John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ‘Thus the Flood came to its height; and ’tis not easy to represent to ourselves this strange scene of things, when the Deluge was in its fury and extremity; when the earth was broken and swallowed up in the abyss, whose raging waters rose higher than the mountains, and filled the air with broken waves, with an universal mist, and with thick darkness, so as nature seemed to be in a second chaos; and upon this chaos rid the distrest Ark, that bore the small remains of mankind. No sea was ever so tumultuous, as this, nor is there anything in present nature to be compared with the disorder of these waters; all the poetry, and all the hyperboles that are used in the description of storms and raging seas, were literally true in this, if not beneath it. The Ark was really carried to the tops of the highest mountains, and into the places of the clouds, and thrown down again into the deepest gulfs; and to this very state of the Deluge and of the Ark, which was a type of the Church in this world, David seems to have alluded in the name of the Church, Psalm xlii. 7, Abyss calls upon abyss at the noise of thy cataracts or waterspouts; all thy waves and billows have gone over me. It was no doubt an extraordinary and miraculous providence, that could make a vessel, so ill manned, live upon such a sea; that kept it from being dashed against the hills, or overwhelmed in the deeps. That abyss which had devoured and swallowed up whole forests of woods, cities, and provinces, nay the whole earth, when it had conquered all, and triumphed over all, could not destroy this single ship. I remember in the story of the Argonautics, Dion. Argonaut. l. i., v. 47, when Jason set out to fetch the Golden Fleece, the poet saith, all the gods that day looked down from Heaven to view the ship, and the nymphs stood upon the mountain-tops to see the noble youth of Thessaly pulling at the oars; we may with more reason suppose the good angels to have looked down upon this ship of Noah’s; and that not out of curiosity, as idle spectators, but with a passionate concern for its safety and deliverance. A ship, whose cargo was no less than a whole world; that carried the fortune and hopes of all posterity, and if this had perished, the earth for any thing we know had been nothing but a desert, a great ruin, a dead heap of rubbish, from the Deluge to the conflagration. But death and hell, the grave, and destruction have their bounds. We may entertain ourselves with the consideration of the face of the Deluge, and of the broken and drowned earth, in this scheme, with the floating Ark, and the guardian angels.’

  The most eminent natural theologian of the time after Ray, and one who would have surpassed Ray in importance if his labours in this department had been more than a brief episode in a busy career, was Richard Bentley, whose power of destructive criticism in other fields proved how formidable a champion he could be on the negative side of any question. Bentley’s massive intelligence, however, aptitude for broad commonsense views, and impatience of niceties and subtleties, entirely qualified him to embrace and expound the form in which natural theology commended itself to the vast majority of the thinkers of his day. He dealt solely with the materialism of Hobbes, ‘there may be some Spinosists beyond seas,’ he says, but to him de non existentibus, et de non apparentibus, eadem est ratio. The questions and the answers of a Goethe would have been equally unintelligible to him; if Newman would certainly have thought him shallow, he would as certainly have thought Newman whimsical. He must be judged from the standpoint of his own day, and from this his argument, delivered as the Boyle lecture for 1691 and 1692, must be pronounced a splendid and cogent piece of reasoning. It is particularly remarkable for its absolute reliance on the doctrines of Newton’s Principia, when Newton had hardly a disciple out of England.

  CHAPTER XIII. BUNYAN AND OTHER WRITERS OF FICTION.

  John Bunyan (1628-1688).

  So great an endowment is genius, that neither the effect produced nor the fame achieved by all the eloquent and learned divines of Charles II.’s age can be for an instant compared to the achievement of a poor and almost illiterate mechanic, whom Macaulay classes with Milton as one of the only two men of that period — he might have excepted Thomas Burnet — to whom had been vouchsafed any considerable measure of imagination. John Bunyan, the one man who has attained to write a successful prose allegory on a large scale, and to infuse true emotion into an exercise of ingenuity, and who probably owed less to study and training than any other of the great authors of the modern world, was born at Elstow, a village in the neighbourhood of Bedford, in November, 1628. He is usually described as a ‘tinker,’ but, as he was not an itinerant, ‘brazier’ would be a more correct appellation. The trade was his father’s, who was also a very small freeholder. Bunyan probably received some instruction at Bedford grammar school, and his narrative of his boyhood shows that he must have had considerable knowledge of the Bible, which impressed his imaginative temper more than he knew at the time. According to his own account he was wild and profane in his youth, but nothing very definite can be extracted from these self-accusations, and it would rather appear that it was only for a short time that he could even be described as careless. In 1644, partly perhaps from grief at the death of his mother and dissatisfaction with his father’s speedy re-marriage, he enlisted into the army, doubtless the Parliamentary force, though he strangely or prudently leaves the point uncertain. About the end of 1648 he married, and through the influence of his wife, whose name he does not tell us, and by the aid of two religious books which she brought him among her scanty possessions, he accomplished what he afterwards came to consider a merely outward reformation. The attempt to subjugate the inward man involved him for several years in the most distressing spiritual conflicts, described with extreme power in his Grace Abounding. They conducted him eventually to peace, and into the Baptist congregation of Mr. Gifford, who had been helpful to him. In 1655 he became a preacher, and in the following year produced his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened, to which was prefixed a recommendatory letter by John Burton, who says, ‘This man is not chosen out of an earthly, but out of the heavenly university.’

  In 1660 the revival under the Restoration government of obsolete enactments against conventicles, with no endeavour to discriminate between seditious conspirators like the Fifth Monarchy men and harmless worshippers like the Baptists, compelled the reluctant Bedford magistrates to arrest and imprison Bunyan as an unlicensed preacher. He might have escaped, or have obtained release by a trifling submission, but with the spirit of a Christian martyr he disdained either course, and abode contentedly in prison for nearly twelve years. His captivity in the commodious county gaol was by no means oppressive; indeed, in the first part of it he enjoyed a large measure of liberty, afterwards withdrawn. He supported himself by making tagged laces, as well as by the publication of some books, of which Grace Abounding (1666) is the most important. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress was also written in prison, but, as Bunyan’s best biographer, Dr. John Brown, almost proves, during a second and comparatively brief confinement in 1676. In 1672 Bunyan published his Defence of Justification by Faith, a coarse and violent attack on the Design of Christianity, by Dr., afterwards Bishop Fowler, one of the most tolerant divines of the age, but who was provoked to reply with almost equal acrimony. In the same year Charles II.’s merciful but entirely illegal suspension of all statutes against Papists and Nonconformists liberated Bunyan, who even obtained a licence to preach, and became stated minister of the Baptist congregation at Bedford, then meeting in a barn in an orchard. Notwithstanding some few molestations, of which the second imprisonment in 1675-76 was the chief, the remainder of his life was in general tranquil and prosperous. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in 1678, and, though not half-a-dozen copies of it are now known to exist, immediately attained the highest popularity. Edition followed edition, the first two or three with remarkable additions and improvements. Bunyan frequently visited London, where he became a popular preacher; his influence was courted, though unsuccessfully, by the government itself, and in 1688, the year of his death, he had become in some sort chaplain to the Lord Mayor, ‘an Anabaptist, a very odd ignorant person,’ says Evelyn. His princi
pal works in the interval had been: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1680; The Holy War, 1682; the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress, 1684; The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, 1688. His death, on August 31st, 1688, took place in London, and was occasioned by cold contracted on a journey which he had undertaken to reconcile a father with his son.

  Of Bunyan’s character there can be but one opinion, he was a truly Apostolic man. As no one’s diction is more forcible, unadulterated Saxon, so no life has better expressed the sturdy, sterling virtues of the Englishman. A wider culture would have enriched both his mind and his writings, but with the probable result of turning a remarkable man into an ordinary one. His good sense and his humility are illustrated by a charming anecdote. ‘Ah, Mr. Bunyan,’ said a grateful hearer, ‘that was a sweet sermon!’ ‘You need not tell me that,’ replied Bunyan, ‘the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit.’

  It is unnecessary to dwell at any great length upon the characteristics of so famous and universally known a book as Pilgrim’s Progress. Though professedly a vision, and treating of spiritual things, it ranks with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels as one of the great realistic books of the English language. All three are examples of the possibility of rendering scenes wholly imaginary, and in fact impossible, truer to the apprehension than experience itself by the narrator’s own air of absolute conviction, and by unswerving fidelity to truth of detail. In Bunyan’s case the triumph is the more remarkable, as his personages are not even imaginary men and women, but mere embodiments of moral or theological qualities. Yet Faithful and Hopeful are as real as Crusoe and Friday. Before he began to write he must have realized what he wished to describe with a vividness only conceivable by regarding it as an outward expression of his own spiritual experience. He had himself been Christian and Faithful and the captive in Doubting Castle; he had gazed on Vanity Fair, and passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The fact that his allegory is in truth an autobiography explains what Macaulay calls the characteristic peculiarity of Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. Other allegories only amuse the fancy. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears.’ Elsewhere he says, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress is 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.’ It may be added that Pilgrim’s Progress, unlike other celebrated works, is a bona fide and unmistakable allegory. Don Quixote may have a much deeper purpose than that of satirizing chivalric romances, but not one reader in a hundred cares to fathom it. Spenser undoubtedly intended to shadow forth Elizabeth in Gloriana; but the perception of the poet’s purpose contributes nothing to the enjoyment of his poem. In Bunyan, however, the allegory is the book, too plain to be overlooked by the most careless reader; and all the minor allegories that combine to enrich the main action are equally apparent for what they are, and yet the obvious invention has all the force of reality. ‘Bunyan,’ says Macaulay, ‘is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors men are mere personifications. The mind of Bunyan, on the other hand, was so imaginative that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. A dialogue between two qualities, in his dream, has more dramatic effect than a dialogue between two human beings in most plays.’ Macaulay proceeds to compare Bunyan in this particular with Shelley, and the comparison is just; but it is surprising that neither he nor Mr. Froude should have dwelt on Bunyan’s deeper affinity to a great predecessor of whom he assuredly never read a line — Dante. Dante’s personifications, indeed, are feeble compared to Bunyan’s; it is doubtful whether some of them are even intended as such. The might of his imagination, however, like Bunyan’s, is shown in his power of reconciling us to its wildest flights by the intensity of his realism; and the chief distinction is that while Bunyan’s materials are necessarily drawn from the only worlds he knew, the narrow and prosaic world of Bedford and the sublime world of the Bible, Dante disposed of all his age could give in philosophy, political life, human learning, the influence of art and the scrutiny of nature. Bunyan is hence a very contracted and terrestrial Dante, but so far as he goes he is a true Dante; he cannot soar with his great predecessor, but if Dante had succeeded him he would not have disdained to have built upon his massive groundwork. Both suffer from the inevitable progress of mankind beyond the conceptions which in their day were accepted as matters of course. Dante’s Inferno now seems rather grotesque than terrible. Christian’s forsaking his kindred in the City of Destruction, which to Bunyan appeared a duty, now seems selfishness. That the fame of both should have survived such profound modifications of belief is one of the most striking evidences of their greatness. One great advantage Bunyan possessed: the Bible had prepared the way for him. There is probably no other such instance of the assimilation of one literature by another as the domestication of the Bible in England. The Greek and Hebrew authors of the Scriptures were better known to the public that Bunyan principally addressed than the majority of their own writers, and he had no need, like other men of original genius, to painfully create the taste by which he was ultimately to be judged. From the first Pilgrim’s Progress took rank as a classic; well might Dr. Arnold call it ‘a complete reflection of Scripture.’ Its chief blemish, the somewhat prosaic and self-seeking character of its piety, harmonized entirely with the current teaching of the pulpit, and offered no stumbling-block to a generation which had not so much as heard of ‘other-worldliness.’ Its popularity soon received the usual attestation of piracies, spurious continuations, and imitations in all languages. The question whether Bunyan was indebted for his allegory to any predecessor is hardly worth discussing. Some general resemblance must necessarily exist between books treating of pilgrimages, and here the resemblance is no more than general. The second part was published in 1684. Its inferiority to the first part is universally admitted, but is less than is usually entailed by the endeavour to append an artificial supplement to an inspired book. Many passages are fully worthy of the first part, and as a whole it abounds with life and variety.

  Three only of Bunyan’s numerous publications, besides Pilgrim’s Progress, claim a place in literature: The Holy War (1682); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680); Grace Abounding (1665). Of these The Holy War is the most important, and affords a highly instructive contrast with Pilgrim’s Progress. It is the peculiar virtue of the latter, while full of wisdom and profitableness, to be in no way professedly didactic. Bunyan himself tells us that he did not sit down to compose it; the thoughts came spontaneously into his mind; he wrote it because he could not help himself. There was thus no need for laboriously instilling lessons which inhered in the original conception, and came forward of themselves as the story flowed along. The elaborate construction of The Holy War precludes belief in a like inspiration. There can, in fact, be little doubt that the idea is consciously derived from Paradise Lost. In both the banished fiends cast about for some means of retaliating upon their omnipotent foe; in Milton their attack is levelled against the Garden of Eden, in Bunyan against the soul of man. All human attributes, virtuous or vicious, are allegorized with graphic liveliness, but at length one wearies of the crowd of abstractions; and where strength was most necessary, Bunyan is weak. Emanuel is not godlike, and Diabolus is not terrible. The book is perhaps chiefly interesting as an index to the great progress effected since Bunyan’s time in spirituality as regards men’s religious conceptions, and in freedom and enlightenment as concerns the things of earth. No one would now depict the offended majesty of Heaven as so like the offended majesty of the Stuarts; or deem that the revolters’ offence could be mitigated by the abjectness of their submission; or try criminals with such unfairness; or lecture them upon conviction with such lack of judicial decorum. Bunyan’s own spirit seems narrower than of old; among the traitors upon whom Emanuel’s ministers execute justice he includes not only Notruth and Pitil
ess, but also Election-doubter and Vocation-doubter, who represent the majority of the members of the Church of England. The whole tone, in truth, is such as might be expected from one nurtured upon the Old rather than the New Testament, and who had never conceived any doubts of the justice of the Israelites’ dealings with the Canaanites. The literary power, nevertheless, is unabated; much ingenuity is shown in keeping up the interest of the story; and there is the old gift of vitalizing abstractions by uncompromising realism of treatment. The following passage is a remarkable instance of the dependence of Bunyan’s style upon his inward mind. Seldom have joy and elation of spirit elevated homely diction into so near an approach to magnificence:

  ‘Well, I told you before, how the prisoners were entertained by the noble Prince Emmanuel, and how they behaved themselves before him, and how he sent them away to their home with pipe and tabor going before them. And now you must think, that those of the town that had all this while waited to hear of their death, could not but be exercised with sadness of mind, and with thoughts that pricked like thorns. Nor could their thoughts be kept to one point; the wind blew with them all this while at great uncertainties, yea, their hearts were like a balance that had been disquieted with shaking hand. But at last as they, with many a long look, looked over the wall of Mansoul, they thought that they saw some returning to the town; and thought again, who should they be? At last they discerned that they were the prisoners. But can you imagine, how their hearts were surprised with wonder! Especially when they perceived also in what equipage, and with what honour they were sent home. They went down to the camp in black, but they came back to the town in white; they went down to the camp in ropes, they came back in chains of gold; they went down to the camp with their feet in tatters, but they came back with their steps enlarged under them; they went also to the camp looking for death, but they came back from thence with assurance of life; they went down to the camp with heavy hearts, but came back again with pipe and tabor playing before them. So, so soon as they were come to Eye-gate, the poor and tottering town of Mansoul adventured to give a shout; and they gave such a shout, as made the captains in the Prince’s army leap at the sound thereof. Alas! for them, poor hearts, who could blame them, since their dead friends were come to life again! For it was to them as life from the dead, to see the ancients of the town of Mansoul to shine in such splendour. They looked for nothing but the axe and the block; but behold! joy and gladness, comfort and consolation, and such melodious notes attending of them, that was sufficient to make a sick man well. So when they came up, they saluted each other with Welcome, welcome, and blessed be he that spared you. They added also, we see it is well with you, but how must it go with the town of Mansoul, and will it go well with the town of Mansoul, said they? Then answered them the Recorder, and my lord Mayor, Oh! tidings! glad tidings! good tidings of good; and of great joy to poor Mansoul! Then they gave another shout, that made the earth to ring again. After this, they enquired yet more particularly, how things went in the camp, and what message they had from Emmanuel to the town. So they told them all passages that had happened to them at the camp, and every thing that the Prince did to them. This made Mansoul wonder at the wisdom and grace of the Prince Emmanuel; then they told them what they had received at his hands, for the whole town of Mansoul; and the Recorder delivered it in these words, Pardon, Pardon, Pardon for Mansoul; and this shall Mansoul know to-morrow. Then he commanded, and they went and summoned Mansoul to meet together in the market-place to-morrow, there to hear their general pardon read.