John Bunyan.
I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the Restoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for this morning.
I think he did never wear a wig. Buckingham, who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have in mind: it is John Bunyan.[83] Not a great name then; so vulgar a one indeed that—a good many years later—the amiable poet Cowper spoke of it charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken.
He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bedford, amid fat green meadows, beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom. You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland Railway; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under Bunyan’s eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow—a mile-long road—to the grammar-school at Bedford.
The trees are beautiful thereabout; the grass is as green as emerald; old cottages are mossy and picturesque; gray towers of churches hang out a great wealth of ivy boughs; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees that shade country houses.
The aspects have not changed much in all these years; even the cottage of Bunyan’s tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The boy received but little schooling, and that at hap-hazard; but he got much religious teaching from the elders of the Baptist chapel, or from this or that old Puritan villager. A stern doctrinal theology overshadowed all his boyish years, full of threatening, fiery darts, and full of golden streaks of promise.
He was a badish boy—as most boys are; a goodly quantum of original sin in him; he says, with his tender conscience, that he was “very bad;” a child of the devil; swearing, sometimes; playing “three old cat” very often; picking flowers, I dare say, or idly looking at the rooks of a Sunday. Yet I would engage that the Newhaven High School would furnish thirty or forty as bad ones as John Bunyan any day in the year. But he makes good resolves; breaks them again; finally is convicted, but falters; marries young (and, as would seem, foolishly, neither bride nor groom being turned of twenty), and she bringing for sole dower not so much as one dish or spoon, but only two good books—The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety.
Even before this he had been drafted for service in the battles which were aflame in England—doubtless fighting for the Commonwealth, as most of his biographers[84] allege. Very probably, too, he was under orders of that Sir Samuel Luke, who lived near by, and who—as I have mentioned—was the butt of much of Samuel Butler’s Hudibrastic satire.
Next we hear of him as preacher—not properly sanctioned even by the non-conforming authorities—but opening that intense religious talk of his upon whatever and whomsoever would come to hear. Even his friendly Baptist brothers look doubtfully upon his irregularities; but he sees only the great golden cross before him in the skies, and hears only the crackle of the flames in the nethermost depths below. He is bound to save, in what way he can, those who will be saved, and to warn, in fearfullest way, those who will be damned.
Hundreds came to hear this working-man who was so dreadfully in earnest, and who had no more respect for pulpits or liturgies than for preaching-places in the woods. It was not strange that he offended against non-conformist acts, nor strange that, after accession of Charles II. he came to imprisonment for his illegal pieties. This prison-life lasted for some twelve years, in the which he still preached to those who would listen within prison walls, and read his Bible, and wrought at tagged laces (still a great industry of that district) for the support of his family, a separation from whom—most of all from his poor blind daughter Mary—was, he says, like “pulling the flesh from his bones.” Over and over in that reach of prison-life he might have been free if he would have promised to abstain from his irregular preachments, or if he would go over seas to America. But he would not; he could not forbear to warn whomsoever might hear, of the fiery pit, and of the days when the heavens should be opened. He loved not the thought of over-ocean crossing; his duties lay near; and with all his radicalism he never outlived a gracious liking for British kingly traditions, and for such ranking of men and powers as belonged to Levitical story.
Finally, under Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence (1672), which was intended more for the benefit of ill-used Romanists than for Non-conformists, Bunyan’s prison-doors were laid open, and he went to his old work of preaching in public places. There may have been, as his more recent biographers intimate, a later (1675) short imprisonment;[85] and this, or some portion of the previous prison-life, was certainly passed in that ancient Bedford jail, which, only a few years since, was standing on Bedford bridge, hanging over the waters of the river Ouse—whose slow current we shall find flowing again in our story of William Cowper.
And if the whole weight of tradition is not to be distrusted, it was in this little prison over the river, where passers-by might shout a greeting to him—that John Bunyan fell into the dreamy fashioning of that book which has made his name known everywhere, and which has as fixed a place in the great body of English literature as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” or Spenser’s Faery Queen—I mean the Pilgrim’s Progress.
But how is it, the reader may ask, that this tinker’s son, who had so far forgotten his school learning that his wife had to teach him over again to read and write—how is it that he makes a book which takes hold on the sympathies of all Christendom, and has a literary quality that ranks it with the first of allegories?[86]
Mr. Pepys told plainly what we wanted him to tell; but he had nothing but those trifles which give a color to every-day life to tell of. If he had undertaken to make a story of a page long, involving imaginative powers, he would have made a failure of it; and if he had tried to be eloquent he would have given himself away deplorably. But this poor brazier (as he calls himself in his last will), with not one-fourth of his knowledge of the world, with not one-twentieth of his learning (bald as the old diarist was in this line), with not one-hundredth part of his self-confidence, makes this wonderful and charming book of which we are talking. How was it?
Well, there was, first, the great compelling and informing Christian purpose in him: he was of the Bible all compact; every utterance of it was a vital truth to him; the fire and the brimstone were real; the Almighty fatherhood was real; the cross and the passion were real; the teeming thousands were real, who hustled him on either side and who were pressing on, rank by rank, in the broad road that leads to the City of Destruction. The man who believes such things in the way in which John Bunyan believed them has a tremendous motive power, which will make itself felt in some shape.
Then that limited schooling of his had kept him to a short vocabulary of the sharpest and keenest and most telling words. Rhetoric did not lead him astray after flowers; learning did not tempt him into far-fetched allusions; literary habit had not spoiled his simplicities. And again, and chiefest of all, there was a great imaginative power, coming—not from schools, nor from grammar teachings—but coming as June days come, and which, breathing over his pages with an almost divine afflatus, lifted their sayings into the regions of Poetry.
Therefore and thereby it is that he has fused his thought into such shape as takes hold on human sympathies everywhere, and his characters are all live creatures. All these two hundred and twenty years last past the noble Great-heart has been thwacking away at Giant Grim and thundering on the walls of Doubting Castle with blows we hear; and poor, timid Christian has been just as many years, in the sight of all of us, making his way through pitfalls and quagmires and Vanity Fairs—hard pressed by Apollyon, and belabored by Giant Despair—on his steady march toward the Delectable Mountains and the river of Death, and the shining shores which lie Beyond.