THE PURITANS. BUNYAN'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS."
I.
The renaissance of learning, with its delight in a sense of existence,
its enjoyment of a new life, a newly acquired knowledge, and a
quickened intelligence, was gradually supplanted by that renaissance of
religion which followed the general introduction of the Bible among the
English people. Weary of the oppression of the clergy, weary of giving
an often ruinous obedience to the tyranny of men whose lives gave them
no claim to control the conduct of others, the early Puritan found in
the Bible the knowledge of God and the means of grace which he
despaired of obtaining from the priest. The Bible became in reality
_The Book_. It was the one volume possessed and read by the people at
large. The classical authors, the volumes of translations issued in
Elizabeth's time, the productions, even, of English genius had been
familiar only to the upper and best-educated classes. The great body of
the people were without books, and the Bible became their one literary
resource, and the sole teacher of the conditions by which salvation
could be attained. It was seized upon with extraordinary avidity and
enthusiasm. Old men learned to read, that they might study it for
themselves. Crowds gathered in churches and private houses to hear it
read aloud. A good reader became a public benefactor. Alike in manor
and in cottage, the family gathered at night to listen with awe-struck
interest to the solemn words whose grandeur was not yet lessened by
familiarity. As we quote, often unconsciously, from a hundred different
authors, the Puritans quoted from their one book.[82] Some, like
Bunyan, at first preferred the historical chapters. But the Bible soon
came to have a far more powerful and absorbing interest than any of a
literary nature. There men looked for their sentence of eternal life or
eternal torment. There they sought the solution of the question: "What
shall I do to be saved?" And they sought it with all the fervor of
conscientious men who realized, as we cannot realize, the doctrine of
eternal damnation. To understand the influence of the Bible, we must
remember how completely men believed in a personal God, ruling England
then, as He had ruled Israel of old; and in a devil who stalked through
the world luring men to their perdition. The Bible was studied with a
fearful eagerness for the way to please the one and to escape the
other. Looked upon as the word of God, pointing out the only means of
salvation, men placed themselves, through the Bible, in direct
communication with the Deity, and, casting aside the authority of a
church, acknowledged responsibility to Him alone. The difficulty of
interpreting obscure portions of the Scriptures drove many to frenzy
and despair. A hopeful or consoling passage was hailed with joy. "Happy
are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." "Lo," wrote Tyndale,
"here God hath made a covenant wyth us, to mercy full unto us, yf we
wyll be mercy full one to another."
Thus two ideas became paramount: the idea of God, and the idea of
conscience. God was thought of as a judge who will reward His chosen
servants by eternal happiness, but who will deliver those who do not
know Him, or those who sin against His laws, to Satan and everlasting
fire; a God to please whom is the first object of this life, as no
pleasure and no pain here can compare with the pleasure or pain to
come. This conception of the Deity still survives among us, but it is
not realized with the intensity of men who feel the hand of God in
every incident of their lives, who fancy that the Devil in person is
among them, and who distinctly hear his tempting words. Conscience, the
guide who pointed out the path of rectitude, became strict and
self-searching, ever looking inwardly, and judging harshly, magnifying,
through the greatness of its ideal of virtue, every failing into a
crime. The natural result of these ideas seething in a brain which had
little other food was Puritanism: the subordination of all other
interests of life to the attainment of a spiritual condition acceptable
in the sight of God. Following this aim with feverish intentness, and
tortured by a conscience of extreme tenderness, the Puritans naturally
cast aside the pleasures of this life as likely to interfere with the
attainment of future happiness, and as worthless compared to it. It was
no time for gaiety and trifling when the horrors of hell were staring
them in the face.
There is extant a life-like picture of a London housewife, which can
teach us much regarding the spirit of Puritanism.[83] "She was very
loving and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband,
very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much
misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto
many, very seldom was seen abroad, except at church. When others
recreated themselves, at holidays and other times, she would take her
needlework, and say, 'here is my recreation.'"
The self-denial of this virtuous housewife developed into that
austerity which, when Puritanism had become the ruling power in
England, closed the theatre and the bear-garden, stopped the dancing on
the village green, and assumed a dress and manner, the sombreness of
which was meant to signify a scorn of this world. While we can now
easily perceive the mistakes of the Puritans, and condemn the folly of
prohibiting innocent amusements which form a natural outlet for
exuberant spirits, it will be well if we can do justice to the nobility
of aim, and the greatness of self-sacrifice, to which their austerity
was due. We must remember that the aim of the Puritans was a godliness
far more exacting than that which we seek, and requiring a
proportionate sacrifice of immediate pleasure. We must remember, too,
that the amusements of that time were in large part brutal, like the
bear-gardens; and licentious, like most of the theatres. Puritanism
could only exist among men filled to an uncommon degree with a love of
virtue, who were ready to undergo every hardship, and to sacrifice
every personal inclination to attain it. Growing up among the people at
large, Puritanism showed a strong national love of religion and
morality. The resolution with which its devotees pursued their aims,
the serene content with which the martyrs welcomed the flames which
were to open the gates of Heaven, were backed by a strength of faith
not exceeded by that of the early Christians. The self-control and
self-sacrifice of the Puritans moulded the armies of the Commonwealth,
and overthrew the tyranny of Charles. But their finer qualities were
clouded by the fanaticism which a long persecution had engendered. A
phrase in our description of the London housewife unconsciously tells
the story: "Loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and
profane." The godly were the sharers of her own faith, the "wicked and
profane" were all those without its pale. Here lay the weakness of
Puritanism: its narrowness, its lack of sympathy with the world at
large, its indifference to the sufferings of those who had no place in
the ranks of the elect.
Among such men we must look in vain for literary productions having the
aim of entertainment. The literature of the time was chiefly polemical,
and commentaries crowded on the book-shelves the volumes of classical
and Italian writers. To Puritanism, fiction was the invention of the
Evil One, but still to Puritanism we owe, what is now, and seems
destined ever to remain, the finest allegory in the English language.
[Footnote 82: See Green's "Short History of the English People," chap.
viii, sec. 1.]
[Footnote 83: John Wallington's description of his mother. Green's
"Short History of the English People," p. 451.]
II.
That John Bunyan, a poor, illiterate tinker, was able to take the first
place among writers of allegory, and to accomplish the extraordinary
intellectual feat of producing a work which charmed alike the ignorant,
who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who
viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own
natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought. To write
a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power. It requires,
in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give
to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality. These conditions
were combined in Bunyan's case to an unexampled degree. He possessed an
imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of
any less powerfully constituted man. His subject, the doctrine of
salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it,
impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive. In
"Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners," Bunyan left a description of
his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is
without a parallel in autobiography. The veil which hides the thoughts
of one man from another is withdrawn, and the reader is placed in the
closest communion with the mind of the writer. In "Grace Abounding" is
easily detected the secret of Bunyan's success in allegory. "My sins
did so offend the Lord, that even in my childhood He did scare and
affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful
visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with
apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then
thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be
rid. I was afflicted with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, night and
day, trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire."
One Sunday, "as I was in the midst of a game at cat, and having struck
it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
Hell?' At this I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat
on the ground, and looking up to Heaven, saw, as with the eyes of my
understanding, Jesus Christ looking down upon me very hotly displeased
with me, and severely threatening me with some grievous punishment for
my ungodly practices. * * * I cannot express with what longing I cried
to Christ to call me. I saw such glory in a converted state that I
could not be contented without a share therein. Had I had a whole world
it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might
have been in a converted state." After Bunyan's conversion he says of
his conscience: "As to the act of sinning, I was never more tender than
now. I durst not take up a pin or a stick, though but so big as a
straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch.
I could not tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace
them."
A man so sensitive to supernatural impressions could realize them as
completely as the actual experiences of his daily life. Such, in fact,
they were. With a conscience so tender, and a longing so intense for
what he considered a condition of grace, Bunyan described the journey
of Christian with the minuteness and fidelity of one who had trod the
same path. The sketch of the pilgrim, which opens the work, stamps
Christian at once an individual.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a
certain place where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to
sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I
saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his
face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great burden
upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read
therein; and, as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able
longer to contain, he broke out with a lamentable cry, saying "what
shall I do?"
The same impression of reality pervades the whole work. Christian's
sins take an actual form in the burden on his back. Every personage
whom he meets on his journey, and every place through which he passes
appears to the mind of the reader with the vividness of actual
experience. The child or the laborer reads the "Pilgrim's Progress" as
a record of adventures undergone by a living man; the scholar forgets
the art which has raised the picture before his mind, in a sense of
contact with the subject portrayed. This is the triumph of a great
genius, and it is a triumph to which no other writer has attained to
the same degree. Other allegorists have pleased the fancy or gratified
the understanding, but Bunyan occupies at once the imagination, the
reason and the heart of his reader. Defoe's power of giving life to
fictitious scenes and personages has not been surpassed by that of any
other novelist. But Defoe's scenes and characters were of a nature
familiar to his readers, and therefore easily realized. In the
"Pilgrim's Progress," strange and unreal regions become well-known
places, and moral qualities distinct human beings. Evangelist, who puts
Christian on the way to the Wicked Gate; Pliable, who deserts him at
the first difficulty; Help, who pulls him out of the Slough of Despond;
Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who shows him an easy way to be rid of his burden,
are all life-like individuals. Timorous, Talkative, Vain Confidence,
Giant Despair, are not mere personifications, but distinct human beings
with whom every reader of the "Pilgrim's Progress" feels an intimate
acquaintance. Not less real is the impression produced by the various
scenes through which the journey of Christian conducts him. The Slough
of Despond, the Wicket Gate, the House of the Interpreter, the Hill
Difficulty, have been familiar localities to many generations of men,
who have watched Christian's struggle with Apollyon in the Valley of
Humiliation, and followed his footsteps as they trod the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, as they passed through the dangers of Vanity Fair,
and brought him at last to the Celestial City, and the welcome of the
Shining Ones.
The "Pilgrim's Progress" and the "Holy War" are not as allegories
entirely perfect, but they probably gain in religious effect, as much
as they lose from a literary point of view, in those passages where the
allegorical disguise is not sustained. The simplicity and power of
their language are alone sufficient to give them an important place in
English literature. Throughout the "Pilgrim's Progress" are evidences
of a strong human sympathy, and a kindly indulgence on the part of the
author for the weak and erring among his fellow-men. Ignorance, to be
sure, is cast into the bottomless pit; but as the work taught a
spiritual perfection, it could not afford to encourage the willingly
ignorant by bestowing a pardon on their representative. Bunyan himself
was distinguished for a general sympathy with his fellow-men which the
narrowness of Puritanism had failed to impair. The sad words in which
he mourned, while in prison, his long separation from his wife and
children, show the natural tenderness of his disposition, as well as
the greatness of the sacrifice which he was making for his
religion:--"The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been
to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones; and that
not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but
also because I often brought to mind the many hardships, miseries, and
wants that my poor family was like to meet with; especially my poor
blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all I had beside."
With the allegories of Bunyan, we leave ideality behind us as a
characteristic feature of English fiction. The knights of the Round
Table, Robin Hood and his merry men, the princes and princesses of the
"Arcadia," the pilgrim Christian, were the ideal heroes of the
particular periods to which they belong. They were placed amid the
scenes which seemed most attractive, and were endowed with the
qualities which seemed most admirable to the men whose imaginations
created them. But, with the exception perhaps of Robin Hood, they were
purely ideal, without prototypes in nature. The writer of fiction had
not yet turned his attention to the delineation of character, to the
study of complex social questions, to the portrayal of actual life.
With the fall of Puritan power, begins a great intellectual change.
History shows, since the Restoration, a tendency which has continuously
grown stronger and wider, to subordinate the imagination to the reason
of man, to withdraw political and social questions from the influence
of mere tradition, to subject them instead, to the test of practical
experience, and to encourage the patient physical investigations which
have resulted in the triumphs of modern science. This tendency has
pervaded all the channels of human industry. Its effect upon works of
fiction has been to introduce into that department of literature, a
spirit of realism, and a love of investigating the problems of life and
character, which have resulted in the modern novel. Henceforth we shall
meet no more ideal beings, but men or women, more or less true to
nature. In the fiction of the Restoration are first observable the new
tendencies, which, although but slightly marked at first, have finally
given to the English novel its present importance. An attempt to trace
the gradual perfection of this form of literature, its development into
a work of art, into a natural history of men, into a truthful
reflection of very varied social conditions, will occupy the remainder
of this volume.