Allegorical interpretation of Scripture, or of stories, or of natural history is not the same thing as allegorical invention. This is sometimes forgotten, but it is clear enough that an allegory such as the Pilgrim’s Progress has a quite different effect on the mind, and requires a different sort of imagination, from the allegorical work which starts from a given text and spins out some sort of moral from it. Any one with a little ingenuity can make an allegorical interpretation of any matter. It is a different thing to invent and carry on an allegorical story. One obvious difference is that in the first case—for example in the Bestiary—the two meanings, literal and allegorical, are separate from one another. Each chapter of the Bestiary is in two parts; first comes the nature of the beast—natura leonis, etc.—the natural history of the lion, the ant, the whale, the panther and so forth; then comes the signification. In the other kind of allegory, though there is a double meaning, there are not two separate meanings presented one after the other to the mind. The signification is given along with, or through, the scene and the figures. Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress is not something different from the Christian man whom he represents allegorically; Mr. Greatheart, without any interpretation at all, is recognized at once as a courageous guide and champion. So when the Middle Ages are blamed for their allegorical tastes it may be well to distinguish between the frequently mechanical allegory which forces a moral out of any object, and the imaginative allegory which puts fresh pictures before the mind. The one process starts from a definite story or fact, and then destroys the story to get at something inside; the other makes a story and asks you to accept it and keep it along with its allegorical meaning.
Thus allegorical invention, in poetry like Spenser’s, or in imaginative prose like Bunyan’s, may be something not very different from imaginative work with no conscious allegory in it at all. All poetry has something of a representative character in it, and often it matters little for the result whether the composer has any definite symbolical intention or not. Beowulf or Samson Agonistes might be said to ‘stand for’ heroism, just as truly as the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, or Mr. Valiant for Truth in the Pilgrim’s Progress. So in studying medieval allegories either in poetry, painting or sculpture, it seems advisable to consider in each case how far the artist has strained his imagination to serve an allegorical meaning, or whether he has not succeeded in being imaginative with no proper allegorical meaning at all.
By far the best known and most influential of medieval allegories is the Romance of the Rose. Both in France and in England it kept its place as a poetical example and authority from the thirteenth century till well on in the sixteenth. It is the work of two authors; the later, Jean Clopinel or Jean de Meung, taking up the work of Guillaume de Lorris about 1270, forty years after the death of the first inventor. The part written by Jean Clopinel is a rambling allegorical satire, notorious for its slander against women. The earlier part, by Guillaume de Lorris, is what really made the fame and spread the influence of the Roman de la Rose, though the second part was not far below it in importance.
Guillaume de Lorris is one of those authors, not very remarkable for original genius, who put together all the favourite ideas and sentiments of their time in one book from which they come to be distributed widely among readers and imitators. His book is an allegory of all the spirit and doctrine of French romantic poetry for the past hundred years; and as the French poets had taken all they could from the lyric poets of Provence, the Roman de la Rose may be fairly regarded as an abstract of the Provençal lyrical ideas almost as much as of French sentiment. It was begun just at the time when the Provençal poetry was ended in the ruin of the South and of the Southern chivalry, after the Albigensian crusade.
No apology is needed for speaking of this poem in a discourse on English literature. Even if Chaucer had not translated it, the Roman de la Rose would still be a necessary book for any one who wishes to understand not only Chaucer but the poets of his time and all his successors down to Spenser. The influence of the Roman de la Rose is incalculable. It is acknowledged by the poet whose style is least like Chaucer’s, except for its liveliness, among all the writers in the reign of Edward III—by the author of the alliterative poem on Purity, who is also generally held to be the author of the Pearl and of Sir Gawayne, and who speaks with respect of ‘Clopyngel’s clene rose’.
It is thoroughly French in all its qualities—French of the thirteenth century, using ingeniously the ideas and the form best suited to the readers whom it sought to win.
One of the titles of the Roman de la Rose is the Art of Love. The name is taken from a poem of Ovid’s which was a favourite with more than one French poet before Guillaume de Lorris. It appealed to them partly on account of its subject, and partly because it was a didactic poem. It suited the common medieval taste for exposition of doctrine, and the Roman de la Rose which follows it and copies its title is a didactic allegory. In every possible way, in its plan, its doctrine, its sentiment, its decoration and machinery, the Roman de la Rose collects all the things that had been approved by literary tradition and conveys them, with their freshness renewed, to its successors. It concludes one period; it is a summary of the old French romantic and sentimental poetry, a narrative allegory setting forth the ideas that might be extracted from Provençal lyric. Then it became a storehouse from which those ideas were carried down to later poets, among others to Chaucer and the Chaucerian school. Better than anything else, the descriptive work in the Roman de la Rose brings out its peculiar success as an intermediary between earlier and later poets. The old French romantic authors had been fond of descriptions, particularly descriptions of pictorial subjects used as decoration, in painting or tapestry, for a magnificent room. The Roman de la Rose, near the beginning, describes the allegorical figures on the outside wall of the garden, and this long and elaborate passage, of the same kind as many earlier descriptions, became in turn, like everything else in the book, an example for imitation. How closely it is related to such arts as it describes was proved in Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, where along with his notes on the Roman de la Rose are illustrations from Giotto’s allegorical figures in the chapel of the Arena at Padua.
The ‘formal garden’ of the Rose is equally true, inside the wall—
The gardin was by mesuring
Right even and squar in compassing.