Introduction to John Bunyan’s “THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS”, by G.K. Chesterton.
John Bunyan was born in 1628, probably in the November of that year, since his baptism followed in that month. His birthplace was the village of Elsow, just outside Bedford. His family was a good example of a thing of which there are many examples, and of which there cannot be too many— a sort of plebian aristocracy, plain and insignificant in name and handicraft, but rooted in the land like a royal dukedom. The notion that Bunyan’s origin lies amid vagrant tinkers is an error; it lies amid highly respectable tinkers, whose presence can be traced for generations and who had left such evidences as a whole farm which had always been called “Bonyon’s End.” Bunyan’s grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, was a small tradesman or “chapman” who died in 1641; of his father less is known, beyond the fact that he had three wives, of whom the second was the mother of John Bunyan, and the third was to all appearance his worst enemy.
He has left on record himself that his youth was riotous, but to judge by the specimens which he gives it would have seemed to boast only a very mild and clumsy sort of rioting. In all human probability he was really only a course and awkward boy, sometimes dropping in among dubious companions, far more often drifting off sulkily by himself. He served in early life in the army, no uncommon episode in the careers of that kind of sullen wastrel. Some dispute has arisen, not indeed about the actuality of his military service, but about the side on which he served in the Civil War. General internal evidence, however, as well as enormous moral probability, allot him to the Parliamentarian camp.
In the year of the Restoration he was arrested for having preached to unlawful assemblies, and was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for twelve years. In this sudden isolation, shut out from effective acting or speaking, it occurred to him systematically to write, and he opened the first window on the dark and amazing drama which had been going on within his seemingly dull personality while he ran about the fields to be away from his stepmother or leaned on his pike by the watch fires of the great war.
He wrote “Grace abounding to the Worst of Sinners” perhaps the most powerful work ever wrought by genius with the materials of morbidity. Certainly no Parisian decadent, no Swinburnian poet, no Beardsleyian artist so completely contrived to give disease the vigor of health. It is the masterpiece of an element which has a right to have a masterpiece, since it is a living and recurring element— the element of the dark and hysterical soul of early youth. It is the epic of the pessimism of boyhood.
During the same period he wrote a less-known work called “The Holy City.” He was released in 1672, but as he refused to abandon his preaching, which was now powerful and popular, he was flung back again into prison in 1675. It was during this second detention that he wrote the work which has set him finally among the English immortals, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Many controversies have raged as to whether he owed the allegorical type of narrative to anything before him, but all the allegories mentioned in this connection are almost as unlike “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as they are unlike “Vanity Fair.” The Elstow tinker produced an original thing, if an original thing was ever produced. Nothing stronger can be said of it than that it dwarfs altogether into insignificance “Grace Abounding” published before it, and “The Holy War,” published afterwards. Bunyan, released from prison, died quietly in 1688.
Nobody will ever plumb the real depths and meaning of that extraordinary thing, the English Puritan movement. Why the English, whose nature it is to be particularly happy and particularly muddle-headed, should have been the one people in Europe to be influenced in so startling a manner by the bitterness and the logic of Calvin, must remain a riddle. It must remain a riddle for two reasons. First, that it was a religious thing and therefore unfathomable; and second, that it was a successful thing, and therefore we are all its heirs; we are looking at it through our Puritan spectacles, and talking about it through our Puritan noses. But whatever else the Puritan revolution was, there is one thing that it was not, and that is what a vast mass of opinion constantly represents that it was. It was not a step towards greater rationalism, or what we choose to call progress, it was not an advance in inquiry; and it was not, in the ordinary sense, an advance in civilization. To put the matter shortly, it was emphatically not a continuation of the Renaissance. If anything, it was a reaction against the Renaissance. It was essentially a barbaric thing, an outburst of the fierce, mysterious part of man. It had far less in common with modern nonconformist decorum. It had far more in common with some primitive religion, beating gongs and bellowing at an eclipse of the moon. It was the voice of that veiled thing within us which is so secret and intractable that men have never really known whether it is the beast, mystically enthroned, or the God sitting in the underworld. The word “savage” used here may, perhaps be misunderstood as indicating an animadversion against Puritainism; I use the word as a compliment. For I think the probability of the matter was really this, that Puritanism was a blind and heroic protest against a world that was growing more and more rational. At least we see that after the fall of Puritanism, when Cromwell’s “righteous Commonwealth” had come crashing to the ground, we suddenly find ourselves in a world of dapper commonsense, a world perfectly unbelieving, perfectly modern. It may be that Bunyan was the last cry of English mysticism under the foot of Hobbes. Religion was indeed preached by the Cavaliers, both before and after the great war: before it, as a very noble scheme of national civilization; after it, as a very ingenious cog-wheel in the political constitution. Between the two rises Puritanism, a naked and roaring giant, announcing that religion is a wheel in no policy, a part of no civilization; a thing as old as fear, and a rapacious of love; that religion is what it really is, a terror, a splendor, a necessity, and a nuisance.
This impression is, at any rate, borne out by a strange literary phenomenon, which everyone must have noticed in connection with the literature of Puritanism. It can also be noticed in connection with the literature of the French Revolution, and of almost all other such religious wars. If we read the high-class literature just preceding or standing apart from the Puritan movement, we are startled to find it seem so much more recent and like ourselves than the literature of Puritanism. Puritanism seems thousands of years old, something that happened in the Stone Age, with its strange cries, its strange visions, its strange tears, its strange happiness. It has in its record a set of things indescribably big and primitive— the slaying of a king, a sacred book, disgusting massacres, and an immortal epic. Go back a few years before it, and you pick up George Herbert or Herrick, and you will find yourself reading a perfectly modern and sensible sort of gentleman. This produces a peculiar impression on the mind. It is as if we were told that Herbert Spencer lived before Judas Maccabeus. The same singular effect can, as I have said, be noticed about the French Revolution. Danton and Marat are distant and gigantic figures in the dawn of the earth, and one sometimes finds it difficult to remember that they wore any clothes. When we remember that they lived a considerable time after the publication of “The Rivals” and about the time of the invention of the top hat, we feel our head turning topsy-turvy.
These great new outbursts of the elemental in man become suddenly centuries old. And this must, I think, be the real description of English Puritanism; that the soul of an ancient people which had once been profoundly religious, whose country had been called the Garden of Mary, and the Island of the Saints, felt by that sixth sense, that only the simple possess, the earth vibrating under the advancing elephant of Reason. Blinded by dense ignorance, bewildered in an anarchic age, furiously suspicious of philosophers and colleges and kings, it snatched up the first wild piece of new theology that lay to its hand and made war for religion, for the everlasting savage and the everlasting child. It had no culture, no guidance, no tradition, no dignity, no manners. The Puritans struck people of taste in their time simply as a sort of black goblins with big ears. But against every obstruction of misery and vulgarity, a way was broken by the divine energy of its hatred of the wisdom of the world. Before the Puritans were swept off the scene for ever, they had done two extraordinary things. They had broken to pieces in plain battle on an English meadow the chivalry of a great nation, bred from its youth to arms. And they brought forth from their agony a small book, called “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was greater literature than the whole contemporary culture of the great Renaissance, founded on three generation of the worship of learning and art.
The “Pilgrim’s Progress” certainly exhibits all the marks of such a revival of primitive power and mystery. Its resemblance to the Bible is not a mere imitation of style; it is also a coincidence of mood. Bunyan, who was a soldier in Cromwell’s army, had himself been thrown into a world almost as ferocious as that of Gideon, or the Maccabees, and he was really under the influence of the same kind of emotion. This was simply because, as I have said, Puritanism was a thing barbaric, and therefore eternal. Nowhere, perhaps, except in Homer, is there such a perfect description conveyed by the use of merely plain words. The description in Bunyan of how Moses came like a wind up the road, and was but a word and a blow; or how Apollyon straddled quite over the breadth of the way and swore by his infernal den— these are things which can only be paralleled in sudden and splendid phrases out of Homer or the Bible, such as the phrases about the monstrous and man-killing hands of Achilles, or the war-horse who laughs at the shaking of the spear.
There is another aspect of Bunyan and the Puritan movement which cannot be neglected, because it throws so great a light on the particular work of Bunyan. To a very considerable extent it is possible to identify even the most important theological and philosophical movement merely with frames of mind. The peculiar frame of mind of Puritanism was a sense of the deadly danger of existence. The whole tendency of England and of the greater part of Europe during the sixteenth century was towards the settlement of everything; toward a pleasant piety, a satisfying learning, well-ordered politics, an authentic philosophy, and so on. It was characteristic of an age in which, for the first time, comfortable private houses began to be built. Just as comfortable houses were built, so were comfortable constitutions built, and comfortable churches built. But no one to whom the name of Bunyan is anything more than a name can ever forget the impression of that awful chapter in “Grace Abounding,” in which the sinner takes refuge in place after place only to expect that roof after roof will crash down upon him, and that he is safe nowhere if the very Universe that he inherits belongs to one who is his enemy. Nor will anyone forget the chapter in which the sinner is reconciled to the Universe, and walks about the fields and cannot forbear from talking to the birds about the great mercy of God. It is this general an acute sense of danger that is the soul of Puritanism, and the soul of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
There are an innumerable company of good and picturesque figures in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” There is the dark man clad in bright vesture (that admirable person), there is Mr. Worldly-wiseman, whose conversation is indistinguishable from that of a modern philanthropist. There is Apollyon, whose eloquence is like the noblest eloquence of the seventeenth century. There is the Giant Despair, who needs no introduction in the modern enlightened world. But no figure in the whole story quite seizes on the imagination, at once pictorial and spiritual, like the figure with which the whole graphic parable begins. The wild figure of the Pilgrim himself with the burden on his back, and his fingers in his ears, running like mad out of the clamorous and scornful and derisive city, which is called the City of Destruction—this certainly is the embodiment of the actual literary energy of Bunyan.
There may be some “I do not know if there are” who will be so much alienated by the seventeenth century apparatus of the great story, so much out of sympathy with endless arguments about the Atonement, so unresponsive to the significance of the Scriptural names and titles, so weary of old texts, so scornful of old doctrines, that they will fancy that this ancient Puritan poetry of danger is interesting only from a literary and not at all from a philosophical or religious point of view. For such people there is, I suppose, still waiting untried that inevitable mood of which a man may stand amid a fields of flowers in the quiet sunlight and realize that of all conceivable things the most dangerous thing is to be alive.
Introduction to John Bunyan’s “THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS”, by G.K. Chesterton.
John Bunyan was born in 1628, probably in the November of that year, since his baptism followed in that month. His birthplace was the village of Elsow, just outside Bedford. His family was a good example of a thing of which there are many examples, and of which there cannot be too many— a sort of plebian aristocracy, plain and insignificant in name and handicraft, but rooted in the land like a royal dukedom. The notion that Bunyan’s origin lies amid vagrant tinkers is an error; it lies amid highly respectable tinkers, whose presence can be traced for generations and who had left such evidences as a whole farm which had always been called “Bonyon’s End.” Bunyan’s grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, was a small tradesman or “chapman” who died in 1641; of his father less is known, beyond the fact that he had three wives, of whom the second was the mother of John Bunyan, and the third was to all appearance his worst enemy.
He has left on record himself that his youth was riotous, but to judge by the specimens which he gives it would have seemed to boast only a very mild and clumsy sort of rioting. In all human probability he was really only a course and awkward boy, sometimes dropping in among dubious companions, far more often drifting off sulkily by himself. He served in early life in the army, no uncommon episode in the careers of that kind of sullen wastrel. Some dispute has arisen, not indeed about the actuality of his military service, but about the side on which he served in the Civil War. General internal evidence, however, as well as enormous moral probability, allot him to the Parliamentarian camp.
In the year of the Restoration he was arrested for having preached to unlawful assemblies, and was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for twelve years. In this sudden isolation, shut out from effective acting or speaking, it occurred to him systematically to write, and he opened the first window on the dark and amazing drama which had been going on within his seemingly dull personality while he ran about the fields to be away from his stepmother or leaned on his pike by the watch fires of the great war.
He wrote “Grace abounding to the Worst of Sinners” perhaps the most powerful work ever wrought by genius with the materials of morbidity. Certainly no Parisian decadent, no Swinburnian poet, no Beardsleyian artist so completely contrived to give disease the vigor of health. It is the masterpiece of an element which has a right to have a masterpiece, since it is a living and recurring element— the element of the dark and hysterical soul of early youth. It is the epic of the pessimism of boyhood.
During the same period he wrote a less-known work called “The Holy City.” He was released in 1672, but as he refused to abandon his preaching, which was now powerful and popular, he was flung back again into prison in 1675. It was during this second detention that he wrote the work which has set him finally among the English immortals, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Many controversies have raged as to whether he owed the allegorical type of narrative to anything before him, but all the allegories mentioned in this connection are almost as unlike “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as they are unlike “Vanity Fair.” The Elstow tinker produced an original thing, if an original thing was ever produced. Nothing stronger can be said of it than that it dwarfs altogether into insignificance “Grace Abounding” published before it, and “The Holy War,” published afterwards. Bunyan, released from prison, died quietly in 1688.
Introduzione a «IL VIAGGIO DEL PELLEGRINO» di John Bunyan, di G.K. Chesterton.
John Bunyan nacque nel 1628, con ogni probabilità nel novembre di quell’anno, poiché il suo battesimo seguì in quello stesso mese. Il suo luogo natale fu il villaggio di Elstow, appena fuori Bedford. La sua famiglia era un buon esempio di una cosa di cui vi sono molti esempi, e di cui non ve ne potranno mai essere troppi: una sorta di aristocrazia plebea, umile e insignificante quanto a nome e mestiere, ma radicata alla terra come un ducato regale. L’idea che le origini di Bunyan giacciano tra calderai vagabondi è un errore; giacciono tra calderai assai rispettabili, la cui presenza si può rintracciare per generazioni e che avevano lasciato testimonianze come un’intera fattoria chiamata da sempre «Bonyon’s End». Il nonno di Bunyan, Thomas Bunyan, era un piccolo bottegaio o «merciaio ambulante» morto nel 1641; del padre si sa meno, oltre al fatto che ebbe tre mogli, delle quali la seconda fu la madre di John Bunyan, e la terza fu a tutti gli effetti la sua peggior nemica.
Egli stesso ha lasciato scritto che la sua giovinezza fu sregolata, ma a giudicare dagli esempi che ne dà sembrerebbe potersi vantare soltanto di una specie assai blanda e goffa di sregolatezza. Con ogni umana probabilità non fu in realtà che un ragazzo rozzo e impacciato, che talora capitava in mezzo a compagnie dubbie, e assai più spesso se ne andava alla deriva, imbronciato, tutto solo. Servì in giovane età nell’esercito, episodio niente affatto insolito nella carriera di quella specie di sfaccendati cupi. È sorta qualche disputa, non certo sulla realtà del suo servizio militare, ma sulla parte per cui combatté nella Guerra Civile. L’evidenza interna generale, tuttavia, come pure un’enorme probabilità morale, lo assegna al campo dei Parlamentari.
Nell’anno della Restaurazione fu arrestato per aver predicato ad assemblee illegali, e fu imprigionato nel carcere di Bedford per dodici anni. In quell’improvviso isolamento, escluso da ogni efficace azione o parola, gli venne in mente di mettersi a scrivere sistematicamente, e aprì la prima finestra sull’oscuro e stupefacente dramma che si era svolto dentro la sua personalità in apparenza scialba, mentre correva per i campi per fuggire la matrigna o si appoggiava alla picca presso i fuochi di guardia della grande guerra.
Scrisse «Grace Abounding to the Worst of Sinners», forse l’opera più potente mai forgiata dal genio con i materiali della morbosità. Di certo nessun decadente parigino, nessun poeta alla Swinburne, nessun artista alla Beardsley riuscì così compiutamente a dare alla malattia il vigore della salute. È il capolavoro di un elemento che ha diritto ad avere un capolavoro, giacché è un elemento vivo e ricorrente: l’elemento dell’anima oscura e isterica della prima giovinezza. È l’epica del pessimismo dell’adolescenza.
Nello stesso periodo scrisse un’opera meno nota, intitolata «La Città Santa». Fu liberato nel 1672, ma poiché rifiutò di rinunciare alla predicazione, ormai potente e popolare, fu ricacciato di nuovo in prigione nel 1675. Fu durante questa seconda detenzione che scrisse l’opera che lo ha posto definitivamente tra gli immortali inglesi, «Il viaggio del Pellegrino». Molte controversie sono divampate se egli dovesse il tipo di narrazione allegorica a qualcosa che l’aveva preceduto, ma tutte le allegorie citate a questo proposito sono quasi tanto dissimili dal «Viaggio del Pellegrino» quanto lo sono dalla «Fiera delle Vanità». Il calderaio di Elstow produsse una cosa originale, se mai una cosa originale fu prodotta. Nulla di più forte si può dirne che questo: essa rimpicciolisce fino all’insignificanza «Grace Abounding», pubblicato prima, e «The Holy War», pubblicato dopo. Bunyan, uscito di prigione, morì tranquillamente nel 1688.
Nobody will ever plumb the real depths and meaning of that extraordinary thing, the English Puritan movement. Why the English, whose nature it is to be particularly happy and particularly muddle-headed, should have been the one people in Europe to be influenced in so startling a manner by the bitterness and the logic of Calvin, must remain a riddle. It must remain a riddle for two reasons. First, that it was a religious thing and therefore unfathomable; and second, that it was a successful thing, and therefore we are all its heirs; we are looking at it through our Puritan spectacles, and talking about it through our Puritan noses. But whatever else the Puritan revolution was, there is one thing that it was not, and that is what a vast mass of opinion constantly represents that it was. It was not a step towards greater rationalism, or what we choose to call progress, it was not an advance in inquiry; and it was not, in the ordinary sense, an advance in civilization. To put the matter shortly, it was emphatically not a continuation of the Renaissance. If anything, it was a reaction against the Renaissance. It was essentially a barbaric thing, an outburst of the fierce, mysterious part of man. It had far less in common with modern nonconformist decorum. It had far more in common with some primitive religion, beating gongs and bellowing at an eclipse of the moon. It was the voice of that veiled thing within us which is so secret and intractable that men have never really known whether it is the beast, mystically enthroned, or the God sitting in the underworld. The word “savage” used here may, perhaps be misunderstood as indicating an animadversion against Puritainism; I use the word as a compliment. For I think the probability of the matter was really this, that Puritanism was a blind and heroic protest against a world that was growing more and more rational. At least we see that after the fall of Puritanism, when Cromwell’s “righteous Commonwealth” had come crashing to the ground, we suddenly find ourselves in a world of dapper commonsense, a world perfectly unbelieving, perfectly modern. It may be that Bunyan was the last cry of English mysticism under the foot of Hobbes. Religion was indeed preached by the Cavaliers, both before and after the great war: before it, as a very noble scheme of national civilization; after it, as a very ingenious cog-wheel in the political constitution. Between the two rises Puritanism, a naked and roaring giant, announcing that religion is a wheel in no policy, a part of no civilization; a thing as old as fear, and a rapacious of love; that religion is what it really is, a terror, a splendor, a necessity, and a nuisance.
This impression is, at any rate, borne out by a strange literary phenomenon, which everyone must have noticed in connection with the literature of Puritanism. It can also be noticed in connection with the literature of the French Revolution, and of almost all other such religious wars. If we read the high-class literature just preceding or standing apart from the Puritan movement, we are startled to find it seem so much more recent and like ourselves than the literature of Puritanism. Puritanism seems thousands of years old, something that happened in the Stone Age, with its strange cries, its strange visions, its strange tears, its strange happiness. It has in its record a set of things indescribably big and primitive— the slaying of a king, a sacred book, disgusting massacres, and an immortal epic. Go back a few years before it, and you pick up George Herbert or Herrick, and you will find yourself reading a perfectly modern and sensible sort of gentleman. This produces a peculiar impression on the mind. It is as if we were told that Herbert Spencer lived before Judas Maccabeus. The same singular effect can, as I have said, be noticed about the French Revolution. Danton and Marat are distant and gigantic figures in the dawn of the earth, and one sometimes finds it difficult to remember that they wore any clothes. When we remember that they lived a considerable time after the publication of “The Rivals” and about the time of the invention of the top hat, we feel our head turning topsy-turvy.
These great new outbursts of the elemental in man become suddenly centuries old. And this must, I think, be the real description of English Puritanism; that the soul of an ancient people which had once been profoundly religious, whose country had been called the Garden of Mary, and the Island of the Saints, felt by that sixth sense, that only the simple possess, the earth vibrating under the advancing elephant of Reason. Blinded by dense ignorance, bewildered in an anarchic age, furiously suspicious of philosophers and colleges and kings, it snatched up the first wild piece of new theology that lay to its hand and made war for religion, for the everlasting savage and the everlasting child. It had no culture, no guidance, no tradition, no dignity, no manners. The Puritans struck people of taste in their time simply as a sort of black goblins with big ears. But against every obstruction of misery and vulgarity, a way was broken by the divine energy of its hatred of the wisdom of the world. Before the Puritans were swept off the scene for ever, they had done two extraordinary things. They had broken to pieces in plain battle on an English meadow the chivalry of a great nation, bred from its youth to arms. And they brought forth from their agony a small book, called “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was greater literature than the whole contemporary culture of the great Renaissance, founded on three generation of the worship of learning and art.
Nessuno sonderà mai le vere profondità e il significato di quella cosa straordinaria che fu il movimento puritano inglese. Perché gli inglesi, la cui natura è quella d’essere particolarmente felici e particolarmente confusionari, dovessero essere l’unico popolo d’Europa a venire influenzato in modo tanto sorprendente dall’amarezza e dalla logica di Calvino, deve restare un enigma. Deve restare un enigma per due ragioni. Primo, che era una cosa religiosa e perciò imperscrutabile; e secondo, che era una cosa riuscita, e perciò ne siamo tutti gli eredi; la stiamo guardando attraverso i nostri occhiali puritani, e ne parliamo attraverso i nostri nasi puritani. Ma qualunque altra cosa fosse la rivoluzione puritana, c’è una cosa che essa non fu, ed è ciò che una vasta massa di opinioni costantemente sostiene che fosse. Non fu un passo verso un maggiore razionalismo, o verso ciò che scegliamo di chiamare progresso; non fu un avanzamento nell’indagine; e non fu, nel senso comune, un avanzamento nella civiltà. Per dirla in breve, essa non fu enfaticamente una continuazione del Rinascimento. Semmai, fu una reazione contro il Rinascimento. Fu essenzialmente una cosa barbarica, un’eruzione della parte feroce e misteriosa dell’uomo. Aveva assai meno in comune con la moderna compostezza anticonformista. Aveva assai più in comune con qualche religione primitiva, che batte gong e mugghia a un’eclissi della Luna. Era la voce di quella cosa velata dentro di noi che è così segreta e intrattabile che gli uomini non hanno mai davvero saputo se sia la bestia, misticamente intronizzata, o il Dio che siede negli inferi. La parola “selvaggio” qui usata potrebbe forse essere fraintesa come un’insinuazione contro il puritanesimo; io uso la parola come un elogio. Poiché penso che la probabilità della faccenda fosse in realtà questa, che il puritanesimo fosse una protesta cieca ed eroica contro un mondo che si faceva sempre più razionale. Vediamo almeno che dopo la caduta del puritanesimo, quando la “giusta Repubblica” di Cromwell era rovinata a terra, ci ritroviamo d’improvviso in un mondo di lindo buon senso, un mondo perfettamente miscredente, perfettamente moderno. Può darsi che Bunyan fosse l’ultimo grido del misticismo inglese sotto il piede di Hobbes. La religione fu invero predicata dai Cavalieri, sia prima sia dopo la grande guerra: prima di essa, come un nobilissimo disegno di civiltà nazionale; dopo di essa, come un ingegnosissimo ingranaggio nella costituzione politica. Tra i due si erge il puritanesimo, un gigante nudo e ruggente, che proclama che la religione non è un ingranaggio in nessuna politica, una parte di nessuna civiltà; una cosa antica quanto la paura, e rapace di amore; che la religione è ciò che realmente è, un terrore, uno splendore, una necessità e una seccatura.
Questa impressione è, in ogni caso, confermata da uno strano fenomeno letterario, che ognuno deve aver notato in rapporto alla letteratura del puritanesimo. Lo si può notare anche in rapporto alla letteratura della Rivoluzione francese, e di quasi tutte le altre guerre religiose di tal genere. Se leggiamo la letteratura di alta classe immediatamente precedente al movimento puritano, o che se ne tiene in disparte, restiamo sorpresi di trovarla tanto più recente e simile a noi della letteratura del puritanesimo. Il puritanesimo sembra vecchio di migliaia di anni, qualcosa accaduto nell’Età della Pietra, con le sue strane grida, le sue strane visioni, le sue strane lacrime, la sua strana felicità. Ha nel suo registro un insieme di cose indescrivibilmente grandi e primitive: la messa a morte di un re, un libro sacro, disgustosi massacri, e un immortale poema epico. Tornate indietro di qualche anno prima, e prendete in mano George Herbert o Herrick, e vi ritroverete a leggere una sorta di gentiluomo perfettamente moderno e assennato. Ciò produce sulla mente una peculiare impressione. È come se ci venisse detto che Herbert Spencer visse prima di Giuda Maccabeo. Il medesimo singolare effetto si può, come ho detto, notare a proposito della Rivoluzione francese. Danton e Marat sono figure lontane e gigantesche nell’alba della terra, e talvolta si stenta a ricordare che indossassero alcun vestito. Quando ricordiamo che essi vissero un tempo considerevole dopo la pubblicazione de “I rivali” e all’incirca all’epoca dell’invenzione del cilindro, ci sentiamo girare la testa sottosopra.
Questi grandi nuovi scoppi dell’elementare nell’uomo diventano d’improvviso vecchi di secoli. E questa deve, io penso, essere la vera descrizione del puritanesimo inglese: che l’anima di un antico popolo, che un tempo era stato profondamente religioso, il cui paese era stato chiamato il Giardino di Maria, e l’Isola dei Santi, sentì per quel sesto senso, che solo i semplici possiedono, la terra vibrare sotto l’elefante avanzante della Ragione. Accecato da una densa ignoranza, smarrito in un’epoca anarchica, furiosamente sospettoso di filosofi e collegi e re, esso afferrò il primo selvaggio brandello di nuova teologia che gli capitò a portata di mano e fece guerra per la religione, per l’eterno selvaggio e l’eterno fanciullo. Non aveva cultura, né guida, né tradizione, né dignità, né maniere. I Puritani colpivano le persone di gusto del loro tempo semplicemente come una sorta di neri folletti dalle grandi orecchie. Ma contro ogni ostacolo di miseria e volgarità, una via fu aperta dalla divina energia del loro odio per la saggezza del mondo. Prima che i Puritani fossero spazzati via dalla scena per sempre, avevano fatto due cose straordinarie. Avevano fatto a pezzi in aperta battaglia, su un prato inglese, la cavalleria di una grande nazione, allevata sin dalla gioventù alle armi. E avevano tratto fuori dalla loro agonia un piccolo libro, intitolato “Il Viaggio del pellegrino”, che era letteratura più grande di tutta la cultura contemporanea del grande Rinascimento, fondata su tre generazioni di culto del sapere e dell’arte.
The “Pilgrim’s Progress” certainly exhibits all the marks of such a revival of primitive power and mystery. Its resemblance to the Bible is not a mere imitation of style; it is also a coincidence of mood. Bunyan, who was a soldier in Cromwell’s army, had himself been thrown into a world almost as ferocious as that of Gideon, or the Maccabees, and he was really under the influence of the same kind of emotion. This was simply because, as I have said, Puritanism was a thing barbaric, and therefore eternal. Nowhere, perhaps, except in Homer, is there such a perfect description conveyed by the use of merely plain words. The description in Bunyan of how Moses came like a wind up the road, and was but a word and a blow; or how Apollyon straddled quite over the breadth of the way and swore by his infernal den— these are things which can only be paralleled in sudden and splendid phrases out of Homer or the Bible, such as the phrases about the monstrous and man-killing hands of Achilles, or the war-horse who laughs at the shaking of the spear.
There is another aspect of Bunyan and the Puritan movement which cannot be neglected, because it throws so great a light on the particular work of Bunyan. To a very considerable extent it is possible to identify even the most important theological and philosophical movement merely with frames of mind. The peculiar frame of mind of Puritanism was a sense of the deadly danger of existence. The whole tendency of England and of the greater part of Europe during the sixteenth century was towards the settlement of everything; toward a pleasant piety, a satisfying learning, well-ordered politics, an authentic philosophy, and so on. It was characteristic of an age in which, for the first time, comfortable private houses began to be built. Just as comfortable houses were built, so were comfortable constitutions built, and comfortable churches built. But no one to whom the name of Bunyan is anything more than a name can ever forget the impression of that awful chapter in “Grace Abounding,” in which the sinner takes refuge in place after place only to expect that roof after roof will crash down upon him, and that he is safe nowhere if the very Universe that he inherits belongs to one who is his enemy. Nor will anyone forget the chapter in which the sinner is reconciled to the Universe, and walks about the fields and cannot forbear from talking to the birds about the great mercy of God. It is this general an acute sense of danger that is the soul of Puritanism, and the soul of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
There are an innumerable company of good and picturesque figures in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” There is the dark man clad in bright vesture (that admirable person), there is Mr. Worldly-wiseman, whose conversation is indistinguishable from that of a modern philanthropist. There is Apollyon, whose eloquence is like the noblest eloquence of the seventeenth century. There is the Giant Despair, who needs no introduction in the modern enlightened world. But no figure in the whole story quite seizes on the imagination, at once pictorial and spiritual, like the figure with which the whole graphic parable begins. The wild figure of the Pilgrim himself with the burden on his back, and his fingers in his ears, running like mad out of the clamorous and scornful and derisive city, which is called the City of Destruction—this certainly is the embodiment of the actual literary energy of Bunyan.
There may be some “I do not know if there are” who will be so much alienated by the seventeenth century apparatus of the great story, so much out of sympathy with endless arguments about the Atonement, so unresponsive to the significance of the Scriptural names and titles, so weary of old texts, so scornful of old doctrines, that they will fancy that this ancient Puritan poetry of danger is interesting only from a literary and not at all from a philosophical or religious point of view. For such people there is, I suppose, still waiting untried that inevitable mood of which a man may stand amid a fields of flowers in the quiet sunlight and realize that of all conceivable things the most dangerous thing is to be alive.
Il “Viaggio del pellegrino” mostra certamente tutti i segni di una simile rinascita di potenza e mistero primitivi. La sua somiglianza con la Bibbia non è una mera imitazione di stile; è anche una coincidenza di stato d’animo. Bunyan, che fu un soldato nell’esercito di Cromwell, era stato egli stesso gettato in un mondo quasi feroce quanto quello di Gedeone, o dei Maccabei, ed era davvero sotto l’influsso del medesimo tipo di emozione. Ciò accadeva semplicemente perché, come ho detto, il puritanesimo era una cosa barbarica, e perciò eterna. In nessun luogo, forse, tranne che in Omero, vi è una descrizione così perfetta resa con l’uso di parole meramente semplici. La descrizione, in Bunyan, di come Mosè venne su per la strada come un vento, e non fu che una parola e un colpo; o di come Apollion si piantò a gambe larghe per tutta la larghezza della via e imprecò per la sua tana infernale: queste sono cose che possono trovare paragone solo in improvvise e splendide frasi tratte da Omero o dalla Bibbia, come le frasi sulle mostruose e micidiali mani di Achille, o sul destriero da guerra che ride allo scuotersi della lancia.
Vi è un altro aspetto di Bunyan e del movimento puritano che non può essere trascurato, perché getta una luce tanto grande sull’opera particolare di Bunyan. In misura assai considerevole è possibile identificare persino il più importante movimento teologico e filosofico semplicemente con stati d’animo. Il peculiare stato d’animo del puritanesimo era un senso del mortale pericolo dell’esistenza. L’intera tendenza dell’Inghilterra e della maggior parte dell’Europa durante il sedicesimo secolo era verso la sistemazione di ogni cosa; verso una piacevole pietà, un sapere appagante, una politica bene ordinata, una filosofia autentica, e così via. Era caratteristico di un’epoca in cui, per la prima volta, comode case private cominciarono a essere costruite. Proprio come venivano costruite case comode, così venivano costruite comode costituzioni, e comode chiese. Ma nessuno per cui il nome di Bunyan sia qualcosa di più di un nome può mai dimenticare l’impressione di quel tremendo capitolo di “Grace Abounding”, in cui il peccatore si rifugia in un luogo dopo l’altro solo per aspettarsi che un tetto dopo l’altro gli crolli addosso, e che egli non è al sicuro in nessun luogo se l’Universo stesso che eredita appartiene a uno che è suo nemico. Né alcuno dimenticherà il capitolo in cui il peccatore si riconcilia con l’Universo, e cammina per i campi e non può trattenersi dal parlare agli uccelli della grande misericordia di Dio. È questo generale e acuto senso del pericolo che è l’anima del puritanesimo, e l’anima del “[[Pilgrim|Viaggio del pellegrino]]”.
Vi è un’innumerevole schiera di figure buone e pittoresche nel “Viaggio del pellegrino”. C’è l’uomo scuro vestito di lucente paramento (quell’ammirevole persona), c’è il signor Saggio-secondo- il-mondo, la cui conversazione è indistinguibile da quella di un moderno filantropo. C’è Apollion, la cui eloquenza è come la più nobile eloquenza del diciassettesimo secolo. C’è il Gigante Disperazione, che non ha bisogno di presentazioni nel moderno mondo illuminato. Ma nessuna figura nell’intera storia afferra l’immaginazione, a un tempo pittorica e spirituale, quanto la figura con cui inizia l’intera grafica parabola. La selvaggia figura del Pellegrino stesso con il fardello sulla schiena, e le dita nelle orecchie, che corre come un pazzo fuori dalla città clamorosa e sprezzante e beffarda, che è chiamata la City della Distruzione: questa è certamente l’incarnazione dell’effettiva energia letteraria di Bunyan.
Vi potranno essere alcuni “non so se ve ne siano” che saranno tanto alienati dall’apparato secentesco della grande storia, tanto poco in sintonia con gli interminabili ragionamenti sull’Espiazione, tanto insensibili al significato dei nomi e dei titoli scritturali, tanto stanchi dei vecchi testi, tanto sprezzanti delle vecchie dottrine, da immaginare che questa antica poesia puritana del pericolo sia interessante solo da un punto di vista letterario e per nulla da un punto di vista filosofico o religioso. Per tali persone vi è, suppongo, ancora in attesa e non provato quell’inevitabile stato d’animo in cui un uomo può stare in mezzo a un campo di fiori nella quieta luce del sole e rendersi conto che, di tutte le cose concepibili, la cosa più pericolosa è essere vivi.