h, and three or four
more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's
fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint
effects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two
points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those
of the stricter sort: "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." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us
in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too
feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend
till more of you be burnt." We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play
of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the
story of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the gloom
of the realist in _Grace Abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in
_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Even in _Grace Abounding_, however, much as it
is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of
Bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to
prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to me
in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my
poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under would
break my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is the
dominating passion in _Grace Abounding_. We are never far from the noise
of Hell in its pages. In _Grace Abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. In
_The Pilgrim's Progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity for
fear, a hero. The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece of
heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that
went to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught
it, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall
arise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back,
as one that had received a mortal wound." Heroic literature cannot surpass
this.