THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ome Words on Allegory in England. O.V. 1895. ^/ . v For ?// il. tm.' ■P With the Writer s Good Wishes, I 7. A- ^^?i To the Memory of Henry Nettleship a true lover of English Letters. PRIVATELY PRINTP:D OPUSCULA ISSUED TO MEMBERS OF THE SETTE OF ODD \' GLUMES No. XXXVII 1. ALLEGORY IN ENGLAND. J/'ERE dictint sapientes — Sunt quot hoinines tot metttes ! Sit res levis sitve gravis, Vix consentit Par in qudvis. Pauca sunt de quibus ciincti Siiniis in sententia jitucti, Sed de isto Disserente Omnibus ex nostra srente Vox est una: gratias damns Noster quia Ignoramus ! Est (ut non laudetur nimis) Inter Impares ex primis. B. Q. London, September 2sth, 1895. "■fc-J-^- ^ 's— 4^4Xi Some Words on Allegory in England read to the Odd Volumes at their Meeting o July 5 1895 by their Brother Ignoramuj and privately printed for him by Platrier Brothers at their Printing House at Chiswick in August 1895 5' O ^ 'Tr\lXlT Frciier Ifrnovamns— ~^^^ Piscibus cope yf us hamus Valde movdax ac movtalis .Est AUe^goria talis! A si yespon-sit Dvmnatista Tu ne crede, frat-ey, ista! Te decipinnt verba, quia Non est si-c- AUsgoria ; Est Matrona pulchra, dccens-, Cni oyigo non ^st recent, ■Ciijus lingua bene pendit-, .Ac mens omnia prehendit, Velata admodum Vestalis, Est A llegoyia talis ! Causam, fratres, jtidicatc Et viiHori plausiirn datc^ 769567 SOME WORDS ON ALLEGORY IN ENGLAND, ALLEGORY has long been with us, it forms part of our speech and part of our thoughts, its power for good and evil has been manifest often enough in human histor}', it is difficult indeed to keep clear of its influence, even where it is possible to do so, and we are reduced to the use of symbols if we would escape the magic of what is itself but a symbolisation. In a famous passage, which I shall here English, of his best known epistle, that to Can Grande, introducing his great Poem, Dante sets forth the 7 meaning of the term Allegory as he understood it, "And according to the testimony to be spoken it must be understood that of this work there is not merely one single meaning or significance, but rather, it should be called polyseme, that is, of many meanings, for there is one significance of the letter and another significance of the meaning of the letter; and the first is called literal, but the second allegoric or mystic. Which kind of process that it may be the better set forth, may be considered with regard to this verse. When Israel went out of Egypt and the house of Israel from among a strange people, Jiidah became his holiness and Israel his power. For if we look at the letter alone, there is set forth the coming up out of Egypt of the sons of Israel in the days of Moses ; if into the A lie gory, there is set forth to us our Redemption, through Christ. If into the moral or ethical meaning, there is set forth to us the conversion of the Soul from the struggle and wretchedness of sin to a state of grace. If into the anagogic sense, there is set forth the issue of the holy Soul from the slavery of this Corruption, into the freedom of Glory Everlasting ; and though these mystic senses be called by divers s names tliey may all be called generally allegoric^ for allegory is called from the Greek alkon, which in Latin is called aliem or diverse,''' This is plain enough, and I would define Allegory for my purposes as a literary representation of qualities by beings and objeds ; an algebra, as it were, of the mind, used by thinkers and poets to set forth more vividly and passionately their imaginings and conclusions. N GLAND in especial has had many famous allegorists, Long Will of Langland, good Master Robert Henryson, Edmond Spenser, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, and there are modern masters of the art allegoric, whose names will readily recur to every reader. The flowers are ours and the fruit, but the seed was fetched from over the sea. The Romance of the Rose, SL grave, pretty rhyme of love, left unfinished by William of Lorris, to receive after a long interval a marvellous and encyclopaedic comple- tion by John Clopinel of Meun, most weighty, most cynical, and most humorous of medieval ethical teachers : the Pilgrimage of Deguilleville, the best known example of a type of alleg^or}' that has gone far since his day : above all the noblest book the Middle Ages have left us, vast and lofty as a great gothic cathedral, as elaborate in detail and as holy in purpose, — the Divine Comedy, por- traying the progress of the Human Spirit towards the Divine— such were the models in the hands of our fourteenth and iifteenth century writers. The makers of the models themselves, French and Italian alike, had devised their beautiful creations after the fashion of the heathen Roman's Dyeam of Scipio, of the Consolation of Wisdom (which our Alfred Englished) by the wise and much-enduring Boece, and of the fantastic Marriage of Philology by Marcianus (Saxo's master in style). These and besides these, that curious series of symbolic Christian Visions, Adamnan's, Fursey's, Tungdal's, which Bede and later hagiographers have preserved for iis, — wild horrors of the brain and heart, sprung from the vast Oriental imagina- tions of fasting seers and prophets, grafted on yet older and more primitive theories and crude myths of heathen magicians and medicine-men — all these lie at the stem of our famous English allegories. But beyond these too, far back as literature exists at all, ay, as far as words and sentences have sound, the roots of Allegory stretch into the primeval darkness that broods over our human beginnings, WE cannot win back so far to-night, we must be content to begin with Langland,a name as unknown five-and-twenty years ago as it was well known five centuries earlier. An earnest, sorrowful personage, that had learnt his wisdom in the hard school of the world, as well as out of crabbed vellums, with the Malvern Hills for his Ecclefechan and the busy, squalid, slimy hithe b)'' Thames Street for the orderly peace of Cheyne Walk ; the Carlyle of his time, and with no less influence ; scornful, pitiful, hopeful, though few stars pierced the black night through which he was steering. With less impatience than tor- mented "true Thomas" and none of that childish make-believe that seems to be a part of Tolstoi's nature, Langland perceived, long before the famous Scot or notorious Russian, that the faithful, simple hard-working Piers Plowman, peasant or fisher- man, taught of earth and sea, comes perhaps ne-arer tfie apostolic life preached and pradtfsed fn: Galilee than any other we know. This poor, proml, lean long-legged clerk, stalking silent and self-absorbed to his chantry, along the merry, noisy, dirty, bright-coloured, stinking East- cheap of Richard II.'s day was indeed the wisest man then alive in England. One cannot forget his bold Apologue of the rats that would bell the cat ; his keen etching of the sluggish, servile Parliament " that dreaded Dukes and forsook Do-Vv''eil " ; his miniatures of Lady Meed and her supporters in Church and State ; his Hogarthian picfture of the seven Deadly Sins portrayed as- seven English types of his day:. — the tavernf braggart, Pride; the meagre backbiting merchant,. Envy: the mischievous convent cook, Ire; the drunken village whoremonger. Lechery ; the ragged tradesmen, Avarice; the ale-house sot,. Glutton, who when he set out for home at night "could neither step nor stand till he had a staff and then he began to go like a gleeman's bitch sometimes aside sometimes arear, as a man that is laying lines to catch larks"; and last and least, the idle, gossiping, ungrateful, poaching priest. Sloth; Nor of less interest is his clear chart of the pilgrim's Path to Truth through Meekness to Conscience across the brook of Natural Piety, by the side of Swear-not to the croft of Covet-not^ past the stocks Steal-not and Slay-not on the left to the park of Lie-not, where, in the field of Say- sooth there stands the manor house of Truth himself, its Moat of Mercy, its walls of Wisdom, its embrasures of Baptism, its buttresses of Belief, its roofing of Love and Loyal Speech, its bars of Brotherhood, its bridge of Prayer, its doorposts of Penance, its hinges of Almsdeeds, where the porter is Grace and seven sisters keep the pos- terns, — Abstinence,. Humihty, Charity, Chastity, Patience, Peace, and Largesse. And as William has his Pilgrim's Progress, so he has his Holy War. My Lady Soul lives in Fleshy Castle, guarded by the castellan Conscience and his sons the Five Senses, assailed at all points by the Evil Ones, Pride and his mighty Meiny, and holpen of the whole host of Heaven. The burning questions of his time, Free-Will, Poverty, the possible Salvation of heretics and heathen, the Right Life, and the coming Reform of the 13 Church, William debates in long tangled rambling *' visions," always with power and often with poetical force, in that rough, tumbling metre that the mass of Englishmen, in spite of Chaucer's fine new-fangled French measures, long continued to prefer to any other. LET us turn from the misty midland hills and the foggy banks of the London river to the wild shaws and desert heaths of the North to seek the Abbey schoolmaster of Dunfermline, with his delicate and humorous anticipation of that greatest of fabulists, La Fontaine, his exquisite paraphrase of Adam's French pastoral, and for us, above all, the dainty little poem that describes the mystic raiment of the Ideal Woman, and that strong and concise allegory, the Bliiidy Sark, sur- passing even Southwell in its plain pathos as it tells of the True Knight that for our sakes (as a contemporary allegorist put it) "jousted at Jeru- salem" with "Death the Joyless" and won the vidlory through great tribulation. Well may Dunbar have regretted such a singer and thinker as Robert Henr3'Son. LEAVING learned Douglas and courtly Lindsay unnoticed now, and passing South again, we omit those worthy Tudor pracftitioners of the Mystery of Similitudes, gallant outspoken George Gascoigne and simple Stephen Hawes (as we must neglecft even the Fletchers, whose mastership Milton was to acknowledge, and tliat Welsh Dante, Ellis Wyn, to whose wierd power George Borrow eagerly testified) and come at once to Spenser. Never was allegory more minutely worked out than in that glorious and typical Elizabethan fragment, the Faery Qneene. ' The theme is worthy, — the construction of a Per- fecfl Characfter, the ideal of highest Humanity, with materials drawn alike from Plato and St. Augustine ; and it is decked with all the jewelled splendour the Renaissance could offer, enriched out of the solid wealth of the re-opened classic mines, adorned with great store of the naive and romantic broidery of the Middle Ages ; while always double, sometimes triple, the red thread of allegory runs through the gorgeous fabric, and the whole design is wrought upon the ever-varied, ever-graceful, if over-elaborate pattern of the 15 stanza its author especially devised for his im- mortal work. Spenser's art must astonish every one that has served apprenticeship, however brief, to the poet's craft, his Mantegnan processions, his Botticellian idylls, his Durer-like grotesques, his wild landscapes recalling those of the old Lom- bard line-engravers, his huge personifications, such as Michael Angelo himself has scarcely sur- passed, and yet, with this astonishing variety, the poet still keeps within the bounds of that particu- lar Italian epic style he learnt from Ariosto, and for the first and onl}^ time naturalised in England. The palace of Spenser was, like other less lasting but bulkier buildings of the Renaissance time, never finished ; but what remains is perfedt in itself, the full plan can be seen, the proportions realised, only the details of the unbuilt wing are to seek. The ethical, political, and religions allegory can be traced by the patient and affe(5lionate student beneath the plain story that in itself yields sufficient pleasure to prevent hundreds of readers from diving deeper into this fair-flowing stream of English poetry. The adventures of the Red Cross Knight and i6 Prince Arthur, Britoinart and Una, Guion and Artegal.Scudamour and Hellanore.the encounters with the false Duessa, and the wicked magician, with cruel, cowardly, braggart pagan knights, and strange and terrific monsters of sea and land, are interesting in themselves ; and it is not until one reads the poet's preface with the attention it merits that one feels there is moie to be got from his poem than the story that delights. The greatest allegories have always drawn to them scores of pleasure-hunters for one profit-seeker. Even Dante and Milton, who would fain have justified God to man, will be read, when their philosophy shall be acknowledged as infantile as their science, by thousands whom their poetry must stir to finer issues through those outward and visible signs, which, after all, are every whit as spiritual as the inward grace. Spenser may be denied a statue as, to our shame, Cromwell was, by those that mislike his patriotism, or loathe his views, political or relig- ious, but as a master of allegory, as the Christian next after Dante, who has most effecflively presented the symbolic and real together, as the most exacT: 17 exponent of the ethic theory of his day, and, certainly, as the greatest of English Platonists he must ever claim our gratitude and respecft. IT is far from Spenser's strong but ill-omened tower in Ireland, far from the rich arras-clad banquetting halls of the peerless Gloriana, where Sidney sung and Shakespeare a6led, to the dark noisome jail, where the simple but sore distradled spirit of the humble Bedfordshire tinker was able to bring forth from its deep treasury things new and old. The Pilgrim's Progress has passed through the whole world like Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels, and is one of that dozen of English clas- sics that are almost as well known in Paris and Moscow as they are in London or New York. The Damascus watchman used the book as a touchstone of his fellows' worth, and who loved the Pilgrim was to him a true man. Founded on an old motif, crammed with Scriptural citations, filled with reminiscenses of Foxe's Martyrs, the book is above all others fresh, personal, and novel. One is attracfted at the very outstart by the natural beauty of the style, which is throughout homely, i8 pithy, and quaint as Sancho's at his best, and noble, xmworldly, and dutiful as his master's. "Who but relishes the earnest doggrel ? Who has not felt the power of those apt parables, the Soul that took the Kingdom of Heaven b}' violence ; the contrasted pair of children, Passion and Patience; the robin and the spider ; the Man with the muck- rake ? We have all longed for those fleeting glimpses from the Shepherds' outlook on the mountain Delecftable of the fair golden City towering above the cold black River. We re- member the Temptation, Trial, and Martyrdom in Vanity Fair. We have shuddered at the doubtful combat with Apollyon ; at the grim horrors of the pit, of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, of the By-way to Hell. We have felt the haunting fear of Doubting Castle, and of that dim glen beside it where the blind are left to stumble among the tombs. We have followed Christian through the Slough of Despond and up the hill Difficulty. And then the characters, everlasting types, but as human as Dickens or Defoe could have made them — the fearfulness of Faint-Heart ; the sturdy courage of Greatheart, and Faithful, of Mr. Steadfast 19 and Old Honesty, in whom the King's Champion dehghted, for he loved one greatly that he found to he a man of his hands and valiant for the Truth ; the brave matronly tenderness of Christiana; the serene Quakerhke charm of gentle Mercy; the carnal smiles of Madam Bubble, the wiles of Lady Wanton and her kindred ; the vanity of the "very pretty man" Mr. Talkative of Prating Row; the easy confidence of Demas and Ignorance ; the cozenage of Mr. By-ends and his followers ; the rancour of that haughty Jeffreys, My Lord Hategood, and the servile malice of his jury; the comfortable presence of the Shining Ones and the pitiless perseverance of the Prince of Evil — a gallery of portraits we all have learnt to know. There are those who would scarce scruple to place the Puritan preacher's Iliad, the Holy War, as high as his Odyssey, the Pilgrims Progress, and there is something to be said for it, even if we must firmly decline to elevate his realistic Mr. Badman to a front place among English allegories. The scenes in and round Mansoul (drawn from Bunyan's own experience of civic strife) are no- table indeed, the beleaguered town, the siege, the sallies, the relief, the judgment of the vi(ftor on the traitors, the secret councils of spies and enemies, the reconciliation of the Lord of the city with the repentant citizens ; and they make up a piece of work comparable even to Milton's two epics for the contrast of bitter and base malignity set over against most patient justice and profoundest mercy. The very muster-roll of the army of fiends mar- shalled for the great assault is full of that simple matter-of-fa(fl horror dear to all of us and ever immensely impressive to the natural British mind. IT were too long to attempt to exhaust the broad realms of English allegory, but for a last stage we may halt a moment to survey the fertile but storm-scarred domain of Jonathan Swift. If his Gulliver be beyond our scope to-night, we may at least consider his Tale of a Tub, a most preg- nant apologue, which cost its author a bishopric it had richly earned him and gave to English letters one of our notable prose -writers, William Cobbett. Still green beneath the summer-sky, un- cumbered as yet by encroaching bricks and mortar, stretches beside Thames that broad meadow where in the early morning, the poor country boy threw himself down in the grass to read the tiny book, whose satiric spell woke the fire of genius in him, for he too was born to bear witness in his own wayward fashion against the wrongs and follies of the world, as the Dean had done before him. Swift vmited Voltaire's fine skill of wit, with the clear, sharp, stinging ironic force of Pascal, and the rich idiomatic expression of Quevedo. Ras- cality and folly show in their worst aspedlis under the white heat of his compressed fury. The tragedy of his own life fitted him for the role he played ; there was a depth of pity and sympathy in the lonely- hearted man, and this pity and sympathy only made the world, as he scanned it, the more terrible to his eyes. We know his achievements. If the love of love seems sometimes to have been denied him. Swift was indeed, dowered with the hate of hate, the scovn of scorn. His satirical allegory is a piercing sermon on the pitiful squabbles and the ignorant intolerance that divided and still divide Christen- dom, and he bore so hard on the ugly malice and vulgar pride of the contending facftions, that as in the case of Defoe's famous pamphlet, those who loved to believe that the filthy parasites, the dead leaves and rotten fruit were essential parts of the living tree were bitterly offended, and took care to revenge themselves in their own scurvy way. AND here I would fain have spoken of one more book, that most original, most philo- sophic, and most searching of modern allegories, Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece, as I hold, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it is well to pause, not for lack of subjecft matter, but for the sake of them that have sat at meat with us. A LAST question intrudes itself: — " Why have we English so excelled in this branch of Art ? " It were probably hard fully to answer. We are reticent. We exaggerate by understate- ment, we like to set forth our case without seeming to attack our adversary, to indulge in imagination without it being flatly forced upon us that we are departing from the stricftly pradlical. We dearly love liteyature with a purpose and we have tried to write it so often that we have sometimes succeeded 23 gloriously in spite of the absurd difficulty of the enterprise. The form in facfl suits us, hence our excellence therein. TO-NIGHT, you have allowed me to lead your thoughts swiftly along a path that passed from the secular pines of Ravenna, through the pleached arbours of the old French Rose-garden, over quiet English hills and rough Scottish moors, till we lingered among the hazel coppices of Bedfordshire, and stood for a moment in the old Deanery at Dublin, The guide may have been a i^ worse Cicerone than you looked for, but he has surely not erred in trying for a short space to recall memories of happy hours spent spell-bound at the feet of the veiled dream-lady Allegory. i I UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. iVlAR 1 6 1957 M «<• AAW LOAN DtSK i JAN 26 1865 } 10111112! l|2i : A rorm L9-100m-9,'52(A3105)444 ^^ THE LKRARY LOS ANGELSfl *'"^** 1/ I Gj H AA 000 294 452