THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.*
Ma. Mscarrtaoar's beautiful and scholarly reprint of The Pilgrim's _Progress may be taken as curious evidence of the position which the Baptist minister has won for himself among the wise of all time. We have had true people's editions, published- more than a century ago, with grotesque pictures of Apollyon and Giant Despair, and sham people's editions of later times, with exquisitely feeble en- gravings and weak evangelical commentaries. Mr. Macmillan has judged wisely in giving a simple pocket edition, with clear type and good paper, with scarcely any notes, and with no preface hut the author's. The fact is that The Pilgrim's Progress, like the Bible or Shakspeare, belongs to spiritual regions, where mere criticism is at -fault, and where those who have eaten their bread in tears have the highest artistic insight. True feeling revolts from a garrulous reve- lation of its own experience, and immature feeling is an impertinence. For a single man, therefore, deliberately to sit down and expound Shakspeare or 'Goethe, tracing their genius in its wanderings and .sounding it in its depths, is a misapplication of time and powers that ought to be devoted to some handicraft, or at most to the mechanical drudgery of literature. Science can give us casts and photographs but not statues or pictures. On the other hand, any one who will be content to read a great poem reverently, and to examine the new forms of life which have risen up before him as he read it, may find something worth telling to the world. A critic who would collect the best essays upon Dante, such as Mr. Church's, or Mr. Carlyle's, and would add Mt. Ruskin's chapter on the landscape of the Divine Com- -media, would zontribute more to a true knowledge of the great medifeval epic than by any conceivable amount of commentary. The essay, however weak it may be, at least examines the thought, and -notes only traverse the details of style and execution. Probably eve-gone who reads the "Pilgrim's Progress" is struck by the incongruities of the author's plan. Taking only the first and most perfect part it is difficult to construct a consistent idea of the Allegory. What, for instance, is the difference between the City of Destruction, which Christian leaves, and Vanity Fair, which he reaches near the end of his journey ? He seems to start from the world, or unregenerate life, and to come again to it. How is it that Faithful has passed by the House Beautiful without entering it, and that Hopeful does not even need to climb the Hill Difficulty? Indeed, this last fact seems to show that Vanity Fair is nearer to the Celestial City than the House Beautiful itself, the pilgrim from Vanity Fair not having to page through the Talley of the Shadow of Death. The confusion is the Tnore remarkable as Ignorance is carried away to hell even from the gates of heaven because he entered not in at the wicket-gate. It is a minor but a considerable incongruity that Faithful -and Hopeful have no burdens, unless we assume that these have dropped off before they met Christian. Probably, however, it is safer to believe that Bunyan wrote for a class of men who cared little for artistic symmetry so long as every part was vivid and com- plete in itself. The Puritan's conception of the wicked world from which he had come out, and which had existed even when the saints -were ruling the earth under Cromwell, was quite distinct from his idea of the wicked world in which Charles II. was king and Jeffreys judge. The sin that taints the soul was actually different from the sin that burns the body. Accordingly in Vanity Fair we must con- fider the streets and booths, the drunkards and rioters, as mere areessories to the bloody tribunal. We feel from the first that Christian is no longer among fellow-citizens, as he was in the City • The Pilgrihes Progrus. lig John Bunyan. Golden Tramany Sorbs Cam- bridge Macmillan and Cu of Destruction, and there is even an artistic probability in the scenes of his old life meeting him again, the sins which he has left far behind him on the road, anew soliciting, and at last judging and con- demning him. It is as disloyal subjects of Beelzebub, as men who have despised the law of their prince, that the pilgrims are brought to trial;
History is perhaps the best key to Banyan's allegory. His work is the poem of all Protestantism, as all Catholicism is summed up in Dante. The symmetry of Dante's circles, spiral coil rising above spiral coil, the universality of .the vision which saw all that time has made or shall make.; the love that counted Ripheus a Christian, and the justice that condemned master and friend to the unquenchable flames of hell, all redect the magnificent philosophy of the times that dealt with the future and the invisible as freely as with the pre- sent and the things of earth. But in virtue of this very greatness the bun= element is comparatively obscured throughout, the men and women whom we meet in the fiery gulfs of the Inferno, or in the twilight of purgatory, are rather representatives of a class, instances of a sin, known to us in some typical act or speech, than many-sided in their strength and weaknesses like life. Francesca da
Ugolino, Ulysses, are love, hatred, and craft, eminent each af its kind but unmixed. Bunyan's world is strangely different. His faith is not weaker than Dente's, or his visiondimmer. But he writes from the heart and from his own life; the problem of existence for him is no questioning on the divine order, but the cry of his soul to be saved. Sometimes the cross which guides his way -seems to narrow his horizon, and he dooms Ignorance to hell with no touch of that gracious compunction which led Dante to create a shadowy Elysium on the very shores of the abyss for the souls of the great who had not known Christ. But we gainin intensity what we lose in width. Dante, after all, gives us Heaven as the best men imagine it, and Bunyan .describes man as God's Spirit has renewed him. The indi- vidual life, with its despendencies and doubts, its eounsel sought from Mr. Legality, its casuistry with By-ends, its meditative discussions, its passage -through hell and the world, and its far-off glimpses of heaven IS before us as one of God's noblest servants lived it. The pilgrim and the straight path make up the book. A man starting from the history of his own experiences would generally become vulgar and egotistical. Half the hatred which the
religious world compl .of encountering is provoked by its own habit of displaying its inner hie as a stage property. But Bunyan was too full of apostolical spirit to obtrude himself into his work. We may trace here and there an allusion to the times, a triumph which the Revolution presently justified over the decay of Giant Pope, and a reminiscence of Twisden in Lord Hate-good. In the plenitude of military illustration we may see recollections of the day when Bunyan fought as a trooper for the Covenant and the Saints. .
But there no bitterness in the satire, and no vindictive vain-glory- ing in the memories. Banyan is against the Lord's foes, but he is without personal enmity, and as he remembers the trumpet sound, he does not seem to recal that he heard it on the fields where the Man of Sin and his perfumed courtiers were beaten back. Yet his religion is not the faith which leads to quiet homes and a tranquil routine of devotion. He had lived in times when a Church, all the more in- tolerant because its differences were slight, had tried to impose a me- chanical compliance with its liturgy, and had kindled a worse than Marian persecution for the creed of Charles II. and Buckingham. He had seen sixty thousand of his countrymen hunted from hiding- place to hiding-place, rotting to death in foul gaols, sent to the plan- tations as slaves, or sworn to death falsely for speaking differently as they prayed, from Sheldon and Titus Oates. The iron of captivity had entered into his own soul, and his wife had been insulted when she appealed for him. A little compliance with legal ordinances, an acquiescence in moderately good institutions, and silence on one or two subjects for which his heart burned would have pro- cured him and his fellows ample toleration to think. There was no question now of driving them to church. Their op,po- sition was profitless, and their numbers were gradually growing small as the faint-hearted and the worldly failed from them. They were not called upon to buy the wares of Vanity Fair. Only, if like By- ends, they would "jump in their judgment with the present way of the times," "liking that religion best that would stand with the security of God's good blessings," they might _live sober and moral lives, talking in biblical phraseology, doing works of charity, and only lying to their own souls and to God. At the distance of almost two centuries, the heart warms to think that so many thousand un- lettered men were found to die obseuiely in Ohrist's cause. "How to make the best of both worlds," as a hand-book of popular religion puts it; "How to serve God and Mammon," as was said more crudely in Galilee, was a thought that never flashed on the Baptist tinker. His idealism is the grander for its unconscious simplicity. Christian flying from wife and children may make every other sacrifice easily. He has left what made life beautiful behind him, but lie is travelling toward the city that shines as the sun. The voice of Evangelist has been the destiny overruling earthly affections, and the antagonism of spirit and flesh, begun in a harsh separation, justifies himself by the pilgrim's gradual exaltation above his old belongings. By the time Christian has reached the river, we feel that a world would have parted him from his wife, even had the voice of Heaven...allowed him to end his days in the city where he was born. Perhaps, when all is said, it was partly the desire to vindicate Christian that led Bunyan to conduct Mercy and her children in a second part to the Celestial City. However it may have arisen, the idea was unfortunate. Commonly, where the allegory of the first part is not reproduced it is violated. The idea of sending an escort with Christian and her children is the very negation of all Protes- tant independency. Greatheart is in fact a spiritual director. The land of Beulah, in which the pilgrims await a summons across the river, is another strange departure from the original conception; and it is difficult to understand how a man like Bunyan can have contemplated rest upon earth even in a dream. Apart from the in- imitable style, the chief merit of this part, perhaps, lies in showing how completely Bunyan had mastered the Language and modes of thought usual among women, and how highly he valued them. The passage in which Gains rehearses the ministrations of women upon our Lord is a noble advance on the conventional sentiment of the times, and may fairly be quoted as proof how far Puritan Christianity was in advance of Cavalier civilization. After all, the substantial failure of the work is not much to be regretted or wondered at. Beautiful and noble as a transitional form, English Puritanism wanted the insight, the width and the culture which are demanded for immortality. It had lived grandly in Cromwell and Milton, and it perished--perhaps with a higher beauty before God—in Baxter and Bunyan. Whether there was in Bunyan himself the germ of an unexpressed, undeveloped thought, of something higher than his own epic, must remain a mystery, but we are inclined to believe that, in this as in other eases, the artist's greatest work was nobler than himself; or is it that the moment of inspiration comes only once in a lifetime
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