DREAMER OF A DREAM STILL POWERFUL AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 293, 2 March 1928, Page 14

DREAMER OF A DREAM STILL POWERFUL AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS

This year marks the tercentenary of John Bunyan’s birth—at Elstow, in Bedfordshire. For 250 years the illiterate tinker’s” masterpiece of prose narrative, “The Pilgrrim’s Progress,” has been the most frequently printed, the most numerously sold book in the English language, next to the Bible. And Bunyan was not a one-book man. “The Life and Death of Mr Badmar 1 is only one of a very long list of other works; but it is the one, perhaps, most "vividly characteristic of his genius. It was a Harrow School master, “a great Latin scholar, who filled eight volumes with bad English,*’ as Augustine Birrell says, “who yet had the effrontery” to call Bunyan “an illiterate tinker.” But three centuries after Bunyan’s birth the applause of millions shames the once proud school-master’s drooping ghost. Mr Birrell says: “Bunyan is as widely known throughout the English-speak-ing realms as either Shakespeare or Milton. And if some personal acquaintance with the contents of an author’s literary work is demanded beyond the mere sound of his name, Bunyan might

head the poll.” He talks of the great Puritan’s “vivid and sane imagination operating night and day upon a vision of human life and the destiny of man.” Mr Robert Lynd says: “Christian, as he draws his sword . . . , is every man’s ideal self, whatever may be his creed”; and also: “Far from being a depressing kind of Puritan, Bunyan makes the world seem more beautiful than we had suspected, just as he makes the life of man on earth seem a more heroic and imaginative Odyssey than we had dreamed.” And Mr Shaw once wrote, in an elevation of Bunyan over Shakespeare which, for the striking interest and boldness of its heroworship, should be sought for in “Dramatic Opinions and Essays”: “All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: ‘Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.* The heart vibrates like a bell to such an utterance as this.” The Nonesuch Press is doing its share to celebrate the tercentenary by devoting all its resources to a new edition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” POETS’ CORNER. THE IDEALIST. [Written for The Sun.] Sometimes within an hour of fiery leaven, Earth falls below him, and he links with none; Lidless and sure between this ball and heaven. He stares unafraid at the core ol the sun — Haughtier than eagles, swifter thar, gannets, . Unjessed from time and infinite ol power. Greater than the Pleiads, equal tc the planets, Or so it seems in the lift of that ho ur. But the Sight leaves him desolate and weary. Huddling to his fellows, a fear lr, the dark. Is it a returning or an exile dreary— Is he fallen angel or homing lark: EILEEN DUGGAN. Wellington.