At the risk of squeezing a topic already wrung dry, might I propose that
Hazlitt is here performing what we might now inelegantly call an
"intervention"? That is, might it be the case that pre-Romantic readers in
fact expected to be entangled by the allegory, expected to be strangled in
its twists of significance, yet also felt that there was a spiritual duty
to be performed, or a moral lesson to be learned, in the very process of
attempting to slay the dragon of the worldly text itself, as it were.
Perhaps Hazlitt is here attempting to propose a new, almost modernist way
of reading the FQ, in which the mature reader may appreciate the
artistry, or the artificiality, of the way the dragon is painted, and may
keep a certain "aesthetic" distance from its shining folds. Of course,
such a proposal can only go so far, since, as Hazlitt himself implies, if
you *do* meddle with the painted dragon it does come alive, and we all
know what happens then...something terrifying *and* yummy!
GG
On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, tom bishop wrote:
> In re Hazlitt's:
> "But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they
> cannot undertake it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the
> allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a
> child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its
> shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the
> allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them."
>
> Suddenly it occurs to me to wonder, in re my last post, whether there
> isn't a tiny Spenserian joke lurking in Hazlitt's "This is very
> idle", as in "This is [a] very idol." Meddling with idols is all the
> show, isn't it?
>
> T
>
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