John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and several other little books of an antinomian spirit, too frequently to be met with in the hands of the common people, was, if we mistake not, a brazier of Bedford.
THE REVD THOMAS COX1
Whoever would assert an equality of genius between … Bunyan and Addison would be thought to defend no less an extravagance than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe or a pond as extensive as the ocean.
DAVID HUME2
Samuel Johnson: [The Pilgrim’s Progress] has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind.
JAMES BOSWELL3
SOMETHING is happening to popular culture all over Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The transformation takes different forms in Counter-Reformation countries, in Lutheran towns in Germany, in Sweden, in the England and New England of the covenant theology, and in Presbyterian Scotland. But something happened which we have not yet properly defined. T. S. Eliot got the question right, but ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is an inadequate answer. Phrases like ‘the rise of individualism’, ‘of capitalism’ are groping towards an answer, but a merely economic definition is too narrow. For England our answer must include—among many other things—an explanation of the decline of magic, of hell, of Calvinism as a dominant intellectual system, of millenarianism as a fighting revolutionary creed.4
Bacon saw the inventions of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass as the key to the modern age—though they were imported from China rather than invented in Europe. The compass and gunpowder made possible the opening up of Asia, Africa, and America to European trade and plunder. By 1800 an Industrial Revolution was under way in England and was beginning in other European countries. Printing, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Revolt of the Netherlands, the English Revolution, and the scientific revolution were all parts of the process. As Peter Burke noted, ‘the spread of literacy and the decline of the epic occurred together in Western Europe, while illiteracy and the epic survived together in Sicily, Bosnia, Russia.’5 Printing gave ballads wider audiences; but fixing a single text discouraged the improvisations of the traditional singers. The spread of literacy widened the gap between upper-class and popular cultures. Bible-reading created a minority religious culture which to some extent cut across classes. Their dedication to this culture of the Bible and godly books left professors blind and indeed hostile to the attractions both of traditional popular culture and of the new science.6
In 1500 the European economy was preponderantly agricultural, social relations were preponderantly ‘feudal’, towns existed in the interstices of society by the grace of king or lords. Life followed agricultural rhythms, time was marked out by the seasons. Men and women worked feverishly when the season or the weather commanded it, and relaxed betweenwhiles, fasting in Lent when food was in shortest supply, celebrating harvest home and the midwinter feast when livestock for which fodder was not available were consumed. Gradually this culture yielded place to the regular rhythms of industrial production, in which the demands of labour discipline called for totally different attitudes. Machinery which is not regularly used is wasted; the market calls for regular production (modified by crises when over-production leads to unemployment). In the medieval culture the agricultural year was marked out by saints’ days, most of them taking over traditional pagan seasonal festivals; in the modern world there are six days of weekly labour (or five if you are lucky) punctuated by occasional holidays on which banks are closed. Peasant attitudes to time differ from industrial attitudes, even for part-time craftsmen with agricultural holdings: non-agricultural work ceases at harvest. Seventeenth-century English economists could not conceal their anger that men worked less when food was cheap. Something of the old low-level moral economy and ‘social security’ went; hospitality and noblesse oblige declined; something of Weber’s capitalist rationality came in, as well as an attitude of devil take the hindmost. Dent and Bernard before Bunyan had summed up by saying Covetousness now called himself Good Husbandry.
So upper-class culture differentiated itself from popular culture. Puritanism was in an ambiguous position. Protestant hostility to saints’ days and Puritan Sabbatarianism were not mere Bibliolatry. In the old calendar, as protestant propagandists pointed out, up to 100 working days a year were wasted in church-going and drinking. The great festivals led to over-consumption of assets which society could ill afford. The ‘protestant ethic’ of thrift, labour in one’s calling to the glory of God, ‘time is money’, hatred of waste and idleness, fitted the needs of the new economy. The attack on church courts, which penalized labour on saints’ days as well as imposing sexual norms, was part of the same campaign. Sabbatarianism was enforced by London and other towns, by JPs in the industrial counties, and by the House of Commons. The City Fathers disliked theatres on law-and-order grounds, and they were closed in 1642. Two years later Parliament ordered the destruction of all maypoles: they returned in 1660 as the appropriately phallic symbol of Charles II, together with theatres now more tightly controlled from above.
To some extent then Puritanism aided the newly evolving culture. But it appealed to more than one social group. Abolition of saints’ days was to the advantage not only of employers but also of small householders working for themselves, and of labourers working on short-term contracts, though not for peasant proprietors or for labourers on yearly contracts. Puritanism, it has often been argued, appealed especially to emerging village elites, to those who prospered during the great divide.
Puritans were censorious of some aspects of the popular culture, for non-economic reasons. Philip Stubbes and Perkins disapproved of bull- and bear-baiting, of cock-fighting, both because they disliked cruelty and because of the pleasure which such activities gave to spectators. Despite Macaulay, the latter seems to me no worse a motive than dislike of cruelty. Violence was endemic in the society. The Dutch were shocked by English merchants’ habit of beating their wives. Rough music and witch-rabbling were means of social control, of maintaining accepted norms: the victims might be wives who refused to accept their inferior status, or unhappy old women whom the community resented having to support. Despite social mobility, it was an intensely local society, hostile to strangers, especially those likely to become a burden on the rates. Executions were public holidays. Bunyan in jail tried to assess the chances of his having a good audience if he were hanged. And there were other considerations. Before 1640 cock-fighting and bear-baiting took place in several Bedfordshire parish churches. There might be religious as well as killjoy reasons for objecting to this, or to a Bedfordshire rector acting as a Christmas Lord of Misrule.7
It is not just a matter of conscious religious zeal or of conscious adherence to the good old ways. The Major-Generals in the 1650s were no doubt activated by godly zeal when they stopped bull- and bear-baiting; but they also encouraged local oligarchies to disgorge embezzled funds which should have been allocated to poor relief; and their prohibition of some horse-racing was motivated by fear of royalist uprisings. Such manifestations of ‘Puritanism’, together with the radicalism and ‘enthusiasm’ of sectaries, helped to drive many gentlemen to support the restoration of monarchy and episcopacy; and after 1660 Puritan gentlemen found dissent socially embarrassing. Dissenters were effectively excluded from national and local politics, from the universities and so from high culture. Some gentlemen patronized aspects of the popular culture, cakes and church ales, maypoles and morris-dancing, bear-and bull-baiting, cock-fighting, the charivari. They maintained ‘good neighbourhood’ by imposing their own patterns of deference on selected activities; others they ignored or despised and tried to suppress. Witch persecution ceased when the upper classes no longer believed in witchcraft. As David Underdown puts it, ‘the old festive culture was being manipulated to reinforce the messages of obedience being transmitted in other ways by the church and the law.’8
So we get a threefold division. ‘High’ culture, that of Augustan literature, Latin-based; plebeian culture, traditional, magical, full of song and dance but virtually unlettered; and the dissenting culture of the Book, which rejected many aspects of the old rural culture but was excluded from ‘high’ culture. Simultaneously men were becoming more conscious of divisions between ‘the people’ and ‘the poor’.9 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many yeomen and artisans came to share economic interests with the landed upper class, and looked down on those who had not been able to afford education. So the popular culture became ‘vulgar’: the word itself changes meaning; rejection of the popular and of the dissenting culture became necessary for the social climber. The word ‘superstition’, Peter Burke reminds us, undergoes a similar change, not only in English, from the 1650s. The traditional sense of ‘false religion’ gives way to ‘irrational fears’—those of the lower classes.10
Many factors then contributed to the divergence of cultures. Paul Slack has convincingly shown that the impact of plague on large towns had serious consequences for traditional popular mores. Plague hit especially the poor. The attempts of governments and the rich to control it came up against ingrained social habits and perceived moral obligations. Shutting plague victims up in their houses, or in pest-houses in the fields, prohibiting crowded funerals—all these infringed ‘neighbourliness’ in the interests of ‘order’—an order which was seen as benefiting the rich. The preachers’ association of plague with ‘sin’ led them and magistrates to attack the sins of the poor—idle vagrants, ale-houses, drunkards, plays, as well as popular sports.11 In 1665–6 the government feared that the discontented might take advantage of the plague to rebel. ‘Now is the time if we will stir’, said a Yorkshireman, ‘for the Anabaptists and Quakers are not afraid of plague.’12
‘Neighbourliness’ could mean very different things, though everyone agreed that it was a virtue. William Grant, chaplain to Bishop Goodman of Gloucester and pre-1640 vicar of Isleworth, lamented that ‘all good fellowship was laid aside in the parish’. He promised to bring it in again, offering ‘wine and tobacco to all that would come to the vicarage house on Sundays after prayers.’ He was alleged to sit up till 2 or 3 in the morning playing cards. ‘Good neighbourhood’ was equally strongly advocated by Bunyan in Christian Behaviour (1663), but his conception of it was different both from Grant’s and from that of the opponents of pest-houses. For Bunyan neighbourliness started from cultivation of the Christian virtues. In this light the Book of Sports had been socially divisive: it set the values of the middling sort against those of the populace, supported sometimes by gentlemen and parsons. David Underdown thinks that the divisions of 1642 were as much cultural as religious or political.13
The Reformation had posed as alternatives salvation through the sacraments and ceremonies of the church, and salvation through direct individual relationship to God. Two consequences followed: first, tension between individual consciences and any national ecclesiastical authority—Pope, king, bishops, presbyterian synods; and second a search to end the isolation of the individual that protestantism tended to create.14 The widening rift between rich and poor undermined village unity. The increasingly oligarchical parish came to be less concerned with solidarity than with keeping down the burden of poor relief on ratepayers. Gradually elect individuals came to recognize one another and form groups within parish churches. But there were difficulties in being of two churches at the same time, and an especial problem of discipline. The godly of the middling sort rejected the culture of the Book of Sports. They called for high standards of conduct. Were they to try to impose them on other members of their community, or were there to be two standards?
Bernard in The Isle of Man called for godly parish officers everywhere; after 1640 attempts were made in London to enforce discipline through control of parishes. But the godly reformation of 1641–2 was never completed; the Army saw to that. Only in New England was ‘the greater part’ also ‘the better part’. Another way was for the pure to separate from the ungodly. After 1640 those self-selected groups which had broken with the parochial system—crossing parish boundaries, especially in towns—could choose their own mechanic preacher and work out a congregational discipline of mutual support and help, their own work and marriage ethic, as at Bedford. ‘They were to me,’ said Bunyan, ‘as if … they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned among their neighbours (Nu. XXIII. 9).’15
Underdown speaks of ‘a new kind of community, united by belief and mission, sometimes formally by covenant in a “gathered church” as a substitute for the territorial parish church community that was now disintegrating.’16 Hence Bunyan’s evolving sense of warmth and love within the congregation, softening his harsher Calvinism by recognizing the problems of the insecure elect, chasing up the hypocrites among them, and maintaining strong barriers against the unregenerate many. The godly were a peculiar people, beleaguered.
Nor should we sentimentalize the village community. Early seventeenth-century England was a much-controlled society. There was no bureaucracy, no police force: the capitalist ethic was not yet internalized. Laudians and Presbyterians both relied on neighbourly espionage and denunciation in villages. The voluntary communities of the godly would start with friendly advice and admonition and only ultimately resort to excommunication. Theirs was certainly not more oppressive than the discipline of the church courts, except in so far as they were likely to be better informed and consequently more effective. Some traditional ideas and norms struggled to survive against new ideas and norms struggling to realize themselves. The charivari could on occasion be used against Laudian clergymen.17
Such issues were especially pressing in London and other great towns, to which men and women fled, among other reasons, because of the anonymity they enjoyed there, the freedom from supervision. The breakdown of 1641–2 made London uncontrollable: sin was visible everywhere—drunkenness, swearing, sex, oppression of the poor. The godly failed to establish social control through the parishes. There were just not enough godly magistrates. Their own congregational discipline was inturned, leaving the profane to their own devices.18
We do not know how far the people of England had ever been fully integrated into the state church. Historians are coming to recognize that few of the lower classes went regularly to church: they were not worth fining by church courts when they did not.19 The breakdown of the machinery of discipline and control after 1640, and the establishment of effective religious toleration, produced startling consequences, depicted, no doubt with much exaggeration, by scores of shocked pamphleteers. They were not surprised by what happened when natural men and women could meet freely and discuss matters which interested them; it was well known that natural men and women (the vast majority of the population) were incurably sinful and must be restrained. But conservative alarm became ever more hysterical as unordained mechanic preachers established semi-permanent congregations, as women began to preach, as traditional lower-class scepticism and anti-clericalism began to be taught and discussed openly in the Ranter milieu in the crisis years 1649–51.
What is freedom but choice? Milton asked. But multiplicity of choice looked like chaos to those who expected stability of custom. The sects could not agree among themselves: how much novelty, what novelty? How much tradition, which traditions? Who was to decide? What shall I do to be saved? The question became personal rather than social. For Bunyan it took the form of querying norms of behaviour. Were tipcat and bell-ringing permissible? What new norms should be observed? The choices were difficult, painful, and serious. His Bedfordshire contemporary, Francis Osborne, saw a transition from traditional ‘patterns and old forms’ to ‘new and forbidden discoveries’.20
As Slack shows, issues were not clear-cut, motives were mixed. Conflicts were mediated by tradition, communal solidarity, and good intentions. Some of the concessions made by Puritan preachers could be interpreted to the advantage of the new capitalist mores; but the preachers’ utopia was not capitalist. Nor was Bunyan’s in Mr. Badman.
Historians have looked perhaps too exclusively at those who express the economic rationality of the future, as old-fashioned historians of science used to pick out ideas which seemed to be those which were going to win. This leads them to concentrate on Petty and political arithmetic, Boyle and the Royal Society, Hobbes and rational politics, Newton’s great synthesis. We forget that Hermeticism and Paracelsanism made their contribution to the scientific revolution, that Boyle was at least as much concerned with combating atheism (and the radical sectarianism which he believed led to atheism) as with scientific truth—a distinction which he would not have admitted—and that Newton was as interested in alchemy and Biblical prophecies as in mathematics and physics.
But the trends towards economic rationality were all-pervasive, regardless of men’s conscious intentions.21 England’s food problems were solved thanks to the abolition of feudal tenures and the establishment of a freer market during the Revolution. But the hidden hand of the market worked against the poor, and it was aided by statutory overriding of traditional rights. Land came to be treated as a commodity to be exploited for profit, protected by absolute rights of ownership where previously custom had guaranteed community access. After 1660 pamphlets opposing enclosure ceased to be published. In the later seventeenth century, as Barry Reay perceptively observed, ‘protection of traditional rights … could be seen as rebellion.’22 From all sides the pressures were on against the popular culture.
Filmer and royalists had attempted to corner the household as the basis for justification of absolutism: the king is the father of the general family, head of the national household. But Winstanley envisaged a communist society based on a federation of equal households; Levellers, Bunyan, and many other Puritans a society of relatively equal households trading fairly with one another. The latter would have made sense only if capitalist accumulation could have been curbed, as Winstanley, Harrington, and Locke wished to do. We have seen the efforts of Bunyan and the Bedford congregation to preserve some traditional standards of the just price and distributive justice; and we have heard Bunyan’s increasingly bitter invectives against professors who adapted themselves to the standards and demands of the market. Bunyan and his congregation were clinging to a via media between old and new values—the via media of the defeated radicals of the Revolution.
Yet Bunyan’s prose encapsulates some of the departing values. Despite his and his congregation’s exclusion from politics, the tension of class-awareness remains. The rootedness of his prose in rural and artisan life preserves it from the courtly, gentlemanly, and scholarly shams of upper-class literature, with its attempt to plant hedges round the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin of Pontius Pilate. It is difficult to think of any great writer in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England who was as passionately, fiercely, and theologically on the side of the poor as Bunyan.
We can see in Bunyan’s imaginative writing almost a conscious take-over of elite literature for a middle- and lower-class audience, endowing it with new positive values. Cervantes in Don Quixote ‘laughed Spain’s chivalry away’, mocking the romances. Bunyan rejected romances on ideological grounds, but he transmuted some of their archetypal themes and fitted them into his Puritan allegory. Professor Sharrock detected a similar transformation of the themes of the morality plays, through the radical Puritanism of Richard Bernard and of Richard Overton in The Araignement of Mr. Persecution.23 Both may have influenced Bunyan.
Before Bunyan became a writer he had been a successful preacher. His prose is vivid because it is spoken, demotic. When he preached, the words flowed. When he wrote his sermons up for publication they presumably came equally spontaneously. In The Pilgrim’s Progress:
Still as I pulled it came: and so I penned
It down.24
We are reminded of the nightly visits which Milton received from his Muse. Bunyan’s subconscious supplied adventures from chap-book romances, and intense class-feeling; the Puritan intellectual framework structured and steadied it.
The Holy War is Bunyan’s conscious attempt to write a popular epic. A Book for Boys and Girls reworks the protestant emblem tradition of Quarles and Wither, without the ‘literary’ pretensions which so soon dated their poems. Grace Abounding moves the spiritual autobiography towards the novel; Mr. Badman does the same for protestant casuistry. Even some of Bunyan’s more strictly theological works—The Barren Fig-tree (1673), The Greatness of the Soul (1682), and Advice to Sufferers (1684)—strive to elevate sermon-style propaganda to the level of popular literature. One example from each must suffice.
The sinner cries again, ‘Good Lord, try me this once …. I will never be so bad again, I will do better.’ ‘Well’, saith God, ‘Death, let this professor alone for this time …. It may be he will mind to keep his promise.’… But by that he hath put on his clothes, is come down from his bed, and ventured into the yard or shop, and there sees how all things are gone to sixes and sevens, he begins to have second thoughts and says to his folks, ‘What have you all been doing? How are all things out of order? I am I cannot tell what behindhand. One may see, if a man be but a little a to side, that you have neither wisdom nor prudence to order things.… ’25
And if at any time they [sin and the soul] can or shall meet with each other again, and nobody never the wiser; O what courting will be ‘twixt sin and the Soul; and this is called doing of things in the dark.26
The executioner comes to John [the Baptist]; now whether he was at dinner, or asleep, or whatever he was about, the bloody man bolts in upon him, and the first word he salutes him with is, ‘Sir, strip, lay down your neck, for I am come to take away your head.’ ‘But hold, stay; wherefore? Pray let me commend my soul to God.’ ‘No, I must not stay; I am in haste;’ ‘slap’ says his sword, and off falls the good man’s head.27
Critics have rightly stopped saying that Bunyan’s style is Biblical. He sometimes echoes the Bible in set pieces when he is consciously indulging in fine writing: but at its best his style is conversational, the conversation of yeomen and artisans, as full of near-proverbs as the conversation of Sancho Panza.28 ‘A river will take away the very stink of a dead dog.’ ‘Christ hath a bosom.’ ‘The lumber and cumber of this world.’29 ‘Words easy to be understood,’ Bunyan wrote, ‘do often hit the mark when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.’ He is echoing countless Puritan preachers. All Bunyan’s art, like this metaphor from archery, springs from everyday life, shared with his audience. ‘As I was walking in the fields …’. ‘The sentences,’ said Shaw, ‘go straight to their mark; and their concluding phrases soar like the sunrise or swing and drop like a hammer.’ They are far removed from the courtly tone which Dryden thought essential for good prose. Bunyan seems to have realized, with some satisfaction, that his style was highly individual, inimitable.30
Bunyan lived through a revolution which must have forced a great deal of rethinking, about style as well as content. For ten or fifteen years ordinary people spoke in print in their own voices, or something more like them than ever before. Overton picked up Martin Marprelate, Walwyn and Overton the popular dialogue of Puritan writers and of plays. Winstanley, Coppe, Clarkson, Fox, and other early Quakers showed the creative power of popular prose, growing from the rural and artisan economy, whose virtues of clarity and matter-of-factness Sprat singled out for imitation. But popular prose had other virtues—passion, compassion, charity, tolerance, and humanity, which the Royal Society’s prose lacked and some of which Dryden avoided. Passion and compassion were needed more than ever for those who had to face the trials of the defeated revolution and subsequent attempts to downgrade popular culture—the censor’s hostility to ‘the great masters of the popular style’.31
There is little to say about the place of Bunyan’s writings in the transition from epic to novel that has not already been said. The failure of Cowley and Davenant to complete their epics marks the end of an epoch. Gunpowder left little room for heroes. Single combat necessarily and increasingly became an upper-class interest (the duel) or a lower-class interest patronized by the gentry (prize-fighting). Milton’s new heroism of fortitude was individualistic, non-militant. Religion was the social bond which linked the new heroic individuals into communities. There was a plethora of Biblical epics as classical epic declined. Paradise Lost is already in a different world: it is about the fortunes of a married couple in a hostile universe—a subject for a novel rather than an epic. L. B. Wright long ago drew special attention to ‘the importance of handbooks on family affairs in fertilizing the ground for the domestic novel’,32—a long way from the traditional epic. From this point of view it is Mr. Badman—the novel of the household—rather than The Pilgrim’s Progress—‘the epic of the itinerant’—that foreshadows the novel, though Part II is moving in that direction.
But Bunyan’s relation to the decline of epic and the rise of the novel, to Defoe, is usually a badly posed question. There were hundreds of roads converging on the novel, not least the evolution of an impersonal capitalist ideology which Joyce Appleby has so splendidly illuminated for us, and Jean-Christophe Agnew has incorporated into his study of theatre and the market.33 We tend to concentrate on the few outstanding figures whom posterity has chosen to remember. But contemporaries did not know what the great tradition was going to be. What mattered for them, and should matter for us, is popular fiction which the enormous haphazardness of posterity has forgotten. Until this has been analysed we cannot trace with confidence the multifarious origins of the novel as we know it. Of the traditional ‘precursors’, Aphra Behn published Oroonoko in the year of Bunyan’s death, but she may have written it whilst he was writing Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister began to appear simultaneously with Part II. Aphra Behn had escaped much more than Bunyan from the moralizing authorial intrusions which differentiate him from most novelists after Defoe. She has a moral lesson to convey, but she conveys it by the story as a whole, rather than by direct comment—in this more like Richardson.
What links Bunyan backwards with Cervantes and the picaresque novels, and forwards with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, is the exuberant mobility of the world he depicts. It is social as well as physical mobility: classes are all mixed up. Pamela married her master, Clarissa could find herself in a brothel, whereas Jane Austen’s families are statically self-contained—despite or because of living in the world of the French Revolution. Perhaps the expansion of overseas trade added to this sense of mobility, as well as creating possibilities for utopias on earth or for clashes of cultures—The Isle of Pines, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels.
Mobility within England offered new angles of criticism for popular literature. From Brome’s A Jovial Crew onwards itinerants are used as instruments of serious social analysis. The anonymous Don Tomazo, published in the same year as Mr. Badman, depicts a man who cold-bloodedly preys upon society. Itinerants of the revolutionary decades included Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson, who offered theoretical challenges to traditional sexual morality, as vagabonds no doubt did in practice. Itinerant preachers or tinkers, no less than knights errant, had to face sexual problems. Clarkson’s autobiography (probably semi-fictitious) set the pattern for Defoe: he even anticipated Defoe’s narrator in his pretence of repentance as he salaciously describes his past sinfulness. Restoration comedy took over the Ranter idea that sexual pleasure was possible and could be discussed, as well as the Ranter penchant for witty profanity and irreverence. The publication of pornographic literature in England dates from the 1650s.
As capitalist society triumphantly stabilized, its standards were challenged by Defoe’s History of the Pyrates (if it is Defoe’s—the authorship doesn’t matter for our present purposes), by Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and by Swift’s Houyhnhnms. Royal slaves, beggars, and pirates can make fundamental criticisms of the new world they have to adapt to or escape from, just as dissenters and small household producers have to adapt to it. Mr. Badman, Moll Flanders, highwaymen, and pirates, all in one way or another criticize the new society by preying on it, by ‘crime’.34
So the novel doesn’t grow only out of the respectable bourgeois household. It also encompasses the picaro, the vagabond, the itinerant, the pirate—outcasts from the stable world of good householders—those who cannot or will not adapt. Cervantes made a joke of the contrast between the standards of the traditional world and bourgeois reality: there was no meeting-place. Bunyan does not look at the itinerant’s world from outside. He can fuse the old romance literature with the demands of the protestant ethic for self-discipline, self-control. He was perhaps the first to do this, but he had many followers.
The early novel takes its life from motion. For Hobbes, ‘Life itself is but motion’, and ‘knowledge of the nature of motion’ is ‘the gate of philosophy universal’. There is ‘but one universal cause, which is motion’.35 The novel too assumes that rest is an abnormal state, which calls for explanation. The early novel is about society in flux, about individuals in relation to a society in flux. Hence the recurrence of the Robinson Crusoe situation, the individual facing his fate alone—like Bunyan in Grace Abounding, Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Only as society restabilizes does the novel settle down to dealing with families, with individuals in relation to other individuals.
Critics have seen a ‘polarization of taste’ from the 1650s. Berkenhead and other embattled royalists turned to classicism as a defence and consolation in defeat. With the restoration language became a social issue. ‘Enthusiasm’ was taboo. The scientists’ demand for clear and distinct ideas provided one model for prose: Sprat’s ideal, though based on the language of artisans, was consciously directed against the ‘enthusiastic’ language of sectaries. Roger L’Estrange, Charles II’s censor, wanted to suppress ‘the great masters of the popular style’, who ‘speak plain and strike home to the capacity and humours of the multitude.’ He might have been referring to Bunyan, though in fact he was looking back to radical pamphleteers who wrote ‘in times of freedom’. As sumptuary laws became unenforceable, social distinctions came more and more to be based on education and culture. ‘Acceptance as a gentleman’, Charles Barber suggested, ‘was probably becoming less a matter of birth and more a matter of breeding and manners.’ Glanville discouraged preachers from ‘the use of vulgar proverbs and homely similitudes and rude clownish phrases’: again the cap would fit Bunyan. After 1660—as in France after the Fronde—classicism proclaimed the stabilizing virtues of monarchy and the established church. Dryden then made the essential shift from ‘plain’ to ‘correct’ style, ‘correct’ style being that of the court. It was a shift from private to public prose.36 Former royalists and former Parliamentarians had coalesced to form a new ruling and religious élite. Their solidarity was signified in language and education. The two nations, church and dissent, the universities and the ‘illiterate’, became two cultures.
Boyle, the Royal Society, and Newtonian science appeared to give unquestionable certainty, such as the godly sects had failed to provide. J. R. and M. C. Jacob have made us aware how much the Latitudinarians’ rational Christianity contributed to the development of science. Bunyan would have agreed with Henry Stubbe, in J. R. Jacob’s assessment of him:
the Royal Society was staging a counter-reformation of its own, namely a response to the social radicalism of the English Revolution.… Modern science in seventeenth-century England … developed in part in response to the growing separation between the élite and the people.
It may have helped to widen this gap.37
Bunyan’s pilgrims were accused of being opposed to natural science. In The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War Bunyan jeered at the idea of there being other worlds, put forward by the Latitudinarian scientist Bishop Wilkins. Keith Thomas pointed out that the radical sects retained some traditional magical and communal aspects of popular culture; the Calvinist Puritanism of the urban haute bourgeoisie could pass more easily into Hobbism or sceptical Latitudinarianism and deism. Ranter scepticism moved in the same direction, questioning the authority of the Bible in the light of increased knowledge of the non-Christian world. Bunyan early broke with this tendency, which fed into the libertinism of the restoration aristocracy.38
So Bunyan’s links with popular culture extended to hostility towards science as well as towards Latitudinarians who helped to take it over for the church. This no doubt contributed to the contempt shown for Bunyan by many of the traditional élite; until Blake, the romantic movement and evangelicism headed a reaction against Newtonianism and deism.
Upper-class classical culture, from Dryden to Johnson, ran the risk of superficiality and affectation, academic pedantry and snobbish facetiousness. The plebeian culture of those excluded from politics and the universities ran the risk of banality and vulgarity on the one hand, of philistine piety on the other. Bunyan avoided both pitfalls. It was important that he was no ‘killjoy’ Puritan—that he had enjoyed the chivalrous romances, that music and dancing are everywhere in The Pilgrim’s Progress, that the pilgrims drink wine and spirits,39 that Bunyan urged hymn-singing on his congregation. The radical reformation of the sixteenth century had employed hymns sung to popular tunes as one way of civilizing the popular culture. In its turn, congregational hymn-singing preserved some of the traditions of the village community which the state church had always shunned. And of radicalism: the words of eighteenth-century Muggletonian songs are often more seditious than their official theology. In such congregations something of the popular culture hung on—independent, off-political, tolerant. Carols in the popular quatrain measures were remembered only by the lower classes until they were revived in the nineteenth century, as the romantics revived lyrics in the traditional quatrain form.40
Later nonconformity had its unlovely features: but the alternative for many might be drowning their poverty in an alehouse. If evicted copyholders were to become full-time wage-labourers, they would need help and solidarity to retain their self-respect. If small householders were to become capitalists, it was better that they should be honest capitalists. Bunyan rejected Mr. Badman’s version of capitalism, false weights and measures, usury, fraudulent bankruptcy; the Bedford congregation enforced standards of economic and social behaviour. Piety was saved from narrowness by Bunyan’s unerring feel for the colloquial phrase, by his ability to embrace the culture of the fairy-story, by his love of music and singing, his ability to write poems for children, and his compassion, as well as by his waiting millenarianism. His enormous strength and vitality derive largely from this ability to draw on the resources of a purged popular culture.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is not the epic of Everyman. It is the epic of the godly, who for Bunyan are almost by definition lower-class, industrious people. Excluded from the universities and upper-class culture, they are adapting to the pressures of an increasingly capitalist society. Hence Bunyan’s continuing dislike of and contempt for the gentry and their state church. Milton shared these dislikes: the aristocracy and the clergy were singled out for destruction at the end of Samson Agonistes, when ‘the vulgar only ‘scaped who stood without’. But Milton was himself a university graduate, steeped in classical culture, though intellectually more radical than Bunyan, as well as more political. His audience, fit though few, was not that for which the tinker wrote.
Throughout this book I have suggested comparisons and contrasts between Milton and Bunyan—the two greatest English Puritan writers, who both straddle the seventeenth century. Milton was born twenty years earlier than Bunyan. He died in 1674, before the money power was fully established. Unlike Bunyan, Milton abandoned Calvinism. He remained an elitist republican, though conscious of the fact that he had been maintained by the sweat of other men.41 Addison, who despised Bunyan, came to represent Milton as the great orthodox Puritan poet, a respectable figure whose republicanism could be disregarded as ‘sincere’ if misguided, irrelevant anyway once the essentials of a republic had been established under a king by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So Milton was made acceptable to polite literary circles in the eighteenth century. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding remained vastly popular with the middling sort in England and the American colonies throughout the eighteenth century; and a discerning few—Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Cowper, Johnson—appreciated Bunyan. But Addison, Young, Hume, and Burke were more typical: Bunyan’s reputation ascended the social scale only as the middling sort and evangelicism gained respectability in the nineteenth century.
Thus Bunyan leap-frogged Milton, the seventeenth-century radical, in popular esteem. Bunyan came to be accepted as the creative artist of dissent, in a way that the university classicist Milton never could be. One of Tillyard’s good insights was that Bunyan was ‘in constant opposition’. Langland, with whom in many respects Bunyan seems comparable, ‘criticizes the government, … but he is not against it.’ He has a sense of responsibility for the ruling group which Bunyan never had—unlike Milton, who had been employed by the government of the Commonwealth.42 Bunyan seems the more conservative of the two in his outlook. But during his twelve years in jail he stood out against the restored regime when men with greater radical credentials—Walwyn, Coppe, Winstanley—remained silent. Bunyan’s strong assertion of the popular culture, his hatred and contempt for the rich, on theological grounds, distinguishes him from Milton. Milton too fought on, in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration; but his disillusioned dismissal of the people puts him in sharp contrast with Bunyan. Milton’s republicanism could appear safely abstract after 1688 had ruled ‘the people’ out of politics; Bunyan’s class-conscious piety remained suspect.