"My little bird, how canst thou sit
And sing amidst so many thorns?
Let me but hold upon thee get,
My love with honour thee adorns.
'Tis true it is sunshine to-day,
To-morrow birds will have a storm;
My pretty one, come thou away,
My bosom then shall keep thee warm.
My father's palace shall be thine,
Yea, in it thou shalt sit and sing;
My little bird, if thou'lt be mine,
The whole year round shall be thy spring.
I'll keep thee safe from cat and cur,
No manner o' harm shall come to thee:
Yea, I will be thy succourer,
My bosom shall thy cabin be."
The last line might have been written by Ben Jonson, and the description
of sunrise in the former poem might almost have been from Chaucer's pen.
Yet the finest poetry of all is the prose allegory of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_. English prose had taken many centuries to form, in the
moulding hands of Chaucer, Malory, and Bacon. It had come at last to
Bunyan with all its flexibility and force ready to his hand. He wrote
with virgin purity, utterly free from mannerisms and affectations; and,
without knowing himself for a writer of fine English, produced it.
The material of the allegory also is supplied from ancient sources. One
curious paragraph in Bunyan's treatise entitled _Sighs from Hell_, gives
us a broad hint of this. "The Scriptures, thought I then, what are they?
A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings price.
Alack! what is Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, _George on
Horseback_ or _Bevis of Southampton_. Give me some book that teaches
curious Arts, that tells old Fables." In _The Plain Man's Pathway to
Heaven_ there is a longer list of such romances as these, including
_Ellen of Rummin_, and many others. As has been already stated, these
tales of ancient folklore would come into his hands either by recitation
or in the form of chap-books. The chap-book literature of Old England
was most voluminous and interesting. It consisted of romances and songs,
sold at country fairs and elsewhere, and the passing reference which we
have quoted proves conclusively, what we might have known without any
proof, that Bunyan knew them.
_George on Horseback_ has been identified by Professor Firth with the
_Seven Champions of England_, an extremely artificial romance, which may
be taken as typical of hundreds more of its kind. The 1610 edition of it
is a very lively book with a good deal of playing to the gallery, such
as this: "As for the name of Queen, I account it a vain title; for I had
rather be an English lady than the greatest empress in the world." There
is not very much in this romance which Bunyan has appropriated, although
there are several interesting correspondences. It is very courtly and
conventional. The narrative is broken here and there by lyrics, quite in
Bunyan's manner, but it is difficult to imagine Bunyan, with his direct
and simple taste, spending much time in reading such sentences as the
following: "By the time the purple-spotted morning had parted with her
grey, and the sun's bright countenance appeared on the mountain-tops,
St. George had rode twenty miles from the Persian Court." On the other
hand, when Great-Heart allows Giant Despair to rise after his fall,
showing his chivalry in refusing to take advantage of the fallen giant,
we remember the incident of Sir Guy and Colebrand in the _Seven
Champions_.
"Good sir, an' it be thy will,
Give me leave to drink my fill,
For sweet St. Charity,
And I will do thee the same deed
Another time if thou have need,
I tell thee certainly."
St. George, like Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
traverses an Enchanted Vale, and hears "dismal croakings of night
ravens, hissing of serpents, bellowing of bulls, and roaring of
monsters."[3] St. Andrew traverses a land of continual darkness, the
Vale of Walking Spirits, amid similar sounds of terror, much as the
pilgrims of the Second Part of Bunyan's story traverse the Enchanted
Ground. And as these pilgrims found deadly arbours in that land,
tempting them to repose which must end in death, so St. David was
tempted in an Enchanted Garden, and fell flat upon the ground, "when his
eyes were so fast locked up by magic art, and his waking senses drowned
in such a dead slumber, that it was as impossible to recover himself
from sleep as to pull the sun out of the firmament."
_Bevis of Southampton_ has many points in common with St. George in the
_Seven Champions_. The description of the giant, the escape of Bevis
from his dungeon, and a number of other passages show how much was
common stock for the writers of these earlier romances. There is the
same rough humour in it from first to last, and the wonderful swing and
stride of vigorous rhyming metre. Of the humour, one quotation will be
enough for an example. It is when they are proposing to baptize the
monstrous giant at Cologne, whom Bevis had first conquered and then
engaged as his body-servant. At the christening of Josian, wife of
Bevis, the Bishop sees the giant.
"'What is,' sayde he, 'this bad vysage?'
'Sir,' sayde Bevys, 'he is my page--
I pray you crysten hym also,
Thoughe he be bothe black and blo!'
The Bysshop crystened Josian,
That was as white as any swan;
For Ascaparde was made a tonne,
And whan he shulde therein be done,
He lept out upon the brenche
And sayde: 'Churle, wylt thou me drenche?
The devyl of hel mot fetche the
I am to moche crystened to be!'
The folke had gode game and laughe,
But the Bysshop was wrothe ynoughe."
There is a curious passage which is almost exactly parallel to the
account of the fight with Apollyon in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and
which was doubtless in Bunyan's mind when he wrote that admirable battle
sketch--
"Beves is swerde anon upswapte,
He and the geaunt togedre rapte;
And delde strokes mani and fale,
The nombre can i nought telle in tale.
The geaunt up is clubbe haf,
And smot to Beves with is staf,
But his scheld flegh from him thore,
Three acres brede and somedel more,
Tho was Beves in strong erur
And karf ato the grete levour,
And on the geauntes brest a-wonde
That negh a-felde him to the grounde.
The geaunt thoughte this bataile hard,
Anon he drough to him a dart,
Throgh Beves scholder he hit schet,
The blold ran doun to Beves' fet,
The Beves segh is owene blod
Out of his wit he wex negh wod,
Unto the geaunt ful swithe he ran,
And kedde that he was doughti man,
And smot ato his nekke bon;
The geant fel to grounde anon."
It is part of his general sympathy with the spirit of the romances that
Bunyan's giants were always real giants to him, and he evidently enjoyed
them for their own sake as literary and imaginative creations, as well
as for the sake of any truths which they might be made to enforce.
Despair and Slay-Good are distinct to his imagination. His interest
remains always twofold. On the one hand there is allegory, and on the
other hand there is live tale. Sometimes the allegory breaks through and
confuses the tale a little, as when Mercy begs for the great mirror that
hangs in the dining-room of the shepherds, and carries it with her
through the remainder of her journey. Sometimes the allegory has to stop
in order that a sermon may be preached on some particular point of
theology, and such sermons are by no means short. Still the story is so
true to life that its irresistible simplicity and naturalness carry it
on and make it immortal. When we read such a conversation as that
between old Honest and Mr. Standfast about Madam Bubble, we feel that
the tale has ceased to be an allegory altogether and has become a novel.
This is perhaps more noticeable in the Second Part than in the First.
The First Part is indeed almost a perfect allegory; although even there,
from time to time, the earnestness and rush of the writer's spirit
oversteps the bounds of consistency and happily forgets the moral
because the story is so interesting, or forgets for a moment the story
because the moral is so important. In the Second Part the two characters
fall apart more definitely. Now you have delightful pieces of crude
human nature, naïve and sparkling. Then you have long and intricate
theological treatises. Neither the allegorical nor the narrative unity
is preserved to anything like the same extent as on the whole is the
case in Part I. The shrewd and humorous touches of human nature are
especially interesting. Bunyan was by no means the gentle saint who
shrank from strong language. When the gate of Doubting Castle is
opening, and at last the pilgrims have all but gone free, we read that
"the lock went damnable hard." When Great-Heart is delighted with Mr.
Honest, he calls him "a cock of the right kind." The poem _On Christian
Behaviour_, which we have quoted, contains the lines--
"When all men's cards are fully played,
Whose will abide the light?"
These are quaint instances of the way in which even the questionable
parts of the unregenerate life of the dreamer came in the end to serve
the uses of his religion.
There are many gems in the Second Part of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ which
are full of mother-wit and sly fun. Mr. Honest confesses, "I came from
the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of
Destruction." Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious
creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he
kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can
never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company
with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair,
when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and
inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly
keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of
them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple,
Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one
Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of
the way and become as they."
Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true
sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human
nature tends to do. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Let me
see thy sword," and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it
for awhile, he adds, "Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade." That sword
lingers in Bunyan's imagination, for, at the close of Valiant's life,
part of his dying speech is this "My sword I give to him that shall
succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can
get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that
I have fought His battles."
Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that
no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor
to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism. We have
accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to
recognise in every page for himself. We have sought in this to show what
has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are.
Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his
book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never
for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which
at his conversion he had been set free. For the human as opposed to the
divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and
profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such
passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton. These are
for him sheer pagans. At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at
the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope
and Pagan dwelt there in old time, but that Pagan has been dead many a
day. Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding
place and home in Vanity Fair. As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben
Jonson, in his play _Bartholomew Fair_, had already told the adventures
of two Puritans who strayed into the Fair, and who regarded the whole
affair as the shop of Satan. There were many other Fairs, such as that
of Sturbridge, and the Elstow Fair itself, which was instituted by the
nuns on the ground close to their convent, and which is held yearly to
the present day. Such Fairs as these have been a source of much
temptation and danger to the neighbourhood, and represent in its popular
form the whole spirit of paganism at its worst.
All the various elements of Bunyan's world live on in the England of
to-day. Thackeray, with a stroke of characteristic genius, has expanded
and applied the earlier conception of paganism in his great novel whose
title _Vanity Fair_ is borrowed from Bunyan. But the main impression of
the allegory is the victory of the spiritual at its weakest over the
temporal at its mightiest. His descriptions of the supper and bed
chamber in the House Beautiful, and of the death of Christiana at the
end of the Second Part, are immortal writings, in the most literal
sense, amid the shows of time. They have indeed laid hold of immortality
not for themselves only, but for the souls of men. Nothing could sum up
the whole story of Bunyan better than the legend of his flute told by
Mr. S.S. M'Currey in his book of poems entitled _In Keswick Vale_. The
story is that in his prison Bunyan took out a bar from one of the chairs
in his cell, scooped it hollow, and converted it into a flute, upon
which he played sweet music in the dark and solitary hours of the prison
evening. The jailers never could find out the source of that music, for
when they came to search his cell, the bar was replaced in the chair,
and there was no apparent possibility of flute-playing; but when the
jailers departed the music would mysteriously recommence. It is very
unlikely that this legend is founded upon fact, or indeed that Bunyan
was a musician at all (although we do have from his pen one touching and
beautiful reference to the finest music in the world being founded upon
the bass), but, like his own greater work, the little legend is an
allegory. The world for centuries has heard sweet music from Bunyan, and
has not known whence it came. It has seemed to most men a miracle, and
indeed they were right in counting it so. Yet there was a flute from
which that music issued, and the flute was part of the rough furniture
of his imprisoned world. He was no scholar, nor delicate man of _belles
lettres_, like so many of his contemporaries. He took what came to his
hand; and in this lecture we have tried to show how much did come thus
to his hand that was rare and serviceable for the purposes of his
spirit, and for the expression of high spiritual truth.