He is the Ulysses of his own prose-epic.
This is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the
representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in
particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its
startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of
Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our
guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his
allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream.
Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at
setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford
jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which
it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind
become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But
Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered
on the Muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. There
is likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted
which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,[296] for example, is by no
means the Ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for
the sublime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with
his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early
faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination.
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