As we launched upon the days of Charles I., in our last talk, we had
somewhat to say of the King’s advisers, lay and ecclesiastic; we came to
quick sense of the war-clouds, fast gathering, through which Jeremy Taylor
shot his flashes of pious eloquence; we heard a strain of Suckling’s
verse, to which might have been added other, and may be better, from such
Royalist singers as Carew or Lovelace;[69] but we cannot swoop all the
birds into our net. We had glimpse of the crop-eared Prynne of the
_Histriomastix_; and from Cowley, that sincere friend of both King and
Queen in the days of their misfortunes, we plucked some “Poetical
Blossoms;” also a charming “Rose,” from the orderly parterres of that
great gardener, and pompous, time-serving man, Edmund Waller.
Then came Milton with the fairy melodies, always sweet, of “Comus”--the
cantankerous pamphleteering--the soured home-life--the bloody thrusts at
the image of the King, and the grander flight of his diviner music into
the courts of Paradise.
_Charles II. and his Friends._
Some fourteen years or so before the death of Milton, the restoration of
Charles II. had come about. He had drifted back upon the traces of the
stout Oliver Cromwell, and of the feebler Richard Cromwell, on a great
tide of British enthusiasm. Independents, Presbyterians, Church of England
men, and Papists were all by the ears; and it did seem to many among the
shrewdest of even the Puritan workers that some balance-wheel (of whatever
metal), though weighted with royal traditions and hereditary privileges,
might keep the governmental machinery to the steady working of old days.
So the Second Charles had come back, with a great throwing up of caps all
through the London streets; Presbyterians giving him welcome because he
was sure to snub the Independents; the Independents giving him welcome
because he was sure to snub the Presbyterians; the Church of England men
giving him welcome because he was sure to snub both (as he did); and
finally, the Papists giving him high welcome because all other ways their
hopes were lean and few.
You know, or should know, what manner of man he was: accomplished--in his
way; an expert swordsman; an easy talker--capable of setting a tableful of
gentlemen in a roar; telling stories inimitably, and a great many of them;
full of grimaces that would have made his fortune on the stage; saying
sweetest things, and meaning the worst things; a daredevil who feared
neither God nor man; generous, too--most of all in his cups; and
liberal--with other people’s money; hating business with all his soul;
loving pleasure with all his heart; ready always to do kindness that cost
him nothing; laughing at all Puritans and purity; yet winning the maudlin
affection of a great many people, and the respect of none.
Notwithstanding all this, the country gentlemen of England, of good blood,
who had sniffed scornfully at the scent of the beer-vats which hung about
the name of Cromwell, welcomed this clever, swarthy, black-haired,
dissolute Prince, who had a pedigree which ran back on the father’s side
to the royal Bruce of Scotland, and on the mother’s side to the great
Clovis, and to the greater Charlemagne.
You will find a good glimpse of this scion of royalty in Scott’s story of
_Peveril of the Peak_. The novel is by no means one of the great
romancer’s best; but it is well worth reading for the clear and vivid idea
it will give one of the social clashings between the reserves of old
Puritanism and the incontinencies of new monarchism; you will find in it
an excellent sample of the gruff, stalwart Cromwellian; and another of the
hot-tempered, swearing cavalier; and still others of the mincing,
scheming, gambling, roystering crew which overran all the purlieus of the
court of Charles. Buckingham was there--that second Villiers,[70] of whom
I had somewhat to say when the elder Buckingham came up for mention in
the days of Charles I.; this younger Villiers running before the elder in
all accomplishments and all villainies; courtly; of noble bearing; with
daintiest of speeches; a pattern of manly graces; capable of a tender
French song, with all his tones in exultant accord with best of court
singers, and of a comedy that drew all the play-goers of London to the
“Rehearsal;” capable too, of the wickedest of plots and of the foulest of
lies. And yet this Buckingham was one of the best accredited advisers of
the Crown.
To the same court belonged Rochester,[71] his great, fine wig covering a
great, fine brain; he writing harmonious verses about--“Nothing”--or worse
than nothing; and at the last wheedling Bishop Burnet into the belief that
he had changed his courses, and that if he might rise from that ugly
deathbed where the good-natured, pompous bishop sought him, he would be
enrolled among the moralists. I think it was lucky that he died with such
good impulse flashing at the top of his badnesses.
Dorset belonged to this court, with his pretty verselets, and Sedley and
Etherege; also the Portsmouth and Lady Castelmaine, and the rest of those
venturesome ladies who show their colors of cheek and bosom, even now, in
the well-handled paintings of Sir Peter Lely. When you go to Hampton Court
you can see these fair and frail beauties by the dozen on the walls of the
King William room. Sir Peter Lely[72] was a rare painter, belonging to
these times; a great favorite of Charles; and he loved such subjects for
his brush; he drew the delicatest hands that were ever put on canvas--too
delicate and too small, unfortunately, to cover the undress of his
figures.
But, at the worst, England was not altogether a Pandemonium in those days
following upon the Restoration. I think, perhaps, the majority of
historians and commentators are disposed to over-color the orgies; it is
so easy to make prodigious effects with strong sulphurous tints and
blazing vermilions. Certain it is that Taine, in writing of these times,
has put an almost malignant touch into his story, blinking the fact that
the trail which shows most of corrupting phosphorescence came over the
Channel with the new King; forgetting that French breeding was at the
bottom of the new tastes, and that French gold made the blazonry of the
chariots in which the Jezebels rode on their triumphal way through London
to--perdition.
Then, again, English vice is more outspoken and less secretive than that
of the over-Channel neighbors. It is now, and has always been true, that
when his Satanic majesty takes possession of a man (or a woman), he can
cover himself in sweeter and more impenetrable disguise under the pretty
perukes and charming millinery of French art than in a homely British
body, out of which the demon horns stick stark through all the wigs and
cosmetics that art can put upon a man.
It is worth while for us to remember that in this London, when the elegant
Duke of Rochester was beating time with his jewelled hand to a French
gallop, Richard Baxter’s[73] ever-living _Saints’ Rest_ was an accredited
book, giving consolation to many a poor soul wrestling with the fears of
death and of future judgment. It was published, indeed, somewhat earlier;
but its author was still wakeful and earnest; and many a time his thin,
stooping figure might be seen threading a way through the street crowds to
his chapel in Southwark, where delighted listeners came to hear him,
almost upon the very spot where Shakespeare, eighty years before, had
played in the Globe Theatre.
The eloquent Tillotson, too, in these times--more liberal than Baxter or
Doddridge--was writing upon _The Wisdom of Being Religious_ and the right
_Rule of Faith_, and by his catholicity and clear-headedness winning such
favor and renown as to bring him later to the see of Canterbury.
I would have you keep in mind, too, that John Milton was still alive--his
“Samson Agonistes” not being published until Charles II. had been some
twelve years upon the throne--and in quiet seclusion was cultivating and
cherishing that serene philosophy which glows along the closing line of
his greatest sonnet,
“They also serve who only stand and wait!”
_Andrew Marvell._
When upon the subject of Milton, I made mention of a certain poet who used
to go and see him in his country retirement, and who was also assistant to
him in his duties as Latin Secretary to the Council. This was Andrew
Marvell,[74] a poet of so true a stamp, and so true a man, that it is
needful to know something more of him.
He was son of a preacher at Kingston-upon-Hull (or, by metonomy, Hull) in
the north of England. In a very singular way, the occasion of his father’s
sudden death by drowning (if current tradition may be trusted) was also
the occasion of the young poet’s entrance upon greatly improved worldly
fortune.
The story of it is this, which I tell to fix his memory better in mind.
Opposite his father’s home, on the other bank of the Humber, lived a lady
with an only daughter, the idol of her mother. This daughter chanced to
visit Hull, that she might be present at the baptism of one of Mr.
Marvell’s children. A tempest came up before night, and the boatmen
declared the crossing of the river to be dangerous; but the young lady,
with girlish wilfulness insisted, notwithstanding the urgence of Mr.
Marvell; who, finding her resolved, went with her; and the sea breaking
over the boat both were lost. The despairing mother found what consolation
she could in virtually adopting the young Andrew Marvell, and eventually
bestowing upon him her whole fortune.
This opened a career to him which he was not slow to follow upon with
diligence and steadiness. Well-taught, well-travelled, well-mannered, he
went up to London, and was there befriended by those whose friendship
insured success. He was liberal in his politics, beautifully tolerant in
religious matters, kept a level head through the years of Parliamentary
rule, and was esteemed and admired by both Puritans and Royalists. He used
a sharp pen in controversy and wrote many pamphlets, some of which even
now might serve as models for incisive speech; he was witty with the
wittiest; was caustic, humorous; his pages adrip with classicisms; and he
had a delicacy of raillery that amused, and a power of logic that smote
heavily, where blows were in order. He was for a long time member of
Parliament for Hull, and by his honesties of speech and pen, made himself
so obnoxious to the political jackals about Charles’s court--that he was
said to be in danger again and again of assassination; he finally died
under strong (but unfounded) suspicion of poisoning.
Those who knew him described him as “of middling stature, strong set,
roundish face, cherry-cheeked, hazel-eyed, brown-haired.”[75]
There are dainty poems of his, which should be read, and which are worth
remembering. Take this, for instance, from his _Garden_, which was written
by him first in Latin, and then rendered thus:
“What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of a vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.”
And this other bit, from his “Appleton House” (Nuneaton), still more full
of rural spirit:
“How safe, methinks, and strong behind
These trees, have I encamped my mind,
Where beauty aiming at the heart
Bends in some tree its useless dart,
And where the world no certain shot
Can make, or me it toucheth not.
“Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
And, oh, so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place!
But, lest your fetters prove too weak
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through!”
This is better than Rochester’s “Nothing,” and has no smack of Nell Gwynne
or of Charles’s court.
_Author of Hudibras._
It is altogether a different, and a far less worthy character that I now
bring to the notice of the reader. The man is Samuel Butler,[76] and the
book _Hudibras_--a jingling, doggerel poem, which at the time of its
publication had very great vogue in London, and was the literary sensation
of the hour in a court which in those same years[77] had received the
great epic of Milton without any noticeable ripple of applause.
For myself, I have no great admiration for _Hudibras_, or for Mr. Samuel
Butler. He was witty, and wise in a way, and coarse, and had humor; but he
was of a bar-room stamp, and although he could make a great gathering of
the court people stretch their sides with laughter, it does not appear
that he had any high sense of honor, or much dignity of character.
Mr. Pepys (whose memoirs you have heard of, and of whom we shall have more
to tell) says that he bought the book one day in the Strand because
everybody was talking of it--which is the only reason a good many people
have for buying books; and, he continues--that having dipped into it,
without finding much benefit, he sold it next day in the Strand for
half-price. But poor Mr. Pepys, in another and later entry, says, “I have
bought _Hudibras_ again; everybody does talk so much of it;” which is very
like Mr. Pepys, and very like a good many other buyers of books.
_Hudibras_ is, in fact, a great, coarse, rattling, witty lunge at the
stiff-neckedness and the cropped heads of the Puritans, which the
roistering fellows about the palace naturally enjoyed immensely. He calls
the Presbyterians,
“Such, as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies
By infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrines orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly, thorough reformation,
Which always must be going on
And still be doing--never done;
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd, perverse antipathies,
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss.
That with more care keep holyday,
The wrong--than others the right way;
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
The self same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another--for:
Quarrel with mince-pies and disparage
Their best and dearest friend plum-porridge;
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,
And blaspheme custard thro’ the nose.”
It is not worth while to tell the story of the poem--which, indeed, its
author did not live to complete. Its fable was undoubtedly suggested by
the far larger and worthier work of Cervantes; Hudibras and Ralpho
standing in the place of the doughty Knight of La Mancha, and Sancho
Panza; but there is a world between the two.
_Hudibras_ had also the like honor of suggesting its scheme and measure
and jingle to an early American poem--that of _McFingal_, by John
Trumbull--in which our compatriot with less of wit and ribaldry, but equal
smoothness, and rhythmic zest, did so catch the humor of the Butler work
in many of his couplets that even now they pass muster as veritable parts
of _Hudibras_.[78]
Samuel Butler was the son of a farmer, over in the pretty Worcestershire
region of England; but there was in him little sense of charming
ruralities; they never put their treasures into his verse. For sometime he
was in the household of one of Cromwell’s generals,[79] who lived in a
stately country-hall a little way out of Bedford; again, he filled some
dependency at that stately Ludlow Castle on the borders of Wales--forever
associated with the music of Milton’s “Comus.” It was after the
Restoration that he budded out in his anti-Puritan lampoon; but though he
pandered to the ruling prejudices of the time, he was not successful in
his search for place and emoluments; he quarrelled with those who laughed
loudest at his buffoonery and died neglected. His name is to be remembered
as that of one of the noticeable men of this epoch, who wrote a poem
bristling all through with coarse wit, and whose memory is kept alive more
by the stinging couplets which have passed from his pen into common speech
than by any high literary merit or true poetic savor. His chief work in
verse must be regarded as a happy, witty extravaganza, which caused so
riotous a mirth as to be mistaken for valid fame. The poem is a curio of
letters--a specimen of literary bric-à-brac--an old, ingeniously
enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the lid.
_Samuel Pepys._
I had occasion just now to speak of the _Pepys Diary_, and promised later
and further talk about its author, whom we now put in focus, and shall
pour what light we can upon him.[80]
He was a man of fair personal appearance and great self-approval, the son
of a well-to-do London tailor, and fairly educated; but the most piquant
memorial of his life at Cambridge University is the “admonition”--which is
of record--of his having been on one occasion “scandalously over-served
with drink.” In his after life in London he escaped the admonitions; but
not wholly the “over-service” in ways of eating and drinking.
Pepys was a not far-off kinsman of Lord Sandwich (whom he strongly
resembled), and it was through that dignitary’s influence that he
ultimately came into a very good position in connection with the
Admiralty, where he was most intrepid in his examination of tar and
cordage, and brought such close scrutiny to his duties as to make him an
admirable official in the Naval Department under Charles II. For this
service, however, he would never have been heard of, any more than another
straightforward, plodding clerk; nor would he have been heard of for his
book about naval matters, which you will hardly find in any library in the
country. But he did write a _Diary_, which you will find everywhere.
It is a _Diary_ which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles’ reign,
covers the ten important succeeding years; within which he saw regicides
hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the
Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he
first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words
“Lord, have mercy on us!” to the time when ten thousand died in a week,
and “little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells.” Page
after page of his _Diary_ is also given to the great fire of the following
year--from the Sunday night when he was waked by his maid to see a big
light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when
two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes.
But Pepys’ _Diary_ is not so valued for its story of great events as for
its daily setting down of little unimportant things--of the plays which he
saw acted--of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the
galleries--of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife
said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably
through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So--just as you and I might have
done--never having a thought either that his _Diary_ would ever be
printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie
unnoticed and undetected for a great many years, until at last some prying
Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published _Pepys’
Diary_ to the world. And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and
straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the every-day
life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books
ever written.
There have been other diaries which have historic value; there was Hyde,
Earl of Clarendon,[81] with some humor and a lordly grace, who wrote a
_History of the Rebellion_--more than half diary--with sentences as long
as his pages; but it does not compare with Pepys’ for flashes of light
upon the accidents of life. There was good, earnest, well-meaning John
Evelyn,[82] who had a pretty place called Says-Court (inherited through
his wife) down at Deptford--which Scott introduces as the residence of
Essex in his story of _Kenilworth_--who had beautiful trees and flowers
there which he greatly loved. Well, John Evelyn wrote a diary, and a very
good one; with perhaps a better description of the great London fire of
1666 in it than you will find anywhere else; he gives us, too, a
delightful memorial of his young daughter Mary--who read the Ancients, who
spoke French and Italian, who sang like an angel, who was as gentle and
loving as she was wise and beautiful--whose death “left him desolate;”
but John Evelyn is silent upon a thousand points in respect to which Pepys
bristles all over like a gooseberry bush. Dr. Burnet, too, wrote a
_History of his Own Times_, bringing great scholarly attainments to its
execution, and a tremendous dignity of authorship; and he would certainly
have turned up his bishop’s nose at mention of Samuel Pepys; yet Pepys is
worth a dozen of him for showing the life of that day. He is so simple; he
is so true; he is so unthinking; he is the veriest photographer. Hear him
for a little--and I take the passages almost at random:
“_November 9, 1660._--Lay long in bed this morning.
“To the office, and thence to dinner at the Hoope Tavern, given us
by Mr. Ady and Mr. Wine the King’s fishmonger. Good sport with Mr.
Talbot, who eats no sort of fish, and there was nothing else till we
sent for a neat’s tongue.
“Thence I went to Sir Harry Wright’s, where my Lord was busy at
cards, and so I staid below with Mrs. Carter and Evans, who did give
me a lesson upon the lute, till he came down, and having talked with
him at the door about his late business of money, I went to my
father’s, and staid late talking with my father about my sister
Poll’s coming to live with me--if she would come and be as a servant
(which my wife did seem to be pretty willing to do to-day); and he
seems to take it very well, and intends to consider of it.”
And again:
“Home by coach, notwithstanding this was the first day of the King’s
proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to
stand to be hired; yet I got one to carry me home.”
Again:
“_11th November, Lord’s Day._--To church into our new gallery, the
first time it was used. There being no woman this day, we sat in the
foremost pew, and behind us our servants, and I hope it will not
always be so, it not being handsome for our servants to sit so equal
with us. Afterward went to my father’s, where I found my wife, and
there supped; and after supper we walked home, my little boy
carrying a link [torch], and Will leading my wife. So home and to
prayers and to bed.”
Another day, having been to court, he says:
“The Queene, a very little plain old woman, and nothing more in any
respect than any ordinary woman. The Princess Henrietta is very
pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself
with her haire frizzed short up to her eares did make her seem so
much the less to me. But my wife, standing near her, with two or
three black patches on, and well dressed, did seem to me much
handsomer than she. Lady Castelmaine not so handsome as once, and
begins to decay; which is also my wife’s opinion.”
One more little extract and I have done:
“_Lord’s Day, May 26._ After dinner I, by water, alone to
Westminster to the Parish Church, by which I had the great pleasure
of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with
that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done.”
Was there ever anything more ingenuous than that? How delightfully sure we
are that such writing was never intended for publication!
The great charm of Mr. Pepys and all such diary writing is, that it gives
us, by a hundred little gossipy touches, the actual complexion of the
times. We have no conventional speech to wrestle with, in order to get at
its meaning. The plain white lights of honesty and common-sense--so much
better than all the rhetorical prismatic hues--put the actual situation
before us; and we have an approach to that realism which the highest art
is always struggling to reach. The courtiers in their great, fresh-curled
wigs, strut and ogle and prattle before us. We scent the perfumed locks of
Peter Lely’s ladies, and the eels frying in the kitchen. We see Mr. Samuel
Pepys bowing to the Princess Henrietta, and know we shall hear of it if he
makes a misstep in backing out of her august presence. How he gloats over
that new plush, or moire-antique, that has just come home for his
wife--cost four guineas--which price shocks him a little, and sends him
to bed vexed, and makes him think he had better have kept by the old
woollen stuff; but, next Lord’s day being bright, and she wearing it to
St. Margaret’s or St. Giles’, where he watches her as she sits under the
dull fire of the sermon--her face beaming with gratitude, and radiant with
red ribbons--he relents, and softens, and is proud and glad, and goes to
sleep! This Pepys stands a good chance to outlive Butler, and to outlive
Burnet, and to outlive Clarendon, and to outlive John Evelyn.
I may add further to this mention of the old diarist, that at a certain
period of his life he became suspected--and without reason--of complicity
with the Popish plots (of whose intricacies you will get curious and
graphic illustration in _Peveril of the Peak_); and poor Pepys had his
period of prisonship like so many others in that day. He also became, at a
later time, singularly enough, the President of the Royal Society of
England--a Society formed in the course of Charles II.s’ reign, and which
enrolled such men as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton in its early days;
and which now enrols the best and worthiest of England’s scientists.
I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President
now; yet it would appear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his
new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to
have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he
made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should
it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of
Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of
some of his best imitations.
When he died--it was in the early years of the eighteenth century--he left
his books, manuscripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen
College, Cambridge; and there, as I said when we first came upon his name,
his famous _Diary_, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more
than a hundred years.
_A Scientist._
Science was making a push for itself in these times. Newton had discovered
the law of gravitation before Charles II. died; the King himself was no
bad dabbler in chemistry.
Robert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help
him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Royal Society I
spoke of; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and
the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes--devoting his fortune to worthy works;
estimable in private life; dignified and serene; tall in person and
spare--wearing, like every other well-born Londoner, the curled,
long-bottomed wig of France, and making sentences in exposition of his
thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample.
He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully
constructed; and this is the way he says it:
“To be told that an eye is the organ of sight, and that this is
performed by that faculty of the mind which, from its function, is
called visive, will give a man but a sorry account of the
instruments and manner of vision itself, or of the knowledge of that
Opificer who, as the Scripture speaks, formed the eye; and he that
can take up with this easy theory of Vision, will not think it
necessary to take the pains to dissect the eyes of animals, nor
study the books of mathematicians to understand Vision; and
accordingly will have but mean thoughts of the contrivance of the
Organ, and the skill of the Artificer, in comparison of the ideas
that will be suggested of both of them to him, that being profoundly
skilled in anatomy and optics, by their help takes asunder the
several coats, humors, muscles, of which that exquisite dioptrical
instrument consists; and having separately considered the size,
figure, consistence, texture, diaphaneity or opacity, situation, and
connection of each of them, and their coaptation in the whole eye,
shall discover, by the help of the laws of optics, how admirably
this little organ is fitted to receive the incident beams of light
and dispose them in the best manner possible for completing the
lively representation of the almost infinitely various objects of
sight.”
What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Royal
Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal),
is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man
who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Samuel
Pepys wrote his _Diary_?
_John Bunyan._
I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the
Restoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for
this morning.
I think he did never wear a wig. Buckingham, who courted almost all orders
of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would
Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal
Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward
him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and
for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless
we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have
in mind: it is John Bunyan.[83] Not a great name then; so vulgar a one
indeed that--a good many years later--the amiable poet Cowper spoke of it
charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken.
He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bedford, amid fat green meadows,
beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom.
You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from
Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland
Railway; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under
Bunyan’s eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow--a
mile-long road--to the grammar-school at Bedford.
The trees are beautiful thereabout; the grass is as green as emerald; old
cottages are mossy and picturesque; gray towers of churches hang out a
great wealth of ivy boughs; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed
contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks
and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees
that shade country houses.
The aspects have not changed much in all these years; even the cottage of
Bunyan’s tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The
boy received but little schooling, and that at hap-hazard; but he got
much religious teaching from the elders of the Baptist chapel, or from
this or that old Puritan villager. A stern doctrinal theology overshadowed
all his boyish years, full of threatening, fiery darts, and full of golden
streaks of promise.
He was a badish boy--as most boys are; a goodly _quantum_ of original sin
in him; he says, with his tender conscience, that he was “very bad;” a
child of the devil; swearing, sometimes; playing “three old cat” very
often; picking flowers, I dare say, or idly looking at the rooks of a
Sunday. Yet I would engage that the Newhaven High School would furnish
thirty or forty as bad ones as John Bunyan any day in the year. But he
makes good resolves; breaks them again; finally is convicted, but falters;
marries young (and, as would seem, foolishly, neither bride nor groom
being turned of twenty), and she bringing for sole dower not so much as
one dish or spoon, but only two good books--_The Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven_ and _The Practice of Piety_.
Even before this he had been drafted for service in the battles which were
aflame in England--doubtless fighting for the Commonwealth, as most of
his biographers[84] allege. Very probably, too, he was under orders of
that Sir Samuel Luke, who lived near by, and who--as I have mentioned--was
the butt of much of Samuel Butler’s Hudibrastic satire.
Next we hear of him as preacher--not properly sanctioned even by the
non-conforming authorities--but opening that intense religious talk of his
upon whatever and whomsoever would come to hear. Even his friendly Baptist
brothers look doubtfully upon his irregularities; but he sees only the
great golden cross before him in the skies, and hears only the crackle of
the flames in the nethermost depths below. He is bound to save, in what
way he can, those who will be saved, and to warn, in fearfullest way,
those who will be damned.
Hundreds came to hear this working-man who was so dreadfully in earnest,
and who had no more respect for pulpits or liturgies than for
preaching-places in the woods. It was not strange that he offended
against non-conformist acts, nor strange that, after accession of Charles
II. he came to imprisonment for his illegal pieties. This prison-life
lasted for some twelve years, in the which he still preached to those who
would listen within prison walls, and read his Bible, and wrought at
tagged laces (still a great industry of that district) for the support of
his family, a separation from whom--most of all from his poor blind
daughter Mary--was, he says, like “pulling the flesh from his bones.” Over
and over in that reach of prison-life he might have been free if he would
have promised to abstain from his irregular preachments, or if he would go
over seas to America. But he would not; he could not forbear to warn
whomsoever might hear, of the fiery pit, and of the days when the heavens
should be opened. He loved not the thought of over-ocean crossing; his
duties lay near; and with all his radicalism he never outlived a gracious
liking for British kingly traditions, and for such ranking of men and
powers as belonged to Levitical story.
Finally, under Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence (1672), which was
intended more for the benefit of ill-used Romanists than for
Non-conformists, Bunyan’s prison-doors were laid open, and he went to his
old work of preaching in public places. There may have been, as his more
recent biographers intimate, a later (1675) short imprisonment;[85] and
this, or some portion of the previous prison-life, was certainly passed in
that ancient Bedford jail, which, only a few years since, was standing on
Bedford bridge, hanging over the waters of the river Ouse--whose slow
current we shall find flowing again in our story of William Cowper.
And if the whole weight of tradition is not to be distrusted, it was in
this little prison over the river, where passers-by might shout a greeting
to him--that John Bunyan fell into the dreamy fashioning of that book
which has made his name known everywhere, and which has as fixed a place
in the great body of English literature as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” or
Spenser’s _Faery Queen_--I mean the _Pilgrim’s Progress_.
But how is it, the reader may ask, that this tinker’s son, who had so far
forgotten his school learning that his wife had to teach him over again to
read and write--how is it that he makes a book which takes hold on the
sympathies of all Christendom, and has a literary quality that ranks it
with the first of allegories?[86]
Mr. Pepys told plainly what we wanted him to tell; but he had nothing but
those trifles which give a color to every-day life to tell of. If he had
undertaken to make a story of a page long, involving imaginative powers,
he would have made a failure of it; and if he had tried to be eloquent he
would have given himself away deplorably. But this poor _brazier_ (as he
calls himself in his last will), with not one-fourth of his knowledge of
the world, with not one-twentieth of his learning (bald as the old diarist
was in this line), with not one-hundredth part of his self-confidence,
makes this wonderful and charming book of which we are talking. How was
it?
Well, there was, first, the great compelling and informing Christian
purpose in him: he was of the Bible all compact; every utterance of it was
a vital truth to him; the fire and the brimstone were real; the Almighty
fatherhood was real; the cross and the passion were real; the teeming
thousands were real, who hustled him on either side and who were pressing
on, rank by rank, in the broad road that leads to the City of Destruction.
The man who believes such things in the way in which John Bunyan believed
them has a tremendous motive power, which will make itself felt in some
shape.
Then that limited schooling of his had kept him to a short vocabulary of
the sharpest and keenest and most telling words. Rhetoric did not lead him
astray after flowers; learning did not tempt him into far-fetched
allusions; literary habit had not spoiled his simplicities. And again, and
chiefest of all, there was a great imaginative power, coming--not from
schools, nor from grammar teachings--but coming as June days come, and
which, breathing over his pages with an almost divine afflatus, lifted
their sayings into the regions of Poetry.
Therefore and thereby it is that he has fused his thought into such shape
as takes hold on human sympathies everywhere, and his characters are all
live creatures. All these two hundred and twenty years last past the noble
Great-heart has been thwacking away at Giant Grim and thundering on the
walls of Doubting Castle with blows we hear; and poor, timid Christian has
been just as many years, in the sight of all of us, making his way through
pitfalls and quagmires and Vanity Fairs--hard pressed by Apollyon, and
belabored by Giant Despair--on his steady march toward the Delectable
Mountains and the river of Death, and the shining shores which lie
Beyond.