ALLEGORY
Allegory is often taken to be the proper and characteristic mode of
thought in the Middle Ages, and certainly there is no kind of invention
which is commoner. The allegorical interpretation of Scripture was the
regular, the universal method employed by preachers and commentators.
Anglo-Saxon religious writings are full of it. At the Revival of
Learning, five hundred years after Ælfric, the end of the Middle Ages is
marked by a definite attack upon the allegorical method, an attack
carried on by religious reformers and classical scholars, who held that
allegory perverted and destroyed the genuine teaching of Scripture, and
the proper understanding of Virgil and Ovid.
The book in which this medieval taste is most plainly exhibited is the
_Gesta Romanorum_, a collection of stories, in Latin prose, drawn from
many different sources, each story having the moral interpretation
attached to it, for the use of preachers.
One of the most popular subjects for moral interpretation was natural
history. There is a book called _Physiologus_—‘the Natural
Philosopher’—which went through all the languages in the same way as the
story of Alexander or the book of the Seven Wise Masters. There are
fragments of an Anglo-Saxon rendering, in verse—the _Whale_, and the
_Panther_, favourite examples. The Whale is the Devil; the Whale lying in
the sea with his back above water is often mistaken by sailors for an
island; they land on his back to rest, and the Whale goes down with them
to the depths. The common name for these natural histories (versions or
adaptations of _Physiologus_) is ‘Bestiary’; there is an English
_Bestiary_ of the beginning of the thirteenth century, most of it in the
irregular alliterative verse which seems to have been common at that
date; some of it is in fairly regular rhyme.
Allegorical interpretation of Scripture, or of stories, or of natural
history is not the same thing as allegorical invention. This is sometimes
forgotten, but it is clear enough that an allegory such as the _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ has a quite different effect on the mind, and requires a
different sort of imagination, from the allegorical work which starts
from a given text and spins out some sort of moral from it. Any one with
a little ingenuity can make an allegorical interpretation of any matter.
It is a different thing to invent and carry on an allegorical story. One
obvious difference is that in the first case—for example in the
_Bestiary_—the two meanings, literal and allegorical, are separate from
one another. Each chapter of the _Bestiary_ is in two parts; first comes
the _nature_ of the beast—_natura leonis, etc._—the natural history of
the lion, the ant, the whale, the panther and so forth; then comes the
_signification_. In the other kind of allegory, though there is a double
meaning, there are not two separate meanings presented one after the
other to the mind. The signification is given along with, or through, the
scene and the figures. Christian in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is not
something different from the Christian man whom he represents
allegorically; Mr. Greatheart, without any interpretation at all, is
recognized at once as a courageous guide and champion. So when the Middle
Ages are blamed for their allegorical tastes it may be well to
distinguish between the frequently mechanical allegory which forces a
moral out of any object, and the imaginative allegory which puts fresh
pictures before the mind. The one process starts from a definite story or
fact, and then destroys the story to get at something inside; the other
makes a story and asks you to accept it and keep it along with its
allegorical meaning.
Thus allegorical invention, in poetry like Spenser’s, or in imaginative
prose like Bunyan’s, may be something not very different from imaginative
work with no conscious allegory in it at all. All poetry has something of
a representative character in it, and often it matters little for the
result whether the composer has any definite symbolical intention or not.
_Beowulf_ or _Samson Agonistes_ might be said to ‘stand for’ heroism,
just as truly as the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, or Mr. Valiant for
Truth in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. So in studying medieval allegories
either in poetry, painting or sculpture, it seems advisable to consider
in each case how far the artist has strained his imagination to serve an
allegorical meaning, or whether he has not succeeded in being imaginative
with no proper allegorical meaning at all.
By far the best known and most influential of medieval allegories is the
_Romance of the Rose_. Both in France and in England it kept its place as
a poetical example and authority from the thirteenth century till well on
in the sixteenth. It is the work of two authors; the later, Jean Clopinel
or Jean de Meung, taking up the work of Guillaume de Lorris about 1270,
forty years after the death of the first inventor. The part written by
Jean Clopinel is a rambling allegorical satire, notorious for its slander
against women. The earlier part, by Guillaume de Lorris, is what really
made the fame and spread the influence of the _Roman de la Rose_, though
the second part was not far below it in importance.
Guillaume de Lorris is one of those authors, not very remarkable for
original genius, who put together all the favourite ideas and sentiments
of their time in one book from which they come to be distributed widely
among readers and imitators. His book is an allegory of all the spirit
and doctrine of French romantic poetry for the past hundred years; and as
the French poets had taken all they could from the lyric poets of
Provence, the _Roman de la Rose_ may be fairly regarded as an abstract of
the Provençal lyrical ideas almost as much as of French sentiment. It was
begun just at the time when the Provençal poetry was ended in the ruin of
the South and of the Southern chivalry, after the Albigensian crusade.
No apology is needed for speaking of this poem in a discourse on English
literature. Even if Chaucer had not translated it, the _Roman de la Rose_
would still be a necessary book for any one who wishes to understand not
only Chaucer but the poets of his time and all his successors down to
Spenser. The influence of the _Roman de la Rose_ is incalculable. It is
acknowledged by the poet whose style is least like Chaucer’s, except for
its liveliness, among all the writers in the reign of Edward III—by the
author of the alliterative poem on _Purity_, who is also generally held
to be the author of the _Pearl_ and of _Sir Gawayne_, and who speaks with
respect of ‘Clopyngel’s clene rose’.
It is thoroughly French in all its qualities—French of the thirteenth
century, using ingeniously the ideas and the form best suited to the
readers whom it sought to win.
One of the titles of the _Roman de la Rose_ is the _Art of Love_. The
name is taken from a poem of Ovid’s which was a favourite with more than
one French poet before Guillaume de Lorris. It appealed to them partly on
account of its subject, and partly because it was a didactic poem. It
suited the common medieval taste for exposition of doctrine, and the
_Roman de la Rose_ which follows it and copies its title is a didactic
allegory. In every possible way, in its plan, its doctrine, its
sentiment, its decoration and machinery, the _Roman de la Rose_ collects
all the things that had been approved by literary tradition and conveys
them, with their freshness renewed, to its successors. It concludes one
period; it is a summary of the old French romantic and sentimental
poetry, a narrative allegory setting forth the ideas that might be
extracted from Provençal lyric. Then it became a storehouse from which
those ideas were carried down to later poets, among others to Chaucer and
the Chaucerian school. Better than anything else, the descriptive work in
the _Roman de la Rose_ brings out its peculiar success as an intermediary
between earlier and later poets. The old French romantic authors had been
fond of descriptions, particularly descriptions of pictorial subjects
used as decoration, in painting or tapestry, for a magnificent room. The
_Roman de la Rose_, near the beginning, describes the allegorical figures
on the outside wall of the garden, and this long and elaborate passage,
of the same kind as many earlier descriptions, became in turn, like
everything else in the book, an example for imitation. How closely it is
related to such arts as it describes was proved in Ruskin’s _Fors
Clavigera_, where along with his notes on the _Roman de la Rose_ are
illustrations from Giotto’s allegorical figures in the chapel of the
Arena at Padua.
The ‘formal garden’ of the Rose is equally true, inside the wall—
The gardin was by mesuring
Right even and squar in compassing.
The trees were set even, five fathom or six from one another.
In places saw I wèlles there
In whiche ther no froggès were
And fair in shadwe was every welle;
But I ne can the nombre telle
Of stremès smale that by device
Mirth had done comè through coundys,
Of which the water in renning
Can make a noyse ful lyking.
The dreamer finds Sir Mirth and a company of fair folk and fresh, dancing
a _carole_.
This folk of which I telle you so
Upon a carole wenten tho;
A lady caroled hem, that highte
Gladnesse the blisful the lighte;
Wel coude she singe and lustily,
Non half so wel and semely,
And make in song swich refreininge
It sat her wonder wel to singe.
The dream, the May morning, the garden, the fair company, the carole all
were repeated for three hundred years by poets of every degree, who drew
from the _Romaunt of the Rose_ unsparingly, as from a perennial fountain.
The writers whom one would expect to be impatient with all things
conventional, Chaucer and Sir David Lyndsay, give no sign that the May of
the old French poet has lost its charm for them; though each on one
occasion, Chaucer in the _Hous of Fame_ and Lyndsay in the _Dreme_, with
a definite purpose changes the time to winter. With both, the May comes
back again, in the _Legend of Good Women_ and in the _Monarchy_.
Even Petrarch, the first of the moderns to think contemptuously of the
Middle Ages, uses the form of the Dream in his _Trionfi_—he lies down and
sleeps on the grass at Vaucluse, and the vision follows, of the Triumph
of Love.
The _Pearl_, one of the most beautiful of the English medieval poems, is
an allegory which begins in this same way; the _Vision of Piers Plowman_
is another. Neither of these has otherwise much likeness to the _Rose_;
it was by Chaucer and his school that the authority of the _Rose_ was
established. The _Pearl_ and _Piers Plowman_ are original works, each
differing very considerably from the French style which was adopted by
Chaucer and Gower.
The _Pearl_ is written in a lyrical stanza, or rather in groups of
stanzas linked to one another by their refrains; the measure is unlike
French verse. The poem itself, which in many details resembles many other
things, is altogether quite distinct from anything else, and
indescribable except to those who have read it. Its resemblance to the
_Paradiso_ of Dante is that which is less misleading than any other
comparison. In the English poem, the dreamer is instructed as to the
things of heaven by his daughter Marjory, the Pearl that he had lost, who
appears to him walking by the river of Paradise and shows him the New
Jerusalem; like Dante’s Beatrice at the end she is caught away from his
side to her place in glory.
But it is not so much in these circumstances that the likeness is to be
found—it is in the fervour, the belief, which carries everything with it
in the argument, and turns theology into imagination. As with Dante,
allegory is a right name, but also an insufficient name for the mode of
thought in this poem.
In the _Pearl_ there is one quite distinct and abstract theory which the
poem is intended to prove; a point of theology (possibly heretical): that
all the souls of the blessed are equal in happiness; each one is queen or
king. In _Sir Gawayne_, which is probably by the same author, there is
the same kind of definite thought, never lost or confused in the details.
_Piers Plowman_, on the other hand, though there are a number of definite
things which the author wishes to enforce, is wholly different in method.
The method often seems as if it were nothing at all but random
association of ideas. The whole world is in the author’s mind,
experience, history, doctrine, the estates and fortunes of mankind, ‘the
mirror of middle-earth’; all the various elements are turned and tossed
about, scenes from Bartholomew Fair mixed up with preaching or
philosophy. There is the same variety, it may be said, in _The Pilgrim’s
Progress_. But there is not the same confusion. With Bunyan, whatever the
conversation may be, there is always the map of the road quite clear. You
know where you are; and if ever the talk is abstract it is the talk of
people who eat and drink and wear clothes—real men, as one is accustomed
to call them. In _Piers Plowman_ there is as much knowledge of life as in
Bunyan; but the visible world is seen only from time to time. It is not
merely that some part of the book is comic description and some of it
serious discourse, but the form of thought shifts in a baffling way from
the pictorial to the abstract. It is tedious to be told of a brook named
‘Be buxom of speech’, and a croft called ‘Covet not men’s cattle nor
their wives’, when nothing is made of the brook or the croft by way of
scenery; the pictorial words add nothing to the moral meaning; if the Ten
Commandments are to be turned into allegory, something more is wanted
than the mere tacking on to them of a figurative name. The author of
_Piers Plowman_ is too careless, and uses too often a mechanical form of
allegory which is little better than verbiage.
But there is more than enough to make up for that, both in the comic
scenes like the Confession of the Seven Deadly Sins, and in the sustained
passages of reasoning, like the argument about the righteous heathen and
the hopes allowable to Saracens and Jews. The Seven Sins are not
abstractions nor grotesque allegories; they are vulgar comic personages
such as might have appeared in a comedy or a novel of low life, in London
taverns or country inns, figures of tradesmen and commercial travellers,
speaking the vulgar tongue, natural, stupid, ordinary people.
Also there is beauty; the poem is not to be dismissed as a long religious
argument with comic interludes, though such a description would be true
enough, as far as it goes. The author is no great artist, for he lets his
meaning overpower him and hurry him, and interrupt his pictures and his
story. But he is a poet, for all that, and he proves his gift from the
outset of his work ‘in a May morning, on Malvern hilles’; and with all
his digressions and seemingly random thought the argument is held
together and moves harmoniously in its large spaces. The secret of its
construction is revealed in the long triumphant passage which renders
afresh the story of the Harrowing of Hell, and in the transition to what
follows, down to the end of the poem. The author has worked up to a
climax in what may be called his drama of the Harrowing of Hell. This is
given fully, and with a sense of its greatness, from the beginning when
the voice and the light together break in upon the darkness of Hell and
on the ‘Dukes of that dim place’—_Attollite portas_: ‘be ye lift up, ye
everlasting doors’. After the triumph, the dreamer awakes and hears the
bells on Easter morning—
That men rongen to the resurrexioun, and right with that I waked
And called Kitte my wyf and Kalote my doughter:
Ariseth and reverenceth Goddes resurrexioun,
And crepeth to the crosse on knees, and kisseth it for a juwel,
For Goddes blessid body it bar for owre bote,
And it afereth the fende, for suche is the myghte
May no grysly gost glyde there it shadoweth!
This is the end of one vision, but it is not the end of the poem. There
is another dream.
I fel eftsones aslepe and sodeynly me mette
That Pieres the plowman was paynted al blody
And come on with a crosse before the comune people
And righte lyke in alle lymes to oure lorde Jhesu
And thanne called I Conscience to kenne me the sothe:
‘Is this Jhesus the juster’ quoth I ‘that Jewes did to death?
Or is it Pieres the plowman? Who paynted him so rede?’
Quoth Conscience and kneled tho: ‘This aren Pieres armes,
His coloures and his cote-armure, ac he that cometh so blody
Is Cryst with his crosse, conqueroure of crystene’.
The end is far off; Antichrist is to come; Old Age and Death have their
triumph likewise. The poem does not close with a solution of all
problems, but with a new beginning; Conscience setting out on a
pilgrimage. The poet has not gone wrong in his argument; the world is as
bad as ever it was, and it is thus that he ends, after scenes of ruin
that make one think of the Twilight of the Gods, and of the courage which
the Northern heroes opposed to it.
It is not by accident that the story is shaped in this way. The
construction is what the writer wished it to be, and his meaning is
expressed with no failure in coherence. His mind is never satisfied;
least of all with such conclusions as would make him forget the
distresses of human life. He is like Blake saying—
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.
The book of _Piers Plowman_ is found in many manuscripts which were
classified by Mr. Skeat in his edition of the poem as representing three
versions, made at different times by the author who twice revised his
book, so that there is an earlier and a later revised and expanded
version besides the first. This theory of the authorship is not accepted
by every one, and attempts have been made to distinguish different hands,
and more particularly to separate the authorship of the first from the
second version. Those who wish to multiply the authors have to consider,
among other things, the tone of thought in the poem; it is hard to
believe that there were two authors in the same reign who had the same
strong and weak points, the same inconsistencies, wavering between lively
imagination and formal allegory, the same indignation and the same
tolerance. _Piers Plowman_ is one of the most impartial of all reformers.
He makes heavy charges against many ranks and orders of men, but he
always remembers the good that is to be said for them. His remedy for the
evils of the world would be to bring the different estates—knights,
clergy, labourers and all—to understand their proper duty. His political
ideal is the commonwealth as it exists, only with each part working as it
was meant to do: the king making the peace, with the knights to help him,
the clergy studying and praying, the commons working honestly, and the
higher estates also giving work and getting wages. In this respect there
is no inconsistency between the earlier and the later text. In the second
version he brings in Envy as the philosophical socialist who proves out
of Plato and Seneca that all things should be in common. This helps to
confirm what is taught in the first version about the functions of the
different ranks. If the later versions are due to later hands, they, at
any rate, continue and amplify what is taught in the first version, with
no inconsistency.