All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not.

That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed, can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in which she herself was a copious practitioner.

But this mistake was not long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language respecting her, and to whom we now come.
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.