puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and
Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious
melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic
characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing,
you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The
comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison
between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know
Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not
interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might
be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a
general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a
child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own
biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a
Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.

Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your
Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside
Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss
that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the
world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the
comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue
and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your
blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and
secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes
and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived
how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back
from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his
pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of