THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JOHN BUNYAN

By Harold E. B. Speight, with an introduction by Francis G. Peabody. New York: Harper Brothers, 1928.

The appearance of this book, which has already sold well up in the thousands, is a good augury for the department of biography at Dartmouth. Its publication marks the announcement of the fact that its author, who is now doing successful work in the department of philosophy, is to become the head of the department of biography in the fall, when the present reviewer enters upon an indeterminate leave of absence, graciously granted by the President, happily without severing his connection with the department. Not every department can signalize a change in chairmen with such a blare of trumpets. Nor can every retiring chairman congratulate the college so heartily upon his successor.

Under these circumstances, it would be impossible to attempt a cold analytic review of the book which marks Professor Speight's entry into a department upon whose development I am so confidently counting. I prefer rather to indicate the characteristics of Mr. Speight rather than of Mr. Bunyan which the book reveals.

To begin with, Professor Speight is evidently not a man who retires into his intellectual fastness and awaits a visit from the sprightly goddess, Opportunity. The careful editing of a volume for Harpers led to an invitation from that firm to prepare another in commemoration of the tercentenary of John Bunyan's birth. With no undue hesitation, no tarrying for a more congenial subject, he accepted. He took advantage of occasion; he used the mood of the hour to give his words carrying power. So well was the opportunity embraced that the first large order for the volume came from the Religious Book Club, which adopted it as its book of the month. Notwithstanding that at least two other books on Bunyan have marked the centenary, Professor Speight's book was the only recent volume admitted to the great Bunyan exhibition in the New York Library.

The volume shows, moreover, on which side of the biographical fence Professor Speight will be found. Nothing was easier than to write a biography of Bunyan in the Asbury or Lipsky style. Strachey has made irony not only permissible but indicated both for popularity and for financial returns. Professor Speight is probably unaware of the temptation that he has put aside. Yet he does not share Bunyan's theology nor is his emphasis in living placed where Bunyan placed his. Indeed some will find the book defective in minimizing the otherworldliness and individualism of Bunyan. Many liberal Christians blessed with Professor Speight's sense of humor, even had they suppressed the caustic mood, would have used Bunyan as a text to indicate how far we had progressed in goodness and virtue in three hundred years. But that is not at all the author's purpose. He has set himself the task of appreciation and he has nobly fulfilled it. Having before him the author of one of the most influential books of the world and of two other notable volumes as well, he wishes to disclose the sources of his power in his time and in the century succeeding, rather than to point out with a sneer why he has no influence in ours. Dartmouth alumni can count on lining up its professor of the fascinating and expanding field of biography with Bradford and Sandburg rather than with Strachey and Annin and Rupert Hughes.

The volume reveals with overwhelming clearness to the reviewer a secret which he will share with the readers of this confidential magazine. For the author is not only the successor but the next door neighbor of the reviewer. Hence the latter can testify that much of the preparation and perhaps some of the actual composition of this volume was done on the porch of his house, while a few rods away the author was overseeing the building of his own. Nor, while he was building at once his house and his book, did he neglect a friendly game of pool. Few men work with such concentration and ease. If this book, thus quickly done, supersedes Froude, as one of its reviewers declares, what contributions to biography may we not expect from its author?

I have more to say" than the editor will permit. He also thinks biography the greatest interest of the readers of this magazine, but he insists on the rights of living men to biographic mention. I can therefore merely mention that when Professor Speight quotes an authority, he underscores it so strongly that it fairly jumps out at you from the page, that he fills many a page with quotations from the original source so that you can come into close grips with the man, that he indicates that not even Bunyan could write a Pilgrim's Progress without having toiled through one himself, and that he endeavors to hang the famous incidents of the allegory on the small hooks which history still allows to project from the facts of Bunyan's obscure career.

I am bound to confess in conclusion that I have not met many Dartmouth men who seemed to me to be making as obviously as Christian for the goal which glorified his way and that I am in some doubt as to whether those that are would find the famous book interesting. Detailed allegories are as apt to confine the unpredictable experiences of life in a strait-jacket as are systems of theology. I commend the present volume to them, however, for the sake of getting acquainted with the author rather than with his subject and I assure them that if they do so, they will lay themselves down to "sleep as confident of the future of the department as I.