The Express.
London, England, 1859-11-04 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Bunyan', Pilgrim's Progres s ; with Illustrations
by Citsauts BENNETT, and a Preface by the Rev.
CHARLES KINGSLEY. Longman.
Once a year, that is to say in the full spring time,
we who are " in town " follow the pretty fasnion of
looking through the galleries of art then opened for
exhibition. Very little experience in this branch of
polite amusement enables us to foretel in great
me sure the sensations we are about to undergo, on
the occasion of each particular visit. The most
attractive pictures will have been manufactured by
the fortunate body of artists who receive commis-
sions to paint them ; and we shall admire and praise
such works with no disagreeable consciousness of
being required to form new opinions upon their
merits. Oar satisfaction will be of an easy sort ; in
some instances it may rise perhaps to delight ; still
the delight will not be as a strange garment, but
wilt cleave to its mould with the aid of use. Then,
slain, in the mass of paintings which await pur-
chasers, we shall perceive a great deal that has be-
come already familiar to our eyes; and though, as a
matter of course, more originality is to be looked for
in this larger section—which, besides being the larger
section, includes all the young schools—we shall be
fortunate to discover, somewhere near the ground,
or high up in a badly lighted corner of the smallest
soma, one clear and positive token of a genius which
trill yet enfold Melt and Ay at nobler things.

Onoe a year, too, there is an Isthmian encounter
of pencils in the design of editions de lure.
The train of illustrated volumes, beginning about
the present time, will last until Christmas, and
we are prepared to weloome a galaxy of artistic
beauty which will charm us for a time, without
disturbing a single idea as to what one should expect
such beauty to be. Only a very few signs of open-
ing life, and new development of power and feeling,
will trouble us to think what places they are des-
tined to fill. We have one such sign, to be sure, in
the earliest slue of the competitive display. The
new edition of Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress," with
its many thoughtful and striking illustrations by
Mr. Bennett, and its eloquent preface by the Rev.
Charles Kingsley, justifies, by its extraordinary
merit in every department of labour, the promises
that have reached us within the pest mouth oe so.
The preface, relating chiefly to the work of the
artist, which is the remarkable feature about this
volume, would have passed very well for the lan-
guage of Mr. Ruskin. To say this implies that it is
worthy to be quoted ; u the following passage will
prove to be no more than true :

To be a faithful illudrator of any bookie no light task.
For no illustration an be considered true which does not
project on paw the very image which was projected upon
the author's brain. Every poet (and Bunyan was • poet)
thinks in pictures to guere what each picture was, and set
it down, is the whole of the illustrator's duty. But this re-
quires a dramatic faculty, a power of standing In another
man's place, and seeing with his ere, which falls to the lot
of few; and which In the cam of Bunyan, whose strength
lies in his knowledge of human character, to the let of very
few indeed. His men and women are living persona, no
two of them alike ; not mere abstractions of a vice or a.int
but English men and women of his own time, whose natural
peculiarities of countananoe, language, gesture, have been
moulded in the course of years, by obedience to some one
overruling defect or virtue. I say of one; for of those com-
plexities and contradictions of the human heart, which we
are now so fond of trying to unravel, Bunyan takes little
note. The distinction between the children of light and
those of darkness was too strongly marked, both in his reli-
gions system, and (as he believed)lathe two English parties
of the day, for him to conceive thole double characters which
Shakapearit, from a wider and dam point of view, saw
round him, and drew so well. Wes the teas regenerate or
unregenerate ? A child of God or of the Devil? A rood man
and true, or a bed mac and false ?is his only criterion. In
his regenerate characters, Wee!, wait as Christian and
Hopeful, ha introduces this self-costrodietion, the image of
that inward conflict between " the spirit and the flesh,"
which he bad felt in himself; but in the =regenerate ones
he allows of no such conflict. They are self-contentedly
" dead in trespamme and situ," the slava of some one bad
habit which has moulded gradually their whole personality.
In this conception, marrow as it metered Ord fight, he is not
altogether wrong. It is a patent lest abet In primped= as
any ern isWM up Is silk sal beessible of the Ideas elobo
of life, his character narrows to ens treensllng Idea, sod be-
comes absorbed by one overran pamitek till, like the mad-
man, he heoomes unconscious of tbe eittek universe, rye at
the one fined point at which it seams to *cook his own selfish
nature. Shakapeare, when he draws Xs* be very seldom
does) thoroughly bad men, duds It neoerary to narrow their
sphere of thought and feeling, till they would become (under
less skilful hands than his) mere Impersonations of some
special vice. Edmund, Shylock, adlege! have that horrible
. .

Wonsietency of aim. that minosn'trationid mind end heart
upon oas paltry purpose, which Bunyan has extended to the
whole " unregenerate " world.
Mr. Kingsley supposes Bunyan to have drawn
mostly from life, and shows very fair reasons for the
supposition. The faces which the illustrator has
undertaken to reproduce as the faces Banyan saw in
his vision should no doubt be human faces, and as
like as can be made to those "which he had seen,
perhaps, in the church and in the market-place, and
studied by such instincts or rules of physiognomy as
he had before he transferred them to his story."
Again, the portraits Bunyan drew were not merely
life portraits, but "English portraits—men of the
solid, practical, unimpassioned, midland rice." So
Mr. Bennett has been wisely encouraged to look for
hie types in the same country—the midland English
country—where men's character seems to have
changed as little, Mr. Kingsley remarks, as their
surnames. To look for the ideal in the actual, the
universal in the particular, and to draw boldly
from life, called for some exercise of courage
on Mr. Bennett's part, no doubt, inasmuch
as to do this was indeed " to ran his
knowledge of human nature against Bunyan's.
But it should be noticed that the race is one which
cannot be decided, upon this ground, by any living
judge ; and that, however bold an undertaking it may
seem to keep pace with the genius of Bunyan, a
practised draughtsman of very ordinary intelligence
will have certain points in his favour which Bunyan
lacked, not to count upon the obvious fact that there
is no possible way of telling what were the faces
which Banyan really did see. Now, there is a part
of Mr. Bennett's work which the preface has not
taken into consideration at all, but which we think
deserves higher praise even than does his life-like
personification of the virtues and vices in the "Pil-
grim's Progress." It is in the small woodcut,, illus-
trative pnocipally of the scenes in Vanity Fair,
but sprinkled over the whole volume, that Mr.
Bennett exhibits a quality more admirable than his
character-drawing. He has, in those little pictures,
run his imagination against the imagination of John
Bunyan ; and this was to court a far more perilous
comparison. The design of the man in the iron
cage, at the house of the Interpreter, is one instano4;
the ban of the cage taking the semblance of the
world, as geographers describe it. This is a fancy
quite worthy the brain of the Puritan author, and is
Mr. Bennett's own. From an *lnborn', de rieheese
we will disentangle one more piece of poetical re-
flection. A butterfly hovering on the use's jaw-bone,
memorable in the scripture story of Samson, is se
complete an image of weakness attending strength
as could possibly have occurred to any mind ; and
Mr. Bennett's delicate handiwork helps the almost
playful beauty of the thought. The drawing
throughout the volume cannot be pronounced good.
The marvel is that, with a faculty co marked and
singular, Mr. Bennett should not have found means
to acquire the grammar of his art. One would
almost fancy that a clever lad, fresh from his first
lesson in drawing the human figure, could teach Mr.
Bennett all that would be necessary to make him •
great artist. Why will he insist on placing the ear
about half its length too high on a head which is
seen in a certain position ? The rule is that the
nose and ear should be even, top and bottom. Mr.
Bennett breaks that rule whenever he draws a full
face, but not when he draws a profile. This is very
strange, and would seem to betoken that he does not
take into account the carved line of the cheek, but
strikes a horizontal line at once from the baaeof the
nostril to the tip of the ear. But for errors such as
this, and even more puerile, the majority of the
heads in this book would be Hogarthian in their oat-
line, as they are in richness of character. We do
not think thus is anything in Hogarth much more

r powerful than the face—a portrait and scarcely a
caricature—of Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The woodcut
of a face representative of the Lust of the Flesh"
is, but for a partial annihilation of its most prominent
feature, a curiously successful embodiment of ern-
euality. Mr. Bennett, with all his shortcomings as
an artist, possesses qualifications which few artists
now among us could have brought to such a task as
this. His physiognomical observation is wonderfully
acute, and the outline of hie heads shows that he
has given some attention to phrenology. As the
book is quite a topic in artistic as well as literary
circles, we may be cordoned noticing two or three
points of general durcussion. The etchings, mas-
terly in their very roughness, are said to be Mr.
Bennett'it first attempts in this branch of art. Nearly
all the types of character are metropolitan like-
nesses; and one or two will be ludicrously familiar
to Londoners of all classes. In one face, for the
model of which Mr. Bennett explored a lugs prison,
is seen the portrait, not of a captive, but of a turn-
key. No other face there would have served half
so well.

Mr. Kingsley's preface is valuable only in its
relations to Mr. Bennett's pictures. As introductory
to the " Pilgrim's Progress " it is worse than worth-
less. His views of human nature and life and those
which Banyan took are not only different but
irreconcileable. This is not the occasion to in-
quire which are right, especially as his main
purpose in writing this preface appears to
have been the deserved exaltation of the artist into a
far higher rank than he has ever yet held in public
estimation. We, who read the "Pilgrim's Progress"
first by aids of illustration far different from then
afforded by the pencil of Mr. Bennett, may yet be
pardoned • lingering fondness for the manifesta-
tions of a school of art which cannot and ought not
to be perpetuated. There can be no doubt that those
half nude or wholly nude figures, Ina quaint fashion
which is not scriptural and not heathen, but an im-
perfect compromise of the two, would have pleased
Bunyan little enough. We take leave to think that
the spirit, at all events, of Mr. Bennett's designs
would have been more after his heart; though
in all likelihood Bunyan cared but little
for pictorial representations of any kind. Let
us observe before quitting the subject of the
preface, in its connexion with the drawings of Mr.
Bennett, that the young artist has thanked his friend
in a pretty allegorical vignette, which represents a
pilgrim assisting his brother in the ascent of a diffi-
cult pass—the two personalities being distinguished
by the form of the staff carried by either traveller,
one being in the shape of a pen and the other a
pencil. The artist who can naturally imagine and
skilfully carry out so graceful • device will sully
have deserved the " lift."
Every mechanical part of the work in this book is
excellent, and might have belonged to a time " when
art was still religion," and when to labour was in-
deed to pray. The wood engraving, by Mr. Joseph
Swain and his assistants, could not be surpassed.
The public has been led to think too little of such
painstaking, while demanding it for ends of mere
luxury. If one happened to know the name of the
workman whose business it was to " bring up" the
impression by the skilful interposition of pieces of cut
paper between certain parts of the block and the
machine, so u to regulate the pressure, we should
have a satisfaction in writing that name and remem-
bering it. And so with the printing, binding, and
every detail. The work throughout seems to have
been art-work, and that of the very first order.

DRAMA.

BTL&ND.

It is time that a protest, however feeble, should be
raised against a style of theatrical writing which is rapidly
wiring at a pitch of hitherto unexampled degradation. We
allude to the burlesques which from pleasant airy trifles,
genial fairy stories, told with clinic elegance by Planche
with sparkling wit by Brough, are now the baldest parodies
et wall-known subjects, distorted lathe matt stations &anon,
laden with dislocated words and disjointed plasm, sad
making with the slang and ribaldry of the Wens sad the
kennel. The authors of whom we speak end their reeding is
the Slang Dictionary and the street-patteree's flesh ergs ;
their wain the lowest repartees of Magma boys; their rhyme
and rhythm in the publications of Mr. Catnach. Tate a
popular legend (the more poetical the better), ridicule every
decent feeling, scoff at every proper act, parody
every pretty air, make young ladles use the language

of Whitechapel and Blue-grate-fields, cast in random
allusions to subjects which were popular three
months since, wind up every song with an extravagant
dance, garnish with good scenery, and aerosol) with consum-
mate impudence, and your modern burlesque is completer
which will be swallowed with immense relish by a degraded
public.
It is with very great regret that vs are compelled to de-
clare that the "comic operatic extravaganza" of AMMO mei
produced last night, is of this kind, and that we are
consequently compelled as a matter of serious duty to con-
demn It in very strong terms. The management of the
Strand Theatre bee been hitherto ro excellent, widths author
of the piece, Mr. Andrew Halliday, nee been so favourably
known to the public (for in none of the humorous essays
which he has contributed to periodical literature has there
been anything in the least degree offensive to good taste), that
it Is specially distasteful to have to speak in damnatory lan-
guage of their joint efforts. But if criticism be at all
regarded as en adjudication of merit or demerit,
and not a mere synopsis of the plot and characters of a play
(equal in weight to the printed " argument " of a beikr),
the truth, however painful it may be, should be boldly and
openly Rokotl.

CRYSTAL PALACIL—The wooed to-morrow will
consist enthely of works composed by the late Dr. Spoilt,
whose &elk et Cassell was announced lost week. Hie greet
symphony, the " Power of Sound," will be played, and
Mr. Homey RI/grows will perform hie dramatic concerto for
rblln. Madame Lef.ormene illterrtsgto, will be the vocalist.

ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OP LONDON.—At the
mcethly general meeting, held yesterday at the society's
home in Hanover-square, Dr. Grey, vice-president, in the
chair, his Excellency Sir George Grey, H.C.8., Colonel
J. M. Caulfield, and Meters. Jelin Scott, W. C. Hewitros,
C. Booth, T. H. Stewart, J. Wolf, H. Woodward, Si,
Leger Olyn, and R. Towns were elected fellows ; the Hon.
ChM. A. Ellis, Major Hay. Mr. C. H. Mills, and Mr. A. T.
Bruce were proposed u candidates for the fellowehip ; and
the Rev. John Fry, of the Caps of Good Hope, sod Mr. D.
G. Elliot, of New York, were proposed es correspond
members of the society. The report from the
amongst other things stated that the number of visitors es
the gardens daring the present year had already amounted
to 334,187, showing an inereess se compared with the same
period in 1868 of upwards of 19,000 persons.
CAPTAIN 111.CLINTOcK, R.N., AT DIINDALK.—.A
meeting of the inhabitants of Dundalk and its vicinity took
place on Monday, in the grand jury room of tie Court-home,
in order to present • testimonial to the distinguished die-
coverer of the relics of the Franklin expedition. The testi-
monial consisted of a 1:131•SiVII silver elver, and a beautifully
deadened claret jug of the same material. On both articles
were engraved the crest of the fd`Clintock family, and also
the corporation arms of the teen of Dundalk, and tho fol-
lowing inscription This salver sad accompanying
claret jug were presented to T. Leopold X•Clintock,
Esq.. captain, R.N., late commander of the Fox,
by his fellow.townerneo, the inhabitants of Dundalk,
and Ito vicinity, in testimony of his gallantry, set,
and perseverance, while in corcmand of the expedition to dis-
cover tidings of the late lamented Sir John Franklin and
competitions, and of its successful Woe." Shortly after three
o'clock Captain M'Cliatock arrived, and was warmly greeted
by the assemblers, which constituted a large portion of the
rank and wealth of the town and neighbourhood, besides
some gentlemen from a distance. The Hon. Major :mein
came forward to reed the address. Captain M'Clintock, who
wee very warmly greeted, on coming forward, reed • suitable
reply, after which several persona advanced and shook hands
with the gallant gentleman; among others an old and respect-
able superannuated custom-home officer named Perkin', in
whose charge he soiled to Bristol to join the first ship is
Ms 'restful life. The proceedings then terminated.—Nmery
flztonther.

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