Pathetic Fallacy

 

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        "Pathetic Fallacy" is a term coined by John Ruskin in 1856 to describe any depiction of inanimate natural objects that bestows upon them human faculties, sensations, and feelings; The term was derogatory in Ruskin's usage, who considered "truth" to be a fundamental standard of artistic merit.                     According to him, such descriptions do not accurately capture how things actually appear to us; rather, they instead capture how they appear to us "extraordinarily" or "falsely," depending on our state 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

        Even though they are beautiful, these passages are "morbid," according to Ruskin. Only the greatest poets can legitimately use the pathetic fallacy, and even then, only under extremely unusual circumstances where it would be cruel to resist the pressure of strong emotions to humanise the perceived fact. According to Ruskin's argument, almost all poets, including Shakespeare, are "morbid."   

        The term "pathetic fallacy" is now primarily used as a neutral term to describe a technique whereby human characteristics are indirectly and less formally assigned to natural objects than in the figure known as personification.