To his contemporaries Bunyan was known
as the Nonconformist Martyr, and the greatest living
Protestant preacher. To us he is mainly interesting
through his writings, and especially through the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress.’ Although he possessed, in a remarkable
degree, the gift of expressing himself in written
words, he had himself no value for literature.
He cared simply for spiritual truth, and literature
in his eyes was only useful as a means of teaching
it. Every thing with which a reasonable man could
concern himself was confined within the limits of
Christian faith and practice. Ambition was folly.
Amusement was idle trifling in a life so short as man’s,
and with issues so far-reaching depending upon it.
To understand, and to make others understand, what
Christ had done, and what Christ required men to do,
was the occupation of his whole mind, and no object
ever held his attention except in connection with it.
With a purpose so strict, and a theory of religion
so precise, there is usually little play for imagination
or feeling. Though we read Protestant theology
as a duty, we find it as dry in the mouth as sawdust.
The literature which would please must represent nature,
and nature refuses to be bound into our dogmatic systems.
No object can be pictured truly, except by a mind
which has sympathy with it. Shakespeare no more
hates Iago than Iago hates himself. He allows
Iago to exhibit himself in his own way, as nature
does. Every character, if justice is to be done
to it, must be painted at its best, as it appears
to itself; and a man impressed deeply with religious
convictions is generally incapable of the sympathy
which would give him an insight into what he disapproves
and dislikes. And yet Bunyan, intensely religious
as he was, and narrow as his theology was, is always
human. His genius remains fresh and vigorous under
the least promising conditions. All mankind being
under sin together, he has no favourites to flatter,
no opponents to misrepresent. There is a kindliness
in his descriptions, even of the Evil One’s attacks
upon himself.
The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’
though professedly an allegoric story of the Protestant
plan of salvation, is conceived in the large, wide
spirit of humanity itself. Anglo-Catholic and
Lutheran, Calvinist and Deist can alike read it with
delight, and find their own theories in it. Even
the Romanist has only to blot out a few paragraphs,
and can discover no purer model of a Christian life
to place in the hands of his children. The religion
of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ is the
religion which must be always and everywhere, as long
as man believes that he has a soul and is responsible
for his actions; and thus it is that, while theological
folios once devoured as manna from Heaven now lie on
the bookshelves dead as Egyptian mummies, this book
is wrought into the mind and memory of every well-conditioned
English or American child; while the matured man,
furnished with all the knowledge which literature
can teach him, still finds the adventures of Christian
as charming as the adventures of Ulysses or Aeneas.
He sees there the reflexion of himself, the familiar
features of his own nature, which remain the same
from era to era. Time cannot impair its interest,
or intellectual progress make it cease to be true
to experience.
But the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’
though the best known, is not the only work of imagination
which Bunyan produced; he wrote another religious
allegory, which Lord Macaulay thought would have been
the best of its kind in the world if the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’ had not existed. The ‘Life
of Mr. Badman,’ though now scarcely read at all,
contains a vivid picture of rough English life in
the days of Charles II. Bunyan was a poet, too,
in the technical sense of the word, and though he
disclaimed the name, and though rhyme and metre were
to him as Saul’s armour to David, the fine quality
of his mind still shows itself in the uncongenial
accoutrements.
It has been the fashion to call Bunyan’s
verse doggerel; but no verse is doggerel which has
a sincere and rational meaning in it. Goethe,
who understood his own trade, says that the test of
poetry is the substance which remains when the poetry
is reduced to prose. Bunyan had infinite invention.
His mind was full of objects which he had gathered
at first hand, from observation and reflection.
He had excellent command of the English language,
and could express what he wished with sharp, defined
outlines, and without the waste of a word. The
rhythmical structure of his prose is carefully correct.
Scarcely a syllable is ever out of place. His
ear for verse, though less true, is seldom wholly
at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the
superlative merit that he could never write nonsense.
If one of the motives of poetical form be to clothe
thought and feeling in the dress in which it can lie
most easily remembered, Bunyan’s lines are often
as successful as the best lines of Quarles or George
Herbert. Who, for instance, could forget these?
Sin is the worm of hell, the
lasting fire:
Hell would soon lose its heat
should sin expire;
Better sinless in hell than
to be where
Heaven is, and to be found
a sinner there.
Or these, on persons whom the world
calls men of spirit:
Though you dare crack a coward’s
crown,
Or quarrel for
a pin,
You dare not on the wicked
frown,
Or speak against
their sin.
The ‘Book of Ruth’ and
the ‘History of Joseph’ done into blank
verse are really beautiful idylls. The substance
with which he worked, indeed, is so good that there
would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but
the prose of the translation in the English Bible,
faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan’s
hands, and if we found these poems in the collected
works of a poet laureate, we should consider that
a difficult task had been accomplished successfully.
Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding
century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was
to give the exact meaning of it, without epithets
or ornaments, and thus the original grace is completely
preserved.
Of a wholly different kind, and more
after Quarles’s manner, is a collection of thoughts
in verse, which he calls a book for boys and girls.
All his observations ran naturally in one direction;
to minds possessed and governed by religion, nature,
be their creed what it may, is always a parable reflecting
back their own views.
But how neatly expressed are these
’Meditations upon an Egg’:
The egg’s no chick by
falling from a hen,
Nor man’s a Christian
till he’s born again;
The egg’s at first contained
in the shell,
Men afore grace in sin and
darkness dwell;
The egg, when laid, by warmth
is made a chicken,
And Christ by grace the dead
in sin doth quicken;
The egg when first a chick
the shell’s its prison,
So flesh to soul who yet with
Christ is risen.
Or this, ’On a Swallow’:
This pretty bird! Oh,
how she flies and sings;
But could she do so if she
had not wings?
Her wings bespeak my faith,
her songs my peace;
When I believe and sing, my
doubtings cease.
Though the Globe Theatre was, in the
opinion of Nonconformists, ’the heart of Satan’s
empire,’ Bunyan must yet have known something
of Shakespeare. In the second part of the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’ we find:
Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come
weather.
The resemblance to the song in ‘As
You Like It’ is too near to be accidental:
Who doth ambition shun,
And loves to be in the sun;
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither,
come hither.
Here shall be no enemy,
Save winter and rough weather.
Bunyan may, perhaps, have heard the
lines, and the rhymes may have clung to him without
his knowing whence they came. But he would never
have been heard of outside his own communion, if his
imagination had found no better form of expression
for itself than verse. His especial gift was
for allegory, the single form of imaginative fiction
which he would not have considered trivial, and his
especial instrument was plain, unaffected Saxon prose.
‘The Holy War’ is a people’s Paradise
Lost and Paradise Regained in one. The ‘Life
of Mr. Badman’ is a didactic tale, describing
the career of a vulgar, middle-class, unprincipled
scoundrel.
These are properly Bunyan’s
‘works,’ the results of his life so far
as it affects the present generation of Englishmen;
and as they are little known, I shall give an account
of each of them.
The ‘Life of Badman’ is
presented as a dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr.
Attentive. Mr. Wiseman tells the story, Mr. Attentive
comments upon it. The names recall Bunyan’s
well-known manner. The figures stand for typical
characters; but as the dramatis personae of
many writers of fiction, while professing to be beings
of flesh and blood are no more than shadows, so Bunyan’s
shadows are solid men whom we can feel and handle.
Mr. Badman is, of course, one of the
‘reprobate.’ Bunyan considered theoretically
that a reprobate may to outward appearance have the
graces of a saint, and that there may be little in
his conduct to mark his true character. A reprobate
may be sorry for his sins, he may repent and lead
a good life. He may reverence good men and may
try to resemble them; he may pray, and his prayers
may be answered; he may have the spirit of God, and
may receive another heart, and yet he may be under
the covenant of works, and may be eternally lost.
This Bunyan could say while he was writing theology;
but art has its rules as well as its more serious
sister, and when he had to draw a living specimen,
he drew him as he had seen him in his own Bedford
neighbourhood.
Badman showed from childhood a propensity
for evil. He was so ’addicted to lying
that his parents could not distinguish when he was
speaking the truth. He would invent, tell, and
stand to the lies which he invented, with such an
audacious face, that one might read in his very countenance
the symptoms of a hard and desperate heart. It
was not the fault of his parents; they were much dejected
at the beginnings of their son, nor did he want counsel
and correction, if that would have made him better:
but all availed nothing.’
Lying was not Badman’s only
fault. He took to pilfering and stealing.
He robbed his neighbours’ orchards. He picked
up money if he found it lying about. Especially,
Mr. Wiseman notes that he hated Sundays. ’Reading
Scriptures, godly conferences, repeating of sermons
and prayers, were things that he could not away with.’
’He was an enemy to that day, because more restraint
was laid upon him from his own ways than was possible
on any other.’ Mr. Wiseman never doubts
that the Puritan Sunday ought to have been appreciated
by little boys. If a child disliked it, the cause
could only be his own wickedness. Young Badman
‘was greatly given also to swearing and cursing.’
’He made no more of it’ than Mr. Wiseman
made ‘of telling his fingers.’ ’He
counted it a glory to swear and curse, and it was as
natural to him as to eat, drink, or sleep.’
Bunyan, in this description, is supposed to have taken
the picture from himself. But too much may be
made of this. He was thinking, perhaps, of what
he might have been if God’s grace had not preserved
him. He himself was saved. Badman is represented
as given over from the first. Anecdotes, however,
are told of contemporary providential judgments upon
swearers, which had much impressed Bunyan. One
was of a certain Dorothy Mately, a woman whose business
was to wash rubbish at the Derby lead mines. Dorothy
(it was in the year when Bunyan was first imprisoned),
had stolen twopence from the coat of a boy who was
working near her. When the boy taxed her with
having robbed him, she wished the ground might swallow
her up if she had ever touched his money. Presently
after, some children who were watching her, saw a
movement in the bank on which she was standing.
They called to her to take care, but it was too late.
The bank fell in, and she was carried down along with
it. A man ran to help her, but the sides of the
pit were crumbling round her: a large stone fell
on her head; the rubbish followed, and she was overwhelmed.
When she was dug out afterwards, the pence were found
in her pocket. Bunyan was perfectly satisfied
that her death was supernatural. To discover
miracles is not peculiar to Catholics. They will
be found wherever there is an active belief in immediate
providential government.
Those more cautious in forming their
conclusions will think, perhaps, that the woman was
working above some shaft in the mine, that the crust
had suddenly broken, and that it would equally have
fallen in when gravitation required it to fall, if
Dorothy Mately had been a saint. They will remember
the words about the Tower of Siloam. But to return
to Badman.
His father, being unable to manage
so unpromising a child, bound him out as an apprentice.
The master to whom he was assigned was as good a man
as the father could find: uptight, Godfearing,
and especially considerate of his servants. He
never worked them too hard. He left them time
to read and pray. He admitted no light or mischievous
books within his doors. He was not one of those
whose religion ’hung as a cloke in his house,
and was never seen on him when he went abroad.’
His household was as well fed and cared for as himself,
and he required nothing of others of which he did
not set them an example in his own person.
This man did his best to reclaim young
Badman, and was particularly kind to him. But
his exertions were thrown away. The good-for-nothing
youth read filthy romances on the sly. He fell
asleep in church, or made eyes at the pretty girls.
He made acquaintance with low companions. He
became profligate, got drunk at alehouses, sold his
master’s property to get money, or stole it out
of the cashbox. Thrice he ran away and was taken
back again. The third time he was allowed to
go. ’The House of Correction would have
been the most fit for him, but thither his master
was loath to send him, for the love he bore his father.’
He was again apprenticed; this time
to a master like himself. Being wicked he was
given over to wickedness. The ways of it were
not altogether pleasant. He was fed worse and
he was worked harder than he had been before; when
he stole, or neglected his business, he was beaten.
He liked his new place, however, better than the old.
’At least, there was no godliness in the house,
which he hated worst of all.’
So far, Bunyan’s hero was travelling
the usual road of the Idle Apprentice, and the gallows
would have been the commonplace ending of it.
But this would not have answered Bunyan’s purpose.
He wished to represent the good-for-nothing character,
under the more instructive aspect of worldly success,
which bad men may arrive at as well as good, if they
are prudent and cunning. Bunyan gives his hero
every chance. He submits him from the first to
the best influences; he creates opportunities for
repentance at every stage of a long career opportunities
which the reprobate nature cannot profit by, yet increases
its guilt by neglecting.
Badman’s term being out, his
father gives him money and sets him up as a tradesman
on his own account. Mr. Attentive considers this
to have been a mistake. Mr. Wiseman answers that
even in the most desperate cases, kindness in parents
is more likely to succeed than severity, and if it
fails they will have the less to reproach themselves
with. The kindness is, of course, thrown away.
Badman continues a loose blackguard, extravagant,
idle and dissolute. He comes to the edge of ruin.
His situation obliges him to think; and now the interest
of the story begins. He must repair his fortune
by some means or other. The easiest way is by
marriage. There was a young orphan lady in the
neighbourhood, who was well off and her own mistress.
She was a ‘professor’ eagerly given to
religion, and not so wise as she ought to have been.
Badman pretends to be converted. He reforms, or
seems to reform. He goes to meeting, sings hymns,
adopts the most correct form of doctrine, tells the
lady that he does not want her money, but that he
wants a companion who will go with him along the road
to Heaven. He was plausible, good-looking, and,
to all appearance, as absorbed as herself in the one
thing needful. The congregation warn her, but
to no purpose. She marries him, and finds what
she has done too late. In her fortune he has
all that he wanted. He swears at her, treats her
brutally, brings prostitutes into his house, laughs
at her religion, and at length orders her to give
it up. When she refuses, Bunyan introduces a
special feature of the times, and makes Badman threaten
to turn informer, and bring her favourite minister
to gaol. The informers were the natural but most
accursed products of the Conventicle Acts. Popular
abhorrence relieved itself by legends of the dreadful
judgments which had overtaken these wretches.
In St. Neots an informer was bitten
by a dog. The wound gangrened and the flesh rotted
off his bones. In Bedford ‘there was one
W. S.’ (Bunyan probably knew him too well),
’a man of very wicked life, and he, when there
seemed to be countenance given to it, would needs turn
informer. Well, so he did, and was as diligent
in his business as most of them could be. He
would watch at nights, climb trees and range the woods
of days, if possible to find out the meeters, for then
they were forced to meet in the fields. Yea,
he would curse them bitterly, and swore most fearfully
what he would do to them when he found them.
Well, after he had gone on like a Bedlam in his course
awhile, and had done some mischief to the people,
he was stricken by the hand of God. He was taken
with a faltering in his speech, a weakness in the back
sinews of his neck, that ofttimes he held up his head
by strength of hand. After this his speech went
quite away, and he could speak no more than a swine
or a bear. Like one of them he would gruntle and
make an ugly noise, according as he was offended or
pleased, or would have anything done. He walked
about till God had made a sufficient spectacle of
his judgments for his sin, and then, on a sudden, he
was stricken, and died miserably.’
Badman, says Mr. Wiseman, ‘had
malice enough in his heart’ to turn informer,
but he was growing prudent and had an eye to the future.
As a tradesman he had to live by his neighbours.
He knew that they would not forgive him, so ‘he
had that wit in his anger that he did it not.’
Nothing else was neglected to make the unfortunate
wife miserable. She bore him seven children,
also typical figures. ’One was a very gracious
child, that loved its mother dearly. This child
Mr. Badman could not abide, and it oftenest felt the
weight of its father’s fingers. Three were
as bad as himself. The others that remained became
a kind of mongrel professors, not so bad as their father
nor so good as their mother, but betwixt them both.
They had their mother’s notions and their father’s
actions. Their father did not like them because
they had their mother’s tongue. Their mother
did not like them because they had their father’s
heart and life, nor were they fit company for good
or bad. They were forced with Esau to join in
affinity with Ishmael, to wit, to look out for a people
that were hypocrites like themselves, and with them
they matched and lived and died.’
Badman meanwhile, with the help of
his wife’s fortune, grew into an important person,
and his character becomes a curious study. ’He
went,’ we are told, ’to school with the
Devil, from his childhood to the end of his life.’
He was shrewd in matters of business, began to extend
his operations, and ‘drove a great trade.’
He carried a double face. He was evil with the
evil. He pretended to be good with the good.
In religion he affected to be a freethinker, careless
of death and judgment, and ridiculing those who feared
them ’as frighted with unseen bugbears.’
But he wore a mask when it suited him, and admired
himself for the ease with which he could assume whatever
aspect was convenient. ‘I can be religious
and irreligious,’ he said; ’I can be anything
or nothing. I can swear and speak against swearing.
I can lie and speak against lying. I can drink,
wench, be unclean, and defraud, and not be troubled
for it. I can enjoy myself and am master of my
own ways, not they of me. This I have attained
with much study, care, and pains.’ ’An
Atheist Badman was, if such a thing as an Atheist could
be. He was not alone in that mystery. There
was abundance of men of the same mind and the same
principle. He was only an arch or chief one among
them.’
Mr. Badman now took to speculation,
which Bunyan’s knowledge of business enabled
him to describe with instructive minuteness. His
adventures were on a large scale, and by some mistakes
and by personal extravagance he had nearly ruined
himself a second time. In this condition he discovered
a means, generally supposed to be a more modern invention,
of ‘getting money by hatfuls.’
’He gave a sudden and great
rush into several men’s debts to the value of
four or five thousand pounds, driving at the same time
a very great trade by selling many things for less
than they cost him, to get him custom and blind his
creditors’ eyes. When he had well feathered
his nest with other men’s goods and money, after
a little while he breaks; while he had by craft and
knavery made so sure of what he had, that his creditors
could not touch a penny. He sends mournful sugared
letters to them, desiring them not to be severe with
him, for he bore towards all men an honest mind, and
would pay them as far as he was able. He talked
of the greatness of the taxes, the badness of the
times, his losses by bad debts, and he brought them
to a composition to take five shillings in the pound.
His release was signed and sealed, and Mr. Badman
could now put his head out of doors again, and be
a better man than when he shut up shop by several thousands
of pounds.’
Twice or three times he repeated the
same trick with equal success. It is likely enough
that Bunyan was drawing from life and perhaps from
a member of his own congregation; for he says that
’he had known a professor do it.’
He detested nothing so much as sham religion which
was put on as a pretence. ‘A professor,’
he exclaims, ’and practise such villanies as
these! Such an one is not worthy the name.
Go professors, go leave off profession
unless you will lead your lives according to your
profession. Better never profess than make profession
a stalking horse to sin, deceit, the devil, and hell.’
Bankruptcy was not the only art by
which Badman piled up his fortune. The seventeenth
century was not so far behind us as we sometimes persuade
ourselves. ’He dealt by deceitful weights
and measures. He kept weights to buy by and weights
to sell by, measures to buy by and measures to sell
by. Those he bought by were too big, and those
he sold by were too little. If he had to do with
other men’s weights and measures, he could use
a thing called sleight of hand. He had the art
besides to misreckon men in their accounts, whether
by weight or measure or money; and if a question was
made of his faithful dealing, he had his servants
ready that would vouch and swear to his look or word.
He would sell goods that cost him not the best price
by far, for as much as he sold his best of all for.
He had also a trick to mingle his commodity, that
that which was bad might go off with the least mistrust.
If any of his customers paid him money, he would call
for payment a second time, and if they could not produce
good and sufficient ground of the payment, a hundred
to one but they paid it again.’
‘To buy in the cheapest market
and sell in the dearest’ was Mr. Badman’s
common rule in business. According to modern political
economy, it is the cardinal principle of wholesome
trade. In Bunyan’s opinion it was knavery
in disguise, and certain to degrade and demoralise
everyone who acted upon it. Bunyan had evidently
thought on the subject. Mr. Attentive is made
to object:
’But you know that there is
no settled price set by God upon any commodity that
is bought or sold under the sun; but all things that
we buy and sell do ebb and flow as to price like the
tide. How then shall a man of tender conscience
do, neither to wrong the seller, buyer, nor himself
in the buying and selling of commodities?’
Mr. Wiseman answers in the spirit
of our old Acts of Parliament, before political economy
was invented:
’Let a man have conscience towards
God, charity to his neighbours, and moderation in
dealing. Let the tradesman consider that there
is not that in great gettings and in abundance which
the most of men do suppose; for all that a man has
over and above what serves for his present necessity
and supply, serves only to feed the lusts of the eye.
Be thou confident that God’s eyes are upon thy
ways; that He marks them, writes them down, and seals
them up in a bag against the time to come. Be
sure that thou rememberest that thou knowest not the
day of thy death. Thou shalt have nothing that
thou mayest so much as carry away in thy hand.
Guilt shall go with thee if thou hast gotten thy substance
dishonestly, and they to whom thou shalt leave it shall
receive it to their hurt. These things duly considered,
I will shew thee how thou should’st live in
the practical part of this art. Art thou to buy
or sell? If thou sellest do not commend.
If thou buyest do not dispraise, any otherwise but
to give the thing that thou hast to do with its just
value and worth. Art thou a seller and do things
grow cheap? set not thy hand to help or hold them
up higher. Art thou a buyer and do things grow
dear? use no cunning or deceitful language to pull
them down. Leave things to the Providence of God,
and do thou with moderation submit to his hand.
Hurt not thy neighbour by crying out Scarcity, scarcity!
beyond the truth of things. Especially take heed
of doing this by way of a prognostic for time to come.
This wicked thing may be done by hoarding up (food)
when the hunger and necessity of the poor calls for
it. If things rise do thou be grieved. Be
also moderate in all thy sellings, and be sure let
the poor have a pennyworth, and sell thy corn to those
who are in necessity; which thou wilt do when thou
showest mercy to the poor in thy selling to him, and
when thou undersellest the market for his sake because
he is poor. This is to buy and sell with a good
conscience. The buyer thou wrongest not, thy
conscience thou wrongest not, thyself thou wrongest
not, for God will surely recompense with thee.’
These views of Bunyan’s are
at issue with modern science, but his principles and
ours are each adjusted to the objects of desire which
good men in those days and good men in ours have respectively
set before themselves. If wealth means money,
as it is now assumed to do, Bunyan is wrong and modern
science right. If wealth means moral welfare,
then those who aim at it will do well to follow Bunyan’s
advice. It is to be feared that this part of his
doctrine is less frequently dwelt upon by those who
profess to admire and follow him, than the theory
of imputed righteousness or justification by faith.
Mr. Badman by his various ingenuities
became a wealthy man. His character as a tradesman
could not have been a secret from his neighbours,
but money and success coloured it over. The world
spoke well of him. He became ‘proud and
haughty,’ took part in public affairs, ’counted
himself as wise as the wisest in the country, as good
as the best, and as beautiful as he that had the most
of it.’ ’He took great delight in
praising himself, and as much in the praises that
others gave him.’ ’He could not abide
that any should think themselves above him, or that
their wit and personage should be by others set before
his.’ He had an objection, nevertheless,
to being called proud, and when Mr. Attentive asked
why, his companion answered with a touch which reminds
us of De Foe, that ’Badman did not tell him
the reason. He supposed it to be that which
was common to all vile persons. They loved their
vice, but cared not to bear its name.’
Badman said he was unwilling to seem singular and fantastical,
and in this way he justified his expensive and luxurious
way of living. Singularity of all kinds he affected
to dislike, and for that reason his special pleasure
was to note the faults of professors. ’If
he could get anything by the end that had scandal
in it, if it did but touch professors, however falsely
reported, oh, then he would glory, laugh and be glad,
and lay it upon the whole party. Hang these rogues,
he would say, there is not a barrel better herring
in all the holy brotherhood of them. Like to
like, quoth the Devil to the collier. This is
your precise crew, and then he would send them all
home with a curse.’
Thus Bunyan developed his specimen
scoundrel, till he brought him to the high altitudes
of worldly prosperity; skilful in every villanous
art, skilful equally in keeping out of the law’s
hands, and feared, admired and respected by all his
neighbours. The reader who desires to see Providence
vindicated would now expect to find him detected in
some crimes by which justice could lay hold, and poetical
retribution fall upon him in the midst of his triumph.
An inferior artist would certainly have allowed his
story to end in this way. But Bunyan, satisfied
though he was that dramatic judgments did overtake
offenders in this world with direct and startling
appropriateness, was yet aware that it was often otherwise,
and that the worst fate which could be inflicted on
a completely worthless person was to allow him to work
out his career unvisited by any penalties which might
have disturbed his conscience and occasioned his amendment.
He chose to make his story natural, and to confine
himself to natural machinery. The judgment to
come Mr. Badman laughed at ‘as old woman’s
fable,’ but his courage lasted only as long
as he was well and strong. One night as he was
riding home drunk, his horse fell and he broke his
leg. ’You would not think,’ says
Mr. Wiseman, ’how he swore at first. Then
coming to himself, and finding he was badly hurt,
he cried out, after the manner of such, Lord help
me; Lord have mercy on me; good God deliver me, and
the like. He was picked up and taken home, where
he lay some time. In his pain he called on God,
but whether it was that his sin might be pardoned
and his soul saved, or whether to be rid of his pain,’
Mr. Wiseman ‘could not determine.’
This leads to several stories of drunkards which Bunyan
clearly believed to be literally true. Such facts
or legends were the food on which his mind had been
nourished. They were in the air which contemporary
England breathed.
‘I have read in Mr. Clarke’s
Looking-glass for Sinners,’ Mr. Wiseman said,
’that upon a time a certain drunken fellow boasted
in his cups that there was neither heaven nor hell.
Also he said he believed that man had no soul, and
that for his own part he would sell his soul to any
that would buy it. Then did one of his companions
buy it of him for a cup of wine, and presently the
devil, in man’s shape, bought it of that man
again at the same price; and so in the presence of
them all laid hold of the soul-seller, and carried
him away through the air so that he was no more heard
of.’
Again:
’There was one at Salisbury
drinking and carousing at a tavern, and he drank a
health to the devil, saying that if the devil would
not come and pledge him, he could not believe that
there was either God or devil. Whereupon his
companions, stricken with fear, hastened out of the
room, and presently after, hearing a hideous noise
and smelling a stinking savour, the vintner ran into
the chamber, and coming in he missed his guest, and
found the window broken, the iron bars in it bowed
and all bloody, but the man was never heard of afterwards.’
These visitations were answers to
a direct challenge of the evil spirit’s existence,
and were thus easy to be accounted for. But no
devil came for Mr. Badman. He clung to his unfortunate
neglected wife. ’She became his dear wife,
his godly wife, his honest wife, his duck, his dear
and all.’ He thought he was dying, and hell
and all its horrors rose up before him. ’Fear
was in his face, and in his tossings to and fro he
would often say I am undone, I am undone, my vile life
hath undone me.’ Atheism did not help him.
It never helped anyone in such extremities Mr. Wiseman
said; as he had known in another instance:
‘There was a man dwelt about
twelve miles off from us,’ he said, ’that
had so trained up himself in his Atheistical notions,
that at last he attempted to write a book against
Jesus Christ and the Divine authority of the Scriptures.
I think it was not printed. Well, after many
days God struck him with sickness whereof he died.
So being sick, and musing of his former doings, the
book that he had written tore his conscience as a
lion would tear a kid. Some of my friends went
to see him, and as they were in his chamber one day
he hastily called for pen and ink and paper, which,
when it was given to him, he took it and writ to this
purpose. “I such an one in such a town must
go to hell fire for writing a book against Jesus Christ.”
He would have leaped out of the window to have killed
himself, but was by them prevented of that, so he
died in his bed by such a death as it was.’
Badman seemed equally miserable.
But deathbed repentances, as Bunyan sensibly
said, were seldom of more value than ‘the howling
of a dog.’ The broken leg was set again.
The pain of body went, and with it the pain of mind.
He was assisted out of his uneasiness, says Bunyan,
with a characteristic hit at the scientific views
then coming into fashion, ‘by his doctor,’
who told him that his alarms had come ’from an
affection of the brain, caused by want of sleep;’
’they were nothing but vapours and the effects
of his distemper.’ He gathered his spirits
together, and became the old man once more. His
poor wife, who had believed him penitent, broke her
heart, and died of the disappointment. The husband
gave himself up to loose connections with abandoned
women, one of whom persuaded him one day, when he was
drunk, to make her a promise of marriage, and she
held him to his word. Then retribution came upon
him, with the coarse, commonplace, yet rigid justice
which fact really deals out. The second bad wife
avenged the wrongs of the first innocent wife.
He was mated with a companion ’who could fit
him with cursing and swearing, give him oath for oath,
and curse for curse. They would fight and fly
at each other like cat and dog.’ In this
condition for Bunyan, before sending his
hero to his account, gave him a protracted spell of
earthly discomforts they lived sixteen
years together. Fortune, who had so long favoured
his speculations, turned her back upon him. Between
them they ’sinned all his wealth away,’
and at last parted ‘as poor as howlets.’
Then came the end. Badman was
still in middle life, and had naturally a powerful
constitution; but his ‘cups and his queans’
had undermined his strength. Dropsy came, and
gout, with worse in his bowels, and ’on the
top of them all, as the captain of the men of death
that came to take him away,’ consumption.
Bunyan was a true artist, though he knew nothing of
the rules, and was not aware that he was an artist
at all. He was not to be tempted into spoiling
a natural story with the melodramatic horrors of a
sinner’s deathbed. He had let his victim
‘howl’ in the usual way, when he meant
him to recover. He had now simply to conduct
him to the gate of the place where he was to receive
the reward of his iniquities. It was enough to
bring him thither still impenitent, with the grave
solemnity with which a felon is taken to execution.
‘As his life was full of sin,’
says Mr. Wiseman, ’so his death was without
repentance. He had not, in all the time of his
sickness, a sight and a sense of his sins; but was
as much at quiet as if he had never sinned in his
life: he was as secure as if he had been sinless
as an angel. When he drew near his end, there
was no more alteration in him than what was made by
his disease upon his body. He was the selfsame
Mr. Badman still, not only in name, but in condition,
and that to the very day of his death and the moment
in which he died. There seemed not to be in it
to the standers by so much as a strong struggle
of nature. He died like a lamb, or, as men call
it, like a chrisom child, quietly and without fear.’
To which end of Mr. Badman Bunyan
attaches the following remarks: ’If a wicked
man, if a man who has lived all his days in notorious
sin, dies quietly, his quiet dying is so far from
being a sign of his being saved that it is an incontestable
proof of his damnation. No man can be saved except
he repents; nor can he repent that knows not that he
is a sinner: and he that knows himself to be a
sinner will, I warrant him, be molested for his knowledge
before he can die quietly. I am no admirer of
sick-bed repentance; for I think verily it is seldom
good for anything. But I see that he that hath
lived in sin and profaneness all his days, as Badman
did, and yet shall die quietly, that is, without repentance
steps in between his life and his death, is assuredly
gone to hell. When God would show the greatness
of his anger against sin and sinners in one word,
He saith, Let them alone! Let them, alone that
is, disturb them not. Let them go on without
control: Let the devil enjoy them peaceably.
Let him carry them out of the world unconverted quietly.
This is the sorest of judgments. I do not say
that all wicked men that are molested at their death
with a sense of sin and fear of hell do therefore
go to heaven; for some are made to see and are left
to despair. But I say there is no surer sign
of a man’s damnation than to die quietly after
a sinful life, than to sin and die with a heart that
cannot repent. The opinion, therefore, of the
common people of this kind of death is frivolous and
vain.’
So ends this very remarkable story.
It is extremely interesting, merely as a picture of
vulgar English life in a provincial town such as Bedford
was when Bunyan lived there. The drawing is so
good, the details so minute, the conception so unexaggerated,
that we are disposed to believe that we must have
a real history before us. But such a supposition
is only a compliment to the skill of the composer.
Bunyan’s inventive faculty was a spring that
never ran dry. He had a manner, as I said, like
De Foe’s, of creating the illusion that we are
reading realities, by little touches such as ‘I
do not know,’ ’He did not tell me this,’
or the needless introduction of particulars irrelevant
to the general plot such as we always stumble on in
life, and writers of fiction usually omit. Bunyan
was never prosecuted for libel by ‘Badman’s’
relations, and the character is the corresponding
contrast to Christian in the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress,’ the pilgrim’s journey being
in the opposite direction to the other place.
Throughout we are on the solid earth, amidst real
experiences. No demand is made on our credulity
by Providential interpositions, except in the
intercalated anecdotes which do not touch the story
itself. The wicked man’s career is not
brought to the abrupt or sensational issues so much
in favour with ordinary didactic tale-writers.
Such issues are the exception, not the rule, and the
edifying story loses its effect when the reader turns
from it to actual life, and perceives that the majority
are not punished in any such way. Bunyan conceals
nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing.
He makes his bad man sharp and shrewd. He allows
sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the rewards
which such qualities in fact command. Badman is
successful, he is powerful; he enjoys all the pleasures
which money can buy; his bad wife helps him to ruin,
but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace.
Bunyan has made him a brute, because such men do become
brutes. It is the real punishment of brutal and
selfish habits. There the figure stands; a picture
of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan
was most familiar, travelling along the primrose path
to the everlasting bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel’s
Land was through the Slough of Despond and the Valley
of the Shadow of Death. Pleasures are to be found
among the primroses, such pleasures as a brute can
be gratified by. Yet the reader feels that even
if there was no bonfire, he would still prefer to
be with Christian.