CHAUCER. 211 



made over into prose, and the Melusine of his contemporary 

 Jehan d Arras is the forlorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived 

 thus far in their decrepitude, the monks endeavoured to give 

 them a religious and moral turn by allegorising them. Their 

 process reminds one of something Ulloa tells us of the fashion 

 in which the Spaniards converted the Mexicans : Here we 

 found an old man in a cavern so extremely aged as it was won 

 derful, which could neither see nor go because he was so lame 

 and crooked. The Father, Friar Raimtmd, said it were good 

 (seeing he was so aged) to make him a Christian ; whereupon 

 we baptized him. The monks found the Romances in the same 

 stage of senility, and gave them a saving sprinkle with the holy 

 water of allegory. Perhaps they were only trying to turn the 

 enemy s own weapons against himself, for it was the free-think 

 ing Romance of the Rose that more than anything else had 

 made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us that an allegory is 

 to say one thing where another is meant, and this might have 

 been needful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, as 

 afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. But, except as a 

 means of evading the fagot, the method has few recommenda 

 tions. It reverses the true office of poetry by making the real 

 unreal. It is imagination endeavouring to recommend itself to 

 the understanding by means of cuts. If an author be in such 

 deadly earnest, or if his imagination be of such creative vigour as 

 to project real figures when it meant to cast only a shadow upon 

 vapour ; if the true spirit come, at once obsequious and terrible, 

 when the conjuror has drawn his circle and gone through with 

 his incantations merely to produce a proper frame of mind in 

 his audience, as was the case with Dante, there is no longer any 

 question of allegory as the word and thing are commonly under 

 stood. But with all secondary poets, as with Spenser for 

 example, the allegory does not become of one substance with 

 the poetry, but is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures 

 lose their meaning, as they cease to be contemporary. It was 

 not a style that could have much attraction for a nature so 

 sensitive to the actual, so observant of it, so interested by it as 

 that of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand at all the 

 forms in vogue, and to have arrived in his old age at the truth, 

 essential to all really great poetry, that his own instincts were 

 his safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in life than life 

 itself, and that to conjure an allegorical significance into it was 

 to lose sight of its real meaning. He of all men could not say 

 one thing and mean another, unless by way of humourous contrast 



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