The simile of the fruit-tree is excellent, and perhaps strikes us the better for its being the one oasis. The resemblance also is strong between the greetings of Gracedieu and Evangelist, and in fact, in the whole situation, and seems hard to account for without supposing Bunyan to have known Lydgate's or some other translation of the earlier author.
The next point is one of apparent discrepancy, but really of likeness. The Pélerin is stopped by a stream, at which he desponds—signifying the water of baptism at the entrance to the church. Bunyan being a Baptist, with strong liberal views of communion, (which, indeed, embroiled him at one time with the radicals of his sect,) naturally balked at this abhorrent papistical metaphor, and substituted his famous Slough of Despond, which, it will be remembered, he makes to be sixteen hundred years old—the age of Christianity at his day.
Another slight touch, perhaps worth noting, is where De Guileville's pilgrims come from Moses, (the Mr. Legality of Bunyan,) as if
"Yssys du bourbier,
Ou dun noir sac a charbonnier:"
while Pliable, in a like case, is represented as seeming "bedaubed with dirt," as if he had been "dipped in a sack of charcoal." This certainly looks like a pebble for Goliath's forehead. Also these same muddy pilgrims of the Pélerinage, returning "Enbordiz et encore tous familleux" come back all of a tremor and beg to join the others: so Christian, after his episode at Mr. Legality's, falls at the feet of Evangelist with prayers to be put again in the way of salvation. Again Christian's second companion Hopeful and the Pélerin's staff Hope are branches of one idea. Farther on, Gracedieu presents her protégé with "the identical pebbles that David had in his scrip when he fought against Goliath." Bunyan makes the damsels of the palace called Beautiful, in exhibiting that establishment to the delighted Christian, display, among other aesthetic accessories of the place, "the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath."
Another curious parallelism is not cited at all in this book. De Guileville's hero is accosted by Avarice, who, in true Amazon style, swears by her golden mammet she carries on her head ("mon ydole est mon Mahommet" says the old lady, instructively) that she will have his life, and makes him the alluring proposal, either to be killed at once, or to give up his staff and scrip, bow down to her mammet, acknowledge it the most worshipful of mammets, and then be killed after all. This reminds us very forcibly of the impressive occasion which so wrought on our childhood's susceptibilities, when "Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den, that you shall go no farther: here will I spill thy soul!'" etc.
Such are the main body of the resemblances between the good old Cistercian abbot and the sturdy Baptist exhorter. There are many who will look them over and decide quite readily with Mr. Southey that the coincidences are fugitive and illusory, and that, as he says, The Pilgrim's Progress might have been exactly what it is, whether Bunyan had ever seen this book or not." But this does not show either much acumen or much thought in Mr. Southey. For all he says might be true from the reason we have before suggested—that Bunyan knew no French, or certainly not enough to master the dialect of De Guileville, and might see the book a thousand times quite harmlessly. We confess, even that if Bunyan had really been familiar with the original poem, these similarities would be trifling. But when he must have drawn if at all from some one of the numerous translations—all indifferently poor—which abounded in his time, slight resemblances mean more. Those who have ever played at the well-known game of passing a story through a number of persons, one by one, will appreciate the force of this. Bunyan could scarcely help seeing some of the translations. For, strange to say, this, to us the baldest of books, was popular for generations, both in France and England. It is hard to understand these cases. We are apt to look upon them as instances of the inveterate slowness of ancient people; but apart from the fact that this slowness is a very difficult thing to analyze, we know that in a few years we shall be slow ourselves. But what every one does not think is, that we are slow to-day. Any one who happens to glance over the shelves of any of our large publishing houses can find there numbers of dull-seeming works, on various specialties, full of facts, figures, demonstrations, discoveries, and what seems to us literally lumber of all sorts. Yet these books sell, and pay an invariable profit to a well-established house. Who buys them and what becomes of them, we shall probably learn when the disappearance of pins, and the necessity of summer clothing, and the origin of evil, are duly cleared up. Certain it is, that the Pélerinage de l'Homme enjoyed a wide reputation and diffusion. Chaucer, especially, was familiar with its author, and his famous "A, B, C," is a palpable and, so far as we know, an undisguised imitation of De Guileville's Prayer to the Virgin, published in the same year 1330. Now, a work which, after filtering through three hundred years, another language and the brains of "painfulle" translators, could still yield the germ of the most nationally popular book in all English literature, has some claim to be called its original.
We shall not attempt to pass upon the question of plagiarism, for the honest reason that, as we have said, we really do not exactly know what the word means in the critical vernacular of to-day. The coincidences we have cited would certainly go to show that The Pilgrim's Progress is not the entire novelty which its author so explicitly proclaims it. On the other hand, it is not proven to complete satisfaction that "John such a dirt-heap ever was" as to mean to steal anything from anybody. Perhaps the most peaceable as well as the most novel conclusion that suggests itself, is to harmonize both sides of this question by a third theory, namely, that one may be a palpable plagiarist, as the word is often used, without in the slightest degree detracting from his originality. The statement sounds extraordinary, but its ingenious advocate, M. Philarète Chasles, is an extraordinary Frenchman, and is talking when he advances it, about the "divine Williams," who is an extraordinary subject for a Frenchman to talk about. We are very much mistaken if those who smile at this seeming contradiction of terms will not find some force in the subjoined excerpt, which we premise, however, suffers greatly in translation for want of the peculiar super-emphatic style of the original French.
"Genius arranges and imitates, studies and deepens; it never invents."