The Life of John Bunyan [64]
most part Bunyan's works came into being. He did not set himself
to compose theological treatises upon stated subjects, but after he
had preached with satisfaction to himself and acceptance with his
audience, he usually wrote out the substance of his discourse from
memory, with the enlargements and additions it might seem to
require. And thus his religious works have all the glow and
fervour of the unwritten utterances of a practised orator, united
with the orderliness and precision of a theologian, and are no less
admirable for the excellence of their arrangement than for their
evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine. Originally meant to be
heard, they lose somewhat by being read. But few can read them
without being delighted with the opulence of his imagination and
impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions. Like the
subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the
Interpreter, he stands "like one who pleads with men, the law of
truth written upon his lips, the world behind his back, and a crown
of gold above his head."
These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer from
most of his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the
works by which he is chiefly known, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the
"Holy War," the "Grace Abounding," and we may add, though from the
repulsiveness of the subject the book is now scarcely read at all,
the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman."
One great charm of these works, especially of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are
written, which render them models of the English speech, plain but
never vulgar, homely but never coarse, and still less unclean, full
of imagery but never obscure, always intelligible, always forcible,
going straight to the point in the fewest and simplest words;
"powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam, "from concise
simplicity." Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord Macaulay as an
invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide command
over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
common people. "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms
of theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant." We may, look
through whole pages, and not find a word of more than two
syllables. Nor is the source of this pellucid clearness and
imaginative power far to seek. Bunyan was essentially a man of one
book, and that book the very best, not only for its spiritual
teaching but for the purity of its style, the English Bible. "In
no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more clearly than in
'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginative force which had been
given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the Bible.
Bunyan's English is the simplest and homeliest English that has
ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English
of the Bible. His images are the images of prophet and evangelist.
So completely had the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its
phrases as the natural expression of his thoughts. He had lived in
the Bible till its words became his own."
All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary
genius call special attention to the richness of his imaginative
power. Few writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a
degree. In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than
in the reality of its impersonations. The DRAMATIS PERSONS are not
shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or
lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of
our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of
like passions with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly;
there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This
life-like power of characterization belongs in the highest degree
to