He who would valiant be

The story of the hymn begins with Bunyan the great storyteller. However it came to be placed in The Pilgrim’s Progress, we meet it near the end of Pt 2 (published 1684). Christiana and her four sons, accompanied by Mr Greatheart, are approaching the goal of their pilgrimage, the Celestial City, when they meet Mr Valiant-for-truth ‘with his sword drawn, and his face all bloody.’ They tend his wounds, share their food and drink, and hear his story as they travel on. As he relates the sorrows and joys of the journey, he
launches into the three verses of Who would true valour see, let him come hither. Although (as at the Magnificat in Luke 1) we are not told that the lines were sung, readers have usually concluded from their rhythm and rhyme that they were. Not, indeed, to the tune MONK’S GATE, but nearly 2 cents later the words were set as a hymn in E Paxton Hood’s Our Hymn Book, compiled in 1873 for the Congregational Church at Brighton. Though many, notably baptists, have stayed loyal to Bunyan’s ‘artless poetry’ rather than to Dearmer’s ‘concoction’, many others have found its ‘Hobgoblin nor foul fiend’ (etc) too quaint for 20th-c singing, let alone 21st. And while the poem is suitable in context, its lack of a specific Christian reference is a further drawback. Percy Dearmer grasped the nettle in 1904, working towards the 1906 EH, and pungently defended his action and the result in Songs of Praise Discussed (1933; pp270–272). His version is used here, thus introducing at least the Master, the Lord, and the Spirit into the still-Bunyanesque verses. Original to Bunyan are 1.5–8; most of stz 2 (5–7 having been ‘No lion can him fright/ he’ll with a giant fight:/ but he will have a right’); and 3.3–8 except for the change from ‘he/he’ll’ to ‘we/I’ll’. 9 masculine pronouns remain applied to the Christian; for those wishing to take the Dearmer process a stage further, in 1981 Michael Saward wrote Who honours courage here (HTC etc) which makes room not only for Christiana and her successors, but also explicitly for Christ. Other books such as A&M have compromised, leaning towards a hobgoblin-free version of Bunyan. Among the textual conservatives is J R Watson, who praises Bunyan’s original rhyming in what may be ‘the most non-denominational hymn in the language, a treasure for every believer.’

Although the tune derives from a Sussex folk-song (‘Our captain calls all hands/ on board tomorrow’), Ralph Vaughan Williams must take much of the credit for its rediscovery, arrangement, and inclusion as a hymn tune. It was set to Dearmer’s text in EH, and thence transferred to Bunyan’s by those adhering to it. Monk’s Gate is a hamlet near Horsham in W Sussex (as it happens, not far from Kingsfold), where the arranger heard the tune in Dec 1904.

b Elstow, Bedfordshire 1628, d London 1688. Born to his father’s second wife, he learned from him the craft of a brazier or ‘tinker’ and only briefly attended the local grammar school. As a teenager was drafted into Cromwell’s parliamentary army at Newport Pagnell, and on his release at 19 married a girl who read with him the two books she brought to their new home. One was The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (a spiritual journey); the other, The Practice of Piety (by a Puritan bishop). These awoke in him a conviction of sin and guilt for his youthful follies and failures, but a long period of spiritual struggle followed, partly chronicled later in the various edns of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). His other reading-matter at this time was mainly the BCP, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (Boke of Martyrs) and above all the Authorised Version of the Bible. At some point he joined an evangelical group led by a converted royalist, and by 1653 he had found Christian assurance, joined an independent Baptist church in Bedford and started his preaching ministry. His wife died c1658, leaving him with a daughter Mary, blind from birth, and two other children, and the next year he married Elizabeth who provided constant support through the dark years to come. In 1660 he was first arrested for ‘illegal’ preaching, and imprisoned for some 10 years from 1662, in Bedford jail where his serious writing began. 9 books were the fruit of this decade. After a 3-year period of freedom, during which he pastored the church, he was jailed again in 1675 and completed the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, possibly begun earlier but published in 1678. In 1680 came The Life and Death of Mr Badman and in 1682 The Holy War; part 2 of his great classic followed in 1684. On his further release he continued to preach in the countryside and in London, no longer molested by the authorities, where he died from pneumonia, succumbing to a chill taken from a rain-soaked journey on a pastoral errand to reconcile a father and son. He wrote many other works, and although not a hymnwriter as such, in the contemporary Baptist controversy he favoured hymn-singing (not Psalms only) in the congregation. Chiefly but not only through his major masterpiece from prison, countlessly reprinted and translated into over 100 languages, he became the first major English writer who was neither London-based nor university-educated.

The Pilgrim’s Progress has been almost universally praised for its memorably picturesque characterisation, vivid story-telling, dramatic moments, homely wit, imaginative beauty, rhythmic prose and native vocabulary. But even above all these, Christian believers value Bunyan’s incisive spiritual allegory, biblical insight and doctrinal discernment, sustained throughout the journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. The most disappointing editions are those which assess its literary or social qualities but are blind to its spiritual ones. Some early readers including Baptists complained of its limitations (where were the church and its ordinances?) while later ones have contrasted Christian’s pilgrimage with Chaucer’s in his Canterbury Tales; at least Bunyan’s pilgrims actually arrive! The other verse often extracted from the book as a hymn is He that is down needs fear no fall. Among many studies of his life and writing are 10 valuable pages in Gordon Rupp’s Six Makers of English Religion (1957), the 12 of Louis F Benson’s The Hymns of John Bunyan (from the Hymn Soc of America, 1930), and 9 columns by David L Jeffrey in the 2003 Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. No.884*.

b Kilburn, Middx (N London) 1867, d Westminster, London 1936. Streatham Sch and Westminster Sch, London; the Lutheran Sch at Vevey, Switzerland (all quite briefly); then in 1886 to Christ Ch Oxford to read History, where his naturally flamboyant style became well known. After being deeply influenced by Chas Gore during his stay at the fledgling Pusey House, he was ordained (CofE) in 1891 to a curacy in S Lambeth, where he met the realities of London poverty and served as the London Sec in the early days of the Christian Social Union, 1891–1912. In 1899 he wrote the widely-used The Parson’s Handbook, which included his advocacy of beauty, art and ceremony to accompany Prayer Bk services. Occupied though it was with much liturgical minutiae, with several revisions, U-turns, and sometimes tenuous connections with the BCP, it ran to 13 edns, like all his work as much anti-Romanising as anti-ugliness, and even more pro-English usage. He became the methodical but innovative Vicar of St Mary’s Primrose Hill (Hampstead, N London), 1901–15, introducing radical changes from day one and many unpublished hymns and tunes which became classics. The thoughtless use of bad hymns exercised him greatly, and during this time he was General Editor of The English Hymnal, whose Preface announced itself in 1906 as ‘a collection of the best hymns in the English language’. In reality this was an assertively Anglo-catholic or ‘high church’ hymnal and a quality book, with Vaughan Williams as Music Editor, serving a particular constituency seen by some as extreme but still (and almost uniquely) in use 100 years on.

In 1904 Dearmer became the first chairman of the Guild of Health, promoting what came to be known as the holistic Christian approach; he also assisted with his first wife Mabel’s dramatic productions including her fresh approaches to Morality and Mystery Plays. He became an Oxford DD in 1911. In 1915 he volunteered as an army chaplain (as Mabel discovered by his announcement from the pulpit), working with the British Red Cross in Serbia, where she also worked as a hospital orderly but died of typhoid 3 months later. His work went on, and included lecturing in several countries to branches of the YMCA.

After remarriage to Nan (who wrote his first biography in 1940) and some global travels together, Percy was appointed in 1919 as the first Prof of Ecclesiastical Art (on which he wrote copiously) at King’s Coll, London, at £50 per annum, and in 1924 for his architectural expertise he was made an Hon ARIBA. In liturgical matters he moved from ‘Prayer Book fundamentalism’ to wanting a more ‘human’ revision of some services, and opposed the rigid Anglo-catholic rule of ‘fasting Communion’. Apparently out of favour with the ecclesiastical establishment, he nevertheless advised on the new archbishop’s ‘enthronement’ service in 1928.

Finally on May Day 1931 he joined the Westminster Abbey staff as Canon Librarian, to a mixed reception. He attacked sweepstakes and all forms of gambling, and (more controversially then) the ban on contraception, and thence the RC church as ‘a great political machine’; he also enrolled his family in the opportunities given by religious broadcasting for children. Meanwhile in 1926 he had edited the very different (from EH) but for its time effective Songs of Praise, reflecting his (by now) more liberal outlook and commandeering much borderline verse as hymn texts, with Martin Shaw and VW (again) as Music Editors and G W Briggs (qv) among what was very much his own team. If EH was blamed for adding to Christian doctrines, SoP was accused of subtracting from them and including ‘hymns’ by avowed atheists; but in school assemblies this lasted well beyond its usefulness for adult congregations, and some of its original hymns have survived. An enlarged edn came in 1932 and the Oxford Book of Carols, also with Shaw and RVW, in 1928—which was not limited to Christmas, and musically jolly and quaintly comic; its Preface was brutally frank about ‘the most inconceivable depravity’ of some contemporary Sunday afternoon religious music. However, whatever we think of the late or retarded Victorians, the textually bizarre contents of much of OBC tends to undermine the main editor’s subsequent scorn of Bunyan’s ‘hobgoblins’ and Watts’s ‘worms’: ‘Poor Satan, you can hear him,/ is raging down in hell,/ for now there’s none to fear him,/ and none to wish him well…’! Also in 1932 PD annexed Mrs Alexander’s title for Prayers and Hymns for Little Children, a small collection for the 4s-7s prepared with Vaughan Williams, M Shaw and G W Briggs, reaching a 4th impression in 1953. In 1933 Dearmer published the informative and highly quotable ‘companion’, Songs of Praise Discussed revealing both prejudice and blind spots (Watts, Toplady etc) as well as ‘wit and wisdom’. But in July 1935 his damaged heart brought a breakdown, and though he recovered some activity, he collapsed and died, aged 69, in the following May. 18 of his own texts and versions appeared in EH (and only one less in the 1986 New English Hymnal) and 23 in SoP, several of which have made their way into later books, mainly Anglican but 7 (eg) in the 1951 Congregational Praise. A&M did not feature his work until 1983 and 2000 (with 4 and 7 hymns respectively). His most famous text is his adaptation of the ‘Pilgrim Song’ by Jn Bunyan qv, as included here. He also wrote The Art of Public Worship, books about Oxford, Wells and Normandy, and on liturgy and much else. A recent biography is Donald Gray’s Percy Dearmer: A Parson’s Pilgrimage (2000). No.884*.