The Art of Letters | Page 6

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." Bunyan, one observes, was always as
ready to defend as to attack himself. The verses he prefixed to The Holy
War are an indignant reply to those who accused him of not being the
real author of The Pilgrim's Progress. He wound up a fervent defence
of his claims to originality by pointing out the fact that his name, if
"anagrammed," made the words: "NU HONY IN A B." Many worse
arguments have been used in the quarrels of theologians.
Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of
countenance, quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech,
I fancy, must have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a
boy, and, as The Pilgrim's Progress shows, even in his later life he had
not lost the humour of calling names. No other English author has ever
invented a name of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly
Wiseman--a character, by the way, who does not appear in the first
edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, but came in later as an afterthought.
Congreve's "Tribulation Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick
Verisopht" are mere mechanical contrivances compared to this triumph
of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's gift for names was in its kind
supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took that form. Even atheists can
read him with pleasure for the sake of his names. The modern reader,
no doubt, often smiles at these names where Bunyan did not mean him
to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was yesterday at Madam
Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do you think
should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four more,
with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's fancifulness,
however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint effects as this.
How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two points in regard
to which he and his family differ in religion from those of the stricter
sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide. Secondly, we are

always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver slippers; we love
much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people
applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us in
toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too
feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend
till more of you be burnt." We do not read The Pilgrim's Progress,
however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than
the play of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques,
but the story of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the
gloom of the realist in Grace Abounding, and with the joy of the artist
in The Pilgrim's Progress. Even in Grace Abounding, however, much
as it is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of
Bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to
prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to
me in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my
poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under
would break my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is
the dominating passion in Grace Abounding. We are never far from the
noise of Hell in its pages. In Grace Abounding man is a trembling
criminal. In The Pilgrim's Progress he has become, despite his
immense capacity for fear, a hero. The description of the fight with
Apollyon is a piece of heroic literature equal to anything in those
romances of adventure that went to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as
God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby
to make a full end of this good man, Christian nimbly reached out his
hand for his sword, and caught it, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O
mine enemy! when I fall I shall arise'; and with that gave him a deadly
thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received a mortal
wound." Heroic literature cannot surpass this. Its appeal is universal.