l the pleasures which money can buy; his bad
wife helps him to ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies
in peace. Bunyan has made him a brute, because such men do become
brutes. It is the real punishment of brutal and selfish habits. There
the figure stands; a picture of a man in the rank of English life with
which Bunyan was most familiar, travelling along the primrose path to
the everlasting bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the
Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Pleasures are
to be found among the primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be
gratified by. Yet the reader feels that even if there was no bonfire,
he would still prefer to be with Christian.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE HOLY WAR.

The supernatural has been successfully represented in poetry,
painting, or sculpture, only at particular periods of human history,
and under peculiar mental conditions. The artist must himself believe
in the supernatural, or his description of it will be a sham, without
dignity and without credibility. He must feel himself able at the same
time to treat the subject which he selects with freedom, throwing his
own mind boldly into it, or he will produce, at best, the hard and
stiff forms of literal tradition. When Benvenuto Cellini was preparing
to make an image of the Virgin, he declares gravely that Our Lady
appeared to him that he might know what she was like; and so real was
the apparition that for many months after, he says that his friends
when the room was dark could see a faint aureole about his head. Yet
Benvenuto worked as if his own brain was partly the author of what he
produced, and, like other contemporary artists, used his mistresses
for his models, and was no servile copyist of phantoms seen in
visions. There is a truth of the imagination, and there is a truth of
fact, religion hovering between them, translating one into the other,
turning natural phenomena into the activity of personal beings; or
giving earthly names and habitations to mere creatures of fancy.
Imagination creates a mythology. The priest takes it and fashions out
of it a theology, a ritual, or a sacred history. So long as the priest
can convince the world that he is dealing with literal facts, he holds
reason prisoner, and imagination is his servant. In the twilight when
dawn is coming near but has not yet come; when the uncertain nature of
the legend is felt, though not intelligently discerned; ima