The romance and the allegory were the prime medieval types, and we find them persisting together or apart in our own English literature from William Langland's "Piers the Plowman" with its Tower of Truth, Conscience, Envy, Advice of Hunger, and the like, to Henry Van Dyke's "Blue Flower" with its crystal river flowing from a mysterious source. "The Hunter" and the "Artist's Secret" by Olive Schreiner and "Poems in Prose" by Oscar Wilde are exquisite modern examples. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote scarcely anything that is not inlaid with allegory. The "Great Stone Face" is a fine instance of how concrete pure allegory can be. It teaches a beautifully spiritual truth by the portrayal of American customs and everyday human shortsightedness. A good German prose allegory is "Peter Schlemihl: or, The Man Who Sold his Shadow." Stevenson's tremendous study, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," is really allegory.
A review of the names of the older but famous allegories will be perhaps more interesting and suggestive than the perusal from beginning to end of any one of them would be, for they are for the most part long and tedious.
Some famous English allegories
In early Anglo-Saxon verse we find appearing the favorite device of allegory, the vision. In the "Dream of the Rood" the author tells of how he saw a strange Tree, the gallows of shame, now the glorious Tree of the Savior, and how it told its life-history. "The Address of the Soul to the Body" is a grim allegorical dialogue. In "The Phoenix," the fabulous bird represents Christ, as does also the Panther in the other poem, the sweet-breathed, lonely, harmless beast. These are all verse, and with the exception of the "Dream of the Rood" hardly narrative. The last two are really English bestiaries. "The Romaunt of the Rose," the greatest medieval allegory, in its English form, contains seventy-six hundred ninety-eight lines. You will find all these included in Chaucer's work, but only seventeen hundred five are his.[1] The "Parlament of Foules" and the "House of Fame," however, are his, but not "The Court of Love," "the Flower and the Leaf," "The Cockowe and the Nightingale." Between Chaucer and Spenser come Dunbar's "Thistle and the Rose" and "The Golden Targe;" Lydgate's "Temple of Glass;" Hawes's "Pastime of Pleasure;" Douglas's "Palace of Honour" and "King Hart;" Lyndesay's "Dream" and "Complaint of Papingo;" Barclay's "Ship of Fooles;" Sackville's "Induction" to the "Mirror for Magistrates." After Spenser, besides Phineas Fletcher's "The Purple Island" and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," come Addison's "Vision of Mirza," Parnell's "Paradise of Fooles," Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," Johnson's "Journey of a Day," Collin's "The Passions," and Aikin's "The Hill of Science."
In the beautiful Elizabethan English translation we have also the allegories of the Bible, of which the "Twenty-third Psalm" is doubtless the best known example, as it is perhaps the best loved quotation from the Old Testament. All the psalms put their truths allegorically in the broad literary sense. Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the other prophets often speak in strict allegorical narratives, which they explain either immediately or later. The great literary beauty of the "Revelation" depends on the exquisite use of allegory; the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations; the water of the river of life is for everyone that thirsteth.
Allegory and parable distinguished
Mention of Hawthorne's use of allegory calls to mind the distinction a student of narrative types must make between parable on the one hand and a particular kind of allegory on the other, that kind in which there are no abstractions. He asks himself, What is the difference when both narratives have only people for actors? He finds the answer in the fact that the actors of the parable are always representatives of a type, doing nothing outside the type, nothing individual, while the actors of that sort of allegory in which there are no personified abstractions are always individual men even though they may have universal vices or virtues; that is, they perform individual deeds and go through peculiar experiences, that not all the men of their class could perform and go through. But although more individual, the allegory is less human than the parable; for the happenings of the parable are always probable, while those of the allegory may be probable, improbable, or so fantastic as to be wholly impossible.
The allegory is usually longer also than the parable. Besides, unlike the parable, the allegory demands no interpretation from without, but carries its interpretation along from name to name. Hence the allegory can be said to be an extended metaphor, and the parable, a long half simile. On the other hand, many proverbs are concise parables and many are also brief allegories.
Allegory and fable distinguished