heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better
than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made
himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute
enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever
modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it
is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the
story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of
the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present
writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,
achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes
called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present
in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by
those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its
principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and
abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill
of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:
while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount
of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is
probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting
the _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that this
encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to
remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation
of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one
of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it
is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to
supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his
time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if
it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious
intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the
"ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for
these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were
Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds
of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,
you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:
and whether we should do better or wo