Dr. Johnson once took Bishop Percy's little daughter on his knee, and
asked her what she thought of the "Pilgrim's Progress." The child
answered that she had not read it. "No?" replied the Doctor; "then I
would not give one farthing for you," and he set her down and took no
further notice of her.
This story, if true, proves that the Doctor was rather intolerant. We
must not excommunicate people because they have not our taste in books.
The majority of people do not care for books at all.
There is a descendant of John Bunyan's alive now, or there was lately,
who never read the "Pilgrim's Progress." Books are not in his line. Nay,
Bunyan himself, who wrote sixty works, was no great reader. An Oxford
scholar who visited him in his study found no books at all, except some
of Bunyan's own and Foxe's "Book of Martyrs."
Yet, little as the world in general cares for reading, it has read Bunyan
more than most. One hundred thousand copies of the "Pilgrim" are
believed to have been sold in his own day, and the story has been done
into the most savage languages, as well as into those of the civilised
world.
Dr. Johnson, who did not like Dissenters, praises the "invention,
imagination, and conduct of the story," and knew no other book he wished
longer except "Robinson Crusoe" and "Don Quixote." Well, Dr. Johnson
would not have given a farthing for _me_, as I am quite contented with
the present length of these masterpieces. What books do _you_ wish
longer? I wish Homer had written a continuation of the Odyssey, and told
us what Odysseus did among the far-off men who never tasted salt nor
heard of the sea. A land epic after the sea epic, how good it would have
been--from Homer! But it would have taxed the imagination of Dante to
continue the adventures of Christian and his wife after they had once
crossed the river and reached the city.
John Bunyan has been more fortunate than most authors in one of his
biographies.
His life has been written by the Rev. Dr. Brown, who is now minister of
his old congregation at Bedford; and an excellent life it is. Dr. Brown
is neither Roundhead nor Cavalier; for though he is, of course, on
Bunyan's side, he does not throw stones at the beautiful Church of
England.
Probably most of us are on Bunyan's side now. It might be a good thing
that we should all dwell together in religious unity, but history shows
that people cannot be bribed into brotherhood. They tried to bully
Bunyan; they arrested and imprisoned him--unfairly even in law, according
to Dr. Brown, not unfairly, Mr. Froude thinks--and he would not be
bullied.
What was much more extraordinary, he would not be embittered. In spite
of all, he still called Charles II. "a gracious Prince." When a subject
is in conscience at variance with the law, Bunyan said, he has but one
course--to accept peaceably the punishment which the law awards. He was
never soured, never angered by twelve years of durance, not exactly in a
loathsome dungeon, but in very uncomfortable quarters. When there came a
brief interval of toleration, he did not occupy himself in brawling, but
in preaching, and looking after the manners and morals of the little
"church," including one woman who brought disagreeable charges against
"Brother Honeylove." The church decided that there was nothing in the
charges, but somehow the name of Brother Honeylove does not inspire
confidence.
Almost everybody knows the main facts of Bunyan's life. They may not
know that he was of Norman descent (as Dr. Brown seems to succeed in
proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the Conqueror, nor that he
was a gipsy, as others hold. On Dr. Brown's showing, Bunyan's ancestors
lost their lands in process of time and change, and Bunyan's father was a
tinker. He preferred to call himself a brazier--his was the rather
unexpected trade to which Mr. Dick proposed apprenticing David
Copperfield.
Bunyan himself, "the wondrous babe," as Dr. Brown enthusiastically styles
him, was christened on November 30th, 1628. He was born in a cottage,
long fallen, and hard by was a marshy place, "a veritable slough of
despond." Bunyan may have had it in mind when he wrote of the slough
where Christian had so much trouble. He was not a travelled man: all his
knowledge of people and places he found at his doors. He had some
schooling, "according to the rate of other poor men's children," and
assuredly it was enough.
The great civil war broke out, and Bunyan was a soldier; he tells us not
on which side. Dr. Brown and Mr. Lewis Morris think he was on that of
the Parliament, but his old father, the tinker, stood for the King. Mr.
Froude is rather more inclined to hold that he was among the "gay
gallants who struck for the crown." He does not seem to have been much
under fire, but he got that knowledge of the appearance of war which he
used in his siege of the City of Mansoul. One can hardly think that
Bunyan liked war--certainly not from cowardice, but from goodness of
heart.
In 1646 the army was disbanded, and Bunyan went back to Elstow village
and his tinkering, his bell-ringing, his dancing with the girls, his
playing at "cat" on a Sunday after service.
He married very young and poor. He married a pious wife, and read all
her library--"The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," and "The Practice of
Piety." He became very devout in the spirit of the Church of England,
and he gave up his amusements. Then he fell into the Slough of Despond,
then he went through the Valley of the Shadow, and battled with Apollyon.
People have wondered _why_ he fancied himself such a sinner? He
confesses to having been a liar and a blasphemer. If I may guess, I
fancy that this was merely the literary genius of Bunyan seeking for
expression. His lies, I would go bail, were tremendous romances, wild
fictions told for fun, never lies of cowardice or for gain. As to his
blasphemies, he had an extraordinary power of language, and that was how
he gave it play. "Fancy swearing" was his only literary safety-valve, in
those early days, when he played cat on Elstow Green.
Then he heard a voice dart from heaven into his soul, which said, "Wilt
thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?"
So he fell on repentance, and passed those awful years of mental torture,
when all nature seemed to tempt him to the Unknown Sin.
What did all this mean? It meant that Bunyan was within an ace of
madness.
It happens to a certain proportion of men, religiously brought up, to
suffer like Bunyan. They hear voices, they are afraid of that awful
unknown iniquity, and of eternal death, as Bunyan and Cowper were afraid.
Was it not De Quincey who was at school with a bully who believed he had
been guilty of the unpardonable offence? Bullying is an offence much
less pardonable than most men are guilty of. Their best plan (in
Bunyan's misery) is to tell Apollyon that the Devil is an ass, to do
their work and speak the truth.
Bunyan got quit of his terror at last, briefly by believing in the
goodness of God. He did not say, like Mr. Carlyle, "Well, if all my
fears are true, what then?" His was a Christian, not a stoical
deliverance.
The "church" in which Bunyan found shelter had for minister a converted
major in a Royalist regiment. It was a quaint little community, the
members living like the early disciples, correcting each other's faults,
and keeping a severe eye on each other's lives. Bunyan became a minister
in it; but, Puritan as he was, he lets his Pilgrims dance on joyful
occasions, and even Mr. Ready-to-Halt waltzes with a young lady of the
Pilgrim company.
As a minister and teacher Bunyan began to write books of controversy with
Quakers and clergymen. The points debated are no longer important to us;
the main thing was that he got a pen into his hand, and found a proper
outlet for his genius, a better way than fancy swearing.
If he had not been cast into Bedford jail for preaching in a cottage, he
might never have dreamed his immortal dream, nor become all that he was.
The leisures of gaol were long. In that "den" the Muse came to him, the
fair kind Muse of the Home Beautiful. He saw all that company of his, so
like and so unlike Chaucer's: Faithful, and Hopeful, and Christian, the
fellowship of fiends, the truculent Cavaliers of Vanity Fair, and Giant
Despair, with his grievous crabtree cudgel; and other people he saw who
are with us always,--the handsome Madam Bubble, and the young woman whose
name was Dull, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Facing Bothways, and
Byends, all the persons of the comedy of human life.
He hears the angelic songs of the City beyond the river; he hears them,
but repeat them to us he cannot, "for I'm no poet," as he says himself.
He beheld the country of Beulah, and the Delectable Mountains, that
earthly Paradise of nature where we might be happy yet, and wander no
farther, if the world would let us--fair mountains in whose streams Izaak
Walton was then even casting angle.
It is pleasant to fancy how Walton and Bunyan might have met and talked,
under a plane tree by the Ouse, while the May showers were falling.
Surely Bunyan would not have likened the good old man to Formalist; and
certainly Walton would have enjoyed travelling with Christian, though the
book was by none of his dear bishops, but by a Non-conformist. They were
made to like but not to convert each other; in matters ecclesiastical
they saw the opposite sides of the shield. Each wrote a masterpiece. It
is too late to praise "The Complete Angler" or the "Pilgrim's Progress."
You may put ingenuity on the rack, but she can say nothing new that is
true about the best romance that ever was wedded to allegory, nor about
the best idyl of old English life.
The people are living now--all the people: the noisy bullying judges, as
of the French Revolutionary Courts, or the Hanging Courts after
Monmouth's war; the demure, grave Puritan girls; and Matthew, who had the
gripes; and lazy, feckless Ignorance, who came to so ill an end, poor
fellow; and sturdy Old Honest, and timid Mr. Fearing; not single persons,
but dozens, arise on the memory.
They come, as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out of Scott or Moliere;
the Tinker is as great a master of character and fiction as the greatest,
almost; his style is pure, and plain, and sound, full of old idioms, and
even of something like old slang. But even his slang is classical.
Bunyan is everybody's author. The very Catholics have their own edition
of the Pilgrim: they have cut out Giant Pope, but have been too
good-natured to insert Giant Protestant in his place. Unheralded,
unannounced, though not uncriticised (they accused the Tinker of being a
plagiarist, of course), Bunyan outshone the Court wits, the learned, the
poets of the Restoration, and even the great theologians.
His other books, except "Grace Abounding" (an autobiography), "The Holy
War," and "Mr. Badman," are only known to students, nor much read by
them. The fashion of his theology, as of all theology, passed away; it
is by virtue of his imagination, of his romance, that he lives.
The allegory, of course, is full of flaws. It would not have been manly
of Christian to run off and save his own soul, leaving his wife and
family. But Bunyan shrank from showing us how difficult, if not
impossible, it is for a married man to be a saint. Christiana was really
with him all through that pilgrimage; and how he must have been hampered
by that woman of the world! But had the allegory clung more closely to
the skirts of truth, it would have changed from a romance to a satire,
from "The Pilgrim's Progress" to "Vanity Fair." There was too much love
in Bunyan for a satirist of that kind; he had just enough for a
humourist.
Born in another class, he might have been, he would have been, a writer
more refined in his strength, more uniformly excellent, but never so
universal nor so popular in the best sense of the term.
In the change of times and belief it is not impossible that Bunyan will
live among the class whom he least thought of addressing--scholars,
lovers of worldly literature--for devotion and poverty are parting
company, while art endures till civilisation perishes.
Are we better or worse for no longer believing as Bunyan believed, no
longer seeing that Abyss of Pascal's open beside our armchairs? The
question is only a form of that wide riddle, Does any theological or
philosophical opinion make us better or worse? The vast majority of men
and women are little affected by schemes and theories of this life and
the next. They who even ask for a reply to the riddle are the few: most
of us take the easy-going morality of our world for a guide, as we take
Bradshaw for a railway journey. It is the few who must find out an
answer: on that answer their lives depend, and the lives of others are
insensibly raised towards their level. Bunyan would not have been a
worse man if he had shared the faith of Izaak Walton. Izaak had his
reply to all questions in the Church Catechism and the Articles. Bunyan
found his in the theology of his sect, appealing more strongly than
orthodoxy to a nature more bellicose than Izaak's. Men like him, with
his indomitable courage, will never lack a solution of the puzzle of the
earth. At worst they will live by law, whether they dare to speak of it
as God's law, or dare not. They will always be our leaders, our Captain
Greathearts, in the pilgrimage to the city where, led or unled, we must
all at last arrive. They will not fail us, while loyalty and valour are
human qualities. The day may conceivably come when we have no Christian
to march before us, but we shall never lack the company of Greatheart.