. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thus I set pen to paper with delight,
And quickly had my thoughts in black and white."
The words are exceedingly suggestive. In writing so aimlessly—"I knew not what"—to gratify himself by permitting the allegory into which he had suddenly fallen to take possession of him and carry him whithersoever it would, while he wrote out with delight his teeming fancies, was not Bunyan for the first time exercising his genius in a freedom from all theological and other restraint, and so in a surpassing range and power? The dreamer and poet supplanted the preacher and teacher. He yielded to the simple impulse of his genius, gave his imagination full sweep, and so, as never before or elsewhere, soared and sang in what seemed to many of his Puritan friends a questionable freedom and profane inspiration. And yet his song, or story, was not a creation of mere fancy,—
"It came from my own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers tricklèd;"—
and therefore, we add, it finds its way to the heart of mankind.
Hence the spontaneity of the allegory, its ease and freedom of movement, its unlabored development, its natural and vital enfolding of that old pilgrim idea of human life which had so often bloomed in the literature of all climes and ages, but whose consummate flower appeared in the book of this inspired Puritan tinker-preacher. Hence also the dramatic unity and methodic perfectness of the story. Its byways all lead to its highway; its episodes are as vitally related to the main theme as are the ramifications of a tree to its central stem. The great diversities of experience in the true pilgrims are dominated by one supreme motive. As for the others, they appear incidentally to complete the scenes, and make the world and its life manifold and real. The Pilgrim is a most substantial person, and once well on the way, the characters he meets, the difficulties he encounters, the succor he receives, the scenes in which he mingles, are all, however surprising, most natural. The names, and one might almost say the forms and faces, of Pliable, Obstinate, Faithful, Hopeful, Talkative, Mercy, Great-heart, old Honest, Valiant-for-truth, Feeble-mind, Ready-to-halt, Miss Much-afraid, and many another, are familiar to us all. Indeed, the pilgrimage is our own—in many of its phases at least,—and we have met the people whom Bunyan saw in his dream, and are ourselves they whom he describes. When Dean Stanley began his course of lectures on Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, his opening words were those of the passage where the Pilgrim is taken to the House Beautiful to see "the rarities and histories of that place, both ancient and modern"; and at the end of the same course, wishing to sketch the prospects of Christendom, he quoted the words in which, on leaving the House Beautiful, Christian was shown the distant view of the Delectable Mountains.
But for one glance at Pope and Pagan, there is almost nothing to indicate the writer's ecclesiastical standing. But for here and there a marking of time in prosaic passages which have nothing to do with the story, there is nothing to mar the catholicity of its spirit. Romanists and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans, Calvinists and Arminians,—all communions and sects have edited and circulated it. It is the completest triumph of truth by fiction in all literature. More than any other human book, it is "a religious bond to the whole of English Christendom." The second part is perhaps inferior to the first, but is richer in incident, and some of its characters—Mercy, old Honest, Valiant-for-truth, and Great-heart, for instance—are exquisitely conceived and presented. Here again the reader will do well to carefully peruse the author's rhymed introduction:—
"What Christian left locked up, and went his way,
Sweet Christiana opens with her key."
"Go then, my little Book," he says, "and tell young damsels of Mercy, and old men of plain-hearted old Honest. Tell people of Master Fearing, who was a good man, though much down in spirit. Tell them of Feeble-mind, and Ready-to-halt, and Master Despondency and his daughter, who 'softly went but sure.'
"When thou hast told the world of all these things,
Then turn about, my Book, and touch these strings,
Which, if but touched, will such a music make,
They'll make a cripple dance, a giant quake."