Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 18))

SYMBOLISM AND ALLEGORY.

LOOSENESS of usage treats these words as practically
synonymous. We speak, for example, of an allegor-
ical representation of Truth, or of a figure symbolizing
Truth ; of its holding a snake or a mirror, the symbols
or allegorical emblems of truth. It is a confusion of
diction that results in a confusion of thinking; for,
indeed, the ideas involved are very different.
Both words have travelled a long way from their
original meaning in the Greek, yet without losing their rudimentary
distinction. An allegory was an “ otherwise-form-of-speech ”; the re-
statement of something in another form of words—a kind of meta-
phor. A symbol, however, was a sign or mark by which something was
inferred : a token or tally, as the two parts of a coin, broken by con-
tracting parties, and retained by them, respectively, as a record of the trans-
action. If we jump the gap of time, we find both words to-day exalted into
the service of the ideal, engaged in interpreting under concrete forms an
abstract idea. But, admirably suggestive fact—while allegory, at root a term
of rhetoric, is still of limited and formal meaning, symbolism, which had
its origin in the market-place, has become evolved into the region of
the spiritual, and is concerned with the expression of what in the main
is inexpressible.
Yet, if there were nothing but this clear distinction between the ideas
conveyed by these words, there would not be the confusion in their usage.
As a matter of fact they overlap ; allegory using symbolism, and the latter
often basing itself on the mind’s natural tendency toward allegorical repre-
sentation. For the anthropomorphic instinct has been universal; every-
where and always, even to our own day, man has habitually represented
things under his own figure. To sun, moon, and stars, to the forces of
nature, to the religious aspirations of his soul, as well as to the convictions
of his moral nature, man has given human shape or, by analogy, the shapes
of animals. It represents the primitive and continuing instinct of the child-
man to picture everything in terms of himself; whereas, when the man-
man's mind develops, it begins to distinguish between objects and ideas,
and to conceive of the latter as separate and self-existing. Then it is that
symbolism supersedes allegory, or becomes to it an illuminating addition.
Accordingly, for our present purpose of briefly considering the influence
of symbolism and allegory on pictorial art, I would suggest that alle-
gory is the expression of the child-mind, and symbolism of the maturer
man-mind.
And this is not to assert that the latter is of necessity superior to the
child-mind. The decision must depend upon what particular standard of
comparison we adopt. If our standard be the conception which in our
purest moments we realize of beauty, as being, shall I call it, the rhythmic
music of the universe, or as Shakaku, the Japanese, said “ the Life-


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