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 The authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its English retaining the savour of a style then out of date, formed at once his writing and his method, as it constituted his education.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.