The Life of John Bunyan

by Edmund Venables

The same reality characterizes the descriptive part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” As his characters are such as he must meet with every day in his native town, so also the scenery and surroundings of his allegory are part of his own everyday life, and reproduce what he had been brought up amidst in his native county, or had noticed in his tinker’s wanderings. “Born and bred,” writes Kingsley, “in the monotonous Midland, he had no natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country houses, he saw about him.” The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire; Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, green all the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrown with briars and thorns, where one tumbled over a bush, another stuck fast in the dirt, some lost their shoes in the mire, and others were fastened from behind with the brambles; the high wall by the roadside over which the fruit trees shot their boughs and tempted the boys with their unripe plums; the arbour with its settle tempting the footsore traveller to drowsiness; the refreshing spring at the bottom of Hill Difficulty; all are evidently drawn from his own experience. Bunyan, in his long tramps, had seen them all. He had known what it was to be in danger of falling into a pit and being dashed to pieces with Vain Confidence, of being drowned in the flooded meadows with Christian and Hopeful; of sinking in deep water when swimming over a river, going down and rising up half dead, and needing all his companion’s strength and skill to keep his head above the stream. Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life. The great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths filled with “wares of all kinds from all countries,” its “shows, jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind,” its “great one of the fair,” its court of justice and power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture. Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines. When he had to describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy and cold. Never having been very far from home, he had had no experience of the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and his pen moves in fetters when he attempts to describe them. When his pilgrims come to the Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, the difference is at once seen. All his nobler imagery is drawn from Scripture. As Hallam has remarked, “There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it really is.”

It would but weary the reader to follow the details of a narrative which is so universally known. Who needs to be told that in the pilgrimage here described is represented in allegorical dress the course of a human soul convinced of sin, struggling onwards to salvation through the trials and temptations that beset its path to its eternal home? The book is so completely wrought into the mind and memory, that most of us can at once recall the incidents which chequer the pilgrim’s way, and realize their meaning; the Slough of Despond, in which the man convinced of his guilt and fleeing from the wrath to come, in his agonizing self-consciousness is in danger of being swallowed up in despair; the Wicket Gate, by which he enters on the strait and narrow way of holiness; the Interpreter’s House, with his visions and acted parables; the Wayside Cross, at the sight of which the burden of guilt falls from the pilgrim’s back, and he is clothed with change of raiment; the Hill Difficulty, which stands right in his way, and which he must surmount, not circumvent; the lions which he has to pass, not knowing that they are chained; the Palace Beautiful, where he is admitted to the communion of the faithful, and sits down to meat with them; the Valley of Humiliation, the scene of his desperate but victorious encounter with Apollyon; the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with its evil sights and doleful sounds, where one of the wicked ones whispers into his ear thoughts of blasphemy which he cannot distinguish from the suggestions of his own mind; the cave at the valley’s mouth, in which, Giant Pagan having been dead this many a day, his brother, Giant Pope, now sits alone, grinning at pilgrims as they pass by, and biting his nails because he cannot get at them; Vanity Fair, the picture of the world, as St. John describes it, hating the light that puts to shame its own self-chosen darkness, and putting it out if it can, where the Pilgrim’s fellow, Faithful, seals his testimony with his death, and the Pilgrim himself barely escapes; the “delicate plain” called Ease, and the little hill, Lucre, where Demas stood “gentlemanlike,” to invite the passersby to come and dig in his silver mine; Byepath Meadow, into which the Pilgrim and his newly-found companion stray, and are made prisoners by Giant Despair and shut up in the dungeons of Doubting Castle, and break out of prison by the help of the Key of Promise; the Delectable Mountains in Immanuel’s Land, with their friendly shepherds and the cheering prospect of the far-off heavenly city; the Enchanted Land, with its temptations to spiritual drowsiness at the very end of the journey; the Land of Beulah, the ante-chamber of the city to which they were bound; and, last stage of all, the deep dark river, without a bridge, which had to be crossed before the city was entered; the entrance into its heavenly gates, the pilgrim’s joyous reception with all the bells in the city ringing again for joy; the Dreamer’s glimpse of its glories through the opened portals—is not every stage of the journey, every scene of the pilgrimage, indelibly printed on our memories, for our warning, our instruction, our encouragement in the race we, as much as they, have each one to run? Have we not all, again and again, shared the Dreamer’s feelings—“After that they shut up the Gates; which, when I had seen, I wished myself among them,” and prayed, God helping us, that our “dangerous journey”—ever the most dangerous when we see its dangers the least—might end in our “safe arrival at the desired country”?

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential of Christian preachers. Hallam, however, claims for him another distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him, as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way. Bunyan was the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness; while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have ever proved so universally entertaining. Intensely religious as it is in purpose, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” may be safely styled the first English novel. “The claim to be the father of English romance,” writes Dr. Allon, “which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to Bunyan. Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the creator of the genus.” As the parent of fictitious biography it is that Bunyan has charmed the world. On its vivid interest as a story, its universal interest and lasting vitality rest. “Other allegorises,” writes Lord Macaulay, “have shown great ingenuity, but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love.” Whatever its deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept Coleridge’s dictum that it is “incomparably the best ‘Summa Theologiæ Evangelicæ’ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;” even if, with Hallam, we consider its “excellencies great indeed, but not of the highest order,” and deem it “a little over-praised,” the fact of its universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction. “I have,” says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a long interval, “always been struck by its piety. I am now struck equally or even more by its profound wisdom. It seems to be a complete reflexion of Scripture.” And to turn to a critic of very different character, Dean Swift: “I have been better entertained and more improved,” writes that cynical pessimist, “by a few pages of this book than by a long discourse on the will and intellect.” The favourite of our childhood, as “the most perfect and complex of fairy tales, so human and intelligible,” read, as Hallam says, “at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or little regarded,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress” becomes the chosen companion of our later years, perused with ever fresh appreciation of its teaching, and enjoyment of its native genius; “the interpreter of life to all who are perplexed with its problems, and the practical guide and solace of all who need counsel and sympathy.”

The secret of this universal acceptableness of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” lies in the breadth of its religious sympathies. Rigid Puritan as Bunyan was, no book is more completely free from sectarian narrowness. Its reach is as wide as Christianity itself, and it takes hold of every human heart because it is so intensely human. No apology is needed for presenting Mr. Froude’s eloquent panegyric: “The Pilgrim, though in Puritan dress, is a genuine man. His experience is so truly human experience that Christians of every persuasion can identify themselves with him; and even those who regard Christianity itself as but a natural outgrowth of the conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly and make the best of themselves, can recognize familiar footprints in every step of Christian’s journey. Thus ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is a book which when once read can never be forgotten. We too, every one of us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them. Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease to be true to experience.” Dr. Brown’s appreciative words may be added: “With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline of life. It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them. And it is this which makes it one of the first books translated by the missionary who seeks to give true thoughts of God and life to heathen men.”

The Second Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” partakes of the character of almost all continuations. It is, in Mr. Froude’s words, “only a feeble reverberation of the first part, which has given it a popularity it would have hardly attained by its own merits. Christiana and her children are tolerated for the pilgrim’s sake to whom they belong.” Bunyan seems not to have been insensible of this himself, when in his metrical preface he thus introduces his new work:

“Go now my little book to every place
Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face.
Call at their door; if any say ‘Who’s there?’
Then answer thus, ‘Christiana is here.’
If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
With all thy boys. And then, as thou know’st how,
Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.”

But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on the whole, to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphic power, such as Bunyan alone could have written. Everywhere we find strokes of his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it has added not a few portraits to Bunyan’s spiritual picture gallery we should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to the memory. The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still thoroughly womanly character of Christiana. Great-Heart is too much of an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants. But the other new characters have generally a vivid personality. Who can forget Old Honesty, the dull good man with no mental gifts but of dogged sincerity, who though coming from the Town of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the City of Destruction, was “known for a cock of the right kind,” because he said the truth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing, that most troublesome of pilgrims, stumbling at every straw, lying roaring at the Slough of Despond above a month together, standing shaking and shrinking at the Wicket Gate, but making no stick at the Lions, and at last getting over the river not much above wetshod; or Mr. Valiant for Truth, the native of Darkland, standing with his sword drawn and his face all bloody from his three hours’ fight with Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick; Mr. Standfast, blushing to be found on his knees in the Enchanted Ground, one who loved to hear his Lord spoken of, and coveted to set his foot wherever he saw the print of his shoe; Mr. Feeblemind, the sickly, melancholy pilgrim, at whose door death did usually knock once a day, betaking himself to a pilgrim’s life because he was never well at home, resolved to run when he could, and go when he could not run, and creep when he could not go, an enemy to laughter and to gay attire, bringing up the rear of the company with Mr. Readytohalt hobbling along on his crutches; Giant Despair’s prisoners, Mr. Despondency, whom he had all but starved to death—and Mistress Much-afraid his daughter, who went through the river singing, though none could understand what she said? Each of these characters has a distinct individuality which lifts them from shadowy abstractions into living men and women. But with all its excellencies, and they are many, the general inferiority of the history of Christiana and her children’s pilgrimage to that of her husband’s must be acknowledged. The story is less skilfully constructed; the interest is sometimes allowed to flag; the dialogues that interrupt the narrative are in places dry and wearisome—too much of sermons in disguise. There is also a want of keeping between the two parts of the allegory. The Wicket Gate of the First Part has become a considerable building with a summer parlour in the Second; the shepherds’ tents on the Delectable Mountains have risen into a palace, with a dining-room, and a looking-glass, and a store of jewels; while Vanity Fair has lost its former bad character, and has become a respectable country town, where Christiana and her family, seeming altogether to forget their pilgrimage, settled down comfortably, enjoy the society of the good people of the place, and the sons marry and have children. These same children also cause the reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course of the supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are terrified with the Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch at the boughs for the unripe plums and cry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are stroked by the Interpreter; who are catechised and called “good boys” by Prudence; who sup on bread crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to bed by Mercy—into strong young men, able to go out and fight with a giant, and lend a hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and becoming husbands and fathers. We cannot but feel the want of vraisemblance which brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly pilgrimage. Bunyan’s mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them together and make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth, which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their dismissal. The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together, and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water’s edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross. Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr. Froude’s words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. “Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and sin.” With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” we may be well content that Bunyan never carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory: “Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my reader—Adieu.”

Bunyan’s second great allegorical work, “The Holy War,” need not detain us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call “the plan of salvation” in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man, like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career. In fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan—John Milton—to bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that—

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being “fools”; but when both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up into the Council Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving, like a sovereign and his ministers when a revolted province has to be brought back to its allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us down to the infernal regions, and makes us privy to the plots and counterplots of the rebel leaders and hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feel that, in spite of the magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their essential mysteries. In point of individual personal interest, “The Holy War” contrasts badly with “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The narrative moves in a more shadowy region. We may admire the workmanship; but the same undefined sense of unreality pursues us through Milton’s noble epic, the outcome of a divinely-fired genius, and Bunyan’s humble narrative, drawing its scenes and circumstances, and to some extent its dramatis personæ, from the writer’s own surroundings in the town and corporation of Bedford, and his brief but stirring experience as a soldier in the great Parliamentary War. The catastrophe also is eminently unsatisfactory. When Christian and Hopeful enter the Golden Gates we feel that the story has come to its proper end, which we have been looking for all along. But the conclusion of “The Holy War” is too much like the closing chapter of “Rasselas”—“a conclusion in which nothing is concluded.” After all the endless vicissitudes of the conflict, and the final and glorious victory of Emmanuel and his forces, and the execution of the ringleaders of the mutiny, the issue still remains doubtful. The town of Mansoul is left open to fresh attacks. Diabolus is still at large. Carnal Sense breaks prison and continues to lurk in the town. Unbelief, that “nimble Jack,” slips away, and can never be laid hold of. These, therefore, and some few others of the more subtle of the Diabolonians, continue to make their home in Mansoul, and will do so until Mansoul ceases to dwell in the kingdom of Universe. It is true they turn chicken-hearted after the other leaders of their party have been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close, lurking in dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel’s men. If Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselves in the streets, the whole town is up in arms against them; the very children raise a hue and cry against them and seek to stone them. But all in vain. Mansoul, it is true, enjoys some good degree of peace and quiet. Her Prince takes up his residence in her borders. Her captains and soldiers do their duties. She minds her trade with the heavenly land afar off; also she is busy in her manufacture. But with the remnants of the Diabolonians still within her walls, ready to show their heads on the least relaxation of strict watchfulness, keeping up constant communication with Diabolus and the other lords of the pit, and prepared to open the gates to them when opportunity offers, this peace can not be lasting. The old battle will have to be fought over again, only to end in the same undecisive result. And so it must be to the end. If untrue to art, Bunyan is true to fact. Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individual or as the whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so long as it abides in “the country of Universe.” The flesh will lust against the spirit, the regenerated man will be in danger of being brought into captivity to the law of sin and death unless he keeps up his watchfulness and maintains the struggle to the end.