Amenities of Literature Part 43

[7] Thia famous tourney may be viewed in Hollinshed--"England," 1317, fo. The four ill.u.s.trious challengers were, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Windsor, Sir Fulke Greville, and Sir Philip Sidney.

ALLEGORY.

Allegory and its exposition of what is termed the double or secret sense, is a topic on more than one account important. The mystical art of types and symbols has given rise to some extraordinary abuses, and even to artifices, which may be considered as an imposture practised on the human understanding. An extended fict.i.tious narrative, constructed on the principle of one continued allegory, is a topic which critical learning has not expressly treated on. An allegorical epic never occurred to the ancient legislator of poetry; and modern critics have consented to define ALLEGORY as "that art in which one thing is _related_, and another _understood_."

But it has been subsequently discovered that this definition was too narrow to comprehend the multiform shapes which allegory a.s.sumes, either in the subtility or the grossness of its nature.

Licentious commentators have rioted in their presumed discoveries by extorting from the apparent meaning a hidden sense; or by typical adumbrations wresting allusions to persons or circ.u.mstances. The genius of allegory has triumphed from an extended metaphor to a whole poem itself; and its chimerical results have often resembled the metamorphoses of Ovid, turning every object into an altered shape, and making two objects, wholly unconnected, appear to rise out of each other. We may show from the success of many of these pretended revelations that the difficulty has not always been so great as the absurdity.

A prevalent folly has usually some parent-origin; and the present one of ALLEGORY may have been an ancient one. The learned have sought for the source of Allegory in the night of Egyptian darkness, among their hieroglyphics. That curious tale of antiquity which Herodotus has preserved shows us all the obscurity and the inconvenience of allegorical communication in its ambidextrous nature. The four symbols--of the arrows, the bird, the mouse, and the frog, which the Scythian amba.s.sadors silently presented to Darius on his invasion of their deserts, were an allegory; and like many allegories, this emblematical emba.s.sy admitted of contrary interpretations. This enigmatic humour of the Egyptian learning seems to have been caught by the emblematical Greeks. The priesthood, eager to save the divinity of their whole theogony from the popular traditions and poetical impieties of that bible of the Polytheists, the Iliad, opened the secret or double sense of Homer. They maintained that the Homeric fables were nothing less than an allegory, shadowing forth the mysteries of nature, and veiling an arcanum of the sciences physical and moral. And these elucidators of speculative obscurities formed a sect under the lower Platonists.[1] The fathers were perfect children in their ridiculous allegories, and they allegorised the Old Testament throughout; and a.s.suredly the Rabbins did not yield in puerility to the fathers. But all these were on topics too solemn to enter into our present inquiry.

We may, however, smile when we discover this race of Oedipuses among the _romanzatori_, or the publishers of the ancient romances. With solemn effrontery these proceeded on the principle of allegory to dignify their light and lying volumes, either to renovate the satiated curiosity of their readers, to cover the freedom of their prurient incidents, or to tolerate their marvellous fantasies. The editor of "Amadis of Gaul"

revealed a secret yet untold. The common reader hitherto had never strayed beyond the literal sense; but he was now informed that he had only culled the most perishable flowers; for the more elevated mind were reserved the perennial fruits of a mystical interpretation of the occult sense. It was in this way that the famous "Romaunt of the Rose," from a mere love-story and a general satire on society, was converted into a volume of theology, of politics, of ethics, and even of the _grand oeuvre_ of the alchemists. Such inchoate mysteries were told under "the rose!" The most ludicrous display of their literary imposture may be seen in that collection of popular tales called the _Gesta Romanorum_.

Every tale is accompanied by the gloss of a pious allegorist. An "Emperor," or "Pompey the Great," is a frequent personage in these tales, and is always the type of "our Heavenly Father," or "the soul,"

or "the Saviour;" while _Contes a la Fontaine_, however licentious, pa.s.s through a moralization by the puritanical cant of hypocritical monkery.

Conforming to the spurious piety of this monkish taste, a voluminous commentary expounded the morality of the ravishing versatilities of Ariosto. Berni gravely a.s.sured us that all the marvels of enchanted gardens, voluminous dragons, sylvan savages, and monsters with human faces, were only thrown out for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the ignorant; and concludes with these memorable lines, which he freely borrowed from the father of Italian poesy--

Ma voi ch'avete gl'intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde, Sotto queste coperte alte e profonde![2]

"But ye of sounder intellect admire the wisdom hidden under these coverings, high and profound!" A strain so solemn and melodious was not the least exquisite pleasantry from a burlesque satirist!

Camoens having adopted the Grecian mythology in his Christian epic, recourse was had to a mystic allegory to defend the incongruity; when Vasco de Gama and his companions sport with Thetis and her nymphs, allegorically, though in good earnest, some Portuguese commentator has explained how "these phantastic amours signify the _wild sects_ of different enthusiasts in the most rational inst.i.tutions, which, however contrary to each other, all agree in deriving their authority from the same source." To such inept.i.tudes are the allegorists sometimes driven, from the sickly taste of gratifying the infirmity of readers by cloaking their freest inventions in the garb of piety and morality. Thus the popular literature of Europe was overrun by these adumbrations. Even Milton echoed the occult doctrine which he had caught from the seers of the old _Romanzatori_--those Gothic Homers in whose spells he had been bound:--

Forests and enchantments drear, _Where more is meant than meets the ear_.

While this mania of allegorising fict.i.tious narratives was in vogue, a remarkable occurrence, had it been publicly known, might have let the initiated into a secret more "high and profound" than any of their esoteric revelations, and might have exposed the imposture which had been so long practised on their simplicity. The hapless Ta.s.so was hara.s.sed by a most "stiff-necked" generation of "the learned Romans," as he calls the Cla.s.sicists--a mob of _signori_, of mechanical critics, protesting against his potent inventions.

Magnanima Mensogna, hor quando e il vero Si bello che si posse a te preporre.

The forest incantations of Ismen, and the enchantments of Armida, those true creations of Gothic romance, were on the point of utter perdition.

In this extremity the poet decided to have recourse to the prevalent folly of fitting an allegory to his epic. He acknowledges to his confidential friend that the whole was only designed to humour the times, and begs that he may not be laughed at. "I will act the profound, and show that I have a deep political purpose;" and he might have added a whole system of ethics which has been extorted from the presumed allegory. "Under this shield," he proceeds, "I shall endeavour to protect the _loves_ and the _enchantments_"--those golden leaves which the furious cla.s.sicists would have torn out of his romantic epic. By this singular fact we are led to this important discovery, that to allegorise is no difficult affair, for the present allegory was "the work of a single morning!"[3]

Ta.s.so's confession is a perpetual demonstration of _the fallacies of allegory_. We must wholly rid ourselves of "gl' intelletti sani," if we doubt that the original writers who have been so largely allegorised ever composed an extended fict.i.tious narrative but in all the freedom of invention, in open daylight, and never seeking to hide nature in secret coverts.

If, as we see, an allegory may be ingeniously drawn from a work which never was allegorical; so when an allegory seems designed, its secret application is usually the forlorn hope of literature, since the most subtile conjectures on these enigmas have wholly differed from each other.

Persons and incidents in an allegorical fiction are noses of wax, ever to be shaped by a more adroit finger. But in a lengthened allegory, the ground is often shifted; the allegorister tires of his allegory, and at length means what he says and nothing more. This has driven the expounders of the double sense into the absurdity of explaining an identical object, sometimes in a metaphysical, and at others in a material sense; they take up what their fancy requires, and cautiously drop what would place them in an inextricable position.

DANTE opened his great work in the darkness of an allegory; but how the erratic commentators have lost their way in "Le tenebre della Divina Commedia!" What are the three allegorical animals which open "the Vision?" The double sense remains inexplicable from its abundant explanations. Are these animals personifications of three great pa.s.sions? Is the gay panther the type of luxurious pleasure, the lion of ambition, the she-wolf of avarice? But what if the spotted panther should be the representative of Dante's own Florence, and its spots indicate the Neri and the Bianchi factions? The hungry lion, with its lofty head, would then be superb France, and the lean she-wolf, never satiate, be devouring Rome. Yet a later revelation from Niebuhr, according to his Platonic ideas, sees but three metaphysical beings the types of the soul, the understanding, and the senses. Should some future allegorister discover, by his historical, political, and ethical fancies, that the three animals were designed, one for a wavering and maculated Ghibelline, and the others for the resolute papal Guelphs, the probability would be much the same. In truth we can afford but small confidence to these expounders of the double sense; for when Jean Molinet allegorised the "Roman de la Rose," and ill.u.s.trated it by historical appliances, as chronology was rarely consulted in his day, it appears that this good canon of Valenciennes had allegorised in reference to persons who flourished and events which occurred posterior to the time of the writers.

In the instances which we have indicated, such as in Ariosto and Ta.s.so, it was the commentator who had indulged his allegorical genius, not the original writers themselves. With one of our great poets unhappily the case is reversed; the poetic character and destiny of Spenser stand connected with allegory; for here the poet himself prematurely _meditated on his allegory before he invented his fiction_. The difference is immense. SPENSER fell a victim to this phantom of the poetic creed of his day. Deeming a mystic allegory a novel spirit in poesy, he who was to run the glorious career of Faery-land first forged the brazen bonds which he could never shake off. His invention was made subordinate to a prescribed system. The poet was continually running after the allegory, which he did not always care to recover in the exuberance of his imagination, and the copious facility of his stanzas.

Often must he have deprived his twelve knights-errant of their tangible humanity, perpetually relapsing into their metaphysical nonent.i.ties--Sir Guyon into temperance, Arthegal into justice, and Sir Caladore into courtesy!

Yet this is not the sole defect of the allegorical character of the "Faery Queen." We may suspect that when SPENSER decided on constructing an allegorical poem, he had not any settled notions of the artifice of types, nor yet of the subjects to be symbolised; of fictions which were to conceal truths, and of truths which might be mistaken for fictions. A strange confusion often prevails in his system, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, whenever the allegory loses itself in what is not allegorical, or the reality is as suddenly lost amid the mystical fancies.

The poet himself announced that the "Faery Queen" was "a continued allegory or dark conceit;" and he was so strongly convinced that "all allegories are doubtfully construed," that he determined to expound his own text regarding a most eminent personage; but this was merely to secure a courtly eulogy on a royal patroness. "In the 'Faerie Queene' I mean _glory_ in my _general_ intention, but in my _particular_ I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of the Queen and her kingdom in Faery-land." He afterwards adds that "in some places also I do otherwise shadow her." And further, the poet informs us that "her Majesty is two persons, a royal Queen and a most virtuous and beautiful lady." Truly her Majesty might have viewed herself "in mirrors more than one," and, as she much liked, in different dresses. Now as the Faerie Queen, now as Belphoebe, now as Cynthia, now as Mercilla; and in the "Legend of Chast.i.ty," who would deny that Britomart is the shadow of the Virgin Queen, notwithstanding that this lady-warrior bears a closer resemblance to Virgil's Camilla, to Ariosto's Bradamante, and Ta.s.so's Clorinda? All this the poet has revealed; but had he been silent, these mystical types might have baffled even the perilous ingenuity of Upton, his egregious expounder of the double sense, the exuberance of whose conjectural sagacity might have enlightened and charmed even Spenser himself!

The poet was himself aware that when an allegory does not gracefully unveil itself, it admits of the most dubious expositions. The allegories of the "Faery Queen" which allude to public events are transparent. The first book exhibits the struggles of the Reformation with papistry. Una is Truth, the Red-cross Knight the Christian militant, still subjected to trial and infirmity, separated from Una, or as it was called, "the true Religion," by the magical illusions of Archimagus, whom Warton considers was the arch-fiend himself, but Upton only an adumbration of "his Holiness." The terrible giant, Orgoglio, seems to have a stronger claim to be the proud and potent Bishop of Rome, enamoured as he is of Superst.i.tion in the false Duessa, that gorgeous enchantress, so fair and foul, arrayed in purple and scarlet, whom he has seated on his seven-headed dragon, and on whose head he has placed a triple crown. The dark den of monstrous Error, the hastening cavalcade of every splendid vice, the combat with the Infidel Sans Foy, the church militant finally triumphant in the solemn union of the Red-cross with Una, complete the allegory of "Holiness." The Apocalypse may serve as the commentary on some of these personages; but the well-known t.i.tle of the lady may not be risked to "ears polite." But such is the moveable machinery of allegorical history, that Sir Walter Scott, in his review of Todd's Spenser, has discovered many other shadowings of _facts_, in the history of Christian "Holiness," who, like the Red-cross Knight, separated from Una, had to encounter "the monster Error, and her brood," in paganism, before the downfall of Orgoglio and Duessa, and popery in England; in the freedom of the Red-cross Knight from his imprisonment, our critic reveals the establishment of the Protestant Church.[4] Sir Walter might have noticed Spenser's abhorrence of the puritans.

The allegory is still more obvious when the poet alludes to some contemporary events. It is then a masquerade by daylight, where the maskers pa.s.s on, holding their masks in their hands. In the fifth book we see the distressed Knight Bourbon, opposed by a rabble-rout in his attempt to possess himself of the Lady _Fleur de Lis_, whom he loves for "her lordships and her lands." He bears away that half-reluctant and coy lady. But for this purpose Bourbon had basely changed his shield, and, reproached by Sir Arthegal or Justice, he offers but a recreant's apology:--

----When time shall serve, My former shield I may resume again; To temporise is not from truth to swerve.

Fie on such forgerie! said Arthegal, Under one hood to shadow faces twain.

The change of shields of Sir Bourbon is the change of faith of Henry of Navarre; and the reluctant mistress is that uncompliant France whom he forced to take him as her monarch. Not less obvious is the episode of the Lady Belge calling for aid on the British prince--she, now widowed, and whose seventeen sons were reduced to five by the cruelties of Geryon, and the horrors of that implacable "monster, who lay hid in darkness, under the cursed Idol's altar-stone;" the great revolution of the Netherlands, the reduction of the seventeen provinces, and the horrors of a Romish persecution, are apparent.

But when the allegory runs into obscurer incidents and more fict.i.tious personages than those which we have noticed, it becomes rarefied into volatile conjecture, or by our ingenuity may be shaped into partial resemblances, always uncertain, when we accept invented fictions as historical evidence. We know that a writer of an elaborate fict.i.tious narrative may have touched on circ.u.mstances and characters caught from life; but all these, in pa.s.sing through the mind of the inventor, are usually so altered from their reality, to be accommodated to the higher design of the invention, that any parallel in private history, or any likeness of an individual character, any indistinct allusion, can never deserve our historical confidence. A picture of human nature would be an anomalous work, in which we could trace no resemblance to individuals, or discover no coincidences of circ.u.mstances.

A century and a half after the publication of the "Faery Queen," a commentator of "the double sense" revealed to its readers that sealed history which they had never read, and which the poet had never divulged. A few traditional rumours may have floated down; but it was UPTON'S edition which startled the world by the abundance of its modern revelations.

JOHN UPTON, prebendary of Rochester, and the master of a public school, which he raised to eminence, was distinguished for his scholastic acquirements, the depth of his critical erudition, and for his acquaintance with the history of the Elizabethan court, chiefly, however, drawn from Camden. Acute in his emendations of texts, they were not, however, slightly tinged by an over-refining pedantry at the cost of his taste; and as his judgment was the infirmest of his faculties, in his enthusiasm for an historical ill.u.s.tration of Spenser, he seems often enc.u.mbered by his knowledge striking out similitudes and parallels; a few appear not infelicitous, but many are suggested in the licentiousness of vague conjecture, or left half in the light and half in the dark. His "Critical Observations on Shakspeare" remind one of Bentley's "slashing" of Milton. Dr. Johnson has been censured for the severity of his character of UPTON; I know not whether the doctor ever attended to Upton's Commentary on Spenser; he has, however, admirably hit off a prominent feature of our critic. "Every cold"--in Upton's case I would rather say warm--"empiric, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist."

"In one sense," says UPTON, "you are in Fairy-Land, yet in another you may be in the British dominions." And further, "where the _moral_ allusion is not apparent, you must look for an _historical_ allusion."

Such are the fundamental positions of the allegorical theory, by which a conjectural historian designs to unveil the secret sense of a romantic epic; the poet, according to him, having frigidly descended into the historiographer of the court of Elizabeth, rather than of the court of the Faery Queen--to catch "the Cynthias of the minute," and to waste his colours on their evanescent portraits.

And amusing it is to watch the historical conjecturer of a romantic poem perilously creeping along the dark pa.s.sages of secret history; but he is often at a stand. In "the palpable obscure," the historical reality, which he seems to be touching, suddenly disappears under his grasp. We have no golden key to open the occult chamber, where we are told so many knights and ladies lie entranced near two centuries in their magical sleep, and where, amid the shadowiness, the historical necromancer promptly furnishes us with their very names, recognising all these enchanted persons by their very att.i.tudes.

One of his most felicitous conjectures regards "the gentle squire Timias" as the poet's honoured friend, Sir Walter Rawleigh. Sir Walter once incurred the disgrace of the Queen by a criminal amour with one of the maids of honour; he was for some time banished the court; but the injury to the lady was expiated by marriage. The private history we are to look for in the Allegory. Timias offends Belphoebe the patroness of Chast.i.ty, and the Queen of England, who surprised "the gentle squire"

in a very suspicious att.i.tude of tenderness with Amoret. This lady was suffering from violence, having been "rapt by greedie l.u.s.t," and the gentle squire himself had partaken of the mischance, in encountering that savage. Timias; the knight, is seen--

From her fair eyes wiping the dewy wet, Which softly slid; and kissing them atween, And handling soft the hurts which she did get.

Belphoebe on the sudden appears, and indignantly exclaims--

"Is this the Faith?" she said, and said no more; But turn'd her face, and fled away for evermore.

In a romantic scene,[5] "the gentle squire" in banishment is wasted with grief, so as not to be recognised by his friends; his lone companion is a turtle-dove, a magical and sympathizing bird, who entices Belphoebe, that Sovereign Chast.i.ty, to pursue its playful flight, till it leads her to the cell of the miserable man from whom she had so long averted her face, and Timias recovers her favour.

In this extended scene we are to view the condition of Rawleigh during his disgrace; and the opening of the canto gives some countenance to the particular application. The apt.i.tude of a resemblance, however, may only be a coincidence. The fatal error of our conjectural historian is that of spinning at his allegory long after he is left without a thread. In Amoret's calamitous adventure, "rapt by greedie l.u.s.t," Upton sees an adumbration of the lady of Sir Walter _before_ her marriage; and in another adventure, where another person, _Serena_, with "the gentle squire," are both carried to a hermit's cell, to be healed of the wounds inflicted by calumny and scandal, their condition _after_ marriage. Our diviner, as further evidence of "the double sense," discovers how remarkably appropriate was the name of Serena to the lady of Rawleigh.

In all these transmigrations of persons the enigmatical expounder acknowledges that the typical incidents suddenly diverge from their prototype. The parallels run crooked, and the fictions will not square with the facts; and he desperately exclaims that "the poet has designedly perplexed the story:" but he concludes with this hardy a.s.sumption, "If the reader cannot see through these disguises, he will see nothing but _the dead letter_." And what but "the dead letter," as this hierophant of mystic senses asperses the free inventions of genius, can now interest the readers of Spenser? For the honour of our poet we protest against the dark and broken dreams hovering about a commentator's desk. Who can credit that the courteous and courtly spirit of Spenser would thus lay bare to the public eye the delicate history of the lady of Sir Walter, even by a remote allusion? Yet this he does by connecting her name with Amoret carried away by "greedie l.u.s.t," and with Serena, who required to be healed of the wounds inflicted by scandal.

Can we conceive that the poet would have thus deliberately re-opened the domestic wound, still tender, of his patron-friend, and distressed that "serene" lady, in a poem to be read by them, to be conned by malicious eyes, and to be consigned to posterity?

The readers of Upton's revelations may often be amused by his lettered ingenuity reasoning with eager perversity. In Book II. Canto i. a pathetic incident occurs in a forest, where we find a lady with her infant on her bosom, and her knight extended in death beside her. Her shriek is deadly as the blow she has given herself. Guyon the Knight of Temperance flies to her succour; dying, she tells how "her liefest lord"

had been beguiled, "for he was flesh," by Acrasia, or sensual pleasure.

The lady had recovered him from the fell embraces of that sorceress, who, in parting, seduces him to drink from a charmed cup her accursed _wine_. On his return homewards with his lady he would quench his thirst at a fountain, but

So soon as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke,

that is, the instant the pure water reaches his viny lips, he tastes, and he dies!

The Knight of Temperance takes the infant from the bleeding bosom of the mother to wash it in the fountain--but no water could cleanse its b.l.o.o.d.y hand; hence it was to be called "Ruddimane:" it was "a sacred symbol in the son's flesh, to tell of the mother's innocence." Upton had discovered that the great Irish insurrectionist O'Neal, as Camden records, "dwelt in all the pollutions of unchaste embraces, and had several children by O'Donnel's wife."