29 November: Boreham on John Bunyan

Immortality of Simplicity
Quite apart from his saintly life and apostolic ministry, John Bunyan, whose birthday this happens to be, cuts a great figure in English life and English literature. He was a plain, blunt, honest man, of whom men of all nations and all creeds now think with peculiar kindness and sincere gratitude. Lord Morley had no sympathy with the peculiar tenets that Bunyan taught; but, when he set himself to produce the library known as the English Men of Letters series, he gave Bunyan a foremost place on his list and entrusted the writing of that notable volume to the capable hands of James Anthony Froude.

The very fact that writers of the calibre of Southey, Coleridge, Macaulay, Froude, Green, Besant, and Kipling have all thought it worth their while to study carefully, and expound exhaustively, the secret of Bunyan's extraordinary influence is the best possible proof that Bunyan is a great cosmopolite. Whether we endorse his views or deride them matters little. We like the man; we admire his transparent sincerity; we enjoy his writings; and we pay respectful homage to his genius. It is on these grounds that, incongruous as the proceeding would have seemed to Bunyan, a noble monument to his illustrious memory was placed in Westminster Abbey.

The charm of Bunyan is that he is always himself. He sprang from the meanest stratum of English society and was never ashamed of his humble origin. In his poem on Bunyan, Kipling calls him the lowest of the low. "I was of poor and inconsiderable generation," he himself tells us, "my father's house being of that rank that is most despised. I never went to school to Aristotle and Plato, but was brought up in my parents' home in the poorest circumstances among a company of simple country folk." He never forgot this and never tried to forget it.

Lasting Lustre Of Effortless Triumph
When, with the passage of the years, he put pen to paper, he expressed himself in the simple homespun speech with which, from childhood, he was most familiar. There is nowhere anything grandiloquent, efflorescent or highfalutin about a word that he says. He never tried to write; he just wrote. The simplicity of his soul found perfect and natural articulation in the crystalline clarity of his own native speech. For this very reason, Macaulay, our severest judge of style, commends "The Pilgrim's Progress," to all literary aspirants as the supreme and incomparable pattern. There is, he says, no book in our literature on which he would so readily stake the fame of the old, unpolluted English; no book which shows so well how rich the language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed. No writer has ever received, or desired, higher praise.

In more ways than one Bunyan was an astonishment to himself. It always seemed to him a sort of sublime jest that he, a villager by birth and a tinker by trade, should have become an author of considerable renown; and it amused him to find himself with a pen in his hand. It seemed incredible that, as if by magic, the folios were multiplying beneath his fingers at such a rate that they threatened to become a book. His pen simply bolted, he tells us; he could not check it; it raced on and on and on; and, before he knew it, the work was complete. Yet, great as was the surprise of the achievement, it was destined to be eclipsed by a still greater astonishment—the astonishment of its success.

Bunyan was not among those who, unrecognised by his contemporaries, made a pathetic but triumphant appeal to posterity. He would undoubtedly have been amazed had he been told that, three centuries after his death, his works would be sold by the million and translated into the languages of all civilised peoples. Yet even this would have seemed scarcely more astounding than the sensation that he actually witnessed.

Varied Life And Valiant Death
He died in 1688 at the age of 60. By that time "The Pilgrim's Progress" had passed through ten editions in English and had been translated into several tongues. And, as Green observes in his "Short History of the English People," its favour, especially among the middle classes and the poor, has grown steadily from his day to our own. It is, Green adds, the most popular and widely known of English books, incomparable in exquisite simplicity, peerless in literary power. Bunyan's is the most easy and unstudied conquest in the entire range of our varied history.

During those sixty years of his, from 1628 to 1688, Bunyan lived a strangely chequered and adventurous life. Rudyard Kipling describes him as:

"A tinker out of Bedford; a vagrant oft in quod;
A private under Fairfax; a
minister of God."

He lived through all the seething agitation of the Revolution—the King was sent to the scaffold in the year in which Bunyan came of age—yet no slightest surge of the fever and tumult of those restless years found its way into his writings. He clearly felt that the bitterness and the strife were but for a day, and he elected to root his life and work in the tranquillity that is dear to all the ages. His end, as Froude remarks, was characteristic. A father and son had quarrelled at Reading. Bunyan decided to ride over from Bedford in the hope of reconciling them. He succeeded, but at the cost of his life. He was drenched to the skin by a storm on the journey home. The chill, falling on a constitution already weakened by illness and hardship, brought on a fever. In 10 days he was dead. But, as so often happens, his death made little difference to him. It was merely an episode in his triumphal progress. In reality he was never so much alive as he is today. His books represent his most imposing monument; and, in the writings of those who have modelled themselves on his perfect style, he lives a thousand lives, quite anonymously but with tremendous effect.

F W Boreham

Image: Grave of John Bunyan, Bunhill Fields, London.