The Common Pursuit (30 page)

represented by Mr Trevelyan's account of'social history* in his Introduction:

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

Positively, we have:

But social history does not merely provide the required link between economic and political history. It has also its own positive value and peculiar concern. Its scope may be defined as the daily life of the inhabitants of the land in past ages: this includes the human as well as die economic relation of different classes to one another, the character of family and household life, the conditions of labour and of leisure, the attitude of man to nature, the culture of each age as it arose out of these general conditions of life, and took ever-changing forms in religion, literature and music, architecture, learning and thought.

A social historian who appreciated the nature of the vitality of the English language and of English literature in the seventeenth century—and such appreciation itself leads to sociological inquiries—would, in defining and developing his interests, be sensitized by more positively and potently realized questions than any that have given life, form and significance to English Social History: questions as to the conditions of a vigorous and spiritually vital culture, the relations between the sophisticated and the popular, and the criteria by which one might attempt to judge the different phases of a national civilization. To say this is not to envisage with complaisance a habit of naive comparative valuation. But social history will have shape and significance—will have significant lines and contours—only so far as informed by the life and pressure of such questions; and as intent preoccupations it is towards comparative valuation that they press, even if they actually issue in none that is explicit, definitive and comprehensive. What, as civilization to live in and be of, did England offer at such and such a time ? As we pass from now to then, what light is thrown on human possibilities—on the potentialities and desirabilities of civilized life 2 In what respects might it have been better to live then than now ? What tentative conception of an ideal civilization are we prompted towards by the hints we gather from history ? It is with such questions in mind—which is not to say that he will come out with answers to them—that a

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social historian, in so far as his history is anything more than an assemblage of mechanically arranged external information, must define the changes and developments that he discerns. Some such questions were no doubt in Mr Trevelyan's mind. But they hadn't a sufficient concrete charge; they were not sufficiently informed with that kind of appreciation of the higher possibilities of a civilization which, in the earlier book, would have made it impossible for him to pronounce that the English of the seventeenth century was inadequate to the complexities and subtleties of Browning and Meredith, or to suggest that one has disposed of the language of Shakespeare in saying that 'the extreme simplicity of Hamlet's thought is only concealed by the obscurity of his motives and the richness of his poetical diction'.

Mr Trevelyan, as I have said, is distinguished among historians by his general culture. But his use of literature is nowhere more than external (see, e.g., his use of Chaucer in England in the Age of Wycliffe): he knows that literature exists—it nowhere amounts to evidence of much more than that. The possible uses of literature to the historian and the sociologist are many in kind, and all the important ones demand that the user shall be able, in the fullest sense, to read. If, for instance, we want to go further than the mere constatation that a century and a half ago the family counted for much more than it does now, if we want some notion of the difference involved in day-to-day living—in, the sense of life and its dimensions and in its emotional and moral accenting—for the ordinary cultivated person, we may profitably start trying to form it from the novels of Jane Austen. But only if we are capable of appreciating shade, tone, implication and essential structure—as (it is necessary to add) none of die academically, or fashionably, accredited authorities seems to be.

On the other hand, the understanding of literature stands to gain much from sociological interests and a knowledge of social history. And this is an opportunity to mention, for illustration, Mr Yvor Winters' Maules Curse, a book that deserves to be distinguished, seeing how few good books of literary criticism appear. In it Mr Winters, by relating the key American authors with the New England background and the heritage of Puritanism, throws a truly revealing light on their work and on the evolution of American literature.

BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES

MR LINDSAY is Marxist and psycho-analytic. The arrival of his book 1 reminded me of one on Bunyan that came out some years ago, and in this earlier book 2 now open before me—it is by William York Tindall—I read (p. 94):

For the saints too the class struggle needed the dignity of divine auspices, and as the miserable of to-day look for their sanction to Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto, their seventeenth-century predecessors looked to Jesus and the Bible,

The religious man may remain only half-aware, or by virtue of a rationalization, quite unaware of the social or economic motives which determine his sectarian allegiance.

Mr Lindsay and Mr Tindall, then, in their modes of approach have something in common. But whereas Mr Lindsay is mainly concerned to show that Bunyan's religion was merely a self-uncomprehending reaction to the class-war, Mr Tindall is mainly concerned to show that Bunyan was merely one of a mob—a large, ludicrous and Hudibrastic mob of preaching and scribbling fanatics:

Bunyan was one of a great number of eloquent tinkers, cobblers and tailors; he thought what they thought, felt what they felt, and wrote according to their conventions; he was one of hundreds of literary mechanicks, and he can be considered unique only by his survival to our day as the sole conspicuous representative of a class of men from whom he differed less in kind than in degree, (viii.)

While Mr Lindsay's * merely' has the intention of exalting, the intention as well as the effect of Mr TindalTs is the reverse, It is true he speaks of Bunyan's 'genius', but what this consists in he gives no sign that he knows or cares. As for the superiority in 'expression': 'The qualities of style for which Bunyan is esteemed to-day', he says, 'his raciness, earthiness, and familiarity were common to his kind, and are not easily to be distinguished from

l john Bunyan: Maker of Myths. 2 John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher.

BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES 205

those of other mechanicks*. And any other superiority there may be doesn't impress Mr Tindall. His set attitude expresses itself in the heavy Gibbonian affectation that (inspired, no doubt, by Lytton Strachey) he practises, with complacent insistence, as his own style:

The ingenious speculations of Mr Gerald Owst have been valuable in suggesting the sermons of Bunyan's time as the principal sources of his similitudes.., Apparently at the impulse of the Spirit, Bunyan condescended to employ and to imitate for his imperishable works the materials of pamphlets, which are now as remote as they were once familiar, and of oral sermons, which are now, perhaps, recorded only in heaven, (p. 196.)

I still bear something of a grudge against The New Republic for having persuaded me, by a eulogistic review, to spend seventeen and six on such a book. The book has, nevertheless, a use. Mr Tindall—and in this he has the advantage over Mr Lindsay—is a scholar; his book represents a disciplined and laborious research, and makes a * genuine contribution to knowledge'—one in which, moreover, in spite of the obtuseness and die offensive tone, we may see some value. In demonstrating so thoroughly that Bunyan was one of a host, and how much he belonged to his environment, Mr Tindall does, if not for himself, illuminate Bunyan's distinctive genius. And at the same time he tells us something about the genius of the English people in that age.

It is a richly fantastic background of fanaticism, bigotry and ignorance that is displayed for us in his account of the sectarian England of Bunyan's time. Here, for instance, is a passage he quotes from a broadside called Divine Fire-Works:

I have seen the Lord. The King;

Who appeared unto me

On (Innocents Day) the 28 of the last moneth.

He spake to me and with me ...

Then was I raised to sit up in my bed (in my^shirt) smoaking like a

furnace .. . Fear not it is L Blu I.

Whereupon die Spirit within me (with exceeding joy) exceedingly groaned; & with a loud voice out-sounded

OtheBlu! OtheBlu! O the Blu! And the worm, and no man said, what Blu ...

That, of course, is a lunatic extreme; but lunatic extremes, Mr Tindall brings home to us, were common—were, one is inclined to say, what sectarian enthusiasm tended towards. Bunyan, of course, was a Baptist (Particular Open-Communion) and not a Quaker, Ranter or antinomian extremist. But Mr Tindall convincingly exhibits the world of fissiparous sects as one, and Bunyan and his works as essentially of it.

Where, then, did The Pilgrim's Progress get its classical quality from? Mr Tindall talks vaguely about Bunyan's 'art', and apparently sees in this nothing but a vividness and 'earthy vigour* of style. But it is not merely vividness and vigour (though these it certainly has) that make The Pilgrims Progress a classic—a classic in the fullest sense. And it is not merely a certain superiority in vividness and vigour so unemphatically conceded by Mr Tindall to Bunyan that explains the following facts:

By 1692, according to Charles Doe, about one hundred thousand copies of Pilgrims Progress had been sold; it had been translated into foreign tongues, and had surpassed by ninety thousand copies the combined sale of Benjamin Reach's two most popular allegories.

The England of the Sects, in thus distinguishing in favour of Bunyan, confirms the conclusions about it that we are in any case led to by The Pilgrim's Progress itself—The Pilgrims Progress being, as Mr Tindall demonstrates, so completely and essentially representative (so essentially unoriginal, the implication almost is), and Bunyan so completely and essentially one of the mob of scribbling and preaching fanatics. That England, plainly, cannot be taken full account of in Hudibrastic (or Strachey-Gibbonian) terms; something besides fanaticism, bigotry and ignorance has to be invoked. For what makes The Pilgrim's Progress a great book, one of the great classics, is its humanity—its rich, poised and mature humanity. And this is not the less impressive for our being, here and there, by the allegorical intent of this and that incident, reminded of the uglier and pettier aspects of the intolerant creed, the narrow Calvinistic scheme of personal salvation, that Bunyan explicitly sets out to allegorize.

The Pilgrims Progress, in fact, is the fruit of a fine civilization; the enthusiasts and mechanick preachers were not out of touch with a traditional wisdom. Bunyan as a popular homilist was, as

BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES 207

Mr G. R. Owst (in Literature and Pulpit in Mediaeval England) has sufficiently shown, in a tradition that goes uninterruptedly back beyond the Reformation to the Middle Ages. If one observes that this tradition owes its vitality to a popular culture it must be only to add that the place of religion in the culture is obvious enough. The same people that created the English language for Shakespeare's use speaks in Bunyan, though it is now a people that knows its Authorized Version.

Mr Tindall, however, has no use for these super-subtleties; he can explain Bunyan's art more simply:

To Bunyan the name By-Ends connoted ends other than that of salvation by imputed righteousness... . By-Ends is the product of the resentment against the Anglicans of an enthusiastic evangelist and despised niechanick ... Bunyan's fortunate discovery that through these controlled debates between his hero and these caricatured projections of his actual enemies he could experience the pleasures of combat without the complications of reality invests Pilgrim s Progress with the character of a controversial Utopia. (60-62.)

And that's what Mr Tindall sees in By-Ends. There seems some point in quoting here what should be one of the best-known passages of Bunyan:

Christian: Pray, who are your kindred there, if a man may be so bold?

By-Ends: Almost the whole Town; and in particular, my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, my Lord. Fair-speech, (from whose ancestors that Town first took its name), also Mr Smoothman, Mr Fadng-both-ways, Mr Anything ; and the Parson of our Parish, Mr Two-tongues, was my Mother's own Brother by Father's side; and to tell you the truth, I am become a Gentleman of good Quality; yet my Great Grandfather was but a Waterman, looking one way and rowing another; and I got most of my estate by the same occupation.

Christian: Are you a married man ?

By-Ends: Yes, and my Wife is a very virtuous woman, the Daughter of a virtuous woman; she was my Lady Paining s daughter, therefore she came of a very honourable Family, and is arrived to such a pitch of breeding, that she knows how to carry it to all, even to Prince and Peasant. 'Tis true we somewhat differ in Religion from those of the stricter sort, yet but in two small points: First, we never strive against Wind and Tide: Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion

goes in his Silver Slippers; we love much to walk with him in the Street, if the Sun shines, and the People applaud him.

That is plainly traditional art and, equally plainly the life in it is of the people (not the less so for there being literary association, too). The names and racy turns are organic with the general styles and the style, concentrating the life of popular idiom, is the expression of popular habit—the expression of a vigorous humane culture. For what is involved is not merely an idiomatic raciness of speech, expressing a strong vitality, but an art of social living, with its mature habits of valuation. We must beware of idealizing, but the fact is plain. There would have been no Shakespeare and no Bunyan if in their time, with all its disadvantages by present