TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE
The old world of fairy tale.
The hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers and the English novelists was not a period of great story-telling like the fifty that were to follow it, or the first half of the nineteenth century. It is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a complete change of audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a light-hearted and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new one. The change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular before and after.
Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling of the first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of The Anatomy of Melancholy. He is referring to spoken tales, but his description applies quite as well to tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in the most solitarie times busie our minds with, are cards, tables and dice ... merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, theeves, cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material of Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's Faërie Queene, of the early rogue books, and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by Greene and Lodge and Pettie.
A more sober spirit.
By 1640 things had already changed a little. James Mabbe, the quaint flavour of whose Tudor style, endearing as the moss on an old house, reminds us that he published his translation of six of the Exemplary Novels before Cervantes had been dead for a quarter of a century, felt that he had to apologise for them to the more sober spirit of the time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,' he writes, 'both in Church and Common-weale, will sometimes leave off their more serious discourses, and entertain themselves with matters of harmelesse Merriment and Disports. Such are these stories I present unto your view. I will not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading them, but I promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so often varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in the end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the mid-seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible that the simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss by these people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a Cromwell and a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a Pilgrim's Progress. Only, in contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident appeal to a Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents, and happy conclusions—a delight only different from that of the Elizabethans in its anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it had enjoyed them.
JOHN BUNYAN
Bunyan's world.
Before the Pilgrim's Progress was written there had come to be two parties in the audience: one with an epicurean delight in loose living, and one whose care was for a stern decency that postponed all flamboyance to a future life. The men of the first party flung their roses the more joyously for their antagonism to the sober black of the others, and were all the merrier for the thought that most of the community held them damned, although, when Bunyan wrote, theirs was the outward victory. Consciences were violently stirred, and so were either hardened absolutely, or else unmistakably alive. If you were good you were very very good, and if you were bad you were horrid, like the little girl in the rhyme. There had been revolutions and counter-revolutions; and likes and dislikes were pretty strongly marked, because men had had to fight for them.
Bunyan's business was the description of a pilgrim's progress through a world thus vividly good and bad. His choice of allegory as a method allowed him to illustrate at the same time the earnestness of his times and their extraordinary clarity of sensation. It was a form ready to his hand. The authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its English retaining the savour of a style then out of date, formed at once his writing and his method, as it constituted his education. 'My Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings.' And, himself a minor prophet, he could quote from Hosea: 'I have used similitudes.'
The justification of allegory.
Bunyan's use of them was very different from Spenser's. Hazlitt said of The Faërie Queene that, if you left the allegory alone, it would leave you; and his advice may be safely followed. It is not so with Bunyan, and his allegory must be defended in another manner. It needs defence, for although it is one of the oldest and pleasantest ways of producing wisdom-laden stories, it is so easy to use badly that people have become a little out of patience with it. We remember the far-fetched explanations tagged on to the Gesta Romanorum, and refuse any longer to be fobbed off with puzzles that are easy to make and hard to solve. We demand that a book shall have cost its author at least as much as it costs us. Allegory is like fantasy, either worthless, or not to be bought with rubies and precious stones; with anything, in fact, but blood. When Bunyan writes:
'It came from my own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dribble it daintily,'
he sets up the one plea that is an absolute justification of his method; that it is 'dribbled daintily,' and came from the depths of him. The old monks wrote their stories, and searched their heads for a meaning. But Bunyan thought for himself, and could not think without seeing. His heart's talk was in passionate imagery.
Bunyan and the early painters.
He was the son of a tinker, and a tinker himself, and saw his visions as clearly as he saw his tin pans. His book is never opalescent with the shifting colours of a vague mysticism. It is painted in tints as sharp and bright and simple as Anglo-Saxon words. Bunyan had to throw himself into no trance in order to watch the pilgrim's arrival at the New Jerusalem. The Celestial City was as real to him as London, and there seemed to him no need to describe it in a whisper. His eyes were as childlike as those of the early painters, who clothed the builders of the Tower of Babel in fifteenth-century Italian costume, put a little bonnet on the head and a flying cloak about the shoulders of Tobias, and set soft leather boots on the feet of the angel. The whole of the Pilgrim's Progress is contemporary with Mr. Pepys. '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, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, named 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.' It might be Mr. Pepys himself describing the frolic of some friends. And yet it was the most natural, righteous thing in the world, since Great Heart had killed Giant Despair, and Despondency and Much-afraid had just been freed from the dungeons of Doubting Castle.
The Fear of Life.
It is characteristic of the English spirit that the greatest national classic of piety should be written by a man whose relish for life was in no way blunted by his thoughts of immortality. Bunyan had a fear of life no less real than his fear of God, and loved both God and life the better for fearing them. Men set capital letters to the Fear of God, and there is a Fear of Life no less different from cowardice. Bunyan, a brave man, imprisoned again and again for his beliefs, and more than once in imminent danger of hanging, shows in a passage of his Grace Abounding this Fear of Life in a very glare of light. Bunyan had loved bell-ringing, and, after he had come to consider it not the occupation of a man whose profession was so perilous and serious as a Christian's, he could not help going to the belfry to watch those whose scruples still allowed them his favourite pastime.
'But quickly after, I began to think, "How if one of the bells should fall?" Then I chose to stand under a main beam, that lay athwart the steeple from side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I thought again, should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam. This made me stand in the steeple door; and now thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding. So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go any further than the steeple door; but then it came into my head, 'How if the steeple itself should fall?' And the thought (it may, for aught I know, when I stood and looked on) did continually so shake my mind, that I durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple should fall upon my head.'
A man who felt as vividly as that, and was as stout as Bunyan, taking existence as he would take a nettle, took it with a grip as firm as that of love, and loved and feared his life as he loved and feared his God. He knew that brightness and clarity of sensation desired by Stendhal when he wrote, 'The perfection of civilisation would be to combine all the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with the more frequent presence of danger.' Life was very actual to him, and so, in this account of a pious dream, we find the clearest prophecy of that sense for reality that distinguishes the novels of the eighteenth century. The Pilgrim's Progress was the first great story of that series of books that was to paint the English character in the eyes of the world.
Facts.
A fact is something very like an Englishman. It is a thing complete in itself, and satisfactory on that account. There is no vanity about a fact, and, as a people, we hate showing off. I can think of no other nation as hungry for fact as ours, none with a book that corresponds to the Newgate Calendar and has been so popular, none with a book of spiritual adventure so actual as the Pilgrims Progress, none with a book of bodily adventure comparable with Robinson Crusoe. Defoe and Bunyan stand for the plain facts of religion and existence, in both of which they found so English a delight.
The instinct for verisimilitude.
Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank fairy tale demanding a certain licence of nature to make possible its supernatural events. Like the Romance of the Rose, unlike the Faërie Queene, it takes its licence in its first sentence—'As I slept, I dreamed'—and is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases without much loss of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and continuity, is of the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality that made Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no longer be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And Defoe, writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality very much more conscientiously developed.
DANIEL DEFOE
With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe, if he had described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it as short-winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with verisimilitude, and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read Defoe,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of Justice.' No compliment could have pleased him better.
Lamb and Defoe.
The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the East India House, immediately after the labour of entering the accounts of a tea sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of Defoe's books that goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The author,' writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting to notice that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of Flaubert's maxim, that a writer should be everywhere invisible in his work, and that his books should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully impressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phases, till you cannot choose but believe them.' Then follows the sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers.'
The new world of matter-of-fact.
There is little to add to that, though Lamb 'had not looked into them latterly,' or he would have noticed in Defoe's books, with his quick eye for such things, Defoe's wary way with anything that seems to him at all incredible. In The Journal of the Plague Year, for example, none of the more dramatic anecdotes are vouched for by the writer. He heard them from some one else, did not see them with his own eyes, finds them hard to believe, and so rivets the belief of his readers. We shall observe in discussing Hawthorne the more advanced possibilities of this ingenious trick. The best books of Defoe's are rogue novels, and in none of them was he content with a merely literary reality. His heroes are as solid as ordinary men, or more so. The figure of Selkirk shrinks away like a faint shadow behind that of Crusoe, whose imaginary adventures his own had suggested, and there can be no doubt in anybody's mind as to which of the two is the more credible. And then there is that style of his, homelier even than Bunyan's, though less markedly so, since he is describing homelier things. There is no Euphuism here; Defoe was not the man to deal in gossamers. The essayist's delicacy of line had not yet been given to the story-tellers, and Defoe was not the man to deal with silver point. His style is as simple and effective as a bricklayer's hod. He carries facts in it, and builds with them alone. The resulting books are like solid Queen Anne houses. There is no affectation about them; they are not decorated with carving; but they are very good for 'matter-of-fact readers' to live in. Matter-of-fact readers made Defoe's audience, and the hundred years since Burton wrote had made a matter-of-fact English nation out of the credulous Elizabethans. The eighteenth century opens with this note. The tales the old woman told Psyche have been blown away like dead leaves into heaps for the children to play in, and grown-up people, serious now, have done with fairy tale and are ready for the English novel.