Oui, sa pudeur n’est que franche grimace,
Qu’une ombre de vertu qui garde mal la place,
Et qui s’evanouit, comme l’on peut savoir
Aux rayons du soleil qu’une bourse fait voir.
Molliere, L’Etourdi, act 3. sc. 2.
Et son feu depourvû de sense et de lecture,
S’éteint a chaque pas, faute de nourriture.
Boileau, L’art poetique, chant. 3. l. 319.
Dryden, in his dedication to the translation of Juvenal, says,
When thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean, without other help than the pole-star of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the moderns, &c.
There is a time when factions, by the vehemence of their own fermentation, stun and disable one another.
Bolingbroke.
This fault of jumbling the figure and plain expression into one confused mass, is not less common in allegory than in metaphor. Take the following example.
—————— Heu! quoties fidem,
Mutatosque Deos flebit, et aspera
Nigris æquora ventis
Emirabitur insolens,
Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aureâ:
Qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
Sperat, nescius auræ
Fallacis.
Horat. Carm. l. 1. ode 5.
Lord Halifax, speaking of the ancient fabulists: “They (says he) wrote in signs and spoke in parables: all their fables carry a double meaning: the story is one and entire; the characters the same throughout; not broken or changed, and always conformable to the nature of the creature they introduce. They never tell you, that the dog which snapp’d at a shadow, lost his troop of horse; that would be unintelligible. This is his (Dryden’s) new way of telling a story, and confounding the moral and the fable together.” After instancing from the hind and panther, he goes on thus: “What relation has the hind to our Saviour? or what notion have we of a panther’s bible? If you say he means the church, how does the church feed on lawns, or range in the forest? Let it be always a church or always a cloven-footed beast, for we cannot bear his shifting the scene every line.”
A few words more upon allegory. Nothing gives greater pleasure than this figure, when the representative subject bears a strong analogy, in all its circumstances, to that which is represented. But the choice is seldom so lucky; the resemblance of the representative subject to the principal, being generally so faint and obscure, as to puzzle and not please. An allegory is still more difficult in painting than in poetry. The former can show no resemblance but what appears to the eye: the latter hath many other resources for showing the resemblance. With respect to what the Abbé du Bos[27] terms mixt allegorical compositions, these may do in poetry, because in writing the allegory can easily be distinguished from the historical part: no person mistakes Virgil’s Fame for a real being. But such a mixture in a picture is intolerable; because in a picture the objects must appear all of the same kind, wholly real or wholly emblematical. The history of Mary de Medicis, in the palace of Luxenbourg, painted by Rubens, is in a vicious taste, by a perpetual jumble of real and allegorical personages, which produce a discordance of parts and an obscurity upon the whole: witness in particular, the tablature representing the arrival of Mary de Medicis at Marseilles: mixt with the real personages, the Nereids and Tritons appear sounding their shells. Such a mixture of fiction and reality in the same group, is strangely absurd. The picture of Alexander and Roxana, described by Lucian, is gay and fanciful: but it suffers by the allegorical figures. It is not in the wit of man to invent an allegorical representation deviating farther from any appearance of resemblance, than one exhibited by Lewis XIV. anno 1664; in which an overgrown chariot, intended to represent that of the sun, is dragg’d along, surrounded with men and women, representing the four ages of the world, the celestial signs, the seasons, the hours, &c.: a monstrous composition; and yet scarce more absurd than Guido’s tablature of Aurora.