SIMILE.

PROMISCUOUS EXAMPLES.

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The following occurs in a seventeenth century writer:-'Man is like a book; his birth is the Title-Page of the book; his baptism is the Epistle Dedicatory; his groans and crying are the Epistle to the Reader; his infancy and childhood are the Argument or Contents of the whole ensuing treatise; his life and actions are the subject or matter of the book; his sins and errors of his life are the Errata, or faults escaped in the printing; and his repentance is the Correction of them,' &c., &c. This may be taken as a typical example of similes that are utterly useless. It throws no light on the subject; it rouses no appropriate emotion; and, as the resemblances traced are forced and artificial, it does not afford the pleasure of agreeable surprise. We may compare it with the following from Dr. Channing:-'Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him'. Here the metaphor, being confined to one suitable aspect of the comparison, expresses the thought in question with brevity and force.

Consider now this simile from Shelley

There was a woman, beautiful as morning,

Sitting beneath the rocks, upon the sand

Of the waste sea;

on the bare strand

Upon the sea-mark a small boat did wait,
Fair as herself, like Love by Hope left desolate.

Obviously this is a simile either of elevation or of agreeable surprise. On the former interpretation, the object is to raise our sense of the desolate state of the woman by comparing her to Love, when Hope has entirely forsaken it. But, as the comparison stands, it does not work up this impression. We have first a concrete picture of the woman-beautiful and desolate; and here we have added to it, for additional effect, an abstract conception, which, moreover, is not sufficiently expanded to be easily grasped. As a simile of agreeable surprise, it is liable to the same objection; the comparison, though fitting and fresh, is not readily felt.

The simile in the Agamemnon of Eschylus, to set forth the disastrous career of Helen of Troy, may be examined as an effective instance of the laws of the Simile in particular. *

In the Ion of Plato, there is a famous simile drawn from the magnet. When a magnet suspends a succession of rings, the attractive force diminishes at each remove. Plato uses this to illustrate the divine inspiration of the poet, who imparts what he has received to his auditors.

* Whoso nurseth the cub of a lion

Weaned from the dugs of its dam, where the draught
Of its mountain-milk was free,

Finds it gentle at first and tame.

It frisks with the children in innocent game,
And the old man smiles to see;

It is dandled about like a babe in the arm,
It licketh the hand that fears no harm,
And when hunger pinches its fretful maw,
It fawns with an eager glee.

But it grows with the years; and soon reveals
The fount of fierceness whence it came:
And, loathing the food of the tame,
It roams abroad, and feasts in the fold,
On feasts forbidden, and stains the floor.

By each successive communication of spiritual or intellectual stimulus, the original inspiration becomes weaker and weaker.

There is a well-sustained and effective parallelism for heightening the feelings in the following from Adam Smith:

'As, in the ancient heathen religion, that holy ground which had been consecrated to some god was not to be trod upon but upon solenin and necessary occasions, and the man who had even ignorantly violated it became piacular from that moment, and, until proper atonement should be made, incurred the vengeance of that powerful and invisible being to whom it had been set apart; so by the wisdom of Nature, the happiness of every innocent man is in the same manner rendered holy, consecrated, and hedged round against the approach of every other man; not to be wantonly trod upon, not even to be, in any respect, ignorantly and involuntarily violated, without requiring some expiation, some atonement in proportion to the greatness of such undesigned violation.'

ALLEGORY.

1. When a comparison is protracted and sustained through numerous details, it is named an Allegory.

Allegories on the great scale are exemplified by Spenser's Faery Queen, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver. In these a whole series of adventures is sustained with a double meaning.

Spenser's Faery Queen is allegorical throughout; the virtues and vices being personified, and made to act out their nature, in a series of supposed adventures. In the Pilgrim's Progress the spiritual life or progress of the Christian is represented at length by the story of a pilgrim in search of a distant country, which he reaches after many struggles and difficulties. Swift's Tale of a Tub is an Allegory, wherein the divisions of Christianity (Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinistic) are satirized under the adventures of three brothers. So, in the Travels of Gulliver, the vices of politicians are ridiculed by being exemplified in communities made up of imaginary beings (Lilliputians or dwarfs, Brobdignagians or giants, Houyhnhmns, Yahoos).

The short Allegory is frequent in literature. In the Spectator, we have the Vision of Mirza, No. 159; Luxury and Avarice, 55; Truth, Falsehood and Fiction, 460.

The Parable is mostly a short Allegory. Such are the Sower, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Ten Virgins, the Two Debtors, &c. But there are also Parables that do not come under this description, such as the good Samaritan,

the Pharisee and the Publican, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. These are fictitious examples, intended for instruction or warning, and do not contain the two distinct meanings-the literal and the figurative--that characterise the Allegory. The only definition applicable to all parables is that they consist of a fictitious story intended to enforce some moral or religious lesson.

The Fable also contains a short story with a moral; but it is not so often allegorical as the Parable. It is further distinguished by its frequent use of the lower animals and their habits, and by its application to lower subjects; while the Parable is mostly confined to the higher lessons of morality and religion.

In the Allegory, there is great variety in the extent of the resemblance sought between the story and the subject it illustrates. At the one extreme, we have such as Bunyan's works, the Vision of Mirza, and many of the Gospel parables, in which the aim is to make the two veins of thought run parallel throughout; at the other, such as the Faery Queen or Gulliver, where the correspondence is but general, and minute resemblances are only occasional. In the first class, the subject to be illustrated is the primary consideration; in the second, the interest of the story. The symbolizing of the course of human history by means of a river is a simile protracted to the point of allegory.

Helps conducts the figure as follows

'The course of history is like that of a great river wandering through various countries; now, in the infancy of its current, collecting its waters from obscure small springs in plashy meadows, and from unconsidered rivulets which the neighbouring rustics do not know the names of; now, in its boisterous youth, forcing its way through mountains; now, in middle life, flowing with equable current busily by great towns, its waters sullied, yet enriched, with commerce; and now, in its burdened old age, making its slow and difficult way with an ever-widening expanse of waters, over which the declining sun looms grandly, to the sea.'

The merits of such a comparison have to be judged in the same way as with similes. If it is to be viewed as an aid to the understanding, the question is how far it facilitates our comprehension of the progress of human history. In other words, is there a distinct phase of historical evolution corresponding to every one of these positions in the course of a river, and rendered more intelligible by the comparison? Properly speaking, this is

a question for an historian to answer; yet a very slight acquaintance with history is sufficient to show the absence of any such illustrative force as a simile to the understanding requires.

There is the same deficiency of influence on the feelings, considered as heightening our impression of the grandeur of the stream of human history. We must, therefore, fall back on the third effect of similitudes-agreeable surprise, with or without harmonizing circumstances, felicitously chosen and expressed. This is perhaps what the author aimed at, and has succeeded in realizing.

In Mr. M. Arnold's River of Time' the same theme passes beyond the bounds of the simile to become an Allegory. It impresses a moral lesson in the manner of the typical examples of the figure. It is open to the same question as before: What is the value of the allegory, with reference to its subject, namely, the portraying of the mind of man at different stages of historical development? We may look upon it as the representation of an ideal man, having a large natural susceptibility to the picture of his surroundings, as if a Wordsworth had been present at every stage of history. The earliest man is given thus—

Brimming with wonder and joy,

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the bank of the stream.

This would not be the state of any actual man, living near the commencement of the human race. Moreover, it is difficult to say what literal fact or situation is intended to be bodied forth. There is throughout the piece a want of clear separation of the literal scenery of a river from the actual facts of history. The second stanza is a vivid picture of how a susceptible mind would be affected at three different points of the course of an actual river; but there is no indication of parallel positions in the history of the world such as to receive illustration from the picture. feelings assigned to Rebekah, as compared with a girl in our own time, have scarcely enough of plausibility to affect us. The case of Moses, an inspired man, is different. Through the remaining stanzas, there is a predominance of the literal situation of crowded cities by the banks of a stream, it being a fact that cities are usually found on river margins.

Take now the following example from Johnson.

The

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

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Order is a lovely nymph, the child of Beauty and Wisdom; her attendants are Comfort, Neatness and Activity; her abode is the Valley of Happiness; she is always to be found when sought for, and never appears so lovely as when contrasted with her opponent-Disorder.'

It cannot be affirmed that any aid is given to the understanding by this mode of expression, nor is there enough of independent interest to rouse our feeling. The resemblance is artificial, requiring more effort to follow it than a simple description would do, while no compensating advantage is offered.

Take another instance, from Swift.

The malignant deity Criticism 'dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla: there Momus found her extended in her den upon the spoils of numberless volumes half-devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill Manners.'

Here the resemblance is sufficiently close to be easily grasped in all its particulars. The picture drawn is such as to rouse our feelings; while it is often an advantage to have such emotions as anger and scorn applied to their objects indirectly.

A more detailed review of the Pilgrim's Progress, as the most famous of allegories, will illustrate on the larger scale both the advantages and the disadvantages of this literary device.

The Pilgrim's Progress is based on the conception of the Christian's life as a journey to the promised land, like Israel's journey to Canaan. The goal in view here is the Celestial City'; and the aim is to represent, by the changing fortunes of the pilgrims on the journey thither, the varying phases of the Christian life. Thus, the setting out is represented by the Wicket Gate: the helps and encouragements are given under such forms as the Interpreter's House, the House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, the Land Beulah, the Christian's armour, the guidance of Greatheart, the pilgrim's Roll: the difficulties and trials appear in the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, the fight with Apollyon, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, and the River of Death; temptations and the consequences of yielding to them are pictured in the incidents of Worldly Wiseman, Christian's sleep in the Arbour and loss of his Roll, the pilgrims walking in Bypath Meadow and their consequent imprisonment in Doubting Castle. Moreover, these various circumstances are represented in their influence over various characters—as Christian,