Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and
says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with
it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? The
truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people
were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest
as a penal institution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion
of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The
true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion
as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double
meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he
meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to
prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest
again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval
church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are
reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our
feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that
we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving
to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in
all their pathetic simplicity.
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