Pathetic fallacy

The pathetic fallacy is "the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human," which the article frames as "a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions": clouds that seem sullen, leaves that dance, rocks that seem indifferent. John Ruskin coined the term in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856); his original definition was "emotional falseness," when "fallacy" meant simply "falseness" and "pathetic" meant "emotional." His gloss on "the cruel, crawling foam" is the classic note: "The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl." Tennyson's Maud he rated an "exquisite" instance.

For the novelist it is setting doing emotional work, weather as the mind's mirror: Ruskin pardons the figure "so long as we see that the feeling is true," and the risk is the mechanical kind, rain at every funeral. It is personification narrowed to nature, and a recurring weather pattern becomes motif and mood.