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.