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JOHN BUNYAN'S HYPOCRISY

BY HAROLD GOLDER

THE Puritan is not usually considered an entertaining person. We hear him frequently praised for his stalwart virtues and frequently condemned for his narrowness. But we find few qualities in the sincere, thorough-going Puritan that are engaging. It is only when he falls from grace, when he displays traits at variance with his ideals, that we find him a fit subject for comedy and adopt him into the society of interesting people. Sir Toby Belch derived little amusement from the contemplation of his niece's model steward, Malvolio, until that unrelenting censor of the household morals fell a victim to his own conceits and blossomed out resplendent in cross-garters and yellow stockings. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Tartuffe, Mr. Pecksniff, Milton, William Wordsworth, all were respectable but uninteresting until the world discovered the touch of nature that established their kinship with humanity.

For this reason, when we contract interesting friendships with men in the latter half of the seventeenth century, we choose Samuel Pepys but seldom John Bunyan. The immortal Diary has illuminated secret corners of Pepys's heart unsuspected by his contemporaries. We chuckle at Pepys and find him exceptionally good company, not because he was a high official in the Admiralty and President of the Royal Society, a respected citizen and a trusted servant of his king, but because we have inside knowledge of his foibles, his impulses, his humanity. The fact that Pepys attended divine services with some regularity and usually remembered the sermons captivates us less than the other fact that he was not at such times wholly unconscious of pretty girls that shared his pew and not wholly disdainful of a feminine hand that came within reach during the course of a prayer. In large measure such revelations of John Bunyan's private life and inner man are denied us. Consequently we see him as his flock of

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admiring Nonconformists saw him-an honest man, an upright man, a saintly man. And such a man is doubtless a stabilizing force in the life of any society, but hardly an exhilarating companion.

It is, therefore, distinctly a relief to discover that John Bunyan was a hypocrite. In one respect he was a whited sepulchre, filled not with dead men's bones, but with abundant life and a very human weakness for a pleasure that his stern code denied him. How Bunyan indulged that weakness is a fascinating glimpse into the intricacies of the Puritan mind.

No sin, outside the conventional vices at least, moved Bunyan's ostensible indignation so much as the sin of reading for entertainment. Fiction was anathema to him. He grouped romances together with atheistical pamphlets as "nasty, odious, lascivious pieces of beastliness". Godly books, such as The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, The Practice of Piety, and The Sick Man's Salve, were sufficiently didactic as well as sufficiently dull to be recommended to the elect. Even certain narratives, Foxe's Martyrs and lurid accounts of God's vengeance against sinners, were exciting in a godly way and consequently not prohibited. But lying stories and vain tales of all sorts, and particularly the romances of chivalry then vastly popular among the peasantry of England, were "worthless things" and "things of no advantage", filthy, untrue, and diverting in the sense that they led the mind from one other-world, that of the Christian, to another other-world, that of romance, where all men are brave and all women fair.

A fondness for chivalric fiction Bunyan placed, in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, prominently among his hero's damnable shortcomings. He showed the young Badman surrounded with influences that should have lured the most hardened of sinners into right paths, influences such as prayers after meals and before bedtime and shelves full of irreproachable tracts on salvation. And yet Mr. Badman wantonly persisted in hiding behind sugar barrels and reading Amadis and The Mirror of Knighthood. "He would keep them in close places, and peruse them at such times as yielded him fit opportunities thereto." Again, in his Sighs from Hell; or, Groans from a Damned Soul, Bunyan made the

reading of romances one of the deadly sins. The chief groans of the repentant ghost concern his memories that during his life he had enjoyed reading the Scriptures less than following the adventures of St. George and Bevis of Hampton from chapter to chapter of black-letter thrillers. Bunyan quite obviously was not, one concludes from his writings, a devotee of romance.

And yet that is exactly what he was. Pilgrim's Progress could not have been written by a man whose mind was not saturated with the literature of chivalry. Greatheart, Valiant-for-Truth, and, for a part of his pilgrimage at least, Christian himself, are knights that fight in armor against giants, dragons, and monsters, conquer the enchantments of haunted valleys, and are in spirit and in deed blood brothers to Sir Guy, Sir Bevis, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Palmerin. The stories centered around Bunyan's Christian heroes are the conventional episodes of romantic fiction. Bunyan must at one time in his life have been extraordinarily familiar with just the sort of literature that in his sermons he condemned, and must have cherished and preserved the memories of this sinful reading throughout his career as a Puritan preacher and teacher. And when he wrote Pilgrim's Progress he used these "carnal cogitations", as he would have called them, to point his moral and adorn his tale.

Take a giant fight at random from the second part of the Progress, the fight between Greatheart and the terrible Bloodyman; observe how the hero dealt his antagonist "a down-right blow, and brought him upon his knees. With this blow he also broke his Helmet, and with the next cut off an Arm. Then did the Giant roar so hideously, that his voice frighted the Women." Then turn to such romances as Don Belianis and Montelion; see one hero charging upon a giant "with so sore a stroak that it, descending full upon his shaggy crown, brought him upon his knees" and made him roar "most hideously"; see another dealing a monster of mankind "such a blow on the Helmet that he clove it in sunder"; see a third striking his foe "such a full Blow on the arm that he cut the same quite off, whereat he gave such a Groan that all the Place rung with the noise thereof”. Greatheart's passages of arms with the other two giants, the redoubtable Maul and Slaygood, are equally close to chivalric

episodes, in diction and in action. Each fight begins with the exchange of vaunts between the combatants, the conventional "flytings" of the romances; each contains an intermission during which the champions lean upon their weapons, pant, and glare at one another; each is a give-and-take of mighty blows that turn the vane of fortune now toward victory and now defeat; each draws to its close with the giant's growing weakness, his fall, his decapitation, and ends with the hero's prayer of thanksgiving. In short, if these giant fights in Pilgrim's Progress were severed by a sharp lancet from their context and grafted skillfully into the body of Amadis de Gaule or Parismus, Prince of Bohemia, the operation would be a complete success.

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Not only the giant fights, but almost every passage of the second Progress that is not pure preaching is a romantic situation. The Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrims pass in imminent danger of being cast into a magic sleep, had its origin in two enchanted gardens described by Richard Johnson in his lar romance, The Seven Champions of Christendom. Adventures at Doubting Castle, presided over by the unamiable Giant Despair, are paralleled by adventures at castles in Emanuel Ford's Parismus and in Samuel Rowlands's version of the old romance, Guy of Warwick.

But nowhere does Bunyan's knowledge of the romances show itself so interestingly, and nowhere is it disguised so subtly, as in that part of Pilgrim's Progress that conducts Christian from the foot of the Hill Difficulty through the terrors of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The Hill Difficulty, from the point of view of the allegory, represents the diffidence which the Puritan convert experiences before he unites with a congregation of the brethren; the two lions that Christian finds in a narrow passage before the gate of the House Beautiful are symbols of church and state persecution directed against Nonconformists; the House Beautiful itself, where four grave damsels entertain Christian after he has safely climbed the hill and passed the lions, represents the community of visible saints, the Christian church. The armor with which the damsels clothe the hero at his departure and the arms that they give him are the spiritual weapons of offence and defence described in Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

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