Ancient Pastoral and the Pathetic Fallacy

Abstract

human situation never received a specific title in ancient rhetoric. If nature manifested itself emphatically by doing the impossible (brambles bearing violets, stags grazing in air), the figure could be considered adynaton, although this term has a much wider connotation.1 The expression entered our critical vocabulary in 1856, and the circumstances of its introduction are well known. John Ruskin coined the phrase to indicate a weakness in subjective poets who were unable to see reality as it was and instead projected their own feelings into it.2 Today the term, which has lost its pejorative meaning, is often interchangeable with personification and merely signifies the imparting of human feelings and powers to natural objects.3 The origins of the pathetic fallacy probably lie in a primitive homeopathy or what Levy-Bruhl called la loi de participation, wherein man regarded himself as part of his natural surroundings.4 The bond of sympathy between nature and human beings has always been a dominant motif in early literature, particularly in epic. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, which antedates Homer by at least fifteen hundred years, there is the lament for Enkidu in which all nature weeps for the dead warrior: