The Pathetic Fallacy in Hellenistic Pastoral

Abstract

Thee, shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves And all their echoes mourn.Milton, LycidasWebster's Third International Dictionary defines the ‘pathetic fallacy’ as ‘the ascription of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature.’ While this definition is in substance what John Ruskin meant when he first spoke of the pathetic fallacy more than a century ago, the great critic intended not merely to describe a movement in art, but to denounce that movement:All violent feelings … produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic fallacy.’… The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is … that of a mind or body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion …Ruskin rejected the pathetic fallacy when artists reduced it to a stock attribute of nature which neither they nor their public believed to reflect the truth. When, however, the pathetic fallacy did convey the artist's true feelings about nature — as groundless in reality as that feeling might have been — the artist was somehow less culpable: the truth of the sentiment mitigated the violation of empirical Truth.