There are books which, while didactic in intention, are read with delight by people who do not want their teaching and may not believe that they have anything to teach—works like Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura or Burton’s Anatomy. This is the class to which The Pilgrim’s Progress belongs. Most of it has been read and re-read by those who were indifferent or hostile to its theology, and even by children who perhaps were hardly aware of it. I say, most of it, for there are some long dialogues where we get bogged down in sheer doctrine, and doctrine, too, of a sort that I find somewhat repellent. The long conversation, near the end of Part I, which Christian and Hopeful conduct ‘to prevent drowsiness in this place’1—they are entering the Enchanted Ground—will not prevent drowsiness on the part of many readers. Worse still is the dialogue with Mr Talkative.
Bunyan—and, from his own point of view, rightly—would not care twopence for the criticism that he here loses the interest of irreligious readers. But such passages are faulty in another way too. In them, the speakers step out of the allegorical story altogether. They talk literally and directly about the spiritual life. The great image of the Road disappears. They are in the pulpit. If this is going to happen, why have a story at all? Allegory frustrates itself the moment the author starts doing what could equally well be done in a straight sermon or treatise. It is a valid form only so long as it is doing what could not be done at all, or done so well, in any other way.
But this fault is rare in Bunyan—far rarer than in Piers Plowman. If such dead wood were removed from The Pilgrim’s Progress the book would not be very much shorter than it is. The greater part of it is enthralling narrative or genuinely dramatic dialogue. Bunyan stands with Malory and Trollope as a master of perfect naturalness in the mimesis of ordinary conversation.
To ask how a great book came into existence is, I believe, often futile. But in this case Bunyan has told us the answer, so far as such things can be told. It comes in the very pedestrian verses prefixed to Part I. He says that while he was at work on quite a different book he ‘Fell suddenly into an Allegory’.2 He means, I take it, a little allegory, an extended metaphor that would have filled a single paragraph. He set down ‘more than twenty things’.3 And, this done, ‘I twenty more had in my Crown’.4 The ‘things’ began ‘to multiply’5 like sparks flying out of a fire. They threatened, he says, to ‘eat out’6 the book he was working on. They insisted on splitting off from it and becoming a separate organism. He let them have their head. Then come the words which describe, better than any others I know, the golden moments of unimpeded composition:
For having now my Method by the end;
Still as I pull’d, it came.7
It came. I doubt if we shall ever know more of the process called ‘inspiration’ than those two monosyllables tell us.
Perhaps we may hazard a guess as to why it came at just that moment. My own guess is that the scheme of a journey with adventures suddenly reunited two things in Bunyan’s mind which had hitherto lain far apart. One was his present and lifelong preoccupation with the spiritual life. The other, far further away and longer ago, left behind (he had supposed) in childhood, was his delight in old wives’ tales and such last remnants of chivalric romance as he had found in chap-books. The one fitted the other like a glove. Now, as never before, the whole man was engaged.
The vehicle he had chosen—or, more accurately, the vehicle that had chosen him—involved a sort of descent. His high theme had to be brought down and incarnated on the level of an adventure story of the most unsophisticated type—a quest story, with lions, goblins, giants, dungeons and enchantments. But then there is a further descent. This adventure story itself is not left in the world of high romance. Whether by choice or by the fortunate limits of Bunyan’s imagination—probably a bit of both—it is all visualized in terms of the contemporary life that Bunyan knew. The garrulous neighbours; Mr Worldly-Wiseman who was so clearly (as Christian said) ‘a Gentleman’;8 the bullying, foul-mouthed Justice; the field-path, seductive to footsore walkers; the sound of a dog barking as you stand knocking at a door; the fruit hanging over a wall which the children insist on eating though their mother admonishes them ‘that Fruit is none of ours’9—these are all characteristic. No one lives further from Wardour Street than Bunyan. The light is sharp: it never comes through stained glass.
And this homely immediacy is not confined to externals. The very motives and thoughts of the pilgrims are similarly brought down to earth. Christian undertakes his journey because he believes his hometown is going to be destroyed by fire. When Mathew sickens after eating the forbidden fruit, his mother’s anxiety is entirely medical; they send for the doctor. When Mr Brisk’s suit to Mercy grows cold, Mercy is allowed to speak and feel as a good many young women would in her situation:
I might a had Husbands afore now, tho’ I spake not of it to any; but they were such as did not like my Conditions, though never did any of them find fault with my Person.10
When Christian keeps on his way and faces Apollyon, he is not inspired by any martial ardour. He goes on because he remembers that he has armour for his chest but not for his back, so that turning tail would be the most dangerous thing he could do.
A page later comes the supreme example. You remember how the text ‘the wages of sin is death’11 is transformed? Asked by Apollyon why he is deserting him, Christian replies: ‘Your wages [were] such as a man could not live on.’12 You would hardly believe it, but I have read a critic who objected to that. He thought the motive attributed to Christian was too low. But that is to misunderstand the very nature of all allegory or parable or even metaphor. The lowness is the whole point. Allegory gives you one thing in terms of another. All depends on respecting the rights of the vehicle, in refusing to allow the least confusion between the vehicle and its freight. The Foolish Virgins, within the parable, do not miss beatitude; they miss a wedding party.13 The Prodigal Son, when he comes home, is not given spiritual consolations; he is given new clothes and the best dinner his father can put up.14 It is extraordinary how often this principle is disregarded. The imbecile, wisely anonymous, who illustrated my old nursery copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress makes a similar blunder at the end of Part II. Bunyan has been telling how a post came for Christiana to say that she was to cross the river and appear in the City within ten days. She made her farewells to all her friends and ‘entered the River with a Beck’n’ (that is a wave) ‘of Fare well, to those that followed her to the River side’.15 The artist has seen fit to illustrate this with a picture of an old lady on her death-bed, surrounded by weeping relatives in the approved Victorian manner. But if Bunyan had wanted a literal death-bed scene he would have written one.
This stupidity perhaps comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated; as if, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents. But that method leads you continually out of the book back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.
There are two things we must not say about the style of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the first place we must not say that it is derived from the Authorised Version. That is based on confusion. Because his whole outlook is biblical, and because direct or embedded quotations from Scripture are so frequent, readers carry away the impression that his own sentences are like those of the English Bible. But you need only look at them to see that they are not:
Come Wet, come Dry, I long to be gone; for however the Weather is in my Journey, I shall have time enough when I come there to sit down and rest me, and dry me.16
Who in the Old or New Testament ever talked like that?
Mr. Great-heart was delighted in him (for he loved one greatly that he found to be a man of his Hands).17
Is that like Scripture?
The other thing we must not say is that Bunyan wrote well because he was a sincere, forthright man who had no literary affectations and simply said what he meant. I do not doubt that is the account of the matter that Bunyan would have given himself. But it will not do. If it were the real explanation, then every sincere, forthright, unaffected man could write as well. But most people of my age learned from censoring the letters of the troops, when we were subalterns in the first war, that unliterary people, however sincere and forthright in their talk, no sooner take a pen in hand than cliché and platitude flow from it. The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well. It is a moral virtue, not a literary talent. We may hope it is rewarded in a better world: it is not rewarded on Parnassus.
We must attribute Bunyan’s style to a perfect natural ear, a great sensibility for the idiom and cadence of popular speech, a long experience in addressing unlettered audiences, and a freedom from bad models. I do not add ‘to an intense imagination’, for that also can shipwreck if a man does not find the right words. Here it is in a descriptive passage:
They are, said she, our Countrey Birds: They sing these Notes but seldom, except it be at the Spring, when the Flowers appear, and the Sun shines warm, and then you may hear them all day long. I often, said she, go out to hear them, we also oft times keep them tame in our House. They are very fine Company for us when we are Melancholy.18
And here it is rendering the exact voice of the rustic wiseacre—Mrs Timorous is speaking:
Well, I see you have a mind to go a fooling too; but take heed in time, and be wise: while we are out of danger we are out; but when we are in, we are in.19
Here you see it turning a point in the narrative, very economical but full of suggestion:
Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the Valley, and then Christiana said, Methinks I see something yonder upon the Road before us, a thing of a shape such as I have not seen. Then said Joseph, Mother, what is it? An ugly thing, Child; an ugly thing, said she. But Mother, what is it like, said he? ’Tis like I cannot tell what, said she. And now it was but a little way off.20
Can anyone read that without hearing both the voices? Here it attempts, successfully, a higher strain:
Then Apollyon strodled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter, prepare thy self to dye, for I swear by my Infernal Den, that thou shalt go no further, here will I spill thy soul.21
Or here with a more daring image than is usual:
I fought till my Sword did cleave to my Hand, and when they were joyned together, as if a Sword grew out of my Arm, and when the Blood run thorow my Fingers, then I fought with most Courage.22
Any of the epic poets would be glad to have thought of that.
In dialogue Bunyan catches not only the cadence of the speech but the tiny twists of thought. Mr Talkative is not allowed to talk much. But note how, when Faithful has tried to correct him, he replies: ‘That is it that I said.’23
It is perfect for the unteachable man; whatever you put to him will be taken as an endorsement of the last opinion he has expressed. Or consider this, from Mr Great-heart’s long story of Mr Fearing:
And I will say that for my Lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly to him.24
Great-heart is devoted to his Master. He delights to eulogize him. Yet the form of words in which the praise here comes out—‘I will say this for him’—is exactly that with which an honest man would reluctantly concede one, and only one, redeeming feature in an opponent. One could understand this if it were artfully done in the witness box; an apparently reluctant witness impresses the jury. But there is no question of that here. There is some kink in the mind of the English rustic, some innate rhetoric, that makes him talk that way. You may hear it in country pubs any day.
But it is always dangerous to talk too long about style. It may lead one to forget that every single sentence depends for its total effect on the place it has in the whole. There is nothing remarkable about the sentence ‘I will pay you when I take my Mony’ and ‘I will fight so long as I can hold my Sword in my Hand.’25 But in their context they are devastating. For they are uttered by two men lying fast asleep on the Enchanted Ground, talking in their sleep, and not to be waked by any endeavour. The final stroke of the grim irony comes with the words: ‘At that, one of the Children laughed.’26 How horrifying the joke and the laughter are is perhaps immediately apparent only to those who share Bunyan’s premises. Yet perhaps not. Even those who think that the stakes we play for in life are not, as Bunyan believed, strictly infinite, may yet feel in some degree the uneasiness he meant us to feel; may wonder whether what we regard as our firm resolutions, our long industry, and our creditable achievements, are not all talking in our sleep and dreaming, sleep from which, though we may talk louder and louder, we shall not wake. For stakes less than infinite may yet be fairly high.
Part of the unpleasant side of The Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the extreme narrowness and exclusiveness of Bunyan’s religious outlook. The faith is limited ‘to one small sect and all are damned beside’. But I suppose that all who read old books have learned somehow or other to make historical allowances for that sort of thing. Our ancestors all wrote and thought like that. The insolence and self-righteousness which now flourish most noticeably in literary circles then found their chief expression in theology, and this is no doubt a change for the better. And one must remember that Bunyan was a persecuted and slandered man.
For some readers the ‘unpleasant side’ of The Pilgrim’s Progress will lie not so much in its sectarianism as in the intolerable terror which is never far away. Indeed unpleasant is here a ludicrous understatement. The dark doctrine has never been more horrifyingly stated than in the words that conclude Part I:
Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.27
In my opinion the book would be immeasurably weakened as a work of art if the flames of Hell were not always flickering on the horizon. I do not mean merely that if they were not it would cease to be true to Bunyan’s own vision and would therefore suffer all the effects which a voluntary distortion or expurgation of experience might be expected to produce. I mean also that the image of this is necessary to us while we read. The urgency, the harsh woodcut energy, the continual sense of momentousness, depend on it.
We might even say that, just as Bunyan’s religious theme demanded for its vehicle this kind of story, so the telling of such a story would have required on merely artistic grounds to be thus loaded with a further significance, a significance which is believed by only some, but can be felt (while they read) by all, to be of immeasurable importance. These adventures, these ogres, monsters, shining helpers, false friends, delectable mountains, and green or ghastly valleys, are not thereby twisted from their nature. They are restored to the weight they had for the savage or dreaming mind which produced them. They come to us, if we are sensitive to them at all, clothed in its ecstasies and terrors. Bunyan is not lending them an alien gravity. He is supplying, in terms of his own fundamental beliefs, grounds for taking them as seriously as we are, by the nature of our imagination, disposed to do. Unless we are very hidebound we can re-interpret these grounds in terms of our own, perhaps very different, outlook. Many do not believe that either the trumpets ‘with melodious noise’28 or the infernal den await us where the road ends. But most, I fancy, have discovered that to be born is to be exposed to delights and miseries greater than imagination could have anticipated; that the choice of ways at any cross-road may be more important than we think; and that short cuts may lead to very nasty places.