The Pilgrim’s Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of the imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian – and let me assure you, that there is a great theological acumen in the work – once with devotional feelings – and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: Table Talk (1836)
Born at Elstow, Bedfordshire, Bunyan was the son of a tinker, learned to read and write at the village school, and intended to follow his father’s trade. He was drafted into Cromwell’s army during the Civil War and stationed at Newport Pagnell. In 1649 he married his first wife, who introduced him to Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Bayly’s Practice of Piety, which, with Fox’s Book of Martyrs, exercised a decisive influence on him. After the Civil War he returned to Elstow as a brazier and became an itinerant Independent preacher. When anti-nonconformist laws were introduced at the restoration of the monarchy, he was arrested in November 1660 and spent most of the next twelve years in Bedford Gaol, where he wrote Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Holy City, or The New Jerusalem (1665) and A Confession of My Faith, and a Reason of My Practice (1672) and began The Pilgrim’s Progress. He was released in 1672 but imprisoned once more for a short period in 1676, when he finished The Pilgrim’s Progress, the first part of which was published in 1678, and the second part in 1684. He had four children by his first wife, who died in c.1656, shortly after which he married for the second time.
Who would true Valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There’s no Discouragement
Shall make him once Relent
His first avow’d Intent
To be a Pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal Storys,
Do but themselves Confound;
His Strength the more is.
No Lyon can him fright,
He’l with a Gyant Fight:
But he will have a right,2
To be a Pilgrim.
Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend3
Can daunt his Spirit:
He knows, he at the end,
Then Fancies fly away,
He’l fear not what men say,
He’l labour Night and Day,
To be a Pilgrim.
Vaughan Williams called his The Pilgrim’s Progress a Morality in a prologue, four acts and an epilogue. He fashioned the libretto himself, basing it on Bunyan, with interpolations from the Bible and verse by his wife, Ursula. The work preoccupied him for over forty years, beginning in 1906, when he wrote incidental music for a semi-professional stage adaptation in Reigate. The one-act episode The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, composed in 1921, was later incorporated into the finished opera as Act IV, sc. ii. He worked on Acts I and II between 1925 and 1936, temporarily abandoned the project, and used a few of the themes in his Fifth Symphony, which was premiered in 1943. His enthusiasm for the opera had been rekindled the previous year, during which he wrote thirty-eight sections of incidental music for a BBC dramatization by Edward Sackville-West – some of which was incorporated in the final operatic version on which he worked from 1944 to 1949, and 1951 to 1952. The work was premiered at Covent Garden on 26 April 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain. It was not well received, and Vaughan Williams declared: ‘They don’t like it, they won’t like it and perhaps they never will like it, but it’s the sort of opera I wanted to write, and there it is.’ Vaughan Williams, who was an agnostic, referred throughout to Christian as Pilgrim, ‘because I want the idea to be universal and to apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life whether he is Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Shintoist or Fifth Day Adventist’.
*
[They went then, till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which Mountains belong to the Lord of that Hill of which we have spoken before; so they went up to the Mountains, to behold the Gardens, and Orchards, the Vineyards, and Fountains of water, where also they drank, and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the Vineyards. Now there was on the tops of these Mountains, Shepherds feeding their flocks, and they stood by the high-way side. The Pilgrims therefore went to them, and leaning upon their staves, (as is common with weary Pilgrims, when they stand to talk with any by the way), they asked,] Whose Delectable Mountains are these? and whose be the sheep that feed upon them?
SHEP. These Mountains are Immanuels Land, and they are within sight of his City; and the sheep also are his, and he laid down his life for them.
CHR. Is this the way to the Cœlestial City?
SHEP. You are just in your way.
CHR. How far is it thither?
SHEP. Too far for any but those that shall get thither indeed.
CHR. Is the way safe or dangerous?
SHEP. Safe for those for whom it is to be safe; but transgressors shall fall therein.
CHR. Is there in this place any relief for Pilgrims that are weary and faint in the way?
SHEP. The Lord of these Mountains hath given us a charge, Not to be forgetful to entertain strangers: Therefore the good of the place is before you.