ALLEGORY

In Rhetoric and Literature (from the Greek words aAX«, another thing, and •yiye^iai, I declare. ) has been defined, " a figurative representation, in which the signs (words or forms) signify something beyond their literal or direct meaning. In this sense.allegory may be addre ed to the eye, in painting and sculpture, by means of forms, intended to convey, besides the notion of those sensible objects which they represent, certain abstract ideas to which these objects are supposed to bear analogy. Allegory differs, 1. from symbolical writing or representation; because in the first, the tj'pe and antitype, or thing exhibited and thing intended, have some real or natural resemblance, relation, or analogy: in the latter, the resemblance is merely conventional. Thus, to take an instance from modern literature: if it be true, as is now alleged, that the earlier Italian poets of the middle ages, and Dante in particular, attached a conventional meaning to certain ideas frequently recurring in their poems; as, for example, that Satan signified the papal power, — the three beasts mentioned in the commencement of Dante's poem three States — love, loyalty to the emperor, . .; then their poems, considered with reference to this occult sense, must be regarded as specimens not of allegory but of symbolical writing. But if, as in the more ordinary interpretation of Dante's poem, Satan represents the abstract idea of eternal misery, the beasts particular vices, ., which in common acceptation are supposed to have some natural analogy with their representatives, the poem is in this respect to be regarded as an allegory. Thus, also, critics have endeavoured to give a sjTnbolical sense to the sixth book of Virgil's iEneid; while, independently of that sense, if it really exist, there is an obvious allegorical meaning running through the whole. (In ancient criticism, however, the words allegory and symbol were not so accurately distinguished; and in our translation of the Bible, St. Paul is made to use the word allegory in the clear sense of type. Gal. iv. 24.) Allegory differs, 2. from parable, only inasmuch as the latter is a species of the former: a parable being a short, sententious, allegorical narration. And, 3. it is different from metaphor, being in effect a chain of metaphors, or a single metaphor continued and wrought out into a lengthened discourse. [s. 45]