A phrase coined by John Ruskin in of Modern Painters (1856) to denote an old and enduring practice in Western lit., the tendency of poets and painters to imbue the natural world with human feeling. For Ruskin it becomes an important criterion of artistic excellence. The fallacy, due to “an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational,” creates “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The offending example is taken from a poem in Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke: “They rowed her in across the rolling foam—/ The cruel, crawling foam.” Ruskin declares that “the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl,” the author’s state of mind being “one in which the reason is unhinged by grief.”
For Ruskin there are two classes of poets, “the Creative (Shakspere [sic], Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson)”; it is one of the faults of the latter group that it admits the p. f. But Ruskin was unconcerned with the psychological origins of the, and his ideas should not be applied indiscriminately to other lits. B. F. Dick contends that the “origins of the. probably lie in a primitive homeopathy wherein man regarded himself as part of his natural surroundings.” In older lits., the does not automatically have the pejorative implications that Ruskin’s definition established. Dick considers the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh an early and important source of the : in a climactic passage, all of nature weeps for the death of the warrior Enkidu; since Enkidu embodies the ideals of the natural man, nature as the universal parent must reflect the joys and sorrows of her children. Homer, for Ruskin one of the first order of poets, occasionally employs the, but he characteristically attributes human feelings to weapons instead of the natural world—a standard convention of the war-epic. It is generally agreed that in the Iliad Homer falls prey to Ruskin’s censures only once, when the sea rejoices as Poseidon passes overhead in his chariot (13.27-29). Yet even in this case Homer strictly curtails the passage, avoiding the indulgences Ruskin would later criticize.
Based on various Cl. models, the pastoral elegies of the 16th and 17th cs. provided Eng. poetry with a natural arena for the p. f. The early Eng. translators—e.g. Sir William Drummond, who translated the sonnets of the It. poet Jacopo Sannazaro in 1616—were among the first poets to provide the Eng. trad. with flowers, lillies, and columbine that would bow their heads in sympathetic response to the poet’s grief; the p. f.’s earliest appearance is thus not the result of native invention but of the preservation of a pastoral convention.
Although he was unconcerned to invent a name for it, Samuel Johnson recognized the phenomenon in the 18th c. and complained 100 years earlier than Ruskin that the phrase “pastoral verse” referred simply to poetry in which, among other things, “the clouds weep.” Johnson was reacting to the excesses of sentimentality in 18th-c. verse, but the device continued to be employed: it appears with varying frequency throughout the work of Collins, Cowper, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins. Wordsworth, justifying its usage, argued that “objects derive their influence not from properties inherent in them but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects.” Tennyson, on the other hand, was well schooled in the scientific issues of his day, and his descriptions of natural objects are often clinically precise: after 1842 his verse reveals a markedly less frequent usage of p. f. (Miles), and In Memoriam offers a striking revision of the device by evoking its essential effect without indulging its excesses (“Calm is the morn without a sound. / Calm as to suit a calmer grief”).
During the 20th c., the most vigorous applications of the p. f. have been self-consciously designed to explore the epistemological issues implied by the technique. Modern usage of the p. f. ironically emphasizes the loss of communion between the individual and the natural world; and in its implied envy of an older world where such communion once existed, it resurrects yet another remnant of its ancient origin, pastoral nostalgia.
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