Bunyan Characters (3rd Series) | Page 4

many memorable things about the military art; memorable and
suggestive things that he afterwards put to the most splendid use in the
siege, the capture, and the subjugation of Mansoul.
The Divine Comedy is beyond dispute the greatest book of personal
and experimental religion the world has ever seen. The consuming
intensity of its author's feelings about sin and holiness, the keenness
and the bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the severity of his
revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning, all set ablaze by
his splendid imagination--all that combines to make the Divine
Comedy the unapproachable masterpiece it is. John Bunyan, on the
other hand, had no learning to be called learning, but he had a strong
and a healthy English understanding, a conscience and a heart wholly
given up to the life of the best religion of his religious day, and then, by
sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite
style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual
world. And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses
in John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses
in Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the
noblest of services--the service of spiritual, and especially of personal
religion; but for one appreciative reader that Dante has had Bunyan has
had a hundred. Happy in being so like his Master in so many things,
Bunyan is happy in being like his unlettered Master in this also, that the
common people hear him gladly and never weary of hearing him.
It gives by far its noblest interest to Dante's noble book that we have
Dante himself in every page of his book. Dante is taken down into Hell,
he is then led up through Purgatory, and after that still up and up into
the very Paradise of God. But that hell all the time is the hell that Dante
had dug and darkened and kindled for himself. In the Purgatory, again,

we see Dante working out his own salvation with fear and trembling,
God all the time working in Dante to will and to do of His good
pleasure. And then the Paradise, with all its sevenfold glory, is just that
place and that life which God hath prepared for them that love Him and
serve Him as Dante did. And so it is in the Holy War. John Bunyan is
in the Pilgrim's Progress, but there are more men and other men than its
author in that rich and populous book, and other experiences and other
attainments than his. But in the Holy War we have Bunyan himself as
fully and as exclusively as we have Dante in the Divine Comedy. In the
first edition of the Holy War there is a frontispiece conceived and
executed after the anatomical and symbolical manner which was so
common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in the
English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length
likeness of the author of the Holy War, with his whole soul laid open
and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why, asked Wordsworth, and
Matthew Arnold in our day has echoed the question--why does Homer
still so live and rule without a rival in the world of letters? And they
answer that it is because he always sang with his eye so fixed upon its
object. 'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it was with Dante. And so it was
with Bunyan. Bunyan's Holy War has its great and abiding and
commanding power over us just because he composed it with his eye
fixed on his own heart.
My readers, I have somewhat else to do, Than with vain stories thus to
trouble you; What here I say some men do know so well They can with
tears and joy the story tell . . . Then lend thine ear to what I do relate,
Touching the town of Mansoul and her state: For my part, I (myself)
was in the town, Both when 'twas set up and when pulling down. Let no
man then count me a fable-maker, Nor make my name or credit a
partaker Of their derision: what is here in view Of mine own
knowledge, I dare say is true.
The characters in the Holy War are not as a rule nearly so clear- cut or
so full of dramatic life and movement as their fellows are in the
Pilgrim's Progress, and Bunyan seems to have felt that to be the case.
He shows all an author's fondness for the children of his imagination in
the Pilgrim's Progress. He returns to and he lingers on their doings and
their sayings and their very names with all