We have seen the eternal battle in its earlier phases surging to and fro
between gods of the earth that are as old as Time, and daring thoughts
of men that rose beyond them and claimed a higher inheritance. Between
that phase of the warfare and the same battle as it is fought to-day, we
shall look at two contemporary men in the latter part of the seventeenth
century who may justly be taken as examples of the opposing types. John
Bunyan and Samuel Pepys, however, will lead us no dance among the
elemental forces of the world. They will rather show us, with very
fascinating _naïveté_, true pictures of their own aspirations, nourished
in the one case upon the busy and crowded life of the time, and in the
other, upon the definite and unquestioned conceptions of a complete and
systematic theology. Yet, typical though they are, it is easy to
exaggerate their simplicity, and it will be interesting to see how John
Bunyan, supposed to be a pure idealist, aloof from the world in which he
lived, yet had the most intimate and even literary connection with that
world. Pepys had certain curious and characteristic outlets upon the
spiritual region, but he seems to have closed them all, and become
increasingly a simple devotee of things seen and temporal.
Bunyan comes upon us full grown and mature in the work by which he is
best known and remembered. His originality is one of the standing
wonders of history. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ was written at a time when
every man had to take sides in a savage and atrocious ecclesiastical
controversy. The absolute judgments passed on either side by the other,
the cruelties practised and the dangers run, were such as to lead the
reader to expect extreme bitterness and sectarian violence in every
religious writing of the time. Bunyan was known to his contemporaries as
a religious writer, pure and simple, and a man whose convictions had
caused him much suffering at the hands of his enemies. Most of the first
readers of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ had no thought of any connection
between that book and worldly literature; and the pious people who shook
their heads over his allegory as being rather too interesting for a
treatise on such high themes as those which it handled, might perhaps
have shaken their heads still more solemnly had they known how much of
what they called the world was actually behind it. Bunyan was a
voluminous writer of theological works, and the complete edition of them
fills three enormous volumes, closely printed in double column. But it
is the little allegory embedded in one of these volumes which has made
his fame eternal, and for the most part the rest are remembered now only
in so far as they throw light upon that story. One exception must be
made in favour of _Grace Abounding_. This is Bunyan's autobiography, in
which he describes, without allegory, the course of his spiritual
experience. For an understanding of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ it is
absolutely necessary to know that companion volume.
It is very curious to watch the course of criticism as it was directed
to him and to his story. The eighteenth century had lost the keenness of
former controversies, and from its classic balcony it looked down upon
what seemed to it the somewhat sordid arena of the past. _The Examiner_
complains that he never yet knew an author that had not his admirers.
Bunyan and Quarles have passed through several editions and pleased as
many readers as Dryden and Tillotson. Even Cowper, timidly appreciative
and patronising, wrote of the "ingenious dreamer"--
"I name thee not, lest so despised a name
Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame,"
--lines which have a pathetic irony in them, as we contrast the anxious
Cowper, with the occasional revivals of interest and the age-long tone
of patronage which have been meted out to him, with the robust and
sturdy immortality of the man he shrank from naming. Swift discovered
Bunyan's literary power, and later Johnson and Southey did him justice.
In the nineteenth century his place was secured for ever, and Macaulay's
essay on him will probably retain its interest longer than anything else
that Macaulay wrote.
We are apt to think of him as a mere dreamer, spinning his cobwebs of
imagination wholly out of his own substance--a pure idealist, whose
writing dwells among his ideals in a region ignorant of the earth. In
one of his own apologies he tells us, apparently in answer to
accusations that had been made against him, that he did not take his
work from anybody, but that it came from himself alone. Doubtless that
is true so far as the real originality of his work is concerned, its
general conception, and the working out of its details point by point.
Yet, to imagine that if there had been no other English literature the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ would have been exactly what it is, is simply to
ignore the facts of the case. John Bunyan is far more interesting just
because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the
influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been
as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be.
The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing
to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of
the life which he criticises, and no reliable guide among its facts.
Bunyan might very easily indeed have been a pagan of the most worldly
type. It was extremely difficult for him to be a Puritan, not only on
account of outward troubles, but also of inward ones belonging to his
own disposition and experience. Accepting Puritanism, the easiest course
for him would have been that of fanaticism, and had he taken that course
he would certainly have had no lack of companions. It was far more
difficult to remain a Puritan and yet to keep his heart open to the
beauty and fascination of human life. Yet he was interested in what men
were writing or had written. All manner of songs and stories, heard in
early days in pot-houses, or in later times in prison, kept sounding in
his ears, and he wove them into his work. The thing that he meant to
say, and did say, was indeed one about which controversy and persecution
were raging, but, except in a very few general references, his writing
shows no sign of this. His eye is upon far-off things, the things of the
soul of man and the life of God, but the way in which he tells these
things shows innumerable signs of the bright world of English books.
It is worth while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been
very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all
such influences as go to the making of other writers. He tells us,
indeed, that "when I pulled it came," and that is delightfully true.
Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to
inquire as to the places from which it did come. As we have said, it
came out of two worlds, and the web is most wonderfully woven and
coloured, but our present concern is rather with the earthly part of it
than the heavenly.
No one can read John Bunyan without thinking of George Herbert. Few of
the short biographies in our language are more interesting reading than
Isaac Walton's life of Herbert. That master of simplicity is always
fascinating, and in this biography he gives us one of the most beautiful
sketches of contemporary narrative that has ever been penned. Herbert
was the quaintest of the saints. He lived in the days of Charles the
First and James the First, a High Churchman who had Laud for his friend.
Shy, sensitive, high-bred, shrinking from the world, he was at the same
time a man of business, skilful in the management of affairs, and yet a
man of morbid delicacy of imagination. The picture of his life at Little
Gidding, where he and Mr. Farrer instituted a kind of hermitage, or
private chapel of devotion, in which the whole of the Psalms were read
through once in every twenty-four hours, grows peculiarly pathetic when
we remember that the house and chapel were sacked by the parliamentary
army, in which for a time John Bunyan served. No two points of view, it
would seem, could be more widely contrasted than those of Bunyan and
Herbert, and yet the points of agreement are far more important than the
differences between them, and _The Temple_ has so much in common with
the _Pilgrim's Progress_ that one is astonished to find that the
likenesses seem to be entirely unconscious. Matthew Henry is perpetually
quoting _The Temple_ in his Commentary. Writing only a few years
earlier, Bunyan reproduces in his own fashion many of its thoughts, but
does not mention its existence.
In order to know Bunyan's early life, and indeed to understand the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ at all adequately, one must read _Grace Abounding_.
It is a short book, written in the years when he was already growing
old, for those whom he had brought into the fold of religion. From this
autobiography it has usually been supposed that he had led a life of the
wildest debauchery before his Christian days; but the more one examines
the book, and indeed all his books, the less is one inclined to believe
in any such desperate estimate of the sins of his youth. The measure of
sin is the sensitiveness of a man's conscience; and where, as in
Bunyan's case, the conscience is abnormally delicate and subject to
violent reactions, a life which in another man would be a pattern of
innocence and respectability may be regarded as an altogether
blackguardly and vicious one. It was, however evidently a life of strong
and intense worldly interest stepping over the line here and there into
positive wrong-doing, but for the most part blameworthy mainly on
account of its absorption in the passing shows of the hour.
What then was that world which interested Bunyan so intensely, and cost
him so many pangs of conscience? No doubt it was just the life of the
road as he travelled about his business; for though by no means a tinker
in the modern sense of the word, he was an itinerant brazier, whose
business took him constantly to and fro among the many villages of the
district of Bedford. He must have heard in inns and from wayside
companions many a catch of plays and songs, and listened to many a
lively story, or read it in the chap-books which were hawked about the
country then. It must also be remembered that these were the days of
puppet shows. The English drama, as we have already mentioned in
connection with _Faust_, was by no means confined to the boards of
actual theatres where living actors played the parts. Little mimic
stages travelled about the country in all directions reproducing the
plays, very much after the fashion of Punch and Judy; and even the
solemnest of Shakespeare's tragedies were exhibited in this way. There
is no possibility of doubt that Bunyan must have often stood agape at
these exhibitions, and thus have received much of the highest literature
at second hand.
As to how much of it he had actually read, that is a different question.
One is tempted to believe that he must have read George Herbert, but of
this there is no positive proof. We are quite certain about five books,
for which we have his own express statements. His wife brought him as
her dowry the very modest furniture of two small volumes, Baily's
_Practice of Piety_ and Dent's _The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven_. The
first is a very complicated and elaborate statement of Christian dogma,
which Bunyan passes by with the scant praise, "Wherein I also found some
things that were somewhat pleasing to me." The other is a much more
vital production. Even to this day it is an immensely interesting piece
of reading. It consists of conversations between various men who stand
for types of worldling, ignoramus, theologian, etc., and there are very
clear traces of it in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, especially in the talks
between Bunyan's pilgrims and the man Ignorance.
Another book which played a large part in Bunyan's life was the short
biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before
Bunyan's time. Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had
found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with
which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman
Church. The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed
conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more
of the mind than of the body. It is an extremely ghastly account of a
morbid and insane melancholia. It was the fashion of the time to take
such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many
persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and
groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls. How the
book came into Bunyan's hands no one can tell, but evidently he had
found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of _Grace
Abounding_ are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes
the very words of Spira.
Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther's _Commentary on the
Galatians_. The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated
1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long
lists of names are printed. The names are those of weavers,
shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns
of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had
subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it
in their own tongue. This curious fact reminds us that the book had
among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic
as Bunyan himself was. Another of his books, and the only one quoted by
name in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ or _Grace Abounding_, with the
exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, traces of
which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of
Faithful and in other parts.
In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge
which Bunyan is known to have possessed. He stands apart from mere
book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears
directly than through the medium of books. But then those eyes and ears
of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they
were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for
its own uses. Thus the rich store of observation which he had already
laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and
popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it. Further,
even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative
faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived
was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many
tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent
twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such
fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would
beguile the tedium of their confinement. That would be for the most part
in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to
1672. The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine
months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where
there would be room for very few companions. The modern bridge crosses
the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the
parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be
the foundations of the old prison bridge.
When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory
was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness
from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others
of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a
private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and
grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and
other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the
devil--narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in
details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole
_Pilgrim's Progress_ there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in
which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts
of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign. The
allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great
Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living
man. The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is
that in which the Pilgrim says, "I hear that our little city is to be
destroyed by fire"--a phrase which obviously has much more direct
connection with the destruction of Sodom than with that of London. The
only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of
Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of
persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular
events.
There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent
and contemporary secular literature. The demonology of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ is quite different from that of the _Holy War_. It used to be
suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the
publication of Milton's _Paradise Regained_, which appeared in 1671.
That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ in his earlier imprisonment. If, as is now
conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this
theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his
_Paradise Regained_ before the first edition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_
was penned. It is, of course, always possible that between the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Holy War_ Bunyan may have seen Milton's
work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly changed his
demonology and made it more like Milton's. Again, there are certain
passages in Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ which bear so close a resemblance
to Bunyan's description of the Celestial City, that it is difficult not
to suppose that either directly or indirectly that poem had influenced
Bunyan's creation; while in at least one of his songs he approaches so
near both the language and the rhythm of a song of Shakespeare's as to
make it very probable that he had heard it sung.[2]
These suppositions are not meant in any way to detract from the
originality of the great allegory, but rather to link the writer in with
that English literature of which he is so conspicuous an ornament. They
are no more significant and no less, than the fact that so much of the
geography of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ seems not to have been created by
his imagination, but to have been built up from well-remembered
landscapes. From his prison window he could not but see the ruins of old
Bedford Castle, which stood demolished upon its hill even in his time.
This, together with Cainhoe Castle, only a few miles away, may well have
suggested the Castle of Despair in Bypath Meadow near the River of God.
Again, memories of Elstow play a notable part in the story. A cross
stood there, at the foot of which, when he was playing the game of cat
upon a certain Sunday, the voice came to his soul with its tremendous
question, "Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins
and go to hell?" There stood the Moot Hall as it stands to-day, in
which, during his worldly days, he had danced with the rest of the
villagers and gained his personal knowledge of Vanity Fair. There, as he
tells us expressly, is the wicket gate, the rough old oak and iron gate
of Elstow parish church. Close beside it, just as you read in the story,
stands that great tower which suggested a devil's castle beside the
wicket gate, whence Satan showered his arrows on those who knocked
below. Not only so, but there was a special reason why for Bunyan that
ancient church tower may well have been symbolic of the stronghold of
the devil; for it had bells in it, and he was so fond of bell-ringing
that it got upon his conscience and became his darling sin. It is easy
to make light of his heart-searchings about so innocent an employment,
but doubtless there were other things that went along with it. We have
all seen those large drinking-vessels, known as bell-ringers' jugs; and
these perhaps may suggest an explanation of the sense of sin which
burdened his conscience so heavily. Anyhow, there the tower stands, and
in the Gothic doorway of it there are one or two deeply cut grooves,
obviously made by the ropes of the bell-ringers when, instead of
standing below their ropes, they preferred the open air, and drew the
ropes through the archway of the door, so as to cut into its moulding.
The little fact gains much significance in the light of Bunyan's own
confession that he was so afraid that the bell would fall upon him and
kill him as a punishment from God, that he used to go outside the door
to ring it. Then again there was the old convent at Elstow, where, long
before Bunyan's time, nuns had lived, who were known to tradition as
"the ladies of Elstow." Very aristocratic and very human ladies they
seem to have been, given to the entertainment of their friends in the
intervals of their tasteful devotion, and occasionally needing a rebuke
from headquarters. Yet it seems not improbable that there is some
glorified memory of those ladies in the inhabitants of the House
Beautiful, which house itself appears to have been modelled upon
Houghton House on the Ampthill heights, built by Sir Philip Sidney's
sister but a century before. The silver mine of Demas might seem to have
come from some far-off source in chap-book or romance, until we remember
that at the village of Pulloxhill, which had been the original home of
the Bunyan family, and near which Bunyan was arrested and brought for
examination to the house of Justice Wingate, there are the actual
remains of an ancient gold mine whose tradition still lingers among the
villagers.
All these things seem to indicate that the great allegory is by no means
so remote from the earth as has sometimes been imagined; and perhaps the
most touching commentary upon this statement is the curious and very
unlovely burying-ground in Bunhill fields, cut through by a straight
path that leads from one busy thoroughfare to another. A few yards to
the left of that path is the tomb and monument of John Bunyan, while at
an equal distance to the right lies Daniel Defoe. The _Pilgrim's
Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ are perhaps the two best-known stories
in the world, and they are not so far remote from one another as they
seem.
Nor was it only in the outward material with which he worked that John
Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He
could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be
difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of
poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and
full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and
worthiness of style, whose compression and terseness have fulfilled at
least one of the canons of high literature. Take, for example, the lines
on Faithful's death--
"Now Faithful, play the man, speak for thy God:
Fear not the wicked's malice, nor their rod:
Speak boldly, man, the truth is on thy side;
Die for it, and to life in triumph ride."