Authors, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Bunyan, John, 1628-1688; Puritans -- England -- Clergy -- Biography
One great charm of these works, especially of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are written, which render
them models of the English speech, plain but never vulgar, homely but
never coarse, and still less unclean, full of imagery but never obscure,
always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to the point in the
fewest and simplest words; "powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam,
"from concise simplicity." Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord
Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide
command over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
common people. "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of
theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant." We may, look through
whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables. Nor is the
source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.
Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best,
not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the
English Bible. "In no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more
clearly than in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginative force which
had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the
Bible. Bunyan's English is the simplest and homeliest English that has
ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English of the
Bible. His images are the images of prophet and evangelist. So
completely had the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases
as the natural expression of his thoughts. He had lived in the Bible
till its words became his own."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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