The Art of Letters | Page 5

be one of the most beautiful sentences in English literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with which Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next. If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because he was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the insubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feeling that he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people, Bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--the skin and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly that Bunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter of fact, Bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. His great and singular gift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with a name like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality as Hamlet.
If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his conception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story of hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only was there that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but there was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We have in The Pilgrim's Progress almost every property of romantic adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as Treasure Island. There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the action of the story as they interrupt the interest of Grace Abounding. But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the author had the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, he was not definitely thinking of the edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of commonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self to gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." Later on, in reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to catch fish,
They must be groped for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do.
But in its origin The Pilgrim's Progress was not a tract, but the inevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. And what wild adventures those were every reader of Grace Abounding knows. There were terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but were as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled," he wrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him--I got sweetness from it." And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle attempts to entice him to sin. "Sometimes, again, when I have been preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the congregation." Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations for the soul. No sentence in The Pilgrim's Progress is more suggestive of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil's traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself, indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and well."