels reasonably secure in his assumption that the imagination provides the ultimate test for poetry. But in Drake's time it was also beginning to be realized that the appeal of the supernatural to the imagination was not perfectly automatic, that "a grateful astonishment, a welcome sensation of fear" (Drake, page 90) do not inevitably result from the poetic introduction of a ghost.

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Shortly after the turn of the century, Mrs. Radcliffe made a significant distinction between terror and horror — a distinction that Burke had not made, although she suggests that he had. "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one." 10 Terror — the emotion appropriate to sublime poetry — expands the soul and awakens the faculties: this is the achievement toward which most writers on the supernatural aspired, and it is only in such a context that the creation of a new world becomes meaningful. If the new world can free men from rigid patterns of thought, if by participation in it they can genuinely expand, the supernatural is clearly justified. B y the time Lyrical Ballads was published, Wordsworth felt no need even to discuss the use of supernatural material in "The Ancient Mariner." Indeed, in his 1800 note on the poem he complains that the character of the Mariner does not partake enough of "something supernatural" for a man who has "been long under the controul of supernatural impressions." 1 1 One of Wordsworth's own concerns, however, was to counteract the view that we have seen suggested by Nathan Drake and Anne Radcliffe, the idea that the supernatural has a special sort of power over the imagination. Peter Bell, he wrote to Southey, "was composed under a belief that the Imagination not only does not require for its exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that, though such agency be excluded, the faculty may be called forth as imperiously, and for kin-

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dred results of pleasure, by incidents within the compass of poetic probability, in the humblest departments of daily life." 1 2 Coleridge's position, of course, was different. In the famous passage of Biographia Literaria where he writes about the purpose of Lyrical Ballads, he says merely: The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.13 Again — and even more famously — "it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (II, 2). The problem of the supernatural's role in poetry, then, by this time had to do with function rather than propriety. There was no longer much question about whether the poet might legitimately make use of the unearthly; the question was, rather, what purpose would be served by the introduction of such material. The originality of Coleridge's major contribution to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads did not depend on its subject matter; it depended on his effort to secure for the poetic supernatural a new sort of belief which rested not on any argument for the actuality of supernatural phenomena, but on the creation of psychological validity for supernatural experience. That Coleridge

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was triumphantly successful in his attempt there is no disputing; nor is there any disputing that "The Ancient Mariner" represents something radically new in the way of supernatural poetry. Robert Mayo, who demonstrates convincingly that most of the pieces in Lyrical Ballads had much in common with a good deal of other poetry being written at the same time, points out also that "The Ancient Mariner" was the one exception, the one poem that seemed in its own time unorthodox. "Opinion was confused," Mayo reminds us, "as by no other poem in the volume." 14 And the newness of this piece, like the "newness" of Wordsworth's diction, consisted in a radical solution to an old problem, a problem conspicuously displayed in the years immediately preceding the publication of Lyrical Ballads. II Difficulties in defining satisfactorily the precise function and value of supernatural material were especially relevant in this period because, in spite of the fact that little conspicuously successful use had been made of the unearthly earlier in the century — or perhaps because of this fact — the supernatural had in a sense worn itself out as poetic subject matter. Earlier, for the critics at least, the justifications for the terrifying supernatural in poetry had to do with its high seriousness, its association with religion. Ghosts and demons were, or could be, sublime subjects. Now, late in the century, Uvedale Price, defining the new aesthetic quality of "picturesqueness," observes that angels, as painted by poets, arouse ideas of beauty and sublimity, but "like earthly objects, they become picturesque when ruined." 15 Picturesqueness, he says, is between beauty and sublimity, but founded on the opposite qualities from

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beauty (page 76). It is of great aesthetic significance; yet to find fallen angels merely picturesque is to suggest that their import is only aesthetic. Arthur Barker, examining the shifting attitudes of the eighteenth century toward Milton's Satan, discovers an increasing tendency to value Milton especially for his creation of hell and its ruler. The term "sublimity" was preserved for these creations, yet gradually the balance was "shifted to favour the dreadful, and . . . the conception of Milton's sublimity was . . . transformed from a theory of religious elevation to a delightful sensationalism." 16 As the supernatural came more and more to be associated with the sensational, it became increasingly difficult to use it for purposes more serious than titillation. One solution — an old one — was again to reject the supernatural altogether; poets who confess their rejection tend to be rather wistful about it. Thus Crabbe, for example: Ghosts, Fairies, Daemons, dance before our Eyes; . . . Ah! happy he who thus in magic Themes, O'er Worlds bewitch'd, in early rapture dreams . . . But lost, for ever lost, to me these Joys, Which Reason scatters and which Time destroys, Too dearly bought; maturer Judgment calls M y busied Mind, from Tales and Madrigals; . . . Ev'n the last lingering Fiction of the Brain, The church-yard Ghost, is now at rest again: And all these wayward Wanderings of my Youth, Fly Reason's Power, and shun the Light of Truth. 17

"The Head and Heart are foes," he observes later (page 162); the really responsible poet is obliged to choose the head. Crabbe is contradicted, however, by more sentimental writers such as Anna Seward, the "Swan of Lichfield": "The noble mind reveres terrific forms,/ And grows

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enamour'd of their darkest frown." 18 It is significant that this assertion occurs in the context of a passage of praise for Ossian, who would, Miss Seward thinks, be happy in the Alps (the nominal subject of her poem), except for the fact that the loud storms of the mountains might drown the voices of the heroic dead. Many second-rate writers of this period found it possible to consider the supernatural only as it had been considered by previous poets: they use praise of Ossian or of Spenser as an excuse for introducing other-worldly beings, or model their work closely on that of some distinguished predecessor. Even this device might seem too daring: Hugh Downman, after composing a piece called " T h e Land of the Muses" in Spenserian style, had second thoughts about it. Here is a discussion of the maid Fancy from his first attempt: Of maugre dernful Pluto's grisly fires, Would cleave the earth and rowse to upper air The Furies with their whips of iron wires, And snakes loud hissing in their troubled hair, And Hecate at her call would her dread front uprear.19 But Downman prints this version at the end of his collected poems, and substitutes for it earlier in the volume a revision, in heroic couplets and characteristically eighteenth-century diction: Or spite of Pluto's horrid flames, would dare T o cleave the earth, and rouse to upper air The Furies with their whips of iron dread, The snakes loud hissing on each ghastly head; With Them, would Hecate reluctant stand, Her cypress wreathe display, and wield her sparkling brand. (page 22) This, with its clear emotional signposts ("horrid flames," "iron dread"), obviously seems to him a more proper sort

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of poetry; yet he still invokes Spenser as his authority. T h e odes to terror, to fancy, to horror continued to the century's end, becoming ever more frenzied, but depending at least partially on a response conditioned by earlier writers. Thus a particularly weak "Ode to Fancy" by an unidentified author—-an ode relying on maddening tempests, ruined castles, gloomy woods, magic spells, witching sorceries, specters, and visionary shapes that "wildly glare and loudly shriek"-—-wins the approval of an editor because he attributes to it "all the imagination of a Collins." 20 With the vast majority of the supernatural poems written in this period, one's sense of the secondhand persists. N o w , as earlier, many poets seemed concerned to use the supernatural as a means of achieving atmospheric effects. Certainly this is one function of the unearthly personages and events of " T h e Ancient Mariner"; but most of the supernatural pieces written by contemporaries of the young Coleridge have more in common with work composed fifty years earlier than with anything in Lyrical Ballads. Poets who invoked terrors of another world did so most often with an apparent sense that such invocation was expected of them. Spirits were traditional concomitants of night, but seldom did a writer manage to summon much enthusiasm about them. Here is a characteristic sample of the bored tone with which the unearthly might be invoked: if e'er malignant sprites, On purposes of vengeance sent, come forth To appal the guilty, now is sure their hour.21 Almost as mechanical was the use of ghosts to suggest the atmosphere of melancholy: Now droops the willow o'er the stream, Pale stalks his ghost in yonder grove, Dire Fancy paints him in my dream . . . 2 2

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T h e singular lack of conviction in such lines, the atmosphere of poetry composed with scissors and pastepot, is likely to intensify a reader's feeling that the supernatural was already essentially outmoded as poetic subject. Y e t there are hints, too, of fresh possibilities. One new direction of experimentation, barely touched, and touched almost entirely b y bad poets, is the use of supernatural imagery as a mode f o r expressing psychological truth. A s early as 1779, A n n a Seward had developed the metaphor of a haunted castle f o r a shift of emotion. 23 A better example, because its possibilities are more f u l l y explored, is a passage f r o m Joseph Fawcet, w h o writes with genuine passion about the origins of war. Oh! I could speculate, with calmer eye, A monstrous cloud of fierce, conflicting fiends, Met in mid air, with malice hot from hell, Keen pains propense and powerful to inflict, Furnish'd all o'er with cruel faculties, And throbbing thro' each vein with quenchless hate, Infernal fray! where all were uproar wild, All unrelenting spite and writhing wounds; A madd'ning war of venom, stings and teeth; Into whose dragon broil, and high-wrought rage, (Prodigious discord!) all her out-sent soul Alecto breath'd! 24 T h e supernatural personages here have no real narrative function; they are introduced solely f o r emotional emphasis on the horror of war. A n d F a w c e t is clearly attempting to exploit so many models simultaneously, and doing this so ineptly, that his work's derivativeness is f a r more conspicuous than its freshness. Y e t his technique is none the less significant. F o r giving a statement maximum emphasis, he chooses the supernatural as metaphor: this is an important variation on the old tactic of suggesting that the super-

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natural was merely a product of the imagination. The difference lies in the elimination of the "merely." The supernatural may be imaginative in origin, yet this fact in itself is meaningful. If speculation about demons reveals nothing about the nature of the universe, it does reveal something about the nature of man. Fawcet does not feel it necessary to insist that he is dealing with imaginary beings, although the fact that the scene is merely "speculation" and the mingling of Alecto with the demons suggest that his fiends are conceived as only metaphorical. But their lack of objective reality makes them no less potent as emblems of human malignity. If the fancy creates such beings, it does so in order to express meaningful ideas. So we find another minor poet, George Harley, beginning a discussion of "Daemons of Hell" with the suggestion that there is no such place as Hell; it is rather man's "Ideal Bridewell for unpunish'd guilt;/ His conscience Satan, and his sins the fiends." 25 But this rational explanation by no means ends the discussion: the poet then continues to develop his fancy about the night air being full of fiends. The recognition that these demons are imaginary actually strengthens their poetic power. This sort of justification for the supernatural, rarely as it appears and sketchily as it is used, is perhaps the most significant new development in supernatural poetry of the late eighteenth century, for it provides a rationale which opened the w a y for nineteenth-century poets to use such material without self-consciousness. The leap from George Harley to Coleridge is gigantic, but not miraculous; a key now existed to the richest resources of the material of horror. The second new direction of emphasis in this late period was a direct outgrowth of the widespread interest in ancient

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history, tradition, and mythology. It was obvious enough, given this interest, that one w a y of evoking a vanished but fascinating mode of life was to suggest the nature of its superstitions. Rocks, by infernal spells and magic prayer Shook from their base, and trembled high in air: The blasted stars their fading light withdrew; The labouring moon shed down a baleful dew; Spirits of hell aerial dances led; And rifled graves gave up the pale cold dead.26 In language and structure, this seems to belong to the earlier years of the century; on the basis of merit, it may hardly be worth consideration; but in purpose, it represents, again, something rather new. T h e passage comes from an Oxford prize poem of 1 7 9 1 , on " T h e Aboriginal Britons." Part of its intent is to suggest the mysterious, compelling aura which surrounds a vanished race; its mode of doing so is to insist on the association of the ancients with magic. T h e same association is made again and again, f o r presumably the same reasons, in the late 1700's. " T h e dusky moon is streak'd with blood,/ T h e demons of the tempest roar . . ." 27 These lines are from one of the many versions of " T h e Twilight of the G o d s , " versions almost always based on translations from Scandinavian legends. In such contexts, the blood-streaked moon, the roaring demons, do not have to be self-justifying; they are justified by the light they are presumed to shed on the ancient Scandinavians. A n d poets did not need to confine themselves to translation; they could branch out in imaginative excursions only vaguely "founded on the northern mythology." 28 For many writers, then, interest in the past for its own sake provided an excuse f o r dealing with far more lurid

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material than might otherwise seem justified. John Leyden, for example, who collected ballads and cooperated on Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, writes with fervor about "the Green Sisters of the haunted heath" who strew their frightful den with mangled limbs "And work with rending fangs the stranger's death" 29 — but only (and this is in 1799) with the excuse that they inhabit an "Ode on Scottish Scenery and Manners." But if this device justified sensational subject matter, and gave it a sort of seriousness it did not seem to have in its own right, it also suggests the continued uneasiness that poets felt about such material. Keats's "Lamia" was still far in the future. Ill Our examples so far have been taken entirely from nonnarrative works, which are by no means typical of the bulk of late eighteenth-century supernatural poetry. The same sort of attempts to establish atmosphere or evoke the past, combined with far more obvious interest in providing thrills, occurred more characteristically in narrative poetry. Modern ballads now were far more popular than modern epics. Many of them relied on supernatural personages and events as interesting in their own right as those of "The Ancient Mariner"; yet they never even approach the same effectiveness. One reason is that their validity never extends beyond the narrative level: it is the same old problem from the opposite side. Earlier, ghosts and demons had atmospheric, or even psychological, function, but no narrative justification; they were too obviously introduced for the poet's purposes, without seeming in any real sense to belong to the poem. The discussion about whether or not super-

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natural beings actually existed was too much in the air, so that one felt the poet in the background saying to himself, " A f t e r all, they're not real." N o w , on the other hand, they seemed, in their narrative context, real enough; poets were far more wholehearted in using them. Southey's "old Woman of Berkeley" says of herself: I have 'nointed myself with infant's fat, The fiends have been my slaves, From sleeping babes I have suck'd the breath, And breaking by charms the sleep of death, I have call'd the dead from their graves. And the Devil will fetch me now in fire, M y witchcrafts to atone; And I who have troubled the dead man's grave Shall never have rest in my own. 30 Her coffin is chained in the church, monks sing day and night while fiends try in vain to get in; the Devil himself finally comes f o r her, forces her out of her coffin, and carries her away. T h e supernatural theme and atmosphere, in short, are sustained throughout the poem, without apology or qualification: the story is told entirely in its own terms. One wonders how Southey could complain that Wordsworth's " G o o d y Blake and H a r r y G i l l " might "promote the popular superstition of witchcraft"! 3 1 His own ballad is typical of many pieces from the same period; written in 1798, it might as well have been composed any time in the last decade and a half of the century. Its great weakness is that it has no justification other than the story; it is an "entertainment" and nothing more. T h e "moral" of the piece is that people who engage in witchcraft are punished: it is not a moral of very wide application. T h e fiends, the devil, the witch herself have no real meaning, theological, psychological, or moral; they exist

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only for the sake of titillation. T h e same sense of emptiness is conspicuous in many of the ballads from the period. In "Monk" Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1799), for example, some gestures are made toward morality. T h e "Introductory Dialogue" added in 1801 makes repeated references to the barbarous superstition of the Middle Ages, superstition reflected and presumably by implication denounced in the poems themselves. In the ballads, guilty priests and nuns — favorite eighteenth-century symbols of medieval superstition -—are often central characters. Demons usually punish wickedness or a momentary slip, and are thus "on the side of the angels." Y e t there is no theological explanation for their existence, and they frequently function in what seem to be antimoral ways. In "Hrim Thor, or the Winter King," for example, a lady awaits her lover, although she knows him to have been killed. A knight comes, offers to take her to her lover, who, he says, is only wounded. She follows him into the snowy mountains, where he turns out to be the demonic Winter King. T h e moral is explicitly, ludicrously, stated: Take warning hence, ye damsels fair, Of men's insidious arts beware; Believe not every courteous knight, Lest he should prove a Winter Sprite.32 This may be intended to have comic effect, to lighten the tone of the piece as a whole (it is almost direct translation from a Scandinavian original), but the question of intention is finally irrelevant. T h e resolution points up the essential lack of import in the poem, the shallowness of its conception. T h e theme of betrayed love remains, in the late ballads of the century, of major importance. It is varied, in Lewis,

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by consideration of the guilty loves of nuns: "The Pilgrim of Valencia" recounts how a palmer meets a nun in a shrine, to fly with her; her "father's pale statue . . . points from the tomb" to reveal that the palmer is the murderer of her brother; the nun dies and her villainous lover commits suicide. Again, in "The Black Canon of Elmham" a spirit haunts a cloister, declaring it will not leave until exorcised by the Black Canon. The Black Canon comes and is killed; blood-red letters appear on his tomb, telling how he married a nun and murdered her because she was remorseful. These variations on the "William and Margaret" theme are not appreciably different in effect from the traditional version; indeed, the traditional version, with various character names, continued to flourish. "Lord George and Lady Dorothy" begins, with blatant plagiarism: When all was wrapt in sable night, And nature sought repose, Forth from its grave the restless sprite Of Dorothy arose. 33

Less obviously imitative is "Albert of Werdendorff, or the Midnight Embrace": Lord Albert had titles, Lord Albert had power, Lord Albert in gold and in jewels was clad; Fair Josephine bloomed like an opening flower, But beauty and virtue were all that she had. 34

This provides a fair sample of the simulacrum of morality presented in the late ballads, which differ from the earlier ones most conspicuously in this aspect. The plot of this adaptation is essentially the same as that of many predecessors: Albert poisons Josephine in order to marry an-

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other; her specter appears to him, he dies, and she provides agreeable shudders for the maidens left behind: Full oft will the damsel, 'mid eve's sober gloom, Review each sad spot of the desolate scene; Will shuddering pass by the libertine's tomb, And weep o'er the lovely, but frail Josephine. (page 39) The moral pose of the ballad, the fact that it seems to justify itself by dealing with human responsibility, was doubtless an important source of its appeal. Yet the more simple attraction of "William and Margaret" remained potent: proof is the fact that the poem received not only a Latin paraphrase (by Vincent Bourne), but a further English paraphrase of the Latin version. In it the characters have been given more elegant names, but the effect remains the same: Sleep is on man, and darkness all things hides, And night's last hour the distant clocks repeat; The doors unfold! —dead J U L I A ' S image glides, Silent and slow, — and stands at G R E V I L L E ' S feet! 35 "Monk" Lewis, then, in the 1799 Tales of Terror, did little actually to expand the concerns of the supernatural ballad: except for the monks and nuns that inhabit them, most of his supernatural pieces are essentially the same as those that had gone before. Others, however, particularly Southey, brought a wider range of material to the form. Southey exploited far more varied possibilities than had any of his predecessors. A nobleman murders a young boy for the sake of his inheritance; finally, in a flood, he goes to the rescue of a child and is borne down by the weight of the dead Edmund. 36 A young man wishes to see Cornelius Agrippa's books, although they are forbidden to him; he opens one and the devil appears.

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His eyes red fire and fury dart As out he tore the young man's heart; He grinn'd a horrible grin at his prey, And in a clap of thunder vanish'd away. 37 Bishop Bruno dreams of death, keeps hearing the voice of Death; finally, at a masquerade, Death takes him b y the hand ("Bishop Bruno" [ 1 7 9 8 ] , V I , 1 4 7 - 1 5 0 ) . A girl dies, but her body is then inhabited by a fiend who must be exorcised ("Donica" [ 1 7 9 7 ] , V I , 1 5 ) . A young man promises his baby to a fiend, who finally comes to claim his own ( " R u d i g e r " [ 1 7 9 6 ] , V I , 24). A n d so on. A s the quotation from "Cornelius Agrippa" will suggest, the narration is often flat and unconvincing — never has a young man's heart been torn out with so little real effect — but the attempt to widen the permissible scope of the ballad is clear. Others experimented in the same vein, moving often toward effects of more genuine horror. John Aikin's "Arthur and Matilda," for example, recounts the tale of Arthur's return from India to his Matilda. His ship is met by a little boat in which a white-clad Matilda invites him to join her. Within the bowels of the ground They plunged in blackest night; Yet still M A T I L D A ' S ghastly form Was seen in bluish light . . . At last they come where mould'ring bones Lie strew'd in heaps around, And opening vaults on either hand Gape in the hollow ground.38 Matilda invites him to embrace her; unaccountably still not unduly suspicious, Arthur attempts to do so and dies. T h e events are as arbitrary as those of " H r i m T h o r " : Arthur has committed no sin, and it is difficult to see w h y he should

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suffer. Here, however, there is far more attention to the specific details of horror: black night, ghastly form, bluish light, mouldering bones. Lewis depends more on a vaguely ominous atmosphere; Aikin makes the ominous specific. A good many of the late ballads of the century moved in this direction. Gothic novels were in great vogue; Gothic drama flourished; the horrifying was increasingly commonplace. A lively sense of participation in a major tradition is apparent in some of the century's late poets. Richard Polwhele, for example, writes something resembling a ballad on the plight of a faithless girl who is finally carried off by a specter on a horrendous ride to the "House of the Thunder." "I fell, yester-morn, "In the fight! But thy bed I prepare!" Cried the Spectre, his eyes flashing vengeance and scorn; Then vanish'd, at once, with his car! Down — down, as to cling to the Thunder she tried, She dropp'd like an arrow of light: And, whirl'd thro' the tempest, the treacherous bride Was plung'd into fathomless night.39 The tone of facile moralizing is suggested even by this brief excerpt, but it is not the "moral" aspects of the piece that interest its author most. He admits the influence of Ossian and that of the German "Lenore," but all such material, he concludes, has been used "in subservience to my own fancy" (III, 15). The justification for such pieces is their effect on the imagination — but it is clearly a comfort to have models to provide more immediate pretexts. Such pretexts are the foundation of almost all the short narrative poems of the time which do not imitate ballads, and the favorite model, for these as for the supernatural lyrics, was northern mythology. Frank Sayers' Dramatic

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Sketches of Northern Mythology (1790) is probably the most extensive collection by a single author; it includes a masque called "The Descent of Frea" which is particularly rich in tomb-fires, vultures, and "all the horrors wrapt in hell." 40 Such material provided the favorite paraphernalia for the "northern" pieces. "Herva, at the Tomb of Argantyr" (Anna Seward) stresses the atmosphere of tombs and corpses: the courageous girl Herva summons the spirit of her father, announcing that she defies corpse-fires for the sake of her mission.41 "The Tomb of Gumar" (Richard Hole) involves a dead father and his two sons: a shepherd hears "dreadful sounds" from a tomb; the two brothers see the tomb open, revealing the majestic seated ghost of their father, who orders them to fight for honor.42 More lurid is Sayers' "Moina," in which a prophetess animates a corpse: The corse uprear'd his head and clotted hair, And slowly cast his ghastly eyes around, Then sunk again, as if the soul had fear'd To animate a hateful, mangled body.43 There were miscellaneous other sources of traditional supernatural material. Anna Seward, for example, versifies two passages from Ossian, both about ghosts. She explains that the ghosts of Ossian "vie in sublime and mournful grace" with those of Patroclus, Hector, and — wonderful anticlimax — Margaret (in the famous Mallet poem). Her turning of Macpherson's poetic prose into heroic couplets is not intended to reflect adversely on the Ossianic technique; it is merely to make appreciation possible for a wider audience.44 "O'er each knight and tinseled minion/ Horror spread her sable pinion": this is a sample of what can be achieved "In the Style of the Provenzal Heroic Romanze." 45 And of course there was always the Shakespearean model, with Macbeth still the favorite repository of witch lore.46

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T h e sense of monotony increases as examples multiply. And it is strange that it should be so, for there is real variety now in material and technique. Yet all these pieces have in common an artificiality so intense that it amounts to meaninglessness. T h e problem that had been so vividly realized early in the century was still alive, although no longer written about in the same ways: how was the supernatural to be given credence in an age which did not really believe in it? It took Coleridge to conceive how the willing suspension of disbelief was to be won; one senses in his immediate predecessors and contemporaries a singular lack of concern with the issue. With no apparent interest in making the supernatural convincing, they attempt merely to provide those "agreeable shudders" for which the Gothic novel was encouraging a taste. Blake of course is an exception, to this as to most other generalizations. Suddenly, in his supernatural poems, the distinction between terror and horror becomes meaningful. When he wishes to achieve an effect of horror, it is more intense than anyone else's horror, although it employs familiar props: She shriek'd aloud, and sunk upon the steps On the cold stone her pale cheeks. Sickly smells Of death issue as f r o m a sepulchre, And all is silent but the sighing vaults . . . Fancy returns, and now she thinks of bones, And grinning skulls, and corruptible death, Wrap'd in his shroud; and now fancies she hears Deep sighs, and sees pale sickly ghosts gliding. 4 7

T h e ghosts and the vision of Death are imaginary; the sickly smells of death are real. But no meaningful distinction is made, within the poem, between the two sorts of actuality; the psychological and the supernatural unite, and the genu-

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ine sense of horror achieved in a poem which does not even approach being the best of Blake is due largely to the blending and mutual reinforcement of interior and exterior horror. Yet reading this piece, one is likely to find it strongly repellent, to recall Mrs. Radcliffe's dictum that horror freezes the faculties rather than enlarges them. And one realizes how rarely in relation to other eighteenth-century poems the point seems relevant at all. The fact is that despite the number of excursions into the supernatural that the eighteenth century provides, genuine horror — or, for that matter, terror — is usually lacking. The excitement of Catherine Morland, in Nonhanger Abbey, over what turns out to be a laundry bill corresponds to the excitement one feels over most eighteenth-century ghosts: most of the ghosts seem, finally, just old sheets. It is perhaps significant that one of the few truly horrible passages in eighteenthcentury supernatural poetry occurs in a predominantly comic poem — Lewis's "Grim, King of the Ghosts; or, the Dance of Death," which recounts the adventures of Nancy, the sexton's daughter, who, refusing to marry the butcher's boy, says she'd rather marry the king of the ghosts. Grim appears to wed her; she then discovers she's to be eaten by ghosts for lunch, but is saved when Grim is unable to fulfill one of her commands: to show her a bloodier butcher than himself. The account of the ghosts' revels is truly horrible: "Through the nostrils of skulls their blood-liquor they pour,/ The black draught in the heads of young infants they quaff." But the same poem contains also the couplet "For who could have eyes, and not see you loved beef?/ Or who see a steak, and not steal it for thee?" (page 55). The horrible, in short, is placed in a comic-macabre context: it is not allowed to function seriously in its own terms. Such

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pieces as Burns's "Address to the Deil" exploit, more subtly, the same sort of effect. Burns uses much of the traditional lore about witches, ghosts, and devils, but mocks it at every turn, by the very structure of his verse. His mockery is purposeful, its effect controlled; Lewis's, one feels, comes from some profound uneasiness about the material of horror. Blake's early experiment with supernatural horror was the only one; most of his uses of the supernatural were more profoundly serious, far less macabre, concerned to evoke terror rather than horror. In "America," " T h e First Book of Urizen," " T h e Book of Ahania," and in " V a l a " — most of the early symbolic works — Blake introduces supernatural figures of quite a new sort: Fuzon on a chariot iron-wing'd On spiked flames rose; his hot visage Flam'd furious; sparkles his hair & beard Shot down his wide bosom and shoulders. On clouds of smoke rages his chariot And his right hand burns red in its cloud Moulding into a vast Globe his wrath, As the thunder-stone is moulded. Son of Urizen's silent burning. 48 Or, in a different mode: Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific, Self-clos'd, all-repelling; what Demon Hath form'd this abominable void, This soul-shudd'ring vacuum? 49 In a sense it is meaningless to speak of the supernatural in poems in which no one seems human. But it is largely by eliminating the human that Blake copes with the special problems of the supernatural in poetry. H e may use either of the modes of description indicated by the quotations

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above: physical description, usually with emphasis on fire and darkness, or metaphysical attempts to define the essential nature of the supernatural. In neither case does he appear to wish his readers to suspend their disbelief; the question of belief is simply irrelevant. The personae of Blake's symbolic poems are, after all, symbolic; one may not be at all sure what they represent, but it is clear that their meaning extends beyond their physical existence and even their emotional effect. They are conceived with authority; even a reader uninitiated into Blake's complexities is forced to admit their rightness. The question of purpose, in short, is again of primary importance; the sense of purpose in these Blake poems makes one accept their unrealistic inhabitants as meaningful without the need that they be convincing — like the allegorical personages of The Faerie Queene. In the long supernatural poems of this period, authors tried to solve their problem by creating and elaborating a world in which the supernatural functioned so frequently as to seem in effect natural. One of the most elaborate —- and in its own time one of the most famous — of these was Richard Hole's Arthur, or The Northern Enchantment, which inspired Hugh Downman to high praise: "Deaf to the tones of modern art,/ T o song like this I ope my heart." 50 One passage will give an idea of the tone of the Hole poem: . . . the turrets crown'd W i t h hideous objects: wheeling wide around, T h e screeching owl, the raven of the night, W i t h notes ill-omen'd urge their crowded flight. Harpies obscene their direful forms unfold . . . Sulphureous torrents roll the moat around In liquid flame; the boiling waves resound, And lash the rugged walls: before his eyes T h e bridge, the portal fades: black vapours rise,

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And fiery flakes shoot thro' the dusky skies. Infernal spirits on the walls appear, Here the sword blazes, there the threatning spear; Here, like a meteor, levell'd at his heart, Gleams on the bending string the flame-tip'd dart. From each red eye-ball glanc'd the sparks of ire; Each dismal front seem'd scath'd with livid fire: With wrath o'ercast, and horror's blackest hue; While wreathing on the winds their snaky tresses flew. Unmov'd, what mortal could sustain the sight Of spectres swarming from the realms of night! Yet no dismay the hero's looks exprest . . . 5 1

The development here is characteristic of the supernatural events of the poem: great abundance of rather perfunctory detail, rapidly shifting focus, resolution in terms of the hero's lack of dismay. Again and again, through sheer absence of fear, Arthur triumphs over various supernatural opponents; frequent notes explain their justification in northern tradition. Hole is clearly steeped in the exciting legends of northern mythology; he also allows himself echoes of the classics. But the fact that Downman considers this work the very antithesis of "modern art" is revealing. Its material is modern enough: compared with Blackmore's Arthurian epics of almost a century before, Arthur seems positively revolutionary in, for example, its elaborate use of "machinery." 52 But its diction and sentence structure ("Sulphureous torrents roll the moat around") would have seemed more appropriate half a century earlier; whatever freshness the material might have is lost as a result. The attempt at Popean couplets ("Infernal spirits on the walls appear,/ Here the sword blazes, there the threatning spear") seems faintly ridiculous, so un-Popean is the subject matter. Even given such scope for leisurely development, such full parapher-

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nalia of glamorous supernatural events, Hole is not able to make anything very interesting of his poem. And precisely the same points might be made of Richard Polwhele's "Sir Allan; or, T h e Knight of Expiring Chivalry," also written in heroic couplets: 'Twas on that spectral eve when Cornwall fills With sacred light and joy her echoing hills, . . . 'Twas on that eve the demons, in a file Of hostile front, to Kainbre's druid pile Rush'd forth. 53 A three-page list of various kinds of demons follows; then a full account of the contents of a "cauldron, bubbling blood"; then a demon dance. Later, the hero takes a ring off a skeleton finger; as a result the corpse rises, and letters of flame appear. A "dark fiend" tries to make him lose his w a y , guides him over a suicide's corpse, and so on. It all seems empty and unconvincing. When, after going through the mass of supernatural poetry that surrounds it, one looks again at the 1798 "Ancient Mariner," it seems even more amazing than it does in its own right. Reading The Road to Xanadu, one feels that the materials of the poem are so exotic, so farreaching, that only Coleridge could have combined them; the poem seems, indeed, so exotic as to be only accidentally of late eighteenth-century composition. But Professor Lowes makes the point repeatedly that it is, after all, characteristic of much that was in the air at the time. " W h a t 'La belle Dame sans Merci' is to the gramarye of the Middle Ages, ' T h e Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is to the voyaging, Neoplatonizing, naively scientific spirit of the closing eighteenth century. It has swept within its assimilating influence a bewildering diversity of facts in which contemporary interest was active." 54 A n d considering only

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the poem's use of the supernatural, in the light of the traditions that surround it, one discovers that most of its elements existed already as part of the common stock of supernatural poetry. One has only to go through Southey's ballads to discover an equivalent range; in Monk Lewis there are parallels for the skeleton figure on the specter ship; the cursed wanderer is, of course, a commonplace of the Gothic novel. As Lowes points out, it is Coleridge's transmutation of such material that gives the poem its fascination. "Nothing in the poem, indeed, is more remarkable than the sublimation, as if they had passed through some ethereal alembic, of the crudities which marred the formative elements of Coleridge's unique conception of the supernatural. And his momentary surrender to the unnatural, in the rejected 'Gothic' stanza, throws into sharpest relief the psychological verisimilitude which we have seen . . . displayed in his final delineation of his supernatural universe." 65 Lowes is speaking particularly of Coleridge's elimination of the lurid detail in the presentation of the dicing pair, but his point has far wider application. Coleridge surrenders momentarily to the unnatural — the stanza in question is this: His bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with purple and green.56 But thinking of the unnaturalness of this stanza, and the extent to which the rest of the improbable events and characters of the poem are made to seem, in reading, perfectly natural, one is brought to the realization that in the other poems we have examined, supernatural and unnatural seem to mean the same thing. T o create a world in which super-

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natural happenings lose none of their strangeness, and yet seem not merely credible but inevitable: this is Coleridge's great accomplishment, his revolutionary contribution to the tradition of supernatural poetry. His predecessors had recognized the imaginative value of the supernatural, had realized even that the supernatural and the psychological might have something to do with one another, had decided that the unearthly need not be believed in in order to function in poetry, had used the supernatural for atmosphere and for plot. But Coleridge was the first to employ the supernatural so that it shaped a plot without distorting it. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" seems to deal with important matters not as Blake's symbolic poems do, but as Keats' poems do. It has to do with the movements of mind and of emotion; the specter ship, the moving corpses, the sweep through the ocean of the mariner's ship all illuminate those interior movements. One does not sense self-consciousness in the poet's use of his material: he is not being quaint or old-fashioned or lurid. Coleridge has solved, in short, the problems that no eighteenth-century poet could fully solve. The way had been opened for a new sort of supernatural poetry.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Personification, 1700-1750 ersonification, as a respectable rhetorical disguise for the supernatural in poetry, was peculiarly characteristic of the eighteenth century from beginning to end. That personification represents for man in general and for eighteenth-century man in particular a potent imaginative force has by now been abundantly proved. C. S. Lewis has written: "It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms . . . To ask how [the] married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question is how they ever came apart." 1 B. H. Bronson demonstrates in this respect a similar attitude: "The personifying impulse is in fact a radical tendency of the human psyche in all stages of culture; it is embedded in the very roots of language itself; it is basic to every impulse towards dramatic representation. To condemn it is not merely to impugn the value of many of the most important literary forms, to which it is ancillary or essential, but to be guilty of the folly of King Canute." 2 More specifically concerned with the special role of personification in the eighteenth century, Earl Wasserman insists upon its emotional force, its imaginative power. "It was assumed by almost all eighteenth-century rhetoricians and critics," he writes, "that only great boldness and intense emotional force could create effective personification, and furthermore that the

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artistic use of this figure effectively conveyed to the reader the passionate transport of the author." 3 An attraction for some poets was the fact that personification provided imaginative freedoms. It supplied, for example, a way of introducing demons in disguise, of exploiting the supernatural without commitment. Such personification, in which supernatural beings are labeled abstractions •— or vice versa — flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraged both by the special ways in which eighteenth-century critics looked at personification and by their special ways of looking at the supernatural. Supernatural beings were, as we have seen, from the point of view of many thinkers merely figments of imagination. So, in a yet more obvious sense, were personifications. Indeed, one way of coping with the references in respectable ancient sources to demons was by interpreting demons as personifications. Thus, the Comte Du Lude wrote, in 1723, "Those Spirits or Daemons, from which Christ delivered men, were Phrensy, Epilepsy, Madness, Lunacy, Melancholy, and the like." 4 Given the notion of such a connection between the concept of "phrensy," say, and that of a demon, one might predict that frenzy as demon or fury would inhabit many an eighteenth-century poem. Addison was one of the earliest to define the relation between personifications and supernatural personages. In "The Fairy Way of Writing," after speaking of ghosts, goblins, fairies, and their importance for the poet, he continues: "There is another sort of imaginary Beings, that we sometimes meet with among the Poets, when the Author represents any Passion, Appetite, Virtue or Vice, under a visible Shape, and makes it a Person or an Actor in his Poem." 5 He cites Ovid, Virgil, Milton, and Spenser as masters of the technique, and summarizes as follows: "Thus

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we see how many Ways Poetry addresses itself to the Imagination, as it has not only the whole Circle of Nature for its Province, but makes new Worlds of its own, shows us Persons who are not to be found in Being, and represents even the Faculties of the Soul, with her several Virtues and Vices, in a sensible Shape and Character" (VI, 94). The function of personifications, in other words, is essentially the same as that of supernatural beings in poetry: both enlarge the imaginative scope of the poet, making it possible for him to evade the narrower implications of the dictum, "First follow Nature." Yet the appeal of personification was not solely to the imagination, and this is precisely the reason why it seemed to many eighteenth-century critics an acceptable poetic device for the introduction of the supernatural, whereas direct presentation of other-worldly personages would seem to exceed the bounds of artistic propriety.6 Allegory, notes John Hughes early in the century, "amuses the Fancy, whilst it informs the Understanding." 7 This double function is Hughes' constant theme, and the implicit concern of many other contemporary commentators. Again, Hughes writes, "Allegory is indeed the Fairy Land of Poetry, peopled by Imagination; its Inhabitants are so many Apparitions; its Woods, Caves, wild Beasts, Rivers, Mountains and Palaces, are produc'd by a kind of magical Power, and are all visionary and typical; and it abounds in such Licences and wou'd be shocking and monstrous, if the Mind did not attend to the my stick Sense contained under them" (I, xxxiv; italics mine). The "mystick Sense" could offer justification for the wildest excursions into fairyland, the most extreme retreats from the world of actuality. "For the sake of the moral Sense," goblins, chimaeras, and fairies might be in-

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troduced; natural and moral qualities might be represented as "divine, human, or infernal Persons" (I, xli). The significance of moral import to the early critics of the century can hardly be overestimated. Any uneasiness about the propriety of the supernatural in literature could readily be dissipated by reference to the clear propriety of the moral in any guise. But the presence of moral significance must be clearly apparent. Blackmore, for example, inveighs fiercely against Ariosto and Spenser for their offensively extravagant and confused images, but would permit controlled personification, and he explicitly mentions the possibility of personifications in the guise of supernatural beings. "There is indeed a way of writing purely Allegorical, as when Vices and Virtues are introduced as Persons, the first as Furies, the other as Divine Persons or Goddesses, which still obtains, and is well enough accomodated to the present Age. For the Allegory is presently discern'd, and the Reader is by no means impos'd on, but sees it immediately to be an Allegory, and is both delighted and instructed with it." 8 The didactic or thematic function of personifications, in other words, was of primary importance; the effectiveness of a figure might be judged primarily by its allegorical significance. Thus Addison, writing on Virgil in The Tatler,9 refers to the personages whom Virgil describes before the gates of the infernal regions, and praises the classic author because his inhabitants have natures "wonderfully suited to the situation of the place, as being either the occasions or resemblances of death." Near the mid-point of the century, Joseph Spence considered more extensively the proper place of allegory in modern poetry, and concluded that the moderns were inferior to the ancients largely in

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lacking a settled scheme for their allegories, in abandoning propriety and simplicity for multiplicity and impropriety. 1 0 H e objects (page 312) to the mingling of the natural and allegorical w a y s of speaking in the works of his contemporaries, and implicitly rebukes modern poets for the essential randomness of their choice of images ("If t w o syllables are wanting, it is Satan; but if four, y o u are sure of meeting with Tisiphone"; page 300). Concerned w i t h the truths w h i c h allegory might convey, he objected, in short, to its being treated lightly as a poetic device. David F o r d y c e also insists upon the high seriousness of personification, w h i c h clothes ideas in proper f o r m to make them f u l l y understandable, and thus conveys fundamental truths. " T h e r e is an obvious, a Natural Connection and Relation, between this kind of Language [personification] and the ideas conveyed b y it; nay, the Language is evidently built upon that Connection or Similitude." 1 1 A l l these criticisms are primarily concerned with the ideas expressed through figures, and the importance of the figures as proper vehicles f o r those ideas. T h e most obvious purpose of personification, then, was to lend vividness to an abstraction; and in the first half of the century, with f e w exceptions, the abstraction itself seems far more important than the vividness. Y e t perhaps one's feeling that these personifications f u n c tion more as ideas than as images comes merely f r o m the limitations of twentieth-century perspective. Certainly the comments of eighteenth-century critics suggest that a sense of vividness was inherent in the v e r y fact of a personification, for t w o important reasons. O n e reason was the consciousness of imaginative energy that personification created. " A vigorous and lively f a n c y does not tamely confine itself to the idea w h i c h lies before it," writes W i l l i a m

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Melmoth, "but looks beyond the immediate object of its contemplation, and observes how it stands in conformity with numberless others. It is the prerogative of the human mind thus to bring its images together . . . I prefer the metaphor to the simile, as a far more pleasing method of illustration. In the former, the action of the mind is less languid, as it is employed at one and the same instant in comparing the resemblance with the idea it attends." 1 2 Again, Melmoth makes it clear that personifications are included for him within the province of metaphor, and he suggests the proper functions and limitations of the device: T o represent natural, moral, or intellectual qualities and affections as persons, and appropriate to them those general emblems by which their powers and properties are usually typified in pagan mythology, may be allowed as one of the most pleasing and graceful figures of poetical rhetoric . . . But I can relish them no farther than as figures only: when they are extended in any serious composition beyond the limits of metaphor, and exhibited under all the various actions of real persons, I cannot but consider them as so many absurdities, which custom has unreasonably authorized. (pages 301-303) These comments suggest a paradoxical element in the eighteenth-century attitude toward personification. Melmoth insists on restricting personifications to the role of "figures o n l y " (thus anticipating Dr. Johnson), and of figures accompanied solely by "general emblems." T h e y are not, in other words, to be given too much specificity, too much resemblance to "real persons." Y e t one senses that Melmoth conceives these restrictions not as obstacles but as aids to the creation of true dramatic effect — true vividness. T h e excitement, the sharpness, of personification seems for him to be in the theoretical act of combining the

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abstract and the concrete, where the operation of the "vigorous and lively fancy" is demonstrated. All efforts at increasing elaboration of detail would merely distract from that central effect. Another important reason why the vividness of a personification did not depend, for the eighteenth-century reader, on its specificity of detail is also hinted by Melmoth, when he remarks that the appropriate emblems for personifications are those "by which their powers and properties are usually typified in pagan mythology." A long tradition lies behind much personification of this period, a tradition so long and so authoritative that it removes considerable responsibility from the individual poet. Mythology had long been read allegorically; when Thomas Blackwell, for example, faces objections that he is "reading in" meanings in his interpretation of the classics, he replies that it is impossible to read these tales without seeking such meanings.13 Mythology is flexible and can be adapted to all purposes, he maintains (page 120); to philosophers, the gods of the ancients have always appeared as "the Parts and Powers of Nature," while seeming "as real Persons to the Vulgar" (page 62). If Alecto, the fury, could be taken as essentially a personification of discord, it seemed natural enough for modern poets to identify Discord as a fury. And there was no need to describe her: the implicit reference to Virgil was enough. Moreover, there was also a pictorial tradition of the representation of abstractions. Treatment of the parallels between poetry and painting frequently stressed this point of connection; Spence, of course, was importantly concerned with it. "The sister arts, to heighten their images, and strike our minds with greater force, agree to represent human qualities as persons, and to endow them with their

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peculiar properties. They describe virtues in the form of goddesses, and vices in that of furies, and give to each their emblematical distinctions." 14 So writes an anonymous commentator, echoing some distinguished predecessors. Given the long history of pictorial depiction of abstractions, poets needed only make glancing references to the physical accouterments of their personages; they could expect their readers to fill in the details with ease. Complex and powerful effects were achievable with this sort of tradition-backed personification. A fine example occurs toward the end of "Windsor Forest": Exil'd by thee [Peace] from earth to deepest hell, In brazen bonds shall barbarous Discord dwell; Gigantic Pride, pale Terror, gloomy Care, And mad Ambition, shall attend her there: There purple Vengeance bath'd in gore retires, Her weapons blunted, and extinct her fires: There hateful Envy her own snakes shall feel, And Persecution mourn her broken wheel: There Faction roar, Rebellion bite her chain, And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain. 15

Modern critics of "Windsor Forest" seem to feel that the passage represents a real and significant achievement. Earl Wasserman, for example, in the course of a detailed explication of "Windsor Forest," writes: "Before Father Thames's unfolding prophecy has carried him to the sublime visionary heights of perceiving the banishment of the abstract evils in personified form, beyond which the visionary power of imagination cannot go, he has established the future of Anne's reign as a reinstitution of the Golden Age of Augustus." 16 Recognizing this series of personifications as representing "sublime visionary heights," Wasserman bypasses the problem of where the sense of sublimity comes from.

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Reuben Brower is somewhat more specific: "The allegorical figures of the conclusion, which in some details recall similar figures from the Aeneid, come to life like Virgil's in dramatic gesture and symbolic image. Throughout the passage as in the better parts of the poem the mythological painter's eye is at work in the service of ideas. In contrast with the Pastorals, there are some ideas worthy of the name, and they matter to the poet and to his audience." 17 The passage, then, combines the strength of personages vividly suggested through image and gesture with the strength of strong underlying ideas. The fact that the associations here evoked are specifically with the supernatural — the supernatural classically conceived, but no less supernatural for that — seems to me to be of paramount significance. The idea of the supernatural, when combined with the principle of personification, afforded the possibility of a sort of eschatology highly appropriate to the eighteenth century. Pope exploits its full values, thus suggesting some of the important reasons why personifications so often appear as supernatural personages in eighteenth-century poetry. Throughout "Windsor Forest," as modern critics have abundantly demonstrated, Pope tries to establish the principle of concors discordia rerum. As so often in his poetry, he here elucidates distinctions between the license in which the existence of opposites implies the possibility of chaos, and the order where opposites exist in conjunction to preserve harmony and balance. The idea of this sort of order has throughout the poem — and throughout many of Pope's poems — the force of a religious vision. In "Windsor Forest," the religious quality of the vision is underlined by the equation of the forest with the garden of Eden and with Mount Olympus, the suggestion that the alternative to the

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order of the forest is a sort of original chaos, the use of such images as "savage howlings fill the sacred quires" to suggest the evils of corrupt rulers. Christian and classical references are combined throughout, and the culminating vision of hell carries both Christian and classic overtones, although its specific referents are clearly classical. The central figure in these lines is plainly Discord, although she is not described at all. But she is the only personage explicitly exiled to hell; others are her attendants or her companions in frustration. The other personifications, indeed, represent causes or effects of discord: they cluster around discord in a metaphorical as well as a physical sense. The union of physical and metaphorical is superbly accomplished throughout the passage: all the adjectives, for example, are perfectly ambiguous, functioning equally well on either level. "Barbarous" is perhaps the richest case in point. It seems at first merely to define the special nature of this particular sort of discord; barbarous — alien, strange, savage — as opposed to harmonious discord is to be banished. This is the discord which must be controlled by external force ("brazen bonds") instead of containing within itself the principle of control. Similarly, the adjectives in the next two lines seem primarily intended to define the abstractions: pride which towers beyond itself, terror and care which imply pallor and gloom in their possessors, ambition which drives men mad. It is not until "purple Vengeance" that the images begin to acquire clear physical being. As they do, the personifications become more and more clearly supernatural figures: Vengeance associated with gore, weapons, and fires; Envy the possessor, like the Virgilian Alecto, of snakes which are an intrinsic part of herself; Faction roaring and Rebellion biting her chain, like great monsters. Finally the vision is concluded without reference

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to specific personifications, with the picture of the gasping Furies in the last line. But the image of the Furies, although identified with none of the personifications, finally sums up all of them. T h e hints that have been offered throughout the passage suddenly come into focus. "Barbarous" becomes the description of a personage, not of an abstraction •— of a personage not merely uncivilized, but cruelly harsh to the point of inhumanity: a nonhuman being, then, made nonhuman by extreme cruelty. She is surrounded by other unearthly figures: the ideas of gigantism, pallor, and gloom now seem descriptive concepts identifying ghostly or monstrous beings. All the figures of the passage, in short, seem to partake of the nature of Furies —• natural inhabitants of hell. When Milton, in Paradise Lost, discusses the effects of original sin on the universe, he deals first, after revealing the punishment meted out to men and devils, with changes in the weather and the physical form of the world. Then he suggests that other effects have preceded even these: Thus began Outrage from liveless things; but Discord first Daughter of Sin, among th' irrational, Death introduc'd through fierce antipathie. (Paradise Lost, X, 706-9) In Milton's theologically conceived universe, then, discord is seen as the First Principle of anti-Law. The genealogy of the personification associates her with Milton's bestdeveloped use of horror-personification: the figures of Sin and Death. In a theological context, all these figures take on theological meaning. T h e place of Discord in Pope's universe is very close to her place in Milton's: the theological context, less obvious, is still there. As I have

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suggested, the idea of order has throughout the poem a sort of religious force, hinted by language and imagery. Its religious overtones are perhaps most clearly defined in the passage we have been considering, in which the principles opposed to order are exiled to hell and gradually illuminated as essentially hellish in nature. In Milton's case, the context defines the personification; in Pope's, the special nature of the personifications also helps to define the context. Donald Davie has written that "personifications and generalizations are justifiable according as they are 'worked for,' " 1 8 Pope's personifications here are certainly worked for — the cosmic overtones of the discussion of Windsor Forest have been suggested throughout the poem —• but the way in which they have been worked for becomes clear only through the illumination which they themselves afford. The insistence on this as a hellish scene inhabited by hellish beings provides a new perspective on the poem as a whole, defines its values and their intensity. And this function suggests an important aspect of eighteenth-century horror-personification at its best. The turning of personifications into supernatural figures did not merely provide an acceptable means for exploiting the values of horror in poetry; it also provided a technique for defining systems of value and insisting on their importance. Writing in The Allegory of Love of ancient uses of personification, C. S. Lewis speaks of how, during the Dark Ages, theological subtleties were lost, but a vivid interest in the inner world remained. "The Seven (or Eight) Deadly Sins, imagined as persons, become so familiar that at last the believer seems to have lost all power of distinguishing between his allegory and his pneumatology. The Virtues and Vices became as real as the angels and fiends" (page

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86). The eighteenth century, of course, was a far more sophisticated age: no one could accuse Pope or Thomson of not knowing the difference between a vice and a fiend. But, knowing the difference, they still recognized the similarity. The interest in the inner world of which Lewis speaks remained in the eighteenth century, although its terms are not those we readily recognize as connected with psychology or theology. The best writers of the time were vitally interested in, for example, the nature of human responsibility — the responsibility that all human beings share. By converting their perception of that responsibility into the naive but vivid images of angels and devils, goddesses and Furies, they could stress and clarify their moral values: could emphasize, for example, the incalculable difference between the conjunction of opposites that results in balance and the conjunction that produces discord. The terms were familiar and available; the classics provided an endless source of "machinery." Yet the very familiarity of the terms implied the dangers of their use — dangers suggested by the word machinery itself. Since the value of mythological reference depends upon — or may seem to depend upon — a sort of unearned complexity, a group of long-established associations to be evoked at will, classical allusion offered obvious temptations to poets unable to create richness and complexity by their own imaginative power. It could be used mechanically, and it frequently was. An early eighteenth-century poet laureate, Nicholas Rowe, provides an example similar in technique to the last part of "Windsor Forest," but appallingly different in effect: Around the Field, all dy'd in purple Foam, Hate, Fury, and insatiate Slaughter roam; Discord with Pleasure o'er the Ruin treads,

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And laughing, wraps her in her tattr'd Weeds; While fierce Bellona thunders in her Car, Shakes terrible her steely Whip from far, And with new Rage revives the fainting War. 19 The nature of the abstractions is defined only by the vaguely classical context, their companionship with Bellona; their shadowiness as personages is emphasized by the reader's difficulty in determining whether Pleasure and W a r are, like Hate, Fury, and Slaughter, to be taken as personifications. The passage depends on multiplicity rather than definition, but it suffers from its lack of definition. For the association with Bellona is not, after all, enough to make us feel or perceive anything new, or to help us define a universal reaction to the abstractions. It is far too mechanical: the poet does not seem to be doing his work. The difference between the passage from Rowe and the one from Pope depends largely, then — by no means entirely, of course — on the difference between the extent to which the poets have worked for their effects. In "Windsor Forest," the pattern of classical allusion is complexly interwoven throughout the poem; such allusion is justified by the meaning, the organization, the texture of the piece. In Rowe, on the other hand, allusions lie on the surface. One may deduce from the context that Discord is intended to be a supernatural personage, but she does not seem supernatural, as Pope's Discord does. And the fact that there were so many more poets like Rowe than like Pope made it increasingly difficult for writers to use the classically oriented horror-personification successfully. Aubrey Williams has observed, of Pope's attitude toward the misuse of classical allusion in general, "after the Tates and Eusdens and Welsteds of an age have finished appropriating all its terms of value for their own irresponsible ends, those terms

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are no longer readily available for serious use; some of their meaning will have leaked away. Though Pope could refurbish and revitalize the resources of classical language in his own very self-conscious practice, it may have become more and more difficult to use this language of value in such a way that the full significance and worth of all that it comprehended would be conveyed." 20 It is not surprising that pseudomythological supernatural personifications were likely to seem unconvincing. Professor Wasserman has vividly defined the process by which, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, mythology came to be a rhetorical rather than an ideological form of reference. "Mythology had degenerated very nearly to the condition of mere language, limited in referential capacity and lacking the power to proliferate into complex systems of articulation. At best, classical mythology could provide an occasional limited metaphor, but not an organizing principle as it did, say, for Spenser." 2 1 Yet for poets lacking the resources of Pope, it was possible to give meaning to personifications based on classical allusion by relying more heavily on direct physical evocation. In James Thomson, for example, we find these lines: Oblivious ages passed; while earth, forsook B y her best genii, lay to demons foul And unchained furies an abandoned prey. Contention led the van; first small of size, But soon dilating to the skies she towers: Then, wide as air, the livid f u r y spread, And high her head above the stormy clouds She blazed in omens, swelled the groaning winds With wild surmises, battlings, sounds of war — From land to land the maddening trumpet blew, And poured her venom through the heart of man. 2 2

T h e details of the visualization here come largely from

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classical tradition, and the suggested picture is confusing: it is difficult to imagine a fury, her head above the clouds, simultaneously blowing a trumpet, pouring venom into the heart of man, and swelling the winds with various nontrumpet-like sounds. Contention as a being, then, is neither real nor convincing; her miscellaneous activities have primarily symbolic force. Yet the attention, however confused, to her physical being and activity points to a method which many eighteenth-century poets were to use in their attempts to revivify classical allusion. Thomson's personification is, after all, convincing in a way that Rowe's is not. If the total picture is ungraspable as a picture, still individual details of the portrayal force one's attention to significant aspects which are given new emphasis, placed in a new perspective, by being conceived in physical terms. The notion of the fury's gradual expansion to the skies, for example, functions in this way; so does her connection with the "maddening trumpet." Given a poet with more precise control over his material, the method of presenting personifications with considerable attention to physical detail offered obvious possibilities for making abstractions seem indeed supernatural personages. The method was not, however, to be generally exploited until the second half of the century. Classical tradition was not the only source of reference explored by those who wished to incorporate the supernatural into their personifications. Some poets relied, instead, on Christian references, on a tradition which might be expected to have more lively and immediate emotional force. T o be sure, Christian allusions were frequently used with no apparent sense of their emotional richness; they might even be combined with equally casual reference to the classical.

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W e now deplore The Muse's loss, since Eden is no more. When Vice from hell rear'd up its hydra-head, Th'affrighted maid, with chaste Astrea, fled.23 The combination of Christian reference ("Eden") with pagan ("hydra-head," "the Muse," "Astrea") is here made possible not, as in Milton, by the richness and complexity of the conception, but b y its perfunctoriness. Vice made a denizen of hell and provided with a hydra-head is no more fearful than vice given no physical being whatever. The attempt is to give an abstraction supernatural reality; the realization, partly because of its confusion of reference, lacks atmosphere almost entirely. But the most consistently Christian apologists in verse also resorted frequently to the device of introducing personified abstractions in the guise of supernatural beings or monsters. Usually they are vague — for example, Isaac Watts' "Sing how he spoil'd the Hosts of Hell,/ And led the Monster Death in Chains." 24 W h e n more attempt at specificity is made, it customarily depends on piling up emotionally weighted adjectives and verbs. Sin is the Worm that never dies . . . O'erwhelm'd with horrible Affright, I shudder at the Monster's Sight, And know not where to fly.25 Yet this method could achieve power by its very vagueness: And raging fiends from long confinement come, With monstrous shapes in open air to roam: A gloomy host: in terrible array They march along; pale horror leads the way, And in its ghastliest form before them walks; Behind them empty desolation stalks.26

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H o r r o r and desolation, identified with "raging fiends," are given new significance, placed in a generalized Christian context through their association with the more traditional denizens of hell. T h e i r physical identities seem deliberately shadowy: their horror is derived f r o m idea. Behind such conceptions as this lies the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, in which the reality of fiends might be denied b y explaining them as symbolic representations of disease or insanity: to say that the demons of hell are horror and desolation might function as a denial of the supernatural, a substitution of the remotely frightening abstraction f o r the more immediately frightening devil. Y e t , paradoxically, when abstractions as demons are used in poetry, they tend to function in the opposite w a y : one is not conscious that the raging fiends are less real f o r being identified with horror and desolation, but only that the abstractions have been made more real and frightening — and this despite the weakness of such phrases as "in its ghastliest f o r m , " obvious attempts to evoke horror without producing it. M a n y of the strongest religious horror-personifications of the early eighteenth century make use of this technique, using idea rather than physical detail to suggest frightening power. So James Thomson, on Slander, writes: High flashing in her hand the ready torch, Or poniard bathed in unbelieving blood; Hell's fiercest fiend! of saintly brow demure, Assuming a celestial seraph's name, While she beneath the blasphemous pretence Of pleasing parent Heaven, the source of love! Has wrought more horrors, more detested deeds Than all the rest combined. 27 Although the abstraction has a sort of physical existence, it is more precisely defined b y its religious context. Thomson

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gives it both importance and reality by adding to the original notion of slander that of hypocrisy, lent special intensity by its conception as religious rather than secular posturing. Thus the idea of fiendishness achieves a particular realization not dependent on physical detail. If Thomson's purposes, in such a passage as this, are altogether transparent, they are also illuminating. One sees clearly that personification might serve rather different purposes from those ordinarily attributed to it. In most of the examples we have been considering, the lack of physical description is striking. The function of these personifications, then, is by no means to make abstractions more vivid by linking them with the horror of the supernatural. Indeed, the supernatural, in these passages, seems to possess no great horror — or, at any rate, not the kind of horror one finds in more direct exploitation of the supernatural. The fact suggests another important aspect of the eighteenth-century attitude toward the unearthly. The critics we have considered appeared to think of goblins and demons as essentially decorative additions to poetry, means of captivating the fancy to make the mind attend to the far more important moral sense. Yet the fiends we have encountered so far in the guise of personifications seem not essentially fanciful but intellectual. The reinforcement of the idea "desolation" or "slander" by embodying it in a fiend seems basically the reinforcement of one idea by another: the demons have symbolic overtones of their own, and are important in their symbolic intellectual being rather than in their physical reality with its direct emotional effects. The complexity of effect in these personifications, in other words, comes not from the tension of uniting the abstract and concrete, but from the union of several kinds of abstraction. Personifications of passions and moral principles, Donald

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Davie points out, tend to make the modern reader uncomfortable because of his interest in discriminations. "But Johnson or Goldsmith was not concerned with those features which make a man unique, but with those which he has in common with his fellows." 28 This interest in generalized moral truth accounts for the sort of personifications we have been examining; their intent is to define, and to define through idea as well as image. This is the variety of personification that Thomas Quayle, for example, scorns: "Abstractions formed b y the deliberate reason are usually more or less rhetorical embellishments of poetry, and to this category belong the great majority of the personifications of eighteenth century verse. T h e y . . . cannot truly be called allegorical, for allegory is a living thing only so long as the ideas it embodies are real forces that control our conduct. T h e inspired personification, which embodies or brings with it a real vision, is the truly poetical figure." 2 9 But this judgment, this distinction between the reasoned and the "inspired" personification, obviously derives from the kind of uneasiness Mr. Davie defines. It fails to recognize that personification can be based on "real forces that control our conduct" without emphasizing visual reality; that in a sense the most visionary personifications of the early eighteenth century are those which rely on complex evocation of concepts rather than images. This sort of evocation, of course, is an effect difficult to achieve successfully, and many poetasters attempted to escape its responsibilities b y relying on lavishly detailed environment rather than figures, to evoke physical reality which might reinforce the essential ideas involved. W h y sweep the spectres o'er the blasted ground? What shakes the mount with hollow-roaring sound? Hell rolls beneath it, Terrour stalks before

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With shrieks and groans, and Horrour bursts a door; And Satan rises in infernal state, Drawn up by Malice, Envy, Rage, and Hate, A darkening vapour with sulphureous steam, In pitchy curlings edg'd by sullen flame, And fram'd a chariot for the dreadful form, Drives whirling up on mad Confusion's storm. 30 Although the syntax and punctuation are somewhat obscure, one can visualize the scene in which such beings as Malice, Rage, and Terror share a single nature with specters and fiends. But descriptive detail defines not the supernatural beings, but the physical surroundings: the atmosphere comes from the "sulphureous" steam rather than the specters. T h e abstractions, indeed, are never explicitly identified as fiends. Yet, feeling that Satan's attendants must be demons of some sort, one feels also that the essential nature of demons is ultimately the same as that of Envy, Rage, or Hate — that no explicit identification is necessary because the identity between fiends and abstractions is no arbitrary attribution, but simply a recognition of the true nature of fiendishness. And the sense of identification is reinforced by the sulfurous, hellish atmosphere. One feels this sense of identity perhaps most strongly in a hymn by Charles Wesley. The Tyrant [Death] sits on his pale Horse, Devourer of Mankind, Attended by a ghastly Train, Sorrow, Astonishment, and Pain, And Hell comes close behind. Ready to pierce thy trembling Heart, The grisly Terror shakes his Dart, And Hell expects its Prey! Ready a Troop of Devils stands

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T o take thee from the Monster's Hands, And hurry thee away. 3 1 T h e reader's direct involvement is here demanded ("thy trembling Heart") to achieve the special didactic purpose of this sort of hymn. T h e poet is working, clearly, on the emotion of fear; to engage this emotional response, he forces on his reader the perception that the punishment of sin includes not only remote future torment by demons whose reality may be difficult to credit, but the more immediate torment of "Sorrow, Astonishment, and Pain," torment here revealed as also essentially demonic. Death is a monster, and emotions become monsters, and all partake equally of fiendishness: this is the realization the poem insists upon. T h e supernatural is virtually redefined, its relevance to the ordinary human condition strongly emphasized; in insisting upon this relevance, the personifications are of primary importance. Sometimes, to be sure, eighteenth-century poets seemed to make a deliberate attempt to eliminate the supernatural character of fiends. Ye skowling Shades who break away, Well do ye fly and shun the purple Day. Ev'ry Fiend and Fiend-like Form, Black and sullen as a Storm, Jealous Fear, and false Surmise, Danger with her dreadful Eyes, Faction, Fury, all are fled, And bold Rebellion hides her daring Head. 32 T h e descriptive epithets f o r the shades and the fiends alike seem intended to emphasize their human or natural qualities. "Skowling" shades are not very horrifying; fiends "Black and sullen as a Storm" seem hardly sinister. T h e fiends, indeed, are defined entirely b y their labels; little or

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nothing is added to the concept of Faction and Fury b y placing them in a train of fiends and fiendlike forms. More characteristically, personifications of this sort are presented in groups ("Lean abstinence, wan grief, lowthoughted care,/ Distracting guilt, and, hell's worst fiend, despair") 33 with little attempt at physical realization other than that which tradition supplies. Thus William King, in "Rufinus; or the Favourite" ( 1 7 1 1 ) , groups together Discord, Famine, Age, E n v y , Luxury, and Want under the general category of fiends; so individual a writer as Allan Ramsay has, in "Content," a group of phantoms labeled as " T h e ugly Brood of lazy Spleen and F e a r " ; 3 4 John Hughes compares miscellaneous shapes of woe, including Unkindness and Strife, to ghosts. A n especially interesting procession of this sort occurs in Henry Brooke's versification of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, which begins with an extensive train of personified horrors. 35 Individual fiend-personifications might also be presented in the same shadowy fashion, and they frequently were. Yet even in this period, even among the same authors, a new direction for personification — or, more accurately, a return to older directions—began to be apparent. John Hughes, who has provided more than one example of the attempt to intensify abstractions b y reference to further abstractions, offers, too, a striking instance of another approach. Oppression, Fraud, Contusion, and Affright, Fierce Fiends, that ravag'd in the gloomy Night Of Lawless Pow'r, defeated, fly before his dazling Light. So to th'eclipsing Moon, by the still Side Of some lone Thicket, rev'lling Haggs provide Dire Charms, that threat the sleeping Neighbourhood, And quaff, with Magick mix'd, vast Bowls of Human Blood;

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But, when the Dawn reveals the purple East, They vanish sullen from th'unfinish'd Feast.38 One feels in the opening sequence which labels the abstractions fiends much the same sort of impulse we have discovered in other personifications: the idea, the compliment to King William, provider of the "dazling Light," seems far more significant than the terror of devils. But the long simile which follows points to something new. It is designed explicitly to control the reader's reaction to the earlier group of personifications, to elaborate the import of the images by providing new images. And it accomplishes its purpose by sharp insistence upon the specifically supernatural implications of the imagery. The details of the passage, from the eclipsing moon to the bowls of blood, are those of well-established folk tradition, closely associated with the most convincing sort of horror tale. Folk tradition, obviously, could be far more readily exploited than classical or Christian tradition for creating a sense of supernatural horror. Users of classical reference, as we have seen, had to develop a sort of complexity and richness that was beyond the poetic capacities of most, or to begin moving in the direction of more elaborate physical description, a direction that was ultimately to defeat the purpose of personification. Their purpose, to be sure, had little to do with the direct evocation of horror. Poets who relied on Christian reference had at their disposal strong emotional and intellectual appeals, but the horror they evoked tended to be symbolic rather than immediate: too many ideas were usually at work to permit heavy emphasis on emotional or physical details of horror. Folk tradition, on the other hand, allowed its users greater freedom, partly because its association with the unlettered gave it a sort of automatic aesthetic distance, something

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like that of the classics: reference to hags implied no belief in hags, simply a knowledge of the traditional tales about them. Yet this tradition, unlike that of the classics or Christianity, was one in which real horror continued to operate. There was no widespread allegorical interpretation of ghost stories, as there was of The Aeneid or the Bible. T h e educated might explain tales of witches and ghosts as coming from overdeveloped imaginations or underdeveloped intelligences, but the details of such stories retained their imaginative potency. Hughes' effort, in the passage quoted above, is not to make fiends into abstractions; instead, the poet causes his fiends — and his abstractions — to seem more fiendish by the associations he invokes. In the horror-personifications which seem to have some genuine connection with the supernatural, in which the atmosphere of horror is developed for its own sake, the references tend to be to folk rather than literary tradition. T h e method by which fiend-abstractions are given horror through comparison or association with other manifestations of the supernatural was fairly common in the early eighteenth century. David Mallet, for example, presenting a picture of Ruin, gives far more attention to supernatural associations than to direct evocation of his figure. Behind me rises huge a reverend pile Sole on his blasted heath, a place of tombs, Waste, desolate, where Ruin dreary dwells. Brooding o'er sightless sculls, and crumbling bones, Ghastful he sits, and eyes with stedfast glare (Sad trophies of his power, where ivy twines Its fatal green around) the falling roof, T h e time-shook arch, the column grey with moss, T h e leaning wall, the sculptur'd stone defac'd, . . . All is dread silence here, and undisturb'd, Save what the wind sighs, and the wailing owl Screams solitary to the mournful Moon,

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Glimmering her western ray through yonder isle, Where the sad spirit walks with shadowy foot His wonted round, or lingers o'er his grave.37 Of this passage, which he had evidently seen in a slightly different form, Thomson wrote: Y o u paint R U I N with a masterly H a n d Gastful H e sits, and views, with stedfast Glare, T h e falling Bust, the C O L U M N grey with Moss

This is such an Attitude as I can never enough admire, and even be astonished at. Save what the Wind sighs, and the Screams solitary —

WAILING O W L

charmingly dreary! Where the sad Spirit walks, with shadowy Foot, His wonted Round, or lingers o'er his Grave.

What dismal Simplicity reigns thro these two Lines! They are equal to any ever Shakespear wrote on the Subject. 38 Even with due allowance made for friendship, the fact that Thomson chose to single out these lines for high praise suggests that for a contemporary audience they exercised a peculiar potency. Although the description of Ruin is not at all developed, depending on one line, Thomson finds it both admirable and astonishing. H e praises his friend because he paints Ruin with a masterly hand, yet the fact is that Mallet paints Ruin almost not at all. Somehow, though, the effect of vivid personification is conveyed. It is conveyed through specific details about the physical surroundings, details appropriate because they deal with the effects of ruin in the world of actuality, thus giving the personification firm links with reality, but justified also merely by their "dismal Simplicity" and the "charmingly dreary" atmosphere they project. T h e dreariness of the atmosphere,

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however, comes not primarily from its physical details, but from its associations: the scene is one in which ghosts might be expected to walk (sighing wind, wailing owl, mournful moon), and the sad spirit who finally appears merely sums up the implications of the description that has gone before. Thus the figure of Ruin comes to seem truly a supernatural personage, not because the poet describes him in monstrous terms, but because he has been firmly placed in a supernatural context, and the context functions finally to define the personifications. It is interesting to note, especially in connection with the sort of objection to most eighteenth-century personification that Quayle has, how often among critics contemporary with the poets the personifications singled out for special praise are the ones that, like Mallet's, provide little visual detail for the personified figure itself. For example, John Langhorne, an eighteenth-century editor of Collins, is frequently embarrassed by his subject's imaginative flights. H e finds especially praiseworthy, however, this couplet: Before them [lions, tigers, and wolves] Death with shrieks directs their way, Fills the wild yell, and leads them to their prey. 39 Langhorne's comment is, "Nothing, certainly, could be more greatly conceived, or more adequately expressed than the image in the last couplet." 40 From the point of view of a modern reader, the image is singularly undefined: we are given no notion of what sort of figure Death is. But the "greatness of conception" that Langhorne insists on has nothing to do with the physical image; the physical nature of Death (skeletal, robed, skull-headed) had long been defined by tradition. T h e excitement of the image comes rather from its use of association, although of a rather dif-

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ferent sort f r o m Mallet's. T h e association of the wild animals with the figure of Death provides a new perspective, insists not only on their sinister aspects, but also on some implication that Fate operates in the pursuit of any given man b y beasts. T h e situation, in other words, has been placed in a new, expanded perspective; and this the critic finds praiseworthy. Collins was a master, also, of another sort of technique which Mallet too uses: that of inserting a personification, without descriptive development, in a group of more conventionally conceived supernatural characters. 41 T h e famous " O d e to Fear," f o r example, never establishes directly the nature of the personage it addresses. Y e t that Fear is conceived as a personage is clear enough: he is referred to consistently as "thee." On the other hand, he is also called " D a r k p o w e r , " a designation which suggests a being transcending human limitations of form. T h e nature of the personification is established only b y association: For, lo, what monsters in thy train appear! Danger, whose limbs of giant mould What mortal eye can fix'd behold? W h o stalks his round, an hideous form, Howling amidst the midnight storm; Or throws him on the ridgy steep Of some loose hanging rock to sleep: And with him thousand phantoms join'd, W h o prompt to deeds accurs'd the mind: And those, the fiends, who, near allied, O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside; Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening brood of Fate, W h o lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly wild, like thee? 42

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Later, there is a reference to the fact that "thou and Furies shar'd the baleful grove." The junction of the personification Fear, throughout the poem, is to suggest the emotion fear. The nature of the personification is in no way defined. Yet the need to define remains, felt by the reader, and the clues the poet provides lead in the direction of conceiving Fear as a somber, powerful supernatural being like the ones with whom he is allied. More definition is given the other personifications in the poem, as in the passage above: Danger and Vengeance have a certain physical reality. Yet they, too, are principally defined by their association with phantoms and fiends. As A. S. P. Woodhouse remarks, "Collins, it would seem, conceives his 'persons' as creatures of the spirit-world. They are revealed to him in a sort of vision. With them move other visitants from the same regions, the demons who preside over nature's cataclysms and mankind's crimes. And the result, for the poet, is a new creation, a world of ideal wonder, touched with terror." 43 In a note to this passage, its author points out that Collins' demons echo "that devil-lore which found a limited place in Renaissance literature": the tradition of fiends which incite men to rapine, murder, and other cruelties, and of another group which operates to produce disruptions in nature itself. By associating his personifications with beings for whom a clearly defined tradition exists, Collins succeeds in giving them potency and reality without having to clarify their precise nature as individual beings. In this way, emphasis on the abstraction and on the emotional or intellectual reality behind the personage could be retained: there was no danger of symbolic function vanishing through elaboration of physical function. Yet in a few personifications even early in the century, one sees the pure emphasis on the physical which was even-

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tually to point the way toward some new directions of nineteenth-century poetry. William Diaper's use of personification, for example, sometimes approaches old-fashioned allegory: Here a small fire glow'd in a smoaky grate, And hovering o're the flames old Febris sate; A thick coarse mantle on her shoulders hung, She gnashed her teeth through cold, and her lean fingers wrung . . . Thus arm'd with sacred spells, I forward pass And with the magick bark besmear'd her haggard face. Dreadfull she shriek'd, and with one mighty shake T h e Hag down sunk into the neighbouring lake. 44

Here, more than in any other personification we have examined, details define both the physical nature and the physical function of the personification as personage. T o be sure, the particular details are here dictated obviously by allegorical considerations rather than by the wish for specificity. On the other hand, they also evoke a sense of magic, suggest the folk-tale tradition in which the most sinister supernatural opponent can be eliminated by saying the proper words and smearing the proper potions. Febris seems far more clearly a being than Collins' Fear, for example; she possesses more physical reality, if less imaginative power. And it was quite possible, of course, in the concentration on physical description, to achieve both immediate reality and imaginative power in the presentation of a personification. So Churchill, for example, even in satire: Came Superstition, fierce and fell, An imp detested, e'en in Hell; H e r eye inflam'd, her face all o'er Foully besmear'd with human gore,

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O'er heaps of mangled saints she rode; Fast at her heels Death proudly strode.45 In tone and meter this anticipates Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy": I met Murder on the way — He had a mask like Castlereagh — Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him.46 As in Shelley's poem, the tripping quality of the meter intensifies, by contrast, the horror of the subject. Churchill, however, is more specific than Shelley in description and in explicitly Christian reference. His effect depends largely on the sharp image of a blood-smeared face from which glares a fierce eye. By the description of her face, Superstition is given a physical reality which intensifies the fearsomeness of her functions: the passive role of being detested even by the fiends of hell, the active one of riding over mangled saints. She seems, in other words, a true supernatural being as well as an abstraction — and in seeming so, she contrasts sharply with most of the early eighteenthcentury evocations of personified Superstition, which are exceedingly and uniformly vague. Perhaps the fullest development of this sort of balanced technique in the early years of the century may be seen in Thomas Parnell's "The Gift of Poetry": My soul, now seek the song, and find me there What Heaven has shown thee to repel dispair: 47 See, where from Hell she breaks the crumbling ground, Her hairs stand upright, and they stare around; Her horrid front deep-trenching wrinkles trace, Lean sharpening looks deform her livid face; Bent lie the brows, and at the bend below, With fire and blood two wandering eye-balls glow;

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Fill'd are her arms with numerous aids to kill, And God she fancies but the judge of ill.48 Earl Wasserman has said of eighteenth-century personification in general, "Far from being a mere abstraction, it is a means of vivid and detailed particularization and materialization." 49 This description, as we have seen, does not apply to many early supernatural personifications. It does, however, apply to Parnell's description of Despair, which, lacking poetic excellence, has nonetheless poetic interest. For this Despair is, first of all, a denizen of hell. She is given additional emotional richness, an extra dimension of horror, by representing an important spiritual sin. Indeed, she recalls Dante's symbol of despair. In the City of Dis, the Furies, "boltered all with blood," are, according to Dorothy Sayers in a note to her translation of the Divine Comedy (Harmondsworth, 1949, page 127) "images of fruitless remorse which does not lead to repentance." They threaten Dante with Medusa, feminine symbol of despair. Parnell's Despair, with her hairs standing upright and staring around, reminds us of these ladies and gains strength by the reminiscence. The poet's effort, except in the purposefully vague "Fill'd are her arms with numerous aids to kill," is constantly toward specificity — not emotional specificity, but definite physical detail: the upright hairs, the wrinkles, the livid face, bent brows, eyeballs glowing with fire and blood. Even the nature of personified despair is sharply defined, in a brilliant piece of selectivity: " G o d she fancies but the judge of ill." Yet if this figure is intended to provide an image of horror (and the most emotionally charged adjective used of her is, significantly, horrid), it is horror of a peculiarly remote kind. One reason for the remoteness is that this personification does not really function, she merely exists.

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T o be sure, she is technically engaged in doing something: she is breaking the ground in order to rise from hell. Yet the activity is so nonessential, and so little emphasized, that one tends to forget it. The image of Despair projected here is statuesque: if she is in motion, it is frozen motion. So the kind of horror she conveys as a being has a quality of unreality. But if the horror of the image is to some extent unreal, the horror of despair as a state of mind is at least potentially always a vivid reality. The special effect of this image depends partly on the tension between the immediacy of the emotion and the deliberate "distancing" of the figure which embodies it. There is, in other words, a special sort of depersonalization operating here which conveys the inexorability, the coldness of despair. Parnell exploits the fact that the supernatural was often felt as unreal to suggest the paradoxical qualities of the emotion with which he is concerned. He points toward a significant special value of the frightening supernatural as material for personification.

C H A P T E R SIX

Personification, 1751-1800 n the second half of the eighteenth century, horrorpersonification became so abundant, and so uniformly bad, that the device could only wear itself out. Its boundaries now were so loosely defined that no discipline governed its users, who made this sort of personification an allpurpose shorthand for the expression of emotion. Investigation of almost any minor poet of the period — the more minor the better — will usually reveal an astonishingly frequent reliance on lurid figures of Revenge, Despair, and Conscience.

I

The criticism of the time dealing with personification, both that which praises the device and that which demonstrates a consciousness of its limitations, reveals clearly why the figure was both tempting and dangerous. The emphasis of the early century on the moral or didactic functions of personification now had disappeared almost entirely. Instead, critics seemed vividly aware of its purely imaginative power. Allegorical poetry, wrote John N e w bery, "gives life and action to virtues and vices, to passions and diseases, to natural and moral qualities; and introduces goblins, fairies, and other imaginary personages and things, acting as divine, human, or infernal beings; and by that means affords matter and machinery sufficient even for an heroic poem; which has pass'd unregarded by the writers on the Art of Poetry, notwithstanding these airy disguises

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are, as it were, the very quintessence or soul of the science." 1 He made even less distinction than had Addison between goblins and fairies and personifications, but in other passages he suggests that the advantage lies with personification. "These short allegories and images, which convey particular circumstances to the reader after an unusual and entertaining manner, have a fine effect in poetry, that delights in imitation, and endeavours to give to almost every thing, life, motion, and sound; but these would in prose appear very ridiculous and pedantic" (I, 42). T h e y had been frequently used in prose during the eighteenth century; Newbery's insistence that they belonged properly only to poetry emphasizes his sense of their imaginative value as "unusual and entertaining." Newbery's idea that personification was of central importance in poetry ("the very quintessence or soul of the science") was frequently repeated at this time. John Langhorne writes, "It is, indeed, from impersonation, or, as it is commonly termed, personification, that poetical description borrows its chief powers and graces. Without the aid of this, moral and intellectual painting would be flat and unanimate, and even the scenery of material objects would be dull without the introduction of fictitious life." 2 Richard Hurd is equally enthusiastic: "Figurative expression is universally pleasing to us, because it tends to impress on the mind the more distinct and vivid conceptions; and truth of representation being of less account in this way of composition, than the liveliness of it, poetry, as such, will delight in tropes and figures, and those the most strongly and forceably expressed." 3 Hurd does not here distinguish between personification and other figures of speech, but he elsewhere makes it clear that he finds personification a particularly potent figure. The greatness of Elizabethan

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poets, he says, is due largely to their mastery of personification. It is true that "rude minds . . . naturally give into this practice," but "art and genius do not disdain to cultivate and improve it. Hence it is, that we find in the phraseology and mode of thinking of that time, and of that time only, the essence of the truest and sublimest poetry." 4 Alexander Gerard, more fully than any of his contemporaries, supplied a detailed rationale for personification and other figures of speech, based on the doctrine of association. "If an author's main subject is destitute of innate grandeur, it may be rendered grand, by comparing or someway associating it with objects naturally such. . . Hence metaphor, comparison and imagery are often productive of sublimity." 5 The device of "imparting sublimity to objects which naturally have it not, by giving them a relation to others" is of course possible only in the arts "which imitate by language" (page 28). One of Gerard's important examples of the way in which the technique may be used is a famous personification, Homer's Discord, which is given grandeur, he points out, by being assigned supernatural qualities and thus being related to the gods (page 25). Some critics, conscious, like Hurd, that personification was much used in the "Gothic" past, were uneasy about it for this reason, yet demonstrated in discussions of individual poets their sense of its great poetic value. In his History of English Poetry, Thomas Warton remarked wistfully that "emblematic imagery . . . at present is only contemplated by a few retired readers in the obsolete pages of our elder poets." 6 Personification, he admitted, was essentially inferior to the depiction of real life and manners. Generalizing about Greece, Rome, France, and Italy, Warton observes (I, 468) that "As knowledge and learning encrease, poetry begins to deal less in imagination: and these fantastic beings

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give w a y to real manners and living characters." He grants (II, 264) that "much fine invention and sublime fabling are displayed in the allegorical visions of our old poets," but complains that personification deprives readers of the chief source of entertainment sought in ancient poetry: the representation of ancient manners. Repeatedly, however, in treating specific poets of the past, Warton manifests his delight in personifications, especially when they concentrate on the particular. His high praise of the Introduction to A Mirrour for Magistrates emphasizes the effectiveness of the personifications at the gate of hell, dependent on their specificity. This model, says Warton (III, 233), "so greatly enlarged the former narrow bounds of our ideal imagery, as that it may justly be deemed an original in that style of painting." In his comments on medieval poetry, he frequently makes the same point. Guillaume de Lorris delineated allegorical personages in a "distinct" style and with great "fullness of characteristical attributes" (I, 382); he is consequently praiseworthy. Chaucer is admirable for the same reason. Gower's personifications, on the other hand, are weak: "Instead of boldly cloathing these qualities with corporeal attributes, aptly and poetically imagined, he coldly yet sensibly describes their operations, and enumerates their properties" (II, 4). Joseph Warton implies the same criteria in dealing with Pope's personifications. A f t e r modified praise for the allegorical personages in "Windsor Forest," he continues, "It may, perhaps, however be wished that the epithets barbarous (discord), mad (ambition), hateful (envy), had been particular and picturesque, instead of general and indiscriminating." 7 Such new insistence on the desirability of particularity in personifications suggests that the concern of the Wartons,

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at least in the passages quoted, is with personifications as personages in poetry, more than as conveyers of moral truth. Gerard, Hurd, Langhorne — all the critics thus far treated in this chapter — share this emphasis on personifications as exciting imaginative creations rather than as limited devices of didactic communication. The implicit dangers for poetry in this view are obvious. If personifications are essentially personages rather than primarily emblems of truth; if, as Hurd suggests, truth of representation is less important than liveliness in their use; if these judgments are acceptable, poets need feel virtually no restrictions in using personification. Dr. Johnson and Lord Kames were acutely conscious of this implication, and fought vigorously against it. " T o exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry," writes Johnson. "But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do [no] more. T o give them any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-entity." 8 Milton's Sin and Death are a case in point: they should not be allowed to stop the journey of Satan or to build a bridge. The view of personifications as imaginative beings should not, in other words, be allowed to interfere with awareness of their strictly allegorical purposes. In the "Life of Pope" (IV, 1 2 1 - 1 2 2 ) , Johnson makes a yet more sweeping statement: "The employment of allegorical persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity; they may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions; when the phantom is put in motion, it dissolves." The necessary limitations of personification, then, are, in

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Johnson's view, so narrow that its imaginative value cannot legitimately be very great. Lord Kames is at least equally emphatic on the same point. "Another species of false sublime is still more faulty than bombast; and that is, to force elevation by introducing imaginary beings without preserving any propriety in their actions, as if it were lawful to ascribe every extravagance and inconsistence to beings of the poet's creation." 9 As examples of false sublime, he cites Death and the Furies from Catiline. Kames makes a great effort to systematize his conception, positing two classes of personification: passionate, in which the poet's or character's emotions carry him away; and descriptive, in which the inanimate is imagined as sensible, but without conviction. Abstract and general terms, he observes, are frequently necessary in poetry, but because they do not suggest an image, they have little poetic value. Consequently, "abstract terms are frequently personified; but such personification rests upon imagination merely, not upon conviction" (page 365). T h e "merely" attached to "imagination" sounds an unusual note in this period. Again and again Kames insists that the actions of personifications must (page 452) "be confined within their own sphere, and never be admitted to mix in the principal action, nor to co-operate in retarding or advancing the catastrophe." Personification "ought to be employed with great reserve" because it is "at any rate a bold figure" (page 368). Finally, he categorically rejects personification. "Nothing is more unnatural. Its effects, at the same time, are deplorable. First, it gives an air of fiction to the whole; and prevents that impression of reality which is requisite to interest our affections, and to move our passions. . . Virtuous emotions cannot be raised successfully, but by the actions of those who are endued with passions and affections like

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our own, that is, by human action; and as for moral instruction, it is clear that none can be drawn from beings who act not upon the same principles with us" (page 450). Personification, then, in his view, is essentially self-defeating. Its very imaginative potency prevents it from having an ultimate moral effect. Almost precisely the same point is made by Blair, in his special pleading for the excellence of the Ossian poems. The fact that allegorical personages are absent from these pieces "is not to be regretted. For the intermixture of those shadowy Beings, which have not the support even of mythological or legendary belief, with human actors, seldom produces a good effect. The fiction becomes too visible and phantastick; and overthrows that impression of reality, which the probable recital of human activities is calculated to make upon the mind." 10 Similarly, Elizabeth Montagu, who sees allegory as inevitably following the more naive ages of fable, believes it an inferior form because of its lack of the power based on reality. It "does not awe and terrify like sacred mythology, nor ever can establish the same fearful devotion, nor assume such arbitrary power over the mind." 1 1 Personification had great power over the imagination, these critics seem to be saying, but only over the imagination; this was a limitation as well as a strength. The typical cavils about personification in this period, then, grow out of reservations about the attitude implied by the even more typical enthusiasm for the figure. Enthusiasts insisted that personifications were imaginary characters, to be used with freedom and gusto; more analytic critics felt obliged to warn poets that personifications were not simply characters, that special laws must govern their use. Did poets, then, employ personifications more freely and

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imaginatively than they had before? It is certainly true that one can discern new imaginative freedom in the use of personification at this time: a freedom connected with the great weaknesses of late eighteenth-century horror-personification and with its hints of what was to come in the nineteenth century. II T h e nature of personification, of course, did not change conveniently at mid-century. In 1751 John Brown published " A n Essay on Satire, Occasioned b y the Death of Mr. Pope." It contained a reference to "the demon shame" and a line stating that "snake-hung envy hissess o'er his [Pope's] urn." 1 2 Such simple identification seemed sufficient to Brown and, throughout the century, to many other poets. Perfunctory personifications continue to abound; so do processional odes in precisely the modes w e have already encountered. It comes as a great relief to find Hugh Downman capable of making fun of himself. His college exercise entitled " T h e Twenty-Ninth of M a y " contains lines all too representative of contemporary serious poetry: Then Civil Discord blood-distain'd, Then fierce Rebellion bellowing fled, And Faction hid her snake-crown'd head: Vanish'd each Fury at his sight. Then, later in the poem, What vast sublimity of diction Is here! what truth-resembling fiction! Methinks I spy a new creation! How fine is Per-so-ni-fi-cation! 1 3 "Sublimity of diction" precisely like his flourished; so did more detailed personifications based entirely on tradition:

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for the personification-tradition was so well defined by now that Erasmus Darwin could maintain that there are "some allegoric figures, which we have so often heard described or seen delineated, that we almost forget that they do not exist in common life; and hence view them without astonishment; as the figures of the heathen mythology, of angels, devils, death, and time; and almost believe them to be realities, even when they are mixed with representations of the natural forms of men." 14 So when John Scott, for example, chooses to evoke the image of Revenge, he does so by reference to various traditions: Revenge with them, relentless Fury, came, Her bosom burning with infernal flame! Her hair sheds horrour, like the comet's blaze; Her eyes, all ghastly, blast where'er they gaze; Her lifted arm a poison'd crice sustains; Her garments drop with blood of kindred veins!

15

This Oriental fury with "poison'd crice" [kris] is constructed from a combination of non-Oriental images of horror. She has the comet's blazing hair, traditionally associated with evil omen; the basilisk-gaze of Medusa; many characteristics of the Virgilian Alecto. Alecto is smeared with blood; snakes form her hair; she is both hideous and, in Dryden's translation, explicitly sublime; her eyes burn sulphur; she rattles chains and waves a whip. John Scott's Revenge has a different weapon and her hair is not so specifically described. Her ancestry is nonetheless clear; and it is approximately that of countless eighteenth-century images of Terror, Despair, Ruin, Affright, Horror, Dismay, and the like. One alternative to describing personified figures only in terms of tradition was not describing them at all. A justifica-

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tion for this technique is suggested by a monody printed anonymously in The Annual Register for 1774. Behind, stood Death, too horrible for sight, In darkness clad, expectant, prun'd for flight; Pleas'd at the word, the shapeless monster sped . . . Terrific horrors all the void invest, Whilst the Archspectre issues forth confest.16 The truly horrible is by nature undescribable; moreover, Burke had insisted emphatically on the poetic value of obscurity: " T o make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary." 1 7 His praise for Milton's Death was based on the fact that "all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree" (page 59). The anonymous monodist is no Milton, but he is clearly attempting the Miltonic technique, to suggest the dreadful rather than delineate it, to achieve a sense of terror by such words as "shapeless," to make "terrific horrors" evoke in a reader a strong emotional response to the unknown. Many late eighteenth-century writers used similar techniques,18 although with no conspicuous success; no one managed very effectively to make an abstraction more real by turning it into a fiend, while simultaneously tempering reality with calculated vagueness. There was, then, a genuine poetic dilemma about description in personifications. On one side was the danger of overdescription. "Descriptive personification," Lord Kames wrote, "cannot be dispatched in too few words: a circumstantiate description dissolves the charm, and makes the attempt to personify appear ridiculous." 19 Yet there was danger, too, in underdescription. Classical references, as a good many twentieth-century critics have noted, were wearing out; reliance on tradition did not always solve all

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problems. A n d the poetry of obscurity, admirable as it might be in Milton, proved surprisingly difficult to imitate. These difficulties perhaps account f o r the increasing emphasis on junction in horror-personification toward the end of the century, with the actions of personifications sometimes elaborately described, but the actors often exceedingly vague. Rachel Trickett, writing of Augustan personifications, points out their characteristically static quality. " T h e personifications in Augustan verse . . . are highly pictorial. T h e y are seldom active metaphors, but more often single illustrations, and they crowd the Odes and didactic pieces of the period with the air of conventional figures in a decorative painting." 20 T h e late horror-personifications of the century, often as conventional as earlier ones — convention remained, after all, a main source of their strength — were far more active. Daniel W e b b wrote, in 1762, "such images as are in motion, and which, b y a gradual enlargement, keep our senses in suspense, are more interesting than those, which owe their power to a single impression, and are perfect at their first appearance. Where there can be no gradation in an object, its influence on the mind is immediately determined." 2 1 Y e t much of the activity associated with personifications was itself extraordinarily static: Come, Melancholy, spread thy raven wing . . . T o the dark charnel vault thy vot'ry bring, The murky mansions of the mould'ring dead . . . Soon as to life our animated clay Awakes, and conscious being opes our eyes, Care's fretful family at once dismay, With ghastly air a thousand phantoms rise, Sad Horror hangs o'er all the deep'ning gloom, Grief prompts the labour'd sigh, Death opes the marble tomb.22

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The atmosphere of this is familiar, from graveyard verse, but the personified figures themselves are not described, except in the reference to Melancholy's raven wing. W e are told what they do rather than how they look. If they are phantoms, they seem phantoms in the sense of figments of the imagination rather than ghosts. And, the personifications of the final couplet seem more essentially abstractions than physical beings; we may even feel, with Coleridge, that their status depends entirely upon the printer's use of capitals, since the function of personified grief is precisely the same as that of grief the emotion. Dr. Johnson's restrictions are being carefully observed; the result here is that the abstraction is given no real physical existence. What has been added is merely atmosphere; the abstractions have been placed in a slightly new emotional context. The new emphasis on function, though frequently unsuccessful by contemporary as well as modern standards, is especially interesting when it is used for the communication of psychic stress. Horror-personifications now frequently become emblems of psychological states. Ghosts and demons could be employed directly, as we have seen, to evoke mental or emotional strain; so could the personifications derived from them. And if demons appeared more frequently in such contexts toward the end of the century, so did horror-personifications. In one birthday ode (1781), for example, Whitehead's "fury fiends" are revenge, pride, hate, and avarice. He turns them into "torturing plagues" in the next line — and the confusions of metaphor suggests that the poet really wishes to convey the horror of certain psychic situations, not to dwell on his furies as personages. Or Dr. John Wolcot writes of a realm where "envy's demons gnaw the throbbing breast/ . . . Where horror breathes around a death-like dread." 23 Perfunctory as this

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seems, it too, is clearly an attempt at psychological emphasis. Poets more adept at their craft were able to make more successful use of natural personages as emblems of mental and emotional difficulty, and with some specific theoretical justification. John Ogilvie suggested that our idea of imaginary personages, such as personifications, "may be more distinct and particular" than our ideas of real people 24 not, as Darwin theorized, because of tradition, but because of psychology. W e may have trouble forming a concept of the physical being of people in literature, because we do not fully know their characters, but there can be no such problem with personifications, for which the original exists in our own minds (I, cv). W e have a notion of what terror is; the physical being of personified Terror must follow directly from that. The true power of personification, then, derives from the fact that it merely objectifies images already implicit in the human mind —• in all human minds. Persons in an overwrought state might be subjects for poetry in their visions of imaginary horrors, but to turn a state of mind into a ghost or Fury worked even better. Fearful spirit, where, O where Speed'st thou through the troubled air? With dread, with dread is seen Thy horror-striking mien: Hide in earth thy snaky crest; Bid thy rod of vengeance rest: . . . Ah whence that scowl, those angry eyes? W h y thus thy swelling form rear to gigantic size?

25

The four stanzas which follow are spoken by the specter, who is, it turns out, Conscience. The horror of the image, the rod of vengeance, the swelling form thus receive specific allegorical meaning; they define precisely the nature and effects of guilt.

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Or consider this excerpt from John Brown's long poem, "The Cure of Saul": The unchain'd furies come! Pale melancholy stalks from hell: Th'abortive offspring of her womb, Despair and anguish round her yell. By sleepless terror Saul possess'd, Deep feels the fiend within his tortur'd breast. Midnight spectres round him howl: Befor his eyes In troops they rise; The seas of horror overwhelm his soul.26 This is overwrought, but the familiar Furies here acquire new emotional force even though their association with fiends and specters and seas of horror is confusingly vague. This time the emphasis is on the function of the abstractions as persons (melancholy stalks, despair and anguish yell), and this makes possible a special sort of economy: the poet suggests simultaneously the physical effects of melancholy (identical with the activities of the personifications) and the full dreadfulness of its psychological effects through insistent association of emotions with fiends.27 There was, of course, nothing new about personifying Remorse or Despair; these were obvious and familiar subjects for such treatment. What was new was the degree to which emphasis now rested more on the effects of the emotion than on its physical embodiment. Poetic interest began to center on the way it feels to be suspicious or remorseful; the more theoretical problem of how the characteristics of anger, say, could be given concrete reality was characteristically subordinated to communication of the personal suffering involved in being angry. Oh Jealousy, whose inly-rankling dart Racks the fond bosom with unnumber'd throes,

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That now, even now, art busy at my heart, Far hence avaunt, and leave me to repose! G o in some Stygian cave unheard to moan, There night and day thy restless eyeballs roll — Ah! spare me, spare me, since thy power I own! Nor thus, so soon returning from control, In size more huge, in shape more hideous grown, With tenfold horrors rush upon my soul.28

This may seem a rather remote approach, but the pains of jealousy are clearly the most important subject of the sonnet. The figure of Jealousy is evoked almost entirely through its effects on its victim; the poem seems concerned to define the peculiarly hellish torments of jealousy by emphatically relating those torments to a traditionally conceived fiendish figure. For of course the poet's interest is not in the sufferings of jealousy as an individual phenomenon; he is trying to use terms which will suggest the universal relevance and power of the emotion. For the suggestion of universality, personification of this kind — with its externalization of personal feeling — seems a particularly appropriate device. In poems of the kind we have just been considering, and in other sorts of personification pieces in this period, one senses that the main poetic problem with personification had become that of finding appropriate functions for the device. Some of its traditional functions were obviously outworn. In religious contexts, for example, personifications appeared with great frequency, but in an increasingly perfunctory fashion. John Newton could have War marching "at the Lord's command"; Thomas Warton might suggest that "just heaven" allows "The tribes of hell-born W o e " to test man's fortitude. Popular poems on the Last Day sometimes introduced personification-fiends: Michael Bruce has Conscience lifting a snaky head to frighten the damned

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into madness; Robert Glynn suggests that on the day of judgment Sin will fly "Back to her native hell"; Bishop Porteus writes of E n v y as "eldest born of hell." 29 Of the Seatonion Prize poems for Cambridge, all on religious subjects, twenty of the thirty-seven dated between 1762 and 1799 contain horror personifications.30 But none of these instances is worth quoting in detail, for they seem so mechanical as to be virtually meaningless. And the main difficulty of conscientious poets seems to have been how to avoid this sense of meaninglessness. One answer was to use horror-personifications in an entirely new sort of context. W e have seen from examples earlier in the century that writers had experimented with placing their personified horror figures in a group of "real" fiends or witches, or had elaborated the supernatural associations of a setting in order to make the personifications in it more convincing. The method which developed in the late eighteenth century was more complicated; it involved introducing personifications into poems which would seem to belong to a genre antithetical to all the values of personification. Thus we find in a piece called "Odin" and based on Scandinavian mythology this group of figures: Ah! see where on the savage heath, Half hid amidst the gloomy storm, And dancing hand in hand with Death, Moves many a rude and ghastly form! There Terror, cheated Fancy's child, Flies o'er the mountains shrieking wild . . .

3 1

The collection also includes Flight, Amazement, Uproar, Agony, Despair, and Desolation. They do not seem much like personifications, these figures; the labels attached to them are titles, not descriptions. Yet they are, as beings, as vivid as any other inhabitants of the poem. Perhaps an even

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better example of the way in which personifications could be absorbed into the imaginative texture of a poem is a piece by one Edward Drewe called " T h e Rapt Bard": Hither, hither bend thine eye, See the sons of Denmark fly! Deep thunders roll From pole to pole, And light'ning gilds the murky sky. See pale Fear Impels their rear! . . . The raven screams, With dark disastrous wing low brooding o'er the field.32 T h e intimate mixture of folk tradition and personification throughout this poem suggests the extent to which personifications might now be felt as personages like any other; the process of "assimilation" was doubtless helped b y the occurrence of such figures in Germanic poetry. This sort of effort at justification amounts to an almost total rejection of the "special" quality of personifications for the sake of emphasis on their flexibility as dramatic instruments. 33 Another technique for justifying personifications in use depended on renewed interest in the relationship between poetry and painting. Pictorial presentation of abstract figures did not necessarily mean detailed description; it might depend on a visually conceived grouping of figures. The frequent corse obstructs the sullen stream, And ghosts glare horrid from the sylvan gloom. How sadly-silent all! Save where outstretch'd beneath yon hanging wall Pale Famine moans with feeble breath, And Torture yells, and grinds her bloody teeth.34 T h e appearance of the figures is stressed not at all, but their arrangement is ordered in a clearly visualized fashion. T h e

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environment is established as a sinister one; ghosts glare from the surrounding gloom, corpses clog the stream, and the frenzied futility of Torture's activity is emphasized by contrast with the stasis of her environment.35 Such devices for lending personifications significance in addition to that automatically supplied by tradition are unimportant in themselves, but interesting in their foreshadowing of the ultimate triumph and defeat of horror personification. For that triumph and defeat, two major early Romantic poets seem, at least symbolically, largely responsible. Blake and the young Coleridge both made rather heavy use of this typically eighteenth-century device in ways which seem the logical culmination of the trends we have seen thus far. Ill Major poets have been conspicuously absent from the discussion in this chapter. Gray did not employ horrorpersonification to any significant extent, nor did Johnson or Cowper or even Burns. All may have been conscious of weaknesses that seemed inherent in the device: the extent to which it relied on fast-dying traditions; the remotely decorative and unreal effect which it tended to have; the triteness of most of the figures that seemed conceivable. And at the other extreme were the dangers of which we know Johnson to have been conscious: any attempt to make personifications fresh might result in total destruction of rhetorical bounds, removing altogether the intellectual content of personifications. Late in the century, however, a group of minor poets developed who completely ignored Johnson's warnings. Theoretically as well as practically concerned with the nature of personification, they tried to expand its possibili-

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ties, and carried many of the trends we have already noted to new extremes. And such men as John Ogilvie, William Hayley, and Erasmus Darwin, all weak poets, all prolific users of horror-personification, prepared the way for Blake and Coleridge by their efforts to create truly "original" horror-personifications. Their efforts, although they might rely basically on tradition, demonstrated a new sort of elaboration. Ogilvie, for example, in a nonallegorical poem, presents Envy thus: Envy! thou Fiend, whose venomed sting Still points to Fame's aspiring wing; Whose breath, blue sulphur's blasting stream, Whose eye the basilisk's lightning-gleam: Say, through the dun ile's solemn round, Where Death's dread foot-step prints the ground, Lovest thou to haunt the yawning tomb, And crush fallen Grandeur's dusty plume? Or, where the wild Hyaena's yell Reigns thro' the hermit's cavern'd cell, Moves thy black wing its devious flight? (Thy wing that bloats the cheek of Night) There oft beneath some hoary wall T h y stings are dipt in scorpion's gall; Thence whizzing springs the forky dart, And spreads its poison to the heart. 36

Several of the physical details are familiar — the sulfurous stream, the basilisk-eye, the black wing. But the attempt at "atmosphere," although also based on the conventions of graveyard poetry (Death's dread footsteps, the yawning tomb, the hermit's cell, the hoary wall), suggests that Ogilvie wants his Envy to be a vivid character in its own right. He does not succeed, because he is not a good poet. ("Is there not imagination in them [Ogilvie's poems], Sir?"

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asked Boswell. Johnson: "Why, Sir, there is in them what was imagination, but it is no more imagination in him, than sound is sound in the echo.") 37 The sting which originally points toward Fame's aspiring wing eventually flies to the heart; the wing of Envy "bloats the cheek of Night" for no discernible reason, and in no clearly discernible fashion. The conception of Envy as fiend, in short, is neither clearly nor consistently developed. Yet, using similar details and offering no more evidence of true imagination, Ogilvie managed later — in a description of Disease in "Providence" (II, 147) — t o evoke a true image of physical horror. Disease, like Envy, has "raven-pinions"; she bloats the face of Nature instead of the cheek of Night; her nostrils, like Envy's, breathe a cloud. We are told explicitly — with clear reference back to Milton — that her form was "shapeless" and "void." On the other hand, we also find eight lines of rather exact physical description. Disease has "the Owl's ill-omen'd eyes," a cheek scooped by Famine's hand, a forky tongue made of a green viper, wings of the putrid stream from the Fens. Finally we learn that "All her form below,/ Ended in fiery basilisks, and snakes,/ And scorpions dropping venom." Ogilvie's mechanical cataloguing, his equally mechanical associations, prevent his figures from being convincing: they have no integral reality. Personifications of the sort he produced have, as Donald Davie observes, "little or nothing to do with language." 38 And they have, as Dr. Johnson hinted, almost as little to do with imagination. But they foretell a development of personification away from its function as a rhetorical device, toward a new place — a duplication, indeed, of a very old place — as a provider of imaginative expansion. In The Triumphs of Temper (1781), the popular poet William Hayley made a serious attempt to widen the

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imaginative resources of poetry. His poem alternated realistic cantos, dealing with the heroine's daytime activities, with fantastic ones, recounting her inspired dreams. Every night, Serena visits the Cave of Spleen: H a y ley explains in his preface that his conception derives from Pope's in "The Rape of the Lock", and that he feels such material as Pope's should be treated more seriously. He presents it seriously indeed, insisting on the relation of his method to Dante's. 39 T h e Cave of Spleen, naturally, is rich in allegorical figures — extended personifications. The Nymph advancing saw, with mute amaze, A dismal, deep, enormous dungeon blaze. Stones of red fire the hideous wall compos'd; And massive gates the horrid confine clos'd. Th'infernal Portress of this doleful dome, With fiery lips, that swell'd with poisonous foam, Pale Discord, rag'd; with whose tormenting tongue, Thro' all its caves th'extensive region rung: A living Vulture was the Fury's crest; And in her hand a Rattlesnake she prest, Whose angry joints incessantly were heard T o sound defiance to the screaming Bird. 40

The poem is composed largely of groups of such set pieces. Hayley, like so many other poets, systematically tries to associate spleen and ennui with hell in order to make a didactic point; and he works harder than most to accomplish this association. He gives heavy weight sometimes to physical appearance, sometimes to activity, sometimes to atmosphere, sometimes to a combination. Moreover, his fiendpersonifications do not inhabit merely the avowedly fantastic sections of the poem. In the realistic cantos, dealing with Serena's ordinary pursuits and her relations with her father and the rest of the world, demon-abstractions frequently appear: Gout, Scandal, Contradiction, Jealousy,

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Avarice, and Ambition are only a few of them. The allegorical scheme of the dream passages permits more complicated relationships and activities among abstractions: but both in realistic and nonrealistic contexts, Hayley succeeds repeatedly in presenting his abstractions from more than a single point of view, suggesting simultaneously their intrinsic relation with the supernatural, their physical appearance and accouterments, and their symbolic or dramatic functions. The way was being paved for personifications to become so fully personages that they ceased to be abstractions; even in this poem, such a figure as Misanthropy becomes so convincing a monster that he no longer represents an attitude. The self-destruction of personification is most clearly demonstrated by Erasmus Darwin, one of the most eloquent theoretical proponents of the device and certainly its most tactless user. He turns plants into sorceresses and imps, completely ignoring the physical existence and limitations of plant life in favor of the most bizarre imaginative conceptions.41 Yet the physical incongruity of his descriptions is not the only reason for their weakness: the poet's attempts to achieve supernatural atmosphere are totally unsuccessful, because his references, his adjectives, his details all seem too completely automatic. Donald Davie has pointed out that the best and most characteristic epithets of eighteenth-century poetry "turn their back upon senseexperience and appeal beyond it, logically, to known truths deduced from it." 42 There is no such logic in Darwin's poetry, no reference to an established system, no derivation of diction from a world-view. Darwin appeals beyond the senses not to known truths, but to known untruths: the supernatural is in his verse purely theoretical, neither felt nor believed in.

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Horror-personifications, then, as the century approached its close, moved in all their elaboration toward meaninglessness. The figures might be superficially vivid, but their details often seemed mechanically selected and used, drawn still from lifeless traditions. Yet the vividness, however superficial, frequently obscured the conceptual reality of the personifications. It is possible to criticize the earlier personifications of the century, the simpler ones, on many grounds, but they do not have the peculiar emptiness so often found in Ogilvie and Darwin and even Hayley. When John Brown wrote of despair and anguish as "Th'abortive offspring of [melancholy's] womb," he used the word abortive in a rich sense, suggesting on one level a concept of despair and anguish as monstrous, foetus-like creatures; on another level, the fact that melancholy tends to keep the emotional life from coming to full fruition. When he described Saul as possessed by sleepless terror, he suggested another personification, a monster surpassing human limitations in never needing to sleep; he conveyed also the horrible, never-ending quality of terror as an emotion. He, too, depended on convention: these personifications are furies, they come from hell, and Brown certainly believed in furies as inhabitants of hell no more than Darwin believed in witches reanimating the dead. Yet his furies are convincing because they serve a real purpose of clarification and emphasis. By many of its later users, personification was intended to decorate rather than illuminate — and its decoration is frequently shoddy.

IV The caveat about personification which Wordsworth offered in the preface to Lyrical Ballads is perhaps better known than the fact that Wordsworth employed person-

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ification fairly often. So did the other early Romantics, who found horror-personifications particularly appealing. A comparison between Blake and an anonymous predecessor suggests the transformation that the Romantics effected in horror-personification. The Annual Register for 1758 contains the following passage from "The Pleasures of the Mind." Last, Winter comes to rule the year, In sweet vicissitude severe; See him on ZembWs mountains stand, He stretches out his palsied hand, And all his magazines unfold Their copious hoards of ice and cold: . . . Deep-bellowing bursts of thunder roll, And pleasing horror swells the soul.43 Here is Blake: He [Winter] hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathed In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes, For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world. Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings T o his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks: He withers all in silence, and in his hand Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life. He takes his seat upon the cliffs; the mariner Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal'st With storms, till heaven smiles, and the monster Is driv'n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla.44 The comparison between a very good poet and a very bad one is, of course, automatically unfair, but some of the reasons for goodness and badness may be significant. The earlier personification is at least honest in the sense that John Brown's personification is honest: it is a genuine

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attempt to express figuratively certain essential qualities of winter, and to evoke a vaguely paradoxical attitude toward these qualities ("sweet vicissitude severe," "pleasing horr o r " ) . But the image intended to sum up qualities and attitudes is itself hazy: Winter never really emerges as a figure, and the personification accomplishes nothing that could not be achieved equally well without it. Blake, too, is honest in intention: the basic purpose of his personification seems identical to that of the earlier one. His greater success in achieving this purpose depends on the genuine creation of an image of power and horror in his Winter, whose relations with men are complex and complexly perceived. This Winter is a being, not merely a season; he seems, indeed, to acquire symbolic overtones that go far beyond any ordinary conception of the season. His defeat by the smiles of heaven suggests an essentially diabolic quality; he is both a time of year (his functions are all appropriate to the nature of winter) and far more than that, a truly direful monster, physically as well as theoretically conceived. But his vivid realization as a monster is an implicit threat to the allegorical limitation required by the nature of personification. In one of Blake's earliest symbolic works, a striking series of terror-personifications occurs: And aged Tiriel stood & said: "Where does the thunder sleep? "Where doth he hide his terrible head? & his swift and fiery daughters, "Where do they shroud their fiery wings & the terrors of their hair? "Earth, thus I stamp thy bosom! rouse the earthquake from his den, " T o raise his dark & burning visage thro' the cleaving ground, " T o thrust these towers with his shoulders! let his fiery dogs

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"Rise from the center, belching flames & roarings, dark smoke! " W h e r e art thou, Pestilence, that bathest in fogs & standing lakes? "Rise up thy sluggish limbs & let the loathsomest of poisons "Drop from thy garments as thou walkest, wrapt in yellow clouds." 45

The richness of imagination here manifested, in the multiplicity and intensity of images, is, of course, unprecedented in the eighteenth century. Though propriety of function is preserved, one feels that dark and terrible beings are being invoked, not that the poet is dealing with thunder and lightning and earthquake and pestilence. And precisely the same sort of imagery, the same intensity, the same stress on darkness and fire as symbols of terror, persist in Blake's later symbolic poems, in which figures are not conveniently identified but become in their symbolic function subjects for critical controversy. There seems a basic unity of imaginative impulse between Blake's early personifications and the kind of Blakean metaphor in which equivalents are not stated. When personifications are conceived in rich imaginative terms, when their physical existence and function are made precise and vivid, they begin to come very close to being something other than personifications. Coleridge also made lavish use of personification in his early poems. In "Ode on the Departing Year" (1796) these lines occur, addressed to England: T h e nations curse thee! T h e y with eager wondering Shall hear Destruction, like a vulture, scream! Strange-eyed Destruction! who with many a dream Of central fires through nether seas up-thundering Soothes her fierce solitude; yet as she lies B y livid fount, or red volcanic stream, If ever to her lidless dragon-eyes,

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O Albion! thy predestined ruins rise, T h e fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap, Muttering distempered triumph in her charmed sleep.46

The "fiend-hag" Destruction, implicitly compared with a vulture, is the product of individual imagination, not tradition. Emphasis on the physical being of the creature is restricted to her eyes: first "strange-eyed," she is later given "lidless dragon-eyes," which define her strangeness and suggest an association with the dragon as traditional enemy of God. (In the Book of Revelation, Satan appears as a dragon; the dragon was in the Middle Ages the characteristic antagonist of the Christian knight; the early Hebrews conceived it as cosmic enemy.) Her surroundings and her triumphant muttering, the more horrible for being part of a charmed sleep, increase the enveloping sense of terror. She is, in short, perceived as an individual — supernatural, fearful, but uniquely fearful. One may remember the image long after forgetting what it represents. Coleridge writes often in similar vein; his war eclogue, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," is an extended instance. Even his Greek ode on astronomy, translated by Southey in 1793, is rich in this sort of material. It is often easy to forget that his horror-personifications are personifications, since they have the effect of fiends, not abstractions. "The Ancient Mariner" offers perhaps the most dramatic example of a description in which personification has moved far from the typical eighteenth-century modes. In the 1798 version included in Lyrical Ballads, the description of the specterwoman and her mate concludes, Her skin is as white as leprosy, And she is far liker Death than he; Her flesh makes the still air cold. 47

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It was not until the revision for the 1817 Sybilline Leaves that the lines became Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.48 In the same revision, the marginal gloss identified the specters as Death and Life-in-Death. The alterations, of course, among other things, change a specter into a personification. They are minor alterations: it makes little difference to the effect of horror whether or not the beings are explicitly identified. For emotional, if not thematic, purposes, the line between the allegorical and the nonallegorical seems not particularly significant. And we have here another indication of how close the relationship between personifications and supernatural beings might be.49 One is not likely to react to Blake and Coleridge, however, with the irritation evoked by the attempts of such poets as Ogilvie and Darwin to use personifications which are in no real sense limited by the conventions of rhetoric. The reason is clear enough: Blake and Coleridge in one sense revivified the very convention they were also destroying. Their personifications do not lack propriety in achieving vividness: to think of Earthquake as having a dark and burning visage, as thrusting towers with his shoulders, does not take us far from a normal conception of earthquakes —• it merely dramatizes normal conceptions; to image Destruction as associated with volcanic streams amplifies rather than violates our ordinary notions of destruction. These are, in short, from one point of view far better personifications than the others we have examined: their authors have elaborated them without losing sight of the original reason for their existence.

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Yet the elaboration remains none the less a threat to the whole notion of personification. As a matter of fact, it is far more a threat in such truly imaginative forms as we have been examining than in the mechanical developments of lesser poets. Darwin's sorceress is more a sorceress than a plant; Hayley's Spleen, more a specter than an emotion. Yet they are not very convincing as sorceress or specter, either, because they seem to be composed of building blocks. But Coleridge's specter-woman is truly a ghostly figure, whether she is called Life-in-Death or simply a specter: the realized imaginative effect, the consciousness of terror, remain the same in either case. If the first version is more powerful than the second, it is because of the differences in the last line — not because of the presence or absence of a label. The image itself is intense: the vision of the fiend-hag is stronger than the idea of destruction; the monster striding over the world engages our attention more than the idea of winter which justifies the conception. T h e images provoke an emotional response so strong that we forget the intellectual connections which need to be made. T h e abstract idea, in other words, adds little to the vividness of the image, and the image is so intense in its own right that it can no longer be said to reinforce the abstraction. Instead, it overpowers the abstraction. And when the imagined personage becomes so clearly stronger than the idea it embodies, it is a small step to direct presentation of a being itself with no reference to the limiting idea. T h e supernatural makes frequent undisguised appearances in nineteenth-century poetry. T h e history of horrorpersonifications, no less than that of other eighteenth-century experiments with supernatural horror, suggests to a great extent the origins of such other-worldly subject matter and the evolution of the characteristic nineteenthcentury practice in its evocation.

CHAPTER S E V E N

Conclusions hat there is something Satanic about the Byronic version of the "romantic hero" has long been recognized. Even the loosest definitions of romanticism may suggest that the supernatural realm is a particularly appropriate subject for exploration by the romantic sensibility: its exoticism, its overtones of terror, its possibilities of morbid beauty all suggest that "tempestuous loveliness of temper" that fascinated not only Shelley but, as Mario Praz has pointed out, most of his contemporaries as well. Richard Blackmore, as we have seen, early suggested that the poetic use of supernatural personages derived from some "strong Tincture of the Romantick Contagion." H e and his contemporaries disapproved violently of such contagion; yet it seems to have spread to epidemic proportions long before the end of the eighteenth century. T h e bad poets of the eighteenth century provide a suggestive record of the progress of the epidemic, and hint at its causes. It is a commonplace that the poetasters of an age habitually imitate and ultimately debase the period's major literary tendencies. And study of such figures frequently clarifies for the critic exactly what those tendencies are. T o define the principles of Augustan poetic theory from Pope's practice, say, is made difficult by Pope's genius: what he accomplishes is so complex, so subtle, that it is difficult to see how lesser poets could hope to imitate it. It is only by examining what these minor figures choose to

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attempt that we can perceive the extent to which the genius can be considered "representative." T h e mass of poems w e have examined in the limited context of their concern with the supernatural are, from one point of view, a series of glosses on the text, " T h e proper study of mankind is man." Particularly the pieces written early in the century, clustered around Pope as a model, suggest the surprising range of interpretations the line might have. T h e sort of balance w e encountered in the theologians, who recognized the limitations of the human capacity f o r knowledge as a justification for believing in the possibility of supernatural intervention one has never encountered, seems to have carried over into poetic theory: restricting oneself to man as poetic subject was a means of inclusion, not exclusion. Dryden had written, it will be remembered, in 1672 that nothing which is or may be in nature can be considered unnatural; an extension of this principle to the consideration of man as subject offered wide latitude indeed. For what was the human heart or mind not capable of? What, then, might not be considered in poetry? It was one application of this principle, clearly, that motivated the "sociological" approach to dealing with the supernatural that w e encountered with great frequency early in the century, the attention to unearthly phenomena because they were matters of belief f o r the uneducated, the rural. Y e t the fact that this approach, with its stern preservation of aesthetic distance, kept turning in practice into something more immediate points to a more significant aspect of the importance of the supernatural. This is the fact explicitly recognized b y Addison, that the mind of man is naturally subject to "secret Terrours and Apprehensions." It is probably the most significant single fact to be

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considered in connection with the poetic use of the unearthly, for it is a key to many of the tensions one feels in the supernatural poetry of the eighteenth century. If the mind of man is naturally subject to secret terrors and apprehensions, if such beings as ghosts and witches are inevitable symbols of these fears, it is clearly difficult to pretend that the ghostly is interesting as a subject only at a distance, that it has to do only with the unsophisticated intelligence; for in fact it has profound significance — even if only symbolically — for all men. T h e history of the uses of the supernatural in eighteenth-century poetry seems, when one looks back over it, to be a history of struggles with this realization; and when the realization was fully achieved, the Romantic Age was at hand. T h e process through which poets came to realize the true meaning of their interest in the supernatural provides a record of the complicated emotional life of the eighteenth century. Northrop Frye recently defined the latter half of the century as an "age of sensibility," pointing out the extent to which it was dominated by an interest in literature as process rather than result. Where there is a sense of literature as process, pity and fear become states of mind without objects, moods which are common to the work of art and the reader, and which bind them together psychologically instead of separating them aesthetically. Fear without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being afraid of anything, is called Angst or anxiety, a somewhat narrow term for what may be almost anything between pleasure and pain. In the general area of pleasure comes the eighteenthcentury conception of the sublime, where qualities of austerity, gloom, grandeur, melancholy or even menace are a source of romantic or penseroso feelings.1 Professor Frye's essay is one of the many studies which have

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helped to refute oversimplifications about the reactions and foreshadowings of the eighteenth century, and the process of redefinition seems endless. F o r it becomes increasingly clear that there are, of course, no boundary lines. T h a t the interest in the unpleasant supernatural has some connection with eighteenth-century Angst is certainly clear; it is also clear that it does not belong merely to the second half of the century: the "negative romanticism" which Morse Peckham defined 2 occurs throughout the 1700's. If the last half of the century is an age of sensibility, so, in a more tentative and scattered fashion, is the first — or so, at least, its treatment of the supernatural would suggest. Allan Ramsay's account of the witches walloping o'er to France, William Diaper's evocation of ghosts roaming through the forest, even John G a y ' s apocryphal tale of the ghost-seeing guest at the inn: all these certainly employ the supernatural to suggest and to create troubled states of mind. T h e power of the first two, in particular, derives almost entirely from their successful evocation of the atmosphere of disruption. But it is all, in the first half of the century, very indirect; and the most important differences in the use of the supernatural early and late in the century have to do with degrees of directness and self-consciousness. T h e emotional justification f o r the subject matter is virtually the same in all cases, but the attitudes toward it differ in some interesting ways. T h e direct connection between the supernatural and the psychological is made early as well as late: but early it is a means of deprecating the importance of the material; later it becomes a mode of providing added emphasis. W h e n countless writers before 1750 explained the ghosts in their poems as the products of spleen or guilt or anxiety, they thus suggested that, lacking objective reality, such beings were not directly significant to the reader.

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When Coleridge, on the other hand, caused his mariner to see unearthly visions as part of a complicated process of insight and redemption, his intent was quite different: he thus conveyed the intensity of the process, its inclusiveness, its emotional ambiguity. For him as for Blake, and even as for such minor figures as William Hayley, the importance of the supernatural depended largely on its connection with profound human feelings. T h a t connection had been grasped far earlier, but when feelings themselves were not considered of primary significance, neither were their supernatural adjuncts. Yet the fact that the connection between feelings and demons was made so early in the century, and persisted so consistently to its end, may hint that although Augustan poetic theory did not justify explicit emphasis on the emotional life as centrally important, still a sense of its centrality plagues even the most conventional and minor of poets. A Pope or a Johnson, while preserving the most rigid metrical and intellectual discipline, could convey the inextricable interrelations of emotional, intellectual, and moral concerns. When first the college rolls receive his name, The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame; Through all his veins the fever of renown Burns from the strong contagion of the gown; O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread, And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head. Are these thy views? proceed, illustrious youth, And virtue guard thee to the throne of Truth! Yet should thy soul indulge the gen'rous heat, Till captive Science yields her last retreat; Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray, And pour on misty Doubt resistless day . . . Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain,

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And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain . . . Should no Disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from letters, to be wise. 3

M y point here is merely that the density of such verse, its complex sense of "the doom of man," derives largely from an assumption that the nature of man (and this is perhaps his greatest curse) is to be in essence an emotional rather than a rational being. The passage is, among other things, a complicated record of emotional life; it insists that even though Reason may guide with her brightest ray, the grief and danger of life ultimately dominate the human spirit, and true wisdom, paradoxically, consists in the recognition that the emotional nature cannot be denied. The desire for renown is a fever, not an idea; even the "gen'rous heat" of the soul partakes of feverishness. And "The Vanity of Human Wishes" arrives at its religious resolution ultimately not by denying the instability of human feelings or their dominance, but by suggesting that the ultimate emotion is inevitably despair and that despair must lead to faith in an afterlife. Such a sense that emotion is, should not be, but tragically must be the essence of humanity emerges frequently from the best Augustan poets; the tragic sense of Cowper and that of Pope are not, after all, so far apart as one might suppose. And the efforts of second-rate and even tenthrate poets to deal with supernatural subject matter reveal with extraordinary clarity the difficulties of conveying this sense. For the use of ghosts, witches, and demons as poetic subjects seems to encourage serious oversimplification. The

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poet who tells of the frightening visions of a terrified maiden only to suggest that she is silly or trivial in seeing them, or that he and his readers could not be subject to such hallucinations, is denying rather than affirming the complexity of the human emotional organization by suggesting that one can simply choose to be rational. And the poet who takes the opposite approach of full indulgence in the lurid details of supernatural horror denies complexity by the other extreme, the implicit assumption that emotionally titillating material is automatically valuable for its own sake. To convey Johnsonian complexity by using the supernatural as primary material seems to have been virtually impossible until assumptions changed: the fact is not so much that bad poets wrote supernatural poetry as that supernatural poetry was often bad, before the end of the century, no matter who wrote it. John Gay, after all, was a much better writer than one would suppose from reading his versified ghost story; The Beggar's Opera, for example, demonstrates rich perceptions, a flexible point of view, and extraordinary dexterity at the balancing of tradition and originality. From these sorts of subtlety the ghost story seemed to cut Gay off; the fact that so many experimenters failed with it may have helped to warn away the greatest poets of the early century. So it is just as we should have expected: supernatural poetry begins to get better, more interesting and more significant, with the advent of Gray and Collins. These poets, unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, could see that ghosts were more than the material of abnormal — and therefore not very significant — psychology, that their imaginative value was real and universal. And this is another point at which the study of the eighteenth-century supernatural becomes really significant: it focuses attention on

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the extent to which imagination, quite early in the century, became of central significance in art. T h e critics made the point most explicit as they sought contemporary justification f o r the supernatural figures which tradition had long sanctioned. T h e rationale that accounted f o r the inclusion in the works of Virgil and Homer of furies and giants clearly was no longer valid: in ancient times, or so the eighteenth century felt, supernatural intervention was a matter of universal belief and consequently a matter f o r poetry. But although scattered believers might remain even after 1736, the state religion b y this time certainly gave no credence to witches, ghosts, or demons. Y e t poets somehow still wanted to use them, and critics somehow still felt — or many of them did — that they should be allowed f o r purely literary reasons, because of the imaginative stimulation they offered. T h e persistent association between the supernatural and the imaginative is demonstrated, moreover, directly in poetry as well as criticism: in the tendency to equate fear and fancy, both before and after Collins's great ode, or at least to consider fear an appropriate concomitant f o r fancy. This association is, of course, closely connected with the Angst which Professor F r y e perceives in the age, with the "black melancholy" which afforded a common poetic subject — but also with the growing interest both in defining and in enlarging to their utmost bounds the principles of imaginative (that is, poetic) excitement. T h e fear-fancy combination occurs most frequently in the irregular odes of the age, and the ode did not seem to the dominant Augustan poets a very attractive form. 4 But the venturesomeness of the form, its lack of clearly defined rules, made it seem far the most appropriate mode f o r poetic allusions to the realm of imagination. Conversely, it is difficult to conceive of such allusions, with their usual tone

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of somewhat factitious excitement, occurring within the disciplined heroic couplet. And it is equally true that supernatural material did not lend itself to the most conventional forms of the Augustan period — another reason why the poets who enforced and invigorated the conventions may well have avoided such subject matter. Consequently the metaphor, and that favorite form of Augustan metaphor, the personification, has special importance in connection with the supernatural. The personification was by this time a rhetorical device so hallowed by tradition that its limitations and its possibilities were well defined; they clearly left room for Furies and demons, which needed only slight disguise to be contained within the proper rhetorical bounds. And the tension implicit in the technique of using such beings simultaneously for imaginative, moral, and rhetorical effect might be expected to produce a rich and fruitful sort of poetry. But poetry of this sort, while inconceivably abundant, did not turn out to be, after all, so very rich and fruitful, and the reason seems to have been that the material was simply too strong for its form. The traditions which made it unnecessary to describe Revenge or Despair seemed somehow inadequate: if effects were truly to be imaginative as well as moral, more individual — more horrifying — description seemed desirable. And we have traced the process through which horror-personifications overreached themselves, coming to seem more and more closely related to monsters, less and less to abstractions. It is a process which may roughly parallel the ancient development of mythology. First of all, perhaps, the primitive mind personifies, creating a pseudohuman or animal image for, say, thunder. But as such images become firmly established they gradually acquire more and more attributes, until there is no longer

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a deity equivalent to thunder but, instead, a god, a Jupiter, one of whose powers is the control of thunderbolts. Let us recall one of the elaborate late eighteenth-century horror-personifications. "Earth, thus I stamp thy bosom! rouse the earthquake from his den, "To raise his dark & burning visage thro' the cleaving ground, "To thrust these towers with his shoulders! let his fiery dogs "Rise from the center, belching flames & roarings, dark smoke!" Only a few years after Blake wrote this, Shelley produced another earthquake personification: Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-demon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply — all seems eternal now. 5 T h e contexts, of course, are very different, but the difference in tone between the two passages has to do partly with their different approaches to personification. For Blake, the personification is an elaborate, highly-charged device; it has to be created in emphatic detail. For Shelley, it can be used with great casualness — but only because of the sort of elaboration that his predecessors have used. For now "the old Earthquake-demon" has the force not of "that personified figure of Earthquake which I choose to make a demon," but rather, more simply, "that demon which causes earthquakes" — and the associations the poet has at his disposal are not merely those of past earthquake-personifications, but also of a long line of demons from Grendel's dam on. T h e process, in other words, has come full circle: it is precisely this sort of double association that the early eight-

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eenth-century users of horror personification wished to evoke. For them, however, the associations seldom worked as well as for Shelley, largely because the status of the supernatural in poetry was so much a vexed question, and a reader's reaction to a poetic demon might be simply rejection. It took the long process through which the poetic status of the supernatural — both in its direct narrative and lyrical uses and its indirect metaphorical ones — was clarified and defined to make its casually effective use possible. In a way the most successful horror-personifications of the eighteenth century were the most ambiguous, the ones which least clearly defined themselves as personifications: Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Tho' fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing They mock the air with idle state.6 Here the ambiguity, the hint that these may be figures rather than merely abstractions, is provided by the long tradition of such personifications, and the lack of clarity intensifies the sense of ominous foreboding. T h e more vividly evoked supernatural beings of the eighteenth century are on the whole less successful. Yet it is only through the experimentation which produced them that the memorable demons of the nineteenth century were made possible; and the persistence of the experimentation is one more piece of evidence of the complexity of the eighteenth century and its poetry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

Bibliography I. P O E T R Y (Individual Authors) Aikin, J[ohn], Poems. London, 1791. [Andrews, Robert], Eidyllia: Or, Miscellaneous Poems. Edinburgh, I

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Blackmore, Richard, Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem. London, 1695. Blake, William, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1947. Bruce, Michael, Poems on Several Occasions. Edinburgh, 1770. Brydges, Sir Egerton, Select Poems. Lee Priory, 1814. Robert Burns, The Poetical Works of Robert Burns. London, n.d. [Carter, Elizabeth], Poems on Several Occasions. London, 1762. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. with a biographical introduction by James Dykes Campbell. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1938. Collins, William, The Poetical Works of William Collins, Aldine Edition. London, 1830. The Poetical Works of William Collins, with Observations on His Genius & Writings by J. Langhorne. London, 1765. Copy well, J. [pseud, for William Woty], The Shrubs of Parnassus. London, 1760. Courtier, P., Poems. London, 1796. Crabbe, George, Poems. 2nd ed. London, 1808. [Darwin, Erasmus], The Botanic Garden, Part I, containing The Economy of Vegetation. London, 1791. [ ] The Botanic Garden, Part II, containing The Loves of the Plants. 2nd ed. London, 1790. [First ed., 1789] Diaper, William, Complete Works, ed. Dorothy Broughton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952. Downman, Hugh, Poems. 2nd ed. Exeter, 1790. [Evans, Abel], The Apparition: A Poem, Or a Dialogue Betwixt the Devil and a Doctor, Concerning the Rights of the Christian Church. 2nd ed. London, 1710.

2O8 [

BIBLIOGRAPHY

] The Second Part of the Apparition: A Poem. London, 1710. Fawcet, Joseph, The Art of War. London, 1795. Gay, John, The Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. John Underhill. 2 vols., London, 1893. Gray, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, ed. Edmund Gosse. 4 vols. New York, 1890. Harley, G. D., Poems. London, 1796. Hayley, William, An Essay on Epic Poetry. 3rd ed. London, 1782. The Triumphs of Temper. London, 1781. Hole, Richard, Arthur; or, The Northern Enchantment. London, 1789. Hughes, John, Poems on Several Occasions, with Some Select Essays in Prose. 2 vols. London, 1735. [Jenyns, Soame], Poems. London, 1752. Johnson, Samuel, The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Tales of Terror and Wonder, with an introduction by Henry Morley. London, 1887. Leyden, John, Poetical Remains. London, 1819. [Macpherson, James], Fingal . . . together with Several Other Poems. London, 1762. [ ^Temora • • • Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal. Dublin, 1763. The Magic Lantern; or, Les Ombres Patriotiques. London, 1794. Mathias, Thomas James, Odes, English and Latin. "Reprinted 1798. Not published." [ ] The Pursuits of Literature. 8th ed. Dublin, 1798. The National Advocates. London, 1795. Ogilvie, John, Poems on Several Subjects. 2 vols. London, 1769. Philips, John, The Poems of John Philips, ed. M. G. Lloyd Thomas. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927. Polwhele, [Richard], Poems. 3 vols. London, 1806. Pope, Alexander, Epistles to Several Persons, ed. F. W . Bateson. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1951. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Sir. A. W . Ward. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1956. [Pye, Henry James], Faringdon Hill: A Poem: In Two Books. Oxford, 1774. Lenore, A Tale: From the German of Gottfried Augustus Burger. London, 1796. Ralph, James, Night: A Poem. 2nd ed. London, 1729.

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Ramsay, Allan, The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. Burns Martin and John W . Oliver, Scottish T e x t Society. 2 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, Ltd., Vol. I (Poems: 1721), 1944-45; Vol. II (Poems: 1728), 1945-46. Richards, George, Poems. 2 vols. Oxford, 1804. Richardson, [William], Poems, Chiefly Rural. 3rd ed. London, 1775[Rogers, Samuel], An Ode to Superstition, with some Other Poems. London, 1786. Rowe, Mrs. Elizabeth, Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse. 4th ed. 2 vols. London, 1756. Rowe, Nicholas, The Works of Nicholas Rowe. 2 vols. London, 1756. Sayers, [Frank], Collective Works. 2 vols. Norwich, 1823. Seward, Anna, Llangollen Vale, with Other Poems. London, 1796. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Walter Scott. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1810. Shaw, Cuthbert, and Thomas Russell, The Poems of Cuthbert Shaw and Thomas Russell, ed. Eric Partridge. London: Dulau and Co., Ltd., 1925. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry Buxton Forman. 4 vols. London, 1877. [Shepherd, Richard], Odes Descriptive and Allegorical. London, 1761. Southey, Robert, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey . . . 10 vols. London, 1837. Sterling, Joseph, Poems. Dublin, 1784. Thomson, James, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Warton, Thomas, Poems: A New Edition, with Additions. London, 1777-

Watts, I[saac], Horae Lyricae. 9th ed. London, 1751. Wesley, Charles, Hymns and Sacred Poems. 2 vols. Bristol, 1749. Whitehouse, John, Poems: Consisting Chiefly of Original Pieces. London, 1787. [Wordsworth, William], Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. 2 vols. London, 1798. Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. 2 vols. London, 1800. Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems. 3rd ed. London, 1802. W o t y , W[illiam], Poems on Several Occasions. Derby, 1780. Wynne, John Huddlestone, Evelina, A Poem. London, 1773.

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The Four Seasons. London, 1773. Yearsley, Ann, Poems on Various Subjects. London, 1787. II. P O E T R Y (Collections) [Anderson, Robert], ed., A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. 14 vols. London, 1794. Cambridge Prize Poems. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1817. Chalmers, Alexander, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper. 21 vols. London, 1810. A Collection of Old Ballads. 3 vols. London, Vols. I & II, 1723; Vol. HI, 1715A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes, By Several Hands. London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1763. [Dodsley, Robert], A Muse in Livery: or, the Footman's Miscellany. London, 1732. [Dryden's Miscellanies]: Miscellany Poems, The First Part, Publish'd by Mr. Dryden, The Third Edition. London, 1702. Sylvae: or, The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies, Publish'd by Mr. Dryden, The Third Edition. London, 1702. Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems, The Second Edition. London, 1706. The Annual Miscellany: . . . Being the Fourth Part of Miscellany Poems, The Second Edition. London, 1708. Poetical Miscellanies: The Fifth Part. London, 1704. Poetical Miscellanies: The Sixth Part. London, 1709. Evans, Thomas, Old Ballads, Historical & Narrative, A new Edition Revised by R. H. Evans. 4 vols. London, 1810. Herd, David, ed., Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, a page-forpage reprint of the edition of 1776 with memoir and illustrative notes by Sidney Gilpin. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1870. Oxford Prize Poems. 3rd ed. Oxford, 1808. Park, Thomas, ed., The Works of the British Poets. 54 vols. London, 1818. [Percy, Bishop Thomas], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. London, 1765. [Polwhele, Richard, ed.], Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall, 2 vols. Bath, 1792.

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Ramsay, Allan, ed., The Ever Green, A Collection of Scots Poems Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. 1 vols. Reprinted from the original edition of 1724, Glasgow, 1876. [Ritson, Joseph], Ancient Songs, from the Time of King Henry the Third to the Revolution. London, 1790. [Ritson, Joseph, ed.], Scotish Songs. 2 vols. London, 1794. Thomson, William, Orpheus Caledonius: Or, A Collection of Scots Songs. 2 vols. London, 1733. III. CRITICISM (Essays and Periodicals) Aikin, J. and A. L., Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. 2nd ed. 1775. The Annual Register, 1758-1789. Blackmore, Sir Richard, Essays Upon Several Subjects. 2 vols. London, 1716. [Blackwell, Thomas], Letters Concerning Mythology. London, 1748. [Blair, Hugh], A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian. London, 1763. Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Frederick A. Pottle. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. with introduction and notes by J. T . Boulton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Bysshe, Edward, The Art of English Poetry. 4th ed. London, 1710. Campbell, George, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford, 1838. The Censor. 3 vols. London, 1717. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 2 vols. London, 1817. Dennis, John, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker. 2 vols. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939. Drake, Nathan, The Gleaner: A Series of Periodical Essays . . . From Scarce or Neglected Volumes. 4 vols. London, 1811. Literary Hours, or Sketches Critical and Narrative. London, 1798. Dryden, John, Essays, selected and edited by W . P. Ker. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926. [Duff, William], An Essay on Original Genius. London, 1767.

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Secker . . . Bp. Warburton . . . and Others, i vols. London, I 77SFarmer, Hugh, A Dissertation on Miracles. London, 1771. An Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament. London, 1775. Fleetwood, William, A Compleat Collection of . . . Sermons. London, 1737. Gillies, John, Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield, to which is appended An Extensive Collection of his Sermons and Other Writings. Middletown, Connecticut, 1838. Hervey, The Reverend James, Meditations and Contemplations. 2 vols. London, 1796. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1950. Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Selections from A Treatise of Human Nature. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1927. Hutchinson, Francis, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft. London, 1718. [Jortin, John], Remarks on Ecclesiastical History. 5 vols. London, 1951. Middleton, Conyers, The Miscellaneous Works of Conyers Middleton. 5 vols. 2nd ed. London, 1755. More, Hannah, Works. 11 vols. London, 1853. Newton, John, Works. 4 vols. New-Haven, 1824. Romaine, W[illiam], A Treatise Upon the Life of Faith. London, 1786. Simeon, Charles, The Entire Works of Charles Simeon, ed. Thomas H. Home. 21 vols. London, 1832. [Smalbroke], Richard, A Vindication of the Miracles of our Blessed Saviour. London, 1729. Swift, Jonathan, Sermons. Glasgow, 1763. Walker, Samuel, Fifty Two Sermons. 2 vols. London, 1763. [Warburton, William], A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles. London, 1727. Wesley, John, The Journal of John Wesley. 4 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1921. Sermons on Several Occasions. 2 vols. New York, 1834. [Woolston, Thomas], Mr. Woolston's Defence of his Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour. London, 1729. Woolston, Thomas, A Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour. London, [1727?].

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A Fifth Discourse on the Miracles of 1728. A Fourth Discourse on the Miracles don, 1728. A Second Discourse on the Miracles don, 1727. A Sixth Discourse on the Miracles of 1729. A Third Discourse on the Miracles of 1728.

215

our Saviour. London, of our Saviour. Lonof our Saviour. Lonour Saviour. London, our Saviour. London,

V. SECONDARY SOURCES Abbey, Charles J., and John H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, revised and abridged. London, 1896. Barker, Arthur, " ' . . . And on His Crest Sat Horror': Eighteenth-Century Interpretations of Milton's Sublimity and His Satan," University of Toronto Quarterly, 11:421-436 (1942). Boyce, Benjamin, "News from Hell: Satiric Communications with the Nether World in English Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," PMLA, 58:402-437 (1943). Bronson, Bertrand H., "Personification Reconsidered," New Light on Dr. Johnson, ed. F. W . Hilles. N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, pp. 189-232. Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth Century England. N e w York: N e w York Public Library, 1958. Brower, Reuben Arthur, Alexander Pope, The Poetry of Allusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Carpenter, S. C., Eighteenth Century Church and People. London: John Murray, 1959. Chapin, Chester F., Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. N e w York: King's Crown Press, 1955. Davie, Donald, Purity of Diction in English Verse. N e w York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James L. Clifford. Galaxy Book. N e w York: Oxford University Press, 19J9. Elliott-Binns, L. E., The Early Evangelicals: A Religious and Social Study. London: Lutterworth Press, 1953. Fairchild, Hoxie Neale, Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. I: /700-/740. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Frye, Roland Mushat, God, Man, and Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, and the

2I6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Great Theologians. Princeton: Princeton University Press, i960. Garcon, Maurice, and Jean Vinchon, The Devil: A Historical, Critical and Medical Study, tr. Stephen Haden Guest from the Sixth French Edition. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1930. Hart, Jeffrey, "Akenside's Revision of The Pleasures of Imagination,," PMLA, 74:67-74 (1959). Havens, Raymond D., "Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Dryden's and Dodsley's Miscellanies," PMLA, 44: 501-536 (1929). "Romantic Aspects of the Age of Pope," PMLA, 27:297324 (1912). Hole, Christina, A Mirror of Witchcraft. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. Witchcraft in England. London: B. T . Batsford Ltd., 1945. Hopkins, Kenneth, The Poets Laureate. London: The Bodley Head, 1954. Langton, Edward, Essentials of Demonology. London: The Epworth Press, 1949. Satan, A Portrait. London: Skeffington & Son, Ltd., n.d. Lea, Henry Charles, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, arr. and ed. Arthur C. Howland. 3 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939. Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. Longueil, Alfred Edwin, "Gothic Romance: Its Influence on the Romantic Poets Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley," unpublished dissertation, Harvard University, 1920. Lowes, John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1959. Mayo, Robert, "The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads," PMLA, 69:486-522 (1954). McKillop, Alan D., ed., James Thomson (1700-1748): Letters and Documents. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1958. "Mrs. Radcliffe on the Supernatural in Poetry," JEGP, 3i:352-359 (1932)Michelet, Jules, Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition, tr. A. R. Allinson. New York: The Citadel Press, 1946. Miles, Josephine, "The Language of Ballads," Romance Philology, 7:1-9 (1953).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

2I7

Millar, Branford P., "Eighteenth-Century Views of the Ballad," Western Folklore, 9:124-135 (1950). Monk, Samuel H., The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIll-Century England. N e w York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935. Murray, Margaret Alice, The God of the Witches. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., n.d. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921. Parrish, Stephen Maxfield, "Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads," PMLA, 74:85-97 (1959). Peckham, Morse, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," PMLA, 66:5-23 ( 1 9 5 1 ) . Pratt, Sister Antoinette Marie, The Attitude of the Catholic Church Towards Witchcraft and the Allied Practices of Sorcery and Magic. Washington, D. C., 1915. Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Quayle, Thomas, Poetic Diction: A Study of Eighteenth Century Verse. London: Methuen, 1924. Shuster, George N., The English Ode from Milton to Keats. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1940. Sickels, Eleanor M., The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Sleigh, Gordon F., " T h e Authorship of William & Margaret," The Library, Ser. 5, 8 : 1 2 1 - 1 2 3 (1953). Stephen, Sir Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1927. Summers, Montague, The Geography of Witchcraft. N e w York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1927. Sutherland, James, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948. Thurnau, C., "Die Geister in der englischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts," Palaestra 55 (1906). Trickett, Rachel, " T h e Augustan Pantheon: Mythology & Personification in Eighteenth-century Poetry." Essays and Studies, N.S., 6:71-86 (1953). Wasserman, Earl R., " T h e Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification," PMLA, 65:435-463 (1950). The Subtler Language, Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems. Baltimore: T h e Johns Hopkins Press, 1959.

2 18

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Williams, Aubrey L., Pope's Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1955. Woodhouse, A. S. P., "Collins and the Creative Imagination: A Study in the Critical Background of His Odes (1746)," Studies in English by Members of University College, Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1931, pp. 59-130.

Notes INTRODUCTION

Witches, Ghosts, Critics, and Poets 1. James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948), p. 2. 2. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), III, 298. 3. Boswell for the Defence, i-j6$-it]4, ed. W . K. Wimsatt, Jr., and F. A . Pottle ( N e w York, 1959), p. 103. T o be sure, Johnson's attitude has a certain ambiguity. Boswell goes on to suggest that the activity of witches ceased with the A c t of 1736, and Johnson comments, "Sir, they ceased before that." This would seem to imply that he believed in witches as having functioned in the past, but not in the present. 4. James Scott, "The Redemption," Cambridge Prize Poems (Cambridge, 1817), I, 325. 5. [William Duff], An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), p. 288.

CHAPTER ONE

Supernatural Horror: T h e Atmosphere of Belief 1. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), II, 429-430. 2. Anthony Collins, Discourse on Freethinking, 1713, p. 28; quoted by Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1927), I, 206. 3. Hannah More, Works (London, 1853), II, 300. 4. Christina Hole, Witchcraft in England (London, 1945), pp. 145fr. In another volume ( A Mirror of Witchcraft, London, 1957), Miss Hole reports duckings or murders of supposed witches in 1705, 1709, 1712, and 1717.

220

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5. The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Monthly Intelligencer, 1:336 (1730. 6. The Spectator, n t h ed. (London, 1733), no. n o , July 6, 1711; II, 108. 7. Spectator, no. 117, July 14, 1711; II, 134. 8. The Censor (London, 1717), no. 11, May 4, 1715; I, 75. 9. For light mockery of popular superstition, see, e.g., The Censor, no. 82, April 30, 1716; Plain dealer, no. 49, September 7, 1724; no. 64, October 30, 1724; no. 103, March 15, 1725; The Guardian, no. 58, May 18, 1713; no. 136, August 17, 1713; The Tatler, no. 21, May 28, 1709. 10. Life of Johnson, III, 230. 11. Life of Johnson, I, 406. 12. The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. P. Cunningham (London, 1854). From The Bee, no. 8, November 24, 1759, " O n Deceit and Falsehood," III, 122-123. 13. See, for example, his essay entitled " A Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern in East-Cheap," in which he quotes with approval an unidentified source as follows: "Equally faulty with ourselves, they believed what the devil was pleased to tell them; and we seem resolved, at last, to believe neither God nor devil" (Works, III, 221). 14. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1718), p. vi. 15. Augustine Calmet, The Phantom World, ed. H. Christmas (London, 1850), I, 108. This is a translation from the French Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits (Paris, 1751), which first appeared in English in 1759. 16. [Daniel Defoe], A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art (London, 1727), pp. 383, 378. 17. John Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and Other Magic Practices (London, 1705). 18. R[obert] B[urton] [Nathaniel Crouch], The Kingdom of Darkness: Or, The History of Demons, Spectres, Witches, Apparitions, Possessions, Disturbances, and other Supernatural Delusions, and malicious Impostures of the Devil, 4th ed. (London, 1728). 19. Stephen, History of English Thought, II, 336. 20. A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligation of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1708), The Works of Samuel Clarke (London, 1738), II, 699.

T H E A T M O S P H E R E OF B E L I E F

22 1

21. [John Jortin], Remarks on Ecclesiastical History (London, 1 7 5 1 ) , II, 1-2. 22. Thomas Woolston, A Second Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour (London, 1727), p. 41. Woolston's imprisonment for such statements, defined as "blasphemous," was justified by the view that an attack on Christianity was an attack on civil government. See S. C. Carpenter, Eighteenth Century Church and People (London, 1959), p. 144. 23. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ( N e w York, 1950), pp. 571-572 (first published 1651). 24. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Selections from a Treatise of Human Nature (Chicago, 1927), p. 124 (first published 1748). 25. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 14. 26. A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers . . . in the Christian Church (1748), The Miscellaneous Works of Conyers Middleton, 2nd ed. (London, 1755), I, 366. 27. Richard Smalbroke, A Vindication of the Miracles of our Blessed Saviour (London, 1729), I, 13. 28. Middleton, Free Inquiry, I, 200-222. 29. [William Warburton], A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles (London, 1727), p. 121. 30. Hugh Farmer, A Dissertation on Miracles (London, 1771), pp. 105-106. 31. William Fleetwood, A Compleat Collection of . . . Sermons (London, 1737), p. 132. 32. Jortin, Ecclesiastical History, I, 14. 33. Clarke, Works, II, 699. 34. John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions ( N e w York, 1834), I, 373. 35. Wesley, Sermons, I, 338. Lapland was to most eighteenthcentury minds the major locale of modern witchcraft. T h e Lapland witch inhabits almost all the books on witchcraft, as well as many poems on the same subject. 36. The Journal of John Wesley (London, 1921), entry for May 25, 1768, III, 329-330. This comment is the introduction to Wesley's presentation of a lengthy and elaborate ghost story, which he clearly believes to be true. T h e Journal also contains repeated references to possession by devils. See, e.g., entries for December 5, 1738, October 1, 1739, May 9, 1740, May 21, 1740, March 10, 1742, January 13, 1743. 37. Charles J . Abbey and John H . Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1896), p. 178.

222

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ONE

38. Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (Northampton, 1804), p. 39. 39. John Newton, Sermon 13: " T h e Great Shepherd," Works (New-Haven, 1824), III, 124. 40. John Gillies, Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield, to Which is Appended an Extensive Collection of his Sermons and Other Writings (Middletown, Conn., 1838), Whitefield's Sermon 6: "Christ the Believer's Wisdom, Righteousness, &c.," p. 375. 41. Samuel Walker, Fifty Two Sermons (London, 1763), I, 44. 42. W[illiam] Romaine, A Treatise Upon the Life of Faith (London, 1786), p. 43. 43. Roland Mushat Frye, God, Man, and Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Great Theologians (Princeton, i960), p. 25. 44. The Entire Works of Charles Simeon, ed. T . H. H o m e (London, 1832), III, 230. 45. Clarke, Sermon C L X X : "Rebellion against God as malignant as Witchcraft," Works, II, 357. 46. Clarke, Sermon CXXII: " H o w Wicked Men Are of the Devil," Works, II, 47. 47. Middleton, Free Inquiry of Witchcraft, Miscellaneous Works, I. 35748. James Hervey, "Contemplations on the Night," Meditations and Contemplations (London, 1796), II, 61-62. 49. Walker, Sermons, I, 284. 50. Francis Atterbury, Forty Three Sermons and Discourses on Several Subjects and Occasions, 6th ed. (London, 1742), I, 273. j i . Jonathan Swift, Sermons (Glasgow, 1763), p. 20. 52. The Family Chaplain: Being a Complete Course of Sermons upon the Festivals and Fasts (London, 1775). 53. Hugh Blair, Sermons (Dublin, 1792), II, 1. 54. John Berridge, The Christian World Unmasked (Boston, 1854), p. 63. CHAPTER T W O

Supernatural Horror in Poetry, 1700-1740 1. Richard Blackmore, " A n Essay upon Epic Poetry," Essays Upon Several Subjects (London, 1716), I, 173. 2. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N . Hooker (Baltimore, 1939), I, 105. 3. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, "Soliloquy or

1700-1740

22

3

Advice to an Author," Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J . M. Robertson ( N e w York, 1900), I, 225. 4. Plain dealer; being Select essays on several curious subjects, no. j 1, September 14, 1724. 5. [Henry Pemberton], Observations on Poetry, Especially the Epic: Occasioned by the Late Poem upon Leonidas (London, 1738), p. 155. 6. In Spectator, no. 523, October 1712, Addison had also recognized the technique, in a comment on Philips's accomplishment rather than a direct recommendation to other poets. After remarking that no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded in truth, he goes on to recommend that those who would admit classical legends into serious compositions should consider the pastorals of Philips. Although we might think it impossible to produce this kind of poetry without making use of fauns and satyrs, "we see he has given a new Life, and a more natural Beauty to this W a y of Writing, by substituting in the place of these antiquated Fables, the superstitious Mythology which prevails among the Shepherds of our own Country." 7. The Guardian (London, 1 7 5 1 ) , no. 23, April 7, 1713; I, 102. 8. Allan Ramsay, " T h e Gentle Shepherd," Works, ed. B. Martin and J . W . Oliver (Edinburgh, 1952-53), II (Poems: 1728), p. 229. 9. John Armstrong, "Imitations of Shakespeare and Spenser" (1726), in A . Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Coivper (London, 1810), X V I , 541. 10. James Thomson, "Winter," Complete Poetical Works, ed. J . Logie Robertson (London, 1951), p. 192. 11. The Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. J . Underhill (London, 1893), II, 389-390, 392, 393. 12. David Mallet, " T h e Excursion," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 17. 13. John Philips, Cyder (1708), The Poems of John Philips, ed. M. G . Lloyd Thomas (Oxford, 1927), p. 66. 14. Mallet, "Edwin and Emma," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 44. 15. Alexander Pope, "Epistle to a Lady," Epistles to Several Persons, ed. F. W . Bateson (London, 1951), p. 67. 16. Aubrey L . Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (Baton Rouge, 1955), p. 1 3 1 . 17. John Dryden, Essays, ed. W . P. K e r (Oxford, 1926), I, 15215418. " T h e Tragedies of the Last A g e " (1678), The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. C. A . Zimansky ( N e w Haven, 1956), p. 26.

224

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TWO

19. The Spectator, n t h ed. (London, 1733), no. 44, April 20, 1 7 1 1 ; I, 171. 20. Spectator, no. 141, August 11, 1 7 1 1 ; II, 221. 21. Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (London, 1742), p. 341. This work is a translation of Trapp's Praelectiones Poeticae (1711IS)22. Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, 4th ed. (London, 1710), preface. 23. Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry (London, 1718). 24. "Plan of an Epic Poem, designed by Mr. Pope," The Annual Register, XII (1769), 3rd ed. (London, 1779), p. 182. 25. "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry" (1704), Dennis, Critical Works, I, 361-362. 26. " T h e Usefulness of the Stage . . ." (1698), Dennis, Critical Works, I, 183. 27. [Richard Glover], Leonidas, A Poem (London, 1737), pp. 122-123. 28. Elizabeth Rowe, Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse, 4th ed. (London, 1756), II, 4. 29. Spectator, no. 419, July 1, 1712; VI, 91-2. 30. Plain dealer, no. 36, July 24, 1724. 31. The more usual version begins as follows: 'Twas at the silent, solemn hour When night and morning meet; In glided Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet. This is closer to the stanza of "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" which was Mallet's admitted inspiration. Versions of the ballad were published by Percy, Herd, and William Thomson (Orpheus Caledonius, 1733), and by Ritson, in Scotish Songs. There has been considerable dispute about Mallet's claim to its authorship, but the most recent consensus seems to be that he is indeed responsible, although with heavy indebtedness to older material. See Gordon F. Sleigh, "The Authorship of William and Margaret," The Library, jth series, 8:121-123 (1953). 32. " A Godly Warning to all Maidens, by the Example of God's Judgments shewed on Jarman's W i f e of Clifton," A Collection of Old Ballads (London, vols. I, II, 1723; vol. Ill, 1725), I, 265. 33. Old Ballads, III, 216-217. 34. William Thomson, Orpheus Caledonius: Or, A Collection of Scots Songs (London, 1733), II, 38. Also in Herd, Ritson, and

i74

I - I

7^o

225

P e r c y . A n o t h e r poem w i t h the same title and theme was written b y John Logan. See Chalmers, English Poets, X V I I I , 53. 3j. The Works of Nicholas Rowe ( L o n d o n , 1756), II, 331. 36. "Cromlet's Lilt," Orpheus Caledonius, II, 3. 37. John Sheffield, D u k e of Buckinghamshire, "Despair," Chalmers, English Poets, X , 84. 38. Isaac W a t t s , Horae Lyricae, 9th ed. ( L o n d o n , 1751), p. 7J. 39. See H o x i e N e a l e Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, V o l . I: /700-/740 ( N e w Y o r k , 1939), passim. 40. Benjamin B o y c e , " N e w s f r o m Hell: Satiric Communications w i t h the N e t h e r W o r l d in English W r i t i n g of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," PMLA 58:402 (1943). B o y c e lists sixtythree examples of this genre published between 1700 and 1760. 41. [ A b e l Evans], The Apparition. A Poem. Or, A Dialogue Betwixt the Devil and a Doctor, Concerning the Rights of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. ( L o n d o n , 1710). Published separately was the poem's sequel, The Second Part of the Apparition ( L o n d o n , 1710). 42. James Ralph, Night: A Poem, 2nd ed. ( L o n d o n , 1729), p. 12. 43. T h o m s o n , " T h e Castle of Indolence," Poetical Works, p. 268. 44. W i l l i a m Diaper, " D r y a d e s , " Complete Works, ed. D . B r o u g h ton ( L o n d o n , 1952), p. 62. 4 j . Ramsay, Works, I {Poems: 1721), 175. CHAPTER

THREE

Supernatural H o r r o r , 1741-1780 1. " G e n e r a l Observations on the Plays of Shakespeare," The Works of Samuel Johnson ( L o n d o n , 1787), IX, 315. T h e treatment of the problem covers IX, 312-315. 2. [Elizabeth] Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, 5th ed. ( L o n d o n , 1785), p. 139. (First edition, 1769.) 3. W i l l i a m Melmoth, The Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne, 6th ed. ( L o n d o n , 1763), pp. 299-300. (First edition, 1742.) 4. T h o m a s W a r t o n , The History of English Poetry (London, vol. I, 2nd ed., 1775; vol. II, ist ed., 1778; vol. III, ist ed., 1781), II, 462. 5. Richard H u r d , Letters on Chivalry and Romance, with the Third Elizabethan Dialogue, ed. E . J. M o r l e y ( L o n d o n , 1 9 1 1 ) , p. 144. 6. The Poetical Works of William Collins ( L o n d o n , 1830), p. 67.

226

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THREE

7. Mark Akenside, "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (1757), in A . Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), X I V , 84. 8. Jeffrey Hart, "Akenside's Revision of The Pleasures of Imagination," PMLA (1959). 9. Consciousness of this power, however ambiguous, emerges even in the least ambitious poetry of the century. For an interesting example, see William Shenstone, Elegy IV, "Ophelia's Urn," Chalmers, English Poets, XIII, 268. 10. James Graeme, "Written Near the Ruins of Cuthally Castle," [R. Anderson, ed.], A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London, 1794), XI, 433. 11. James Graeme, " A Night-Piece," Anderson, Poets, XI, 445. 12. Nathaniel Cotton, "The Night Piece," Chalmers, English Poets, XVIII, 27. 13. See, for especially vivid examples among many, William W o t y , "The Libertine Reclaimed," The Shrubs of Parnassus [published under pseudonym "J. Copywell"] (London, 1760), pp. 8182; [Richard Shepherd], Ode VIII, " T o Melancholy," Odes Descriptive and Allegorical (London, 1761), p. 25; [Elizabeth Carter], "Ode to Melancholy," Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1762), p. 80; [William] Richardson, "The Progress of Melancholy: A Vision," Poems, Chiefly Rural, 3rd ed. (London, 1775), p. 115; Robert Anderson, "Elegy X X I V " (1773), Anderson, Poets, XI, 435-

14. Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 62. 15. Thomas Russell, "Cervantes," The Poems of Cuthbert Shaw and Thomas Russell, ed. Eric Partridge (London, 1925), pp. 147148. 16. " O n Epic Poetry," Grays-Inn Journal, XCII (1752), in Nathan Drake, The Gleaner: A Series of Periodical Essays . . . From Scarce or Neglected Volumes (London, 1811), II, 187. 17. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. A. Mills ( N e w York, 1838), p. 57. 18. "Even where the agency is supernatural," Johnson writes of Shakespeare, "the dialogue is level with life . . . Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned" ("Preface to Shakespeare," Works, IX, 245). 19. "Life of Gray," Johnson, Works, IV, 306.

227

20. "Wilkie's Epigoniad," Monthly Review, X V I I (September, 1757), 228; The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. P. Cunningham (London, 1854), I V , 306-307. 21. The Poetical Works of William Collins, ed. J . Langhorne (London, 1765), p. 152. 22. The Student, II (1750), 313, in The Gleaner, II, 229. 23. Thomas Warton, " T h e Pleasures of Melancholy" (1745), Chalmers, English Poets, X V I I I , 95. 24.

Rous'd from their slumbers, In grim array the grisly spectres rise, Grin horrible, and, obstinately sullen, Pass and repass, hush'd as the foot of night. (Chalmers, X V , 63) 25. Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats ( N e w York, 1932), pp. 156-157. 26. John Newton, "On Dreaming," Works (New-Haven, 1824), II, 58327. John Ogilvie, "Ode to Time," Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1769), I, 87. 28. [Hugh Blair], A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London, 1763), p. 33. 29. [James Macpherson], Temora . . . Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (Dublin, 1763), p. 93. 30. [James Macpherson], Fingal . . . together with Several Other Poems (London, 1762), p. 22. 31. Thomas Warton, "Ode IX. The Crusade," Poems: A New Edition, with Additions (London, 1777), p. 61. Similar in tone and theme is John Scott's " T h e Mexican Prophecy," Chalmers, English Poets, X V I I , 488. 32. A n interesting offshoot of this general technique of relying on exotic setting is the device of taking over setting, atmosphere, and characters directly from Shakespeare. See, for an embarrassingly close imitation, John Cunningham's "Incantation," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 462. Less faithful is " T h e Beldames," The Annual Register, II (1759), 6th ed. (London, 1777), p. 463. 33. Josephine Miles, " T h e Language of Ballads," Romance Philology 7:2-3 (1953). 34. [Bishop Thomas Percy, ed.], Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765), I, 3 1 1 . 35. David Herd, ed., Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (originally published 1776) (Edinburgh, 1870), I, 136-137.

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36. Michael Bruce, Poems on Several Occasions (Edinburgh, 1770), p. 85. 37. Richardson, "Rowena," Poems, Chiefly Rural, p. [123]. 38. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry, p. 137. 39. The Works of Richard Hurd (London, 1811), II, 9. 40. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry, p. 138. 41. Hurd, "Universal Poetry," Works, II, 10. 42. A variant on this idea is suggested by John Newbery, who clearly feels that imaginary beings may be instructive primarily because of their stimulation of the imagination. "The poet, not satisfied with exploring all nature for subjects, wantons in the fields of fancy, and creates beings of his own . . . and from imaginary things excites real pleasure, and furnishes the mind with solid instruction." [John Newbery], The Art of Poetry on a New Plan (London, 1762), I, iv. 43. [William Duff], An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), p. 143. 44. Montagu, Essay on Shakespeare, p. 135. 45. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T . Boulton (London, 1958), p. 58. 46. Burke, Enquiry, p. 59. In his brilliant study of the sublime, Samuel Monk comments on the great significance of the repudiation of clarity implied by this emphasis on the value of obscurity. Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935), p. 94. 47. John Aikin, "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror," J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, 2nd ed. (London, 1775), pp. 121-122. 48. Aikin, "Objects of Terror," p. 126. Like Burke, Aikin appears to make no clear distinction between terror and horror. 49. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1759), p. 19. 50. "An Hymn to May," Chalmers, English Poets, X V , 35. 51. The Poetical Works of William Collins, p. 24. 52. Percival Stockdale, An Inquiry into the Nature, and Genuine Laws of Poetry (London, 1778), pp. i i o - m . 53. "The Fatal Sisters. An Ode," The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, ed. Edmund Gosse (New York, 1890), I, 56. 54. "Invocation to Melancholy," The Poetical Works of Henry Headley (London, 1808), p. 15; Thomas Park, ed., The Works of the British Poets (London, 1818), vol. X X X I .

1781-1800 CHAPTER

229

FOUR

Supernatural Horror, 1781-1800 1. David Mallet, "The Excursion," in A. Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Coivper (London, 1810), X I V , 17. 2. [Richard] Polwhele, "Highland Ode," Poems (London, 1806), III, 18. 3. William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, 3rd ed. (London, 1782), pp. 97-100. 4. John Scott, Critical Essays on Some of the Poems of Several English Poets (London, 1785), p. 54. 5. Henry James Pye, Lenore, A Tale: From the German of Gottfried Augustus Burger (London, 1796). 6. [Thomas James Mathias], The Pursuits of Literature, 8th ed. (Dublin, 1798), p. 231. (First edition, 1794-97.) 7. Joseph Sterling, Poems (Dublin, 1782), p. 33. 8. Richard Hole, Arthur; or, The Northern Enchantment (London, 1789), p. iv. 9. Nathan Drake, " O n Gothic Superstition," Literary Hours, or Sketches Critical and Narrative (London, 1798), p. 94. 10. " O n the Supernatural in Poetry. By the Late Mrs. Radcliffe," New Monthly Magazine (1826), 149-150. Quoted by Alan D. McKillop, "Mrs. Radcliffe on the Supernatural in Poetry," JEGP 31:357 (1932). The quotation is taken from a dialogue in the manuscript introduction to Gaston de Blondeville, begun in 1802. 11. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems (London, 1800), unnumbered page after text. 12. Letter to Sou they, April 7, 1819, quoted by Stephen Maxfield Parrish, "Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads," PMLA 74:89 (1959). 13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (London, 1817), II, 1-2. 14. Robert Mayo, "The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads," PMLA 59:492 (1954). 15. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque (London, 1794), p. 71. 16. Arthur Barker, " '. . . And on His Crest Sat Horror': Eighteenth-Century Interpretations of Milton's Sublimity and His Satan," University of Toronto Quarterly 11:430 (1942).

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17. George Crabbe, "The Library," Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 1808), p. 161. 18. "Alpine Scenery" (1785), The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1810), II, 364. 19. Hugh Downman, Poems, 2nd ed. (Exeter, 1790), p. 227. 20. "Ode to Fancy," signed " G , " in [R. Polwhele, ed.], Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (Bath, 1792), I. 75-76. 21. George Richards, "Emma," Poems (Oxford, 1804), I, 149. 22. "Miss Hörne," "Song L X V I , " in [Joseph Ritson, ed.], Scotish Songs (London, 1794), I, 144. 23. Anna Seward, "Louisa," Works, II, 237. 24. Joseph Fawcet, The Art of War (London, 1795), pp. 30-31. 25. G. D. Harley, "Night," Poems (London, 1796), pp. 30-31. 26. George Richards, "The Aboriginal Britons," Oxford Prize Poems, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1808), p. 61. 27. Joseph Sterling, "The Twilight of the Gods," Poems (Dublin, 1782), p. 42. 28. E.g., T . J. Mathias, " A n Incantation, Founded on the Northern Mythology": By Peolphan, murky King, Master of th'enchanted ring; By all and each of hell's grim host, Howling demon, tortur'd ghost . . . ("Battle," Odes, English and Latin, "Reprinted 1798. N o t published," p. 37.) Again, one finds here the combination of diction from much earlier in the century with a new sort of commitment to interest in the subject matter. 29. John Leyden, Poetical Remains (London, 1819), p. 21. 30. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London, 1837), VI, 177. 31. Quoted by Parrish, "Dramatic Technique," p. 94. 32. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Tales of Terror and Wonder, with an introduction by Henry Morley (London, 1887), p. 23. 33. Thomas Evans, Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative, ed. R. H. Evans (London, 1810), III, 354. (Original edition, 1784.) 34. Lewis, Tales, p. 33. 3 j. Anna Seward, Works, III, 308. 36. Southey, "Lord William" (1798), VI, 39. 37. Southey, "Cornelius Agrippa" (1798), VI, 84. 38. John Aikin, Poems (London, 1791), pp. 39-40. 39. Polwhele, Poems, III, 14-15. 40. [Frank] Sayers, Collective Works (Norwich, 1823), I, 34.

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231

41. Seward, Works, I, 31. 42. Devonshire and Cornwall Poems, I, 78-79. 43. Sayers, Collective Works, I, 71. 44. Seward, "Crugal's Ghost Appearing to Connal," Works, III, 16; " T h e Ghost of Cuchillin," Works, III, 21. 45. John Pinkerton, " T h e Ghost of Azo," Rimes, 2nd ed. (London, 1782), p. 213. 46. See, for example, John Aikin, "Duncan's Warning" (Poems, p. 23) and Southey, " T h e Race of Banquo" (Works, II, 155). 47. William Blake, "Fair Elenor," The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 4. 48. Blake, " T h e Book of Ahania" (1795), p. 249. 49. Blake, " T h e First Book of Urizen" (1794), p. 222. 50. Downman, "Ode, on reading Mr. Hole's Arthur, or The Northern Enchantment," Poems, p. 198. 51. Richard Hole, Arthur; or, The Northern Enchantment (London, 1789), pp. 88-89. 52. It is interesting to note that Richard Glover, who, in his early epic, Leónidas, rejected the direct use of machinery altogether, makes lavish use of it in The Athenaid, published posthumously in 1787. Here one finds heavy dependence on the unearthly f o r emotional atmosphere (see, e.g., Chalmers, English Poets, X V I I , 97); supernatural dreams (Chalmers, X V I I , 106), clearly based on the appearance of Hector's ghost to Aeneas in Book II of The Aeneid; and, finally, a trip to visit the Furies in a vague region with obvious affinities to Virgil's Avernus. T h e passage recounting this visit (Chalmers, X V I I , 128) is especially interesting, for it combines a basic structure and many details closely imitated from Virgil with other details (night's impurest birds, efts, snakes, and toads) derived from the traditional accompaniments of the eighteenthcentury witch in poetry. In Virgil's description of the "innavigable lake," it is quite specifically stated that there are no birds (Book V I , lines 341-343, in Dryden's translation); Glover's deliberate introduction of them is certainly an attempt to reinforce the horror of the classical image by reference to another realm of the supernatural, to give it emphasis by suggesting a somewhat more immediate, and consequently more potent, area of reference than the archaic Furies. His poem, however, was not a popular success. 53. Polwhele, Poems, II, 134-135. 54. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination ( N e w York, 1959), p. 220. 55. Ibid., pp. 255-2J6. j6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London, 1798), p. 18.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Personification, 1700-1750 1. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition ( N e w York, 1958), p. 44. 2. Bertrand H. Bronson, "Personification Reconsidered," New Light on Dr. Johnson, ed. F. W . Hilles (New Haven, 1959), p. 205. 3. Earl R. Wasserman, "The Inherent Values of EighteenthCentury Personification," PMLA 65:441 (1950). 4. Jacques Daillon, Comte Du Lude, Aaiju.ovoAoyta: Or, A Treatise of Spirits (London, 1723), p. 90. It is, in this connection, interesting to note that some modern writers on demonology consider one class of Hebrew demons to have originated as personifications of certain physical maladies or unpleasant moral qualities. See Edward Langton, Satan: A Portrait (London, n.d.), p. 219. 5. The Spectator, n t h ed. (London, 1733), no. 419, July 1, 1712; VI, 946. For a fuller account of personification criticism in the eighteenth century, see Chester F. Chapin, Personification in EighteenthCentury English Poetry ( N e w York, 1955). Wasserman's "Inherent Values" (see above, Note 2) is also exceedingly valuable. 7. John Hughes, "An Essay on Allegorical Poetry," prefaced to The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser (London, 1715), I, xxix. 8. Richard Blackmore, Preface to Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem (London, 1695). 9. The Tatler, ed. George A . Aitken ( N e w York, 1899), no. 154, April 4, 1710; III, 211. 10. [Joseph] Spence, Poly metis: Or, An Enquiry Concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists (London, 1747), pp. 292, 300. 11. [David Fordyce], Dialogues Concerning Education (London, 1745), p. 368. Quoted by Wasserman, "Inherent Values," p. 453. 12. William Melmoth, The Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne, 6th ed. (London, 1763), pp. 106-107. (First edition, 1742.) 13. [Thomas Blackwell], Letters Concerning Mythology (London, 1748), p. 186. 14. " A Continuation of the Parallel Between Poetry and Painting," Lay-Monastery, no. 32, January 27, 1713. Reprinted by Nathan Drake, The Gleaner: A Series of Periodical Essays . . . From Scarce or Neglected Volumes (London, 1811), I, 38-39. 15. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Sir Adolphus William Ward (London, 1956), pp. 39-40.

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2

33

16. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language, Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1959), p. 165. 17. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope, The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), p. 60. 18. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (New York, 1953), p. 46. 19. Nicholas Rowe, " A Poem on the Late Glorious Successes," The Works of Nicholas Rowe (London, 1756), II, 290. 20. Aubrey L. Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (Baton Rouge, 1955), p. 53. 21. Wasserman, Subtler Language, p. 174. 22. James Thomson, "Liberty," Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London, 1951), p. 358. 23. John Hughes, " T o the Author of Fatal Friendship," in A. Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), X, 24. 24. I[saac] Watts, "Christ Dying, Rising, and Reigning," Horae Lyricae, 9th ed. (London, 1751), p. 72. 2j. Charles Wesley, "Hymn IX," Hymns and Sacred Poems (Bristol, 1 7 4 9 ) , I, h i . 26. Elizabeth Rowe, "Revelation. Chap, xvi," Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse, 4th ed. (London, 1756), I, 79. 27. Thomson, "Liberty," Poetical Works, p. 359. 28. Davie, Purity of Diction, p. 44. 29. Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction: A Study of Eighteenth Century Verse (London, 1924), p. 164. 30. Thomas Parnell, "The Gift of Poetry," Chalmers, English Poets, IX, 376-377. 3 1 . Wesley, "Hymn X X V I , " Hymns, I, 64-65. 32. Rowe, "Ode for the New Year, 1716," Works, II, 346-347. 33. James Cawthorn, "Abelard to Eloise" (1747), Supplement to the British Poets, ed. Thomas Park (London, 1809), IV, 83; bound into Thomas Park, ed., The Works of the British Poets (London, 1818), vol. X X X V . 34. "Content," The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. Burns Martin and John W . Oliver (Edinburgh, 1944-46), I (Poems: 1721), 97. 3 j. "Constantia: or, The Man of Law's Tale" (1741), Chalmers, English Poets, XVII, 382. 36. John Hughes, "The Court of Neptune," Poems on Several Occasions, with Some Select Essays in Prose (London, 1735), I, 32-3337. David Mallet, "The Excursion," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 19.

2

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38. James Thomson, letter to David Mallet, August 1 1 , 1726, in James Thomson (1100-1148): Letters and Documents, ed. A . D. McKillop (Lawrence, Kansas, 1958), p. 44. 39. "Eclogue II: Hassan; or, the Camel-Driver," The Poetical Works of William Collins, Aldine Edition (London, 1830), p. 9. 40. The Poetical Works of William Collins, ed. J . Langhorne (London, 1765), p. 124. It is interesting to note that John Scott, twenty years later, singled out the same personification for special praise. " T h e prosopopoiea of Death," he writes, "is one of the finest instances of the horrid sublime our language can boast of." John Scott, Critical Essays on Some of the Poems of Several English Poets (London, 1785), pp. 170-171. 41. For an example of the technique as employed by Mallet, see " T h e Excursion," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 19. 42. Collins, "Ode to Fear," Poetical Works, Aldine Edition, pp. 24-25. 43. A . S. P. Woodhouse, "Collins and the Creative Imagination: A Study in the Critical Background of His Odes (1746)," Studies in English by Members of University College, Toronto (1931), pp. 105-106. 44. William Diaper, "Brent," Complete Works, ed. Dorothy Broughton (London, 1952), p. 6. 45. Charles Churchill, " T h e Ghost," Chalmers, English Poets, X I V , 327. 46. " T h e Mask of Anarchy," The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H . B. Forman (London, 1877), III, 157. 47. T h e use of a lower-case " d " for the personification "dispair" is interesting, even though it is presumably the product of late editing or printing. In this connection a recent observation by Professor Bronson might be noted. H e remarks on the early eighteenthcentury habit of capitalizing all nouns. "Personifications, naturally, were no exception to the rule — but neither did they give rise to it. That they became exceptions because of the general proscription of capitals in printing of the latter half of the century is doubtless a natural consequence of their affinity to proper names. Once a typographical shift had occurred, a certain class of images was thrown into high relief, that before had claimed no more notice than what intrinsically was the due of each . . . T o restore the balance, we ought never to capitalize personification in a modernized text." Bertrand H . Bronson, Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth Century England ( N e w York, 1958), pp. 17-18. 48. Thomas Parnell, " T h e G i f t of Poetry," Chalmers, English Poets, IX, 397. 49. Wasserman, "Inherent Values," p. 460.

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CHAPTER SIX

Personification, 1751-1800 I am grateful to Studies in Philology for permission to make use, in this chapter, of material that originally appeared in my article, 'Horror Personification in Late Eighteenth-Century Poetry,' which appeared in that periodical, volume LIX, pages 560-578 (1962). 1. [John Newbery], The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, 2 vols. (London, 1762), I, 252. 2. The Poetical Works of William Collins, with Observations on His Genius and Writings by }. Langhorne (London, 1765), p. 145. 3. Richard Hurd, "On the Idea of Universal Poetry" (1765), The Works of Richard Hurd (London, 1811), II, 6. 4. Richard Hurd, "Dialogue III: On the Age of Queen Elizabeth" (1759), Letters on Chivalry and Romance, with the Third Elizabethan Dialogue, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1911), p. 71. 5. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1759), pp. 26-27. 6. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry (I, 2nd ed., London, 1775; II, London, 1778; III, 1781), II, 365. 7. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2nd ed. (I, London, 1762; II, 1782), I, 28. 8. "Life of Milton," The Works of Samuel Johnson (London, 1787), II, 169. 9. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. James R. Boyd (New York, 1855), p. 146. 10. [Hugh Blair], A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London, 1763), p. 65. 11. [Elizabeth] Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, 5th ed. (London, 1785), p. 150. (First edition, 1769.) 12. [Robert Anderson, ed.], A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London, 1794), X, 878, 877. 13. "The Twenty-Ninth of May" (1761), [Richard Polwhele, ed.], Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (Bath, 1792), I, 20, 21. 14. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, containing The Loves of the Plants, 2nd ed. (London, 1790), p. 53. 15. John Scott, "Serim; or, The Artificial Famine," in A. Chalmers, ed., The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), XVII, 475. 16. "From a Monody, on the Death of Dr. Oliver Goldsmith,"

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The Annual Register, X V I I (1774), 2nd ed. (London, 1778), 204. Italics mine. 17. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J . T . Boulton (London, 1958), p. 58. 18. Chester Chapin believes that "eighteenth-century poets do not ordinarily attempt the fabrication of 'obscure' personifications in their own verse. T h e y may admire instances of this in Milton, but if their own personifications are 'obscure,' this is rarely, if ever, from design" (Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry [New York, 1955], n. 33, p. 144). Questions of design or intention must necessarily remain ultimately unresolvable in most cases, but it seems to me that there are clear indications, at least in this special realm of horror-personification, that the attempt at obscurity was a fairly common and significant device. Death, perhaps because of the Miltonic model, was probably most frequently a subject for the deliberate withholding of descriptive detail: Bishop Porteus, for example, in his long poem entitled "Death" never really describes his central figure, but offers, instead, detailed accounts of the dread ministers surrounding him. Nathaniel Cotton uses the same technique, describing his subject as a "frightful monster" and a "ghastly form," but never offering more specific detail than that he has " T w o pinions of enormous size" ("Death," Chalmers, English Poets, X V I I I , 44). T h e many examples of this sort of thing have a dreadful monotony, but they certainly derive from a theory that poetic excitement depends partly on what is withheld. 19. Kames, Elements of Criticism, p. 358. 20. Rachel Trickett, " T h e Augustan Pantheon: Mythology and Personification in Eighteenth-Century Poetry," Essays and Studies, N . S , 6: 76 (1953). 21. Daniel Webb, Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry (1762), from Hans Hecht, Daniel Webb, Ein Beitrag zur Englischen Ästhetik des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts mit einem Abdruck der Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry (Hamburg, 1920), p. 94. 22. Thomas Denton, "Immortality: or, the Consolation of Human Life," A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes, By Several Hands (London, 1763), V , 229. 23. [John] Wolcot, " T h e Captive. A Persian Elegy," The Annual Register, X I X (1776), 2nd ed. (London, 1779), 222. 24. John Ogilvie, Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1769), I, cii.

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25. George Richards, "Emma," Poems (Oxford, 1804), I, 152iJ3-

26. John Brown, " T h e Cure of Saul" (1763), Anderson, Poets, X , 881-882. 27. Melancholy, Despair, and Anguish, the figures who torment Saul, are frequent fiend-images, partly, no doubt, because it was a commonplace of eighteenth-century psychology that melancholy was frequently responsible for the creation of ghosts or demons. T h e line between the real and the imaginary phantom might become very delicate: James Cawthorn, for example, writes: All that around the louring eye of spleen Throws the pale phantom, and terrific scene; Or, direr still, calls from the' abyss below Despair's dread genius to the couch of woe. ("Life Unhappy, Because W e Use It Improperly," Supplement to the British Poets [London, 1809], I V , 107; in Thomas Park, ed., The Works of the British Poets [London, 1818], X X X V . ) Spleen as a personification is totally unrealized; spleen as a force is clearly responsible for the creation of the "pale phantom, and terrific scene" and for the summoning of Despair — but Despair as a figure comes "from the' abyss below," is, in other words, a genuine denizen of hell even though a product of a disordered psychic state. Thomas Warton offers a more fully developed image of Despair: Beckoning the wretch to torments new, Despair for ever in his view, A spectre pale, appear'd; While, as the shades of eve arose And brought the day's unwelcome close, More horrible and huge her giant-shape she rear'd. ("Ode V I : T h e Suicide," Poems [London, 1777], p. 43.) Locke had long before suggested the possibility that darkness seems terrible to the human mind only because of its association with the beings of superstition; Warton is clearly trying to exploit this sort of association with the idea that the specter grows more horrible and more huge as night approaches. He thus establishes an emphatic kinship between his personification-specter and the entire folk tradition of specters. Other interesting personifications of Despair occur in P. Courtier, " T o Suicide," Poems (London, 1796), p. 22; Hugh Downman, "Sonnet I " (1767), Poems, 2nd ed. (Exeter, 1790), p. 74; James Scott, "Repentance" (1762), Cambridge Prize Poems (Cambridge, 1817), I, 140. Madness appears in similar fashion in John Whitehouse, "Ode to Melancholy," Poems: Consisting Chiefly

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of Original Pieces (London, 1787), p. 49; Downman's "Ode Occasioned by the Coronation 1761" has a characterization of Envy in the same mode (Poems, p. 53). 28. Thomas Russell, "Sonnet XVII," The Poems of Cuthbert Shaw and Thomas Russell, ed. Eric Partridge (London, 1925), p. 132. 29. John Newton, "Death and War" (1778), Works (NewHaven, 1824), II, 545; Warton, Poems, p. 46; "The Last Day," The Poetical Works of Michael Bruce (London, 1813), p. 41; in Park, British Poets, vol. X X V I I ; Glynn, "The Day of Judgment," The Poetical Works of Blair, Glynn, etc. (London, 1807), p. 51 (Park, British Poets, vol. X X X ) ; Beilby Porteus, "Death," Poetical Works of Blair . . ., p. 101. 30. See Cambridge Prize Poems (Cambridge, 1817). 31. George Richards, Poems, I, 29-30. 32. Devonshire and Cornwall Poems, I, 32. 33. See, for further examples, the personification of Death in [Richard] Polwhele, "Sir Allan; or, The Knight of Expiring Chivalry," Poems (London, 1806), II, no; that of Despair in "The Visions," The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1810); the "savage Graces," who seem to be the powers of frost, in Anna Seward's "Alpine Scenery" (1785), II, 355-

34. Chalmers, English Poets, XVIII, 540. Further dramatic examples of the technique of horror by association are Nathaniel Cotton's "Death" and Thomas Warton's "Monody, Written Near Stratford upon Avon," in which the figure of Terror joins a band of Shakespearean characters compared to "spectres swarming to the wisard's hall." 3j. See also the "Demon of storms" in George Richards, "Barnborough Castle," Poems, II, 183, and Rage in John Pinkerton, Rimes, 2nd ed. (London, 1782), p. 64. 36. John Ogilvie, "Jupiter and the Clown," Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1769), I, 124. 37. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), I, 421. 38. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London, 1952), p. 40. 39. His own account of his influences: "I wished, indeed . . . for powers to unite some touches of the sportive wildness of Ariosto, and the more serious sublime painting of Dante, with some portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination,

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1751-1800

239

and the moral grace of Pope." Preface, The Triumphs of Temper (London, 1781), p. x. 40. Hayley, Triumphs of Temper, pp. 6-7. 41. A sample of Darwinian style should suffice: Thrice round the grave Circaea prints her tread, And chaunts the numbers, which disturb the dead; Shakes o'er the holy earth her sable plume, Waves her dread wand, and strikes the echoing tomb! — Pale shoot the stars across the troubled night, T h e timorous moon withholds her conscious light; Shrill scream the famish'd bats, and shivering owls; And loud and long the dog of midnight howls! — — Then yawns the bursting ground! — t w o imps obscene Rise on broad wings, and hail the baleful queen; Each with dire grin salutes the potent wand, And leads the sorceress with his sooty hand . . . (Loves of the Plants, pp. 98-100.) A footnote to the passage reveals that Circaea is a plant, popularly called Enchanter's Nightshade, that it is characterized by having two males and one female, and that it is much celebrated in the mysteries of witchcraft and for raising the devil. 42. Davie, Purity of Diction, p. 48. 43. The Annual Register, I (1758), 6th ed. (London, 1777), p. 414. 44. " T o Winter," The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. G . Keynes (London, 1947), p. 3. T h e poem was first printed in Poetical Sketches (1783). 4j. "Tiriel," Complete Blake, p. 106. 46. The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. J . D. Campbell (London, 1938), p. 81. 47. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London, 1798), p. 18. 48. Works of Coleridge, p. 100. 49. This close relationship seems to be implicitly denied by Chapin in his generalizations about eighteenth-century personification. "Collins may believe in the reality of his abstractions as creatures of a spirit-world, but Collins is an exception. Personifications become 'real' to the eighteenth-century mind when they are felt as dramatizations of the values, affections, or qualities which relate to the activities of man in the empirical world — not when they are projected as figures from a world of vision" (Personification, p. 132). Horror-personifications, to be sure, represent a special case,

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SIX

one which would, by its very nature, be likely to include abstractions "projected as figures from a world of vision." In this category, at any rate, the development of the late eighteenth century appears to be more and more in the direction of Collins, the direction of conceiving personifications as true supernatural beings. Such personifications are not rhetorical devices so much as imaginative ones.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conclusions 1. Northrop Frye, "Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility," Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. J. L. Clifford (New York, 1959), p. 316. 2. Morse Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," PMLA 66: j-23 (1951). 3. "The Vanity of Human Wishes," The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. D. N . Smith and E. L. McAdam (Oxford, 1941), pp. 36-38. 4. See George N . Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats ( N e w York, 1940), pp. 106-107. 5. "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni," The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman (London, 1877), I, 75-

6. "The Bard," The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, ed. Edmund Gosse (New York, 1890), I, 41.

Index Addison, Joseph, 10, u , 19, 53, 166, 195; on ghosts, 8, 9; "The Fairy W a y of Writing," 50-52, 133134; on Virgil, 135; on Philips's pastorals, 223n6 Aikin, John, 121-122; quoted 97, 121 Akenside, Mark, 6, 75-76, 78; quoted 75, 76 Ariosto, 5, 135 Armstrong, John, quoted 34 Atterbury, Bishop Francis, 28; quoted 25-26 Barker, Arthur, quoted 110 Beattie, James, 78 Beaumont, John, 13 Berridge, John, quoted 27 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 30, 44, 128, 194; quoted 29, 135 Blackwell, Thomas, quoted 138 Blair, Hugh, quoted 27, 85, 86, 171 Blair, Robert, 81, 82 Blake, William, 2, 5, 104, 131, 182, 183, 192, 198; "Fair Elenor," 124125; "The Book of Ahania," 126127; "The First Book of Urizen," 126-127; " T o Winter," 188-189; "Tiriel," 189-190, 203 Boswell, James, 3, 5, 9, 24; quoted 7, io, 183-184 Boyce, Benjamin, quoted 59 Bronson, Bertrand H., quoted 132 Brooke, Henry, 154 Broome, William, 62 Brower, Reuben A., quoted 140 Brown, John, 187, 188; quoted 172, 178

Bruce, Michael, 92-93, 179 Burke, Edmund, 96-97, 107; quoted 96, 174 Burns, Robert, 126, 182 Bysshe, Edward, quoted 42 Calmet, Augustine, quoted 12 Cawthorn, James, quoted 154 Chatterton, Thomas, 84; quoted 83, 84 Churchill, Charles, quoted 161-162 Clarke, Samuel, 18; quoted 14, 19, 23-24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 5, 104, 114, 124, 176, 182, 183; Lyrical Ballads, 6, 108-109; "The Ancient Mariner," 109, 112, 116, 129-131, 191-192, 193, 198; "Ode on the Departing Year," 190-191 Collier, Jeremy, 44 Collins, Anthony, quoted 7 Collins, William, 2, 5, 6, 101; critics' attitudes toward, 67, 80, 112, 158, 200; "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," 70-74; "Ode to Fear," 99-100, 159-160, 161, 201 Cotton, Nathaniel, quoted 77 Cowper, William, 2, 82, 182, 199 Crabbe, George, 5; quoted n o Crouch, Nathaniel, 13 Daillon, Jacques, Comte Du Lude, quoted 133 Dante, 163, 185 Darwin, Erasmus, 177, 183, 186, 187, 192, 193; quoted 173, 2391141

242

INDEX

Davie, Donald, quoted 143, 151, 184, 186 Defoe, Daniel, 12; quoted i j Dennis, John, 43-45, 47, 49; quoted 29-30, 43-44 Denton, Thomas, quoted 175 Diaper, William, 197; quoted 65, 161 Doddridge, Philip, 21 Dodsley, Robert, 83, 84 Downman, Hugh, 128; quoted 111, 127, 172 Drake, Nathan, 107; quoted 106 Drewe, Edward; quoted 181 Dryden, John, 39-40, jo, j i , 71, 93, 195; quoted 39 Duff, William, 6, 95-96; quoted 95 Evans, Abel, 59-60; quoted 59 Farmer, Hugh, 24; quoted 17-18 Fawcet, Joseph, 113-114; quoted »3 Fleetwood, William, 18 Fordyce, David, quoted 136 Frye, Northrop, 201; quoted 196 Frye, Roland, quoted 22 Gay, John, 34-36, 197, 200; quoted 34-35 Gerard, Alexander, 169; quoted 97» 167 Gildon, Charles, 42 Glover, Richard, 45-47, 2 3 1 ^ 2 ; quoted 45-46 Glyn, Robert, 180 Goldsmith, Oliver, 11, 151; quoted 10, 80 Graeme, James, quoted 76-77 Granville, George, Lord Lansdowne, 63; quoted 62 Gray, Thomas, 2, 6, 73, 100-101, 182, 200; quoted 204 Hamilton, William, 92; quoted 55 Harley, George, quoted 114 Hart, Jeffrey, quoted 76

Hayley, William, 2, 6, 183, 187, 198; Essay on Epic Poetry, 104; The Triumphs of Temper, 184-186, 193 Headley, Henry, quoted 102 Herd, David, 91 Hervey, James, 24-25 Hill, Aaron, quoted 52-53 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 34, 59; quoted 16 Hole, Richard, 6, 106, 123; quoted 105-106, 127-128 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 80, 169; quoted 79, 170-171, 174 Home, John, 70, 71, 72 Homer, 52, 53, 67, 201; as model, 5, 31, 47; criticism of, 40, 167 Hughes, John, 155, 156; quoted 134-135, 148, 154-155 Hume, David, 15, 19, 24; quoted 16 Hurd, Richard, 94-95, 96, 167, 169; quoted 69, 94, 166 Hutchinson, Francis, 12; quoted 11-12 Johnson, Samuel, 2, 3, 5, 80, 137, 151, 200; attitude toward the supernatural, 7, 9-10, 19, 24; on Shakespeare, 51, 67, 226ni8; on Collins, 67-68, 70; on the supernatural in poetry, 79; on personification, 169-170, 176, 182; on Ogilvie, 184; "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 198-199 Jortin, John, 24; quoted 14, 18 Keats, John, 116, 131 Langhorne, John, 169; quoted 158, 166 Lewis, C. S., 144; quoted 132, 143 Lewis, M. G., 118-120, 122, 126, 130; quoted 118, 119, 120, 125 Leyden, John, quoted 116 Locke, John, 26 Logan, John, quoted 92

INDEX Longinus, 43, 45 Lowes, John Livingston, quoted 129, 130 Macpherson, James, 86-87, 100; quoted 86, 87 Mallet, David, 52, 61-62, 90, 104, 156-158, 159; quoted 36, 103, 156•57

Mason, William, 6 Mathias, T . J., quoted 105 Mayo, Robert, quoted 109 Melmoth, William, 136-138; quoted 68, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7

Mickle, William, 88-89; quoted 88 Middleton, Conyers, quoted 16, 17, 24 Miles, Josephine, 90; quoted 89 Milton, John, 22, 59, 107, no, 175; as model, 4, 47, 49, 88, 104, 184; criticism of, 80, 169, 174; personification in, 133, 142-143, 169, 174

Montagu, Elizabeth, 96, 97; quoted 68, 96, 171 More, Hannah, quoted 8 Newbery, John, quoted 165-166, 228042 Newton, John, 179; quoted 21, 82 Ogilvie, John, 6, 85, 183-184, 187, 192; quoted 85, 177, 183 Ovid, 133 Parnell, Thomas, 57, 152, 162-164; quoted 151-152, 162-163 Peckham, Morse, 197 Pemberton, Henry, 39, 45; quoted 30-31 Percy, Bishop Thomas, 89, 90, 92 Philips, Ambrose, 31 Philips, John, quoted 36 Polwhele, Richard, 103-104; quoted 103, 122, 129 Pope, Alexander, 2, 7, 128, 144, 146, 172, 185, 194, 195, 198, 199;

243

"Epistle to a Lady," 37-38; plan for an epic poem, 42-43; "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," 54; "Ode for Music on Saint Cecilia's Day," 60-61; The Dunciad, 38, 62; "Windsor Forest," 139-143, 145 Porteus, Bishop Beilby, 180 Praz, Mario, 194 Price, Uvedale, quoted 109-110 Pye, H. J., quoted 105 Quayle, Thomas, 158; quoted 151 Radcliffe, Anne, 125; quoted 107 Ralph, James, 62, 63 Ramsay, Allan, 5, 32-33, 65-66, 90, 197; quoted 32, 33, 65-^6, 154 Richards, George, quoted u z , 115, 177, 180 Richardson, William, 93 Romaine, William, quoted 22 Rowe, Elizabeth, 45, 47-50, 51; quoted 47, 48-49, 148 Rowe, Nicholas, 2, 144-145, 147; quoted 56, 144-145, 153 Russell, Thomas, quoted 78, 178179 Rymer, Thomas, 40 Savage, Richard, 62 Sayers, Frank, 122-123; quoted 123 Scott, James, quoted 5 Scott, John, quoted 104, 173 Seward, Anna, 2, 113, 123; quoted 110—111, 120 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, quoted 3°

Shakespeare, William, 52, 53, 67, 99. '57! criticism of, 3, 51, 68, 69, 95. 96, 107; as model, 4, 41, 123, 227n32 Sheffield, John, Duke of Buckinghamshire, quoted 56 Shelley, Percy B., 194, 204; quoted 162, 203

244

INDEX

Sickels, Eleanor, quoted 82 Simeon, Charles, quoted 23 Smalbroke, Richard, quoted 17 Southey, Robert, 107, 117, 120-121, 130, 191; quoted 117, 121 Spence, Joseph, 135-136, 138 Spenser, Edmund, 1 1 1 , 127, 146; as model, 4, 76, 90, 98, 112; criticism of, 42, 133, 135 Stephen, Sir Leslie, quoted 13, 27 Sterling, Joseph, quoted 105, 115 Stockdale, Percival, 101; quoted 100 Sutherland, James, quoted 1 Swift, Jonathan, 38; quoted 26 Tasso, Torquato, 5, 42, 47, 48, 49, 72 Theocritus, 31 Thompson, William, 98-99; quoted 98 Thomson, James, 5, 144; The Seasons, 34, 62; "The Castle of Indolence," 64; Liberty, 146-147, 149-150; letter to Mallet, 157 Tickell, Thomas, 3, 33, 54, 92; quoted 31 Tindal, Matthew, 26, 59 Toland, John, 26 Trapp, Joseph, quoted 41-42 Trickett, Rachel, quoted 175

Virgil, 156, 201; as model, 5, 46, 47, 138, 140, 141, 173; criticism of, 31, 133, 135 Walker, Samuel, 28; quoted 21, 22, 25 Warburton, Bishop William, 17 Warton, Joseph, quoted 168 Warton, Thomas, 2, 68, 76, 81, 88, 179; quoted 69, 81, 87, 167-168 Wasserman, Earl, quoted 132-133, 139, 146, 163 Watts, Isaac, 63-64; quoted 57, 63, 148 Webb, Daniel, quoted 175 Wesley, Charles, quoted 148, 152153 Wesley, John, quoted 20 Whitefield, George, quoted 21, 23 Whitehead, William, 176 Williams, Aubrey, quoted 38, 145— 146 Wolcot, John, quoted 176 Woodhouse, A . S. P., quoted 160 Woolston, Thomas, 14, 17, 19; quoted 15 Wordsworth, William, 107, 109, 117, 187 Young, Edward, 6, 81; quoted 57, 82