Compare your own troubles with the troubles of others, in body, in soul, and in estate. I can give but hints of these things; I hope you will remember them, and meditate more largely upon them. Compare your troubles in spiritual things with the troubles of others. You have had, it may be, difficulties, darkness upon your mind, distraction, and sometimes the absence of God; but the gospel is not absent from you, you have still the promises of grace, you have still the Bible in your hands, you have still the death of a Saviour, you have still an all-sufficient Redeemer proposed to you, in all his grace, and all his glory: If christians would be thankful, let them go to the heathen world, and there see millions stooping before a wooden image, or adoring a god of stone, and then let each of them say, "Why was not I one of them?" See there the torments and the racks that they expose their flesh to, (and their flesh is as tender and subject to pain as your own,) see there, I say, the racks and the torments that they expose their own flesh to, in order to atone for their sins, and make satisfaction to God for their offences; and not one sin is atoned for, not one of their iniquities is expiated by all their sufferings. But you have the blood of Jesus, it cost you not one drop of your own blood. Go to the nations where men are kept in popish darkness, where the doctrine of the cross is mingled with so much ceremony, that it is almost lost in confusion; and the redemption that our Lord Jesus Christ wrought out is distributed among so many intercessors, so many mediators, and blended with so great a mixture of will-worship, that the Godhead is almost spoiled, if not utterly lost, among them. Go to the inquisition, go to the slaves in the gallies, and they will tell what it cost them to utter a word concerning the profession of religion, concerning the salvation of Christ; and ask yourself, "Have not I then in England, in London, abundant reason for thankfulness?" As for distress in body, if you would learn to be thankful when you are afflicted under it, go to the hospitals of the sick, go to the beds of the lame and maimed, that cannot move or stir; go to the chambers of the distracted, whose reason is hindred in its exercise by the disorders of the brain; go to the fields of battle, where thousands lie groaning under anguish, with the extremity of pain arising from bloody wounds. Of these distresses you suffer nothing; by the mercy of God you are free from them; yet way should not you, as well as others, be in the number of these miserable ones ?' pp. 185-187. you Art. VIII.-The Pilgrimage of Theophilus to the City of God. 8vo. pp.257. Price 7s. 6d. Robinson. 1812. PERHAPS no unpardonable sin against good taste would be committed by a man, who should wish that the method of instructing mankind by protracted and complicated allegory, might be laid aside for ever. Indeed, separately from any judgement dictated by the laws of good taste merely and literary merit, there is a moral consideration, not entirely inapplicable to the subject it is, that the period and state of the world in which we are fallen, should have some influence on the choice of modes of written instruction. And if there is VOL. IX. - 2 A any fact, in the character of the present times, that peculiarly claims to have such an influence, it is this, that the attention and the time of the community, are pressed upon by an extraordinary combination of urgent circumstances, which force people to be, for the most part, very busy and very anxious. We think that, in consideration of this fact, those who write to convey instruction, will do well to adopt, generally, the most direct and perspicuous methods, instead of obliging their readers to expend their efforts in following it through circuitous courses-to toil in pondering and guessing the import of visions and allegories-and often to feel that their labour has resulted, after all, in nothing like a clear addition to their knowledge, or beneficial effect on their will. If there be some readers disposed to be content on these terms, it is at least certain that the class for whom such a work as that before us would seem intended, cannot afford to be so employed. This moral view of the matter assumes the inferior merits of extended allegory, as a mode of instruction. And in truth we suppose that almost all readers, so far as they reflect, have one conviction on this point. Every one's experience testifies that it is inefficient and unsatisfactory, whether, considered in reference to the laws of allegorical writing, it be executed well or ill. Well executed, we suppose a long allegorical work will hardly be allowed to be called on easier conditions than these that the story shall be mainly constructed of objects and facts, and not be a mere dialogue of qualities personified; that almost all the constituent matters of it, whether persons, actions, or scenery, shall be figurative and emblematical, the interior meaning being, to a considerable extent, carried, with analogical proportion, into even the ramifications and minutiae of the fable; and that, at the same time, it shall be quite as complete, taken simply as a story, as if it had no such interior meaning. Now, to say nothing, in this case, of the writer (though it would be much to be deplored that a better employment had not been found for the prodigious genius, and labour indispensable for the successful execution of this double and parallel work, each part of which is to be complete in itself, while the two parts are to maintain a perfect correspondence, so that wherever the reader stops to take an observation, he shall find himself to be at precisely the same point of the sensible world and of the speculative or moral world) to say nothing of the vast difficulty of such a performance, and the consequent probability of failure in almost every new attempt, it is evident that, supposing the attempt to be successful, in as high a degree as it is possible to conceive, the pretended moral purpose will be but slenderly effected. For one thing it is a perfectly known fact, that extremely few readers are of a disposition to be at any considerable pains, to discover the supposed import of allegorical types, either where it is more recondite or where it is more obvious. But suppo sing them ever so intent on ascertaining it, and following it on, no undertaking on earth can be more hopeless, than that of detecting distinct moral significances in the indefinite multiplicity of particulars necessarily included in the construction of a complete story,-of getting acquainted with the rational souls supposed to be latent in the endless variety of forms presented in the fictitious creation. By what previous exercises and proofs of his sagacity is any reader to assure himself, in entering on a long allegorical fable, that he shall readily and unerringly apprehend the moral import of, for example, the variety of the landscape views in the fabled regionof each of the enumerated kinds of trees, flowers, animals of every edifice and its respective parts of the diverse modes and colours of the draperies of the personages-and of all the actions of the animate and the rational beings represented? If it should be said that this is greatly overstating the require ments on his sagacity; for that very many of these particulars are not meant to be allegorical, that the author has not pretended to put any moral or speculative soul within a great portion of the sensible objects represented for the sake of the mere completeness and verisimilitude of the story; the reader's unfortunate situation is not at all mended. He now cannot know, probably in nine instances in ten, whether the forms presented to him are mere shadows or painted shapes, meant only to amuse, in passing, his eye and fancy, or veritable philosophers and moralists, whom it becomes him to approach, and salute with deference and inquiry. It will seem to him hardly a due respect to the genius and wisdom of the writer to assume, without consideration, that this, and the next, and that ten successive images, though he cannot discern any glimpse of the interior significance, are the mere play of poetry, or the proprieties or embellishments of picture. Yet, on the other hand nothing could be more ridicu lous than for him to be gravely detecting a hidden sapience of which the writer himself, the creator of the whole affair," never dreamed. Think then what a facile and enviable task this reader has on his hands. He has, at one and the same time if he pleases, or if he pleases it may be in succession, to contemplate the fable in its palpable and foremost quality of a complicated scheme of action and scenery; to ascertain which of the vast multitude of particulars great and small are allegorical, and which are not; and to draw out in a precise form the respective moral significance of each and every one that he has discovered to have an important secret to tell. It is evident that if all this, or something near it, is not done, the pretended purpose of allegorical writing is not, as to the reader, accomplished; it is equally evident that all this, or any thing near it, will not be done by one reader in ten thou sand; it is therefore evident, finally, that extended allegory, when executed even in the best manner, is, at least comparatively, a wretched misapplication of the writer's talent and labour.-The Fairy Queen is beyond all question or comparison, the grandest work in this department; and we may appeal to its readers whether they ever think of studying it as a system of moral philosophy. They would almost all confess that they read it for its marvellous adventures and exquisite descriptions; pleased, undoubtedly they will say, and perhaps profited, by the moral reflections momentarily presented here h and there through an interval of the imagery, but so occupied and satisfied with the obvious and superficial magnificence of the scene, as rarely to think of any attempt at digging into the precious mines reported to be underneath. Now and then perhaps they are visited by a rather ungracious consciousness that they are not obtaining all that the work might yield to them; that they are even failing to obtain that which grave commentators, if not the author himself, may have professed to regard as the most valuable thing contained. They are perhaps excited to a slight attempt to develope the included wisdom; but they find that this breaks the fascination of the story, and that, besides, there is something in every stanza to baffle this moral inquest. They are uncertain whether the object before them is an emblem or not, or, if it be, what it means; they reflect, in excuse for their indolence, or in consolation for their dulness, that they can learn morality with much more precision at all events elsewhere; and they then return to the mighty performer, in a disposition to give him all due credit as a philosopher, but confessing that it is not for his lectures but his magic that they attend him. * If such be the inefficacy, for moral instruction, of allegory in the most perfect state of execution it is ever likely to attain, it is hardly worth while to say a word about it as exemplified in a numerous tribe of clumsy performances; excepting indeed that in such performances it is often much more intelligible, as to its interior import, than it is in the Fairy Queen, and than it would be in any work of that high rank of genius; from this plain cause, that men of little genius or none are not masters of refined analogies and remote relations. A mind of Spenser's kindred, perceives so many relations real while not grossly palpable, between moral truth and the material world, as to be able to invest that truth, when put ting it in the form of allegory, with a vast combination of various and unexpected symbols, all having some true relation to the subject, but not a few of them having so refined a relation, that their import cannot be obvious to the generality of readers. Inferior allegories, on the contrary, will be likely to take their emblematical figures from the narrow tract of coarse and obvious relations,--with the exception of now and then a far-fetched absurdity, obtained by a desperate effort for boldness and originality. Thus the reader is saved an immensity of trouble; he is forced into none of those wanderings of conjecture and exercises of ingenuity to which he would be doomed, in prosecuting the abstract import of a superior work, through its wilderness of visionary fancies, its endless crowds of emblematical forms. But then, he is precluded from that delight of the imagination, by which it is pretended to be the very purpose and value of allegory to recommend the otherwise too austere instructions of truth. He is to receive these instructions under the guise of a few ordinary figures, which instead of giving those truths the attractions of a new and variegated and animated vehicle, only force them into a less distinct, while it is not at all a more pleasing, mode of exhibition than their naked plainness would have been. Indeed a main device of ordinary allegorists, has been, as we have already hinted, to invest doctrines, virtues, and vices, with a personal being, by the great and creative process of giving them a personal denomination, and then without more ado to set them a talking; and Spenser, amidst the arduous toils of his great performance, might have enviously fretted, if he could have foreseen with what facility we should be able to work an allegory to any required extent, by means of Mr. Proud-Spirit and Mr. Humble-Mind; Mr. Liberty and Mr. Self-Interest, and a countless generation of personages of all dispositions, occupations, sexes, and sizes, created with as much ease as Deucalion and Pyrrha made men by flinging pebbles backward over their heads. The Pilgrim's Progress, a work of real' though confined genius, partakes somewhat of the higher, and doubtless much of the inferior style of allegorical invention. Among religious readers, it has obtained an established favour which no criticism would much contribute either to confirm or impair. It has acquired so much of a certain venerableness of antiquity and prescription, and is the object of a partiality so kind and extensive, among even children as an amusing story, and among their pious elders partly from its having thus been a favourite of their childhood, and partly because it supplies much religious instruction, that all modern works of similar object and construction necessarily appear under the greatest disadvantage.. ソ |