[6] This edition of 1715, from its modernized orthography, and from greater freedoms taken with the text, is valueless.
[7] Thia famous tourney may be viewed in Hollinshed—“England,” 1317, fo. The four illustrious 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 fictitious 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 assumes, 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 circumstances. 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 ambassadors silently presented to Darius on his invasion of their deserts, were an allegory; and like many allegories, this emblematical embassy 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 assuredly 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 Œdipuses 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 œuvre 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 à la Fontaine, however licentious, pass through a moralization by the puritanical cant of hypocritical monkery.