A phrase invented by John Ruskin in 1856 to signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions.
It is used by Ruskin—for whom "truth" was a primary criterion of art—the term was derogatory; for, he claimed, such descriptions do not represent the "true
appearances of things to us" but "the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy."
Two of Ruskin's examples are the lines
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold,
and Coleridge's description in "Christabel" of
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can.
These passages, Ruskin says, however beautiful, are false and "morbid." Only
in the greatest poets is the use of the pathetic fallacy valid, and then only at
those rare times when it would be inhuman to resist the pressure of powerful feelings to humanize the perceived fact.
Ruskin's contention would make not only his romantic predecessors but
just about all poets, including Shakespeare, "morbid."
"Pathetic fallacy" is now used, for the most part, as a neutral name for a very common phenomenon in descriptive poetry, in which the ascription of human traits to inanimate nature is less formal and more indirect than in the figure called personification.
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