John Bunyan " TEEN read my Fancies, they will stick
like Burrs," wrote Bunyan in his Apology for Pilgrim's Progress. It would seem that in the last years his allegory has lost some of its powers of sticking in the mind. Children no longer read it, and it is to the child's imagination that Christian, Faithful, Giant Despair and the other inhabitants of Bunyan's Sunday version of fairyland first adhered, to cling there for the rest of life. To scholars—and especially American scholars, to judge from Profeisor Talon's very ample bibliography—he continues to appeal, and scholarly articles on his possible debt to mediaeval allegorists which he probably never read continue to proliferate.
But here, from an unexpected source, comes a book which has something new to say,' and which will send adults back to read Pilgrim's Progress. and perhaps Mr. Badman too, even if it cannot bring back Bunyan's old childish audience. The source is unexpected, because Professor Talon is a Roman Catholic, and continually stresses " the gulf which separates the Puritan, absorbed in the anguished contemplation of his sin and of invisible reality, from the Catholic who embraces the whole world as everlasting nourishment and as a fruit that we grip with our teeth." Yet Pro- fessor Talon sees that the intensity of Bunyan's single shattering experience, the moment of his conversion, amply atoned for this narrowness of his vision. " If by some miracle," he says, " the Puritan does succeed in re-creating his fervour and vision in a con- crete form, then he, too, will be an artist; and, by virtue of his temperament and conception of the world, a great artist." And Professor Talon's book triumphantly, and with consummate scholarship, demonstrates that this miracle indeed took place.
The need which drove Bunyan to write first the overtly auto- biographical Grace Abounding and then the covert account of his own trials and conversion in Pilgrim's Progress was, as Professor Talon sees it, the desire " to survey his whole life in one glance, the better to possess himself." For that reason we perhaps know him more intimately than he knew himself. Certainly there is a good deal of confusion in Grace Abounding. Yet—as Professor Talon puts it—though Bunyan often misconstrued his motives, his writing seemed to know them for him Once only, perhaps, did he go seriously wrong: in not concluding Pilgrim's Progress with the reception of Christian and Hopeful into the City. " And after that, they shut up the Gates: which when I had seen, I wished myself among them." Here, as an artist, Bunyan should. have stopped. But, as a Puritan moralist, he had one more lesson to drive home. So Ignorance was allowed to cheat his way over the River and through the Gate, only to be bound and imprisoned for his pains.
Yet even this superfluous page yields its little'elinging burr: " Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction."
Professor Talon sees another aspect of Bunyan's talent with a fresh eye. He considers him as, even before,Defoe, the father of the modern English novel. Great-Heart seems to him to foreshadow one of Hardy's peasants, while the other people in Pilgrim's Progress, though nearly all flat characters, " are capable of swelling out, of becoming round, of giving an impression of hpinan depth like those in Pickwick Papers." The novelist's quality' which Bunyan lacks, however, is a sense of time. To realise that the road is long and that days have passed, says Professor Talon, we have to calculate mathematically ; the sensation that time has elapsed is lacking. The explanation of this is, surely, Bunyan's desire to view his life as a whole. For a life can only be visible as a single pattern in a time- less world. Runyan was therefore not the progenitor of the novel in its narrative prime, but a model rather for novelists in its present decadence, for Kafka, Camus or Rex Warner who, like him but far more knowingly, create their worlds as a screen on which to project their interior landscapes.
Professor Talon gives as brilliant a picture of the social and the theological background as of Bunyan's religious experience and his artistry. His book is a product of knowledge tempered by wisdom, pleasantly written, ably- translated and. a most remarkable contribution by a Frenchman to- English letters. I. M. C,OHEN.
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