The Life of John Bunyan

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"The Pilgrim's Progress" exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he
would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential
of Christian preachers. Hallam, however, claims for him another
distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him,
as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many
predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the
natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their
works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way. Bunyan was
the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so
overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness;
while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have
ever proved so universally entertaining. Intensely religious as it is in
purpose, "The Pilgrim's Progress" may be safely styled the first English
novel. "The claim to be the father of English romance," writes Dr.
Allon, "which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to
Bunyan. Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the
creator of the genus." As the parent of fictitious biography it is that
Bunyan has charmed the world. On its vivid interest as a story, its
universal interest and lasting vitality rest. "Other allegorises,"
writes Lord Macaulay, "have shown great ingenuity, but no other
allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its
abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love." Whatever its
deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in
the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological
deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept
Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae
Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even
if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of
the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its
universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of
intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction. "I have,"
says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a long interval, "always been
struck by its piety. I am now struck equally or even more by its
profound wisdom. It seems to be a complete reflexion of Scripture." And
to turn to a critic of very different character, Dean Swift: "I have been
better entertained and more improved," writes that cynical pessimist, "by
a few pages of this book than by a long discourse on the will and
intellect." The favourite of our childhood, as "the most perfect and
complex of fairy tales, so human and intelligible," read, as Hallam says,
"at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or
little regarded," the "Pilgrim's Progress" becomes the chosen companion
of our later years, perused with ever fresh appreciation of its teaching,
and enjoyment of its native genius; "the interpreter of life to all who
are perplexed with its problems, and the practical guide and solace of
all who need counsel and sympathy."

The secret of this universal acceptableness of "The Pilgrim's Progress"
lies in the breadth of its religious sympathies. Rigid Puritan as Bunyan
was, no book is more completely free from sectarian narrowness. Its
reach is as wide as Christianity itself, and it takes hold of every human
heart because it is so intensely human. No apology is needed for
presenting Mr. Froude's eloquent panegyric: "The Pilgrim, though in
Puritan dress, is a genuine man. His experience is so truly human
experience that Christians of every persuasion can identify themselves
with him; and even those who regard Christianity itself as but a natural
outgrowth of the conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly
and make the best of themselves, can recognize familiar footprints in
every step of Christian's journey. Thus 'The Pilgrim's Progress' is a
book which when once read can never be forgotten. We too, every one of
us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back
to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and
learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them.
Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease
to be true to experience." Dr. Brown's appreciative words may be added:
"With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of
us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline
of life. It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold
which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book
above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them. And it is
this which makes it one of the first books translated by the missionary
who seeks to give true thoughts of God and life to heathen men."

The Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" partakes of the character of
almost all continuations. It is, in Mr. Froude's words, "only a feeble
reverberation of the first part, which has given it a popularity it would
have hardly attained by its own merits. Christiana and her children are
tolerated for the pilgrim's sake to whom they belong." Bunyan seems not
to have been insensible of this himself, when in his metrical preface he
thus introduces his new work:

"Go now my little book to every place
Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face.
Call at their door; if any say 'Who's there?'
Then answer thus, 'Christiana is here.'
If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
With all thy boys. And then, as thou know'st how,
Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
Perhaps they'll know them by their looks or name."

But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on the whole,
to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphic power,
such as Bunyan alone could have written. Everywhere we find strokes of
his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it
has added not a few portraits to Bunyan's spiritual picture gallery we
should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to
the memory. The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle
feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still
thoroughly womanly character of Christiana. Great-Heart is too much of
an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly
champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants. But the other
new characters have generally a vivid personality. Who can forget Old
Honesty, the dull good man with no mental gifts but of dogged sincerity,
who though coming from the Town of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the
City of Destruction, was "known for a cock of the right kind," because he
said the truth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing, that most
troublesome of pilgrims, stumbling at every straw, lying roaring at the
Slough of Despond above a month together, standing shaking and shrinking
at the Wicket Gate, but making no stick at the Lions, and at last getting
over the river not much above wetshod; or Mr. Valiant for Truth, the
native of Darkland, standing with his sword drawn and his face all bloody
from his three hours' fight with Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick;
Mr. Standfast, blushing to be found on his knees in the Enchanted Ground,
one who loved to hear his Lord spoken of, and coveted to set his foot
wherever he saw the print of his shoe; Mr. Feeblemind, the sickly,
melancholy pilgrim, at whose door death did usually knock once a day,
betaking himself to a pilgrim's life because he was never well at home,
resolved to run when he could, and go when he could not run, and creep
when he could not go, an enemy to laughter and to gay attire, bringing up
the rear of the company with Mr. Readytohalt hobbling along on his
crutches; Giant Despair's prisoners, Mr. Despondency, whom he had all but
starved to death--and Mistress Much-afraid his daughter, who went through
the river singing, though none could understand what she said? Each of
these characters has a distinct individuality which lifts them from
shadowy abstractions into living men and women. But with all its
excellencies, and they are many, the general inferiority of the history
of Christiana and her children's pilgrimage to that of her husband's must
be acknowledged. The story is less skilfully constructed; the interest
is sometimes allowed to flag; the dialogues that interrupt the narrative
are in places dry and wearisome--too much of sermons in disguise. There
is also a want of keeping between the two parts of the allegory. The
Wicket Gate of the First Part has become a considerable building with a
summer parlour in the Second; the shepherds' tents on the Delectable
Mountains have risen into a palace, with a dining-room, and a looking-
glass, and a store of jewels; while Vanity Fair has lost its former bad
character, and has become a respectable country town, where Christiana
and her family, seeming altogether to forget their pilgrimage, settled
down comfortably, enjoy the society of the good people of the place, and
the sons marry and have children. These same children also cause the
reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course of the
supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are terrified with the
Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch at the boughs for the
unripe plums and cry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are stroked
by the Interpreter; who are catechised and called "good boys" by
Prudence; who sup on bread crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to
bed by Mercy--into strong young men, able to go out and fight with a
giant, and lend a hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and
becoming husbands and fathers. We cannot but feel the want of
_vraisemblance_ which brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks
of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession,
following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The
four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile,
but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
pilgrimage. Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and
making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them together and
make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth,
which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their
dismissal. The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the
river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the
impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together,
and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic
picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.
Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one
but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr.
Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a
tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. "Giants, dragons, and angelic
champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a
preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously
chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the
soul and sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:
"Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it
an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my
reader--Adieu."

Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not detain
us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful
attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the plan of salvation"
in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of
description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque
nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily
wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man,
like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career. In
fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race
are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its
origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that
remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan--John Milton--to
bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render
it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that--

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but when
both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up into the Council
Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of the ever-blessed
Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving, like a sovereign
and his ministers when a revolted province has to be brought back to its
allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us down to the infernal regions,
and makes us privy to the plots and counterplots of the rebel leaders and
hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feel that, in spite of the
magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely
picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded
if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their
essential mysteries. In point of individual personal interest, "The Holy
War" contrasts badly with "The Pilgrim's Progress." The narrative moves
in a more shadowy region. We may admire the workmanship; but the same
undefined sense of unreality pursues us through Milton's noble epic, the
outcome of a divinely-fired genius, and Bunyan's humble narrative,
drawing its scenes and circumstances, and to some extent its _dramatis
personae_, from the writer's own surroundings in the town and corporation
of Bedford, and his brief but stirring experience as a soldier in the
great Parliamentary War. The catastrophe also is eminently
unsatisfactory. When Christian and Hopeful enter the Golden Gates we
feel that the story has come to its proper end, which we have been
looking for all along. But the conclusion of "The Holy War" is too much
like the closing chapter of "Rasselas"--"a conclusion in which nothing is
concluded." After all the endless vicissitudes of the conflict, and the
final and glorious victory of Emmanuel and his forces, and the execution
of the ringleaders of the mutiny, the issue still remains doubtful. The
town of Mansoul is left open to fresh attacks. Diabolus is still at
large. Carnal Sense breaks prison and continues to lurk in the town.
Unbelief, that "nimble Jack," slips away, and can never be laid hold of.
These, therefore, and some few others of the more subtle of the
Diabolonians, continue to make their home in Mansoul, and will do so
until Mansoul ceases to dwell in the kingdom of Universe. It is true
they turn chicken-hearted after the other leaders of their party have
been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close, lurking in
dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel's men. If
Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselves in the streets,
the whole town is up in arms against them; the very children raise a hue
and cry against them and seek to stone them. But all in vain. Mansoul,
it is true, enjoys some good degree of peace and quiet. Her Prince takes
up his residence in her borders. Her captains and soldiers do their
duties. She minds her trade with the heavenly land afar off; also she is
busy in her manufacture. But with the remnants of the Diabolonians still
within her walls, ready to show their heads on the least relaxation of
strict watchfulness, keeping up constant communication with Diabolus and
the other lords of the pit, and prepared to open the gates to them when
opportunity offers, this peace can not be lasting. The old battle will
have to be fought over again, only to end in the same undecisive result.
And so it must be to the end. If untrue to art, Bunyan is true to fact.
Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individual or as the
whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so long as it abides
in "the country of Universe." The flesh will lust against the spirit,
the regenerated man will be in danger of being brought into captivity to
the law of sin and death unless he keeps up his watchfulness and
maintains the struggle to the end.

And it is here, that, for purposes of art, not for purposes of truth, the
real failing of "The Holy War" lies. The drama of Mansoul is incomplete,
and whether individually or collectively, must remain incomplete till man
puts on a new nature, and the victory, once for all gained on Calvary, is
consummated, in the fulness of time, at the restitution of all things.
There is no uncertainty what the end will be. Evil must be put down, and
good must triumph at last. But the end is not yet, and it seems as far
off as ever. The army of Doubters, under their several captains,
Election Doubters, Vocation Doubters, Salvation Doubters, Grace Doubters,
with their general the great Lord Incredulity at their head, reinforced
by many fresh regiments under novel standards, unknown and unthought of
in Bunyan's days, taking the place of those whose power is past, is ever
making new attacks upon poor Mansoul, and terrifying feeble souls with
their threatenings. Whichever way we look there is much to puzzle, much
to grieve over, much that to our present limited view is entirely
inexplicable. But the mind that accepts the loving will and wisdom of
God as the law of the Universe, can rest in the calm assurance that all,
however mysteriously, is fulfilling His eternal designs, and that though
He seems to permit "His work to be spoilt, His power defied, and even His
victories when won made useless," it is but seeming,--that the triumph of
evil is but temporary, and that these apparent failures and
contradictions, are slowly but surely working out and helping forward

"The one unseen divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

"The mysteries and contradictions which the Christian revelation leaves
unsolved are made tolerable by Hope." To adopt Bunyan's figurative
language in the closing paragraph of his allegory, the day is certainly
coming when the famous town of Mansoul shall be taken down and
transported "every stick and stone" to Emmanuel's land, and there set up
for the Father's habitation in such strength and glory as it never saw
before. No Diabolonian shall be able to creep into its streets, burrow
in its walls, or be seen in its borders. No evil tidings shall trouble
its inhabitants, nor sound of Diabolian drum be heard there. Sorrow and
grief shall be ended, and life, always sweet, always new, shall last
longer than they could even desire it, even all the days of eternity.
Meanwhile let those who have such a glorious hope set before them keep
clean and white the liveries their Lord has given them, and wash often in
the open fountain. Let them believe in His love, live upon His word;
watch, fight, and pray, and hold fast till He come.

One more work of Bunyan's still remains to be briefly noticed, as bearing
the characteristic stamp of his genius, "The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman." The original idea of this book was to furnish a contrast to
"The Pilgrim's Progress." As in that work he had described the course of
a man setting out on his course heavenwards, struggling onwards through
temptation, trials, and difficulties, and entering at last through the
golden gates into the city of God, so in this later work his purpose was
to depict the career of a man whose face from the first was turned in the
opposite direction, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and
more irretrievably evil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his
life full of sin and his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of
his sins in hopeless sinfulness. That this was the original purpose of
the work, Bunyan tells us in his preface. It came into his mind, he
says, as in the former book he had written concerning the progress of the
Pilgrim from this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the
life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to
hell. The new work, however, as in almost every respect it differs from
the earlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it. It is totally unlike
"The Pilgrim's Progress" both in form and execution. The one is an
allegory, the other a tale, describing without imagery or metaphor, in
the plainest language, the career of a "vulgar, middle-class,
unprincipled scoundrel." While "The Pilgrim's Progress" pursues the
narrative form throughout, only interrupted by dialogues between the
leading characters, "Mr. Badman's career" is presented to the world in a
dialogue between a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive. Mr. Wiseman
tells the story, and Mr. Attentive supplies appropriate reflections on
it. The narrative is needlessly burdened with a succession of short
sermons, in the form of didactic discourses on lying, stealing, impurity,
and the other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and which
brought him to his miserable end. The plainness of speech with which
some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman's indulgence
in them described, makes portions of the book very disagreeable, and
indeed hardly profitable reading. With omissions, however, the book well
deserves perusal, as a picture such as only Bunyan or his rival in
lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in
the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town
such as Bedford. It is not at all a pleasant picture. The life
described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean and commonplace.
But as a description of English middle-class life at the epoch of the
Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable for those who wish to put
themselves in touch with that period. The anecdotes introduced to
illustrate Bunyan's positions of God's judgment upon swearers and
sinners, convicting him of a credulity and a harshness of feeling one is
sorry to think him capable of, are very interesting for the side-lights
they throw upon the times and the people who lived in them. It would
take too long to give a sketch of the story, even if a summary could give
any real estimate of its picturesque and vivid power. It is certainly a
remarkable, if an offensive book. As with "Robinson Crusoe" and Defoe's
other tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history before
us. We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded should not
have happened. There are no surprises; no unlooked-for catastrophes; no
providential interpositions to punish the sinner or rescue the good man.
Badman's pious wife is made to pay the penalty of allowing herself to be
deceived by a tall, good-looking, hypocritical scoundrel. He himself
pursues his evil way to the end, and "dies like a lamb, or as men call
it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear," but the selfsame Mr.
Badman still, not only in name, but in condition; sinning onto the last,
and dying with a heart that cannot repent.

Mr. Froude's summing up of this book is so masterly that we make no
apology for presenting it to our readers. "Bunyan conceals nothing,
assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing. He makes his bad man sharp and
shrewd. He allows sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the reward which
such qualities in fact command. Badman is successful; is powerful; he
enjoys all the pleasures which money can bring; his bad wife helps him to
ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace. Bunyan has
made him a brute, because such men do become brutes. It is the real
punishment of brutal and selfish habits. There the figure stands--a
picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most
familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,
as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the Slough of Despond and the
Valley of the Shadow of Death. Pleasures are to be found among the
primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by. Yet the reader
feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would still prefer to be with
Christian."




FOOTNOTES


{1} A small enclosure behind a cottage.