The lover of the old order does not stop to ask whether the lion may not have made a mistake, and whether the object of his attack may not have been, instead of a proud Paynim, only a Christian knight who had approached to ask his way. Nor does he feel pity for the pains inflicted by the lion’s “sharp rending clawes.” He only cries, “Poor lion! Poor Lady Truth!”
“But,” says the careful reader, “are you not getting away from your subject? You proposed the question, ‘Why are good people so cruel?’ You began with the conversation of excellent ladies in the drawing-room, and now you have wandered off into faery land, and are talking about the Lady Truth and the noble lion who died in her defense. I fear you are losing your way.”
On the contrary, dear reader, I think, as the children say when they are hunting the thimble, we are “getting warm.” We started out to find a cause for the obliviousness of good people to the pain which they inflict on others, and we have come into the region of allegory. Now, one of the chief reasons why good people are cruel is that it is so easy for them to allegorize.
In an allegory virtues and vices are personified. Each is complete in itself, and when it once has been set going it follows a preordained course. It does not grow into something else, and it is incapable of repentance or improvement. In the morality plays a virtue is as virtuous and a vice as vicious at the beginning as at the end. Spenser prefixes to “The Faerie Queene” a prose explanation of the meaning of each important character. “The first of the Knight of the Red-crosse, in whom I set forth Holynes; the second of Sir Guyon, in whome I sette forth Temperance; the third of Britomartis, a lady knight, in whom I picture Chastity.” Now, after this explanation we are relieved of all those anxieties which beset us when we watch creatures of flesh and blood setting out in the world to try their souls. Everything is as much a matter of invariable law as the reactions of chemical elements. The Knight of the Red-cross may appear to be tempted, but he is really immune. He cannot fall from grace. From that disaster he is protected by the definition. We have only to learn what the word holiness means to know what he will do. As for Sir Guyon, when once we learn that he is Temperance, we would trust him anywhere. For such characters there is nothing possible but ultimate triumph over their foes. And what of their foes? Being allegorical characters, they cannot be reformed. There is nothing to do but to kill them without compunction, or if we can catch them in the traps which they have set for others, and make them suffer the torments they have themselves invented, so much the better. We welcome the knight—
Who slayes the Gyaunt, wounds the Beast,
And strips Duessa quight.
We have no compunctions as we watch the administration of poetical justice. Whatever happens to the false Duessa and to such miscreants as Sansfoy and Sansjoy and Sansloy, we say that it serves them right.
If we can only hold fast to the allegorical clue, and be assured that he is dealing with sins and not with persons, we can follow Dante through purgatory without flinching. The moral always is a good one, and full of suggestiveness.
But the moment we mistake an allegorical character for a person of flesh and blood we get into trouble. Even the most perfect parable represents only a certain phase of reality. When it is forced beyond its real intention and taken literally it shocks our sense of humanity. It needs to be interpreted by the same wise spirit that conceived it. We repeat the story of the symbolic virgins who had forgotten to put oil in their lamps, or of the servant who was too timid to put his master’s money out to usury. The child asks, “Wasn’t it cruel of those wise virgins not to give the others just a little of their oil? And after the door was shut and the foolish virgins knew how foolish they were and were sorry, couldn’t the people inside have opened the door just a little bit? And just because the servant was afraid to go to the bank with the money, because it was so little, ought the master to have been so hard with him as to say, ‘Cast ye the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness; there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?’ Why didn’t he give him another chance?”
Then the parent will explain that these are symbolic characters. Or perhaps he may not try to explain, but change the subject and read a story of real people like that of the prodigal son or the good Samaritan. The child may be made to understand that while the door is always shut against a sin, it is always open for the sinner who repents.