Peace … is expressed by singing, because the peace of God when it is received into the soul by faith putteth the conscience into a heavenly and melodious frame.
BUNYAN1
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 avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.
Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
Can daunt his spirit:
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
BUNYAN2
MUSIC was a controversial subject in the seventeenth century. Francis Osborne denounced the ‘time and cost’ wasted on it. John Locke thought music ‘wastes so much of a young man’s time, to give him but a moderate skill in it, and engages him in such odd company.’ Jeremy Collier said that music was ‘almost as dangerous as gunpowder, and it may be requires looking after no less than the press or the Mint.’3 For Locke and his like by the end of the seventeenth century music was something that should be left to professionals, of an inferior rank; for Bunyan it was still a living part of popular culture.
The idea that Puritans were opposed to music has, one would have hoped, been scotched for ever by Percy Scholes’s The Puritans and Music. But myths have a way of living on long after they have been disproved. Some Puritans disliked certain types of music in church services, since they believed that polyphony or choral singing, for instance, or the playing of organs distracted the attention of auditors from the intellectual content of worship; but under Puritan rule in the 1640s ‘music flourished as never before’. Bunyan, like John Owen, played the flute, and Bunyan is said to have made himself a flute out of a chair-leg to play in jail. There survive a metal violin and a cabinet decorated with musical instruments which are believed to have belonged to him. The very title of Grace Abounding may come from a book of madrigals.4
Hymn- and psalm-singing, St Augustine tells us, were first introduced under persecution, ‘lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow’. Congregational singing, as opposed to singing by choristers only, was regarded as a protestant innovation. Bishop Jewell in 1559 thought that the kingdom of ‘the mass-priests and the devil … is weakened and shaken at almost every note’ uttered by large crowds singing together after the sermon at Paul’s Cross. At Exeter, in the same year, laymen singing metrical psalms invaded the cathedral choir, despite the clergy’s attempts to keep them out. In Elizabeth’s reign a Puritan village in Northamptonshire abandoned the prayer book and substituted communal psalm-singing plus a sermon. London congregations in 1640 sang psalms to drown the prayer book service. Popular songs were adapted by reformers for religious themes: the Geneva psalter relied heavily on ballad tunes.5 Congregational singing became controversial.
Hymns, as opposed to metrical psalms, came to be associated with the more radical sects, Baptists in particular. No congregational singing was envisaged by the Book of Common Prayer. George Wither in 1622 published Hymns and Songs of the Church, but he failed in his efforts to get it printed with the prayer book. In 1641 his Hallelujah assumed that his readers would be familiar with the metrical psalms. The Long Parliament’s Directory of 1644 enjoined the singing of metrical psalms only. It must have been these that Bunyan enjoyed singing in Elstow parish church.
Congregational hymn-singing flourished during the breakdown of ecclesiastical controls in the 1640s, when congregations could take their own decisions. John Goodwin’s church in Coleman Street sang hymns to celebrate the victories of Dunbar and Worcester; John Rogers’s Independent church in Dublin sang hymns in the 1650s. John Cotton’s Singing of Psalms a Gospel Ordinance (1650) was followed in 1653 by Thomas Ford’s Singing of Psalms the Duty of Christians. (Ford had been chaplain to the regiment of his cousin, Sir Samuel Luke, when Bunyan was stationed at Newport Pagnell. Since Ford’s book derived from sermons, Bunyan may have heard him preach on the subject. Ford became a nonconformist after the restoration, and is believed to have been the author of a pamphlet which attacked the bishops as ‘unprofitable drones’, guilty of covetousness, extortion, and oppression of tenants.)6 John Goodwin, Vavasor Powell, Thomas Lambe, Christopher Feake, and Anna Trapnel all composed hymns. George Fox thought that Christians ‘might sing in hymns, psalms and spiritual songs’, so long as they avoided ‘David’s psalms made metre by Hopkins and Sternhold after the manner of the priests’. But not all Quakers agreed. The Story-Wilkinson Quaker separatists objected to any congregational singing; disputes continued.7
In 1660 the restored Church of England made no concessions towards hymn-singing. ‘Men triumphing in a House of Commons that sang psalms’ to celebrate a Parliamentarian victory were still remembered with resentment in 1679. ‘Hymns’, says their historian, ‘seem to be more congenial to the persecuted’—again especially Baptists. In 1664 Benjamin Keach issued a Child’s Instructor with hymns; but it was seized and destroyed, and he was pilloried and imprisoned for his pains. The book nevertheless went through thirty editions during the next 100 years. Keach introduced regular hymn-singing into church services at his Southwark congregation; it led to a schism.8 Under the Indulgence of 1672 Vavasor Powell’s collected hymns appeared, followed by Abraham Cheare’s; John Playford’s Psalms and Hymns had been printed in 1671, but it was not until 1685–6 that W. Rogers published A New and Easy Method to learn to sing by Book.9
Hymn-singing then was regarded by the authorities as potentially dangerous. It was associated with the lower classes, with Baptists and Muggletonians. John Mason, rector of Water Stratford, published Spiritual Songs in 1683, which became very popular; but he was no orthodox Anglican. He became a millenarian, followed by large crowds; like Bunyan, he taught that the poor were to be saved, not the rich. He wrote a poem on Dives and Lazarus. He did not even bother to discuss his opinions with learned men, whom he regarded as hopeless. His following assembled at Water Stratford to await the millennium, sharing their property in common. The popularity of his hymns seems to have been with dissenters rather than Anglicans.10
Among Baptists too the subject led to disagreements. Singing hymns and psalms could be seen as equivalent to repeating set forms of prayer; and you could never be sure that all those with whom you joined in song were the elect of God. The Hexham church in 1653 thought that ‘singing of psalms with the world, that is with the multitude where you meet’, was something that they, like the church at Coleman Street, London, would shun. Knollys and Keach, who favoured congregational singing, got involved in controversies on the subject in London after 1688.11
There had been disputes over this in the Bedford church from its earliest days. Gifford warned against them in his deathbed letter, but they recurred from at least 1674 onwards. Hymn-singing was not formally accepted until October 1690, two years after Bunyan’s death, by a majority of eighteen to two. Even then the church insisted that none should ‘perform in it but such as can sing with grace in their hearts’. Those who did not feel free to sing might depart from that part of the service. The discussion had clearly been acrimonious, and it continued until at least 1700.12 The Toleration Act of 1689 removed one obstacle to hymn-singing: congregations were no longer afraid to draw attention to their existence.
There can be no doubt about where Bunyan stood in these disputes. He loved music, and had no use for ‘closed-communion’ arguments. As early as 1659 he anticipated ‘singing the Lord’s songs’ in the New Jerusalem. Several of his poems deal with music; two are printed with tunes, which have not been identified. Scholes suggested that these might be of Bunyan’s own composition, but Midgley is doubtful. One tune ‘has something of the character of a jig, and he may well have remembered it from his unregenerate dancing days.’13
Tindall suggested that the songs in The Pilgrim’s Progress were intended as propaganda on behalf of church singing. They are preponderantly in the measures of Sternhold and Hopkins. The Interpreter ‘did usually entertain those that lodged with him with music at meals, so the minstrels played’ and someone sang. ‘Music in the house, music in the heart, and music also in heaven for joy that we are here’, cried Mercy in the Palace Beautiful. (The emphasis on women playing and singing is probably connected with Bunyan’s view of women’s domestic role, expressed in the controversies about women’s meetings going on at this time.) ‘The church [is] to sing now new songs, with new hearts, for new mercies’, wrote Bunyan in one of the last treatises he published; ‘Sion-songs, temple-songs, must be sung by Sion’s sons and temple-worshippers;… in the church, by the church.’14
Bunyan in his later writings continually insists on the acceptability of music, singing, and dancing. This emphasis stands out in Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress and in later additions to Part I. When Mr. Great-heart crosses the River of Death, ‘the trumpets sounded for him on the other side’, as they had done for Christ at his ascension. This may be a recollection of victory celebrations when Bunyan was in the army at Newport Pagnell. But instrumental music, singing, and dancing feature no less than martial music (PP, 160, 309).
Bunyan gave up his early addiction to bell-ringing—whether because he thought it sinful in itself, or only sinful on the Sabbath is not clear. (A Parliamentary ordinance of 4 April 1644 forbade, among other things, ‘ringing of bells for pleasure or pastime’ on Sundays.) Bell-ringing as such was far from being opposed by all Puritans. When a Russian ambassador came to England for the first time in 1645, after London had been under Puritan domination for four years, the merry pealing of church bells was one of the things he reported to the Tsar as having most impressed him. Others included the universal singing of psalms and the beautiful stained-glass windows in London churches—which, according to the legend, Puritans had by then destroyed, together with church bells.15 Bunyan’s delight in bell-ringing continued as long as he lived, and is expressed in The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. In a poem called ‘Upon a Ring of Bells’ in A Book for Boys and Girls bell-ringing is mentioned with pleasure and no disapprobation: it shows knowledge of technical terms (231–2). Lewis Bayly had left £5 to his birthplace, Carmarthen, ‘to buy a bell’.16
Bunyan stopped dancing as well as bell-ringing, though with more difficulty. But in The Pilgrim’s Progress Christian and Hopeful dance when they escape from Giant Despair’s prison. In Part II there is dancing to the viol and lute as well as music on virginals, singing, and trumpets. In The Holy War every celebration calls for trumpets, and all the time there are singing-men and singing-women, music in every house, bells, pipes, and tabors, damsels playing on timbrels, dancing.17 The vision of ‘the elders of Man-soul … dancing before Emanuel’ is particularly agreeable, and it is unlikely that Bunyan did not see its comic side. I suspect it relates to controversies over hymn-singing, in which Bunyan would hardly have failed to get his own way if he had not been opposed by elders.
Perhaps I am saying it at excessive length. But I think the point must be made that Bunyan, like most seventeenth-century Puritans, was no killjoy. He thought Quaker teetotallers were ‘walking after their own lusts, and not after the spirit of God.’ The pilgrims drink wines and spirits—the latter only in Part II. At the feasts which Emanuel gave to Mansoul there was ‘brave entertainment’, wines, and a succession of exotic dishes (‘promise after promise’).18
Anyone attempting to write about Bunyan’s poems must depend heavily on Graham Midgley’s excellent introduction to the Oxford University Press edition. This has established the case for regarding Bunyan not as a failed Herbert, Vaughan, Crashawe, or Herrick, but as ‘the inheritor and refiner of a folk-tradition of verse’, drawing on ballads, broadsides, chap-books, and metrical psalms. Midgley gives an intriguing list of possible influences on Bunyan from such sources, including The Wofull Lamentation of Edward Smith, a poore penitent prisoner in the jayle of Bedford, which was published some time before 1633; and The Pensive Prisoner’s Apology (date uncertain) by a prisoner of conscience urging steadfastness and rejoicing in his suffering. Midgley reasonably suggests that Bunyan may have continued to read religious ballads and chap-books after his conversion: most of those which have survived were Puritan in tone (pp. xxvii-xxxvi). Indeed the echo of Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison’ in Bunyan’s Prison Meditations:
For though men keep my outward man
Within their locks and bars,
Yet by the faith of Christ I can
Mount higher than the stars (43),
may in fact come not from reading Lovelace’s:
Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage
but via The Pensive Prisoner’s Apology:
Yet though I am in prison cast
My senses mounts on high,
The wind that bloweth where it list
Knows no such liberty (xxxiii, 320)
Midgley points out that the stanza patterns in Bunyan’s poems printed before 1684—twenty-five types of them—all have their equivalent in Sternhold and Hopkins, but Bunyan was by now escaping from their ‘metrical thud’ and unvarying line lengths. This allowed him ‘greater freedom and exuberance’ (pp. xxiv-xxvi, xlvii). In addition to the popular ballad quatrain, adopted in and after 1665, he uses the pentameter couplet, not to be found in the metrical psalms, which he probably encountered in translations or imitations of Aesop’s fables (by W.B. in a chap-book of 1639, by John Ogilby in 1651, and ‘Anon.’ in 1673), or from emblem books like Thomas Jenner’s The Soules Solace; or Thirtie and one Spirituall Emblems (1626). The teaching of this popular work is in the central covenant tradition; ‘the homely realism of the examples and the straightforward colloquial diction bring them very close to Bunyan’s work in A Book for Boys and Girls’ (pp. xxxix-xlii). The quatrain came to be regarded as vulgar, and its use dies out after Rochester until the Romantic revival—as emblems were to die, without resurrection.19
A Book for Boys and Girls is an emblem book. It is customary to derive English emblem books from the Counter-Reformation catholic tradition. But Bunyan was writing in a native protestant tradition. Protestantism started from rejection of images as books for the simple, in favour of the Word, which the simple must be educated to appreciate. In protestant emblems the Word is illustrated not from complicated symbolic hieroglyphs, but from familiar natural objects. Not the image, but the Word and the Book of Nature are the message. The essential feature of the emblem books fashionable with intellectuals was the illustration, the wood-cut, which became increasingly complex, intricate and allusive; verses elaborated witty and ingenious conceits. Francis Quarles (Emblemes, 1635, and Hieroglyphicks of the Life of Man, 1638) successfully followed the protestant emblem tradition. For his pains he was described by Edward Phillips as ‘the darling of our plebeian judgments’. George Wither (A Collection of Emblemes, 1635) wrote in a more popular style which Bunyan followed. Ben Jonson sneered at Wither as the idol of apprentices, journeymen, and fishwives. ‘Vulgarly taken for a great poet’, said Edward Phillips; ‘a pitiful poet’, Berkenhead agreed. Wither spent some months in prison on account of his satires, and his Psalms of David had to be published in the Netherlands in 1632 because of the censorship. Wither fought for Parliament in the civil war, and associated himself with radical sectaries. After the restoration he was in jail again.20
Bunyan’s emblems take ‘as their starting-point, not an intricately contrived problem picture which demands an interpreter, but common objects and actions from the real world of everyday life, which then … suggest moral or religious lessons.’ His choice of subjects ‘connects him most clearly with the parables of the Bible, … candles, lost sheep, coins, seeds, old wineskins and patched clothes’, and with Aesop’s fables. So here again Bunyan was doing something different. He was not at the degenerate dead end of a tradition. There had always been something childish about emblems: they appealed either to sophisticated grown-up children, or to more natural children. Bunyan wrote for the latter, for whom his type of emblem was in fact more appropriate. Wither and Bunyan may have given an extra lease of life to a tradition which was dying anyway, like the masque which in some respects it resembled (pp. xxxvi-xxxviii). Homely Biblical emblems first occur in the Interpreter’s House in The Pilgrim’s Progress.21 Midgley suggests that A Book for Boys and Girls was a sort of overflow: it was published two years after Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress (p. xxxvii).
Unlike Vaughan and Traherne, who wrote much about childhood, Bunyan obviously liked the children for whom he wrote. There is little evidence that Vaughan or Traherne liked real children: it was the idea of childhood’s innocence that appealed to them. Bunyan did not think children were innocent: they were the victims of original sin. But A Book for Boys and Girls nevertheless suggests that, despite his theories, he came closer to children than either Vaughan or Traherne. For Bunyan they are not figures in a rural landscape, still less symbols of a lost innocence, but people to be talked to and helped—and learnt from. Bunyan’s theory was conventional Puritanism. Francis Cheynell, in a Fast Sermon of March 1646, emphasized to the House of Commons the importance of the correct education of children. ‘The joys of heaven’ should be represented to a child ‘under the notion of a banquet, or a crown of gold’. ‘Terrify him from sin by representing the torments of hell to him under the notion of fire and brimstone.… Children are excellent at the remembering of stories; relate the story of drowning the world, and the burning of Sodom to your children, such stories will work upon them.’22 There is no mention of the love which led Jesus to say ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven’, in Bunyan any more than in Cheynell. Rather Bunyan draws attention to Christ’s suffering: ‘He shows me now his blessed hands and feet’ (11; cf. 8, 15).
Bunyan repeatedly emphasized that children should be taught about hell, and that they are accursed. ‘Upon the Disobedient Child’ is written strictly from the parents’ point of view. ‘The rod of correction … is appointed by God for parents to use’, Bunyan had written in Mr. Badman, ‘that thereby they might keep their children from hell.’ But flogging in this case was not successful. ‘Since this young Badman would not be ruled at home’, his father put him out as apprentice to a good man of his acquaintance. This familiar seventeenth-century practice did not work either. Bunyan’s own eldest son, John, though apparently properly flogged in childhood, was by 1680 mixing with bad company (including another son of a member of Bunyan’s church) and later took to ‘drunkenness, card-playing, stoolball’, and dancing round the maypole.23
Bunyan’s preaching technique, which spills over into his prose writing, often involved emphatic repetition of a key phrase. The same effect was achieved in his verse by the use of slightly varied refrains: ‘Unless we diligently watch and pray’; ‘No man can travel here without a guide’ (pp. lxi, 297–8, 118).
Bunyan’s overwhelming horror of sin was accompanied by pity for the sinner. Milton seems to have felt little but contempt for the sinful irrationality of the masses. Bunyan again and again expresses pity and desire to help: his contempt is reserved for the hypocritical godly. Old men and women can be children, and need the same help that we give to boys and girls (190–2, 224).
A Book for Boys and Girls starts with some grim theology in ‘The awakened Child’s Lamentation’ (197–202). But it relaxes as it proceeds. In Bunyan’s ‘emblem’ poems the description of unexpectedly familiar natural objects is invariably far livelier and in better verse than is the moral drawn.
A comely sight indeed it is to see
A world of blossoms on an apple-tree.
Yet far more comely would this tree appear,
If all its dainty blooms young apples were (229)
If these ringers do the changes ring …
My soul then (Lord) cannot but bounce and sing (232)
The frog by nature is both damp and cold,
Her mouth is large, her belly much will hold:
She sits somewhat ascending, loves to be
Croaking in gardens, though unpleasantly (240)
There’s one rides very sagely on the road,
Showing that he affects the gravest mode.
Another rides tantivy, or full trot,
To show, much gravity he matters not … (243)
So many birds, so many various things,
Tumbling i’th’element upon their wings. (246)
‘Upon a Penny Loaf’:
The price one penny is, in time of plenty;
In famine doubled ’tis, from one to twenty (247).
This watch my father did on me bestow,
A golden one it is, but ‘twill not go (248).
Some horses will, some can’t endure the drum,
But snort and flounce, if it doth near them come (252).
Or of a hen:
About the yard she cackling now doth go
To tell what ’twas she at her nest did do (253).
‘Upon the snail’:
She goes but softly, but she goeth sure,
She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do:
Her journeys shorter, so she may endure,
Better than they which do much further go (256).24
Spectacles are for sight, and not for show,
Necessity doth spectacles commend;
Was’t not for need, there is but very few,
That would for wearing spectacles contend (263).
Bunyan wrote several dialogue poems in which one of the spokesmen is a sinner—‘Christ and the Sinner’, ‘Death and the Sinner’ in Profitable Meditations (16–19, 21–4). The most interesting is ‘The Sinner and the Spider’ in A Book for Boys and Girls (214–21). Bunyan is imaginatively sympathetic to the Spider, which at first the Sinner treats with utter contempt: ‘What black, what ugly crawling thing art thou?’ He is won round by rational argument to see that there is much to be said for the lowly spider, who is perhaps the less undesirable creature of the two.
I spin, I weave, and all to let thee see
Thy best performances but cobwebs be ….
I am a spider, yet I can possess
The palace of a king.
The moral is theological, but something social comes through too.
Bunyan’s arresting openings must have caught the attention of children, and there was really no need to listen to the long-drawn-out moral, since it is nearly always implicit in the opening. It was, says Midgley, ‘a voice children would understand’, distinguished by a gentleness unknown to other contemporary Baptist writers for children like Benjamin Keach (Instructions for Children, 1664), James Janeway (A Token for Children, 1671?; A Token for Youth, 1672?), Henry Jessey (A Looking Glass for Children, 1672) (pp. xliii-xivi). The genre was relatively new, and Bunyan was its most appealing practitioner. His poems are enjoyable because he himself obviously enjoyed observing and writing them. He wrote with gusto and wit.
Well, Lady, well, God has been good to thee,
Thou of an outcaste, now art made a Queen ….
A beggar made thus high is seldom seen.
So Bunyan punningly apostrophizes the church, to teach the lesson of humility (257–9). The social point is pressed home in ‘Of Physick’:
Let them be beggars, knights, lords, earls or dukes:
You must not spare them, life doth lie at stake. (262)
Behold how huff, how big they look, how high
They lift their heads, as if they’d touch the sky;
but they are only little boys swaggering on hobby horses (266). The beggar who:
wants, he asks, he pleads his poverty;
They within doors do him an alms deny.
turns out to:
resemble them that pray
To God for mercy and will take no nay. (242)
Even when writing for boys and girls, Bunyan cannot resist a dig at inadequate professors. Unless they mortify their sin ‘they are not worth a pin’ (248: cf. 253–4—‘Of the cackling of a hen’). And he uses ‘The going down of the sun’ to teach a sombre political lesson:
Thou seemest angry, why dost on us frown? …
Tell’s, who hath thee offended? Turn again.
Our Gospel has had here a summer’s day;
But in its sunshine we, like fools, did play.
Or else fall out, and with each other wrangle,
And did instead of work not much but jangle. (239)
Failure to reach agreement among the saints ruined the godly cause and led to the restoration: the children’s generation must do better.
Almost equally remarkable, in its different way, is Profitable Meditations, published in 1661, when Bunyan was in Bedford jail. Bunyan is still fighting the spiritual battles soon to be recorded in Grace Abounding. There is the temptation to sell Christ (6, 9), which recurs even in The Building of the House of God (1688) (314). Despair threatens. Bunyan is still combating what he sees as the antinomian lack of a sense of sin, and the ‘formalist’s’ reliance upon deathbed repentance. Yet he has to a remarkable extent freed himself from the intensity of self-questioning, and can now in a relaxed and almost flippant manner satirize the complacency of the godly hypocrite. The Sinner is speaking in a dialogue with Christ:
Thy mercy, Lord, I do accept, as mine,
Thy grace is free, and that thy Word doth say:
And I will turn to thee another time,
Hereafter, Lord, when ’tis my dying day.…
I fear not but thy love I shall obtain,
Though I with Sin be still in hearty love:
I need not yet forsake my worldly gain,
’Tis grace, not works, that brings to Heaven above.…
I have a mind to Heaven, I must confess,
I fear to feel the sore revenging smart;
Yet Sin give me, though Heaven I have the less;
Take thou my mouth, but let sin have my heart.…
This world is present, that world is to come,
And I for my part am for present pay:
Take thou all that, give me of this but some,
I will not for thy wages make delay.…
My work is great, my time is short also,
My children’s portions I have still to get:
The world must be my friend and not my foe;
I’ll come hereafter, though I cannot come yet. (17–19)
I cite only the Sinner’s part of the dialogue: Christ’s is less striking. (Often, I suspect, when Bunyan’s verse seems to be bad, it is the religious platitudes which create this effect.) There is a lightness in Bunyan’s wit in this dialogue which will not surprise readers of The Pilgrim’s Progress or Mr. Badman, but which is often lacking in his theological works.