One of my friends had a mania for Bunyan once upon a time, and, although he has now abandoned that fad for the more fashionable passion of Napoleonana, he still exhibits with evident pride the many editions of the ``Pilgrim's Progress'' he gathered together years ago. I have frequently besought him to give me one of his copies, which has a curious frontispiece illustrating the dangers besetting the traveller from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. This frontispiece, which is prettily illuminated, occurs in Virtue's edition of the ``Pilgrim's Progress''; the book itself is not rare, but it is hardly procurable in perfect condition, for the reason that the colored plate is so pleasing to the eye that few have been able to resist the temptation to make away with it.
For similar reasons it is seldom that we meet with a perfect edition of Quarles' ``Emblems''; indeed, an ``Emblems'' of early publication that does not lack the title-page is a great rarity.
In the ``good old days,'' when juvenile books were few, the works of Bunyan and of Quarles were vastly popular with the little folk, and little fingers wrought sad havoc with the title-pages and the pictures that with their extravagant and vivid suggestions appealed so directly and powerfully to the youthful fancy.
Coleridge says of the ``Pilgrim's Progress'' that it is the best summary of evangelical Christianity ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired. Froude declares that it has for two centuries affected the spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more powerfully than any other book, except the Bible. ``It is,'' says Macaulay, ``perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.''
Whether or not Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of the people, and whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism, the best evidence of the merit of the ``Pilgrim's Progress'' appears, as Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued approbation of mankind. Southey has critically observed that to his natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general popularity, his language being everywhere level to the most ignorant reader and to the meanest capacity; ``there is a homely reality about it--a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child.''
Another cause of his popularity, says Southey, is that he taxes the imagination as little as the understanding. ``The vividness of his own, which, as history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal impressions from actual ones, occasioned this.
He saw the things of which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were, indeed, passing before him in a dream.''
It is clear to me that in his youth Bunyan would have endeared himself to me had I lived at that time, for his fancy was of that kind and of such intensity as I delight to find in youth. ``My sins,'' he tells us, ``did so offend the Lord that even in my childhood He did scare and affright me with fearful dreams and did terrify me with dreadful visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be rid.''
It is quite likely that Bunyan overestimated his viciousness.
One of his ardent, intense temperament having once been touched of the saving grace could hardly help recognizing in himself the most miserable of sinners. It is related that upon one occasion he was going somewhere disguised as a wagoner, when he was overtaken by a constable who had a warrant for his arrest.
``Do you know that devil of a fellow Bunyan?'' asked the constable.
``Know him?'' cried Bunyan. ''You might call him a devil indeed, if you knew him as well as I once did!''
This was not the only time his wit served him to good purpose.
On another occasion a certain Cambridge student, who was filled with a sense of his own importance, undertook to prove to him what a divine thing reason was, and he capped his argument with the declaration that reason was the chief glory of man which distinguished him from a beast. To this Bunyan calmly made answer: ``Sin distinguishes man from beast; is sin divine?''
Frederick Saunders observes that, like Milton in his blindness, Bunyan in his imprisonment had his spiritual perception made all the brighter by his exclusion from the glare of the outside world. And of the great debt of gratitude we all owe to ``the wicked tinker of Elstow'' Dean Stanley has spoken so truly that Iam fain to quote his words: ``We all need to be cheered by the help of Greatheart and Standfast and Valiant-for-the-Truth, and good old Honesty! Some of us have been in Doubting Castle, some in the Slough of Despond. Some have experienced the temptations of Vanity Fair; all of us have to climb the Hill of Difficulty;all of us need to be instructed by the Interpreter in the House Beautiful; all of us bear the same burden; all of us need the same armor in our fight with Apollyon; all of us have to pass through the Wicket Gate--to pass through the dark river, and for all of us (if God so will) there wait the shining ones at the gates of the Celestial City! Who does not love to linger over the life story of the `immortal dreamer' as one of those characters for whom man has done so little and God so much?''
