The Life of John Bunyan [70]
also cause
the reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course
of the supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are
terrified with the Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch
at the boughs for the unripe plums and cry at having to climb the
hill; whose faces are stroked by the Interpreter; who are
catechised and called "good boys" by Prudence; who sup on bread
crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to bed by Mercy - into
strong young men, able to go out and fight with a giant, and lend a
hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and becoming husbands
and fathers. We cannot but feel the want of VRAISEMBLANCE which
brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark river
at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one
another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The four boys
with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but
there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
pilgrimage. Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive
genius and making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them
together and make them travel in company without any sacrifice of
dramatic truth, which, however, he was forced to disregard when the
time came for their dismissal. The exquisite pathos of the
description of the passage of the river by Christian and Hopeful
blinds us to what may be almost termed the impossibility of two
persons passing through the final struggle together, and dying at
the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic picture
of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them
cross. Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and
what no one but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it
that, in Mr. Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has
been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish.
"Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious
fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair
ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill
with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and
sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his
allegory: "Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give
those that desire it an account of what I am here silent about; in
the meantime I bid my reader - Adieu."
Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not
detain us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an
unsuccessful attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the
plan of salvation" in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all
its vividness of description in parts, its clearly drawn characters
with their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes
of the drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which
attaches to an individual man, like Christian, and those who are
linked with or follow his career. In fact, the tremendous
realities of the spiritual history of the human race are entirely
unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its origin, its
consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that remedy
though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan - John
Milton - to bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite
intellect, only render it more perplexing. The proverbial line
tells us that -
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but
when
the reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course
of the supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are
terrified with the Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch
at the boughs for the unripe plums and cry at having to climb the
hill; whose faces are stroked by the Interpreter; who are
catechised and called "good boys" by Prudence; who sup on bread
crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to bed by Mercy - into
strong young men, able to go out and fight with a giant, and lend a
hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and becoming husbands
and fathers. We cannot but feel the want of VRAISEMBLANCE which
brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark river
at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one
another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The four boys
with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but
there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
pilgrimage. Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive
genius and making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them
together and make them travel in company without any sacrifice of
dramatic truth, which, however, he was forced to disregard when the
time came for their dismissal. The exquisite pathos of the
description of the passage of the river by Christian and Hopeful
blinds us to what may be almost termed the impossibility of two
persons passing through the final struggle together, and dying at
the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic picture
of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them
cross. Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and
what no one but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it
that, in Mr. Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has
been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish.
"Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious
fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair
ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill
with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and
sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his
allegory: "Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give
those that desire it an account of what I am here silent about; in
the meantime I bid my reader - Adieu."
Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not
detain us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an
unsuccessful attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the
plan of salvation" in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all
its vividness of description in parts, its clearly drawn characters
with their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes
of the drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which
attaches to an individual man, like Christian, and those who are
linked with or follow his career. In fact, the tremendous
realities of the spiritual history of the human race are entirely
unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its origin, its
consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that remedy
though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan - John
Milton - to bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite
intellect, only render it more perplexing. The proverbial line
tells us that -
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but
when