CHAPTER XIII.
BUNYAN AND OTHER WRITERS OF FICTION
John Bunyan (1628-1688).
So great an endowment is genius, that neither the effect produced nor the fame achieved by all the eloquent and learned divines of Charles II.’s age can be for an instant compared to the achievement of a poor and almost illiterate mechanic, whom Macaulay classes with Milton as one of the only two men of that period – he might have excepted Thomas Burnet – to whom had been vouchsafed any considerable measure of imagination. John Bunyan, the one man who has attained to write a successful prose allegory on a large scale, and to infuse true emotion into an exercise of ingenuity, and who probably owed less to study and training than any other of the great authors of the modern world, was born at Elstow, a village in the neighbourhood of Bedford, in November, 1628. He is usually described as a ‘tinker,’ but, as he was not an itinerant, ‘brazier’ would be a more correct appellation. The trade was his father’s, who was also a very small freeholder. Bunyan probably received some instruction at Bedford grammar school, and his narrative of his boyhood shows that he must have had considerable knowledge of the Bible, which impressed his imaginative temper more than he knew at the time. According to his own account he was wild and profane in his youth, but nothing very definite can be extracted from these self-accusations, and it would rather appear that it was only for a short time that he could even be described as careless. In 1644, partly perhaps from grief at the death of his mother and dissatisfaction with his father’s speedy re-marriage, he enlisted into the army, doubtless the Parliamentary force, though he strangely or prudently leaves the point uncertain. About the end of 1648 he married, and through the influence of his wife, whose name he does not tell us, and by the aid of two religious books which she brought him among her scanty possessions, he accomplished what he afterwards came to consider a merely outward reformation. The attempt to subjugate the inward man involved him for several years in the most distressing spiritual conflicts, described with extreme power in his Grace Abounding. They conducted him eventually to peace, and into the Baptist congregation of Mr. Gifford, who had been helpful to him. In 1655 he became a preacher, and in the following year produced his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened, to which was prefixed a recommendatory letter by John Burton, who says, ‘This man is not chosen out of an earthly, but out of the heavenly university.’
In 1660 the revival under the Restoration government of obsolete enactments against conventicles, with no endeavour to discriminate between seditious conspirators like the Fifth Monarchy men and harmless worshippers like the Baptists, compelled the reluctant Bedford magistrates to arrest and imprison Bunyan as an unlicensed preacher. He might have escaped, or have obtained release by a trifling submission, but with the spirit of a Christian martyr he disdained either course, and abode contentedly in prison for nearly twelve years. His captivity in the commodious county gaol was by no means oppressive; indeed, in the first part of it he enjoyed a large measure of liberty, afterwards withdrawn. He supported himself by making tagged laces, as well as by the publication of some books, of which Grace Abounding (1666) is the most important. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress was also written in prison, but, as Bunyan’s best biographer, Dr. John Brown, almost proves, during a second and comparatively brief confinement in 1676. In 1672 Bunyan published his Defence of Justification by Faith, a coarse and violent attack on the Design of Christianity, by Dr., afterwards Bishop Fowler, one of the most tolerant divines of the age, but who was provoked to reply with almost equal acrimony. In the same year Charles II.’s merciful but entirely illegal suspension of all statutes against Papists and Nonconformists liberated Bunyan, who even obtained a licence to preach, and became stated minister of the Baptist congregation at Bedford, then meeting in a barn in an orchard. Notwithstanding some few molestations, of which the second imprisonment in 1675-76 was the chief, the remainder of his life was in general tranquil and prosperous. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in 1678, and, though not half-a-dozen copies of it are now known to exist, immediately attained the highest popularity. Edition followed edition, the first two or three with remarkable additions and improvements. Bunyan frequently visited London, where he became a popular preacher; his influence was courted, though unsuccessfully, by the government itself, and in 1688, the year of his death, he had become in some sort chaplain to the Lord Mayor, ‘an Anabaptist, a very odd ignorant person,’ says Evelyn. His principal works in the interval had been: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1680; The Holy War, 1682; the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress, 1684; The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, 1688. His death, on August 31st, 1688, took place in London, and was occasioned by cold contracted on a journey which he had undertaken to reconcile a father with his son.
Of Bunyan’s character there can be but one opinion, he was a truly Apostolic man. As no one’s diction is more forcible, unadulterated Saxon, so no life has better expressed the sturdy, sterling virtues of the Englishman. A wider culture would have enriched both his mind and his writings, but with the probable result of turning a remarkable man into an ordinary one. His good sense and his humility are illustrated by a charming anecdote. ‘Ah, Mr. Bunyan,’ said a grateful hearer, ‘that was a sweet sermon!’ ‘You need not tell me that,’ replied Bunyan, ‘the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit.’
It is unnecessary to dwell at any great length upon the characteristics of so famous and universally known a book as Pilgrim’s Progress. Though professedly a vision, and treating of spiritual things, it ranks with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels as one of the great realistic books of the English language. All three are examples of the possibility of rendering scenes wholly imaginary, and in fact impossible, truer to the apprehension than experience itself by the narrator’s own air of absolute conviction, and by unswerving fidelity to truth of detail. In Bunyan’s case the triumph is the more remarkable, as his personages are not even imaginary men and women, but mere embodiments of moral or theological qualities. Yet Faithful and Hopeful are as real as Crusoe and Friday. Before he began to write he must have realized what he wished to describe with a vividness only conceivable by regarding it as an outward expression of his own spiritual experience. He had himself been Christian and Faithful and the captive in Doubting Castle; he had gazed on Vanity Fair, and passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The fact that his allegory is in truth an autobiography explains what Macaulay calls the characteristic peculiarity of Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. Other allegories only amuse the fancy. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears.’ Elsewhere he says, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.’ It may be added that Pilgrim’s Progress, unlike other celebrated works, is a bona fide and unmistakable allegory. Don Quixote may have a much deeper purpose than that of satirizing chivalric romances, but not one reader in a hundred cares to fathom it. Spenser undoubtedly intended to shadow forth Elizabeth in Gloriana; but the perception of the poet’s purpose contributes nothing to the enjoyment of his poem. In Bunyan, however, the allegory is the book, too plain to be overlooked by the most careless reader; and all the minor allegories that combine to enrich the main action are equally apparent for what they are, and yet the obvious invention has all the force of reality. ‘Bunyan,’ says Macaulay, ‘is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors men are mere personifications. The mind of Bunyan, on the other hand, was so imaginative that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. A dialogue between two qualities, in his dream, has more dramatic effect than a dialogue between two human beings in most plays.’ Macaulay proceeds to compare Bunyan in this particular with Shelley, and the comparison is just; but it is surprising that neither he nor Mr. Froude should have dwelt on Bunyan’s deeper affinity to a great predecessor of whom he assuredly never read a line – Dante. Dante’s personifications, indeed, are feeble compared to Bunyan’s; it is doubtful whether some of them are even intended as such. The might of his imagination, however, like Bunyan’s, is shown in his power of reconciling us to its wildest flights by the intensity of his realism; and the chief distinction is that while Bunyan’s materials are necessarily drawn from the only worlds he knew, the narrow and prosaic world of Bedford and the sublime world of the Bible, Dante disposed of all his age could give in philosophy, political life, human learning, the influence of art and the scrutiny of nature. Bunyan is hence a very contracted and terrestrial Dante, but so far as he goes he is a true Dante; he cannot soar with his great predecessor, but if Dante had succeeded him he would not have disdained to have built upon his massive groundwork. Both suffer from the inevitable progress of mankind beyond the conceptions which in their day were accepted as matters of course. Dante’s Inferno now seems rather grotesque than terrible. Christian’s forsaking his kindred in the City of Destruction, which to Bunyan appeared a duty, now seems selfishness. That the fame of both should have survived such profound modifications of belief is one of the most striking evidences of their greatness. One great advantage Bunyan possessed: the Bible had prepared the way for him. There is probably no other such instance of the assimilation of one literature by another as the domestication of the Bible in England. The Greek and Hebrew authors of the Scriptures were better known to the public that Bunyan principally addressed than the majority of their own writers, and he had no need, like other men of original genius, to painfully create the taste by which he was ultimately to be judged. From the first Pilgrim’s Progress took rank as a classic; well might Dr. Arnold call it ‘a complete reflection of Scripture.’ Its chief blemish, the somewhat prosaic and self-seeking character of its piety, harmonized entirely with the current teaching of the pulpit, and offered no stumbling-block to a generation which had not so much as heard of ‘other-worldliness.’ Its popularity soon received the usual attestation of piracies, spurious continuations, and imitations in all languages. The question whether Bunyan was indebted for his allegory to any predecessor is hardly worth discussing. Some general resemblance must necessarily exist between books treating of pilgrimages, and here the resemblance is no more than general. The second part was published in 1684. Its inferiority to the first part is universally admitted, but is less than is usually entailed by the endeavour to append an artificial supplement to an inspired book. Many passages are fully worthy of the first part, and as a whole it abounds with life and variety.
Three only of Bunyan’s numerous publications, besides Pilgrim’s Progress, claim a place in literature: The Holy War (1682); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680); Grace Abounding (1665). Of these The Holy War is the most important, and affords a highly instructive contrast with Pilgrim’s Progress. It is the peculiar virtue of the latter, while full of wisdom and profitableness, to be in no way professedly didactic. Bunyan himself tells us that he did not sit down to compose it; the thoughts came spontaneously into his mind; he wrote it because he could not help himself. There was thus no need for laboriously instilling lessons which inhered in the original conception, and came forward of themselves as the story flowed along. The elaborate construction of The Holy War precludes belief in a like inspiration. There can, in fact, be little doubt that the idea is consciously derived from Paradise Lost. In both the banished fiends cast about for some means of retaliating upon their omnipotent foe; in Milton their attack is levelled against the Garden of Eden, in Bunyan against the soul of man. All human attributes, virtuous or vicious, are allegorized with graphic liveliness, but at length one wearies of the crowd of abstractions; and where strength was most necessary, Bunyan is weak. Emanuel is not godlike, and Diabolus is not terrible. The book is perhaps chiefly interesting as an index to the great progress effected since Bunyan’s time in spirituality as regards men’s religious conceptions, and in freedom and enlightenment as concerns the things of earth. No one would now depict the offended majesty of Heaven as so like the offended majesty of the Stuarts; or deem that the revolters’ offence could be mitigated by the abjectness of their submission; or try criminals with such unfairness; or lecture them upon conviction with such lack of judicial decorum. Bunyan’s own spirit seems narrower than of old; among the traitors upon whom Emanuel’s ministers execute justice he includes not only Notruth and Pitiless, but also Election-doubter and Vocation-doubter, who represent the majority of the members of the Church of England. The whole tone, in truth, is such as might be expected from one nurtured upon the Old rather than the New Testament, and who had never conceived any doubts of the justice of the Israelites’ dealings with the Canaanites. The literary power, nevertheless, is unabated; much ingenuity is shown in keeping up the interest of the story; and there is the old gift of vitalizing abstractions by uncompromising realism of treatment. The following passage is a remarkable instance of the dependence of Bunyan’s style upon his inward mind. Seldom have joy and elation of spirit elevated homely diction into so near an approach to magnificence:
‘Well, I told you before, how the prisoners were entertained by the noble Prince Emmanuel, and how they behaved themselves before him, and how he sent them away to their home with pipe and tabor going before them. And now you must think, that those of the town that had all this while waited to hear of their death, could not but be exercised with sadness of mind, and with thoughts that pricked like thorns. Nor could their thoughts be kept to one point; the wind blew with them all this while at great uncertainties, yea, their hearts were like a balance that had been disquieted with shaking hand. But at last as they, with many a long look, looked over the wall of Mansoul, they thought that they saw some returning to the town; and thought again, who should they be? At last they discerned that they were the prisoners. But can you imagine, how their hearts were surprised with wonder! Especially when they perceived also in what equipage, and with what honour they were sent home. They went down to the camp in black, but they came back to the town in white; they went down to the camp in ropes, they came back in chains of gold; they went down to the camp with their feet in tatters, but they came back with their steps enlarged under them; they went also to the camp looking for death, but they came back from thence with assurance of life; they went down to the camp with heavy hearts, but came back again with pipe and tabor playing before them. So, so soon as they were come to Eye-gate, the poor and tottering town of Mansoul adventured to give a shout; and they gave such a shout, as made the captains in the Prince’s army leap at the sound thereof. Alas! for them, poor hearts, who could blame them, since their dead friends were come to life again! For it was to them as life from the dead, to see the ancients of the town of Mansoul to shine in such splendour. They looked for nothing but the axe and the block; but behold! joy and gladness, comfort and consolation, and such melodious notes attending of them, that was sufficient to make a sick man well. So when they came up, they saluted each other with Welcome, welcome, and blessed be he that spared you. They added also, we see it is well with you, but how must it go with the town of Mansoul, and will it go well with the town of Mansoul, said they? Then answered them the Recorder, and my lord Mayor, Oh! tidings! glad tidings! good tidings of good; and of great joy to poor Mansoul! Then they gave another shout, that made the earth to ring again. After this, they enquired yet more particularly, how things went in the camp, and what message they had from Emmanuel to the town. So they told them all passages that had happened to them at the camp, and every thing that the Prince did to them. This made Mansoul wonder at the wisdom and grace of the Prince Emmanuel; then they told them what they had received at his hands, for the whole town of Mansoul; and the Recorder delivered it in these words, Pardon, Pardon, Pardon for Mansoul; and this shall Mansoul know to-morrow. Then he commanded, and they went and summoned Mansoul to meet together in the market-place to-morrow, there to hear their general pardon read.
‘But who can think what a turn, what a change, what an alteration this hint of things did make in the countenance of the town of Mansoul; no man of Mansoul could sleep that night for joy; in every house there was joy and music, singing and making merry, telling and hearing of Mansoul’s happiness was then all that Mansoul had to do; and this was the burden of all their song, “Oh! more of this at the rising of the sun! more of this to-morrow! Who thought yesterday, would one say, that this day would have been such a day to us? And who thought, that saw our prisoners go down in irons, that they would have returned in chains of gold! Yea, they that judged themselves as they went to be judged of their judge, were, by his mouth, acquitted, not for that they were innocent, but of the Prince’s mercy, and sent home with pipe and tabor.”’
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman is a piece of prose indeed, and its realism is, perhaps, the more effective from being wholly devoid of the least particle of imagination. The genesis and purpose of the book are thus stated by the author: ‘As I was considering with myself what I had written concerning the progress of the Pilgrim from this world to glory, and how it had been acceptable to many in this nation, it came again into my mind to write, as then of him that was going to heaven, so now of the life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to hell.’ Had this conception been strictly carried out, the narrative must have been a failure from the want of admixture of light and shade. The Christian of the Pilgrim’s Progress is a mixed character, and though we are scarcely in doubt as to the ultimate success of his adventure, this is sufficiently chequered with peril and hardship to keep our interest alert. This evidently cannot be the case with Mr. Badman, whose career is not only a monotony, but a monotony of sordid evil; and who only excites a flickering sort of interest in virtue of the sympathy naturally felt for the victim of the animosity of his creator. Bunyan, however, has not been faithful to his original plan, and has in a measure redeemed one fault in art by committing another. As a rule, nothing is more reprehensible in a fiction than inordinate digression; but here it is the greatest relief to be turned away from the repulsive career of Mr. Badman to the running commentary in which Bunyan opens his mind on a variety of subjects, spiritual and secular, ranging from earnest rebukes of the maxim to be anon formulated as ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,’ to foolish stories of the deaths of persecutors, quite in the vein of the Methodist anecdotes satirized by Sydney Smith. This garrulity is greatly promoted by the inartistic character of the machinery employed, a dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, which allows the writer to say whatever he pleases. It is evident that he has real persons and actual transactions continually in his mind, and it would not be surprising to learn that his book made no inconsiderable commotion in the town of Bedford.
Grace Abounding resembles thousands of similar narratives in essentials, differing principally in the vigour with which a terrifying religious experience is portrayed. It does not, as some seem to have taken for granted, terminate with what would be technically considered as Bunyan’s conversion; on the contrary, a large portion is employed in recording his agonies of apprehension long after he had become a recognized religious instructor, even so late as the beginning of his imprisonment, when he was so little acquainted with the law as to suppose himself in jeopardy of the gallows. Much might be said in censure or compassion of his lamentably distorted views of divine things; but one thing cannot be said: there is not from first to last the slightest symptom of cant. The book is more sincere than Rousseau’s Confessions, but could not, like that book, have helped a Carlyle or a George Eliot to learn that there was something in them. As Pilgrim’s Progress may be termed a prosaic Divine Comedy, so might the Bunyan of Grace Abounding rank as a prosaic Augustine, but an Augustine without a Monica. With the rarest exceptions, self is its beginning, middle, and end; it is only when the author for a space becomes, unlike Cardinal Newman, conscious of the existence of something besides God and his own soul, that we catch the real moral of his tale, which he himself was far from intending or perceiving. In his own incomparably forcible words: ‘I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to beware of. I can truly say, and that without dissembling, that when I have been to preach I have gone full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit-door, and there it hath been taken off; and I have been at liberty in my mind until I have done my work, and then immediately, even before I could get down the pulpit-stairs, I have been as bad as I was before.’ What is this but to own that self-seeking is unprofitable even when cloaked with piety and contrition; that there is no true peace save in disinterested service?
Aphra Behn (1640-1689).
Violent indeed is the transition from John Bunyan to Aphra Behn, but in fact the living fiction of the age is almost summed up in these two names. But for the demonstration of the contrary afforded by the state of French literature since 1830, one would almost have been inclined to formulate it as a maxim that the drama and the novel cannot flourish together. The almost utter barrenness of the Restoration age in the latter class of literature is certainly very remarkable. All needful conditions seemed present in a teeming national life, clever writers, and a public that craved to be amused. It seems difficult to offer any explanation except that it had as yet occurred to none to depart from French models, and that the French exemplars of the day, like Samuel Weller, disdained all under the degree of ‘a female markis.’ Hence the healthy realism without which the English novel cannot prosper was impossible, and it was left to the Fieldings and Smolletts of the next age to effect a momentous revolution in art by the simple discovery that for the novelist’s purpose, ‘Jack was as good as his master.’ One variety of fiction, apparently still popular at the Restoration, gradually died out – the interminable romance of the Clelia class, by which French polite society under Louis XIII. had replaced the exploded romance of chivalry. Of the few examples of this which English literature still produced, it will suffice to name Lord Orrery’s Parthenissa, whose heroine, as an example of chastity, lived long enough to be dethroned by Pamela. Mrs. Behn’s tales, it need not be said, are constructed upon principles in every respect antipodal to Parthenissa; they are, however, much less objectionable than her comedies. They are on the French pattern, brief and bright, but inevitably conventional. At the present day, however, when the disuse of an equally conventional fashion is restoring action to the rank from which it had been almost displaced by dialogue, Mrs. Behn’s tales might be not unprofitably read as examples of movement and condensation; and occasionally of strong situation, of which she rarely makes the most. The most celebrated is Oroonoko, the groundwork of Southern’s play, and itself founded on facts within the authoress’s knowledge. Among other remarkable passages is one descriptive of the effects of the electric eel. Mrs. Behn’s stories are types of a large number of miniature romances, apparently little noticed in their own day, and utterly unknown in ours, which they have not always reached in other fashion than Protus’s
‘Little tract on worming dogs,
Whereof the name, in sundry catalogues,
Is extant yet.’
‘This class of literature,’ says Mr. Gosse, ‘was treated with marked disdain, and having been read to pieces by the women, was thrown into the fire.’ One specimen, Incognita, deserves a word of mention as the first work of the youthful Congreve. Some variety was introduced into pure fiction by the importation from France by Mrs. Manley, already mentioned as a dramatist, of the political novel, in which the actions of living monarchs and statesmen were represented under transparent disguises. The presses of Amsterdam and Cologne had long teemed with such productions, and Mrs. Manley’s Atalanta and Zarah are conspicuous English examples. Another romance, A New and further Discovery of the Isle of Pines, in a letter professing to emanate from Cornelius van Sloetton, a Dutchman (1668), deserves some attention from its possible influence on Defoe. It has been represented to be connected with Australian discovery, with which it has in fact nothing to do, the imaginary island being placed in the very centre of the Indian Ocean. It afforded the theme for Voltaire’s joke about the Englishman qui travaillait si bien that the island on which he was wrecked was shortly afterwards found to be peopled by twelve thousand English Protestants.