Puslapio vaizdai
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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. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a Catholic version of The Pilgrim's Progress, in which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization.

when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was yesterday at Madam Wanton's, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, 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 seventeenthcentury 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. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a Catholic version of The Pilgrim's Progress, in which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization.

poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,

admiration treads on the heels of worship.

All that I sung still to her praise did tend;
Still she was first, still she my song did end—

in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's work. Compared with this, that other song beginning:

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,

Though thou be black as night,

And she made all of light,

Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow

seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songs hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The compliment is certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out

When thou must home to shades of underground,

And, there arriv'd, a new admired guest,

The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,

White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,

To hear the stories of thy finisht love

From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in the second verse:

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,

Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.

There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an act of courtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expense of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles Campion to a place above any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare as a writer of songs. His dates (1567-1620) almost coincide with those of Shakespeare. Living in an age of music, he wrote music that Shakespeare alone could equal and even Shakespeare could hardly surpass. Campion's words are themselves airs. They give us at once singer and song and stringed instrument.

It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way comparable to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merely because of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he pours out in his songs. In contrast with his abundance, Campion's fortune seems lean, like his person. Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. Shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant background of the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of the existence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among his songs there is nothing comparable to "When daisies pied and violets blue," or "Where the bee sucks," or "You spotted snakes with double tongue," or "When daffodils begin to peer," or "Full fathom five," or "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." He had neither Shakespeare's eye nor Shakespeare's experiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse. He knows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies grow,

he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers.

Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs he dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." It is as though he

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