Pilgrim'sProgress the Finest ofAll Allegories
Bunyan's Story Full of the Spirit of the Bible – The Simple Tale of Christian's Struggles and Triumph Appeals to Old and Young
No contrast could be greater than that between Milton and John Bunyan unless it be the contrast between their masterpieces, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress. One was born in the purple and had all the advantages that flow from wealth and liberal education; the other was the son of a tinker, who had only a common school education and who from boyhood was forced to work for a living. Milton produced a poem nearly every line of which is rich in allusions to classical literature and mythology; Bunyan wrote an allegory, as simple in style as the English Bible, but which was destined to have a sale in English-speaking countries second only to the Bible itself, from which its inspiration was drawn.
Milton knew many lands and peoples; he was one of the great scholars of all ages, and in literary craftsmanship has never been surpassed by any writer. Bunyan never traveled beyond the bounds of England; he knew only two books well, the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, yet he produced one of the great literary masterpieces which profoundly influenced his own time and which has been the delight of thousands of readers in England and America, because of the simple human nature and the tremendous spiritual force that he put into the many trials and the ultimate victory of Christian.
John Bunyan was born in 1628 near Bedford, England, and he lived for sixty years. His father was a tinker, a calling that was held in some disrepute because of its association with wandering gypsies. The boy was a typical Saxon, large and strong, full of rude health; but by the time he was ten years old he began to show signs of an imagination that would have wrecked a weaker body. Bred in the rigid Calvinism of his day, he began to have visions of the consequences of sin; he began to see that he was perilously near to the consuming fire which the preachers declared was in store for all who did not repent and seek the Lord.
The stories of his early years remind one of the experiences of Rousseau. Between the man of supreme literary genius and the epileptic there is a very narrow line, and more than once Bunyan seemed about to overstep this danger line. At seventeen the youth joined the Parliamentary army and saw some service. The sudden death of the soldier next to him in the ranks made a profound impression upon his sensitive mind; he seemed to see in it the hand of the Lord which had been stretched out to protect him.
On his return from the wars he married a country girl, who brought him as a marriage portion a large number of pious books. These Bunyan devoured, and they served as fuel to his growing sense of the terrible results of sin. Of his spiritual wrestlings in those days he has given a very good account in Grace Abounding, a highly colored autobiography in which he is represented as the chief of sinners, driven to repentance by the power of God. The fact is that he was a very fine young Puritan and his only offense lay in his propensity to profane swearing.
Out of this mental and moral turmoil Bunyan emerged as a wayside preacher who finally came to address small country congregations. Soon he became known far and wide as a man who could move audiences to tears, so strong was the feeling that he put into his words, so convincing was the picture that he drew of his own evil life and the peace that came when he accepted the mercy of the Lord. He went up and down the countryside and he preached in London.
Finally, in 1660, he was arrested under the new law which forbade dissenters to preach and was thrown into Bedford jail. He had then a wife and three children, the youngest a blind girl whom he loved more than the others. To provide for them he learned to make lace. The authorities were anxious to free Bunyan because his life had been without reproach and he had made many friends, but he refused to take the oath that he would not preach. For twelve years he remained in Bedford jail, and it is in these years that he conceived the plot of Pilgrim's Progress and wrote most of the book, although it was three years after his release before the volume was finally in form for publication.
Bunyan in a rhymed introduction to the book apologizes for the story form, which he feared would injure the work in the eyes of his Puritan neighbors, but the allegory proved a great success from the outset. No less than ten editions were issued in fourteen years. It made Bunyan one of the best known men of his time and it added greatly to his influence as a preacher. He wrote a number of other works, including a fine allegory, The Holy War, but none of these approached the Pilgrim's Progress in popularity.
When one takes up the Pilgrim's Progress in these days it is always with something of the same feeling that the book inspired in childhood. Then it ranked with the Arabian Nights as a thrilling story, though there were many tedious passages in which Christian debated religious topics with his companions. Still, despite these drawbacks, the book was a great story, full of the keenest human interest, with Christian struggling through dangers on every hand; with Giant Despair and Apollyon as real as the terrible genii of Arabian story, and with Great-heart a champion who more than matched the mysterious Black Knight in Ivanhoe.
Bunyan, out of his spiritual wrestlings, imagined his conflict with the powers of evil as a journey which he made Christian take from his home town along the straight and narrow way to the Shining Gate. Reproduced from his own imaginative sufferings were the flounderings in the Slough of Despond and his experiences in the Vale of Humiliation, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and in Vanity Fair, where he lost the company of Faithful.
It is difficult, unless one is very familiar with the book, to separate the adventures in the first part from those in the second part, which deals with the experiences of Christiana and her children. It is in this second part that Great-heart, the knightly champion of the faith, appears, as well as the muck-raker, who has been given so much prominence in these last few years as the type of the magazine writers, who are eager to drag down into the dirt the reputations of prominent men. In fact, Bunyan's allegory has been a veritable mine to all literary people who have followed him. For a hundred years his book remained known only to the poor for whom it was written. Then its literary merits were perceived, and since then it has held its place as second only to the Bible in English-speaking lands.
Bunyan, in his years in prison, studied the Bible so that his mind was saturated with its phraseology, and he knew it almost by heart. Every page of Pilgrim's Progress bears witness to this close and loving study. The language of the Bible is often used, but it blends so perfectly with the simple, direct speech of Bunyan's characters that it reads like his own work. The only thing that betrays it is the reference to book and verse. A specimen of Bunyan's close reading of the Bible may be found in this list of curiosities in the museum of the House Beautiful on the Delectable Mountains:
"They showed him Moses' rod; the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera; the pitcher, trumpets and lamps, too, with which Gideon put to flight the armies of Midian. Then they showed him the ox's goad wherewith Shambar slew six hundred men. They showed him also the jaw-bone with which Samson did such mighty feats. They showed him, moreover, the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath; and the sword, also, with which their Lord will kill the Man of Sin, in the day that he shall rise up to prey."
And here is a part of Bunyan's description of the fight between Apollyon and Christian in the Valley of Humiliation:
"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said: 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die, for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further; here will I spill thy soul.' * * * In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and heard as I did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made, nor what sighs and groans burst from Christian's heart. I never saw him all the while give so much as one pleasant look, till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon with his two-edged sword; then, indeed, he did smile, and look upward; but it was the dreadfulest sight that I ever saw."
The miracle of this book is that it should have been written by a man who had little education and small knowledge of the great world, yet that it should be a literary masterpiece in the simple perfection of its form, and that it should be so filled with wisdom that the wisest man may gain something from its pages. Literary genius has never been shown in greater measure than in this immortal allegory by the poor tinker of Bedfordshire.
OldDr. Johnson andHis Boswell
His Great Fame Due to His Admirer's Biography – Boswell's Work Makes the Doctor the Best Known Literary Man of His Age
The last of the worthies of old English literature is Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose monumental figure casts a long shadow over most of his contemporaries. The man whom Boswell immortalized and made as real to us today as though he actually lived and worked and browbeat his associates in our own time, is really the last of the great eighteenth century writers in style, in ways of thought and in feeling. Gibbon, who was his contemporary, appears far more modern than Johnson because, in his religious views and in his way of appraising historical characters, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a hundred years in advance of his time. Dr. Johnson therefore may be regarded as the last of the worthies who have made English literature memorable in the eighteenth century, and his work may fittingly conclude this series of articles on the good old books.
Yet in considering Dr. Johnson's work we have the curious anomaly of a man who is not only far greater than anything he ever wrote, but who depends for his fame upon a biographer much inferior to himself in scholarship and in literary ability. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell Esquire is the title of the book that has preserved for us one of the most interesting figures in all literature. Commonly it is known as Boswell's Johnson. Though written over a hundred years ago, it still stands unrivaled among the world's great biographies.
Boswell had in him the makings of a great reporter, for no detail of Johnson's life, appearance, talk or manner escaped his keen eye, and for years it was his custom to set down every night in notebooks all the table talk and other conversation of the great man whom he worshiped. In this way Boswell gathered little by little a mass of material which he afterward recast into his great work. Jotted down when every word was fresh in his memory, these conversations by the old doctor are full of meat.
If Johnson was ever worsted in the wit combats that took place at his favorite club, then Boswell fails to record it; but hundreds of instances are given of the doughty old Englishman's rough usage of an adversary when he found himself hard pressed. As Goldsmith aptly put it: "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."
Samuel Johnson was the son of a book-seller of Litchfield. He was born in 1709 and died in 1784. His early education was confined to a grammar school of his native town. The boy was big of figure, but he early showed traces of a scrofulous taint, which not only disfigured his face but made him morose and inclined to depression. But his mind was very keen and he read very widely. When nineteen years of age he went up to Oxford and surprised his tutors by the extent of his miscellaneous reading.
His college life was wretched because of his poverty, and the historical incident of the youth's scornful rejection of a new pair of shoes, left outside his chamber door, is probably true. Certain it is that he could not have fitted into the elegant life of most of the undergraduates of Pembroke College, although today his name stands among the most distinguished of its scholars. In 1731 he left Oxford without a degree, and, after an unhappy experience as a school usher, he married a widow old enough to be his mother and established a school to prepare young men for college. Among his pupils was David Garrick, who became the famous actor. In 1737 Johnson, in company with Garrick, tramped to London. In the great city which he came to love he had a very hard time for years. He served as a publisher's hack and he knew from personal experience the woes of Grub-street writers.
His first literary hit was made with a poem, London, and this was followed by the Life of Richard Savage, in which he told of the miseries of the writer without regular employment. Next followed his finest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Then Johnson started a weekly paper, The Rambler, in imitation of The Spectator, and ran it regularly for about two years. For some time Johnson had been considering the publication of a dictionary of the English language. He issued his prospectus in 1747 and inscribed the work to Lord Chesterfield. He did not secure any help from the noble lord, and when Chesterfield showed some interest in the work seven years after, Johnson wrote an open letter to the nobleman, which is one of the masterpieces of English satire. In 1762 Johnson accepted a Government pension of £300 a year, and after that he lived in comparative comfort. The best literary work of his later years was his Lives of the Poets, which extended to ten volumes.
Johnson was not an accurate scholar, nor was he a graceful writer, like Goldsmith; but he had a force of mind and a vigor of language that made him the greatest talker of his day. He was one of the founders of a literary club in 1764 which numbered among its members Gibbon, Burke, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other famous men of genius. Though he was unpolished in manners, ill dressed and uncouth, Johnson was easily the leader in the debates of this club, and he remained its dominating force until the day of his death.
The best idea of Dr. Johnson's verse may be gained from London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. These are not great poetry. The verse is of the style which Pope produced, but which the modern taste rejects because of its artificial form. Yet there are many good lines in these two poems and they reflect the author's wide reading as well as his knowledge of human life. The Lives of the Poets are far better written than Johnson's early work, and they contain many interesting incidents and much keen criticism. These, with some of Johnson's prayers and his letter to Lord Chesterfield, include about all that the modern reader will care to go through.
The Chesterfield letter is a little masterpiece of satire. Johnson, it must be borne in mind, had dedicated the prospectus of his Dictionary to Chesterfield, but he had been virtually turned away from this patron's door with the beggarly gift of £10. For seven years he wrought at his desk, often hungry, ragged and exposed to the weather, without any assistance; but when the end was in sight and the great work was passing through the press, the noble lord deigned to write two review articles, praising the work. And here is a bit of Dr. Johnson's incisive sarcasm in the famous letter to the selfish nobleman:
"Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it."
Of Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson only a few words can be said. To treat it properly one should have an entire article like this, for it is one of the great books of the world. A good preparation for taking it up is the reading of the reviews of it by Macaulay and Carlyle. These two essays, among the most brilliant of their authors' work, give striking pictures of Boswell and of the man who was the dictator of English literature for thirty years. Then take up Boswell himself in such a handy edition as that in Everyman's Library, in two volumes. Read the book in spare half hours, when you are not hurried, and you will get from it much pleasure as well as profit. It is packed with amusement and information, and it is very modern in spirit, in spite of its old-fashioned style.
Through its pages you get a very strong impression of old Dr. Johnson. You laugh at the man's gross superstitions, at his vanity, his greediness at table, his absurd judgments of many of his contemporaries, his abuse of pensioners and his own quick acceptance of a pension. At all these foibles and weaknesses you smile, yet underneath them was a genuine man, like Milton, full of simplicity, honesty, reverence and humility – a man greater than any literary work that he produced or spoken word that he left behind him. You laugh at his groanings, his gluttony, his capacity for unlimited cups of hot tea; but you recall with tears in your eyes his pathetic prayers, his kindness to the old and crippled pensioners whom he fed and clothed, and his pilgrimage to Uttoxeter to stand bare-headed in the street, as penance for harsh words spoken to his father in a fit of boyish petulance years before.
RobinsonCrusoe and Gulliver'sTravels
Masterpieces of Defoe and Swift Widely Read – Two Writers of Genius Whose Stories Have Delighted Readers for Hundreds of Years
Two famous books that seem to follow naturally after Pilgrim's Progress are Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Not to be familiar with these two English masterpieces is to miss allusions which occur in everyday reading even of newspapers and magazines. Probably not one American boy in one thousand is ignorant of Robinson Crusoe. It is the greatest book of adventure for boys that has ever been written, because it relates the novel and exciting experiences of a castaway sailor on a solitary island in a style so simple that a child of six is able to understand it. Yet the mature reader who takes up Robinson Crusoe will find it full of charm, because he can see the art of the novelist, revealed in that passion for minute detail to which we have come to give the name of realism, and that spiritual quality which makes the reader a sharer in the fears, the loneliness and the simple faith of the sailor who lived alone for so many years on Juan Fernandez Island.
In all English literature there is nothing finer than the descriptions of Robinson Crusoe's solitary life, his delight in his pets, and his care and training of Friday. Swift's work, on the other hand, is not for children, although young readers may enjoy the ludicrous features of Gulliver's adventures. Back of these is the bitter satire on all human traits which no one can appreciate who has not had hard experience in the ways of the world. These two books are the masterpieces of their authors, but if any one has time to read others of their works he will be repaid, for both made noteworthy contributions to the literature that endures.
Daniel Defoe, the son of a butcher, was born in 1661 and died in 1731. Much of his career is still a puzzle to literary students because of his extraordinary passion for secrecy. He gained no literary fame until after fifty years of age, although he had written many pamphlets and had conducted a review which gave to Addison the idea of The Spectator. Defoe engaged in mercantile business and failed. He also wrote much for the Government, his pungent and persuasive style fitting him for the career of a pamphleteer. But his independence and his lack of tact caused him to lose credit at court and he fell back upon literature. He may be called the first of the newspaper reporters, before the day of the daily newspaper, and he first saw the advantage of the interview. No one has ever surpassed him in the power of making an imaginary narrative seem real and genuine by minute detail artfully introduced.
The English-reading public was captured by Robinson Crusoe. Four editions were called for in four months, and Defoe met the demand for more stories from his pen by issuing in the following year Duncan Campbell, Captain Singleton and Memoirs of a Cavalier. It is evident that Defoe had written these works in previous years and had not been encouraged to print them. Readers of today seldom look into these books, but the Memoirs are noteworthy for splendid descriptions of fights between Roundheads and Cavaliers, and Captain Singleton contains a memorable narrative of an expedition across Africa, then an unknown land, which anticipated many of the discoveries of Mungo Park, Bruce, Speke, and Stanley.
Defoe's other works are Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Roxana, and Journal of the Plague Year. Years ago I read all the novels of Defoe, taking them up at night after work hours. They are not to be commended as books that will induce sleep, because they are far too entertaining. Defoe's story of the great plague in London is far more striking than the records of those who actually lived through the terrible months when a great city was converted into a huge charnel-house by the pestilence that walketh by noonday. Pepys in his Diary has many passages on the plague, but these do not appeal to one as Defoe's story does, probably because Pepys did not have the literary faculty.
The three other stories all deal with life in the underworld of London. Defoe in Moll Flanders and Roxana depicts two types of the courtesan and, despite several coarse scenes, the narratives of the lives of these women are singularly entertaining. The only dull spots are those in which he indulges in his habit of drawing pious morals from the vices of his characters. From these stories one may get a better idea of the London of the early part of the eighteenth century than from books which were specially written to describe the customs and manners of the time, because Defoe regarded nothing as too trivial to set down in his descriptions.
Defoe wrote his masterpiece from materials furnished by a sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who returned to London after spending many years of solitude on the Island of Juan Fernandez. The records of the time give a brief outline of his adventures, and there is no question that Defoe interviewed this man and received from his lips the suggestion of his immortal story. But everything that has made the book a classic for three hundred years was furnished by Defoe himself.
The life of the story lies in the artfully written details of the daily life of the sailor from the time when he was cast ashore on the desolate island. Even the mature reader takes a keen interest in the salvage by Crusoe of the many articles which are to prove of the greatest value to him, while to any healthy child this is one of the most absorbing stories of adventure ever written. The child cannot appreciate Crusoe's mental and moral attitude, but the mature reader sees between the lines of the solitary sailor's reflexions the lessons which Defoe learned in those hard years when everything he touched ended in failure.
Jonathan Swift may be bracketed with Defoe, because he was born in 1667 and died in 1745, only fourteen years after death claimed the author of Robinson Crusoe. As Defoe is known mainly by his story of the island castaway, so Swift is known by his bitter satire, Gulliver's Travels, although he was a prolific writer of political pamphlets. Swift is usually regarded as an Irishman, but he was of English stock, although by chance he happened to be born in Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and he had the great advantage of several years' residence at the country seat of Sir William Temple, one of the most accomplished men of his time.
There he was associated with Esther Johnson, a poor relation of Temple's who later became the Stella who inspired his journal. Swift, through the influence of Temple, hoped to get political preferment, but though he wrote many pamphlets and a strong satire in verse, The Tale of a Tub, his hopes of office were disappointed. Finally he obtained a living at Laracor, in Meath, and there he preached several years, making frequent visits to London and Dublin.
Like Defoe, Swift wrote English that was modern in its simplicity and directness. He never indulged in florid metaphor or concealed his thought under verbiage. Everything was clear, direct, incisive. While Defoe accepted failure frankly and remained untinged with bitterness, Swift seemed to store up venom after every defeat and every humiliation, and this poison he injected into his writings.
Although a priest of the church, he divided his attentions for years between Stella, the woman he first met at Sir William Temple's, and Vanessa, a young woman of Dublin. He was reported to have secretly married Stella in 1716, but there is no record of the marriage. Seven years later he broke off all relations with Vanessa because she wrote to Stella asking her if she were married to Swift, and this rupture brought on the woman's death. Stella's death followed soon after, and the closing years of Swift were clouded with remorse and fear of insanity.
In Gulliver's Travels Swift wrote several stories of the adventures of an Englishman who was cast away on the shores of Lilliput, a country whose people were only six inches tall; then upon Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants sixty feet high; then upon Laputa, a flying island, and finally upon the land of the Houyhnhnms, where the horse rules and man is represented by a degenerate creature known as a Yahoo, who serves the horse as a slave. In the first two stories Gulliver's satire is amusing, but the picture of the old people in Laputa who cannot die and of the Yahoos, who have every detestable vice, are so bitter that they repel any except morbid readers. Yet the style never lacks clearness, simplicity and force, and one feels in reading these tales that he is listening to the voice of a master of the English tongue.