"The Pilgrim's Progress" exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he
would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential
of Christian preachers. Hallam, however, claims for him another
distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him,
as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many
predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the
natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their
works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way. Bunyan was
the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so
overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness;
while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have
ever proved so universally entertaining. Intensely religious as it is in
purpose, "The Pilgrim's Progress" may be safely styled the first English
novel. "The claim to be the father of English romance," writes Dr.
Allon, "which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to
Bunyan. Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the
creator of the genus." As the parent of fictitious biography it is that
Bunyan has charmed the world. On its vivid interest as a story, its
universal interest and lasting vitality rest. "Other allegorises,"
writes Lord Macaulay, "have shown great ingenuity, but no other
allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its
abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love." Whatever its
deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in
the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological
deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept
Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae
Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even
if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of
the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its
universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of