pipet Phe ho Ee # 7 BY OF PRINS THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: A LEG! 29 1°24 TURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL ay INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN || 3!) MARCH 14, 1924. By J. W.\MACKAIL LONGMANS, GREEN AND CoO., 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4s° NEW YORK, TORONTO, BOM- BAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS. 1924 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS Tue book about which I am going to speak is one of the great English classics. If, as I think is the case, it is less largely read now than it once was, this is a temporary obscura- tion, in which, from time to time, all classics share. Fashion is capricious, but there may be traced in it, if we extend our survey widely, a certain periodic movement. The masterpieces appeal to fresh generations in different ways and aspects, and in virtue of different qualities. Some of their qualities are temporary and accidental, for all classics, even the greatest, were produced at a particular time and place, in a particular environment. ‘ Kingdoms fall and climates change and races die,’ and not only so, but language alters. I use the term language in its widest sense, as meaning any medium of words or forms or colours or sounds in which the thought and emotion and aspiration of 4 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS man can express themselves, become articu- late, and leave permanent record. ‘The language of men in this wide sense alters, and the historical sense has to be invoked to translate its import into some fresh code of symbols which has displaced those earlier in use. I shall have something to say on this later in relation to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress.” But the effort required to bring the mind and imagination and language of the seventeenth century into touch with our own is not great, and in this case, at least, will be amply repaid. I have used the word ‘ classic.’ That is the highest claim that can be made for any work of art. Its meaning is fairly obvious, but should anyone be disposed to press for some closer definition I would say, without going into technicalities, but only giving a working criterion, that any product of litera- ture or art is a classic, whatever be its date or place of origin, to which we find ourselves continually returning, and which we con- tinually find on returning to it even greater than we had realised. This claim in the case of ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress’ hardly needs vindication. It is now nearly a century since it was formally THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 5 made by Macaulay,in his well-known essay on Bunyan. That essay did not, of course, create the;fame of the work, any more than Addison’s papers in the Spectator created the fame of the ‘ Paradise Lost’; what it did was to register that fame as an accepted thing. But it was only more recently that either the artistic quality of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress ’ or its importance in the history of English literature was adequately appreciated. ‘Three names in this process of increasing apprecia- tion must specially be mentioned. Froude, in his monograph on Bunyan in the © English Men of Letters’ series, published in 1880, may be said to have handled the matter for the first time with fully intelligent sympathy. The late Mr. Hale White (better known under the name of Mark Rutherford) did so again five-and-twenty years later with an even finer touch, and with that lucidity of which he was an unequalled master. And more important for the present purpose than either of these is the introduction written by Sir Charles Firth, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, for an edition of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ published in 1898. Sir Charles Firth is the first living authority upon England of the seventeenth 6 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS century; he is also an accomplished man of letters. It would be an impertinence to praise his introductory essay, whether for the width and depth of its knowledge, for the completeness of its appreciation, or for its literary skill. It is my easier and pleasanter task to follow in his footprints when I invite you to renew your acquantance, if it needs renewal, with this unique product of the English genius. ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’—I speak now of the first part, to which the name properly applies—was begun by Bunyan in the winter of 1675-6 while he was in prison for a few months in the town gaol of Bedford, after Charles II. had been obliged by parlia- mentary pressure to revoke his Declaration of Indulgence, and the persecution of Non- conformists had been reinstated. ‘This gaol, the gatehouse on the bridge over the Ouse, was the ‘den’ in which Bunyan laid him down to sleep, and as he slept dreamed a dream. He resumed and finished it after his release, some time in the spring or early summer of 1676. ‘The break occurs about three-quarters of the way through the story, and is marked by the author with his curious accuracy by the interjected sentence, THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 7 ‘So I awoke from my dream, and slept, and dreamed again.’ It was published early in 1678 at the price of eighteen-pence. Its success was immediate and complete. A second edition followed almost at once, and new editions thereafter were called for every year. During that short imprisonment Bunyan had found out by accident his real genius. It is true that he had developed one side of it ten years earlier when he wrote ‘ Grace Abounding,’ the greatest of all spiritual autobiographies. But that is a thing by itself. It does, no doubt, suggest, and to some degree anticipate, the narrative and dramatic qualities which are so consummate in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ but its scope was strictly limited and its modulations were confined to one key. It would not, by itself, place Bunyan among the masters of literature. ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ un- sealed new springs not only for the author, but for the world. It was in its inception a by-product. Bunyan himself, in the versified preface or apology which he prefixes to it, has told the story of its origin and growth with perfect candour and vivid clearness. One cannot 8 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS begin to quote from that without the tempta- tion to go on, but you will remember how he begins : When at the first I took my pen in hand ‘Thus for to write, I did not understand That I at all should make a little book In such a mode ; nay, I had undertook To make another ; which when almost done, Before I was aware, I this begun. Neither did I but vacant seasons spend In this my scribble ; nor did I intend But to divert myself in doing this From worser thoughts which make me do amiss. Thus I set pen to paper with delight, And quickly had my thoughts in black and white ; For, having now my method by the end, Still as I pulled, it came ; and so I penned It down ; until it came at last to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see. ‘Faster than springtime showers’ came thought on thought, image on image, inci- dent on incident, and one may well believe that in putting them down on paper he, like Shakespeare, hardly blotted a line. He dropped his pen when he did partly because the book had already grown to a size beyond all his expectation, partly however—and this is a more important point—from the artist’s instinct which developed in him from the THE PILGRIMS PROGRESS © 9 moment when he first allowed it exercise. The pressure of matter behind his pen was as strong as ever, but he knew where to stop. Nor, indeed, had he realised the im- portance of his new achievement, or shaken himself quite free from the feeling urged on him frequently enough by some of his brothers in religion, that creative romance was a thing which it was unbecoming or even dangerous for a Christian to handle. ‘Some said, It might do good, others said, No.’ But he had taken a decisive step at a single stroke. He had not only produced a masterpiece, but had created the English novel. He had no suspicion, as Macaulay observes, that he was doing the one; still less was it possible to have the faintest idea that he was doing the other. If he was at all conscious that he had become—the words are Macaulay’s again—‘the most popular religious writer in the English language,’ it was the religious side of his work to which he attached all the importance. He would have been perplexed and probably pained if he could have been told that after two hundred and fifty years his theology would be regarded as obsolete, that the truths upon which he anchored himself would be 10 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS either disbelieved or translated into new terms wholly beyond his comprehension. It would have been little comfort to him if he had been told that he would be looked back to and looked up to as an initiator, or almost as the creator, of the form of literary art which has bulked more largely, and exercised more influence, over life than any other. Yet he was so open-minded that one might be doing him an injustice by this suggestion. In good sense, tolerance, charity, he was in advance of his time. His Puritanism was intense. ‘There is for him no neutral ground between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong. ‘The way is, like the way in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ inflexibly straight; a single step off it is dangerous, a divergence from it is fatal. But his large humanity was even more remarkable, and it kept expanding as his life advanced. Modern readers, at all events, approach ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ as it were, from the other end ; not so much for edification, for the sake of the religious and ethical doctrine set forth in it, as for its narrative and dramatic excellence, its unsurpassed power of characterisation, its humour, its mastery of terse and lucid English. Only THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 11 when we get behind these qualities we can still realise—and if it costs us an effort to- day so much the better—that his “ message ’ —that is to say, those truths or realities which are behind his picture of life, and give it consistence—is fundamental. ‘They remain truths however differently we express and envisage them now. ‘The ethical and spiritual import of * The Pilgrim’s Progress ’ is more fundamentally valid than that of the * Paradise Lost,’ and the kingdom of the classics is so large that there is room in it for two works so completely different in kind and yet that suggest a strange affinity. They represent between them the national character and the spiritual belief of a great age. The English novel was, of course, no sudden growth due to any single inventor. Tentative approaches to it had been made a century earlier by Greene and Lodge and Nash, but these had at the time come to little or nothing. ‘The inchoate novel was swallowed up by the predominance of the drama, and during the period which followed literature went astray in the wilderness of those enormous heroic or _ sentimental romances, the fashion for which did not 12 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS collapse under its own insufferable weight until nearly the end of the seventeenth century. ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is generally called an allegory. That is a word used by Bunyan himself: ‘I fell suddenly into an allegory.’ But, on the title-page, the descrip- tion of the book given is, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream.’ It is in effect like all works of art, a dream in the deeper sense of the word. Allegories, if they are nothing more than allegory, are always tedious., For proof of this we need not go beyond Bunyan’s own ‘Holy War,’ written four years later. In the ‘ Faery Queen’ the allegory is only in the way. Allegorisation was an obsession of the medieval mind ; the age of its universal and disastrous popularity was already over, and in ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress’ it has become merely one form or medium of art, a parti- cular framework which serves to give shape and definition, to give structural quality to material which it would otherwise be difficult toset out. It is the absence of this structural quality which prevents ‘ ‘The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,’ Bunyan’s next work after THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS | 13 ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ which is in effect a realistic novel, from being a work of art in the highest sense. In ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ the allegorical quality does not fetter him, it rather gives him wings. The words he uses himself in speaking of it are many and various : metaphor, parable, figure, shadow, similitude, fable, romance ; but he keeps falling back on the word dream as what comes nearest to the truth. He begins by saying, ‘ As I slept I dreamed a dream,’ and ends with the words, ‘So I awoke, and behold, it was a dream.’ All art is in a sense allegorical, because it is not a record but an interpretation of facts. This applies to fiction just as much as to anything else. Forty years later Defoe wrote ‘ Robinson Crusoe’ as an allegory of his own life and his spiritual experience. We should hardly know this unless he had told us so, but the fact is just one reason for its singular and arresting charm. Both with Bunyan and Defoe, the point is that they projected their own life—and that is as much as to say the life of mankind, for life is one thing—into a book, and so the book is alive. There is a prevalent idea that, for a hundred years or more, ‘The Pilgrim’s 14 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS Progress ’ was a book only read by the vulgar. This is so exaggerated as to be in effect untrue. From the first it was eagerly read and enjoyed by all ranks and classes, not in England only, for it was very soon trans- lated into French and Dutch, as it has since been into nearly all the languages of Europe. In the verses prefixed to the second part Bunyan, who always told the exact truth, says as much as this : My Pilgrim’s Book has travelled sea and land, Yet could I never come to understand That it was slighted, or turned out of door, By any kingdom, were they rich or poor. And later he adds quaintly : Brave gallants do my Pilgrim hug and love ; Young ladies, and young gentlewomen too, Do no small kindness to my Pilgrim shew. It was in the small but well-selected library in Mrs. Wishfort’s dressing-closet in 1700, and Mrs. Wishfort was in the first flight of fashion. The only exception taken to it, in fact, was by the ultra-religious. “ Romance they count it,’ Bunyan says, the only place I think where he uses the word romance, and he devotes himself at some length to arguing against this criticism. Depreciation of the THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 15 book as vulgar did exist, no doubt, during the period of strong classicist reaction known as the Augustan Age ; though even then, if disparaged in a paper which has been wrongly attributed to Addison, Swift speaks of it with praise which is the higher because it is put in studiously quiet words. But, after that, disparagement is confined to the few people who would now be called ‘ high- brows, thin pedants like Mrs. Montague. Johnson’s appreciation is a typical no less than a splendid tribute. It is, he says, ° of great merit both for invention, imagination, and the conduct of the story, and it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind.’ And he said of it even more strikingly that it was one of the only three books ever written that are wished longer by their readers. The idea that it was either long or largely disparaged is mainly due, I think, to misapprehension of Cowper’s well-known couplet, the date of which is 1784—more than ten years after Johnson’s eulogium : I name thee not, lest so despised a name Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame. In this couplet both the existence of its 16 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS fame and the actual merit on which its fame was based are expressly stated. What Cowper hints at is, that the name Bunyan was a little ludicrous, like other words which it is diffi- cult to hitch into poetry. There are other instances of this: Sprat, one of the most eminent men of his time both in letters and science, or, Flatman, Dryden’s contemporary, whose unlucky name has in fact done much to obscure the real excellence of his poetry. Yet it is curious that the plebeian name of Bunyan is Anglo-Norman. The Buingnons or Boynuns. who held it were a family of standing in Bedfordshire as early as the thirteenth century. Macaulay’s essay was written just at the full tide of the Evangelical movement, when ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ was exalted by that school, and was correspondingly depre- ciated by their opponents, as a manual of theology. It is, in fact, just about this time that the most hostile criticismcomes. Dunlop a few years earlier, in his “ History of Fiction,’ had called it coarse and inelegant, and another critic, a little later, mean and weari- some. The immediate occasion of Macaulay’s essay was a sumptuously printed edition of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ with a Life by THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 17 Southey prefixed to it, the appearance of which (though Southey was himself a High Churchman of the old school) was in fact an Evangelical manifesto. It was part of the boom in revived Puritanism just then at its height. But Puritanism is deeply rooted in the national character in one form or another. We may be sure that it will reappear ; the eternal antithesis between Puritanism and Art will be raised once more, and will again, as it does in Bunyan’s work, arrive at some synthesis. For Bunyan’s glory is that he was at one and the same time a Puritan of burning conviction and an artist of irrepres- sible genius, and that in him the two elements for once coalesced. The tendency of the fiction of our own day is, in its pursuit of impressions, to lose touch with reality. It does not penetrate below the surface, and, having no roots, has no permanence. It is an impression of impressions, which fades away and is forgotten. We do not find our- selves returning to it, and if we do return to it, there is even less in it than we thought. To enlarge on the qualities of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ as a work of art would be delightful but endless. I will just single out a few points. B 18 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS The first thing perhaps to notice is the author’s certainty of touch, the completeness with which he has his mechanism in hand. The really accomplished artist may be known by the way in which he begins. The first half-dozen lines of ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress ’ give an example of a perfect beginning : As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Den ; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man - clothed with Rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. In these few words, as in a few strokes by some master of etching, the atmosphere is made, the movement is launched, the effect is got for the whole narrative. But even more remarkable is the skill with which he brings it to an end: Now I saw in my Dream, that these two men went in at the Gate; and lo, as they entered they were trans- figured, and they had Raiment put on that shone like Gold. ‘There was also that met them with Harps and Crowns, and gave them to them; . . . Then I heard in my Dream that all the bells in the City rang again for joy. This by itself would be a fine conclusion, and perhaps almost anyone else, even were THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS ig he possessed of narrative instinct and dramatic power of a high degree, would have stopped here. But Bunyan with a more subtle and accomplished art goes on : Now just as the Gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them ; and behold, the City shone like the Sun, the Streets also were paved with Gold, and in them walked many men, with Crowns on their heads, Palms in their hands, and golden Harps to sing praises withal. ‘There were also of them that had wings, and they answered one another without intermission, saying, Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord. And after that, they shut up the Gates: which when I had seen, I wished myself among them. Notice the beautiful cadence of these last words. They give the quiet ending which was insisted upon by Greek art, and which is so conspicuous in Milton at the close both of the ‘ Paradise Lost’ and of the ‘Samson.’ But even this is not all, for to Bunyan art is not everything, art indeed is nothing. He is an artist only because he cannot help being one. He has had throughout the sense of his message resting on him heavily, and the sort of happy ending which would suit comedy or romance will not satisfy him here. And so by instinctive force of genius he triumphantly transgresses all rules, and 20 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS knits up his work, before letting it go, with the most tremendous passage in the whole book. For other failures or backslidings Bunyan has some touch of sympathetic pity, or at the worst, a certain passionless contempt : for Pliable at the Slough of Despond, for Simple, Sloth, and Presumption laid by the heels asleep at the foot of the Hill Diff- culty, for Formalist and Hypocrisy who were born in the land of Vainglory and were going for praise to Mount Sion, even for the irrepressible Talkative and the ingenious By-ends. ‘To Ignorance alone he is merciless : Now while I was gazing upon all these things, I turned my head to look back, and saw Ignorance come up to the river side; but he soon got over, and that without half that difficulty which the other two men met with. For it happened that there was then in that place one Vain-hope, a ferryman, that with his boat helped him over ; so he, as the other I saw, did ascend the hill to come up to the gate, only he came alone ; neither did any man meet him with the least encourage- ment. When he was come up to the gate, he looked up to the writing that was above ; and then began to knock, supposing that entrance should have been quickly ad- ministered to him, But he was asked by the men that looked over the top of the gate, Whence came you? and what would you have? He answered, I have eat and drank in the presence of the King, and he has taught in our streets. “Then they asked him for his certificate, THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 21 that they might go in and show it to the King. So he fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none. ‘Then said they, Have you none? But the man answered never a word. So they told the King; but he would not come down to see him, but commanded the two Shining Ones that conducted Christian and Hopeful to the City, to go out and take Ignorance and bind him hand and foct, and have himaway. ‘Then they took him up and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill, and put him in there. “Then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction. So I awoke, and behold, it was a dream. Alike for substance and for style this cannot be surpassed in his, or indeed in any, writing. Then the next thing on which stress may be laid is his extraordinary power of charac- terisation. ‘This applies not only to the main figures, but to all those incidentally intro- duced. Each one of them has only to be mentioned in order to become fully alive. Mrs. By-ends, for instance, though she does not appear in person, we know as well as if we had been familiar with her all our lives from her husband’s incidental words, ‘ My Wife is a very vertuous Woman, the Daughter of a vertuous Woman. She came of a very Honourable Family, and is arrived at such a pitch of Breeding, that she knows how to 22 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS carry it to all, even to Prince and Peasant.’ In the most celebrated instance, perhaps (it is in the second part), the personality is given complete in seven words, ‘A young Woman her name was Dull.’ ‘Of this young woman,’ Mr. Hale White says, ‘it is much to be regretted that Bunyan did not give us a further account.’ I do not think so. [he account is entire and perfect as it stands, in its significant vacuity. It requires no addition, and no comment, except to note, for it is worth noticing, that the seven words form only a single phrase. Most modern editions have done their best to spoil it by inserting a comma after the words ‘young Woman.’ This power is equally conspicuous in the relation of incidents and even in the descrip- tion of scenes and landscapes. In the fewest words he makes us see things happen just as they did, and gives us their setting with a clearness which stamps them on the mind once for all. ‘The way to the Celestial City can be followed from one end to the other with the precision of a map. The vignettes of the sights shown in the House of the Interpreter are all perfect in their clearness as well as large in the variation of their range. Teh PAL GRING Ss PROGRESS? 127 They include household pictures like those of the dusty parlour, the two children on their chairs in the little room or the fire against the wall; and alongside of these, romantic or tragic pieces such as the achieve- ment of the Palace and the Man in the Iron Cage. But all alike get their effect in the fewest possible touches, and all alike once read are unforgettable. This is in sharp contrast to the usual method of allegory, which is conventional and not precise. His sensitiveness to nature is like Words- worth’s. Christiana hears ‘in a grove a little way off, on the right hand, a most curious melodious note. They are our country birds,’ is the comment: ‘they sing these notes at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm, and then you may hear them all day long. They make the woods and groves, and solitary places, places desirous to be in.’ Bunyan’s power as a landscapist has hardly been recognised enough. He might be called one of the originators of the English School. ‘Take one instance out of a hundred, the view from the House Beautiful : When the morning was up, they had him to the top of the house, and bid him look south, so he did ; 24 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS and behold at a great distance he saw a most pleasant mountainous country beautified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also, with springs and foun- tains, very delectable to behold. It is interesting to compare this with the landscape work of another great English writer, who was as serious minded as he was romantic, William Morris. You may remember the landscape seen by Michael in ‘ The Man Born to be King’ : Long time he rode, till suddenly When now the sun was broad and high, From out a hollow where the yew Still guarded patches of the dew, He found at last that he had won ‘That highland’s top, and gazed upon A valley that beneath the haze Of that most fair of autumn days Showed glorious, fair with golden sheaves, Rich with the darkened autumn leaves, Gay with the water-meadows green, The bright blue streams that lay between, ‘The miles of beauty stretched away From that bleak hill-side bare and grey, Till white cliffs over slopes of vine Drew ’gainst the sky a broken line. In a way no two methods could be more unlike, but the point is to notice how the one with its exquisite minute detail does not lose breadth of effect, and how the other in its few large swift touches gets an effect THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 25 almost equally vivid. I do not mean to suggest that the two methods should be set against one another or put into competition : for there are many kinds of perfection ; but these are two kinds. Then, again, what is very remarkable in “The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is the author’s conspicuous fairness, the largeness of his dramatic sympathy. His religious belief is, of course, inflexible ; it admits no doubt and no compromise, but he thoroughly under- stands, he even, we might say, humanly sympathises with, the irreligious point of view, and in particular he sees the humorous side both of his hero—if Christian may be called the hero of the work—and of life itself, however grave and even awful a thing lifeis. It is this sense of humour which makes Christian a thoroughly living char- acter. Look at the conversation between him and Evangelist when he has got into such trouble by taking the advice of Mr. Worldly Wiseman : ‘Then said Evangelist, Art not thou the man that 1 aay crying without the walls of the City of Destruc- tion ! Yes, dear Sir, I am the man. Did not I direct thee the way to the little Wicket Gate ? 26 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS Yes, dear Sir, said Christian. How is it then that thou art now out of the way? I met with a gentleman as soon as I had got over the Slough of Despond, who persuaded me that I might, in the village before me, find a man that could take off my burden. What was he? He looked like a gentleman. What said that gentleman to you ? Why, he asked me whither I was going, and I told him, When the Shining One has disentangled Christian and Hopeful from the net ‘he asked moreover, if the Shepherds did not bid them beware of the Flatterer? They answered, Yes: but we did not imagine, said they, that this fine-spoken man had been he.’ Or a little further on, after the sights had been shown to him in the Interpreter’s House, we come to an inimitable touch, when Christian begins to feel what is known to all of us as the museum headache, and timidly suggests, ‘ Sir, is it not time for me to go on my way now?’ Even in the colloquy between Christian and Apollyon there is a dash of mingled candour and humour, for Bunyan is determined to treat even the devil fairly. When reproached by Apollyon with quitting his service, Christian’s answer does THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 27 not take any spiritually high ground ; it is apologetic rather than defiant. ‘ Your ser- vice, he says, “was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, therefore I did as other considerate persons do, look out if perhaps I might mend myself.’ Or when he has asked Faithful to tell the whole story of his experiences, notice the way that he keeps interrupting with some experiences of his own, so that Faithful has to protest feebly, * But, dear brother, hear me out.’ In the discussion between Faithful and Talkative, T'alkative’s manners are much the better of the two, and his complaint that Baithiuly lies atsthe’ catch and) that >this is not for edification ’ is perfectly true. And not only in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ but in. all Bunyan’s later work, there is this wonderful fairness, this appreciation of what may be said on the other side, and this frank recognition of the difficulties, and even, as it may seem, the impossibilities connected with orthodox belief and with Christian practice. As good an instance of this as any occurs towards the end of that very noble discourse, ‘The Heavenly Footman.’ Bunyan has had occasion to mention Lot’s wife, and his comment is this: ‘ His wife looked behind 28 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS her, and died immediately, but let what would become of her, Lot would not so much as look behind him to see her. I have some- times wondered at Lot in this particular.’ Few preachers would be as frank as this. Mr. By-ends, with whose wife we have already made acquaintance, is treated in almost a loving way. In some respects he is amazingly like Shakespeare’s Falstaff ; both have to be turned down in the end, but they have had a full run for their money. The adroitness and fertility with which Mr. By-ends meets the criticism made upon him are hardly less than Falstaff’s own : Is not your name Mr. By-ends of Fair-speech ? ‘That is not my name ;_ but indeed it is a nickname that is given me by some that cannot abide me, and I must be content to bear it as a reproach, as other good men have borne theirs before me. But did you never give an occasion to men to call you by this name ? Never, never! ‘The worst that ever I did to give them an occasion to give me this name was, that I had always the luck to jump in my judgment with the present way of the times, whatever it was, and my chance was to get thereby. But if things are thus cast upon me, let me count them a blessing ; but let not the malicious load me therefore with reproach. Shakespeare might have written that. We can see the grave face with which THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 29 Christiana pretends to taste the nauseous concoction made up by Mr. Skill (the doctor who evades a direct answer to the inquiry what he charges, only saying, ‘ Nay, I hope I shall be reasonable’), when her boy has made himself ill with eating fruit from the garden of the man who keeps the barking dog; we can hear her voice as she says, ‘Oh Matthew, this potion is sweeter than honey.’ We can see the pert little toss of her head with which Mercy remarks, after Mr. Brisk has ceased calling, ‘I might a had husbands afore now, though I spake not of it to any ; but they were such as did not like my condi- tions, though never did any of them find fault with my person.’ And once more, though it is idle to multiply instances of what meets us at almost every other page of the work, there is a stroke of almost malicious humour in the middle of the long religious conversation between Christian and Hopeful on the Enchanted Ground. ‘That was a region “whose air naturally tended to make one drowsy, and the drowsiness is creeping into the discussion. Bunyan perfectly realises this. ‘I believe you have said the truth,’ Hopeful interjects, and we can feel him 30 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS smothering a yawn as he says so; * Are we now almost got past the Enchanted Ground ?’ ‘Why, are you weary of this discourse ? ’ Christian a little testily asks. ‘No, verily,’ answers Hopeful meekly, * but that I would know where we are.’ ‘We have not now above two miles further to go thereon,’ Christian replies: * but let us return to our matter.’ And there is another point also to be noticed, the sense of romance, and even of romantic beauty, which only appears in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ shyly and fitfully, but very remarkably. ‘The finest instance of the romantic thrill is the dream within the dream, which is the last incident in the pageants shown at the House of the Inter- preter. For mingled splendour and terror it bears being set alongside of the ‘ Ancient Mariner’ or the ‘ Belle Dame sans Merci’ : So he took Christian by the hand again, and led him into a chamber, where there was one a rising out of bed ; and, as he put on his raiment, he shook and trembled. Then said Christian, Why doth this man thus tremble ? ‘The Interpreter then bid him tell to Christian the reason of his so doing. So he began, and said, ‘his Night as I was in my sleep, I dreamed, and behold, the Heavens grew exceeding black ; also it thundered and lightened in most fearful wise, that it put me into an agony. So I THE PIEGREVS “PROGRESS +21 looked up in my dream, and saw the clouds rack at an unusual rate ; upon which I heard a great sound of a trumpet and saw also a Man sit upon a cloud, attended with the thousands of heaven ; they were all in flaming fire; also the heavens were on a burning flame. I heard then a voice saying, Arise ye dead, and come to judgment ; and with that the rocks rent, the graves opened, and the dead that were therein came forth ; some of them were exceeding glad, and looked upward ; and some thought to hide themselves under the mountains. Then I saw the Man that sat upon the cloud open the book, and bid the world draw near. Yet there was, by reason of a fierce flame that issued out and came from before him, a convenient distance betwixt him and them, as betwixt the judge and the prisoners at the bar. I heard it also proclaimed to them that attended on the Man that sat on the cloud, Gather together the tares, the chaff, and stubble, and cast them into the burning lake ; and with that, the bottomless pit opened, just whereabout I stood; out of the mouth of which there came in an abundant manner smoke and coals of fire, with hideous noises. It was also said to the same persons, Gather my wheat into the garner. And with that I saw many catched up and carried away into the clouds ; but I was left behind. I also sought to hide myself, but I could not ; for the Man that sat upon the cloud still kept his eye upon me; my sins also came into my mind, and my conscience did accuse me on every side. Upon this I awaked from my sleep. The simpler sense of romantic beauty is found sometimes in scenes and episodes, but more frequently in a mere passing touch here and there, like that of the ‘ grave and 32 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS beautiful damsel? who comes out of the door of the House on the Hill, or that of ‘ the meadow curiously beautified with lilies, and it was green all the year long.’ ‘He was illiterate,’ Macaulay says of Bunyan, ‘but he spoke to illiterate men.’ This needs careful qualification. Illiterate in the sense of not being widely read he certainly was, but illiteracy in its more accurate sense does not depend so much on the quantity of a man’s reading as on the quality of mind which he has brought to it. He knew his Bible thoroughly, and that is in itself a literary education. He had read quantities of the political or religious treatises which were produced in immense volume at that period. As regards works of pure literature, the books which we are certain that he knew may be counted on the fingers of one hand. We cannot go much beyond Foxe’s ‘ Martyrs,’ Quarles’ ‘ Emblems,’ and the ‘Seven Champions of Christendom ’— if these may be called literature. It is all but certain that he had never read, and probable that he had never heard of, the numerous books which have been suggested as origins or suggestions for ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ from the fourteenth-century THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 33 ‘ Pilgrimage of the Soul’ down to the ‘ Faery Queen.” No doubt with his quick intelli- gence and his great receptive power he must have picked a great many things up inci- dentally just as Shakespeare did, but his genius he had direct from nature, and it is this incalculable genius, not education, and not study of models, which made him a master of prose. That same genius did something even more wonderful: it let him recapture, alone in his age, and for once only, the authentic note of the great lyric period. The copy of verses beginning : Who would true valour see, Let him come hither, if they came to us without any indication of their origin, would certainly be called Elizabethan ; for their actual date they are unique. It is as though he had taken up the torch just where Nash, nearly a century before, had laid it down. The exaggerated notions about Bunyan’s illiteracy are like the exaggerations about his belonging to the lowest class of the people. That was not the case. Whether as a boy he went to Bedford Grammar School as Shakespeare did to the Grammar School at Stratford is uncertain. The status of the C 34 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS family corresponded pretty nearly to that of Shakespeare’s. His father was not a tinker in the modern sense of the word, but a brazier or whitesmith, quite a reputable occupation. The whole thing rests on a misconception of some expressions of his own which are of elaborate, even ostentatious, humility: ‘I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father’s house in a very mean condition,’ and elsewhere, “My father’s house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land.’ The accent is precisely like that of Gideon in the Book of Judges: “Behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.’ That humility is a sort of inverted pride. It was in both cases an assertion of spiritual dignity independent of rank or wealth. The other two books which, according to Johnson, were the only ones which their readers wish longer are ‘ Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Don Quixote,’ and this triad have resemblances to one another which are very remarkable. All three were written in mature or even advanced age. Bunyan was fifty, Defoe fifty-eight, Cervantes fifty- seven at the time when they produced their THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 35 masterpieces. It is a curious coincidence that this holds good likewise for Bunyan’s greatest contemporaries. Dryden, had he died at fifty, would only be known as a minor poet; and Milton, had he died at fifty-five, would indeed hold a very dis- tinguished place in English letters, but as a lyrical poet whose great poetical gift had dried up early. All three were subsequently followed up by their authors by a second part or continuation. In the case of ‘ Robinson Crusoe” the second part followed almost immediately, but there was an interval of six years in the case of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and of ten years in the case of ‘Don Quixote.’ All three stand quite alone among the voluminous and multiform pro- ducts of their authors; so much so, that when the author’s name is mentioned, it is the single book that is instinctively thought of. All three have had circulation and fame, not only in their native country but through- out the world ; and all three owe little to any predecessor (except in so far as Defoe has to be regarded as carrying on the tradi- tion of Bunyan), while they have been a source of inspiration to whole schools of subsequent writers. 36 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS The parallel between Cervantes and Bunyan in particular is very striking. It is not only in their mixture of satire with high idealism. It is not only in their humane and splendid wisdom—for of ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress’ also might be said what the late Sir Walter Raleigh finely says of * Don Quixote, “It is a mine, deep below deep.’ It is so close as to suggest the notion that Bunyan must have read ‘ Don Quixote’ in Shelton’s translation. This is within the limits of possibility, but is very unlikely. Continuations are notoriously dangerous, but these two are exceptions. In both there is a curious feature of which there is hardly a third example, that the first part is treated in the continuation as a known work, familiar not only to the readers of the second part, but to the characters in it. This device, and the intricate humour with which it is treated, have always been noted in ‘ Don Quixote’ as marks of the unique genius of Cervantes, but they are equally conspicuous here. “There are but few houses,’ says Mr. Sagacity, ‘that have heard of him and his doings, but have sought after and got the records of his pilgrimage.’ On the Delectable Mountains the shepherds tell THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 37 Christiana and her companions of the man whom they see tumbling the hills about, ‘That man was the son of one Great-grace, of whom you read in the first part of the record of the Pilgrim’s Progress. Then said Mr. Great-heart, I know him.’ Later on, one Mr. Tell-true is reported as having told Mr. Valiant-for-truth how Christian had killed a serpent that did come out to resist him in his journey. That serpent, in fact, we only hear of now for the first time: it is not mentioned in the first part. Valiant-for-truth then goes on to give a summary sketch of the main incidents of Part I., as they had been told to him by his father and mother. It includes the surprising information that, according to some authorities, Christian ‘after all his adventures was certainly drowned in the Black River and never went foot further, however it was smothered up.’ The immediate occasion for a second part was in both cases the flood of imitations and spurious continuations of the first part which its popularity had let loose. It is only in the second part of ‘Don Quixote’ that the powers of Cervantes are fully mani- fested. This is not so with ‘ The Pilgrim’s 38 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS Progress.’ The second part is at a lower temperature than the first. It has not the same tension, it has not the same elevation, it has not the same dramatic unity. But it marks a further step of great importance in the development of prose fiction. ‘There is much freer handling. There is greater variety and multiplicity of incident. It takes in a larger field of human nature. Not only are there many more characters but they are of much more varied kinds. Indeed, this second part might almost be called the first example in England of the picaresque novel on a large canvas. In it Bunyan even seems now and then to forget his moral purpose, throwing allegory for the moment completely overboard and abandon- ing himself to the delight of realistic por- traiture and of romantic incident or sentiment. Its movement from first to last is very leisurely, in strong contrast to the swiftness of the first part. There are many digressions, which are only kept from spreading quite beyond bounds by what may be called the geographical framework, the map of the route and its stages, taken over from Part I. But even there the secularisation or humanisa- tion of the whole outlook on life was begin- THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 39 ning occasionally to break in. Some scandal was caused among purists by phrases and passages in both parts where Bunyan wrote more like a man of the world than like a Nonconformist minister. The sentence in which he mentions that the lock of the gate of Doubting Castle ‘ went damnable hard ’ was actually altered by scrupulous editors. A like exception was taken to the passage where Great-heart applauds Mr. Honest as ‘a cock of the right kind.’ Cock-fighting was one of the pastimes to which Bunyan, in his autobiography, deplores that his own youth had been addicted. But evi- dently his taste for it had not wholly disappeared. But in Part II. we feel the breath of the open air throughout. Never, except in the noble conclusion (to which I shall return), is the tension acute. The road, like the story, unrolls itself in a leisurely fashion. It is pleasantly diversified by adventures with giants, by prolonged visits at the houses of friends, by frequent junketings, and by little episodes of no particular relevance, except that they make the story more interesting and more of a picture of common daily life. We move gently through a 40 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS country ‘made green with the running of rivers, and gracious with temperate air.’ We are never in any anxiety about the travellers, for we have complete confidence in Mr. Great-heart, who is indeed no other than Bunyan himself ; and he makes fun of them upon occasion inimitably. Christiana’s loss of her pocket-flask at the arbour on the Hill Difficulty is almost like a deliberate bur- lesque of Christian’s loss of his roll there, and his bitter remorse over it. ‘The scene of Christian’s fight with Apollyon has already become a tourist resort, with an inscription carved on a monument at the roadside giving an account of the battle, and with stains of Christian’s blood, like those of Rizzio’s on the floor of Holyrood Palace, carefully preserved, while the comment of the guide is that Christian in that battle “showed himself as stout as Hercules him- self.’ The Valley of the Shadow of Death has ceased to be awful and has become only disagreeable or frightening. Vanity Fair is quite a desirable place to live in. The townspeople have an esteem and respect for the Pilgrims ; and the Pilgrims in their turn grew acquainted with many of the people of the town, and ‘did them what service THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 41 they could.’ Instead of being put in the cage or killed they make up a party to kill a serpent “that came out of the woods and slew many of the people of that town and would also carry away their children.” The whole company stay for more than a month at the house of Gaius, ‘ who keeps an excellent table,’ which the Pilgrims thoroughly appre- ciate. And they stay apparently for several years at Mr. Mnason’s, where—note the delicacy of the distinction—there is ‘a very fair dining-room.’ Christiana tips the porter half a sovereign when she leaves the Palace Beautiful. Mercy sets her heart on the great looking-glass that hangs up in the dining-room at the House of the Shepherds. Christiana asks what ails her, for she does not look well, and when told, says at once that she will mention it to the shepherds. ‘Then, Mother,’ says Mercy, ‘if you please, ask the shepherds if they are willing to sell it.” Of course she gets it, and of course she gets it for nothing. It is a good world that we are in and a cheerful one. After Giant Despair has been killed (‘he struggled hard,’ Bunyan tells us, ‘and had as many lives as a cat’), the Pilgrims are very jocund and merry. 42 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute ; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson. The lesson she played was very likely by Blow. Purcell’s sonatas had been pub- lished the year before. But Bunyan may perhaps have been thinking back to his own youth and the music of Byrd or Lawes. And Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency’s daughter Much-afraid by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. ‘True he could not dance without one crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well ; also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely. As for Mr. Despondency, the music was not much to him ; he was for feeding rather than dancing, for that he was almost starved. So Christiana gave him some of her bottle of spirits for present relief, and then prepared him some- thing to eat; and in a little time the old gentleman came to himself and began to be finely revived. It is a pretty picture of Puritan England ; and perhaps not a misleading one. Further on, the Enchanted Ground, only lightly sketched in in Part I. as a “sleepy place,’ becomes here a romantic fairyland, with secret arbours in tangled briar thickets, with a mist (like that round about Camelot in Tennyson) that settles down strangely and as strangely drifts away, and with a witch- THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 43 woman in the heart of it, ‘by virtue of whose sorceries this ground is enchanted.’ It is through this episode with its imagina- tive or romantic treatment that Bunyan leads up from the common daylight of the earlier scenes to his magnificent conclusion. Here we are in some Land East of the Sun, where there is no earthly night and day. The Shining Ones walk in it. The bells so ring, and trumpets continually sound so melo- diously, that they could not sleep, and yet they received as much refreshing as if they had slept never so soundly. ‘Here also all the noise of them that walked the streets was, More Pilgrims are come to town.’ ‘The words and their musical cadence are both almost an exact reproduction of the famous Lenten is come with love to town, the loveliest of English lyrics of the earlier fourteenth century. Children go into the King’s garden and gather nosegays, and the post comes in daily from the Celestial City. It is in this setting that Bunyan ends his work, with the dispersal of the company and the farewells of Christiana to all her com- panions. ‘There is a wonderful touch here, the delicacy and beauty of which are seldom quite realised. One hardly likes to speak of 44 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS it, SO poignant is it in its reticence and depth of meaning, and yet it would be a pity to miss it. ‘To the others Christiana has words of comfort or encouragement or exhortation, very practical and very beautiful; to one alone among them she says nothing. ‘ But she gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring.’ In his last words Bunyan makes a half promise to continue the story. He did not do so, and he was right. His work was rounded off and concluded. It was for other hands in later times to take up, and handle after their own fashion, the art which he had created. But he had unlocked the door. He had made the English novel, with its large, searching treatment of actual life, possible. He had given it method and aim, and a consciousness of both. The pilgrimage of life has received a thousand interpretations since; this one remains unique in truth and beauty. The two parts of “ The Pilgrim’s Progress’ might almost be called an English prose ‘Tliad’ and ‘ Odyssey.’ ‘To weigh one work of art against another is not a very profitable occupation. But by the common judgment of mankind, in both these cases the earlier work of the two is also the greater. It is THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 45 more concentrated and more elevated ; not perhaps more interesting, but more majestic and impressive. Bunyan, in fact, inserted a few additional episodes in the second edition of Part I. He did well to insert no more: but a considerable amount of the contents of Part II. might be called spare material from Part I., which would have overloaded its structure. Or one might say, without insisting on its accuracy, that Part I. is an epic, Part IJ. a romance. It is in virtue of its epic quality, its sustained nobility, that Part I. takes its place in literature. “Io more modern taste, its theological discussions, like the battle-scenes in the ‘ Iliad,’ have seemed to bulk disproportionately, and to deal with matters that had lost their interest and their relevance to actual life. But, in both cases, to remove these would be fatal. The artist’s control over them is secure; they belong to, they are inseparable from, they are alive in, a single organic structure. Nor, perhaps, are we so inclined now to slight or discard them as we should have been twenty or even ten years ago. Bunyan was more than an artist ; and ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is more than a work of art. The ‘ similitude of a dream’ 46 THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS is also the clear vision of one who had probed life to its depths. It is the statement of and the appeal to truths which, under whatever form they may be expressed from one age to another, are unchangeable: that there is but one way; that the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, is fundamental ; that the laws of God are inflexible and inevitable; that ignorance, so far from being a venial error, still less a flaunted merit, is a vice and a sin, the root of all other sins and vices. Implicit on every page is the doctrine formally laid down a generation later by Bishop Butler: ‘Things are what they are, and their con- sequences will be what they will be; why then should we seek to be deceived?” That is a truth which, simple as it seems, has continually to be soatatedt Bunyan held, as part of his deen conviction, the Hoceine of predestination. But the argument that predestination carries with it absence of human responsibility was to him not so much false as meaningless. Responsibility was an abstraction. It did not trouble him; it did not even interest him. Sin, and the consequences of sin, were facts. So, too, was the forgiveness of THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 47 sin. But here we touch on deep matters ; and in these, no less than as a work of art, “The Pilgrim’s Progress’ may be left to pro- duce its own impression. ‘If a man was to come here as we do now, he might see that that would be delightful to him. Some have wished that the next way to their Father’s House were here, that they might be troubled no more ; but the way is the way, and there’s an end.’ Printed in England at THE BALLANTYNE PRESS SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co. LTD. Colchester, London & Eton i Na ee . HT +e ify yi i tPA ee hav