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.