Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are satisfied with Sancho's chatter, and his master's Quixoteries, because they are both pretty closely connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the clouds, Sancho Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of them the book itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is a perpetual interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous and the sublime, and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and give opportunity to each other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful of common sense, whose business is to make the Knight of the Doleful Countenance appear ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too, prefers sometimes those two birds twittering distantly in the bush; Romance, smilingly enough, has touched his puzzled forehead also. And Don Quixote, with ideals no less noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or Don Belianis of Greece, with notions of life no less exaggerated than those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a man of blood and bone. His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are in the book as a soul in a body. Don Quixote is a book of dreams set upon earth, and earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue novels and the romances were, either of them, the one without the other.
We see Don Quixote's adventures with the realist's eye of disillusion, and find that external perfection does not matter to our dreams. ''Tis not the deed but the intent.' The gorgeous charger of the knight of chivalry is become a poor old starveling hack that should have been horsemeat these dozen years. Mambrino's helmet is but a barber's bason after all. Lancelot's Guinevere is Dulcinea of the Mill. Her feet are large and her shoulders one higher than the other. The castle is a wayside inn, the routed army a flock of luckless sheep. The goatherds do not talk after the fashion of the Court, like those in Galatea; but, 'with some coarse compliment, after the country way, they desired Don Quixote to sit down upon a trough with the bottom upwards.' Gone are the rose-flecked cloudy pinnacles of dawn; we know them now for drenching rain. And yet—the play's the thing, and is not judged by its trappings, but by its beating heart. Not one scene in the Romances, not one glimpse of the Happy Valley in the Pastorals, has ever moved us like this book, which is so near life that when we close it we seem not to have flown on an enchanted carpet from a thousand leagues away, but to have stepped merely from one room to another of our own existence.
The Exemplary Novels were begun before Don Quixote, and published afterwards. They are examples rather of a form in story-telling than of any particular piety. Cervantes was, he tells us, 'the first to essay novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many novels which go about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.' He took the form of the Italian short story, not the episode but the nouvelle, the little novel that had inspired the Elizabethans. He took this form and filled it with his own material, told in his own manner. In thinking of that manner I am reminded of the band of Spanish village musicians who seemed at first to have no obvious connection with my subject. There were perhaps a dozen of them grouped on the stage of a London music hall, and they played small windy tunes, occasionally blaring out with trumpets, using a musical scale entirely different from our own. I remembered a Japanese I had heard playing on a bamboo flute, and then the semitones of a little henna-stained flageolet from Kairouan. For theirs was Eastern music, and I wondered if these Spaniards still owed their scale to the old rulers of Granada. They set me thinking whether the peculiar movement of Cervantes' narrative had not also an Eastern origin. The facts favour the supposition. Up to the battle of Lepanto the Turks were so far a ruling nation as to be the supreme sea-power; until even later the most likely of incidents for the use of the story-teller was that which happened to Cervantes himself—capture by a Moslem pirate and imprisonment in Algiers. Only a hundred years had passed since the Moors had been driven from Granada. It would indeed be surprising if in Cervantes' work we found no sign of Eastern influence. 'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all stories are told in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any other way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united forces of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea.
Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary trick of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the engaging, erudite manner of the heroes of the Arabian Nights. Sancho Panza's conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-laden maxims that had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set a hen upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is no hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful Hakim exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the East. But these are small things and beside the main point. I want to suggest that Cervantes had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or in his Morocco-Spanish Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden, unflinching atmosphere of Oriental story-telling. The form of the nouvelle, Eastern in origin, had been passed on from Naples to Paris and to London, without noticeable improvement, but it seems to me that now in Spain it met the East again, and was accordingly recreated. It is just the element of Eastern narrative, accidental in the genius of Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form so infinitely more important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott told Lockhart that the reading of the Exemplary Novels first turned his mind to the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess Scherazada.
The novels are delightful specimens of ambling, elaborate narrative, full of the easiest, most confident knowledge of humanity, illustrating with serene clarity a point of view that is to-day as refreshing as it is surprising. The happy endings, when the seducer falls in love at sight on meeting the seduced of years before, and satisfies all her scruples, and turns her sorrow to unblemished joy by marrying her, show an ethic of respectability no less assured than Richardson's. They are enriched by passages whose observation is as minute as Fielding's. They are never tales about nothing. There is always meat on their bones. They are among the few stories that can be read on a summer afternoon under an apple-tree, for they will bear contact with nature, and are never in a hurry. Even if Cervantes had not written Don Quixote, the Exemplary Novels would have assured him a place in the history of his art. There is no cleverness in them, any more than in the greater book. The whole body of Cervantes' work is an illustration of the impregnable advantage that plain humanity possesses over intellect.
And now, after these various questions for the schoolmen, questions to more than one of which the cautious man must answer with Sir Roger, that 'much might be said on both sides,' let us return to the old story-teller himself, who will survive by innumerable generations our little praises and discussions as he has lived benevolent and secure through the centuries that have already passed over his grave. The only authentic portrait of Cervantes is in his own words. A hundred artists have tried to supplement these words with paint, and their pictures have at least a family likeness. The portrait made by Miss Gavin after a careful comparison parison of many others represents very fairly the traditional Cervantes type, and does not materially belie the lineaments that he describes:—'He whom you here behold, with aquiline visage, with chestnut hair, smooth and unruffled brow, with sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned, a silver beard, although not twenty years ago it was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth not important, for he has but six of them, and those in ill condition and worse placed because they do not correspond the one with the other, the body between two extremes, neither large nor small, the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat heavy-shouldered, and not very nimble on his feet; this, I say, is the portrait of the author of the Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha.' That is the sort of statement of himself that an honest humorous man might make to a friend. Part of the satisfaction given by his books is due to the comfortable knowledge that there is a man behind them, a man who knew the world and had not frozen in it. Cervantes, for all his intimacy with life, never became worldly enough to believe in hatred. He assumed that all his readers were his friends, and made them so by the assumption.
No: Cervantes is too simple a man to do anything but suffer in discussion. There are men whom you know well, who seem to elude you like the final mystery of metaphysics when you try to talk about them. My history and not Cervantes is the clearer for the rags and tatters of observation I have picked off him one by one. I had put them there myself. It was necessary, for the purposes of my book, to notice the Eastern character of his story-telling and his position between rogue novel and romance, but, now that it is done, I am glad to go back to him without pre-occupations. There is yet hot water in the kettle, and tea in the pot, and four hours to spend with Don Quixote before I go to bed. Cervantes, at least, will bear me no malice, but tell me his story as simply as before I had tried to bring it into argument.
The detailed, silver-point portrait studies of Fanny Burney, the miniatures of Jane Austen, and the stronger etchings of Fielding and Smollett, owed their existence to something outside the art of story-telling, something other than the grave, humorous pictures of Chaucer, or the hiding of real people under the homespun of lovesick shepherds, or the gay autobiographies of swindling rogues. They owed it to an art which in its beginnings seemed far enough away from any sort of narrative. In those happy, thievish times when plagiary was a virtue to be cried upon the housetops, this art, or rather this artistic form, had been, like much else, stolen from antiquity.
When literature was for the first time become a fashionable toy, and when, even at Court, a gallant or a soldier was far outmatched by a wit, the little book of Theophrastus his Characters suggested a pastime that offered no less opportunity than poetry for the display of nimbleness and sparkling fancy. Life had become very diverse and elaborate, and how delightful to take one of its flowerings, one man, one woman, of a particular species, and exhibit it in a small space, in a select number of points and quips, each one barbed and sticking in the chosen target. Sir Thomas Overbury, trying to define the art he used so skilfully, said, in his clear way:—'To square out a character by our English levell, it is a picture (reall or personall) quaintly drawne, in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing. It is a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close: it is wit's descant on any plaine song.' The thing had to be witty; it had to be short. A busy courtier could compose one in a morning while his barber was arranging his coiffure, and show it round in the afternoon for the delectation of his friends and the increase of his vanity. He could take a subject like 'A Woman,' and with quick sentences pin her to the paper like a butterfly on cork. Then he could take another title, like 'A Very Woman,' and repeat his triumph with another variety of the species. |Sir Thomas Overbury.| Sir Thomas Overbury, that charming, insolent, honest man, the friend of Somerset, venomously done to death by his Countess for having given too good advice to her husband, is perhaps the most notable of the early practitioners. He is not to be despised for his sage poem on the choice of a wife, but he is at his best in the making of these little portraits, like that of the 'Faire and happy Milk-mayd,' wherein, in accordance with his definition, he could polish each detail without jarring his musical close, and without nullifying the single shadowing designed to heighten the whole. The form was fitted to the times like their fashions in clothes. The Character belonged to that age, like the novel to the nineteenth century. Sir Thomas, as his title-page tells us, was assisted by 'other much learned gentlemen'; he was presently followed by a man as different from himself as gentle John Earle, Doctor of Divinity, and just such a student as an Inns of Court man like Sir Thomas would naturally despise. So general was the inclination of the age to portraiture.
With Earle we are nearer the drawing of individuals, and so to a tenderer touch on idiosyncrasies. He relies less on quaint conceits (though he has plenty of them and charming ones at command; witness the child whose 'father hath writ him as his owne little story, wherein hee reads those dayes of his life that hee cannot remember') and trusts more often to fragments of real observation. His Characters are not so consistently wit's descant on a plain song. He is often content to give us a plain descant on a plain song—less concerned with his cleverness than with his subjects. With Earle we are already some way from the age of Elizabeth, and indeed Overbury, though he was able to quarrel with Ben Jonson, and in spite of his Renaissance death, seems to have a part in a less youthful century. In his wisdom, in his wise advice unwisely given to his friend, there is something already of the flavour of Addison; an essence ever so slight of the sound morality of the periodical essayists whose work owed more than a little to his own.
The same impulse that suggested the pleasure and profit of collecting Londoners as Theophrastus had collected his Athenians, suggested also the noting of contemporary manners. Manners and Characters, especially since Characters meant peculiarities, belonged to each other. Overbury's 'Pyrate' is a picture of the times quite as much as of that sterling fellow they produced, to whom if you gave 'sea roome in never so small a vessell, like a witch in a sieve, you would think he were going to make merry with the devill.' And the portrait of 'The Faire and happy Milk-mayd' betrays in its painting more than a little of the artist and of the age in which she sat for him. This is true of the plain Character, unexpanded and unframed; it is still more true of the Character in the form it very speedily took. The Character became a paragraph in a discursive essay, and La Bruyère, who copied directly from Theophrastus, does not make series of separate portraits, but notices in his original less his picturing of types than his suggestion of their circumstances, dividing his own work into large sections, 'de la ville,' 'de la Cour,' 'des Biens de Fortune,' 'de la Société et de la Conversation,' where he seems to stroll slowly through a garden-walk of philosophy, pointing his remarks with his stick, and using such portraits as he cares to make to illustrate his general observations. His Characters are almost anecdotes. He is like the more advanced naturalist who, no longer content with his butterflies on cork and his stuffed birds stiff on perches, attempts to place them in the setting of their ordinary existence, where they may illustrate at once that existence and their own natures by some characteristic pose. How near is this to the desire of seeing them alive and in continuous action, which, if he had had it, would perhaps have made him combine his notes and sketches in a novel.
The periodical essayists had La Bruyère, and Earle's Microcosmography: A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters, and Sir Thomas Overbury with his much learned gentlemen, and Theophrastus, the father of them all, well in their memory. They too were collectors of Characters and observers of public morals and censurers of private follies. La Bruyère's aims with something more were theirs. Hazlitt's is so excellent a description of their work that I shall quote it instead of writing a stupid one. 'Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli, is the general motto of this department of literature.... It makes familiar with the world of men and women, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and body of the time its form and pressure"; takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.' We might be listening to a description of the eighteenth century novel of manners. Fanny Burney would have recognised these pretensions for her secret own, though she might have blushed to see them so emblazoned.
The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, and the rest of them, are like a long series of skirmishes in a determined campaign on the part of the essayists to cross the borderland of narrative. Their traditions, the Character, Montaigne, and Bacon, were very different from those of the story-tellers. The canvases prescribed for them were not huge things almost shutting out the sky, but a very small stock size, two or three pages only, to lie two days on coffee-house tables, and be used for wrapping butter on the third. The essayists were like men compelled to examine an elephant with a pocket microscope. Each subject, small as it was, hid all others for the moment, so that their observation made mountain peaks and ranges out of pimples and creases. These very limitations sharpened the weapons of their struggle, the weapons that were at last to be taken over by the novelists. The small canvas made carelessness impossible, and this compulsory attention to detail gave a new dignity to the trivialities that the novelists had so far overlooked.
The very conception of these papers contained an accidental discovery of a possibility in fiction. The Tatler was not written by Steele, or Swift, or Addison, or indeed by any one of its contributors, but by a Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, an oldish gentleman, a bachelor, a lover of children and discreet good fellowship, of an austere but kindly life, possessed by a pleasant, old-gentlemanly desire to better the manners of the town. This is personal, yes, but ... and the but has the dignity of the sentence ... the personality is imaginary. It is a Character so far alive as to be able to conduct a magazine. It was a utilitarian conception. Steele was, or pretended to be, vastly annoyed when the authorship was found out and his own jolly person discovered under the sober clothes of Mr. Bickerstaff. 'The work,' he says, 'has indeed for some time been disagreeable to me, and the purpose of it wholly lost by my being so long understood as its author.... The general purpose of the whole has been to recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue as the chief ornaments of life; but I considered that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and that only, chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess, my life is at best but pardonable. And, with no greater character than this, a man would make but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit, that would have lost both its beauty and efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.' It is as if we were to hear Defoe apologising for dressing up as Robinson Crusoe, assuring us that his book is but an allegory, and telling us with due solemnity that he has lived with his wife these many years, and hardly above once set foot on shipboard, and then only between London Bridge and Greenwich. Steele was quite unaware that The Tatler was an embryo novel. And yet, what is it, but an imaginary character, sometimes meeting other imaginary characters, and experiencing subjects instead of undergoing adventures?
Mr. Bickerstaff was in himself a contribution to character-study in fiction; the daily talks that were put into his mouth by Steele and his friends, supplied others no less valuable. The Character, the neat driven team of short sentences, became in his hands something like a story. It became an anecdote with no other point than to bring alive the person described. And the portraits became less general. Types turned into individuals. Ned Softly, for example, is not called 'a very Poet,' and hit off with, 'He will ever into Company with a Copy of Verses in his Pocket; and these will be read to all that suffer him. Every Opinion he taketh for Praise, and Ridicule in his Ears soundeth like Flattery.' He is given the name by which he is known in private life. We see him walk into the room, hear his preliminaries, watch his battery unmasked as he opens his pocket, listen to his verses, hear them again, line by ridiculous line, observe him batten on the opinions he extracts, and see him hide his darlings at the approach of sterner-featured critics. The Character is become a little scene. The moth has no pin through his middle, but flaps his way where we may see him best. Here is the very art that Fanny Burney, that charming show-woman, was to use for the exhibition of Madame Duval; here the alchemy that was to turn puppets into people. It is the same that gave Pygmalion his mistress. The essayists owed much to their own hearts, or to the heart they set in 'our' Mr. Bickerstaff, for if you love a man as well as you laugh at him, it is great odds that he will come alive.
Steele probably got a few letters from unknown correspondents, dull and stupid as such things are. Perhaps in laughingly parodying them at the coffee-house tables he caught the idea of inventing better ones for Mr. Bickerstaff's assistance. Perhaps, when hard pressed for time, thrown to the last minute for his work by some merry expedition with the Kit Kats to talk and drink wine under the mulberry-tree on Hampstead Heath, he found he could get quicker into a subject through the letter of a servant girl than through Mr. Bickerstaff's first-personal lucubrations. However that may be, much of the best reading in both Tatler and Spectator is held in the letters supposed to be written to the man who was supposed to write the whole. These letters are not mere statements of fact, to serve instead of Latin quotations as texts for essays. They are imitations, 'liker than life itself,' of the letters of reality. Each one of them is written by some individual person whose impress on its writing is so clear that the letter makes a portrait of himself. Even the cock in Clare Market has a personality quite his own when he sends Mr. Bickerstaff a petition. And as for the Quaker; remember how he would have been described in the old manner, and read this:—
'To the man called the Spectator
'Friend,—Forasmuch as at the Birth of thy Labour, thou didst promise upon thy Word, that letting alone the Vanities that do abound, thou wouldest only endeavour to strengthen the crooked Morals of this our Babylon, I gave Credit to thy fair Speeches, and admitted one of thy Papers every Day, save Sunday, into my House; for the Edification of my Daughter Tabitha, and to the End that Susanna, the Wife of my Bosom, might profit thereby. But alas! my Friend, I find that thou art a Liar, and that the Truth is not in thee; else why didst thou in a Paper which thou didst lately put forth, make Mention of those vain Coverings for the Heads of our Females, which thou lovest to liken unto Tulips, and which are lately sprung up among us? Nay, why didst thou make Mention of them in such a Seeming, as if thou didst approve the Invention, insomuch that my Daughter Tabitha beginneth to wax wanton, and to lust after these foolish Vanities? Surely thou dost see with the Eyes of the Flesh. Verily, therefore, unless thou dost speedily amend and leave off following thine own Imagination, I will leave off thee.—Thy Friend as hereafter thou dost demean Thyself,
'Hezekiah Broadbrim.'
Could anything of the kind be better? It needed only a series of such letters, consistent to a few characters, and dealing with a succession of events, to produce a 'Humphry Clinker.' The letters of Matthew Bramble and his sister, and Lyddy, 'who had a languishing eye and read romances,' are built no more cunningly than this of Hezekiah.
If I were asked which was the first English novel of character-study, as I am asking myself now, I should reply, as I reply now, those essays in the Spectator that are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley. Set that little series of pictures in a book by themselves, as has been done with appropriate and delightful illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson, and in reading them you will find it hard to remember that you are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely kind of narrative. The knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch him at the assizes, leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good weather his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble; we watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that is a testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture. If only his love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not begun and ended in a chapter, Sir Roger de Coverley would be a novel indeed. As it is, in that delicate picture of a country gentleman and country life—for Sir Roger does not stand against a black curtain for his portraiture, but before his tenants and his friends—we have the promise of The Vicar of Wakefield and of Cranford, and of all that chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is almost peculiar to our literature.
Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the ponderous Doctor could step lightly at times, and never so lightly as when he obeyed the instinct that turns discussion into fiction and essays into sketches. He too can write his letters, and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger, the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a story in itself. And as for Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a paragraph before it breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes merrily along the bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi Altangi, that serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident, turn continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist.
The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the periodical essayists into avowed story-telling. Miss Burney left them nothing to do but to write sketches for chapters that might have appeared in her books. The essayists who came later could only make beautiful examples of a form that was already a little old-fashioned, though, following other suggestions, they experimented in a new direction and found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's pair of early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was known to Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern story-telling. He does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's secrets, but in telling us of her attitude towards the game of whist he shows us how she looked upon the game of life. We would know her if we met her, even if she were not seated at the card-table, the candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth, and in the faces of her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour of the game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives us characters too—that noble one of his father!—and his account of Jack Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down to see the fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative. But the gift of the later essayists to story-telling was the new art of reverie, and of the description of an event so soaked in the describer's personality as to be at once an essay and a story. |The art of reverie.| Few forms are richer in opportunity either for essayist or story-teller, than that which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,' and in which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show us the calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask at last whether death or life were the more terrible, the more to be feared. It is sufficient to mention the names of Walter Pater and Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show that some of the finest work of modern times has been done in this kind of story-telling, and is being so done to-day. And this art, this most delicate art of suggested narrative, is it not also—to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to the tragic old knight's definition—is it not also 'a picture in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'?
The hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers and the English novelists was not a period of great story-telling like the fifty that were to follow it, or the first half of the nineteenth century. It is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a complete change of audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a light-hearted and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new one. The change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular before and after.
Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling of the first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of The Anatomy of Melancholy. He is referring to spoken tales, but his description applies quite as well to tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in the most solitarie times busie our minds with, are cards, tables and dice ... merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, theeves, cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material of Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's Faërie Queene, of the early rogue books, and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by Greene and Lodge and Pettie.
By 1640 things had already changed a little. James Mabbe, the quaint flavour of whose Tudor style, endearing as the moss on an old house, reminds us that he published his translation of six of the Exemplary Novels before Cervantes had been dead for a quarter of a century, felt that he had to apologise for them to the more sober spirit of the time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,' he writes, 'both in Church and Common-weale, will sometimes leave off their more serious discourses, and entertain themselves with matters of harmelesse Merriment and Disports. Such are these stories I present unto your view. I will not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading them, but I promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so often varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in the end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the mid-seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible that the simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss by these people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a Cromwell and a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a Pilgrim's Progress. Only, in contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident appeal to a Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents, and happy conclusions—a delight only different from that of the Elizabethans in its anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it had enjoyed them.
Before the Pilgrim's Progress was written there had come to be two parties in the audience: one with an epicurean delight in loose living, and one whose care was for a stern decency that postponed all flamboyance to a future life. The men of the first party flung their roses the more joyously for their antagonism to the sober black of the others, and were all the merrier for the thought that most of the community held them damned, although, when Bunyan wrote, theirs was the outward victory. Consciences were violently stirred, and so were either hardened absolutely, or else unmistakably alive. If you were good you were very very good, and if you were bad you were horrid, like the little girl in the rhyme. There had been revolutions and counter-revolutions; and likes and dislikes were pretty strongly marked, because men had had to fight for them.
Bunyan's business was the description of a pilgrim's progress through a world thus vividly good and bad. His choice of allegory as a method allowed him to illustrate at the same time the earnestness of his times and their extraordinary clarity of sensation. It was a form ready to his hand. The authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its English retaining the savour of a style then out of date, formed at once his writing and his method, as it constituted his education. 'My Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings.' And, himself a minor prophet, he could quote from Hosea: 'I have used similitudes.'
Bunyan's use of them was very different from Spenser's. Hazlitt said of The Faërie Queene that, if you left the allegory alone, it would leave you; and his advice may be safely followed. It is not so with Bunyan, and his allegory must be defended in another manner. It needs defence, for although it is one of the oldest and pleasantest ways of producing wisdom-laden stories, it is so easy to use badly that people have become a little out of patience with it. We remember the far-fetched explanations tagged on to the Gesta Romanorum, and refuse any longer to be fobbed off with puzzles that are easy to make and hard to solve. We demand that a book shall have cost its author at least as much as it costs us. Allegory is like fantasy, either worthless, or not to be bought with rubies and precious stones; with anything, in fact, but blood. When Bunyan writes:
he sets up the one plea that is an absolute justification of his method; that it is 'dribbled daintily,' and came from the depths of him. The old monks wrote their stories, and searched their heads for a meaning. But Bunyan thought for himself, and could not think without seeing. His heart's talk was in passionate imagery.
He was the son of a tinker, and a tinker himself, and saw his visions as clearly as he saw his tin pans. His book is never opalescent with the shifting colours of a vague mysticism. It is painted in tints as sharp and bright and simple as Anglo-Saxon words. Bunyan had to throw himself into no trance in order to watch the pilgrim's arrival at the New Jerusalem. The Celestial City was as real to him as London, and there seemed to him no need to describe it in a whisper. His eyes were as childlike as those of the early painters, who clothed the builders of the Tower of Babel in fifteenth-century Italian costume, put a little bonnet on the head and a flying cloak about the shoulders of Tobias, and set soft leather boots on the feet of the angel. The whole of the Pilgrim's Progress is contemporary with Mr. Pepys. 'Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, named Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but, I promise you, he footed it well. Also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely.' It might be Mr. Pepys himself describing the frolic of some friends. And yet it was the most natural, righteous thing in the world, since Great Heart had killed Giant Despair, and Despondency and Much-afraid had just been freed from the dungeons of Doubting Castle.
It is characteristic of the English spirit that the greatest national classic of piety should be written by a man whose relish for life was in no way blunted by his thoughts of immortality. Bunyan had a fear of life no less real than his fear of God, and loved both God and life the better for fearing them. Men set capital letters to the Fear of God, and there is a Fear of Life no less different from cowardice. Bunyan, a brave man, imprisoned again and again for his beliefs, and more than once in imminent danger of hanging, shows in a passage of his Grace Abounding this Fear of Life in a very glare of light. Bunyan had loved bell-ringing, and, after he had come to consider it not the occupation of a man whose profession was so perilous and serious as a Christian's, he could not help going to the belfry to watch those whose scruples still allowed them his favourite pastime.
'But quickly after, I began to think, "How if one of the bells should fall?" Then I chose to stand under a main beam, that lay athwart the steeple from side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I thought again, should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam. This made me stand in the steeple door; and now thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding. So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go any further than the steeple door; but then it came into my head, 'How if the steeple itself should fall?' And the thought (it may, for aught I know, when I stood and looked on) did continually so shake my mind, that I durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple should fall upon my head.'
A man who felt as vividly as that, and was as stout as Bunyan, taking existence as he would take a nettle, took it with a grip as firm as that of love, and loved and feared his life as he loved and feared his God. He knew that brightness and clarity of sensation desired by Stendhal when he wrote, 'The perfection of civilisation would be to combine all the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with the more frequent presence of danger.' Life was very actual to him, and so, in this account of a pious dream, we find the clearest prophecy of that sense for reality that distinguishes the novels of the eighteenth century. The Pilgrim's Progress was the first great story of that series of books that was to paint the English character in the eyes of the world.
A fact is something very like an Englishman. It is a thing complete in itself, and satisfactory on that account. There is no vanity about a fact, and, as a people, we hate showing off. I can think of no other nation as hungry for fact as ours, none with a book that corresponds to the Newgate Calendar and has been so popular, none with a book of spiritual adventure so actual as the Pilgrims Progress, none with a book of bodily adventure comparable with Robinson Crusoe. Defoe and Bunyan stand for the plain facts of religion and existence, in both of which they found so English a delight.
Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank fairy tale demanding a certain licence of nature to make possible its supernatural events. Like the Romance of the Rose, unlike the Faërie Queene, it takes its licence in its first sentence—'As I slept, I dreamed'—and is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases without much loss of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and continuity, is of the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality that made Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no longer be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And Defoe, writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality very much more conscientiously developed.
With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe, if he had described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it as short-winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with verisimilitude, and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read Defoe,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of Justice.' No compliment could have pleased him better.