CHAUCER. 250 



Arrived thus far in their decrepitude, the monks endeav 

 oured 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 : &quot; Here we found an old man in a cavern so 

 extremely aged as it was wonderful, which could neither see 

 nor go because he was so lame and crooked. The Father, 

 Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so aged) to 

 make him a Christian ; whereupon we baptised him.&quot; 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-thinking 

 &quot; Romance of the Rose &quot; 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 recommendations. 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 understood. 

 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 



