Art. 6.-JOHN BUNYAN.

1. John Bunyan, His Life, Times, and Work. By John Brown, D.D. Two vols. Sir Isaac Pitman, 1918. 2. John Bunyan. By John Brown, D.D. Tercentenary edition, 1628–1928. Revised by Frank Mott Harrison. Hulbert Publishing Company, 1928.

3. Life of John Bunyan. By Robert Southey. Murray's Colonial and Home Library.) 1844.

(In

4. Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding and a Relation of His Imprisonment. By Edmund Venables. Second edition. Revised by Mabel Peacock. Clarendon Press, 1900.

5. John Bunyan: A Study in Personality. By G. B. Harrison, M.A. Dent, 1928.

And other works.

IN the Quarterly Review' for October 1830 there was an article of twenty pages on Southey's edition of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' with a Life of Bunyan' which had been published earlier in the year. Lockhart calls the article a very pretty reviewal,' and so it is. It was written by Walter Scott in August, six months after the attack which was 'the penalty of his unparalleled toils.' It shows nothing of the failing powers which are traced by his biographer in other productions of that year-a year, it must be remembered, in which he covered almost as many sheets with his MS as in 1829.' But though Scott was only fifty-nine the end of his literary activity was not far off. The essay on Bunyan may be regarded as the last expression of his full powers. A delightful study it is. It is well worth our consideration how far the opinion of the greatest English man of letters of nearly a century ago represents the final judgment on the work of Bunyan, three centuries after the birth of that 'Spenser of the People,' as he was called by Isaac D'Israeli and by Scott after him.

How are we to account, says Sir Walter, for the fact that Bunyan 'in spite of a clownish and vulgar education, rose into a degree of popularity scarce equalled by any English writer'? One may well pause to criticise the words. 'Clownish,' may be admitted. 'Vulgar' is a word Scott himself had deprecated the use of, telling

a young lady that it only meant 'common,' and that we should be thankful that all the works of God most useful to man were common. As to the degree of popularity one may well accept it, for no one English writer a hundred years ago had ever been so popular, except Scott himself. But it is a familiar trick of the critic to begin by depreciating the writer he will conclude by exalting.

Scott, of course, follows his author; and Southey was not too sure as to the social depths from which a tinker may have ascended, but he spoke of 'a generation of Tinkers' and of 'so mean and despised a calling.' Scott could hardly rid himself of the thought of those dirty limping folk who may still be seen wandering about the Highland roads and lighting fires by the shores of Loch Lomond: to him Bunyan, being a tinker, was probably a gipsy, and a gipsy one of those Egyptians whom the Scottish kings of the Middle Ages suspected and watched. But Bunyan we now know was & 'brassyer'; and a brazier need not be a man of very low estate, though Bunyan himself rather gloried in being of 'that rank which is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.' Nowadays we do not trouble about Bunyan's birth or feel surprise that literature, which glories in Burns and acknowledges Clare and even Bloomfield, should admit him of her crew. Yet it may be doubted if we are much nearer than was Scott or Southey to the secret of Bunyan's education. He says himself that he learnt to read and write according to the rate of other poor men's children,' and pretends (can it be more than a pretence?) that he soon lost what he had learnt 'even almost utterly.' If he did so lose what he had learnt, one asks, when did he recover it? His books, his pamphlets even, show a command of somewhat more than homespun English. He seems to have at least as much knowledge of English literature as Burns had, a century and a half later— perhaps even more. His vocabulary is certainly as extensive as that of John Clare, though that might not be saying much. There is even a suspicion of a little Latin, though not so much of classic tongues as his contemporaries allowed to Shakespeare. There is an ocean of knowledge and taste dividing him from Vaughan,

Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell, not to speak of Milton and Dryden; yet, after all, is he not, now and then, as great a writer as any of them? It remains a puzzle to discover where he got the learning, even the knowledge of English, that he possessed. There may have been a village school of Elstow, a decaying descendant of a monastery school, or he may have learned his grammar in the since famous school of Bedford.

In 1700 a volume was printed, as the work of John Bunyan, by a far from honest publisher named Blair, called 'Scriptural Poems,' containing these lines:

For I'm no poet, nor a poet's son,
But a mechanic guided by no rule

But what I gained in a grammar school,
In my minority.'

If this were genuine it would help us to know something of what Bunyan learnt as a boy. But is it? Probably not. Dr Stebbing, in his edition of the Works, says:

'Necessity might have obliged Bunyan's parents to withdraw him from school, and set him to work while he was still a boy; but another reason is given by his first biographer. A rude and licentious spirit prevailed among several of the scholars; they were of different ranks, and some of them, probably the children of wealthy parents, defied control. Bunyan's father lamented the effect of this evil example on his son, and he took him away from the school, not, we are told, for the sake of the work he could do, but to save, if possible, his morals.'

This is a flight of fancy. However that may be, we may imagine a Parson Evans putting him, like little William, through his paces, and his rustic father being as shocked as was Mrs Quickly. In later life Bunyan was certainly not mealy-mouthed. In fact, that was the chief trouble of his early manhood. We do not know whether he learnt to swear in Cromwell's army, where he was under the command of that noted soldier whom Butler depicted in 'Hudibras'; but we do know that he was a foul-mouthed fellow. Scott thinks that the stains on his character were 'profane swearing, sabbath breaking, and a mind addicted to the games and

idle sports of Vanity Fair.' Southey goes farther and says he was a blackguard.

The vividness of his language may have shown a literary bent: it is not unusual. Certainly the vividness of his imagination did. He was constantly seeing visions, with his mind's eye constantly dreaming dreams. Without going into the tedious discussion of what genius precisely is, there can be no doubt that Bunyan possessed it. Poeta nascitur, non fit, of course; and most certainly Bunyan was never a poet. But there is no congenital qualification, one fancies, for an admirable writer of prose. One speaks it, however indifferently, like M. Jourdain, all one's life; and Bunyan must have spoken it admirably, because he wrote it so well. Oratory may be a despicable art, but there is no doubt at all that Bunyan was an attractive speaker: in the later years of his life crowds flocked to hear him whenever it was known, in London, that he would preach. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he learnt to speak better as he grew older, or to write better. The earliest things that we know of him, from outside, belong to his success as a speaker, and his enthusiasm for speaking. Did he begin in a tavern? Did he catch the infection from the windy orators of the Parliamentary army? Did he submit to a strict training when he came under the rather prosaic if excitable influence of John Gifford? Really we do not know. But early in his life, when he had served in the fighting forces of the king's enemiesand nearly been sent off to Ireland, whence he might have added a little Celtic fire to his sober Englishry of tongue--he became a popular preacher and an easy writer of things which hover between a pamphlet and a

sermon.

And from the time of these beginnings certainly imagination had begun to soar. As soon as he joined the little Baptist flock-not, so far as we know, one replenished with literary culture or poetic feeling-he was able to idealise his companions and see them as already on the way to the Delectable Mountains. As he thinks, in the scrap of Autobiography which he called 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,' of the happy folk; happy in the love of God, to whom he joined himself, he anticipates the visions which should make him

the author of the greatest allegory in the English tongue.

'I saw them,' he says, as if they were on the sunny side of some high mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold, afflicted with frost, snow and dark clouds. Methought also, betwixt me and them, I saw a wall that did compass about this mountain; now through this wall my soul did greatly desire to pass; concluding that if I could, I would even go into the very midst of them, and there also comfort myself with the heat of their sun. About this wall I thought myself to go again and again, still prying as I went, to see if I could find some way or passage, by which I might enter therein; but none could I find for some time. . . . At last with great striving, methought I at first did get in my head; and after that, by a side-long striving, my shoulders, and my whole body: then was I exceeding glad, went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their sun. Now the mountain and wall, &c, were thus made out to me. The mountain signified the Church of the living God: the sun that shone thereon, the comfortable shining of his merciful face on them that were within the wall, I thought, was the word, that did make separation between the Christians and the world; and the gap which was in the wall, I thought, was Jesus Christ, who is the way to God the Father.'

Without saying that Bunyan's prose style was unlike that of any of his contemporaries, we shall certainly discover in him no kinship to those whose lives and literary interests were different from his own. Rustic writers are generally copyists of the generation before them, or they strive rather clumsily to catch the fashion of their social superiors; but Bunyan's sober periods are quite unlike the rose-tinted prose of Raleigh, and have no touch of the tropical exuberance of Jeremy Taylor or the mystical fragrance of Traherne. Indeed his writing can perhaps never be described as charming, yet it has in its serious simplicity real gleams of beauty, not few or far between.

So many men of letters have attempted to describe his manner that one hesitates to make a new attempt. Southey was a good judge, and he wrote in a golden, we do not say the golden, age of English prose. And he wrote thus :