I suggest to my young radical friends that they amuse an idle hour by applying “Pilgrim’s Progress” to the great movement of our day. Instead of Christian, read Comrade; instead of Christian’s burden, read a soap-box. You can always find some youngster to serve as traveling companion under the name of Hopeful. And very soon in your journey you will enter the Valley of Humiliation; very soon you will begin to meet Mr. Money-Love and Mr. Pliable; also Mr. Talkative will come in swarms to your studio parties. And By-Ends—he works beside you in every office; the fellow who takes care of himself and does not believe in going to extremes. And Mr. Worldly-Wiseman—perhaps you have a rich uncle who will serve; you can see him sitting in the padded leather chairs of any club. And when Comrade’s Pilgrimage brings him to New York, he will see Vanity Fair, flaunting its glories up and down the avenue, protected by plate glass. And the fiend Appolyon—we have had two attorney-generals exactly cut for the rôle. If you think that a joke, it means that you have been playing the part of Mr. Facing Both-ways during the past ten years, and do not know about the realities of government by gunmen.

The forms of things change, but the inner essence remains the same, and you must learn to recognize it. The Slough of Despond, for example, is discovered in the bottom of the coffee-cups in which Greenwich Village now gets its bootleg gin. As for the Giant Despair—a singular transformation!—he is a pale-colored microscopic organism of cork-screw shape, lurking in the delicious intrigues of our gay and saucy young folks. As for the Interpreter’s House, it is out of repair just now, having been hit by H-E shells in 1917. As for the Celestial City, which we old fogies used to vision under the name of the Co-operative Commonwealth—the young people won’t let us mention it any more; they tell us that propaganda is out of style, in these days of petting-parties and hip-pocket flasks.

CHAPTER XXXIX
VANITY FAIR

We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, yes; and we should pay a brief visit to that Vanity Fair which Bunyan saw through the bars of his prison.

There was a poet laureate, who did not go to prison but became the idol of his age, and the most prosperous writer up to that time. John Dryden was his name, and like Milton, he was born of a well-to-do Puritan family, and received the best education going. He was twenty-seven years old when Cromwell died, and he wrote heroic stanzas on the Lord Protector. He attached himself to his cousin, an official of the Puritan republic, expecting advancement; but he did not get it, so two years later, when the “bonnie Prince Charlie” came back to be crowned, the young poet welcomed him with a panegyric ode, several pages of ecstatic compliment—

How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May?
A month that owns an interest in your name,
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.

I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor. This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden, but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, Madam Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic! As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!”

The elegant literature of that time was described by the term “metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his appearance, records that

Each little dimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit.

By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl. He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and Elinor Glyn rolled into one.