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Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier."
But these seductive pictures belonged to a class of art with which the moneyed public had become since '73 unhappily too familiar. They had to jostle, in the gallery of the stock-market, a vast and various collection exhaustive of the whole field of allegory, mythological and technical, and framed in the most bewitching aureoles of blue, red and green printer's ink.
It is a singular fact that, at a time when allegory was the characteristic literary form, it was yet so impossible even for the finer spirits to follow a train of thought clearly and consistently, that it was only when a mind passed beyond the limitations of its own age, and assumed a position sub specie aeternitatis, that it was able to free itself from the prevalent confusion of the imaginary and the real, the word and the idea, and to perceive that success in allegory depends, not on the chaotic intermingling of the attributes of the type and the thing typified, but on so representing the one as to suggest and illuminate the other.
Were there space we might go on to point out how this law of life is traceable, not only in the origin but in the development of language; how in primitive tongues the plural is made by a duplication of the singular, which is a multiplication of the word to make it like the multiplicity of the things; how the use of metaphor that prolific source of new words is a suggesting of ideas that are like the ideas to be conveyed in some respect or other; and how, in the copious use of simile, fable, and allegory among uncivilised races, we see that complex conceptions, which there is yet no direct language for, are rendered, by presenting known conceptions more or less like them.
Its cypress-log foundations, which had kept sound from colonial days in a soil always wet, had begun to decay when a new drainage system began to dry it out. Fact, but also allegory. It may have been in connection with this work, or with some change in the house of the Discalceated Sisters of Mt. Carmel, or of the archbishop, or of St.
At the same time, we have Lord Macaulay's word for it that if the Pilgrim's Progress did not exist the Holy War would be the best allegory that ever was written: and even Mr. Froude admits that the Holy War alone would have entitled its author to rank high up among the acknowledged masters of English literature.
There is also a want of keeping between the two parts of the allegory.
The first three books are by far the best; and judging by the way the interest lags and the allegory grows incomprehensible, it is perhaps as well for Spenser's reputation that the other eighteen books remained a dream.
He belonged to the sect of the Baptists, and stands at the head of all unlettered men of genius the most successful writer of allegory that any age has seen. The Pilgrim's Progress is the most popular religious work ever published, full of genius and beauty, and a complete exhibition of the Calvinistic theology, and the experiences of the Christian life.
Madam Bubble, that 'tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant attire, but old, 'gives you a smile at the end of each sentence' a real woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying 'gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring, for no possible reason in the allegory, merely because the touch was human and affecting.
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