For the great safeguard and guide in the perilous forest of fancy is to find enough interest in the actual facts of some history or the qualities of some heroic character, whether real or fabled, round which at first you may group your thought and allegory. Listen to them, and try to formulate and illustrate their meaning, not to announce your own. Do not set puzzles, or set things that will be puzzling, without the highest and deepest reasons and the apostleship urgently laid upon you so to do—but let your allegory surround some definite subject, so that men in general can see it and say, "Yes, that is so and so," and go away satisfied rather than puzzled and affronted; leaving the
inner few for whom you really speak, the hearts that, you hope, are waiting for your message, to find it out (and you need have no fear that they will do so), and to say, "Yes, that means so and so, and it is a good thought."
For, remember always that, even if you conceive that you have a mission laid upon you to declare Truth, it is most sternly conditioned by an obligation, as binding as itself and of as high authority, to set forth Beauty: the holiness of beauty equally with the beauty of holiness. No amount of good intent can make up for lack of skill; it is your business to know your business. Youth always would begin with allegory, but the ambition of the good intention is generally in exactly the reverse proportion to the ability to carry it out in expression. But the true allegory that appeals to all is the presentment of noble natures and of noble deeds. Where, for most people at any rate, is the "allegory" in the Theseus or the Venus of Milo? Yet is not the whole race of man the better for them?
Work, therefore, quietly and continually at the great themes ready set for you in the story of the past and "understanded
of the people," while you are patiently strengthening and maturing your powers of art in safety, sheltered from yourself, and sheltered from the condemnation due to the too presumptuous assumption of apostleship. For it is one thing to stand forth and say, "I have a message to deliver to the world," and quite another to say, "There is such a message, and it has fallen to me to be its mouthpiece; woe is me, because I am a man of unclean lips." It is needless, therefore—nay, it is harmful—to be always breaking your heart against tasks beyond your strength. Work in some little province; get foothold and grow outwards from it; go on from weakness to strength, and then from strength to the stronger, doing the things you can do while you practise towards the things you hope to do, and illustrating impersonal themes until the time comes for you to try your own individual battle in the great world of thought and feeling; till, mature in strength equal to the portrayal of great natures, the Angels of God as shown forth by you may be recognised as indeed Spirit, and His Ministers as flaming Fire.
There is even yet one last word, and
that is, in all the minor symbolism surrounding your subjects, to observe a due proportion. For you may easily be tempted to allow some beautiful little fancy, not essential to the subject, to find expression in a form or symbol that will thrust itself unduly on the attention, and will only puzzle and distract.
Never let little things come first, and never let them be allowed at all to the damage, or impairing, or obscuring of the simplicity and dignity of the great things; remembering always that the first function of a window is to have stately and seemly figures in beautiful glass, and not to arrest or distract the attention of the spectator with puzzles. Given the great themes adequately expressed, the little fancies may then cluster round them and will be carried lightly, as the victor wears his wreath; while, on the other hand, if these be lacking no amount of symbolism or attribute will supply their place. "Cucullus non facit monachum," as the old proverb says—"It is not the hood that makes the monk," but the ascetic face you depict within it. Indeed, rather beware of trusting even to the ordinary, well-recognised symbols in common use, and being misled
by them to think you have done something you have not done; and rather withhold these until the other be made sure. Get your figures dignified and your faces beautiful; show the majesty or the sanctity that you are aiming at in these alone, and your saint will be recognised as saintly without his halo of glory, and your angel as angelic without his tongue of flame.