"Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine
In name and fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother.
"Or that so fond I am of being sire,
I'll father bastards, or, if need require,
I'll tell a lie in print to get applause.
I scorn it; John such dirt-heap never was
Since God converted him. Let this suffice
To show why I my Pilgrim patronize.
"It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dripple it daintily.
"Manner and matter too was all mine own;
Nor was it unto any mortal known,
Till I had done it. Nor did any then,
By books, by wits, by tongues, or hand, or pen,
Add five words to it, or wrote half a line
Thereof; the whole and every whit is mine." …
This leaves the suggestion of plagiarism apparently little room to stand upon, unless it fall back upon some safe generality, such as that in a republic (or commonwealth) all things are possible, or that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, etc.
Against this giant of truth, panoplied in the very robur et as triplex of self-conscious originality, comes out the queerest antagonist imaginable—a French David against a Welsh Goliath. These little books altogether deserve a passing word. Both are published privately and by subscription. One, the later, is a mere translation, arising out of its predecessor. The other is a most singular compilation, from a number of notes which one Mr. Nathaniel Hill, M.R.S.L., as we are not surprised to learn, died making. They make a book very unlike most books. To begin with, Mr. Basil Montagu Pickering, the publisher, has taken for his motto, "Aldi Discipulus Anglus," and the printing is an excellent imitation of that famous old press which so many dead scholars have blessed, and so many dead printers doubtless sworn at. Then the engravings are very curious ones, copied from the oldest editions of the original, and combine a childlike range of scenery with a Chinese mastery of perspective. The text, though, is vilely marred by a variation of plan. Mr. Hill's idea was to show the indebtedness of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to many earlier works, and its principal creditor happened to be this Pélerinage de l'Homme of Guillaume De Guileville. His editors finding it so quaint, were struck by the bright afterthought of making this book itself the main subject. It may have sold better, but for ourselves we differ toto caelo with their taste. Their method defies order, and results in a most extraordinary hotch-potch of queer quotations, Scripture references past number, antique French, archaic English to match, biographies, analogies, and translations, that reads like a fit of levity of old Fuller, or an excursus—or pilgrimage—from the Anatomy of Melancholy. Add now to all this, that to an old-fashioned translation of an antiquated poem by an obsolete monk, there are appended a body of notes full of all sorts of odd learning, and finally, that translation, notes and all, are by a woman, and the outré picture is complete.
The comparison between De Guileville and Bunyan is not originated by this book. Southey, among others, speaks of the Pélerinage, which he entitles the Pélerin de la Vie Humaine, (although this name is not given it in any of the editions on the very full list of this volume,) and dismisses the subject with a wary vagueness that has to our ear a soupçon of Podsnappery, and somehow makes us doubt if the worthy laureate ever read the book at all. But, at any rate, this is by far the most extended comparison yet made, and all the better in that it does not argue a preconceived theory.
One thing, at least, it plainly proves—that Master Bunyan very much overstated his originality in saying that manner and matter too were all his own. It shows that from the time of the Norman troubadors (not to go back to the Apocalypse of St. John) the dream-form which is the framing of The Pilgrim's Progress was a common and favorite device, and instances Piers Plowman's Vision, (A.D. 1369,) Walter de Mapes's Apocalypsis Golice, the older poem, The Debate of the Body and the Soul, Lydgate's Temple of Glass, Hampole's Prycke of Conscience, (1349,) Sir David Lyndesay of the Mount's poem, The Dreme, (1528,) and Dunbar's Daunce, (1470.) Probably Bunyan, not being accused of stealing so obvious and public an artifice, did not have it in mind at all when he made his sweeping self-assertion.
In looking further for resemblances, those who expect to find strong similarity of any sort will be disappointed. In fact, they would in ordinary cases be dismissed as trivial. But we must remember the vast difference between the two works. De Guileville's is a true mediaeval monastic "boke," justly described in this volume as "a cold and lifeless dialogue between abstract and unembodied qualities." It is, in all but its ancient quaintness, the dullest and driest of books; there is not a ray of reality in it anywhere. Bunyan, on the contrary, gives us men and women where the old prior of Chaliz has nothing but ghosts of abstract ideas. One is like the antiquated masques or miracle-plays; the other like the theatre before Garrick's day. Thus between a galvanized French Roman of 1330 and a live English book of 1670, by a man innocent of French, any resemblance in diction would not only be matter of wonder but matter of the merest chance. We will, however, cite a few of the parallelisms given in the comparison which forms the gist and pith of these volumes. And first comes one which we cite because it contains the only lines we have seen worth remembering in De Guileville's dreary waste of dialogue. He is describing the lady (Gracedieu) whom his Pélerin meets at the outset.
De Guileville.
"Moult courtoise et de douce chère
Me fut grandement car première
Me saulua en demandant
Pourquoy nauoie meilleur semblant
Et pour quelle cause ie pleuroye
Et saucune defaulte auoie.
Adonc ie fuz comme surpris
Pource que pas nauoye apris
Que dame de si grant atour
Daignast vers moi faire vng seul tour
Fors et seullement pour autant
Que cil qui a bonte plus grant
Plus a en soy dhumilite
Grant doulceur et benignite
CAR PLUS A LE POMMIER DE POMMES
PLUS BAS SENCLINE VERS LES HOMMES,
Et ne scay signe de bonte
Si grant comme est humilite,
Qui ne porte ceste baniere
Na vertu ne bonte entiere." [Footnote 52]
[Footnote 52: "Full courteously, and in most gentle wise Made she first salutation, questioning Wherefore that I bore not more cheerful mien And why I wept, and if in aught I lacked. And then I was as one o'erta'en with wonder, That lady of so great nobility Should even deign to turn towards such as I, Saving for this sole cause, that whoso most Of gracious ruth doth bless, the same alway Most in his bosom bears of lowliness. For the more rich in store of golden fruit, More deeply bendeth unto man the tree. Nor know I any sign of graciousness Great as humility. Who bears not that Graved on his banner, hath not truly virtue.">[
Lydgate's Translation.
This ladye that I spak of here
Was curteys and of noble chere
And wonderly of gret vertu,
And ffyrst she 'gan me to salue
In goodly wise axynge of me
What maner thyng yt myght be
Or cause why I should hyr lere
That I made so heavy chere,
Or why that I was aye wepyng,
Wher of when I gan take hede
I ffyl into a maner drede
For unkonnyng and leudnesse
That ache of so great noblesse
Dysdenede not in her degre
To speke to on so pore as me;
But yiff it were so, as I guess,
Al only of hyr gentyllenesse,
For gladly wher is most beute
Ther is grettest humylyte,
And that ys verrylye the sygne
Suych ar most goodly and benygne,
An apple tre with frut most lade
To folk that stonden in the shade
More lowly doth his branches loute
Then a nother tre withoute.
Wher haboundeth most goodness
There is ay most of meeknesse,
None so gret token of bewte
As is parfyt humylyte.
Who wanteth hyr in hys banere
Hath not vertu hool and entere.
"The same gracious salutation," says our book, "is made by Evangelist to Christian whilst he is weeping." "I looked then," says Bunyan, "and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, who asked, 'Wherefore dost thou cry?' 'Because I fear,' replies Christian, 'that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into the grave.'"