Anything worse than _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ in the matter of defiance of
literary canons can hardly be conceived. The allegory halts continually;
it professes to be spiritual, but nothing can be more carnal than the
golden splendour of the eternal city; the view of life and the world
generally is flat blasphemy against the order of things with which we are
surrounded. Yet, like the _Odyssey_, which flatly defies sense and
criticism (no, it doesn’t; still, it defies them a good deal), no one can
doubt that it must rank among the very greatest books that have ever been
written. How Odyssean it is in its sincerity and downrightness, as well
as in the marvellous beauty of its language, its freedom from all taint
of the schools and, not least, in complete victory of genuine internal
zeal over a scheme initially so faulty as to appear hopeless.
I read that part where Christian passes the lions which he thought were
free but which were really chained and it occurred to me that all lions
are chained until they actually eat us and that, the moment they do this,
they chain themselves up again automatically, as far as we are concerned.
If one dissects this passage it fares as many a passage in the _Odyssey_
does when we dissect it. Christian did not, after all, venture to pass
the lions till he was assured that they were chained. And really it is
more excusable to refuse point-blank to pass a couple of lions till one
knows whether they are chained or not—and the poor wicked people seem to
have done nothing more than this,—than it would be to pass them.
Besides, by being told, Christian fights, as it were, with loaded dice.