Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend
congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind me
of that," replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of the
pulpit." On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a
constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he
knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a
devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a
key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and
a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr.
Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his
self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye
of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in
the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his
hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from
orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his
followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like,
where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to
the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he
relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and
ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a
neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted
manner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." This
passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in
_Grace Abounding_, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but
the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless
remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the
next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a
day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling,
and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or
four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things of
God." That seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in
English literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with
which Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next.
If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because he
was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the
insubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feeling
that he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people,
Bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--the
skin and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly that
Bunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter of fact,
Bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. His great and singular
gift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with a
name like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality as
Hamlet.
If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his
conception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story of
hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only was
there that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but
there was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We
have in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ almost every property of romantic
adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the
fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _Treasure Island_.
There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the
action of the story as they interrupt the interest of _Grace Abounding_.
But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the
author had the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he
wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, he was not definitely thinking of the
edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of
commonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self to
gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." Later on, in
reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in
fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to
catch fish,
They must be groped for, and be tickled too,
Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do.
But in its origin _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was not a tract, but the
inevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. And what wild
adventures those were every reader of _Grace Abounding_ knows. There were
terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he
charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but
were as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled," he
wrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him--I got sweetness
from it." And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle
attempts to entice him to sin. "Sometimes, again, when I have been
preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and
strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the
congregation." Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his
spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the
Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations
for the soul. No sentence in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is more suggestive
of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair
is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives,
husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls,
silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder
that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil's
traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and
applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday
sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong
if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself,
indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own
confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable
past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be
produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My
foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am
not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the
fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they
be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and
well." Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack
himself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant reply
to those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by
pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "NU
HONY IN A B." Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of
theologians.
Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance,
quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must
have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the
humour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a name
of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character,
by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "Tribulation
Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanical
contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's
gift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took
that form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his
names. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where
Bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was
yesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do
you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four
more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's
fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint
effects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two
points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those
of the stricter sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide.
Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver
slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines,
and the people applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us
in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too
feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend
till more of you be burnt." We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play
of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the
story of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the gloom
of the realist in _Grace Abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in
_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Even in _Grace Abounding_, however, much as it
is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of
Bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to
prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to me
in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my
poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under would
break my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is the
dominating passion in _Grace Abounding_. We are never far from the noise
of Hell in its pages. In _Grace Abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. In
_The Pilgrim's Progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity for
fear, a hero. The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece of
heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that
went to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught
it, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall
arise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back,
as one that had received a mortal wound." Heroic literature cannot surpass
this. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonder
that there exists even a Catholic version of _The Pilgrim's Progress_, in
which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian
remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His
imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a
seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a
Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to
Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from
sinking into a pulpit generalization.