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.