John Bunyan.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 458, 29 March 1890, Page 3

John Bunyan.

By Andrew Lang.

Dr. Johnson once took Bishop Percy’s little daughter on his knee and asked her what she thought of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ The child answered that she had not read it. 4 No,’ replied the Doctor, ‘ then I would not give one farthing for you,’ and he set her down and took no further notice of her.

This story, if true, proves that the doctor was rather intolerant. We must nob excommunicate people because they have notour tastein books. Themajoribyof people do not care for books at all. There is a descendant of John Bunyan’s, alive how or lately, who never read the Pilgrim’s Progress.’ Books are not in his line. Nay, Bunyan himself, who wrote sixty works, was no great reader. An Oxford &eholar who visited him in his study found no books at all except some of Bunyan’s own and Fox's ‘ Bo.ok of Martyrs.’ Yet, little as the world in general cares for reading, it has read Bunyan more than most. Onehundred thousand copies of the 4 Pilgrim ’ are believed to have been sold in his own day, and tho story has been done Into the most, savage languages, ns well as into those of the civilised world. Dr. Johnson, who did nob like Dissenters, prai“C3 tho invention, imagination, and conduct of the story, and knew nn other book he wished longer except 4 Robi'-sm Crus -o’ and 4 Don Quixote.’ Well. Dr. Johnson coni 1 not have given a farthing for we, hub I am quite contented with the present, length of these masterpieces. What books do you wish longer ? [ wish Ilomer had written a continuation of the Odyssey, and told us what Odysseus did among the far-off men who never tasted ■alt, nor heard of the sea. A land epic after the sea epic, how good it would havo been I Bub it would have taxed the imagination of Dante to continue the adventures o : Chris? tian and his wife, after they had once crossed the river and reached the city. John Bunyan. who wroto tho ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ’ and fifty-nine other works, was a -iplendid example of an Englishman. His biography has been written hy the Rev. Dr. Brown, who is now minister of his -)hl;congregationatßedford,and an excellent biography it is (published by I? bis ter). Mr Brown is neither Roundhead nor Cavalier, for though he is, of course, on Bunyan’s side, he doe? not throw stones at the beautiful church of England. Probably most of us are on Bunyan’s side now. It might be a good thing that we should all dwell together in religious unity, but history shows that people cannot be bribed into brotherhood. They tried to bully Bunyan ; they arrested and imprisoned him, unfairly even in law, according to Mr Brown, and he would nob be bullied. What was much more extraordinary, he would not be embittered. In spite of all he still calject Charles 11. 4 a gracious prince.’ When a subject is in conscience at variance with the law, Bunyan said, he has but one course, to

accept peaceably the punishment which the law awarded. He was never soured, never angered, by twelve years of durance, nob exactly in a loathsome dungeon, bub in very uncomfortable quarters. When there came a brief interval of toleration, he did not occupy himself in brawling, bub in preaching, and looking after the manners and morals of the little 4 church,’ including one woman who brought disagreeable charges against ‘ Brother Honeylove,’ The Church decided that there was nothing in the charges, bub somehow, the name of Brother Honeylove does nob inspire confidence. Almost everybody knows the main facts of Bunyan’s life. They may nob know that he was of Norman descent (as Mr Brown seems to succeed in proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the Conqueror. Bub they did, apparently. They lost their lands, in process of time and change, and Bunyan’s father was a tinker. He preferred to call himself a brazier—his was the rather unexpected trade to which Mr Dick proposed apprenticing David Copperfaeld. Bunyan himself, ‘the wondrous babe’ as Mr Brown enthusiastically styles him, was christened on November 30, 1628. He was born in a cottage, long fallen, and hard by was a marshy place, 4 a veritable slough of despond.’ .Bunyan may havo had it in mind when he wrote of the slough where Christian had so much trouble. He was nob a travelled man ; all his knowledge of people and places he found at his doors. He had Borne schooling, ‘ according to the rate of other poor men’s children,’ and assuredly it was enough. The great civil war broke out, and Bunyan was a soldier; he tells us not on which side. Mr Brown thinks he was on that of the Parliament, Bedfordshire being of that party, but his old father, the tinker, stood for the King. He does not seem to have been much under fire, but he got that knowledge of the appearance of war which he used in his siege of the city of Mansoul. I do not think tbab Bunyan liked war, certainly not from cowardice, bub from goodness of heart.

Civil war is an ugly business—God keep us out of it, and the English, our fathers, would very fain have been at peace. In 1646 the army was disbanded, and Bunyan went back to Elston village and his tinkering, his bell-ringing, his dancing with the girls, his playing at ‘ cab’ on a Sunday after service. He married very young and poor. He married a pious wife, and read all her library— * The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven,’ and 4 The Practice of Piety. ’ He became very devout in the spirit of the Church of England, and he gave up his amusements. Then he fell into the Slough of Despond, then he went through the Valley of the Shadow, and battled with Apollyon. People have wondered why he fancied himself such a sinner? He confesses bohaving been a liar andablasphemer. If I may guess, I fancy that this was merely the literary genius of Bunyan seeking for expression. His lies, I would go to bail, were tremendous romances, with fictions told for fun, never lies of cowardice or for gain. As to his blasphemies, he had an extraordinary power of language, and that was how he gave it play. ‘ Fancy swearing ’ was his only literary safety valve in those early days, when he played cab on Elston Green. Then ho heard a voice dart from heaven into hissoul which said, * Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to "hell ?’ So he fell on repentance, and passed those awful years of mental torture, when all nature seemed to tempt him to the Unknown Sin. What did all this mean ? It meant that Bunyan was within an ace of madness. These papers are written for young people; may I give them one word of serious advice ? It may happen to a certain proportion of you, religiously brought up, to suffer like Bunyan. You may hear voices, you may be afraid of that awful unknowu iniquity, and of eternal death, as Bunyan and Cowper were afraid. Do not give way to it for a moment. God is good ;He does nob lay traps for boys and girls, nor suffer them to be laid. The whispers of Apollyon are the folly of youth and ignorance ; Apollyon is to bo told to get behind you, and to be fought by work and exercise, and honestly doing your duty. Was it not De Quincey who was at school with a bully that believed he had been guilty of the unpardonable offence? Bullying is an offence much less pardonable than I hope most of you are guilty of. Tell Apollyon that the devil is an Ass, and do your work, or play your game, and tell the truth.

Bunyan got quit of his terror at last, briefly by believing in the goodness of God. He did nob say, like Mr Carlyle, well, if all my fears are true, 4 What then ?’ His was a Christian, nob a stoical deliverance. The ‘Church’ in which Bunyan found shelter had for minister a converted major in a Royalist regiment. It was a quaint little community, the members living like the early disciples, correcting each other's faults, and keeping a severe eye on each other’s lives. Bunyan became a minister in it; but Puritan as he was, he lets his Pilgrims dance on joyful occasions, and even Mr Ready to Halt waltzes with a young lady of the Pilgrim company. Bunyan began ta write books of controversy with Quakers and clergymen. The points debated are no longer important to us ; the main thing was that he gob a pen into his hand and found a proper outlet for ■his genius, a better way than fancy swearing. If he had not been cast into Bedford Gaol for preaching in a cottage he might never have dreamed, his immortal dream, nor become all that he was. The leisures of gaol were long. In that 4 den ' the muse came to him, the fair kind muse of the Home Beaut’ful. He saw all that company of his, so like and so unlike Chaucer’s j Faithful, and Hopeful, and Christian, the fellowship of fiends, the truculent Caval ers of Vanity Fair, and Giant Despair, with his grievous crabtree cudgel, and other people he savr who are with us always ; the handsome Madame Buddie, and the young woman whose name was Dull, and Mr Worldly Wiseman, and Mr Facing Bothways, and By ends, all the comedy of human life. He hears the angolic songs of the City bs3 T ond the River : he hoars them, but repeat them to us he cannot, ‘ for I’m no poet,’ as he says himself. He beheld the country of Beulah, and the Delectable Mountains, that earthly Paradise of nature where we might be happy yet, and wander no further, if the world would let us—fair mountains in whose streams Isaac Walton was then casting angle. It is pleasant to fancy how Walton and Bunyan might have met and talked, under a plane tree by the Ouse, while the May showers were falling. Surely Bunyan would not have likened the good old man to Formalist, and certainly Walton would have enjoyed travelling with Christian, though the book was.by none of his dear bishops, bub by a Nonconformist. They were maae to like, but not to convert, each other ; in matters ecciesiasbicalthey saw the opposite sides of the shield. It is too late to praise the 4 Pilgrim’s Progress. ’ You may put ingenuity on the rack, but she can say nothing new that is true about the best romance that ever was wedded to allegory. The people live, they are living, now, all the people, the noisy bullying judges, as of- the French : Revolutionary Courts, or tho Hanging Courts after Monmouth's war; the demure grave

Puritan girls, and Matthew, who had the gripes, and lazy freckless Ignorance, who came to so ill an end, poor fellow, and sturdy Old Honest, and timid Mr Fearing ; not single persons but dozens arise on the memory. They come as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out of Scott or Moliere; the Tinker is as great a master of character and fiction as the greatest, almost ; his style is pure, and plain, and sound, full of old idioms and even of something like old slang. But even his slang is classical. Bunyan is everybody’s author. The very Catholics have their own edition of the Pilgrim; they have cut out Giant Pope, but have been too good-natured to insert Giant Protestant in his place- Unheralded, unannounced, though not uncriticised (they accused the Tinker of being a plagiarist,of course) Bunyan outshone the Court wits, the learned, the poets of the Restoration, and even the great theologians. His other books, except ‘Grace Abounding,’ (an autobiography), ‘The Holy War,’ and Mr Badman,’are only known to students,nor much read by them. The fashion of his theology, as of all theology, passed away ; it is by virtue of his imagination, of his romance, that he lives. The allegory, of course, is full of flaws. It would not have been manly of Christian to run off and save his own soul, leaving his wife and family. But Bunyan i shrank from showing us how difficult,if not impossible, it is for a married man to be a saint. Christiana was really with him all through that pilgrimage, and how he must have been hampered by that woman of the world ! But, had his allegory clung more closely to the skirts of truth, it would have changed from a romance to a satire, from ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress ’to ‘ Vanity Fair.’ There was too much love in Bnnyan for a satirist of that kind ; he had just enough for a humourist. Born in another class, he might have been, he would have been, a writer more refined in his strength, more uniformly excellent, bub never so universal, nor so popular in the best sense of the term. In the change of times and belief it is nob impossible that Bunyan will live among the class whom he least thought of addressing, scholars, lovers of worldly literature, for devotion and poverty are parting company, while art endures till civilisation perishes. This is the last of these capers ; it has been hard for me to write for young people, an unaccustomed task, and harder because I suspect that the essays are read, when they are read, by the elders. They are useless if they do nob tempt people to read books for themselves, rather than articles about books. To write such things is my business, no doubt a very poor one, unless you neglect my comments for the text, the criticisms for the originals. Bub I fear that, in Bunyan’s day, when readers were so few, there were more readers than now for good literature. Perhaps this was be- 1 cause, in those years, the new books were good books.