Among Famous Books Part 5

And when the folk there spy me, They will all come up to me, With, 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'

And dance like a wave of the sea."

In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in the long battle between paganism and idealism. There is no question that Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side. Certainly it is true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who take it wrongly. Meredith's great line was never truer than it is here, "Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare." The effect upon the mind, and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the reading of it.

All this bringing back of the discarded G.o.ds has its glamour and its risk. Such G.o.ds are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the quaintest of studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.

But, for the unwary, there is the double danger in all this region that they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to wors.h.i.+p the old G.o.ds; or that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite wors.h.i.+p, the old black magic may spring out upon them. As to the former alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and commanding. They will cry, "Here is the great G.o.d"; and, intoxicated by the mystery, will fall down to wors.h.i.+p. But that which does not command can never save, and for a guiding faith we need something more sure than this.

Moreover, there is the second alternative of the old black magic. A discarded G.o.d is always an uncanny thing to take liberties with. While the earth-spirit in all its grandeur may appeal to the jaded and perplexed minds of to-day as a satisfying object of faith, the result will probably be but a modern form of the ancient Baal-wors.h.i.+p. It will in some respects be a superior cult to its ancient prototype. Its devotees will not cut themselves with knives. They will cut themselves with sweet and bitter poignancies of laughter and tears, when the sun s.h.i.+nes upon wet forests in the green earth. This, too, is Baal-wors.h.i.+p, hardly distinguishable in essence from that cruder devotion to the fructifying and terrifying powers of nature against which the prophets of Israel made their war. In much that Fiona Macleod has written we feel the spirit struggling like Samson against its bonds of green withes, though by no means always able to break them as he did; or lying down in an earth-bound stupor, content with the world that nature produces and sustains. Here, among the elemental roots of things, when the heart is satisfying itself with the pa.s.sionate life of nature, the red flower grows in the green life, and the imperative of pa.s.sion becomes the final law.

On the other hand, a child of nature may remember that he is also a child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not wors.h.i.+p the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona Macleod's writing, reminds us strangely of that old text, "Born of water and of the Spirit." While man lives upon the sea-girt earth, the voices of the ocean, that seem to come from the depths of its green heart, will always call to him, reminding him of the mysterious powers and the terrible beauties among which his life is cradled. Yet there are deeper secrets which the spirit of man may learn--secrets that will still be told when the day of earth is over, when the sea has ceased from her swinging, and the earth-spirit has fled for ever. It is well that a man should remember this, and remain a spiritual man in spite of every form of seductive paganism.

Sharp has said in his _Green Fire_:--

"There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all, through (not b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, for the brute world is clean and sane) perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are subject; the sole law, the law of nature. Then there is that small untoward cla.s.s which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons: which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one--is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of life."

There are indeed the three races. There is the pagan, which knows only the fleshly aspect of life, and seeks nothing beyond it. There is the spiritual, which ignores and seeks to flee from that to which its body chains it. There is also that wise race who know that all things are theirs, flesh and spirit both, and who have learned how to reap the harvests both of time and of eternity.

LECTURE V

JOHN BUNYAN

We have seen the eternal battle in its earlier phases surging to and fro between G.o.ds of the earth that are as old as Time, and daring thoughts of men that rose beyond them and claimed a higher inheritance. Between that phase of the warfare and the same battle as it is fought to-day, we shall look at two contemporary men in the latter part of the seventeenth century who may justly be taken as examples of the opposing types. John Bunyan and Samuel Pepys, however, will lead us no dance among the elemental forces of the world. They will rather show us, with very fascinating _navete_, true pictures of their own aspirations, nourished in the one case upon the busy and crowded life of the time, and in the other, upon the definite and unquestioned conceptions of a complete and systematic theology. Yet, typical though they are, it is easy to exaggerate their simplicity, and it will be interesting to see how John Bunyan, supposed to be a pure idealist, aloof from the world in which he lived, yet had the most intimate and even literary connection with that world. Pepys had certain curious and characteristic outlets upon the spiritual region, but he seems to have closed them all, and become increasingly a simple devotee of things seen and temporal.

Bunyan comes upon us full grown and mature in the work by which he is best known and remembered. His originality is one of the standing wonders of history. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ was written at a time when every man had to take sides in a savage and atrocious ecclesiastical controversy. The absolute judgments pa.s.sed on either side by the other, the cruelties practised and the dangers run, were such as to lead the reader to expect extreme bitterness and sectarian violence in every religious writing of the time. Bunyan was known to his contemporaries as a religious writer, pure and simple, and a man whose convictions had caused him much suffering at the hands of his enemies. Most of the first readers of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ had no thought of any connection between that book and worldly literature; and the pious people who shook their heads over his allegory as being rather too interesting for a treatise on such high themes as those which it handled, might perhaps have shaken their heads still more solemnly had they known how much of what they called the world was actually behind it. Bunyan was a voluminous writer of theological works, and the complete edition of them fills three enormous volumes, closely printed in double column. But it is the little allegory embedded in one of these volumes which has made his fame eternal, and for the most part the rest are remembered now only in so far as they throw light upon that story. One exception must be made in favour of _Grace Abounding_. This is Bunyan's autobiography, in which he describes, without allegory, the course of his spiritual experience. For an understanding of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ it is absolutely necessary to know that companion volume.

It is very curious to watch the course of criticism as it was directed to him and to his story. The eighteenth century had lost the keenness of former controversies, and from its cla.s.sic balcony it looked down upon what seemed to it the somewhat sordid arena of the past. _The Examiner_ complains that he never yet knew an author that had not his admirers.

Bunyan and Quarles have pa.s.sed through several editions and pleased as many readers as Dryden and Tillotson. Even Cowper, timidly appreciative and patronising, wrote of the "ingenious dreamer"--

"I name thee not, lest so despised a name Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame,"

--lines which have a pathetic irony in them, as we contrast the anxious Cowper, with the occasional revivals of interest and the age-long tone of patronage which have been meted out to him, with the robust and st.u.r.dy immortality of the man he shrank from naming. Swift discovered Bunyan's literary power, and later Johnson and Southey did him justice.

In the nineteenth century his place was secured for ever, and Macaulay's essay on him will probably retain its interest longer than anything else that Macaulay wrote.

We are apt to think of him as a mere dreamer, spinning his cobwebs of imagination wholly out of his own substance--a pure idealist, whose writing dwells among his ideals in a region ignorant of the earth. In one of his own apologies he tells us, apparently in answer to accusations that had been made against him, that he did not take his work from anybody, but that it came from himself alone. Doubtless that is true so far as the real originality of his work is concerned, its general conception, and the working out of its details point by point.

Yet, to imagine that if there had been no other English literature the _Pilgrim's Progress_ would have been exactly what it is, is simply to ignore the facts of the case. John Bunyan is far more interesting just because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be.

The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of the life which he criticises, and no reliable guide among its facts.

Bunyan might very easily indeed have been a pagan of the most worldly type. It was extremely difficult for him to be a Puritan, not only on account of outward troubles, but also of inward ones belonging to his own disposition and experience. Accepting Puritanism, the easiest course for him would have been that of fanaticism, and had he taken that course he would certainly have had no lack of companions. It was far more difficult to remain a Puritan and yet to keep his heart open to the beauty and fascination of human life. Yet he was interested in what men were writing or had written. All manner of songs and stories, heard in early days in pot-houses, or in later times in prison, kept sounding in his ears, and he wove them into his work. The thing that he meant to say, and did say, was indeed one about which controversy and persecution were raging, but, except in a very few general references, his writing shows no sign of this. His eye is upon far-off things, the things of the soul of man and the life of G.o.d, but the way in which he tells these things shows innumerable signs of the bright world of English books.

It is worth while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all such influences as go to the making of other writers. He tells us, indeed, that "when I pulled it came," and that is delightfully true.

Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to inquire as to the places from which it did come. As we have said, it came out of two worlds, and the web is most wonderfully woven and coloured, but our present concern is rather with the earthly part of it than the heavenly.

No one can read John Bunyan without thinking of George Herbert. Few of the short biographies in our language are more interesting reading than Isaac Walton's life of Herbert. That master of simplicity is always fascinating, and in this biography he gives us one of the most beautiful sketches of contemporary narrative that has ever been penned. Herbert was the quaintest of the saints. He lived in the days of Charles the First and James the First, a High Churchman who had Laud for his friend.

Shy, sensitive, high-bred, shrinking from the world, he was at the same time a man of business, skilful in the management of affairs, and yet a man of morbid delicacy of imagination. The picture of his life at Little Gidding, where he and Mr. Farrer inst.i.tuted a kind of hermitage, or private chapel of devotion, in which the whole of the Psalms were read through once in every twenty-four hours, grows peculiarly pathetic when we remember that the house and chapel were sacked by the parliamentary army, in which for a time John Bunyan served. No two points of view, it would seem, could be more widely contrasted than those of Bunyan and Herbert, and yet the points of agreement are far more important than the differences between them, and _The Temple_ has so much in common with the _Pilgrim's Progress_ that one is astonished to find that the likenesses seem to be entirely unconscious. Matthew Henry is perpetually quoting _The Temple_ in his Commentary. Writing only a few years earlier, Bunyan reproduces in his own fas.h.i.+on many of its thoughts, but does not mention its existence.

In order to know Bunyan's early life, and indeed to understand the _Pilgrim's Progress_ at all adequately, one must read _Grace Abounding_.

It is a short book, written in the years when he was already growing old, for those whom he had brought into the fold of religion. From this autobiography it has usually been supposed that he had led a life of the wildest debauchery before his Christian days; but the more one examines the book, and indeed all his books, the less is one inclined to believe in any such desperate estimate of the sins of his youth. The measure of sin is the sensitiveness of a man's conscience; and where, as in Bunyan's case, the conscience is abnormally delicate and subject to violent reactions, a life which in another man would be a pattern of innocence and respectability may be regarded as an altogether blackguardly and vicious one. It was, however evidently a life of strong and intense worldly interest stepping over the line here and there into positive wrong-doing, but for the most part blameworthy mainly on account of its absorption in the pa.s.sing shows of the hour.

What then was that world which interested Bunyan so intensely, and cost him so many pangs of conscience? No doubt it was just the life of the road as he travelled about his business; for though by no means a tinker in the modern sense of the word, he was an itinerant brazier, whose business took him constantly to and fro among the many villages of the district of Bedford. He must have heard in inns and from wayside companions many a catch of plays and songs, and listened to many a lively story, or read it in the chap-books which were hawked about the country then. It must also be remembered that these were the days of puppet shows. The English drama, as we have already mentioned in connection with _Faust_, was by no means confined to the boards of actual theatres where living actors played the parts. Little mimic stages travelled about the country in all directions reproducing the plays, very much after the fas.h.i.+on of Punch and Judy; and even the solemnest of Shakespeare's tragedies were exhibited in this way. There is no possibility of doubt that Bunyan must have often stood agape at these exhibitions, and thus have received much of the highest literature at second hand.

As to how much of it he had actually read, that is a different question.

One is tempted to believe that he must have read George Herbert, but of this there is no positive proof. We are quite certain about five books, for which we have his own express statements. His wife brought him as her dowry the very modest furniture of two small volumes, Baily's _Practice of Piety_ and Dent's _The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven_. The first is a very complicated and elaborate statement of Christian dogma, which Bunyan pa.s.ses by with the scant praise, "Wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me." The other is a much more vital production. Even to this day it is an immensely interesting piece of reading. It consists of conversations between various men who stand for types of worldling, ignoramus, theologian, etc., and there are very clear traces of it in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, especially in the talks between Bunyan's pilgrims and the man Ignorance.

Another book which played a large part in Bunyan's life was the short biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before Bunyan's time. Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman Church. The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more of the mind than of the body. It is an extremely ghastly account of a morbid and insane melancholia. It was the fas.h.i.+on of the time to take such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls. How the book came into Bunyan's hands no one can tell, but evidently he had found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of _Grace Abounding_ are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes the very words of Spira.

Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther's _Commentary on the Galatians_. The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated 1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long lists of names are printed. The names are those of weavers, shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it in their own tongue. This curious fact reminds us that the book had among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic as Bunyan himself was. Another of his books, and the only one quoted by name in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ or _Grace Abounding_, with the exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, traces of which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of Faithful and in other parts.

In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge which Bunyan is known to have possessed. He stands apart from mere book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears directly than through the medium of books. But then those eyes and ears of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for its own uses. Thus the rich store of observation which he had already laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it. Further, even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would beguile the tedium of their confinement. That would be for the most part in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to 1672. The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where there would be room for very few companions. The modern bridge crosses the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be the foundations of the old prison bridge.

When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and other specially notorious sinners being s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the devil--narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole _Pilgrim's Progress_ there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign. The allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living man. The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is that in which the Pilgrim says, "I hear that our little city is to be destroyed by fire"--a phrase which obviously has much more direct connection with the destruction of Sodom than with that of London. The only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular events.

There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent and contemporary secular literature. The demonology of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is quite different from that of the _Holy War_. It used to be suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the publication of Milton's _Paradise Regained_, which appeared in 1671.

That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the _Pilgrim's Progress_ in his earlier imprisonment. If, as is now conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his _Paradise Regained_ before the first edition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was penned. It is, of course, always possible that between the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Holy War_ Bunyan may have seen Milton's work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly changed his demonology and made it more like Milton's. Again, there are certain pa.s.sages in Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ which bear so close a resemblance to Bunyan's description of the Celestial City, that it is difficult not to suppose that either directly or indirectly that poem had influenced Bunyan's creation; while in at least one of his songs he approaches so near both the language and the rhythm of a song of Shakespeare's as to make it very probable that he had heard it sung.[2]

These suppositions are not meant in any way to detract from the originality of the great allegory, but rather to link the writer in with that English literature of which he is so conspicuous an ornament. They are no more significant and no less, than the fact that so much of the geography of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ seems not to have been created by his imagination, but to have been built up from well-remembered landscapes. From his prison window he could not but see the ruins of old Bedford Castle, which stood demolished upon its hill even in his time.

This, together with Cainhoe Castle, only a few miles away, may well have suggested the Castle of Despair in Bypath Meadow near the River of G.o.d.

Again, memories of Elstow play a notable part in the story. A cross stood there, at the foot of which, when he was playing the game of cat upon a certain Sunday, the voice came to his soul with its tremendous question, "Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to h.e.l.l?" There stood the Moot Hall as it stands to-day, in which, during his worldly days, he had danced with the rest of the villagers and gained his personal knowledge of Vanity Fair. There, as he tells us expressly, is the wicket gate, the rough old oak and iron gate of Elstow parish church. Close beside it, just as you read in the story, stands that great tower which suggested a devil's castle beside the wicket gate, whence Satan showered his arrows on those who knocked below. Not only so, but there was a special reason why for Bunyan that ancient church tower may well have been symbolic of the stronghold of the devil; for it had bells in it, and he was so fond of bell-ringing that it got upon his conscience and became his darling sin. It is easy to make light of his heart-searchings about so innocent an employment, but doubtless there were other things that went along with it. We have all seen those large drinking-vessels, known as bell-ringers' jugs; and these perhaps may suggest an explanation of the sense of sin which burdened his conscience so heavily. Anyhow, there the tower stands, and in the Gothic doorway of it there are one or two deeply cut grooves, obviously made by the ropes of the bell-ringers when, instead of standing below their ropes, they preferred the open air, and drew the ropes through the archway of the door, so as to cut into its moulding.

The little fact gains much significance in the light of Bunyan's own confession that he was so afraid that the bell would fall upon him and kill him as a punishment from G.o.d, that he used to go outside the door to ring it. Then again there was the old convent at Elstow, where, long before Bunyan's time, nuns had lived, who were known to tradition as "the ladies of Elstow." Very aristocratic and very human ladies they seem to have been, given to the entertainment of their friends in the intervals of their tasteful devotion, and occasionally needing a rebuke from headquarters. Yet it seems not improbable that there is some glorified memory of those ladies in the inhabitants of the House Beautiful, which house itself appears to have been modelled upon Houghton House on the Ampthill heights, built by Sir Philip Sidney's sister but a century before. The silver mine of Demas might seem to have come from some far-off source in chap-book or romance, until we remember that at the village of Pulloxhill, which had been the original home of the Bunyan family, and near which Bunyan was arrested and brought for examination to the house of Justice Wingate, there are the actual remains of an ancient gold mine whose tradition still lingers among the villagers.

All these things seem to indicate that the great allegory is by no means so remote from the earth as has sometimes been imagined; and perhaps the most touching commentary upon this statement is the curious and very unlovely burying-ground in Bunhill fields, cut through by a straight path that leads from one busy thoroughfare to another. A few yards to the left of that path is the tomb and monument of John Bunyan, while at an equal distance to the right lies Daniel Defoe. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ are perhaps the two best-known stories in the world, and they are not so far remote from one another as they seem.

Nor was it only in the outward material with which he worked that John Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and worthiness of style, whose compression and terseness have fulfilled at least one of the canons of high literature. Take, for example, the lines on Faithful's death--

"Now Faithful, play the man, speak for thy G.o.d: Fear not the wicked's malice, nor their rod: Speak boldly, man, the truth is on thy side; Die for it, and to life in triumph ride."

Or take this as a second example, from his _Prison Meditations_--

"Here come the angels, here come saints, Here comes the Spirit of G.o.d, To comfort us in our restraints Under the wicked's rod.

This gaol to us is as a hill, From whence we plainly see Beyond this world, and take our fill Of things that lasting be.

We change our drossy dust for gold, From death to life we fly: We let go shadows, and take hold Of immortality."

This whole poem has in it not merely the bright march of a very vigorous mind, but also a great many of the elements which long before had built up the ancient romances. In it, and in much else that he wrote, he finds a congenial escape from the mere middle-cla.s.s respectability of his time, and ranges himself with the splendid chivalry both of the past and of the present. There is an elfin element in him as there was in Chaucer, which now and again twinkles forth in a quaint touch of humour, or escapes from the merely spiritual into an extremely interesting human region.

In _Grace Abounding_ he very pleasantly tells us that he could have written in a much higher style if he had chosen to do so, but that for our sakes he has refrained. He does, however, sometimes "step into" his finer style. There is some exquisite pre-Raphaelite work that comes unexpectedly upon the reader, in which he is not only a poet, but a writer capable of seeing and of describing the most highly coloured and minute detail: "Besides, on the banks of this river on either side were green trees, that bore all manner of fruit...." "On either side of the river was also a meadow, curiously beautified with lilies; and it was green the year long." At other times he affrights us with a sudden outburst of the most terrifying imagination, as in the close of the poem of _The Fly at the Candle_--

"At last the Gospel doth become their snare, Doth them with burning hands in pieces tear."

His imagination was sometimes as quaint and sweet as at other times it could be lurid and powerful. _Upon a Snail_ is not a very promising subject for a poem, but its first lines justify the experiment--

"She goes but softly, but she goeth sure; She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do."