Two centuries before--by, say, 1716--the novel had proceeded but a very little way. I should say that Bunyan in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and still more in _The Holy War_ had gone as far as any writer till that day and dying in 1688 he anticipated Defoe as novelist by at least a generation. Ostensibly the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is an allegorical work just as the English Bible is a theological or even a doctrinal one; but just as in the Morality Plays which were produced by professionally religious writers or actors and the Mysteries which were religious spectacles produced and acted under the direction of clerics by members of the professedly lay Guilds--just as in those productions the real attraction was the imaginative presentation of realities rather than the pious aspirations of authors or producers, so it is strongly to be suspected that the realistically human appeal of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ far outweighs the moral or religious interests. Indeed in _The Holy War_, which is an allegorical presentation of the eternal struggle between the unseen forces that make for good and evil on earth, the presentation of seventeenth-century warfare is for long passages so realistic that one might accuse Bunyan of having thrown up the moral sponge and of taking a pagan pleasure in fighting for fighting’s sake. He renders, in short, battles of the Great Rebellion in which he took part or on whose outskirts he was present. He rendered them and did not write about them. But the moral fervour and fierce sincerity of Bunyan are so far above suspicion that the mere fact that at times he was carried away in a sheer outburst of the artist’s spirit and love of terrestrial aspects for the mere sake of those aspects--his moral fervour is so great and so deserving of respect that no slightest tang of hypocrisy can attach to him any more than it can attach to the translators of the English Bible. And, if we except Smollett and possibly Samuel Richardson who was the real great precursor of the modern novel, we cannot say as much for any other English novelist who wrote before the later years of the nineteenth century. For it is impossible to absolve such writers as Defoe, Fielding, or Thackeray from the charge of deliberately writing with their tongues in their cheeks passages of virtuous aspirations that were in no way any aspirations of theirs and that in consequence very seriously detracted from the value of their works as art.