286 CHAUCER. 



the forlorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus fal 

 in their decrcj^itude, the monks endeavored to give them 

 a religious and moral turn by allegorizing 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 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 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 w^ere only 

 trying to turn the enemy's own weapons against him- 

 self, for it was the free-thinking " Romance of the Rose " 

 that more than anything else had made allegory fashion- 

 able. 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 

 endeavoring 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 vigor 

 as to project real figures when it meant to cast only a 

 shadow upon vapor ; if the true spirit come, at once 

 obsequious and terrible, w^hen the conjurer 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 ques- 

 tion 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 



