1. Imaginative Method

1. Imaginative Method

The most conventional form of symbolism is allegory. This may be no more than what Lowell calls “personification by capital letters,” as in the Vice and Virtue, the Reason, Feeling, or Nature, of the eighteenth century. Even so it has more point when the convention is as instantly recognizable as the seven deadly sins of medieval capitals and poems, or the four cardinal and the three theological virtues, or even the seven liberal arts, each with appropriate costume, attitude, gesture, or action. How pleasant allegory may be in verse is evident in the wide popularity of the _Roman de la Rose_.

But no less evidently such pictorial aggregation offers little to preaching, since it has no vigor of composition. To be moving, allegory as well as higher symbolism must be narrative. The classic demonstration of this, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, was written by a preacher. The art has never been more widely or more expertly pursued than in the middle age. The fourteenth-century English _Piers Plowman_ suggests even more vividly, with its strongly oral manner, how allegory might move in preaching. A sermon might be not only enlivened by passages of easily recognizable description; it might further be vivified by making the figures individuals and by putting them into speech and action. A complete demonstration is furnished in the interlude, prologue, and tale of Chaucer’s Pardoner. That accomplished rascal is made to display the whole art of oral narrative, from its vulgar drama to its high ranges of symbolic suggestion. The case is extreme; but the method has been a resource of popular preaching from the days of Nathan’s rebuke to David down to the present. Oral narrative, often with dramatic dialogue, has been heard again and again, both in such base uses as the Pardoner’s and in such urgency of message as Bunyan’s, because it has been found surely persuasive.

Here is the high art of the _exemplum_. Often the medieval record puts us off with a summary; sometimes the manuals give a mere note, “Tell the story of so-and-so”; but sometimes there are clear clues to such narrative art as makes the Pardoner’s tale breathless. An _exemplum_ of Walter Map’s lets us divine how dramatic the tale might be in the pulpit.

But for other men the monastic life turns out otherwise. Far more pitiable was the fate of a noble and eloquent man who, likewise a monk of the same community, was in the same case recalled to arms. [After winning great fame as a warrior, he had in penitence become a monk, vowing never again to shed blood. But when the countryside was harried, his old comrades dragged him forth, in spite of his protests, and made him lead them once more.] Enduring many reverses of battle with a noble fortitude, he was always reanimated by defeat to fight again, and, inflamed as it were with new ardor, would fly at the enemy the more fiercely, and whether they fled or held their ground, would indefatigably stick to them like glue. When the enemy sought to crush him by the size of their company, they found that victory goes to bravery, not to numbers. Burning with wrath, therefore, and increasing their force many fold, they surprised him in a valley hemmed between two cliffs, and had him almost trapped. No hope, for he was caught; no issue, for he was held; they went to work the more leisurely because the more securely.

But he, bursting into their midst like a tempest, scatters them like dust in a whirlwind, and so stupefies them by his daring that they see nothing to do but run. Promptly he hangs on their rear with his band, small enough in comparison with theirs; and the throng of the enemy, in the effort to save their lords from him, becomes the prize of a single monk. But one leader of that attack, after escaping, makes a detour ahead and, mingling unrecognized with the monk’s men, works back steadily toward the monk, risking his own life to take his. The monk, almost stifled with toil and sun, calls his page, enters a vineyard, doffs his armor, and, while his band passes on, stretches himself half-stripped to the air under the shade of a tall vine. Then the skulker, leaving the line of march and slipping up stealthily step by step, pierces the monk with a deadly dart and escapes. The monk, knowing himself near death, confesses his sins to the page, the only person within reach, bidding him impose penance.

He, being a layman, swears he knows not how. But the monk, extreme in his penitence as in everything, says: “Impose upon me by the mercy of God, dearest son, that in the name of Jesus Christ my soul may be in hell doing penance up to the day of judgment; so that then the Lord may have mercy upon me, lest with the wicked I behold the countenance of his wrath and anger.” Then replies the boy with tears, “My lord, I impose upon thee for penance that which here before the Lord thy lips have uttered.” And he, accepting with word and look, devoutly received the penance and died.

Here let us remember the words of mercy, In whatsoever hour a sinner shall repent, he shall be saved. Wherein he might have repented and did not, whether he omitted anything possible, we may discuss; and God have mercy on his soul. Walter Map, _De nugis curialium_, I. xiv.