Note (return) — Chapter II · FROM LYLY TO SWIFT

It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that The Pilgrim's Progress and The Holy War are religious, and that they are allegories.5 It may be humbly suggested that by applying the double rule to verse we can exclude Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must not cancel Don Quixote from the list of the world's novels. Even in prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation—unless it comes from the foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry of the last generation or two—comes from the almost equally foolish determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing measure, even The Holy War is a novel, and that The Pilgrim's Progress has every one of the four requisites—plot, character, description, and dialogue—while one of these requisites—character with its accessory manners—is further developed in the History of Mr. Badman after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the "English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This wonderful little sketch, however—the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed repentance—is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel—a sketch of a bourgeois Barnes Newcome—than anything more. It has the old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half a century before Fielding attempted Joseph Andrews, no more need be said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory are too prominent in The Holy War—the novelist's desk is made too much of a pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind: and if The Pilgrim's Progress did not exist, it would be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most fortunately does exist, this is not needful.