PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, The. This is an allegory of the life of man, the journey of the awakened soul to God. Crying uWhat shall I do?' Christian flees from the City of Destruc tion, puts aside his jeering or pitying neigh bors, struggles through the Slough of Despond, trembles under Sinai, is comforted and in structed at Interpreter's house, and losing his burden at the Cross, is ready for the great journey. He fights against Apollyon, is im prisoned with Faithful in Vanity Fair. Escap ing both seducers by the way and the clutches of Giant Despair, he gains those Delectable Mountains whence, though Atheist and Igno rance intervene, the way to the Celestial City is sure, even through the river of Death. Though the conception of human life as a hard journey toward the divine is both old and common, it has nowhere else been imagined so appealingly. This is not critical opinion; it is fact. The 'Pilgrim's Progress,> translated into all lan guages, has had a circulation beyond the pos sibility of record. It is one of the few in stances, not merely of international fame, but of international popularity. Its characters have become proverbial; and the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair are used almost as common nouns.
Popularity so wide must have its springs very deep. Surface reasons explain merely the occasion. Bunyan was a Dissenter in the time of the Protestant revolt. Born eight years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, he was a lad during the Civil War (1642-46), a young man under the Commonwealth and in his manhood 12 years a prisoner for insisting on liberty of preaching. He spoke to English Pro testants on both sides of the Atlantic in their own religious language. But since his appeal has been limited neither to English nor to Prot estants, we must look deeper. The persons of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,) Mr. By-Ends, the brisk lad Ignorance, Faithful and the rest, though they bear abstract names, are not mere personifications. They are more than the types of ordinary allegory, more even than the pictur esque figures of the 'Faery Queene.) They are individuals, as truly characters as the persons of plays and novels. They talk as real people. We get from them what we desire of all imagi native literature, vicarious experience of human life.
The life that Bunyan thus creates by force of imagination he knew by direct contact. It is common life because he was a man of the people. An unschooled tinker, mending pots and pans from door to door, he knew the com mon hopes and loves and fears by daily hard experience from childhood. That tells why he speaks the common language, a language so common as to he sometimes illiterate; it does not yet tell why he speaks the universal language. Bunyan happened to be a tinker; he was born to be a preacher; he became a great preacher because he developed to an extraordi nary degree imaginative vision. Such of his
actual sermonizing as has been imperfectly pre served, or is suffered to interrupt the story of the Pilgrim's Progress,' shows little beyond the disputatious habit of his sect. It is not characteristic. Bunyan cannot be reduced to sermon heads; for he was not a reasoner. But he was all the more a popular preacher; for his persuasion sprang from imaginative oral realization. He pictured vividly in his own mind both things and thoughts; he had a seeing imagination. And to an equal degree he had the power of oral utterance in words that would make his hearers see and feel too. Thus his diction is habitually concrete because for him to think was to see. He makes doubt, fear, repentance real by making them visible and al most tangible. He makes us live them in the persons of his story, feel them with him because Mm.
we see them with m.
The other mainspring of his appeal is a style more utterly oral than that of any other English author. He follows with fearless sim plicity the ways of common speech. The prov erbs that he uses so often—% saint abroad and a devil at home,o waterman, looking one way and rowing another)'—are no more homely than his own habitual expression. eThere is a company of these crazed-headed coxcombs that when they take a fancy by the end are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a reason.)) cry out against sin even as the mother cries out against the child in her lap, when she calleth it slut and naughty girl and then falls to hug ging and kissing Knowing few books but the English Bible, he has the cadences not of literature, but of talk. His style is as oral as any that was ever put into a book.
But deeper even than his vivid concreteness and his oral homeliness is the spring of his sincerity. His style is the pure expression of his own intense experience. His power still to stir men's souls wells from the agonies and triumph so vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' from his going down, as he says, into the deep, his enlarged spiritual capacity. The crowning merit of the (Pilgrim's Progress' is that it cannot be long thought of as a work of art, that it makes us forget its style for its summons from the deceptions of things seen to the eternal unseen. Born an artist, Bunyan with single mind devoted his art to the glory of God and the salvation of men. His expres sion of the spiritual world is most simple and homely because he himself was simpler and homelier than any other Englishman who ever took a pen; but it is most intense because he himself was a fellow citizen with the saints.