Whatever else Bunyan is he is never long; he takes you quickly on
from incident to incident and, however little his incidents may
appeal to us, we feel that he is never giving us one that is not bona
fide so far as he is concerned. His episodes and incidents are
introduced not because he wants to make his book longer but because
he cannot be satisfied without these particular ones, even though he
may feel that his book is getting longer than he likes.
. . .
And here I must break away from this problem, leaving it unsolved.
[1897.]
Bunyan and the Odyssey
Anything worse than The Pilgrim's Progress in the matter of defiance
of literary canons can hardly be conceived. The allegory halts
continually; it professes to be spiritual, but nothing can be more
carnal than the golden splendour of the eternal city; the view of
life and the world generally is flat blasphemy against the order of
things with which we are surrounded. Yet, like the Odyssey, which
flatly defies sense and criticism (no, it doesn't; still, it defies
them a good deal), no one can doubt that it must rank among the very
greatest books that have ever been written. How Odyssean it is in
its sincerity and downrightness, as well as in the marvellous beauty
of its language, its freedom from all taint of the schools and, not
least, in complete victory of genuine internal zeal over a scheme
initially so faulty as to appear hopeless.
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